When She Came Home by Drusilla Campbell Page A

said, “Someone from Belasco’s committee’s going to ask you to testify.”
    “Who told them I have anything to say?”
    “Use your brain, Marine.” His bushy eyebrows veed with irritation. “You couldn’t keep your mouth shut about Three Fountain. You talked to that chaplain and then you went to Culligan.”
    “How do you know? That day, when you came to Redline, I never told you who I talked to.”
    But she
had
described the incident to him. Hard to believe that just a few months ago, she had still trusted her godfather. “How do you or anyone else know I went to Culligan?”
    “Doesn’t matter.” He waved her question away, diamonds strobing. “The point is that Senator Belasco’s afteryou. You’ll be front-page news, Frankie. Is that what you want?”
    She stared at him for a long moment. “Who are you, Bunny?”
    “I’m your godfather,” he said, beaming innocently. “And it’s my job to look out for you. Belasco’s handing out subpoenas to anyone who ever complained about G4S. She’s going to ask you what you think you saw.”
    “What I
did
see. I saw a murder.”
    Bunny winced. “If you testify against the military—”
    “It
wasn’t
the Marines or the Army.” She forced the words out, her throat pinching shut as she spoke. “It was Global Sword and Saber Security Services. G4S.”
    “Your father and I believe—”
    “The General doesn’t believe in murder.”
    “Frankie, sometimes there’s a bad apple and I agree it should be tossed. But the way Belasco wants to do it, she’s gonna throw out the whole bushel basket and nuke the orchard. A bad apple, Frankie. That’s all that guy was.”
    “So you admit it happened.”
    “I don’t admit anything. How can I? I wasn’t there.”
    “But I was. I saw it all through binoculars.”
    “You’d never been under fire, Frankie. You were frightened.”
    Frightened? Afterward yes, but at the time she had never felt more intensely alive.
    “I saw him. Later.”
    It seemed to Frankie that she heard a click as Bunny came to attention.
    “I was in the airport in Kuwait, going home.” She had been in a line to buy coffee and seen the G4S contractor leaning against a wall with a cell phone pressed to his ear. He looked right at her.
    “You imagined it, Frankie.”
    She would never forget his face. In a land of mahogany skin and black hair, the contractor was alarmingly fair. White-blond hair, a milky face despite the desert sun. “And he was short. He was built like a tree stump.”
    Bunny sighed and rolled his neck from left to right. “Okay, let’s look at this thing another way. Suppose Belasco asks you to testify and you do it. Senator Delaware is on the committee and we all know he supports the contractors one hundred fifty percent. He’s gonna ask you questions and make chop suey out of your answers. You say the shooter looks like a tree stump and Delaware’s going to laugh ’til he busts. I guarantee he’ll make you out to be a hysterical female who had no business being in Iraq in the first place. He’ll talk you in circles until you admit yourself that you should have stayed home with your husband and daughter.” He ran his hand back from his forehead over the crown of his head as if he still had hair to groom. “You’ll humiliate the corps, Frankie. And the General with you. You won’t mean to, honey, but it’ll happen.”
    It was too easy to imagine.
    “Whatever happened in Baghdad, you were hurt by it. I know that and if I could undo it, I would. But isn’t that enough? Do you want to spread the hurt around? Believe me, Jesus, I’m thinking of you and your family.”
    She imagined herself standing at attention before the congressional committee, in uniform of course, her hand on her heart. The perfume and aftershave body smell of the overheated hearing room. The reporters in the well between the witness table and the senators’ podium, the microphones, the light reflecting off eyeglasses, wristwatches, camera