The Night Crew by Brian Haig Read Free Book Online

kind of red-meat patriotism that equals unquestioning obedience. I would put a gun to my head if I lived in such a place, and I suspected that Lydia’s motives for enlisting in the Guard were a little more dark and complicated than she was admitting to me, if not to herself. After she tried out a few more quaint anecdotal details about Justin, I asked, “And did you have a full-time civilian job?”
    “Sure did. At the post office.”
    This was an almost irresistible set-up for a crack about postal employees, but I asked, with an admirably straight face, “Doing what?”
    “Letter sorter. Good benefits. Didn’t pay much, though.”
    And so on. Most of this stuff could be gleaned from her personnel jacket or a standard background check, of course. But with new clients it’s important to build trust and rapport, to get to know each other before you get into the ickier stuff, such as, What in the hell was on your mind when you peed on that man’s face?
    Anyway, as we went on, my initial impressions regarding Lydia Eddelston were largely reinforced, though she was slightly cuter in person than in the photo of her emptying her bladder. Also I thought she had packed on a few pounds since those pictures, which could be accounted for by the fact that she was in confinement with nothing better to do than eat.
    Her accent was thick, country-style, and grammar and diction were definitely not her friends. Though she possessed a high school diploma, she was not well educated and, occasionally she stared at me for inappropriately long periods before responding. I couldn’t tell if she was dense, confused, the victim of some weird processing disorder, or all of the above.
    As brazen and uninhibited as her poses and expressions appeared in the photos, in person, she came across as shy, remote, and while not depressed, clearly she was emotionally fragile. Also, she kept glancing at Katherine: fleeting, needy glances. Presumably she came from blue-collar, or possibly, no-collar stock. Regarding family, she informed me that she was raised a strict Southern Baptist, one brother, also in the National Guard, both parents still living and still married, and hopefully they weren’t first cousins or, God forbid, brother and sister.
    Simple. That one adjective jumped out as I listened patiently to her responses to the perfunctory questions I occasionally had to reframe, because she became easily confused. Simple answers. Simple outlooks. Mentally simple. Indeed, I was tempted to ask her for her proof of age, because, in both her mannerisms and her coyness, she seemed to me almost childlike.
    The more I listened to her, the more difficult I found it to believe this intellectually austere woman was the provocateur of so much attention, trouble, and harm. If I ever met anyone predestined for a life that would arouse little interest or attention, Lydia Eddelston was the personification of it.
    For some reason, I recalled Homer’s aphorism about Helen of Troy—she, of the face that launched a thousand ships, and a war—and certainly here we had a paradox or an irony, for the somewhat plain face across the table from me threatened to sink a thousand careers, not to mention capsizing an entire war.
    The mystery was not whether she did it or not. She definitely did. The mystery was this: How and why had such a seemingly unremarkable young lady from bucolic small-town America become the iconic figure of a war that seemed to be going off the rails?
    Strange. No other word could explain it—strange girl, strange behavior. Strange case.
    For a moment I closed my eyes and listened to her speech; the image that formed, inevitably, was of Lydia on a small backcountry farm, wearing slack blue coveralls, hauling milk pails or slopping pig shit, whatever it is farm hands do these days. I reopened my eyes and was instantly transported back to the photographs showing Lydia doing things that were surely the buzz of her Baptist congregation back in Justin,