Chapter 2 - The Nikon and the Memory Card
Ava wiped her nose on the sleeve of her oversized flannel shirt—an old shirt of mine I had left behind two deployments ago. Her bedroom was dark, the blackout blinds drawn tight against the afternoon sun. Scattered across her desk were dozens of glossy photographic prints, a battery charger, and her heavy semi-professional Nikon DSLR camera, a birthday gift I had saved three months of combat pay to buy her. The lens casing showed a deep, jagged scratch near the focus ring, and the plastic hot shoe was bent completely out of alignment.
"Tell me what happened at the reception, Ava. Start from the beginning. No skipping," I said gently, sitting on the edge of her unmade mattress.
She walked over to the desk, picked up the camera, and turned it over in her hands with an almost reverent tenderness. "Wade hired this fancy wedding photographer from Chicago, but he was mostly taking pictures of Mom and the ice sculptures. Wade’s family—his uncle Frank and his mother—they kept going into the private study behind the banquet hall. Uncle Frank had this metal briefcase. I was outside by the rose garden trying to take pictures of the blue jays, but the window to the study was open because of the heat."
She looked up at me, her eyes dead serious. "Daddy, you taught me how to shoot long-distance reconnaissance when we went camping in the Cascades. You told me that if you watch people when they think they're alone, they show you who they really are."
My stomach tightened. "What did you see, Ava?"
"Uncle Frank opened the case. Inside were thick brown envelopes, tied with red string. But there were also old yellow folders with police stamps on them. Wade walked in right after the vows. He was laughing, but then his mother handed him one of the envelopes, and he started arguing with Frank. Wade said, 'The old man’s property is ours now. The girl doesn't have any claim left, and the state closed the inquiry twelve years ago.' Then he pulled out an old silver pendant and shoved it into his pocket."
"A pendant?"
"A locket. With a broken hinge," Ava said, her voice dropping to a whisper. "I zoomed all the way in with the 300mm lens. The shutter was on silent mode. I took forty-two frames. I got the names on the folders, Dad. I got the serial numbers on the bank bonds. And I got the photograph inside that locket. It was a picture of a little girl who looked just like Wade, but with dark hair. And across the police folder, it said: SUSPICIOUS DROWNING - COLD CASE 2014."
The air in the room suddenly felt thin. Wade Mercer’s family had built their fortune on county real estate, commercial zoning, and agricultural land grabs across three counties. Wade’s father had been the district judge for thirty years until his sudden death five years back. The Mercer name was stamped on the town library, the municipal park, and the local hospital wing.
"Why did you hit him, Ava?" I asked, needing the physical fact that had brought the police to my doorstep.
"Because he saw the reflection of my lens in the windowpane," Ava said, her lower lip trembling again. "He ran out through the side door. He grabbed me by my hair behind the catering tent. He wrenched my camera away and slammed it against the concrete curb. He told me that if I ever breathed a word of what I saw, he would make sure Mom sent me to a reform academy in Utah where you’d never find me. He said little girls who pry end up like his sister."
A red-hot spike of pure fury shot through my spine, hotter than any incoming mortar round I’d ever ducked in the sandbox. "He touched you?"
"He grabbed my wrist so hard it left bruises," she said, pulling back her left sleeve to reveal four dark, purple finger marks encircling her wrist. "Then he raised his fist to slap me. Dad... I remembered what you taught me in the garage before you deployed. The leverage strike. The hip pivot. The heel of the hand straight into the base of the nose."
I looked at my twelve-year-old daughter. She had dropped a six-foot-two, two-hundred-pound grown man who was attacking her, and she had done it using basic combatives to defend her life.
May you like
"Where is the memory card, Ava?"
She reached down, unlaced her left sneaker, and pulled out the inner sole. Tucked inside a small plastic sleeve was a black 128-gigabyte SanDisk Extreme Pro.
