Callie's Piece of the Puzzle
Chapter 05 - Callie's Piece of the Puzzle
Callie Aldana lived two hours away, in a small rental house with a wind chime on the porch that never stopped moving, even when there was no wind that Elaine could feel.
She was younger than Elaine expected. Late twenties, maybe. Red hair pulled back, eyes swollen from crying that had clearly become a permanent condition rather than a passing storm.
"I don't really know why you two are here," Callie said, once they were all sitting in her small living room, mismatched mugs of coffee going cold on the table between them. "I already told the Army everything I know, which isn't much."
"We're not here for the Army," Priya said gently. "We're here because Ray told you something before he died. Something about a company called Sallow."
Callie's hands tightened around her mug.
"He wasn't supposed to tell me anything," she said quietly. "He always said that. Whatever happens over there stays over there, that's just how it works, that's the deal you make marrying someone in the Army."
"But he told you something anyway," Elaine said.
Callie was quiet for a long moment.
"He called me two nights before," she finally said. "He sounded off. Not scared exactly. More like, tired in a way that wasn't just tired from work."
She set the mug down.
"He said the convoy they were supposed to run had gotten switched. New vehicles, from a different contractor, cheaper armor plating than what they usually used. He said something about how Sallow's company had underbid the contract by cutting corners nobody was supposed to notice."
Elaine felt her stomach drop.
"Cheaper armor," she repeated.
"He said it like a joke at first. Something like, 'Guess we're the ones who find out if it actually works.' But then he got quiet, and he told me if anything ever happened to him, I should ask questions instead of just accepting whatever version of the story I got handed."
Callie looked up at both of them, eyes wet.
"I thought he was just being paranoid. Every soldier complains about equipment. It's practically a hobby over there."
"This wasn't just complaining," Priya said quietly.
"No," Callie whispered. "I don't think it was."
Elaine pulled out her phone, opened the screenshot of the threatening text message, and turned the screen toward Callie.
"Did you get anything like this?"
Callie's face went pale.
"Two days ago," she said. "I thought it was spam. I deleted it."
"Don't delete anything else," Elaine said. "Not one text, not one email, not one piece of mail. Everything gets saved from now on."
Callie nodded slowly, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.
"What are we even doing," she said. "I'm twenty-eight years old. I don't know how to investigate a defense contractor. I don't know how to do any of this."
"None of us do," Elaine said. "But three widows independently hearing the same company name, followed by three anonymous warnings telling us to stop talking about it, is not a coincidence. That's a pattern. And patterns can be proven."
Callie stood and walked to the window, wrapping her arms around herself, watching the wind chime on her porch move without any wind Elaine could feel.
"Ray used to tell me I worried too much," she said quietly, not turning around. "Every deployment, I'd ask him a hundred questions, and he'd just laugh and tell me the Army had rules for everything, systems on top of systems, and nothing ever fell through the cracks that badly."
She turned back to face them.
"I believed him. I think I needed to believe him, because the alternative was too frightening to actually sit with."
"You're allowed to have believed him," Priya said gently. "None of us knew any of this a month ago."
"I keep thinking about the last thing he said to me," Callie said, her voice cracking slightly. "He told me to take care of myself if anything happened. Not take care of the house, not take care of the finances, just take care of myself. Like he already knew something I didn't."
Elaine felt her own chest tighten at that.
"Maybe he did," she said quietly. "Maybe some part of him sensed something was wrong, even if he couldn't have told you exactly what."
Callie sat back down, wiping her eyes with the sleeve of her sweatshirt.
"I don't want to be scared anymore," she said. "I've spent three weeks being scared of everything. The phone ringing. The mail arriving. Every knock on the door. I'm tired of it."
"Then let's stop being scared together," Priya said, reaching for Callie's hand across the small coffee table.
Priya reached across and squeezed Callie's hand.
"We're not doing this alone," she said. "We're doing it together. Three women asking the same question is harder to scare into silence than one."
Callie looked between the two of them, something steadying behind her eyes for the first time since they'd walked in.
"Okay," she said. "Where do we even start?"
May you like
Elaine thought about the armor plating Ray had mentioned. About the timeline discrepancy in Daniel's voicemail. About Grant Sallow's practiced smile on a corporate website.
"We start," Elaine said, "by finding someone who actually knows how these investigations are supposed to work. Someone who used to be on the inside."
