VI
Spring and snow went together in Quebec. Lucien Galtier drove with exaggerated care. He knew the Chevrolet would skid if he did anything heroic—which was to say, stupid or abrupt—on an icy road. The point of going to a dance, after all, was getting there in one piece. He wondered if he would have thought the same as a young buck courting Marie. Of course, back in those days before the turn of the century, only a few millionaires had had motorcars. It was hard to do anything too spectacularly idiotic in a carriage.
Marie … His hands tightened on the steering wheel. She was seven years dead, and half the time it felt as if she were just around the corner visiting neighbors and would be back any minute. The other half, Galtier knew she was gone, all right, and the knowledge was knives in his soul. Those were the black days. He’d heard time was supposed to heal such wounds. Maybe it did. The knives, now, didn’t seem to have serrated edges.
A right turn, a left, and yes, there was the path leading to François Berlinguet’s farmhouse and, even more to the point, to the barn nearby. Plenty of other autos and carriages and wagons sat by the house. Lucien found a vacant spot. He turned off his headlights and got out of the Chevrolet. Snow crunched under his shoes.
Lamplight spilled out of the barn door. So did the sweet strains of fiddle music. Then, suddenly, a whole band joined in. Galtier shook his head in bemusement. Back in his courting days, nobody had owned a phonograph, either. Music meant real, live musicians. It still could—those fiddlers were real, live human beings. But it didn’t have to, not any more.
The band stopped. People in the barn laughed and clapped their hands. Then the music started up again—someone must have turned the record over or put a new one on the phonograph. The live fiddlers joined in.
Lucien blinked against the bright lights inside the barn. He’d got used to the darkness driving over. Couples dipped and swirled in the cleared space in the middle. Men and women watched from the edges of the action. Some perched on chairs; others leaned against the wall. Quite a few of them were holding mugs of cider or beer or applejack. Galtier sidled toward a table not far from the fiddlers and the phonograph. Berlinguet’s wife, Madeleine, a smiling woman of about forty-five, gave him a mug. He sipped. It was cider, cider with a stronger kick than beer.
“Merci,” he said. She nodded.
When the next tune ended, François Berlinguet, who was a few years older than Madeleine, pointed toward Lucien. “And here we have the most eligible bachelor in all of the county of Temiscouata, Monsieur Lucien Galtier!” His red face and raucous voice said he’d been drinking a lot of that potent cider.
The drunker the people were, the louder they cheered and clapped their hands. “God knows what a liar you are, François, and so do I,” Lucien said. Berlinguet bowed, as if at a compliment. Galtier got a laugh. His host got a bigger one.
Trouble was, it hadn’t been altogether a lie. Ever since he’d lost Marie, widows had been throwing themselves at Galtier. So had the daughters and granddaughters of friends, acquaintances, and optimistic strangers. He felt no urgent need for a second wife. He’d done his best to make that plain. No one seemed to want to listen to him.
Even though the phonograph was quiet, the fiddlers struck up a tune. People began to dance again. What Lucien noticed was how harsh and ragged the music seemed. When he was young, people had enjoyed whatever music their neighbors made. Some was better, some not quite so good, but what difference did it make?
It made a difference now. People measured neighbors’ music not by the standards of other neighbors’ music, but against the professionals who made records. What would have been fine a couple of generations before was anything but now. We’re spoiled, Lucien thought. That hadn’t occurred to him before, which made it no less true.
Berlinguet came over to him. “Will you be a wallflower?” he teased.
“If I want to,” Galtier answered. “I can do just about anything I want to, it seems to me. I have the years for it.”
“But you will break the hearts of all the pretty girls here,” his host said. “How can they dance with you if you will not dance?”
“Now that, my friend, that is a truly interesting question,” Lucien said. “And now I have another question for you as well: is it that they wish to dance with me, or is it that they wish to dance with my farm and my electricity and my Chevrolet?”
François Berlinguet did him the courtesy of taking him seriously. “It could be that some of them do wish to dance with the farm and the other things. But, you know, it could also be that some of them wish to dance with you. Will you take away their chance along with that of the others?”
“I do not know.” Galtier shrugged a Gallic shrug. “Truly, I do not. The trouble is, how do I tell with a certainty the ones from the others?”
Before Berlinguet could answer, Dr. Leonard O’Doull and Galtier’s daughter, Nicole, walked into the barn. With his long, angular body and fair, Irish-looking face, O’Doull always looked like a stranger in a crowd of Quebecois. But he wasn’t a stranger here. He must have treated at least half the people in the barn. Men and women swarmed up to him. Some wanted to talk about their aches and pains. More, though, wanted to talk politics or gossip. Even if he did still sound a little—and only a little—like the American he was, he’d made a place for himself in and around Rivière-du-Loup.
Eventually, he and Nicole came over to Galtier. As François Berlinguet had, O’Doull said, “You’re not dancing, mon beau-père. Do you think you will wear out all the sweet young things?”
“It could be,” Lucien answered. “It could also be that I think they will wear me out. When I want to dance, I will dance. And if I do not care to … well, who will make me?”
Nicole grabbed his left hand. When she did, her husband plucked the mug of cider out of his right hand. “I will make you,” she said, and dragged him out toward the middle of the floor. “You don’t need to wonder why I want to dance with you, either.” She understood him very well.
He wagged a finger at her. “Yes, I know why you want to dance with me. You want to make me look like a fool in front of the entire neighborhood. How is it that you have come down here from town?”
“I talked with Madeleine Berlinguet when she came up to sell some chickens, and she invited us,” Nicole answered. “Before too long, you know, little Lucien will want to start coming to dances, too.”
The idea that his grandson would soon be old enough to want to dance with girls rocked Galtier back on his heels. Had it really been so many years since little Lucien was born? It had, sure enough.
When the music started—fiddlers playing along with the phonograph—he had to remember where his feet went. Nicole didn’t lead too obviously, for which he was grateful. And, once he’d been dancing a little while, he discovered he was having a good time. He didn’t intend to admit that, but it was true.
After the song (an import from the USA, with lyrics translated into French) ended, Leonard O’Doull came out and tapped Galtier on the shoulder. “Excuse me, mon beau-père, but I am going to dance this next dance with my wife.”
“You think so, do you?” Galtier asked in mock anger. “Then what am I to do? Return to wallflowerdom?”
“Is that a word?” His son-in-law looked dubious. “You can go back if you like, or you can find some other lady and dance with her.”
“Such choices you give me. I am not worthy,” Galtier said, and Leonard O’Doull snorted. Now Lucien did feel like dancing. He touched a woman on the shoulder. He smiled. “Hello, Éloise. May I have this dance?”
“Mais certainement, Lucien.” Éloise Granche was a widow of about Nicole’s age. She’d lost her husband in a train wreck a little before Lucien lost Marie. If he hadn’t known her before, he would have thought that was what gave her an air of calm perhaps too firmly held. In fact, she’d always been like that. Philippe Granche had drunk like a fish; maybe that had more to do with it.
The music started again. Galtier took her in his arms. She was two or three inches shorter than Marie had been, and plumper, too, but not so much that she didn’t make a pleasant armful. She danced well. Lucien had to remind himself he needed to say such things.
“And you,” she told him when he did. After a moment, she asked, “Is this your first time since … ?”
She let that hang, but Galtier understood perfectly well what she meant. “No, not quite,” he answered, “but it still seems very strange. How long have you been dancing now?”
“A couple of years,” Éloise said. “Yes, it is strange, isn’t it? With Philippe, I always knew just what he would do. Other people are surprises, one after another.”
“Yes!” He nodded. “They certainly seem to be. And not only on the dance floor, either. The world is a different place now.”
“It certainly is for me,” she said. “I wasn’t so sure it would be for a man.”
“Oh, yes. For this man, anyhow.” Galtier didn’t think he’d ever spoken of his love for Marie outside the bosom of his family. He didn’t intend to start now. Even saying so much was more than he’d thought he would do.
Éloise Granche seemed to know what he meant even when he didn’t say it. She said, “You have to go on. It’s very hard at first, but you have to.”
He nodded again. “So I’ve seen. It was hard at first.” He hadn’t spoken of that even with his family. There had been weeks—months—when he hadn’t wanted to get out of bed, let alone get on with his life.
The music stopped. “Thank you for asking me,” Éloise said. “That was very pleasant.”
“I thought so, too.” Lucien hesitated. He hadn’t talked with anyone who knew what he was talking about before. She’d traveled down the same road as he. After the hesitation, he plunged: “Shall we also dance the next one?”
“I’d like to,” she said briskly. “We’ve both made the same journey, haven’t we?”
“I was just thinking that very thing!” he said in surprise. When he and Marie had the same thought at the same time, he’d taken it for granted. Why not? They’d spent forty years living in each other’s pockets. When he did it with a near stranger … That was a surprise.
Éloise’s shrug said it astonished her less than him. “It springs from what we were talking about, I think.” The fiddlers began to play. She swayed forward. They started dancing again, this time without words.
Galtier wondered what Marie would say. Probably something like, Try not to step on her toes, the way you always did on mine. Éloise’s eyes were closed as they spun around the barn. Her expression said she might have been listening to someone who wasn’t there, too. But she was also very much with Lucien.
When the music stopped this time, they both walked over to the table to get some cider. They stood by the wall, talking of this and that, through the next dance—and the next. But Galtier didn’t feel like a wallflower any more.
The USS Remembrance steamed south, accompanied by a couple of destroyers and a heavy cruiser. Lieutenant, Junior Grade, Sam Carsten smeared zinc-oxide ointment on his nose and the backs of his hands. He knew he would burn anyhow, but he wouldn’t burn so badly this way.
Off to the east rose the bleak, almost lunar landscape of Baja California. The Remembrance and her companions sailed outside the three-mile limit the Empire of Mexico claimed, but not very far outside it. Their guns and the carrier’s aeroplanes could have smashed up that coast or whatever little gunboats the Mexicans sent out to challenge them.
But the Mexicans sent out nothing. Cabo San Lucas wasn’t much of a port. No, actually, that wasn’t true. It had the makings of a fine harbor—or it would have, if only there were any fresh water close by. Since there wasn’t, the protected bay went to waste except for an old gunboat or two and a few fishing trawlers.
Sam turned to Lieutenant Commander Harrison, the assistant officer of the deck. “Sir, may I make a suggestion?”
“Go ahead, Carsten,” Roosevelt Harrison replied. The Annapolis ring on the younger officer’s finger explained why he was where he was and Sam was where he was.
“Thank you, sir,” replied Sam, who’d never expected to become an officer at all when he joined the Navy a few years before the Great War started. “The Confederates have a naval base at Guaymas, sir. Where we are and where we’re headed, they might want to use us to give their submersible skippers some practice.”
“They aren’t supposed to have any submersibles,” the assistant OOD said.
“Yes, sir. I know that, sir,” Carsten said, and said no more.
Harrison considered. After a few seconds, he said, “You may have a point. I wouldn’t trust those bastards as far as I could throw ’em.” He cupped his hands in front of his mouth and raised his voice to a shout: “Attention on deck! All hands be alert for submarines in the neighborhood.” Sailors hurried to the edge of the deck and peered in all directions, shielding their eyes from the glare of the sun with their palms. Lieutenant Commander Harrison gave his attention back to Sam. “A good thought. I don’t believe they’d try anything even if they do have boats in the water, but you’re right—stalking us would give them good practice.”
“What happens if somebody does spot a periscope?” Carsten asked. “Do we drop ashcans on the submersible?”
“That’s a damn good question, and I’m glad the skipper’s the one who’s got to answer it,” Harrison said. “My guess would be no. The Confederates aren’t allowed to have any submersibles, but how do we know whatever we spot isn’t flying Maximilian’s flag?” He and Sam exchanged wry grins; the Empire of Mexico could no more build submarines than it could aeroplane carriers. But where a boat was built had nothing to do with whose flag she flew.
“I don’t suppose we can tell, sir,” Sam allowed. “Still, if it looks like a boat’s getting ready to fire something …”
“Then we’re liable to have a war on our hands.” The assistant OOD shivered, though the day was fine and warm. “Till I see a wake in the water, I won’t order an attack on any submarine we spot. If the skipper has a different notion, that’ll be up to him.”
Sometimes not having rank was a comfort. Sam knew that from his days as a petty officer. If you weren’t important enough to give any really important orders, you couldn’t get into really big trouble. When he was a petty officer, he would have figured a lieutenant commander had the clout to screw up in a big way. From Harrison’s point of view, though, that exalted status belonged only to the skipper.
Of course, Harrison wasn’t thinking small. He was talking about starting a war. Back in Sam’s petty-officer days, he couldn’t have imagined a decision with that much riding on it. Even though he’d clawed his way up to officer’s rank, carrying that much responsibility still didn’t seem real to him.
It must have to Lieutenant Commander Harrison, though. A little later, Sam saw him talking on a telephone line that led straight to the bridge. And, not too long after that, elevators started lifting aeroplanes from the hangars belowdecks. Pilots raced to the aeroplanes, some of them putting on goggles as they ran. The Remembrance turned into the wind, what there was of it. One after another, the aeroplanes roared off the flight deck.
Were they hunting submersibles, too? Carsten couldn’t think of anything else they might have in mind. Maybe Captain Stein thought that, if the Confederates were getting in some training, he might as well do the same thing. Or maybe the skipper just believed in wearing both suspenders and belt. In his place, Sam knew he would have.
He wished he could hang around the wireless shack and find out what the aeroplanes were seeing, but the skipper chose that moment to sound general quarters. Maybe it was a drill. Undoubtedly, most of the crew would figure it was. But maybe, too, one of the pilots had spotted something that made him jumpy. The Remembrance had been a nervous ship going through the Straits of Florida a few years before, and for many of the reasons also relevant today.
Sam’s general-quarters station was deep in the bowels of the ship. He sighed as he hurried down to it. He still wished he had another post besides damage control. He’d been stuck with it for years now, but that didn’t mean he liked it. He wished he could see, could be part of, what the ship was doing against its enemies. Cleaning up the mess after the guns and aeroplanes had failed to stop trouble was a lot less appealing.
It was to him, anyhow. Some people wouldn’t have done anything else. Some people fancied sauerkraut, too—no accounting for taste. Lieutenant Commander Pottinger found damage control fascinating. He probably liked sauerkraut, too, though Carsten had never asked him about that.
By now, Hiram Pottinger had had more than a year to learn the ropes around the Remembrance. He really led the damage-control party, which he hadn’t when he first boarded the carrier. Part of Sam chafed at losing the responsibility that had been his. The rest insisted he’d never wanted that particular responsibility in the first place.
“Do you know anything, Carsten?” Pottinger asked. “Have any idea why the captain called us to general quarters? You like to hang around on the flight deck.” By the way he said it, that was a faintly—or maybe more than faintly—reprehensible habit for a damage-control man to have. Sam told what he’d seen and heard. Pottinger frowned. “Do you think it’s the real McCoy?”
“Sir, I don’t know for sure one way or the other,” Carsten answered. “All I know is, it could be the McCoy.”
“Yes.” Pottinger nodded emphatically. “Of course, that’s the way we have to treat every general-quarters call—something to remember.”
He spoke now to the seamen and petty officers in the party, not to Sam. Their nods held varying degrees of impatience. They knew the truth of that better than he did. Most of them had served on the Remembrance when the war with Japan broke out. Pottinger hadn’t. As far as Sam knew, he hadn’t seen combat.
The damage-control party waited, down there in what they knew could easily become their tomb. A torpedo hit in the engine room, and the light bulbs that were the only illumination in this world of narrow steel corridors smelling of paint and oil and sweat would go out, trapping them in the darkness while, all too probably, the sea surged in around them.
Maybe my trouble is too much imagination, Sam thought unhappily. Damage control’s no place for somebody who sees all the things that can go wrong before they do.
But that thought had hardly crossed his mind before the all-clear sounded. As always, sighs of relief accompanied it. If they seemed more heartfelt than usual this time … well, they did, that was all.
Reprehensible habit or not, Sam made a beeline for the flight deck as soon as he could leave his station. He soon found out the call to general quarters had been a drill, and hadn’t sprung from sighting a submersible or anything else that could have been hostile. That was all to the good.
On steamed the Remembrance, into the Gulf of California. She was scrupulous about staying outside the territorial waters of both the Empire of Mexico and the Confederate States. Legally speaking, she was as much on the high seas as she would have been halfway out from San Francisco to the Sandwich Islands. Somehow, though, neither the Mexicans nor the Confederates seemed to feel that way.
A rusty gunboat flying the Mexican flag chugged out from La Paz to look her over. A Confederate coast-defense battleship, a much more serious threat, steamed into the Gulf from Guaymas. On the open sea, the Remembrance could easily have outrun her. Here in these narrow waters, the slow but heavily armored and armed ship had no trouble sticking close.
And, as they had in the Straits of Florida, aeroplanes flew over the Remembrance. Her own machines leaped into the air to warn off the intruders. The Confederacy was supposed to have no military aeroplanes, but… . Carsten waited for another general-quarters call. In his time as a seaman and petty officer, he’d served the carrier’s five-inch guns. These days, they fired at aeroplanes as well as aiming at targets on land and sea.
When the alarm didn’t come, Sam drifted over to the wireless shack. He let out a snort when he found out the strange aeroplanes overhead were labeled CONFEDERATE CITRUS COMPANY. “What’s so funny, sir?” asked a wireless operator, a youngster who hadn’t been aboard on that earlier cruise.
“That’s the same outfit that eyeballed us when we sailed between Florida and Cuba,” Carsten answered. “Do the Confederates even grow citrus over by Guaymas?”
“Damned if I know, uh, sir,” the operator said. Sam didn’t know, either. He did know the land there would have to be more fertile than the sorry, sun-baked soil of Baja California to give anybody even half a chance.
He didn’t know the Confederate Citrus Company was a smoke screen to get around the military restrictions the armistice had imposed on the CSA. He didn’t know, but he’d wondered even back in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean. Here in the Gulf of California, he went from wondering to downright suspicion.
The wireless operator said, “Sir, shall we remind the skipper the name’s the same now as it was then?”
“He’s bound to remember,” Sam said, but then, “Yes, go ahead and remind him. It can’t hurt, and it might do some good.”
He went back out to the flight deck. The aeroplanes from the Confederate Citrus Company seemed about as swift and maneuverable as the ones that had sprung into the air from the Remembrance’s flight deck. Why would an outfit that dealt with oranges and lemons and limes need machines like that? Carsten didn’t know, but he got more suspicious.
About twenty minutes later, the aeroplanes that had flown out from the coast of Sonora suddenly went back the way they’d come. Rumor, which flew faster than any aeroplane, said Captain Stein had warned them he would have his pilots shoot them down if they lingered.
Sam didn’t know if the rumor was true. If it was, he didn’t know if it was connected to the reminder. But, when he got the news, he said only one word: “Good.”
Through the coffeehouse’s front window, Nellie Jacobs watched a tweedy man come out of the cobbler’s shop across the street. The fellow’s long, lean face bore an unhappy expression. She wasn’t surprised; the shop had gone to the dogs in the more than three years since her husband, who’d had charge of it from not long after the turn of the century, passed away.
The tweedy man crossed the street, heading her way. He almost walked in front of an auto; the horn’s angry bray pierced the plate glass. Nellie wasn’t sure the man even realized the horn had been aimed at him. Once safe on the sidewalk again, he took a notebook out of a jacket pocket, consulted it, and then headed for her door.
She brightened. Business hadn’t been brisk this morning. Business hadn’t been brisk a lot of mornings lately, or afternoons, either. The man pulled at the door when he should have pushed. Realizing his mistake, he tried again. The bell over the door rang.
“What can I get you, sir?” Nellie asked from behind the counter.
“Oh.” By the surprise in his voice, he hadn’t thought of ordering anything. Then he nodded to himself, deciding he would. “A … a cup of coffee, please.” He set a dime in front of Nellie. Tiny and shiny in silver, Theodore Roosevelt’s toothy grin stared up at her.
“Here you are.” She gave him the cup. “Cream and sugar right there.” She didn’t bother pointing them out to most people, but he might not have noticed without help.
“Thank you,” he said, and used them. After a sudden, pleased smile at the coffee, he asked, “Excuse me, but were you acquainted with the gentleman who used to run the cobbler’s shop across the street, Mr., uh”—he paused to check that little notebook again—“Harold Jacobs?”
“Was I acquainted with him?” Nellie echoed, scorn in her voice. “I should hope I was! Aren’t I the mother of his daughter?”
“Oh!” The tweedy man brightened. “Is that why he wasn’t there, then? Is he here? May I speak with him, please?”
She eyed him with even more scorn than she’d used while speaking. “Good luck, pal. I wish I could. He died in 1933. Who the devil are you, anyway?”
“My name is Maynard G. Ferguson, Mrs. Jacobs.” Ferguson used the title with some hesitation, as if unsure she deserved it. She gave him a dirty look. He hurried on: “I am a professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. I’m studying the way the United States gathered intelligence in Confederate-occupied Washington. Would you know anything about that?”
“I hope I would,” Nellie answered. “Haven’t I got my own Order of Remembrance, First Class, put on me by Teddy Roosevelt his own self, for the help I gave Hal during the war? What do you need to know?”
“Order of Remembrance, First Class?” Out came the notebook again. After peering into it, Maynard Ferguson said, “Then you would be … Nellie Semphroch?”
“Not now,” she said, as if to an idiot. “You said it yourself—I’m Nellie Jacobs.”
“Yes. Of course.” Ferguson scribbled in the little book. “Then you would know how information was smuggled out of the city and over to the U.S. lines?”
“I know pigeons were a part of it,” Nellie said. “There was a fellow named … Oh, what was his name? Lou Pfeiffer, that was it! A fellow named Lou Pfeiffer who used to keep them. You could ask him about the details.”
“Mr. Pfeiffer, unfortunately, is deceased. He died in… .” Professor Ferguson flipped through the pages of the notebook. “In 1927. In any case, I am not chiefly concerned with the pigeons. I am interested in the man to whom Mr. Jacobs—and every other man in the Washington spy ring—reported, a Mr. William Reach. Were you by any chance acquainted with him?”
Ice ran through Nellie. “With Bill Reach?” she said, through lips suddenly numb. “I knew him a little bit, but only a little bit.” And you can’t prove anything else, God damn it, not now you can’t. “Why do you want to know about him in particular?”
“Primarily because he’s such a man of mystery,” Maynard Ferguson replied. “He conducted such an important intelligence campaign throughout the occupation, then disappeared without a trace just before U.S. soldiers retook Washington, D.C. I’ve been on the trail of that mystery for more than ten years now, ever since I started doing research on this topic, and I’m still hoping to get to the bottom of it.”
Well, you won’t, not from me. You’ve just come to the end of the trail. Nellie could have told what she knew, or at least some of it. It was safe enough now, with Hal dead. But she’d been keeping the secret so long, hugging it so tightly to herself, that letting go of it never once crossed her mind. She said, “My best guess is, he was killed in the shelling. An awful lot of people were.”
Ferguson looked disappointed. “It could be, I suppose. Somehow, though, I want to believe he had a more dramatic end, and that someone still living knows what it was. He doesn’t strike me as the type who would have gone quietly.”
A more dramatic end? He did. Nellie still remembered the feel of the knife as she drove it into Bill Reach’s chest. And somebody does know, sure enough. But you never will.
“If you don’t know what happened to him, could you at least speak to what he was like?” the man from Pittsburgh asked.
“I didn’t like him. He wasn’t a gentleman, and he drank too much,” Nellie said, and every word of that was true. “I have no idea how he got to be a spy. He was a reporter, wasn’t he, back in the days before the war?”
“Yes, that’s correct, with the Star-News,” Ferguson said. “How did you know? You are the first person with whom I have spoken who did.”
“I … used to know him back then,” Nellie answered unwillingly. “I’ve lived in Washington all my life. I was here—I think I was five, or maybe seven—when the Confederates shelled us during the Second Mexican War.”
“It was in 1881,” Maynard Ferguson said. Maybe he was expecting her to tell him how old she’d been then, from which he could figure out exactly how old she was now. She wondered if he’d ever had anything to do with women before. After a moment, realizing she wasn’t going to do anything of the sort, he asked, “Were you … romantically involved with Mr. Reach?”
“No,” Nellie said at once, with great firmness. There hadn’t been anything romantic about what passed between them in one hotel room or another. He’d laid his money on the dresser, and then she’d done what he paid for. Later, during the war, he’d decided that meant there was something between the two of them. Nellie knew better. She added, “He drank too much even way back then.”
“Did he? How interesting!” By the way Professor Ferguson said it, the news really did interest him. “Impressive how he ran and organized a sophisticate spy ring while at the same time battling his drunkenness.”
“I don’t know what’s so impressive about it,” Nellie said with a sniff. “I saw him sitting right where you are when he was too drunk to know who I was even though he’d … known me before.” She didn’t want to put that pause there, but couldn’t help herself. “You can’t make me believe that was good for what he was doing.”
“But information from Washington kept right on getting to Philadelphia even so,” the professor said.
“Yes, and it kept right on getting to Philadelphia even when your precious Bill Reach spent time in jail on account of he stole something or other, or at least the Confederates thought he did,” Nellie said.
Ferguson scribbled furiously. “That’s fascinating,” he said. “It’s something else I hadn’t heard of, too. I wonder if Confederate records survive to confirm your statement. Hard to guess; much was destroyed in the bombardment, and Reach also might have used an alias with them. But it’s another avenue to explore. How do you suppose the ring continued to function with Reach in custody?”
“I’ll tell you how—through my Hal, that’s how,” Nellie answered proudly. “You know TR gave him a Distinguished Service Cross, I expect. He didn’t win that for playing tiddlywinks.”
“I’m sure he didn’t,” Ferguson said. “I wish he were alive today so I could ask him about this entire important period.”
“I wish he was alive today because I loved him and I miss him.” When she first said she’d marry Hal, there at the end of the Great War, she hadn’t dreamt how true that would be. What occasionally passed in their bedroom had next to nothing to do with it—with the large exception of causing Clara, who was the biggest surprise (and one of the most pleasant) Nellie had ever got. What made it true was that Hal had been a good man, and even Nellie, who had no use for the male half of the human race, couldn’t possibly have had a different opinion.
“I’m sorry,” the professor said. He was just being polite, though; Nellie could tell. He asked, “Is there anyone else who could possibly shed light on the way William Reach met his end in 1917, if that is what happened to him?”
“I can’t think of anybody else,” Nellie answered, which, again, was nothing but the truth. No one had been anywhere close by when Reach tried to rape her and she killed him.
But Professor Ferguson had ideas of his own. “What about your daughter, Edna”—flip, flip, flip went the notebook pages—“Semphroch?”
Even with his fancy research, he still got things wrong. “She’s been Edna Grimes for a long time now,” Nellie said, “and I guarantee she doesn’t know anything about that.” She did know about Nellie’s scandalous background, though. Would she tell some professor what she knew? Nellie didn’t think so, but wasn’t a hundred percent sure. Edna had a mean streak in her that came out now and again.
“Didn’t she receive a”—flip, flip, flip—“an Order of Remembrance, Second Class, at the same time as you were given your decoration?” Ferguson asked. “How can she be ignorant with that background?”
Nellie laughed in his face. “Easy as pie, that’s how. She worked here with me, and sometimes I’d pass on things she told me, things she heard and I didn’t. That’s what she got her medal for. She would’ve married a Confederate officer, you know, if an artillery bombardment hadn’t killed him on the way to the altar.”
“Oh.” Ferguson sounded faintly disappointed—and more than faintly revolted. He was old enough to have fought in the Great War. Like most men who were, he had no love for the Confederate States. He also seemed to have little understanding for what the people of Washington, who’d lived under Confederate occupation for more than two years, had gone through during that time. Nellie wasn’t surprised. Few who hadn’t lived here then did understand.
“You see?” Any which way, Nellie didn’t want Ferguson talking to Edna. “Nobody knows nothing about Bill Reach.”
Maynard Ferguson sighed. “I suppose not. I hope you realize how frustrating this is for me.”
“I’m sorry,” said Nellie, who was anything but. “Nothing I can do about it, though.” Nothing I will do about it, anyway.
The professor left the coffeehouse, head down, shoulders slumped. Nellie put his cup in the sink. She’d never dreamt anybody would come poking after Bill Reach. But it didn’t matter. In the end, it truly didn’t. Only she knew the answer—only she knew, literally enough, where the body was buried—and she wasn’t talking. Not now, not ever.