The fire was farther away than Jennie expected. The smoke had quickly stained the blue sky overhead gray and filled the air with a nasty smell. The closer they got to the main plume of smoke, the more people crowded the sidewalks. Some stared at the sky, but others hurried along with Jennie and Tommy toward the smoke’s source.
At last they rounded a street corner and saw a fiery scene. Tall tongues of flame licked at a large building that sat back a little from the street. The fire’s heat blew at them, along with smoke and cinders. Off to one side an electrical line dangled from a broken pole. It danced through the air like it was alive, shooting sparks in every direction. Jennie pulled at Tommy’s arm to stop him. Maybe they were close enough.
“What was in that building?” Jennie yelled. A fire engine rounded the corner and sped past them, its siren screaming.
“A packing plant, where they cut up meat,” a bystander said.
“There were probably people in there working,” Jennie said. She swallowed hard. “Do you think they were killed?”
Tommy stared at the blazing building. “Maybe,” he said slowly.
Moments later a woman ran past them. “Raymond! Raymond! Where are you?” the woman screamed. In a few moments she was out of sight, running toward the fire.
Jennie and Tommy stared at each other and then back at the fire. Police cars screeched to a halt in the street followed by military cars. More fire trucks arrived and ambulances followed. It was exciting in a horrible way, and Jennie and Tommy backed up a little and climbed on an old bench so they could watch.
A few minutes later the police moved everyone away from the fire. Jennie and Tommy escaped notice for a few minutes, but soon a policeman hollered at them to get down off the bench and move along. They obeyed, but Jennie stopped for one last look at the flames.
In the reddish-orange glow of the fire, she saw something that she hadn’t noticed before. The flames had partly burned up the building, revealing the blackened skeleton of what looked like an airplane. She frowned and rubbed her eyes.
“Tommy, look at that.” Jennie pointed at the building. “There—inside. It’s an airplane … or what’s left of one. But how did an airplane get in that building?”
Tommy stared for a moment and then raised his eyebrows. “It is a plane. Maybe it crashed.”
“Remember that roaring noise right before the explosion? Maybe it was that airplane about to crash,” Jennie said. “That’s what the first woman was yelling.”
“I told you kids to move along, didn’t I?” The policeman had returned and gave them a ferocious look.
“We’re going,” Jennie said. “Did that plane crash into the building and start the fire?” She pointed at the plane framework, which was even more visible in the fire now.
The policeman didn’t even look. “There’s no plane. It was an explosion of some kind. Maybe gas. No plane involved. Now get a move on. This is a restricted area.”
“But I can see the plane shape in the fire,” Jennie persisted. “Just look.”
“I said there is no airplane,” the policeman snapped. “If you two don’t hightail it out of here, I’m going to run you in.”
At that, Jennie and Tommy took off down the sidewalk. In her haste, Jennie didn’t see a man who was standing partly in the shadow of a nearby church. She ran right into the large, dark-haired man. The man muttered some words in a foreign language and brushed off Jennie as if she were a fly.
“I’m sorry, sir,” Jennie said. “I wasn’t looking.” The man seemed not to hear and continued to stare toward the fire.
The pair ran for a couple of blocks before slowing and stopping by the side of a building.
“Tommy, I know I saw an airplane in that fire,” Jennie said.
“I saw it, too. Why did the policeman say the opposite?”
“I don’t know,” Jennie replied. “It doesn’t make sense. Let’s go find Art and Jasper.”
There was a lot in Jennie’s life that didn’t make sense these days. The war dragged on. She could barely remember what life was like before Japanese bombs had dropped out of the sky on Pearl Harbor more than two years ago. Her oldest brother, Roger, had enlisted in the army and was now serving in Europe. Jennie had never told anyone, but sometimes she couldn’t remember what Roger looked like. When that happened, she stared at his picture on the living room table.
The older boys were waiting at the bus stop when Tommy and Jennie arrived.
“Where have you been?” Art said impatiently. “You two wouldn’t notice if the street blew up under you if it meant getting some scrap for your collection.”
“Wait until you hear what we saw,” Jennie said, ignoring her brother’s tone.
“Save it,” Art ordered. He jerked his head at the oncoming bus. “Jasper and I were supposed to be back at the hotel by one o’clock to meet the coal delivery truck. You can explain to Mama why we’re late.” Jasper lived in the hotel, too, and he and Art both worked there after school and on Saturdays.
Everyone on the bus talked loudly about what they had seen, including the bus driver, who claimed to have snapped some pictures of a mysterious airplane flying low a few moments before the explosion. Not everyone agreed that it was an airplane, but they all had felt the jolt.
“Do you think they heard the explosion at home?” Jennie asked as they swung off the bus at the corner near the hotel.
“Maybe,” Tommy said, “but I don’t know how loud it would have been this far away.”
“We’ll find out in a minute.” Jennie turned into the doorway and bounded up the stairs that led to the lobby of the hotel. Their family was running the hotel for some Japanese friends, the Tanakas, who had been sent to an internment camp soon after the war began. Art and Jasper ran for the back stairs to see if the coal delivery truck had come yet.
“It’s so dark in here. Why aren’t the lights on?” Jennie walked over to a wall switch and flipped it, but nothing happened. The only light shone dimly through the windows at the front of the lobby.
Their mother rushed out of the hotel office door. “There you are! I’ve been worried sick. What with the explosion and no electricity, I was thinking awful thoughts.” She pulled the pair close for a hug. “Is Arthur with you?”
Jennie nodded and pointed toward the back of the building.
“Why on earth didn’t you come home right away after that explosion? And don’t tell me you didn’t hear it. Everybody for miles around heard it.”
Jennie looked at Tommy. She knew what he was thinking. How much should they tell? They would never lie to their mother, but some things were best left unsaid. Tommy raised his eyebrows and gave a tiny shoulder shrug. Jennie figured that meant Tommy thought they should tell the whole truth because Mama would find out anyhow.
“We were there,” Jennie said finally.
“What do you mean?” Mama asked. She sounded suspicious. “I thought you were collecting rubber in the neighborhood.”
“Oh, we were collecting rubber,” Jennie said. “Just not in the neighborhood. Art and Jasper took us with them. We were right near the explosion, and an airplane was in the fire.”
“But the policeman said it wasn’t an airplane,” Tommy said.
“Only it was,” Jennie said, “because we both saw the shape of it in the fire. We think a plane crashed into that building and caused the fire. But we don’t know why the policeman said it wasn’t a plane.”
Mama looked in stunned silence from one sibling to the other. “You mean to tell me that you went out of our neighborhood without telling me and then saw this fire or plane crash or whatever it was?” she said at last. She stood in the middle of the lobby with her arms crossed, frowning at her two youngest children.
“We didn’t see the crash,” Jennie said. “We heard it. It was afterward that we saw the fire and the plane.” She avoided the first part of her mother’s question.
“Don’t tell me another thing right now.” Mama raised her hands. “I don’t want to know.
You children will be the death of me yet. For now, get busy and find some extra candles. We don’t know how long the power will be off, and our hotel guests will be needing light.” She strode back to the office.
Jennie sneaked a grin at Tommy. Off easy so far. Maybe Mama would get busy and forget the whole thing. They started down the hall toward their apartment.
Mama stuck her head out of the office. “By the way, you haven’t heard the last of this episode.”
Jennie and Tommy groaned at the same time.
In a few minutes they were in the depths of a storage closet looking for candles.
“I was sure I saw some candles in here somewhere. You feel in the boxes on one side, and I’ll do the other.” Jennie shoved the closet door wide open to get every bit of light from the hallway. “I don’t much like putting my hands into places I can’t see first,” she said.
“We’re in enough trouble anyway, so we’d better just do it,” Tommy said. “I guess it wasn’t such a great idea to go with Art and Jasper today.”
“It was a good idea,” Jennie insisted, “but the wrong time.” She felt among the boxes and other things stored on shelves.
“I’ll say.”
“Hey, I forgot,” Jennie said. “We didn’t stop and get our rubber and my tire.”
“Forget about that stuff. We can get more,” Tommy said.
Jennie knocked a box off the shelf, but there was no sound of breaking, so she felt for it on the floor and shoved it back on the shelf.
“Of course you’d say that,” Jennie muttered, “since it was my tire we left behind. Well, I’m not forgetting. Tomorrow I’m going after it.”
“We probably won’t be let out of the apartment for a month,” Tommy said. “We’ll probably be given bed detail.”
“Yuck! I hope not, because I hate changing sheets.” Jennie fumbled in yet one more box. “Here it is!” she yelled. The pieces of candle felt smooth to the touch. The small box was half full of assorted old and new candles. She tucked it under her arm and walked into the hallway with Tommy close behind.
Maybe Mama would be so happy to have the candles that she’d go easy on the two for leaving the neighborhood. It was more likely that Jennie would be changing dirty sheets, and the hotel never ran out of that item.
CHAPTER 2
Mr. Romano’s Cousin
When I was in the grocery store, a man said that it was a Japanese airplane trying to bomb the Boeing factory, but it missed,” Tommy said. He tossed dirty sheets on the pile in the hallway the Saturday after the crash.
Jennie shoved some of the sheets into a basket. “Dad has always said that Japanese planes couldn’t come this far.” She remembered the early days of the war when everyone was terrified that Japanese airplanes would swoop out of the sky just like they had at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Dad and Mama made sure that the hotel met all blackout restrictions in case of attack, but Dad still said that the Japanese couldn’t fly the big bombers nearly this far. Dad was an engineer, so Jennie thought he should know.
“I heard a clerk say that an enemy agent blew up the meatpacking plant. He sure wasn’t a very smart agent if that’s what he thought was most important to blow up. Why wouldn’t he blow up the shipyards or Boeing?” Tommy asked.
“Don’t talk about blowing up Boeing. Dad says he is as safe as he can be working there,” Jennie said.
“Maybe he just doesn’t want us to worry,” Tommy said.
Jennie frowned at her brother and jammed more dirty sheets in the basket. She handled a lot of her worries by keeping busy and thinking about other things, but it was hard to ignore the fact that her father worked in an important airplane factory. It made sense that the enemy would want to get rid of a factory that helped the United States so much.
“It was an airplane crash, not a bomb,” Jennie said firmly. “We saw that with our own eyes. And I don’t think it was a Japanese plane, either.” She was having a hard time forgetting that fiery scene from the other day. She kept thinking about the woman who had called out for someone named Raymond. Maybe Raymond had died and left his wife and children to take care of themselves.
Jennie knew one thing for sure about war. It meant death—and plenty of it. She couldn’t walk a block from her home in the hotel without seeing a gold star in a window showing that a soldier from that family had been killed. Somehow the disaster she had seen last week seemed worse, maybe because it was so close to home. Each night right after she prayed for Roger, she prayed for the families of the people who had died in the fire. She hoped God was listening.
“It must have been one of our planes,” Tommy said after he tossed some wet towels into another basket. “But why would the government make such a secret of it? Planes have crashed around here before, and everyone knew.”
“I don’t know,” Jennie said, “but I’m going to ask Dad about it again.” The mystery of the plane in the fire was a puzzle she’d like to solve.
“He won’t tell you anything.” Tommy pushed the heavy basket down the hall.
Jennie sighed and picked up her overflowing basket. She knew Tommy was right. Dad probably wouldn’t tell anything he might know about the crash. He was always quoting the war poster that said LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS. Dad said keeping quiet about war production, especially airplanes, was a serious matter. Jennie understood, but that didn’t keep her from being curious. Maybe her best friend, Colleen Kramer, had heard something. They could talk after the Girl Scout meeting that afternoon while they hauled their crushed tin cans to the collection center. If she weren’t on double duty here at the hotel because of their rubber-collecting expedition, Jennie would already be out with Colleen going door-to-door asking for tin cans. This hotel work never ended.
“Are we done yet?” Tommy asked after the last basket of dirty sheets and towels had been piled in the laundry room.
“No, and I want to get everything done before my Girl Scout meeting.”
“Get the buckets then. All we have left is scrubbing the hall floor,” Tommy said.
Jennie ducked back into the laundry room, muttering as she went. Tommy followed her and grabbed the mops off the rack where they hung. They were small mops, or Jennie and Tommy couldn’t have managed them at all. In a few minutes they had partly filled two buckets with cleaner and water from the faucet over the laundry room sink.
Jennie set down her bucket in the hallway and stared at the faded linoleum floor. “How does this get so dirty?” There were muddy footprints down one side of the hall and a spot or two that looked sticky. “You wouldn’t think people could get their feet so dirty when it hasn’t rained for days. It will take forever to get this clean.”
“Let’s race. We’ll each start at opposite ends of the hall, and the one who gets to the middle first wins.” Tommy set his bucket next to Jennie’s.
Jennie eyed the long hallway. Usually they helped their mother or older sister Trudy mop, and that meant that it took forever since they both insisted on a careful washing and rinsing of the floor. Jennie had often thought mopping could be done in less time, and she was sure she could win the race with Tommy.
“Let’s go!” Jennie yelled. She grabbed her bucket and mop and scurried for the far end of the hall. She mopped feverishly, but still her progress toward the middle seemed turtlelike. Rinsing and wringing out the mop every few minutes took a long time. There must be an easier way to do this.
The first and second time that Jennie glanced down the hall at her brother, he was about as far from the middle as she was; but the third time she looked, he was much farther along. Jennie stretched her neck to get a better view. He had abandoned his mop and was scooting along on his knees, scrubbing at the floor with a brush and some rags. And was he ever going fast!
Jennie frowned. She wasn’t about to let her brother win this race. She looked at the stretch of floor in front of her. The part that took so long was the wringing out of the mop. Maybe she should stop wringing it out. She poured a little of the water on the tile, rubbed i
t around, and moved on. The water flew as she tried to go faster and faster. She slopped and mopped, slopped and mopped. Before long the hall floor behind her glistened with a sheen of water. Maybe too much water, she thought when she glanced back, but she figured it would soon dry.
Tommy sped up, too, but Jennie could see that she was gaining on him. Gaining, that is, until a tall blond-haired woman flung open the door to her room and stepped into the hall. She slipped on the wet floor but was able to catch herself by grabbing at Jennie. Jennie promptly staggered into her bucket, dumping the contents. Jennie and the woman stared as the water spread out before them in a tiny tidal wave.
Mama picked that moment to walk around the corner. “What in the world is going on?” The water lay in a big puddle.
“Um, we’re mopping,” Jennie said and held out her mop for proof. Tommy inched around the edge of the puddle to stand by his sister.
“That’s not what I would call this,” Mama replied crisply. She stared down the hallway. “It looks like you poured water and sloshed it around.”
Jennie remained silent. The blond-haired woman smiled at her and tiptoed through the water to the lobby with Mama apologizing the whole time.
“Now you two get this cleaned up. Pronto.”
“I didn’t do it,” Tommy protested, but Mama gave him a look that made him be quiet.
“Tommy didn’t do it,” Jennie said. “I managed it all by myself.”
“I’m glad you’re honest, but he can still help clean up.” Mama raised a hand to keep Jennie from talking. “Experience with you two has shown me that if one is in trouble, the other one usually has something to do with it.”
Jennie sighed and leaned over to pick up Tommy’s bucket.
“I’m off now to volunteer at the ration board,” Mama said. “This hallway better be shining clean and dry when I return.”
“It will be. I promise,” Jennie said. The two spent the better part of the next hour mopping and wiping and polishing. Jennie thought the floor had never looked so good.
American Triumph: 1939-1945: 4 STORIES IN 1 Page 23
