by Eric Flint
"Lorrie Gorrell will be nice enough to her," Joe said. "Lorrie's the sister of Fred Pence, who's over at Fulda working with Harlan. And Amber Lee Barnes, of course."
Tony laughed. Amber Lee had been in the military from 1631 to 1634. She and Scott Blackwell, who was the military commander down in Wuerzburg, had gotten a divorce a couple of years before the Ring of Fire. Frank Jackson gave her a compassionate discharge when she married Sterling Pridmore and the blessed event turned out to be twins, rather than accommodate the babies in the Erfurt Supply Depot, although Amber Lee was quite willing to soldier on. Dennis promptly hired her as his executive assistant, to continue as a civilian doing the job she had done in the military, so the twins were spending their days in the Erfurt Supply Depot anyway.
Joe laughed, too, at the thought of Amber Lee. "A couple of the others may be a bit stiff at first. But Pat can find plenty to do, ramping up their little clinic into a satellite of the sanitary commission. It should help a little that the others are all fifteen or twenty years younger than she is. Or more. Most people have trouble being outrageously disrespectful to someone who's old enough to be their mother."
* * *
Amber Lee Barnes looked up from her desk in the Erfurt Supply Depot. Jim Fritz was standing there. Silently, as usual. It never occurred to him to say anything on the order of "excuse me." He just stood until someone noticed him.
Right now, he was looking at the bassinets in which Jamie and Pel were sleeping—both, O wonder of wonders, sleeping at once. She grinned at the twins affectionately. Jamie had been born very close to midnight on March 31. She had thought that Tucker Conway, the EMT who was serving as midwife, was joking when he said, "There's another one." But Pel had arrived as an April Fool, right after midnight, so someday she would have to do a lot of explaining about how a person could have twins with different birthdays.
When she said, "Good morning, Jim," he said, "They're different. They don't stay the same."
"They grow, Jim. They get older. When they grow, they change."
He thought about that for a while. Finally he nodded. "People do that. Things stay the same. Or they should, unless somebody changes them."
This was almost certainly a signal that Jim, the way his mind worked, had noticed something that was different from the way he thought it should be. Dennis had told him to look for things that were different, so he was doing that.
"Do you want to see Dennis?" she asked.
It turned out that wanting to see Dennis was the reason Jim was standing there. Working with Jim Fritz could be a little different sometimes, but if you could figure out the clues he sent, he just about never wasted a person's time.
Jim didn't really like to talk to people. If he absolutely had to talk to someone, he preferred to do it over in the closed-off side shed where he managed the R&D inventory. As things were, however, Amber Lee thought . . .
"Go into Dennis' office," she said. "He got shot. He shouldn't walk over to your place unless he has to. He's on crutches because his hip still hurts."
"That's right," Jim answered. "He got shot. His hip hurts. I'll go to his office."
As he went, he looked back at her rather reproachfully. "Things shouldn't be the wrong shape."
* * *
"The news from the pre-opening teachers' meeting front," Natalie Bellamy said, "is that Fran has left Horace Bolender."
Idelette Cavriani and Annalise Richter sat quietly, hoping that their presence had been forgotten and that they would learn a lot more about the peccadilloes of the adults in authority over them.
"Fran is?" Carol asked.
"The librarian at the elementary school," Aura Lee inserted.
"She announced it generally, because she took Dustin and Damien with her. Dustin's seventeen now—he'll be a junior—and Damien's fifteen. He'll be a freshman. She doesn't want them leaving school and going anywhere with Horace, if he comes asking for them."
"That has to be a pretty desperate step for her," Aura Lee said. "She's from Fairmont. Her parents and brothers all lived over there. She doesn't have a soul in Grantville to rely on except herself, if she's leaving Horace."
Natalie picked up her coffee cup. "She said that she's going to file for divorce before school opens and try to get a legal temporary custody order for the boys from Maurice Tito. That's all she said publicly. She's Methodist, of course, so I may be able to pick up bits and pieces more around church, even though the Reverend Mary Ellen is properly closemouthed about things like this. It'll be harder for her to keep Horace away from them at church than at home or school, though, since he's a Methodist too and has a perfect right to be there, so something may come up. I imagine that Mildred—that's Horace's mother—is just livid."
Annalise couldn't resist. "Sheryl Cunningham is Horace Bolender's niece and she left home too. She's been an apprentice engineer down at USE Steel for two years, but she's been taking the commuter bus from Grantville. Now she's moved out, down to Kamsdorf, into employee housing. She's been going with Ward Alberts for a while. He and several other of the military EMT trainees showed up at her house Saturday morning and just stood there looking at her father while she took her stuff out of her room."
Carol Koch frowned. "Sheryl is?"
"Dan and Laura Jo's oldest. Well, Laura Jo's oldest and probably Dan's. Anyway, he acknowledged paternity at the time. She was born in 1981, but they didn't get married until 1986. The two younger kids were born after they married. It was right after Delton went to prison that they got married," Natalie said. "A lot of people thought that Dan was taking out insurance—that Laura Jo knew something about his involvement in the corruption scandals and wanted to marry her to keep a wife from testifying against her husband, if it came to that."
"Sheryl and Ward are going to get married in January, after Ward finishes his training," Idelette contributed. "He's going to come back to the Presbyterian church because his mom wants him to and Sheryl's going to switch over from Methodist. They came to talk to the Reverend Enoch about it." She was hoping very hard that she had now demonstrated enough grasp of what Aura Lee defined as "reality" that she could attend the high school rather than being tutored.
Aura Lee picked up her coffee cup. "You'd better brief Tony on all of this, Carol," she said. "And I'll talk to Joe. It's the kind of thing that men, bless their hearts, tend to miss until it walks right up and slaps them in the face. There has to have been some kind of a blow-up."
"If Horace tried to get Dustin mixed up in his machinations somehow," Natalie said, "you can be damned sure that Fran blew up. Both those boys are good kids."
* * *
"Attempted rape?" Tony Adducci looked at his sister Bernadette. "We've been trying to get von Drachhausen for a lot of things, but that wasn't one that we expected."
Bernadette smiled back cheerfully. "The charge will do for the time being. It's definitely enough to hold him on, and Sheryl didn't come to any serious harm. Drachhausen still hasn't really come to terms with modern technology and didn't suspect a thing when she backed toward the telephone stand. That's where Dan keeps his handgun, too. So first she pulled the drawer open and got the gun. Then, with it on him, she went through the motions of dialing the police. Of course, she didn't have the safety off, but he found just the idea of the gun intimidating enough, particularly given where she was threatening to shoot him."
"Went through the motions? Safety on?" Tony shook his head.
"I'll get to that in a moment. Hold him a while and he may be prepared to sing songs about other topics. Especially if we manage to give the impression that Horace and the Cunninghams are throwing him to the wolves."
"What about his father-in-law? He is a state senator, after all. Or member of the House of Lords. Or whatever we're calling it in the latest change-of-names carousel."
"Count August von Sommersburg? He's definitely throwing Drachhausen to the wolves. His older daughter is in town, now, as well as Elena. She's established residence and gone down to take the c
itizenship class. The minute she takes her oath of allegiance, she's going to file for divorce." Bernadette had a very satisfied expression on her face.
"I believe Sommersburg said something about that possibility to me last spring. I didn't believe that he meant it."
"Whether he did or not at the time, which he may have or may not have, he definitely does now." Bernadette cocked her head to one side. "It could have just been a red herring he was dragging in front of your nose while he made up his mind whether or not to throw in with Bolender. I wouldn't put it past him, but as far as we know, he must have decided to stay out of it. Which is all to the good, since the prosecution of a sitting legislator is always messy."
"What's the background on the attempted rape? As much as you can tell me without undermining the prosecution, of course, Sis."
"According to what Sheryl is telling us, Dan deliberately took Laura Jo and the other kids out to supper on an evening when he knew that Ward was on duty and wouldn't be there with her. Thus giving Drachhausen open season on his daughter. Or step-daughter, as the case may be."
"Nasty." Tony frowned.
"A payoff for services received. The services being currently unspecified, but I have hopes that some further interrogation will elicit information about them."
"I do recall that Sommersburg said that von Drachhausen could be 'personally unpleasant.'"
"Sommersburg shares the basic ethical system of an Elizabethan privateer." Bernadette snorted. "It's just that his operations are land-based and run on wagons and gravel, concrete, and cement rather than ships and pieces of eight. If he said 'personally unpleasant,' there's probably not much a person could imagine that's beyond Drachhausen."
She stood up. "Horace Bolender told Dan to give Drachhausen his chance at Sheryl, since that was what the man wanted." Bernadette's voice was flat.
Tony looked up at her.
"He told Dan with Dustin in the room. Dustin went to Fran. Fran called Preston Richards, so the police were already in place at Dan's house by the time Drachhausen showed up. Which Drachhausen doesn't know, by the way. He thinks that they came bursting in as a result of Sheryl's dialing. Dustin's willing to testify, when we need him, but we don't want Horace to realize, yet, just how much we know."
Tony shook his head. After all the work they had been doing to get the goods in regard to what he and Joe and the others called the "grand scam" now, the corruption that was starting to run through the government of the State of Thuringia-Franconia like a spider web. After all their work that much of the time hadn't seemed to be going anywhere, Horace had been that dumb.
Of course, nine times out of ten, prosecutors got the guy on something like mail fraud rather than for what he actually did.
Life was like that.
* * *
"Ah," Count August von Sommersburg said, "Louisa, my dear daughter."
His dear daughter Louisa looked at him with considerable exasperation. It had been an utterly horrid trip. Eleonora and August had whined and cried the whole way, their nursemaid had become motion sick so she had to let her get out of the carriage and walk alongside, her usual lady-in-waiting had refused to come beyond Erfurt and stayed behind there, she was two months away from delivering her third child. She had been, at any rate, peacefully in residence at Sommersburg enjoying the fact that her husband was, whether peacefully or not, at least in residence somewhere else, when her father had written insisting that she come to Grantville.
"Papa," she said. "This had better be good."
"Oh, Louisa, it is," her sister Elena said. "It's just marvelous. Since Papa wrote you, Marcus tried to force his attentions upon the daughter of one of his up-time business associates, so we'll be able to get you a divorce with no trouble at all."
"If it's only 'tried to,'" Louisa answered sourly, "then it didn't go far enough for me to get rid of him on the grounds of adultery. Can't the man ever do anything right?"
"Oh, but Louisa," Elena said. "You haven't been reading all the little treatises I have been compiling so carefully and sending to you. Under the up-timers' law, he doesn't have to have succeeded. You can divorce him anyway. Then, really, all we have to do is wait. You wouldn't want to remarry until after the baby you're carrying is weaned, anyway, and that will give Marcus at least two years to do something so dreadful that the Ehegericht will divorce you from him, too. The up-timers have lovely proverbs. Jonas Justinus Muselius, the teacher at St. Katharina the Heroic, is collecting them. The one most applicable at the moment is, 'Give him enough rope and he'll hang himself.'"
* * *
Horace Bolender looked up with irritation. There were days that he thought that someone should issue an ordinance against humming while wandering up and down the halls of the Department of Economic Resources.
Unfortunately, the person who would have to issue it was his boss, Tony Adducci, who was currently humming the "Folsom Prison Blues."
There were days when Horace thought that Tony must have the world's largest inventory of country music songs that either started or ended up with someone in prison for any one of a variety of offenses. If he heard "The Green, Green Grass of Home" just one more time, he thought he would freak out. Tony had been on a kick, repeating that one over and over, for the past several days.
Maybe "Folsom Prison Blues" wasn't so bad.
Tony smiled to himself once he was safely past Horace's door. He really shouldn't do it, but he'd been making a sort of collection of prison songs. Benny Pierce had been a big help.
September, 1634
Tony Adducci's well-intentioned letter had been chasing Noelle Murphy all over the map of Franconia. She paid the fee, wondering why it was so thick. When she came to open it, she realized that another letter was stuck to the back of it. Carefully, she separated the two.
Tony's letter was old news by now. But she was grateful that her godfather had thought of her. She had sent her mother a very careful letter when she first got the news, which was by way of a message that Ed Piazza had radioed down to Steve Salatto in Wuerzburg. Steve and his wife Anita Masaniello had given her a bare bones version of the events at Juliann Stull's funeral because that was what they had.
It had been a very, very careful letter. Trying to say, "I love you a lot, Mom, but are you really sure about this?" Sounding more like an anxious parent than a child, she was afraid. What with the other three girls being left up-time and Keenan not being of much help about anything, she guessed that she was responsible now.
After all, under the will of God, she owed her very existence to the fact that her mom had no common sense at all when it came to Dennis Stull. And never did have. And probably never would have.
She hadn't known whether she should write anything to Dennis. Not at all. It was the kind of occasion when you missed printed greeting cards that had messages thought up by someone else. Finally, she had sent a little note wishing him a rapid recovery from his wound. That would have to do for the moment.
It wasn't as if she really knew him.
The second letter now, stuck to the one from Tony. She looked at it. Presumably, it had been stuck there since the day it left Grantville. The moisture in the glue on Tony's letter had completely blotted the address. She opened it, looking for some identification of sender or intended recipient.
Read through the contents. Smiled a blissful smile. Talk about a person digging his own grave. She reached for an envelope, dropped the item into it along with a cover note of her own, and sent it on its way back to Grantville and Tony.
* * *
"Jim's father, Duane Fritz, is my first cousin," Natalie Bellamy said. "His mother was Susan Bock. That was a bad idea. Bocks and Fritzes shouldn't marry each other. Both families have some little oddities. The Bocks more than the Fritzes, if I do say so myself. Laurene Bock, Mona Pennock's mother, who went out to California, was a little peculiar, too. Though nowhere near as much as Duane. As is Marjorie, Archie Mitchell's wife. The only branch of those Bocks that escaped it were the kids
of Nancy, who married Phil Reardon. And I'm not so sure about Dude Reardon, either. Which would really mean that only Gary Reardon who married Gaylynn Murray is what a person might call not in any way dysfunctional."
"What's wrong with Jim?" Carol Koch asked.
"I can't give you a medical diagnosis. I'm not a psychologist or a psychiatrist. But just as a lay person with no more training than any teacher gets, I'd guess high-functioning autistic for both of them, Duane and Jim. Or Asperger's Syndrome. Somewhere in that area. Nothing that anyone in Grantville has the training to do anything about, or ever did."
She sighed. "Sometimes I'm not sure that I'm so different from them. People have been known to say that my social skills are lacking, even though I've been working on them for as long as I can remember."
