“We need to call the police, don’t we?” Beckie said.
“The sheriff, you mean,” Justin said. Elizabeth wasn’t big enough to have a police department. But it was a county seat, and the sheriff’s office and the county jail were in the same building as the county courthouse.
“That’s right. I’ve talked with him before,” Beckie said. She took her phone off her belt. “Do you want to call, or shall I?”
“I’ll do it,” he said. “We’re both strangers, but at least I come from Virginia.” One more lie he had to tell.
He didn’t have the Wirt County sheriff’s number, but a call to information took care of that. “This here is Sheriff Cochrane,” said a deep voice on the other end of the line. “Who am I talking to?” Justin gave his name. He told Sheriff Cochrane where he was, and what he and Beckie had found there. “Good God in the foothills!” the sheriff burst out. “Charlie? Are you sure?”
Before Justin answered, he breathed in another lungful of that foul odor. “I’m sure, all right,” he answered grimly.
“Okay. I’m on my way—top of Jephany Knob, you said? Don’t touch anything before I get there, you hear?” Without waiting for an answer, Cochrane hung up.
“Well?” Beckie asked when Justin gave her phone back.
“He’s coming,” Justin said. “He says not to touch anything.”
That made her mad, which Justin thought was funny. “How dumb does he think we are?” she demanded.
“He probably doesn’t think we are. He probably said it just in case,” Justin answered. “He probably says it every time anything happens.” How often did things happen in Wirt County? Justin had no idea.
Sheriff Cochrane wasted no time. Red lights flashing, his car pulled to a stop at the bottom of the knob inside of five minutes. He wore brown boots, a khaki uniform, and what Justin thought of as a Smokey the Bear hat, though nobody in this alternate had ever dreamed up Smokey. He climbed Jephany Knob with the air of a man who knew the ground as well as he knew his own office—and with a pistol in his right hand.
“You two,” he muttered when he saw Justin and Beckie. “Strangers.” By the way he said it, that was almost a crime in itself. He didn’t quite aim the pistol at them, but he sure had it ready.
Justin pointed to the lightning-blasted tree. “There’s the body.”
“Uh-huh.” As soon as Cochrane turned towards it, his long face got even longer. “Yeah, that’s Charlie, sure as the devil.” His nostrils twitched. He grimaced. “And he’s been here a couple days, hasn’t he?” He did some more muttering, then walked over and crouched next to the dead man—and next to the assault rifle by his right hand. Cochrane pointed to it. “You kids touch this piece? At all? I won’t get mad—well, I won’t get real mad—if you tell me yes. But if you tell me no and your prints show up, you don’t even want to think about how much trouble you’re in, not in wartime you don’t. So—did you?”
“No, sir,” Justin and Beckie said together.
“Okay.” The sheriff put on rubber gloves. He picked up the assault rifle, holding it by the barrel, and put it in a plastic evidence bag. Then he looked down at Charlie and shook his head. “I hadn’t seen him around, but I didn’t think anything of it, you know? His wife didn’t call him in missing, either. I don’t like that a bit. I don’t want to believe any of this. If Charlie’s not to be trusted, there’s not a colored fellow in the whole blamed state who is.”
He was likely to be right. Why would blacks in Virginia stay loyal to the government that didn’t give them the rights whites took for granted? The only reason Justin could see for their staying quiet was that they were afraid to rise up. If they lost that fear … Well, there Charlie lay.
“Strangers,” Sheriff Cochrane muttered again. He eyed Justin and Beckie. “What were you two doing up here, anyway?”
“Just taking a walk,” Justin answered.
“We were glad to get out after the rain cooped us up,” Beckie added.
“Uh-huh,” the sheriff said. That might have meant he wondered if they’d come up here to fool around. Rules or no rules, Justin wouldn’t have minded. But Cochrane was also thinking of something else. “You weren’t by any chance up here while it was raining, were you?”
They were white. He had to be careful how he questioned them. But Justin knew what he meant. He wanted to know if they had anything to do with the Negro and the assault rifle. That was what they got for being strangers. They both shook their heads at the same time. “You can ask my grandmother and Mr. and Mrs. Snodgrass,” Beckie said. “Besides, I would have drowned if I went out in that.”
“My uncle will tell you I was with him all the time,” Justin said.
“Another stranger,” Sheriff Cochrane said. But he went on, “Well, I’ve known the Snodgrasses since dirt. They wouldn’t have any truck with a thing like this, that’s a fact.” He got to his feet. “You kids come on back to the car with me. I’ll take you into town.”
“What about Charlie?” Justin asked.
Sheriff Cochrane looked back at the janitor’s body. “He’s not going anywhere,” he said, and Justin couldn’t very well argue with that. The sheriff’s voice took on the snap of command: “Come on, I told you.”
Down Jephany Knob they went, all of them skidding when they hit slick patches of mud. Nobody fell, which Justin took for a minor miracle. The sheriff started to open the back door to the bright red car, then changed his mind and opened the front door instead.
“Crowd in beside me,” he said. “If I put you in back, everybody who sees you in there’ll figure I’ve jugged you, and I’ve got no call to do that.” As with most police cars, this one had a fine metal grill between front seat and back to make sure prisoners didn’t kick up any trouble.
The front seat was crowded with three people in it. Justin, in the middle, didn’t mind getting squeezed against Beckie. Sheriff Cochrane was a different story. He smelled of tobacco, and the pistol on his right hip was an uncomfortable lump. Justin was glad it wasn’t more than a couple of minutes’ ride back to Elizabeth.
Cochrane stopped the car at the corner of Route 14 and Prunty. “Guess I’ll let the two of you out right here, if that’s okay,” he said.
“Sure,” Beckie said, and got out in a hurry. Justin slid out after her. The sheriff’s car headed on up toward the courthouse. “Shall we go back to the Snodgrasses’?” Beckie asked.
Justin shook his head. “Let’s just wait here for a little bit.” She looked puzzled, but she didn’t say no.
Inside of ten minutes, the sheriff’s car raced down Route 14 toward Jephany Knob again. This time, Sheriff Cochrane had his deputy along with him. “Oh,” Beckie said. “Is that what you were looking for?”
“Yeah,” he answered. “Weren’t you?”
“I guess,” she said. “I’m not from here, so I don’t know for sure—how much trouble is what we found going to cause?”
Even though Justin wasn’t really from this alternate’s Virginia, either, answering that was easy as pie. “Lots,” he said.
“Charlie?” Mrs. Snodgrass said. “Charlie up there on the knob with a rifle? I don’t believe it.”
“I don’t want to believe it,” Mr. Snodgrass said, which wasn’t the same thing at all. “If Charlie could do a thing like that …”
“Ungrateful, is what it is,” his wife said. “Everybody in town treated him almost like he was one of us.”
That almost was the problem. Beckie could hear it, and could hear that it was wrong. By all the signs, nobody born and raised in Virginia could. She thought about saying something, but she was sure nobody would listen to her. She’d hoped her grandmother might, but Gran was nodding along with what Mrs. Snodgrass said—for once, she’d found something she agreed with. You could take the young woman out of Virginia, but taking Virginia out of the young woman was much harder. Virginia’s attitudes stayed in Gran even though she wasn’t young any more.
“If things are like that here,” Mr. Snodgr
ass said, “what’s it like places where they have lots of colored people?”
“The TV hasn’t talked about anything bad,” his wife said.
“It wouldn’t, not unless things are so bad it can’t pretend they’re good,” he said darkly.
“Maybe the sickness has something to do with keeping everything else quiet,” Beckie said.
“Maybe it does. I wouldn’t be surprised,” Mr. Snodgrass said. “And when you’ve got to go and thank a disease for something, you know you’re in a pile of trouble.” Beckie wished she could think that was wrong, too, but she feared it was much too right.
Late that afternoon, somebody rang the doorbell. When Mrs. Snodgrass opened the door, she exclaimed in surprise—it wasn’t Mr. Brooks and Justin, and it wasn’t any of her neighbors, either. “Who are you?” she asked, her voice a startled squeak.
“We’re from the Virginia Bureau of Investigation,” one of the men at the door said in a hard, flat voice. “Here is my identification.”
“And mine,” another man said.
“We’re here to see a Miss, uh, Rebecca Royer. Is she staying at this address?” yet another man added.
“Yes, she is,” Mrs. Snodgrass answered. She turned and raised her voice: “Beckie! Three men from the VBI to see you!”
Beckie wanted to see men from the VBI, or even one man from the VBI, about as much as she wanted to lose her appendix without anesthetics. Nobody cared what she wanted, though. She was just a foreigner here, and Virginia, as Sheriff Cochrane had reminded her and Justin, was at war. If she gave these people trouble, they could give her more and worse. “Here I am,” she said.
In came the men from the Virginia Bureau of Investigation. They weren’t quite so alike as three peas in a pod, but they came close. They wore sober suits, two of gray, one of navy. Their hair was cut short, military style. They were about the same size, and they all had serious expressions. The one in the blue suit said, “Miss Royer, I am Senior Agent Jefferson. With me are Agent Madison and Agent Tyler.” They all flashed badges. Jefferson’s was gold, the other two silver. The senior agent went on, “May I see your passport, please?”
“Here.” Beckie pulled it out of her purse. When you were in a foreign state, you always had to have it with you. She knew that.
Senior Agent Jefferson didn’t just examine the passport. He took a jeweler’s loupe from his pocket and stuck the magnifier in front of his eye. Even that didn’t satisfy him. He used some kind of handheld electronic sniffer on the passport, too. Only after a green light came on did he grudgingly hand the booklet back. “This does appear to be genuine,” he said. “What is the purpose of your visit to Virginia?”
“My grandmother grew up in Elizabeth,” Beckie answered. “She and Mrs. Snodgrass are cousins.”
“That checks out,” Agent Tyler said—Beckie thought the one on Jefferson’s left was Tyler, anyhow.
“Well, it would, whether or not. The other side isn’t about to miss that kind of trick,” the senior agent said.
“What other side?” Beckie asked.
Jefferson didn’t answer her, or maybe he did: “What was the purpose of your stops in Ohio prior to entering Virginia?”
They think I’m a spy. The certainty she was right filled Beckie with fear. They even think Gran’s a spy. If that didn’t prove they’d never had thing one to do with Beckie’s grandmother, nothing ever would. “Two of Gran’s sisters live in Ohio,” she said, as calmly as she could. “We stayed with them before we came here.”
“That also checks,” Agent Madison said.
“I told you—it would.” Senior Agent Jefferson seemed to make a career out of not letting anything impress him. He turned back to Beckie. “And by chance you were one of the people involved in the discovery of Charles Clark’s body?”
“If that’s what his last name was. I never knew. Nobody here ever used it.” Beckie couldn’t resist the little sarcastic dig.
She might have done better to let it go. Jefferson looked at her with no expression at all on his face. “What is your opinion of Virginia’s social structure, Miss Royer?”
That one had teeth and claws and spines. She didn’t need to be a secret agent to see as much. “In California, we treat everybody pretty much the same way,” she said carefully. “We try to, anyhow. It seems to work for us.”
“And so you would be opposed to our forms of social control?” Senior Agent Jefferson pounced.
If she said no, he’d think she was lying. He’d be right, too. If she said yes, he’d think she was some kind of subversive. What to do? What to do? “Well, if I were black, I sure wouldn’t want to live under them,” she answered. “But that doesn’t mean I want to pick up a gun and start shooting people.”
“Would you give other people guns so they could pick them up and start shooting with them?” the VBI man asked.
“No!” There was real horror in her voice, horror and terror enough to make all three agents blink. Tyler stepped back a pace. They didn’t know—she hoped to heaven they didn’t know—about Uncle Luke and about the rifles she’d helped smuggle into Virginia.
The agents put their heads together. They plainly believed her. How could they not believe her after she let out a yelp like that? If they did believe her, they also had to believe she had nothing to do with the assault rifle poor Charlie Clark was carrying when lightning and the toppling tree did him in.
“Why were you up on Jephany Knob when you discovered the dead man’s body?” Agent Madison asked.
“It felt nice to get out and about. It felt nice to be able to get out and about,” Beckie said. “We’d had two days of thunderstorms like you wouldn’t believe—like I wouldn’t believe, anyway. We don’t get that kind of weather in Los Angeles.”
“You were with”—Madison paused to check his notes—“Justin Monroe on the knob. What is your relationship with Justin Monroe?”
“We’re friends,” Beckie said.
“Are you … more than friends?”
“No,” she said. “We both got stuck here in Elizabeth. Gran and I couldn’t get out after the war started, and he and his uncle couldn’t leave after the disease broke out.” Justin and Mr. Brooks had been exposed to it, too. She tried not to think about that, because it might mean she’d also been exposed.
“Why did you make friends with him and not with some of the young men from Elizabeth?” Madison asked. “And how did it happen that two strangers found the body, not any of the locals?”
“He’s been over here a lot because his uncle does business with Mr. Snodgrass,” Beckie answered. “He’s nice enough, and he’s from a city, too. We have more in common than I do with people in Elizabeth.” She had less in common with people from Elizabeth than she did with anyone this side of men from the moon, but she didn’t want to say that.
Agent Madison was stubborn. “You only answered the first half of my question,” he reminded her.
“Oh. Why were we the ones who found the body? I don’t know what to tell you. Dumb luck is the only thing I can think of. It wasn’t good luck, either.”
“We think it was,” Senior Agent Jefferson said. “It shows that treason has reached even out-of-the-way places like this. Treason is a disease worse than the one Ohio turned loose on us, but we’ll fix it.” He sounded grim and determined. But then he eased—just a little. “I don’t believe you were personally involved in it, even if you are from California. Thank you for your time.” He and the other two agents left.
Even if you are from California. They assumed she was a radical just because she’d grown up in L.A. By their standards, they were right, too. California and Virginia weren’t only two different states. They were two different worlds. But she was stuck in this one now, no matter how much she wished she weren’t. She’d got through this first grilling. What was coming up next?
In movies and on TV, the knock on the door always came in the middle of the night. Justin and Mr. Brooks were getting ready to go the the grocery when it came
in Elizabeth. They both jumped. They weren’t used to company in their motel room.
Justin was closer to the door, so he opened it. He didn’t expect to see three somber men in this alternate’s somber business suits. “Who are you?” he said foolishly.
“Senior Agent Jefferson, VBI.” The one in the middle flashed a gold badge. “With me are Agents Tyler and Madison.” The other two men showed silver badges. Jefferson went on, “You would be Justin Monroe, correct?”
“That’s right.”
“And your uncle is Randolph Brooks? Is he here now?”
“I’m here,” Mr. Brooks said from behind Justin. “What’s this all about?”
“We have some questions for your nephew, Mr. Brooks, regarding his discovery of the body of Charles Clark,” Jefferson answered. He gave his attention back to Justin. “May I see your identification, please?”
They were in a state called Virginia. It was a democracy of sorts. They spoke an English not much different from that of the home timeline. Even so, Justin couldn’t tell them to get lost, not unless he wanted to see the inside of a cell in nothing flat. He’d already found that his forged documents were good enough to pass muster. All the same, his heart thumped as he handed them over. Senior Agent Jefferson examined them with a lens and with an electronic gadget, then nodded and passed them back. Justin tried not to show how relieved he was as he stuck them in his wallet and put the wallet in his pocket.
“Thank you,” Jefferson said, plainly not meaning it in the least. “Please describe how you found Charles Clark’s body. You were not alone on Jephany Knob when you did—is that correct?”
“Yes, uh, sir,” Justin answered. Jefferson had to know that. He would have talked with Sheriff Cochrane. If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t be in Elizabeth at all. Had he already talked to Beckie? Justin wouldn’t have been surprised. He said, “Do you people want to come in instead of standing in the doorway?”
“Thank you,” the senior agent said again, this time with a little more warmth in his voice. The three VBI men walked into the motel room and sat down on the ratty couch. Without missing a beat, Jefferson continued, “Who was with you?”
The Disunited States of America Page 11
