1635:The Dreeson Incident

Chapter 41

Grantville

Pam Hardesty's apartment was a handy place to meet. Much more convenient than going out to Lothlorien, especially now that Bill Hudson was around so much of the time. Cory Joe had asked her to set something up the next time he came from Magdeburg. She was sitting on the end of the sofa now, frowning.

Missy was looking at Ron. She hadn't expected anything for Valentine's Day. She seriously doubted that Ron had even noticed that it was Valentine's Day. What she had just gotten had nothing to do with Valentine's day. He had made her an offer that was an honor in a way. He trusted her. But it was an honor that she would much rather refuse.

"You seriously want me to do that?"

"There's enough local rumbling about these anti-Semitic groups in a dozen towns around. We really need to know if they can be expected to try something in Grantville. Missy, honest, I hate to ask this. I tried to tell them that I didn't like the idea at all. I knew that it would not really be your thing. Your uncle Wes doesn't like it, either. It's Don Francisco Nasi's idea. He thinks that if you could pick up an acquaintance with this Dumais guy? Something superficial. Play 'ditzy sympathizer' for a while? Everyone knows that early on, your dad supported Simpson instead of Stearns."

"Yow," he protested against a ferocious attack with a sofa pillow. "I'm not saying that Chad's a bad guy. Just that he did, back when, even if he's changed over, since then. Cory Joe says that it would give you 'plausibility.' " He looked at Cory Joe, hoping for assistance. "Or his boss says it, and Cory Joe is just passing on the message?"

"I am not," Missy said flatly, "all that much of a risk taker."

The sentence sat between them. It had come up in other contexts.

"I particularly do not want to take the risks that would come up if I had to deal with some of those guys who hang out around the 250 Club. I'm not a wilting lily, but some of them are really rough."

"I could go with you," Pam said. "Two would be better. And that way, we wouldn't even have to go to the 250 Club."

Cory Joe raised his eyebrows at his sister. "How?"

"Veda Mae Haggerty. The Willard. Dumais is there with her, sometimes."

Missy looked up with obvious relief. So did Ron.

"I could hack that, I think," Missy said. "Willard Carson is a stinkeroo, but the hotel is a perfectly respectable place. I could play a 'ditzy sympathizer' in the hotel dining room, I think. I don't even want to be in the 250 Club."

"I'll start with Veda Mae," Pam said. "You'll be with me sometimes. Is that better?"

"It's a lot better," Missy said.

"Don Francisco has sent some stuff for you to study. Basic guidance, more or less."

Cory Joe was feeling uncomfortable. This had seemed like a much better idea before it involved his sister.

He began to understand why Ron and Wes Jenkins had argued so hard against it before the others had voted them down. Back when they'd been expecting Missy to do it on her own.

"Ditzy," Missy said indignantly. " 'Ditzy.' I'll get you for 'ditzy.' " She leaned down, made a snowball, and threw it at him.

He grinned, the snow all over his ski cap. "What about 'ditzy cheerleader'?"

They battled all the way from Pam's to St. Mary's, where a huge bank of snow had been thrown up behind the church. They climbed it, tossing snow all the way, and fell over into a little pit at the top, like a miniature volcano crater, with seven or eight inches of undisturbed fresh snow on top of that which had been cleared from the alley.

They were just kissing, to start with, enchanted by finding this magic little mini-world right in the middle of town, isolated from all the rest of it.

When they stood up, Ron took her hand. "I might make you cry someday. But not on purpose."

Shivering, they slid back down the pile. Missy picked up some snow at the bottom and threw another ball; they battled all the way to her house. By the time they practically fell through the kitchen door, they were sufficiently white that Debbie accused them of being a pair of yeti.

"Well," Missy said. "Look at it this way. We're considerate enough that we didn't come in the front door and aren't dripping all over the hardwood floor in the front hall."

"You're going to be considerate enough to mop the linoleum, too. Toss those things in the dryer. Ron can't walk out to Lothlorien with half his clothes sopping wet."

They started to strip, beginning with mittens and hats and continuing for quite a while. Winter in Thuringia during the Little Ice Age encouraged the layered look.

"How on earth did you get snow there, Missy?"

"Snow angels?" Missy offered, hoping her mother would not pursue the issue.

"Those ski pants, too," Debbie said firmly. "They're wet."

Ron looked at her. "They're the last layer before my boxers, Mrs. Jenkins."

In Debbie Jenkins' experience, epochal changes tended to turn around small things. "Toss them in. I'll get you an old pair of Chip's to wear while they're drying." She went upstairs.

When she came down, Missy was curled up on the floor, sitting with her head against the door of the dryer. Ron had the teakettle on. "She needs a cup of tea," he said. "With sugar or honey, if you have it."

"I'll make it," Debbie said. "I don't have any real tea, but I have some herbal concoctions. Use this to dry your boots."

"What's that?" Ron asked.

Debbie was startled. "It's a portable hair dryer. You can use it to blow hot air into your boots to dry the lining." She looked at the expression on his face. "Haven't you ever seen one before?"

"I didn't even know they existed," Ron answered. "I thought hair just dried."

"He didn't know about portable hair driers," Debbie said.

Chad turned a page of the newspaper. "Where would he have learned?" he asked. "There weren't any women out at Lothlorien while he was growing up. I doubt he ever read the ads for beautician's supplies in the Sunday paper."

"It's one of those things," Missy said. "WYSIWYG. With Ron, what you see really is what you get. It's just that every now and then, something a little unexpected surfaces. Something you haven't seen before.

"He says that according to his dad, a lot of the world's problems come from not cluing people in when you ought to. That's why he made me sit here and tell you what Don Francisco wants Pam and me to do. So we wouldn't have any misunderstandings."

Thinking, as she said it, that she was glad she had ratcheted the level of the project down to something she could clue them in on. The truth was that, "I'm going to be going with Pam to the Willard occasionally when she tries to pump Veda Mae Haggerty to see if the people she hangs around with have dropped any information about these anti-Jewish agitators" was something that her parents had swallowed, however unwillingly. "I'm going to go by myself to the 250 Club, pretending to be a fellow traveler, to try to pump information concerning anti-Jewish agitators out of a possible agent of Michel Ducos, who is the guy who tried to assassinate the pope" would have been thoroughly over the top. She could only imagine how they would have reacted.

"You really needed that tea," Debbie said.

"We ate at Cora's before we went over to Pam's. She doesn't earn enough that we can expect her to feed us. So it had been a while. And first contact with Don Francisco, even by way of Cory Joe, can be a bit unnerving. I'm going to bed."

She lay there, curled up.

She was so relieved that it hadn't come to that.

She wished so badly that it had.

No valentine from Ron. But a hand brushing her cheek, a voice saying, "No risks you don't want. It would be a pity if salty tears melted these snowflakes." Without those, the evidences of her virginity, as the down-time girls called it, would be in a snowbank behind St. Mary's this evening. She hadn't been going to push him away. She'd been pulling him down toward her.

She sooooo didn't need this kind of complication in her life right now.

"It's not very exciting," Missy said. "But it's odd."

"Everyone already knew that Dumais was dealing with Velma. He's the one who hooked her up with Mauger."

"It's those Theme things. But I guess you weren't back yet."

"What Theme things?"

"For a while before she left town, Velma was wandering around town talking about Themes and other sort of new age stuff."

"So?"

"About the only thing I've picked up so far is that she got those Themes from Dumais. So I sort of followed her trail. Where she repeated them. Picked up what she said from week to week. Tried to track them down."

"And?"

"And you're lucky that you guys picked a reference librarian to do this job. Not a 'ditz.' "

Ron had a feeling that "ditz" had really grated on Missy. She kept coming back to it.

"I really think you ought to bring it to Don Francisco's attention. Those Themes were quotations, almost all of them. Most of them from Seneca. Which makes it likely that Dumais has some kind of an academic background. That's not exactly typical for a garbage collector, is it? One of the things in the material that Cory Joe brought for Pam and me to study was to look for things that are out of character. If you ask me, Seneca quotations from a garbage collector are really out of character."

There was something to be said for the greenhouse at Lothlorien. For one thing, it was, for the time being, private. Over at the house, Bill was sitting in the living room studying an incredibly expensive herbal, or botanical manual, they had bought. The down-time cleaning woman, who did it as a second job and had no qualms of conscience whatsoever about working on Sunday afternoon, was racketing around with the vacuum cleaner.

Admittedly, the floor was brick. On the other hand, the air was warm. Part of Missy's pony tail had come loose, which was an increasingly common problem as time went on and the bands lost their stretch. The winter sun was catching it, making every individual hair glisten. They'd been here a while. The sun wasn't going to last much longer. Once it went down, that it was it for necking in the greenhouse. The artificial lighting would be like putting a spotlight on them.

Ron looked down. Her eyes were dreamy.

"What are you thinking?" she asked.

"That I'm getting positive feedback."

It wouldn't be a good idea to say exactly what he had been thinking. Which was that he had made out with a fair number of girls before Missy, but he'd sure never made out with one who appreciated his perfectly average and ordinary efforts at making love anywhere near as much as she did.

He had a suspicion that he wasn't likely to come across any other girl this appreciative in the future, either. Which meant that since he wanted continuing positive feedback, he ought not bring up other girls, past or future.

He might even be starting to get the hang of this.

His left foot gently climbed upward from the bare toes, started to explore her lower leg, and then pulled back from the barrier.

He had been a little startled when she climbed up into the Jenkins attic the day after the snow fight, went through several boxes of old toys that her mother had put away to wait for the day she had grandchildren to babysit, came down with a pair of fairly sturdy plastic handcuffs that still had their key, and put them on her ankles that evening. Plus quite a few following occasions.

"Revival of the chastity belt?" He had to laugh.

"Not exactly," Missy answered. "I'm the one who has the key. That makes it different."

He wasn't sure she was joking. At least not entirely. She kept the handcuffs in her jacket pocket, tucked underneath her gloves. And referred to them as "the accessory."

Not that there hadn't been a couple of occasions when the reminder had been useful.

Necessary, really, considering that even though Missy's mind really meant it when she said "no way," the subsection of primal instinct that had moved in on her was obviously starting to put up considerable argument on the point.

Sometimes Ron could kick himself for having pulled back when they were in that snowbank. He hadn't been violating Dad's precepts. By no means had it been a first date, by no means had he been forcing the issue, and Missy had been so willing. Or, at least, the part of Missy that was her body had been very willing indeed. Cooperating, responding, inviting, and encouraging every move he made.

But…

He had rolled himself off her, face down into the snow, which had been goddamned fucking unbelievably cold by comparison to the heat the two of them had been generating ten seconds before. Well, no male fantasy story he had ever read back up-time had recommended a snowbank in February as a desirable venue for seduction.

He had this suspicion that if her instincts took over before her mind agreed with them, he was the one she'd be mad at. Mad at herself, but really mad at him. Maybe mad enough to break the whole thing off. Even if it wouldn't really be his fault.

He knew that having Missy break it off would be a bad thing. Way closer to a catastrophe-type bad thing than to a nuisance-type bad thing. That was why, really…

Not that he could have explained to anybody else exactly what "it" was.

"It" was pretty amorphous right now.

They were spending more and more of their free time at Lothlorien, where the privacy and comfort seemed almost designed to foster temptation. But it also seemed to be almost the only place that they could really talk. They talked a lot when they weren't doing other things. Even while they were doing other things, sometimes.

Besides, Missy was helping him design a records management system and compile a procedures manual, so a lot of the time they spent there wasn't private at all, but involved wandering through the manufacturing plant with clipboards. As she said, it wouldn't be as good a system as if he had been up-time and able to hire a professional consultant, but it would definitely be better than no system at all.

She had told him that one of the nice things about Lothlorien was that none of the staff looked at them cross-eyed, unlike Nani and Gran, who definitely did. The employees, she said, were mostly as friendly and helpful as they could possibly be, even when she plopped herself down on a stool and spent two hours watching how a process was carried out. Then watched it six times more, trying to figure out what parts of it needed to be standardized and recorded and which ones didn't.

He definitely didn't want to do anything that would cause her to break it off before they were finished with the procedures manual. Great Om, Stone, what a rationale.

On the other hand…

Out of the corner of his eye, he could see a handy pair of pruning shears leaning against a potting table. If he didn't have some rationale available, he would take them to the stupid handcuffs. The things were only plastic.

He didn't want to do anything that would cause her to break it off at all.

He kissed her again. She also had an eye on that vanishing sunlight. There was a kind of equation. The less time remaining, the fewer restrictions. This was a really rewarding kiss. Sort of an improved, expanded version.

He could live with the accessory. It wasn't a good thing, exactly, but it was sure better than a bad thing. They might as well make the most of the last ten minutes.

Plus, there was always hope. Once her mind finally decided to agree with her instincts, she had the key. More accurately, in the unlikely event that her mind ever decided to agree with her instincts, she had the key. Hope springeth eternal…