1635:The Dreeson Incident

Chapter 48

Grantville

Under the influence of Mary Ward, the mother superior of the English Ladies or "Jesuitesses" whom she had met during her Bavarian adventures the summer before, Veronica had started attending mass regularly. She could walk downtown with Henry, see him into the Presbyterian church for the ten o'clock sermon, run a couple of errands, fulfill her duty, which she now felt vaguely obliged to fulfill, and then be back to walk home with him after he and Enoch Wiley finished their regular Sunday chat.

It worked. She worried about having him walk by himself any more. She had changed her schedule at the school this winter. She had hired an extra attendant so she could walk with him to City Hall in the morning and return home with him in the evening. If he fell, it could do a lot of damage. Dr. Nichols recommended that he start using a walker instead of the cane. Henry referred to that as 'the beginning of the end.' "

She wished that he would use the walker. If there had to be an end, she would rather have it not come for quite a while than have it come now. There was no reason to let him slip on a patch of black ice frozen on the sidewalk.

The walls at St. Mary's were so thick that they muffled all the noise. The parishioners spilled out into the middle of the after-attack activity down by the main bridge.

Henry? She started to run toward the Presbyterian church.

"Mrs. Dreeson?"

A man was waving at her, beckoning her to the front of the synagogue.

She knelt down by the two men who'd been shot.

She had seen death all too often before.

So had Annalise, who was suddenly standing behind her, Idelette Cavriani at her side.

Where had Annalise come from? They had left her at home, looking after the children. She went to early mass, came home and fixed breakfast, and was there when her grandmother and Henry started out. The cook and housekeeper had Sunday off. Martha would be out at St. Martin's in the Fields, still. Who was taking care of Gretchen's children?

"I checked," Annalise said. "As soon as someone phoned me. Thea and Nicol are at the house with Willi and Joey and the other children."

Veronica spared the couple the first kind thought she had given them since she had parted with them in Grafenwohr the previous summer.

"Thea said that they'd been getting ready to have a romantic lunch to celebrate their first anniversary. Anniversary of what?"

Her grandmother was getting up off her knees, to get out of the way of the men who had come with a stretcher. " Ganz ehrlich," she said, looking at the two girls, " braucht ihr beide das gar nicht wissen."

Annalise wondered why on earth she didn't need to know that. Then she started counting backwards from the date of little Anna Elisabetha's birth and came up with a pretty good idea. Idelette, who had apparently been conducting the same exercise in mental mathematics, winked at her. They then turned their minds to the obligations of mourning.

Someone pried Inez out from under the piano. The next step should have been taking her to the hospital, but there was still shooting going on down in that direction. They could hear it. Jenny Maddox ran out of the funeral home, saying to bring her inside there. With the lower panel of the piano console serving as a makeshift litter, a half dozen men carried her in. Wilton Blackwell, who during more than forty years as a mortician had gained a very sound working knowledge of basic human anatomy, splinted her leg. Without anesthetic, unfortunately. His regular clients, as he said rather apologetically, never needed it.

"I don't, either," Inez said. "I'm not feeling anything, yet. Maybe it's shock. Maybe there's something cutting off the pain the nerves down there are trying to send up to my brain. It's not getting through."

Jenny looked at her, frowning with worry.

Ellen Acton, Wilton's daughter and their billing clerk, closed the doors between the front and back parlors. She thought that Inez didn't need to see the men carrying Enoch and Henry in. And Buster. Definitely. Nobody needed to see Buster until her pa had a chance to work on him a bit. For Enoch and Henry, at least, the shots had been clean.

She'd told them to put the goons in the garage. It was cold enough that they would keep for a while and the police might want to go over their clothes and things. They were sending the policemen who went down at Leahy over to Genucci's. Central Funeral Home was out of space.

Ellen touched Jenny's shoulder. "Will's back," she said in a whisper. "I don't know when he got into town, but Bob saw him last night. He was eating at Marcantonio's Pizza with Skip Hilton. Should I call over to UMWA headquarters to see if they know where he is?"

Jenny bit the nail on the little finger of her left hand. "I guess you had better, seeing as he's the only one of Enoch and Inez's kids who came through the Ring of Fire. Even though he's been on the outs with them for years. Since he was in high school. They can at least let him know about this before it goes on the radio tonight. Call the power plant too. Gina works Sundays as a regular thing. She has for years, so she doesn't have to face the issue of whether Reverend Curtis would humiliate her if she showed up at church. Have someone out there get Gina, so she can pull Brette out of youth group over at the Church of Christ and tell her about her grandpa. That will take a while. They'll have to call someone else in to replace her for the rest of her shift."

Jenny hadn't really expected Will to come. He had been a bad boy since his early teens. "Rebel without a cause" style, except that he had a cause, at least to start with, which was that his dad had been so unreasonably strict with him. Unlike John Enoch, who had turned into an Episcopalian monk in response to Enoch's Calvinist child-rearing techniques, Will had reacted by going wild and then wilder.

Inez had felt obliged to agree with Enoch, so Will had fought with her, too.

Jenny had reason to know. Will Wiley was only three years younger than she was. He'd run around with her twin sisters, the ones left up-time. Maybe more than run around with Donna Jae, both before and after she got married, at least while Lee was overseas during the Gulf War. Will had been working in Fairmont and going to college part time. That was over before he married Gina and luckily Lee had never found out as far as Jenny knew, but it was the sort of thing Will did. The sort of thing that finally caused Gina to blow up.

But here he was.

For good or bad, so was Gina. The power plant had sent her downtown in one of its trucks.

Brette was standing there, her hands behind her back. What was she, now? About ten? She'd only been three when Will and Gina separated. Four when they divorced.

Gina's brother Drew used to pick her up and take her over to Will's for visitation; then pick her up at Will's and take her back to Gina. Brette probably didn't remember ever seeing her parents in the same room.

The last time the two of them had been in the same room, probably, was in the courthouse in Fairmont. And the time before that, Gina had taken a shot at Will. She'd missed, but not intentionally.

That had been back when Velma Hardesty was starting to notice the arrival of middle age and was going through her "younger man" phase. As it was, Will insisted to the judge, swearing under oath, that it was accidental. Gina got probation for reckless handling of a firearm.

The judge had to have been a very trusting type of person. When was the last time he had a case in which a wife had accidentally let off a gun at her buck-naked husband who was in bed with another woman? In the other woman's trailer? How many cases like that did a judge ever get?

Jenny cleared her throat. Damn, but Will Wiley was still a good-looking man.

She wondered what Gina was thinking. She glanced over that way. From the expression on Gina's face as she looked at Will, probably the same thing as she was.

Jenny's mind clicked along. In a way it was too bad that Gina hadn't shot Velma when she had a chance, before she messed up a couple of other marriages, but then who would have taken care of Brette? The judge had probably realized that Gina wasn't a danger to anyone but Will. He'd put a restraining order on her along with the probation.

Why had the UMWA sent Will over to Brandenburg, anyway? He'd been there, in Berlin or somewhere near it, for months. Politics. Jenny didn't even try to keep up with politics.

It was finally Inez who said something.

"You'll have to go home, Will. Over to the house and get his other suit. The keys are in my purse. That's back at the church. Ask Idelette Cavriani to take you to the committee room where the Red Cross was meeting. She's in the other parlor, with Veronica and Annalise. You haven't been there since we remodeled it so much. You'll have to bring his other suit for him to wear."

After Denise made her second call up to the storage lot, Christin George rode down to the bridge on her own motorcycle, ignored the "pedestrians only" prohibition, and pulled up right in front of Cora's. By then, Denise was waiting inside the cafe. As soon as Christin appeared, she ran out.

"They took him into Central Funeral Home," she said. "For the usual reason."

Christin looked her over. Denise's clothes were pretty well blood-soaked. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah, Mom, I'm fine. The blood's all Daddy's. Well. Some of it's probably from some of the men he killed."

Christin nodded. Like daughter, like mother. She wasn't given to public histrionics either. "We'd better go find out how much it will be, then."

"Daddy didn't believe in funerals. He always said he wanted to be cremated. Or just put out in a garbage bag."

"Grantville never had a crematorium. They'd have had to take him out of town, even up-time. I don't think they have them at all around here. Or plastic sacks, either. We ran out of those a long time ago."

"I don't want to see him in one of those satin-lined things. He'd have hated it, Mom. You know he would."

"Jenny ran out of those a long time ago, too. It's plain wood boxes now, and linen sheets. We'll do the best we can to keep the frills off, but this is going to hit Johnnie Ray hard, especially with Julia passing last fall. I ought to at least ask him what he wants, since he's Buster's grandpa."

By mid-afternoon, the Grantville police appeared at the synagogue in force, if somewhat belatedly, after finishing up at Leahy. They rounded up the casualties-in addition to the twenty-two dead goons and four badly injured ones who'd been involved in the fighting with Buster and the Hebraic defense guard, there were twelve others who'd been wounded earlier. Not badly enough to die, but badly enough not to run away. They were being held by the informal posse of Jewish defenders.

Then, the police started scouring the town. They arrested any of the attackers still on foot who had not managed to get out of Grantville or go into hiding. There were about twenty of those, although three of them turned out later to be innocent vagrants and were released.

Six members of the synagogue had been wounded, but none of them very badly. Buster had been so savage that by the time the Hebraic defense guard swung into action there hadn't been much fight left in the rioters.

They'd all recover. None of them would even agree to go to the hospital. They'd patch each other up.

In addition to Inez, fourteen Grantvillers, a mix of up-timers and down-timers, were wounded. Mostly the men who had been wielding folding chairs in defense of the women on the cart. Only three had to go to the hospital; Jeff Adams' staff had worked on the others in his office and then sent them home.

Before the police arrived and while they worked, Minnie kept standing on the bridge, right next to the balustrade, stubbornly, well into the afternoon. Several times, she tried to get the attention of some of the police. They knew her, of course. How could they avoid knowing her, the way she handled that motorcycle? They ignored her. Several times, one or another tried to shoo her away, get her to go home.

There wouldn't be daylight for much longer. They wouldn't be able to retrieve the weapon.

Finally, someone showed up who might listen to her. "Blake!" she called. "Blake Haggerty!"

He turned. "I can't talk now, Minnie. I'm working. We don't need gawkers. Go on home."

"Blake, I saw the sniper who killed them. I'm standing here marking where he threw the gun. It's down in the creek. They won't listen to me."

He was turning away, trying to concentrate on what he was doing, half-blocking her voice. Then what she was saying penetrated. He almost jumped back toward her.

"Please, Blake. If I leave, I'll lose a lot of what I'm marking. Can't you go into Cora's? Call Benny. Call Mr. Pallavicino from the school. If they come down and believe what I'm telling them, then maybe someone in the police will pay attention."

"I'm paying attention," Blake said. "Believe me, I'm paying attention right now." He paid more attention when she pointed and he could see, misshapen by the ripples of the water in the creek, the wavering outline of a gun.

His immediate superior dismissed it as "a fool girl trying to attract attention and get some publicity."

Blake wasn't supposed to go out of the chain of command. But he went over to Marvin Tipton, interrupted what he was doing, summarized the situation, and requested permission to go into Cora's and call Benny and Joe.

"For one thing," he said, "Minnie's half frozen already. She was dressed for noon and the temperature really starts dropping once the sun goes down. If nobody pays attention to her, she's prepared to stand on that bridge all night."

"Why?" Marvin asked.

"The mayor gave her that eye. Old Jim Dreeson's artificial eye from World War I, in place of the one she lost at that riot in Jena. As far as Minnie is concerned, she owed Henry. Owed him a lot."

Jacques-Pierre Dumais was truly very relieved when he returned to Madame Haggerty's garage at the end of the day to find that Mademoiselle Hardesty had disappeared. If not mysteriously disappeared, given the hole in the back of the building. He wondered how she managed it. He stood there briefly, deciding upon the most prudent course of action.

Which would be the least conspicuous. He nailed the two broken boards lying at the back of the garage into place, rubbing some dirt over the new, shiny, nail heads. Then he moved the three garbage cans in which he was keeping his records. Not far. Just onto Madame Haggerty's enclosed back porch. It was not difficult to carry them. There were only one or two packets in each. Partly because he had sorted them by topic; partly because even he had no particular desire to try to wrestle anything as heavy as a garbage can packed solid with paper from one place to another.

Then he went home to his trailer to listen to the news on the radio. Tomorrow, he thought, each of the newspapers would publish a special edition. He would need to buy a copy of each.

As he listened to the reports, Jacques-Pierre's dominant emotion was annoyance. The whole thing had been poorly handled, from start to finish. During his time in Grantville, he had read every police procedural novel in the "mystery" section of the public library. He certainly understood how the local authorities felt, up-time, when the feds had moved in on one of their cases.

If only Locquifier had left it to him! He could have managed it all much better.

But, of course, if Locquifier had left it to him, there would have been no attack on the synagogue and no killings.

This was going to be a disaster.

To be fair, though, the miserable debacle at the hospital was his own fault. His own disaster. Somehow, he should have found out about the anti-autopsy group and prevented them from coming.

But the other. Didn't the fools ever learn?

Possibly not, it seemed. He would have to think about that.

He wrote up a report to send to the duke.

"The hard thing, sometimes," Pam said, "is trying to remember how much of what you have reported to whom. Just in case any of the recipients come around asking questions again."

"It was easier back when there were copy machines," Missy said wistfully. "Just put a sheet of paper on the glass, press a button, and there you were."

She got up and looked out the window, then turned around. "Do you know what, Pam? There are kids coming into middle school now who don't remember copy machines at all. The first year middle school students, the fifth graders, were only six or seven years old when the Ring of Fire happened."

Ron walked over and put his arm around her. "You two have diddled around with these reports for long enough, now. One version for Cory Joe, one for the police. They're as done as you're ever going to get them."

"I don't really want to do this," Missy said. "But I guess that I will." The thought of having to go to the two funeral homes, much less the morgue at the hospital, had been looming over her head all day.

"You will, though," Ron said. "Not because you want to. But because you have to."

Missy and Pam didn't recognize any of the bodies in the garages at Central Funeral Home. None of the bodies at Genucci's, either. Those were the men who had been in front of the synagogue. At the hospital, both of them were able to identify one of the anonymous corpses as one of the men who had been taking signs out of Veda Mae's garage and putting them on a handcart. He was the one who had dragged Pam into the garage and had rushed at Missy, but been dragged away by another man wearing a ski mask.

Neither of them, of course, had any idea who that man was. As Pam said to the disappointed policeman, all they knew was that he had been hauling signs out of Veda Mae Haggerty's garage and putting them on a handcart. She was sorry, but that was it. Although several other men were there when Pam came by, they had all been in the shadow of the garage, so she couldn't tell if any were among either the dead or the living demonstrators in custody. Missy said that by the time she caught up, there had been only two men, both had been outside the garage, and the second one had been wearing a ski mask.

Overall, the policeman was disappointed. He had been hoping for more. But, of course, it was only coincidence that the girls had been out walking the previous morning in any case, and it did provide a connection to Mrs. Haggerty.

Veda Mae simply refused to answer questions from the police. She said that she didn't have to. She challenged them to come back with a search warrant. For the time being, they left it at that. She wasn't likely to become a fugitive and eventually someone would be in a position to question her under oath.

When it crossed her mind that her grandson Blake was now a policeman, she refused to answer any questions he asked her, either.

She decided to warn Jacques-Pierre Dumais, the next time she saw him, that the police were asking about the signs he had stored in her garage.