1635:The Dreeson Incident

Chapter 51

Erfurt, March 1635

Mathurin Brillard always enjoyed his morning paper.

This morning's was truly fascinating. Being a stranger to Grantville, he had not realized at the time that he had not merely assassinated the mayor of Grantville, precisely as Locquifier had told him to do, and the Calvinist minister, more or less as a bonus, but that it was significant that he had fired those two shots in the general direction of a dozen or so middle-aged to elderly ladies standing next to a rolling cart and on the steps of the synagogue. Given his marksmanship, the women really hadn't been in any danger. But he realized now that the residents of Grantville didn't know that, so their fury was all the greater than if he'd simply shot the two men.

The group of women included…

In addition to the Calvinist minister's wife: Annabelle Graham, the wife of the SoTF president, Ed Piazza; Eleanor Jenkins, who was now the SoTF Red Cross president, and her daughter-in-law Deborah, who was wife of the increasingly prominent industrialist Charles Jenkins who had just won election as West Virginia County's senator to the SoTF congress. It appeared that Jenkins' wife also ran the town's teacher training program and was the daughter of Willie Ray Hudson, well known as the first president of the Grange movement. Not to mention Veleda Riddle, the mother of the chief justice of the SoTF Supreme Court, who was also the president of the SoTF League of Women Voters and reorganizer of Grantville's Episcopalian Church; her daughter-in-law Kathryn, wife of the chief justice of the SoTF Supreme Court; Mary Jo Kindred, the wife of Grantville's senior newspaper publisher; Claudette, the wife of the Reverend Al Green of the First Baptist Church, and Linda Bartolli, organist at St. Mary Magdelene Catholic Church.

That was the purely factual information he gleaned from the most staid of the newspapers. The more gossipy added additional information, such as that Mrs. Bartolli had gone to early mass specifically in order to have time to attend the Red Cross meeting. And that Veleda Riddle, in the opinion of Frau Veda Mae Haggerty, was there because she was not about to let Eleanor Jenkins run anything without keeping her nose in the tent to make sure what was going on.

Brillard reflected as he ate his morning bread.

The Grantville powers-that-be were very angry. It was entirely possible that shooting the two men while they were near the women had been a mistake in judgment. Possibly he should have waited until the men moved somewhere else. But that was water over the dam. At the time, he had no way of knowing who the women were.

He paid his bill and started north on the trade route. Still walking.

Grantville

Press Richards looked like he hadn't slept for two days. For good reason. "I don't know where our training went wrong," he said. Again.

"Stop agonizing," Chad Jenkins advised him. "We're going to have to make the up-timers come to terms with the fact that for the town's new citizens, 'restrained response' to civil unrest is a relative term. Which most of them are doing. Yeah, Maurer shot first, out at the hospital. There aren't a half-dozen people in town who have complained. Just because a couple of bleeding heart liberals like Linda Jane Colburn and Rachel Hill have big mouths, it doesn't mean there's some kind of a 'groundswell of opinion.' Not even Gerry and Tami Simmons are making a fuss. Forget it. Or call Dan Frost, talk to him for a while, and then forget it."

"Not to mention," Arnold Bellamy added, "that Maurer is dead. So's Bill Magen, who was the only person in the line who was talking to him right before it happened. Which means that there's not going to be any long-drawn-out investigation, agonizing about his motivation. That always helps. Least said, soonest mended."

The Grantville police kept on doing police-like things. Investigating. Arresting. Questioning. Putting people in jail. And, since this more than strained the capacity of Grantville's rather small jail, putting people other places where they could be watched.

"What I really wonder," Pam Hardesty said, "is where they ever got those slogans against vaccination. The ones that were on the placards at the hospital demonstration. The placards that they were hauling out of Veda Mae's garage. There's got to be some kind of a connection."

"I'll check through the reference materials and see what I can find out," Missy said. "But I sure don't remember that we have anything like it in the state library."

"Whereas I," Pam said, "will have another little heart-to-heart chat with Veda Mae."

"Hey. You volunteered. You don't like to look things up, remember? You're a people person. That's why you picked circulation instead of reference. Think of Veda Mae as a people. Well, as a person."

"That's a damned hard thing to do."

A couple of days later, they had the data. They gave it to Cory Joe who, on behalf of Don Francisco, filed off the serial numbers and gave it to Preston Richards. Who, in turn, sent Marvin Tipton to talk to John Daoud, the chiropractor, who fingered Jacques-Pierre Dumais as the only person he recalled who had come to him seeking information on the topic.

"I really wish," Preston Richards said, "that I knew how you do it."

"Oh," Cory Joe answered mildly, "Don Francisco has his sources."