1635:The Dreeson Incident

Chapter 57

Grantville

It was finally the block of reservations at the workmen's hostel that provided unambiguous evidence of Bryant Holloway's participation in the events leading up to the hospital riot, once they started looking. Steve Matheny had made it quite plain that the fire department had not had any training project under way the last week of February and first few days of March, and had known nothing of the men who had been billeted there with Bryant's name on the ledger.

"We've got to deal with it," Wes said. "There's no way to pretend that he wasn't involved."

The rest of the people around the table looked at him with considerable relief.

"It's going to put you somewhat on the spot, Wes," Ed Piazza said. "He's your son-in-law."

"He was involved with it. He was actively, heavily, involved with Jacques-Pierre Dumais. He was recruiting the thugs the man used. Mostly for the attack on the hospital, as far as Don Francisco can find out, but a few of them were in the mix at the synagogue. He's as culpable as the attackers themselves."

"The question now," Arnold Bellamy said, "is not whether we deal with it, but how we deal with it."

"We need to show that the judicial process does not play favorites because of family connections. Arrest him. Try him. Lenore doesn't know, yet," Wes said. "I wish she would never have to find out. That's what I wish as her father, at least. But there's no help for it."

"Lenore is a big girl now," Clara said. "She should not have any illusions about Bryant left. If she ever had any to start with."

The men looked at her.

"She does not know what he was doing in this matter. I am sure of that." Clara paused. "She will have no reason for surprise that he was capable of doing it, I think. I will accept the task of telling her, if the rest of you prefer."

Cory Joe Lang, representing Don Francisco Nasi, simply said, "Thanks." This relieved the other men around the table from the obligation of saying anything at all.

"Then," Cory Joe said, "the next thing is to see about getting Holloway into safe custody. Preferably before the more radical local CoC people find out what he was doing, catch him, and decide to string him up in public without considering what the consequences for Lenore and the rest of the Jenkins family might be. They're prepared to live with a judicial process, I think. Isn't that really what you were saying, Wes?"

"I have people looking," Preston Richards said. "They haven't found him yet."

The phone rang early. Bryant grabbed it.

One of the clerks at the workmen's hostel owed him a favor. So now he knew that the police had taken the record book containing that block reservation and that Matheny had been right there saying that it had not been for the fire department.

So it looked like it was about time to get out of town.

But he was going to do a few things before he did.

He went across to the nursery and looked at Lenore on the cot. She had slept right through the phone ringing, the lazy bitch. The first order of business was to make sure she stayed available until he got around to her.

He had her more than halfway tied before she woke up. The rest was no problem. In his job, a guy had to keep himself in good shape.

He walked right past the crib. If the other bitches said that he wasn't to lay a finger on Weshelle, then he wouldn't. The kid could lie there all day in her stink as far as he was concerned.

Item the first. Wes Jenkins' German woman who had tried twice to get Lenore to walk out on him.

She worked with Wes, at the Bureau of Consular Affairs. Bad example. Maybe she was why Lenore had gone back to work, too. He'd always thought that old-time women had been domestic. Docile. Big miscalculation. These Krauts. Rebecca. Gretchen. Clara. Wannabe Amazons, the whole batch of them. Some of them could make an outright American feminazi look like a piker. Like the women out in the fields, when a guy drove by, working like men. Or someone like Bibi Barlow, who outranked him.

Item the second. Lenore. Damn Lenore.

Item the third. Those papers Dumais had told him to get rid of. If Dumais had wanted him to get rid of them, they must have some value. That was why the three garbage cans were still on Veda Mae's back porch. He hadn't ever bothered to put them out at the curb to be dumped.

Can't make that item the third. No way to move them. Item the third. Transportation. Pickup truck from the fire department lot. That was what he got when he went places on detail.

Then item the fourth, get those papers.

Somebody, somewhere, in the SoTF bureaucracy had decided to issue drivers' licenses to operators of motorcycles and dirt bikes.

Separate from drivers' licenses for four wheeled vehicles. Not to be obtained by mail. Granted only between the hours of eight o'clock a.m. and eleven o'clock a.m. in the Department of Internal Affairs office in Grantville. Required to be obtained by April fifteenth. Subject to administrative penalties. Identification required.

For various reasons of combined nostalgia and Schadenfreude, Grantville had continued to use April fifteenth as a deadline for all sorts of measures that its citizenry was likely to dislike.

In any case, Christin George was in line. Followed by Denise, Minnie, Ron, and Missy.

The line was going nowhere.

That was exactly what Christin had predicted when she had first insisted that all of them show up early. It was a reminder of the importance of keeping your paperwork in order. And of the fact that in order to do so, a person had to outwit a lot of bureaucratic inertia and incompetence.

The deadline had come and the deadline had gone. This was their fourth appearance at the licensing window over the past two weeks.

At the moment Christin was predicting that the person behind the counter, if that person ever took notice of their presence, would insist that they needed some other item which had unfortunately been omitted from the public notice published in the newspapers, that nobody had told them about on their prior appearances, and with which they would have to return another day. Which would mean that they would all have to pay a fine for being tardy and would not legally be allowed to ride for several days until they got the mess straightened out, at which time some incompetent clerk would not realize that it had been straightened out and send them a bill for a another fine, which would require another visit to the Department of Internal Affairs.

The person behind the counter, who this morning happened to be Arnold Bellamy's daughter Amy, waved from behind the barrier, cheerfully calling out to Missy that she would get to them in no time.

That was when someone down the hall started screaming. The five of them turned and ran, followed by Amy, who leapfrogged over the counter.

Consular Affairs. Christin had been last when they left the queue, but somehow she was first through the door. She took a running leap, landed with her arms around the man's neck like a spitting cat, and began to kick the backs of his knees and jam her knees into his kidneys while letting her full, if not very impressive, weight press against his windpipe.

Ron paused a moment in surprised admiration. When it came to plain old dirty fighting, of no particular style, Denise's mother was no slouch at all. She could probably open up a martial arts studio of sorts. Then he reached over her head, grabbed the man by his hair, and yanked backwards.

Missy thought of trying a tackle, but didn't. She had a feeling that she was too likely to get hit by Christin's flailing feet.

The man had a knife. Amy reached up and handed Denise a vase of dried flowers that was on top of the filing cabinet. Denise brought it down hard on that hand. The man yowled, turned, and ran out into the corridor, jerking away from Ron and bowling over the security guard who was running up the stairs.

Christin dropped off his back. "Damn," she said. "That guy is strong." She ran after him, Ron following.

Missy thought vaguely that she probably ought to chase him too. Instead, she dropped onto her knees. "Clara, are you all right?"

Clara Bachmeierin crawled out from under the desk. "Yes. I would not let him hurt my baby. I drop under the desk onto my hands and knees and scream and scream and scream."

"The scream was pretty impressive."

Christin came back saying, "He got away. But not for long or very far, I think. The security guard is calling the cops. What became of the knife?"

"Over here, Mom," Denise said. "That was Bryant Holloway. What is going on?"

Missy's automatic reaction to any question was to try to provide an answer. This was not the best orientation for a covert operative, as Don Francisco had concluded to his sorrow. In this instance, preoccupied with getting Clara back on her feet and making sure that she was in fact uninjured, she covered the essentials in four or five pungent, cogent sentences.

The only part that really interested Denise was Holloway's involvement in setting up the distraction at the hospital that drew the police away from the synagogue on March fourth.

Ron came back, following Christin. "Missy," he said. "That's, ah, privileged data."

"It's just us. And Clara knows anyway."

"There's going to be practically dozens of people here any minute. Uh…"

"I," Christin said, "am going to get back in line to get the drivers' licenses. Amy will go back and issue them. Right now. Denise and Minnie will come with me. And Amy will give me yours and Missy's as well as ours. It's an ill wind that blows nobody good. We weren't here, anyway."

"Ah," Amy started to protest. Then she decided it would be better to say, "Yes, ma'am."

So by the time the police arrived, those four were back at the other end of the corridor, inside another door. With Minnie writing up detailed notes concerning an event at which she had not been present, officially speaking.

And Clara was asking, "What about Lenore? If he comed-came-to hurt me, what about Lenore?"

"There isn't any answer," Missy said.

"Maybe he didn't come here," Ron said. "The garage door is open."

"That doesn't make any difference. Bryant and Lenore don't have a car. Not even bicycles. She walks everywhere and he uses fire department vehicles when they send him out of town."

"Now what?"

"I think we ought to break in," Missy said.

"Why?"

"Because Lenore ought to be at work and Weshelle ought to be at Aunt Debbie's since Chandra went to Frankfurt this week. I don't know what happened, but Weshelle is here. I can hear her crying. And crying. And crying. If she was sick and Lenore stayed home with her today, if Lenore was here, if she was okay at least, she wouldn't let that happen."

Ron came up the walk. "Do we actually have to force our way in, or does she hide a key somewhere?"

"She does, now that you remind me. Under the kindling pile. There's a fake rock. It's hollow."

"He didn't kick me," Lenore said. "He's strong. If he had kicked me, I would probably be dead."

"Then," Ron asked, "what are these marks?"

"He hit me with my boots. My winter boots. That's what he used the last time, too. I wish I hadn't put them back on, that night when Clara and Trent Dorrman and Brother Green were here. I wish I hadn't gone into the bedroom still wearing them. I wish that I had left those heavy winter boots right there in the hall, by the door. I wish that they hadn't been so handy."

"What night?" Missy said, as she came in carrying Weshelle. "I got her changed, gave her a sippy cup of milk and now she's chewing on toast. So she's happier."

"Back in February."

"Lenore, what happened in February? I know that Bryant was recruiting for Dumais, and Clara said, when she sent us over here just now, that she and Lola and the other women at the court had gotten a protective order for you, but what else is going on here?"

"I'm too ashamed. I'm too ashamed to tell anybody else. Too many people know already what he did."

"This time, in another half hour, you would have been too dead to tell anybody else." Ron thought it was only reasonable to point this out. "It might have gone faster if he had kicked you, but he was definitely making progress when we turned up."

"I didn't do anything," Lenore moaned. "I didn't do anything to make him so mad."

Missy looked at Ron. "What next? We can't leave Lenore alone with Weshelle and we can't stay here. At least, both of us can't. One of us has to go back and tell Chief Richards and Don Francisco and all those that Bryant was here and what he did and that he ran."

"I'll go, but they'll need you too, if we're going to make sense out of this. Is there anyone else you can call to help?"

Missy stood there, holding Weshelle and thinking. Uncle Wes was at a meeting somewhere and Clara was busy with the police at Consular Affairs and anyway, if Uncle Wes saw Lenore right now… That was not a good thing to think about.

"I'm going to call the Reverend Mary Ellen. I don't ever go to church any more, but Lenore does. That's the best idea, I think. She'll come. And the hospital. Some medical type has to take a look at Lenore. We'll need an ambulance anyway, to move her. She sure can't go anywhere by herself. You go now. After other people get here, I'll come after you. Mary Ellen can take care of things here and send the police to catch up with us later to tell them what was going on."

"No," Lenore said. "I'm not going to cry for a love gone wrong, Mary Ellen. There wasn't any love between Bryant and me, from start to finish. Neither of us ever thought so."

She looked up. "And I'm not going to cry for anything else, either. I didn't try to fool Bryant. I am angry, though. I've thought about it, and what I'm feeling is angry. Miserable, degraded, but angry, too. When we married, I was willing to give him an honorable effort to make the best of things in a world that isn't perfect. He wasn't willing to give that much back."

Mary Ellen looked down. None of them had tried to lift Lenore off the floor. All of them thought that had better wait for the EMTs.

"I thought he was, at first. If I hadn't thought so, I wouldn't have agreed to marry him. He wasn't, but I'm not going to cry about that. I'm not going to cry. Not ever."

"Lenore," Mary Ellen asked. "If the EMTs say that you don't have to go to the hospital, is there anyone that I can get to come over and stay with you after I leave? Someone you are willing to have? The kind of friend who would come and ask no questions?"

Lenore smiled for the first time since Bryant had come back to the house that morning. "The only person I can think of I would want is Caroline Jones. Dorrman. Which isn't going to work, considering what you just told me."

Mary Ellen smiled too. About nine o'clock in the morning, Simon's niece Caroline had phoned the parsonage to say that the baby was on its way.