1635:The Dreeson Incident

Chapter 60

Frankfurt am Main

Chandra sat in the waiting room at the Frankfurt post office. Not a room, really. A sheltered porch sort of thing in front of the building. No benches; she was sitting on a keg with someone's freight in it.

She had stayed too long to catch the turnaround on Wackernagel's trip out. He wouldn't be back for at least two weeks. That was his schedule. Nathan hadn't given her any money. Wackernagel would have trusted her to pay him back after she got home, but a stranger wouldn't. As soon as someone else came through with available space in a wagon or cart, she would pay him for a ride back home. Whether she had ever seen him before in her life or not. At least, if the postmaster said he was reliable. She thought she had enough for that. She was closer to having enough for that than she was to being able to pay for a room at an inn for two weeks.

She wished she could start out walking, but she couldn't. The roads were still not safe enough for an unaccompanied, unarmed woman to go walking alone. If nothing else, there were feral pigs that went hunting in the night if she was outside the walls of a town, and she couldn't afford inns for all the nights it would take to get back to Grantville any more than she could afford an inn here. She had responsibilities. She had the kids. She had to get home safely for them. She had to sit here and wait for a ride.

She felt so miserable.

Nathan had been mad when she showed up, but she'd expected that.

First, he had claimed that he was angry because she came in spite of the civil unrest resulting from the assassinations, because she had put herself in danger, because she had risked the possibility that she might leave the children motherless. He had tried to make feel like she was an irresponsible fool.

She'd stood her ground, at least. Pointed out that there would have been plenty of time for her to come before the assassinations, if he would have let her. Maybe she hadn't just stood her ground. She'd pushed him.

So now she knew. Well, she knew already that he hadn't wanted the third pregnancy. Now she knew that he considered it the end. From now on, he intended to conduct their marriage on an absentee basis. "To eliminate temptation." he said. It was the "best plan."

He hadn't even offered to let her stay at his place until she could find a ride back.

He hadn't even offered to arrange for her to stay with one of the other Grantville men in Frankfurt until she could find a ride back.

He hadn't even asked whether she had enough money to pay for a ride back.

He would rather that she had never come. Coming hadn't been one of his plans. So she wasn't here, as far as he was concerned.

He had told her not to come. That had been his plan. For her to stay in Grantville forever more, like a good little girl, asking no questions.

"Ask me no questions, I'll tell you no lies."

She was sick and tired of Nathan's plans. All of them.

Bryant Holloway drove the pickup truck he had stolen from the fire department lot in Grantville off the road to the right, behind some trees and brush, about a mile outside of Frankfurt. Around a curve going to the right, sharp right, and then double back a little. No one coming in the direction from Grantville toward Frankfurt was likely to see it. It wasn't the best place to leave it, but there weren't any better ones. He got out and headed into town. He had to get to Nathan's. Once he got to Nathan's, he should be safe enough for the time being. He could come back and get the stuff later.

Neither Missy nor Ron noticed the place where Bryant had driven the truck off the road. The road surfaces were naturally petty rocky and bumpy. Not something on which a truck left obvious tracks-but something which did require all their attention to keep the cycles upright. Assuming that he was headed into Frankfurt, they continued right into the town.

Just inside the walls, Missy braked the motorcycle more sharply than she should have. What on earth?

Ron, hearing her stop, slowed and then turned back.

Chandra? Sitting at the post office?

"Get on," Missy said. "We'll explain later. Something blew up after you left Grantville. Once we take care of it, I'll take you back home with me, if you don't mind riding behind. Not the most comfortable way to go, but a lot faster than a horse and wagon."

Chandra nodded. Any way to get back home was better than staying here, sitting outside the Post Office, waiting.

Ron and Missy proceeded through Frankfurt pretty sedately. She figured they didn't want to attract a lot of attention. At "sedately," they would just be a couple more of those oddball up-timers, doing oddball up-time things that involved oddball up-time machines. The inhabitants of Frankfurt were used to that by now.

Chandra hadn't expected that their business would take them directly to Nathan's.

Nor that, as they pulled up, Bryant Holloway would burst out of the back door and make a run for it, heading toward the east side of town.

It took them a while to explain things to Nathan. Particularly since Ron and Missy didn't want to explain one bit more than they had to.

Particularly since Chandra had left for Frankfurt before Bryant had beaten Lenore up. Explaining that caused quite a bit of delay all by itself. First to Chandra, who was horrified. Horrified, but not surprised. Missy looked at her rather sharply when she noticed that.

"He beat her up in February," Chandra said. "We managed to hide it. He wasn't so bad to her when he came back in March. We sort of hoped that the worst had blown over. Maybe he was just biding his time."

Then to Nathan, who was righteously indignant that Bryant thought he would provide him with any kind of refuge after he had pulled a stunt like that.

Nathan didn't much want to ride behind Ron, but he did. They headed back, in the general direction in which Bryant had been running. There was only one real road going east from Frankfurt. They came to it from behind the post office.

"Look!" shouted Minnie, pointing to something on the side of the road. Looking over, Denise saw the unmistakable tracks of truck tires heading off into the woods.

Minnie might have trouble with depth perception, with just one eye, but there was nothing at all wrong with the eye itself.

They set off in pursuit. Buster would have chewed Denise out, if he'd seen her driving a motorcycle like that over such rough terrain, especially a bike with a sidecar.

But Buster was dead and Denise thought she finally had one of his killers tracked down and cornered. Some part of her mind understood, probably, that Bryant Holloway hadn't been directly involved with her father's killing. But that was a very small part of her mind and one she'd already brushed aside.

Buster had had a favored expression, when he wanted to describe someone in a really dark fury. "He's feeling Old Testament," he'd say.

Denise Beasley was feeling very Old Testament that day. Who cared whether Bryant Holloway had been directly responsible for her father's death? Had the God of the Old Testament cared about the fussy details when he slew all the firstborn of Egypt?

Not hardly. If it was good enough for God, it was good enough for Denise.

They found Holloway's truck, but there was no sign of Holloway himself. Denise took the carbine from Minnie and climbed into the truck bed. Then, stooped so she could get a better look at the papers he had in there.

" Look out!" Minnie shouted.

Two gunshots. They shouted like pistol shots. Nine millimeter, maybe.

Denise sprawled flat and then peeked over the side of the truck, in Minnie's direction. She could see Minnie's feet sticking out from behind a different tree, where she must have gone for shelter.

Movement to the left. She looked and saw Holloway, rising from behind a bush. He must have heard them coming and been waiting in ambush.

He saw her at the same time, aimed in her direction, and fired two more shots with his pistol.

Both of them went wild, as far as Denise could tell. But she wasn't paying much attention to that. She was getting up on one knee and the carbine was coming to her shoulder and she was a damn good shot and her soul was now well into Leviticus.

Bam! Bam! She didn't even feel the recoil.

Holloway was down, sprawled against another tree. There was blood all over his chest.

There were a lot of chapters in Leviticus, none of them kindly and forgiving. And there were fifteen rounds in the magazine of her M-1 carbine.

Which her Daddy had given her, for her twelfth birthday.

She went through the entire clip. Only the last two shots missed. By then, finally, Denise Beasley had started crying and her aim got a little wobbly.

She didn't cry for long, though. By the time Minnie came up, she was dry-eyed. In fact, she was starting to reload.

"You going to keep shooting him?" Minnie asked.

Denise thought about it. "I guess there's not much point, any longer."

Minnie shook her head. "No. He's dead. I don't think anybody in the history of the world has ever been deader."

Shots, in the distance. One, two. Then another two. Then another two. Then a whole fusillade.

They came around a curve. From this direction, it was easy enough to see where Bryant had driven the truck off the road. The spring growth of the plants along the way was still a little squashed.

Better to be cautious. They stopped and cut the engines. Nathan and Chandra got off. Missy and Ron pushed the cycles. When they reached the cutoff, each of them followed one set of the truck tracks.

Not just the truck. Another motorcycle.

A motorcycle, pretty obviously, whose rider had been more skilled than Ron and Missy. And who had a second rider on the pillion who had spotted the truck on the way into Frankfurt. Who had stopped to investigate.

Denise and Minnie were, quite calmly, putting Bryant Holloway's body into the cab of the truck, behind the steering wheel.

With Denise, in a most businesslike manner, advising Minnie to use a handkerchief to roll down the window. "Just in case they've heard of fingerprints or one of the Grantvillers in town tells them, we'd better not leave any. There's probably not a lot of crime detection going on. We can hope, anyway."

"What about his gun?" Minnie asked.

"Take it. No reason for anyone to know he dropped it here, and one more can always come in handy."

That was about the time they saw the others coming.

They didn't panic in the least. Just finished what they were doing and waited until the others came down toward the truck.

They gave a quick description of what had happened.

Ron looked into the truck. There wasn't as much blood as you'd expect in there. Probably because Holloway had already bled out before they muscled him into the cab, as many times as he'd been shot.

You could recognize him, but just barely. Two of Denise's shots had hit him in the face.

Ron and Missy looked at one another. It was perfectly clear that the girls were of the opinion that they had not done anything wrong. As they saw it, Bryant Holloway had helped bring into Grantville the demonstrators who killed Denise's dad, had helped the people who arranged the killing of Mayor Dreeson, who gave Minnie her eye.

Minnie was pretty Old Testament herself. She reached up into the socket, popped it out, and held it out for them to look at. None of the others had ever observed this phenomenon before. It did have the effect of taking their minds off Holloway's death for the time being. "I owed him," Minnie said.

"No different from killing a mad dog," was Denise's summary.

The four others stood there, wondering if there was any way to salvage the situation.

Minnie and Denise looked at one another. There was no telling how long the others were going to stand around. With the possibility that someone else could come along any minute and find them there. Shots tended to attract attention. Since they were of the opinion that the papers were now available to the people who had gone looking for them and that they had already taken care of the rest of situation quite adequately, they climbed back on Buster's cycle and started for home.

"See you later!" Denise called over her shoulder.

For one thing, they were cutting school. They saw more of the truant officer than they wanted to even without side trips to Frankfurt. Mrs. Dreeson and Mrs. Wiley would be pissed. Mrs. Dreeson and Mrs. Wiley had a tendency to compare their behavior at considerable length to the far more responsible and thus infinitely preferable manner in which Annalise Richter and Idelette Cavriani approached life.

Having a mentor could be a real pain.

"I don't believe it, quite," Missy was saying, "but he has Dumais' papers thrown in the back here. Just tied up in bundles with red tape around them. Without so much as a camper cover. What if it had started raining?"

"He wasn't thinking straight when he left Grantville," Ron answered. "That's pretty obvious. Reach over the edge of the truck bed and lift them out. Try not to snag your sleeves or anything. Pack them into the sidecars. I hope there's not more than will fit."

"There's more than will fit into one. I think that we can put the rest into the bottom of the other one and then the full gas cans on top. But we can't leave the empty gas cans here."

"Give the empty cans to Nathan to carry," Chandra said. "He might as well be of some use, for a change."

"That's it, then. Let's get out of here before someone shows up to investigate those shots. Prickett, we're going back to your place." Ron started his cycle. On the way out, he was once more careful to follow one of the tracks that the truck tires had made on the way in. Missy followed the other one.

Nathan Prickett was sulking, insofar as an adult could be said to sulk. That kid Ron had started giving him directions. Notify the Frankfurt authorities where he found the vehicle; say that he found Bryant dead in it; had no idea who'd killed him; say that he had gone looking because he knew that his brother-in-law was coming and he was getting worried because of the delay; remind them that Bryant had been here before on that firefighting detail.

Ron ran through it again. "Tell them that you were expecting him again and were getting worried because of the delay. Tell them you saw tracks where the truck ran off the road. Before you notify them, hide the empty gas cans-and make sure that you send them back to Denise and Minnie when you get a chance, because they are practically irreplaceable. Let the authorities worry about what to do with the truck next. It has a fire department sticker on it, so that will back up your reminder that Bryant was here in connection with that the last time."

"At least," Missy said, "I'm Chandra's cousin. It may make some minimal sense that I would have come to give her a ride back home. If anyone asks you why we were here. If nobody asks, don't bring it up."

Then she glared at Nathan.

"Which reminds me, Prickett you prick. Exactly what did you think you were doing leaving Chandra to sit there shivering in front of the Post Office, waiting for some way to get back home, not having the slightest idea when a ride would come along? What were you expecting her to do if none came along today? Sit there all night?"

"I told her not to come," Nathan said sullenly. "I've told her that all along."

"He doesn't want us to live together any more," Chandra said. "He doesn't want any more children. It's not in his plans."

Ron turned around and stared. "You know," he said. "That is really stupid. You could always take a couple of weeks off. Go back to Grantville for a few days. Go to Dr. Shipley and get a vasectomy if you really want to go back home. Or if you want to have Chandra and the kids come here. Unless you're so attached to keeping the family jewels as an option, even though you already have more kids than you want, that you're willing to ruin all of your lives."

"Look, Stone," Nathan said. "None of this is any of your business at all."

"Chandra is Missy's cousin."

Nathan blinked. "What does that have to do with it?" He had a strange feeling of being out of the loop. Why should it make any difference to the Stone kid that Chandra was Missy's cousin?

Missy interrupted. "And, now that the possibility of doing something about it has been pointed out, if you tell her to go have her tubes tied instead so you can keep the jewels, I personally will tell the whole world that you're willing to risk her life unnecessarily. That's abdominal surgery. Something they can do these days, if they have to. But no joke. Way too high risk, compared with your option. You're not worth it to her. Believe me, you are not. She doesn't have to put up with you. She has people around who love her."

Ron kept going. "Face, it, Prickett. It's one thing for couples who want kids, but not yet. Or still want more kids, but not right now. They have to deal with the whole spacing thing. Timing thing. Inconvenient timing thing. But where are you getting off on this? The whole point is that you don't want any more at all. If you don't intend to do anything sensible, you at least ought to have the common decency to ask your wife for a divorce and let her get on with her life. Talk about being a dog in the manger."

Chandra looked from one to another. She had not wanted to come quite as far as that word. Divorce. At least not yet. She'd thought around it, of course. Back last fall. Talking to Paige Modi. Talking to Aunt Debbie at Thanksgiving. Skipped around it. Skirted around it. Never quite looked it in the face. She hadn't quite wanted to think that it was something that could happen to her.

Divorce. Now Ron had said it for her. With Nathan in the room. She couldn't pretend that it didn't exist. Not any more. Maybe she was as bad as Nathan, in her own way. It wasn't something she had planned on.

Nathan's reaction to Ron's unsolicited advice was far from favorable.

Particularly when Ron expressed the opinion that in all probability he was just using this as an excuse-that if he didn't have it, he would be finding some other reason to skip out on his responsibilities.

"What in hell do you know about it?"

"If someone wants to dump his kids-or hers-he will. Or she will. He'll find a reason. Or she will. What did you want? Not real sons, apparently. A couple of little wind-up toys to pat on the head at the end of the day?"

Missy flinched. This wasn't just about Nathan and Chandra. For Ron, this was about him and his brothers. About abandonment. About children left without a father. Or a mother. Even if Ron wasn't conscious of it himself.

Missy decided that she couldn't calm the situation down. She had no idea how to do that. But she could bring it to an end.

"Stop it," she said. "Both of you. We've got to get going. If we don't leave now, we won't make any decent time today at all. We don't want to get stuck out on the road somewhere."

Nathan Prickett stood outside his house, looking at the vanishing motorcycles.

Damn Ron Stone's multiple last-minute instructions. Most of which, Nathan granted rather grudgingly, made sense. All of which Nathan distinctly resented having to take from a kid. Much less one of that hippie Tom Stone's kids. As if he wouldn't have been able to manage things himself.

But he had taken them. Because, probably, it would turn out to the best way to handle it all from the don's point of view. If it wasn't, at least it would give him a little maneuvering room. But the don would need to know exactly what had come off here.

He'd done the best he could, under the circumstances. He couldn't very well have said, "I'm one of Francisco Nasi's agents in Frankfurt, so you can leave the stuff with me."

One of the agents, he was sure. He was certain that Don Francisco had others here. If he didn't have a couple of down-timers in place, at least, he wouldn't be competent enough to have the job he did.

Dear Don Francisco.

He concentrated on the report. Better to think about that than to think about how he felt when he saw Chandra leaving, riding pillion behind Missy.

A lot better to think about what Don Francisco needed to know than about the other things Ron Stone had said. The things that Missy had said.

Chandra had not been in his plans. He'd done his best to fit her into his plans. He really had. For a long time now, he had done his best to fit Chandra into his plans.