Grantville Gazette - Volume V (19 page)

Carol waited patiently. As patiently as possible, for quite a while. It didn't seem to be doing any good, so she started talking again. "We looked at all the personnel and ended up focusing on Gordon Fritz. Of the previously retired people working for the Grantville Research Center, it seems to us that he is about the only one with the background to pick up on what we'll be looking for. To see the patterns developing and the connections between one thing and the other. Proposals; financing; backers; outcomes. Connections between what crosses Laura Jo's and Beverly Kay's desks and who brings it in, who's assigned to research it."

"Dad's seventy-seven years old."

"Not too old to keep his eyes open," Carol said.

"Mom would strangle me if anything happened to him. She's only seventy and counts herself lucky not to be a widow already."

"Good grief," Carol said. "There's nothing going on here that's likely to be dangerous."

Natalie gave her a hard look. "You're not from around here, Carol. Anyone who steps between Horace Bolender and a lot of money is likely to be in danger. Probably not directly from Horace. He's not the violent type himself. But he wouldn't be past making suggestions. Giving hints. Employing a couple of unsavory types. Especially not since his father died last February and isn't around to rein him in any more."

Carol's face was a study.

"If Tony didn't tell you and Ron that before he put you onto this project," Natalie said, "then he's guilty of misleading advertising. Especially since Tony thinks that Horace is working with Dan and Delton Cunningham. Both of them have plenty of access to unsavory types. Rough types. Delton was in prison for a while before he married Bev—he was one of the people caught up in the scandals around Arch Moore's second term as governor. Dan didn't land in prison, but a lot of people thought he probably deserved to more than Delton did. He's a lot more ambitious than Delton, but he's a lot smarter, too. He probably managed to cover his tracks pretty well and was a small enough fish that it wasn't worth the while of the federal prosecutor's office to go after him."

"I probably ought to ask Tony a little more about this."

"You certainly should. And let's have dinner one day later this week. At Tyler's. I'll shovel you all the dirt you'll need to avoid ticking Dad off, if you do end up working with him." Natalie sighed. "And I'll talk to Dad about it. Open up the subject."

"So that's Dad and Mom," Natalie said after dinner. "Just as long as you stay off the topic of Arnold when you talk to him, you should understand one another fine."

"Definitely attached to one another." Carol looked around for her purse.

"Way back, after our senior prom, all of us were out in the parking lot, getting into cars to caravan over to the Methodist church for the after-party. That was when we were still in the old building, not the nice new consolidated school we have now. Dennis Stull was parked there in his pickup, waiting to drive Joe over to Fairmont to catch a bus back to Louisiana. Joe and Aura Lee kissed goodbye. Just a hug and a kiss, the kind that said, 'I love you, I'll miss you while you're gone and I hope you come back soon.' An embrace, if you want to call it that. Head to toe, but no . . . urgency. No pawing each other."

Natalie got up. "Joe's burly like most of those Stulls, but not so tall that a tiny girl like Aura Lee looked silly kissing him. He's five-seven, maybe? Not much more, for sure. I'm taller than he is when I wear heels and I'm five-six. The minute I saw it, I realized that the answer to the 'do they or don't they' question that people had been asking for a couple of years was that they most definitely did. And had. And would again. And knew it for sure. It was exactly how my parents kissed each other goodbye when Dad was going off to an insurance convention or something. A no-fuss, married kind of goodbye kiss."

"How did the rest of the kids take that?" Carol asked.

"The other kids were very unimpressed. Didn't even really look at them. Nobody else noticed except Mrs. Fielder—the mother of Marietta, at the library. I know you've met Marietta; she's about our age. Mr. Fielder was the science teacher back then. You know him, too—he came out of retirement after the Ring of Fire and started teaching again. He and his wife were chaperoning the prom, along with a lot of other teachers, of course. She was standing behind me and what she said, sort of under her breath, was, 'I wish them well. They have a long haul ahead of them if they're going to make this work.' She was an old friend of Aura Lee's mother, of course. They were in a lot of the same clubs and things. They'd even been in the same church before Mrs. Hudson changed from Disciples of Christ to Methodist when she married Willie Ray."

"I saw your friend Carol Koch having dinner with Natalie Fritz—Natalie Bellamy—at Tyler's last evening," Debbie Jenkins said to Aura Lee.

"I introduced them," Aura Lee said. "They should have a lot in common. Carol's been pretty slow to get to know people around town. Not standoffish. Just slow. Nat's more outgoing."

"Nat and you and I were in school together all the way through," Chad Jenkins said. I don't think I'd pick 'outgoing' as the right word. 'Blunt,' maybe. She always tended to say exactly what she thought whether it was suitable to the situation or not."

"How did she come to marry Mr. Bellamy?" his daughter Missy asked.

"She met Arnold up in Morgantown. He's five or six years older than she is, I think. He had an undergraduate degree in history and had come back to get his certification in secondary social studies. She married him in the Newman Center chapel the fall of 1979, part way through her senior year, with none of her relatives there except her brothers Vern and Gene, because Gordon and Verlinda Fritz weren't willing to accept a Catholic 'foreigner' from New Jersey as her husband. Though they came around, more or less, after the deed was done and he was a fact of life, so to speak."

Missy contemplated the question of why any woman, even a somewhat overweight math teacher, would want to marry Mr. Bellamy enough to defy her parents, shuddered a little, and dismissed the topic from her mind hurriedly. Some things just didn't bear thinking about.

Not that Mr. Bellamy had been a bad teacher. He'd come back to the high school to teach the intensive constitution and government course for the six "accelerated" kids who graduated in August 1633. A funny course—they had classes three or four hours a day sometimes when he was in town and then none when he was off doing other things for Mr. Piazza. He'd made it pretty plain that it was their responsibility to carry on under their own initiative when he was somewhere else representing the NUS government.

"They named her after Natalie Wood," her father was saying absentmindedly.

"Who?"

Chad contemplated the ignorant little barbarian who was also his daughter the future information librarian. "She was Verlinda's favorite actress.
Rebel Without a Cause
with James Dean, and a lot of other films."

"Oh. I've heard of James Dean," Missy said.

"Pity that Nat didn't turn out to look more like Natalie Wood."

"Stuff it, Chad," was Aura Lee's comment on that.

"Dennis is up and about and back in Erfurt," Joe Stull said. "Pat's winding up everything she does at the sanitary commission, turning it over to Marianne Dormann, so she can go up and join him. They'll get married as soon as Maurice Tito doth civilly put Francis and Pat asunder. Which he is distinctly on the fast track to do; seems to think that when a man shoots at his estranged wife, even if he misses, the marriage is essentially defunct, especially when they've been separated for a quarter of a century. And now that Pat has finally made up her mind, she's not going to wait a bit longer than necessary."

"How is this going over with all of Dennis's respectable employees?" Tony asked. "Of course, I can ask Regina if you don't feel comfortable with saying."

Regina was married to Tony's brother Nick, who was in Erfurt working for Dennis.

Almost all the civilian Grantville families in Erfurt were working with or for Dennis Stull on military procurement. The men had gone in the autumn of 1632, right after Mike Stearns had made the alliance with Gustavus Adolphus. Dennis had encouraged them to have their families join them as soon as possible. He believed strongly that a happy work force was an efficient work force. Once Regina finished her teacher training—she had come back to Grantville as soon as the two year program for mature women opened up—the American community would have its own school. Until then, the other mothers, collectively, were home-schooling the kids using a curriculum that Laurie Beth Walker had for her children before the Ring of Fire.

Dennis had paid education costs for all of the wives, on a "no strings attached" basis. Some of them had taken CNA training before they moved, for example. They'd set up a little health clinic, open to down-timers as well.

But, as it happened, most of them were either pretty strongly Church of Christ or else nondenominational Evangelicals. Tony was a bit dubious about how well they were going to accept Pat. From the point of view of some of them, Pat would be about as fallen as a woman could get, short of being outright promiscuous. What with her having lived with Dennis before she married Francis, while she was married to Francis—two episodes of that counting the present—and, presumably, after she was divorced from Francis until they got the knot tied.

"Lorrie Gorrell will be nice enough to her," Joe said. "Lorrie's the sister of Fred Pence, who's over at Fulda working with Harlan. And Amber Lee Barnes, of course."

Tony laughed. Amber Lee had been in the military from 1631 to 1634. She and Scott Blackwell, who was the military commander down in Wuerzburg, had gotten a divorce a couple of years before the Ring of Fire. Frank Jackson gave her a compassionate discharge when she married Sterling Pridmore and the blessed event turned out to be twins, rather than accommodate the babies in the Erfurt Supply Depot, although Amber Lee was quite willing to soldier on. Dennis promptly hired her as his executive assistant, to continue as a civilian doing the job she had done in the military, so the twins were spending their days in the Erfurt Supply Depot anyway.

Joe laughed, too, at the thought of Amber Lee. "A couple of the others may be a bit stiff at first. But Pat can find plenty to do, ramping up their little clinic into a satellite of the sanitary commission. It should help a little that the others are all fifteen or twenty years younger than she is. Or more. Most people have trouble being outrageously disrespectful to someone who's old enough to be their mother."

Amber Lee Barnes looked up from her desk in the Erfurt Supply Depot. Jim Fritz was standing there. Silently, as usual. It never occurred to him to say anything on the order of "excuse me." He just stood until someone noticed him.

Right now, he was looking at the bassinets in which Jamie and Pel were sleeping—both, O wonder of wonders, sleeping at once. She grinned at the twins affectionately. Jamie had been born very close to midnight on March 31. She had thought that Tucker Conway, the EMT who was serving as midwife, was joking when he said, "There's another one." But Pel had arrived as an April Fool, right after midnight, so someday she would have to do a lot of explaining about how a person could have twins with different birthdays.

When she said, "Good morning, Jim," he said, "They're different. They don't stay the same."

"They grow, Jim. They get older. When they grow, they change."

He thought about that for a while. Finally he nodded. "People do that. Things stay the same. Or they should, unless somebody changes them."

This was almost certainly a signal that Jim, the way his mind worked, had noticed something that was different from the way he thought it should be. Dennis had told him to look for things that were different, so he was doing that.

"Do you want to see Dennis?" she asked.

It turned out that wanting to see Dennis was the reason Jim was standing there. Working with Jim Fritz could be a little different sometimes, but if you could figure out the clues he sent, he just about never wasted a person's time.

Jim didn't really like to talk to people. If he absolutely had to talk to someone, he preferred to do it over in the closed-off side shed where he managed the R&D inventory. As things were, however, Amber Lee thought . . .

"Go into Dennis' office," she said. "He got shot. He shouldn't walk over to your place unless he has to. He's on crutches because his hip still hurts."

"That's right," Jim answered. "He got shot. His hip hurts. I'll go to his office."

As he went, he looked back at her rather reproachfully. "Things shouldn't be the wrong shape."

"The news from the pre-opening teachers' meeting front," Natalie Bellamy said, "is that Fran has left Horace Bolender."

Idelette Cavriani and Annalise Richter sat quietly, hoping that their presence had been forgotten and that they would learn a lot more about the peccadilloes of the adults in authority over them.

"Fran is?" Carol asked.

"The librarian at the elementary school," Aura Lee inserted.

"She announced it generally, because she took Dustin and Damien with her. Dustin's seventeen now—he'll be a junior—and Damien's fifteen. He'll be a freshman. She doesn't want them leaving school and going anywhere with Horace, if he comes asking for them."

"That has to be a pretty desperate step for her," Aura Lee said. "She's from Fairmont. Her parents and brothers all lived over there. She doesn't have a soul in Grantville to rely on except herself, if she's leaving Horace."

Natalie picked up her coffee cup. "She said that she's going to file for divorce before school opens and try to get a legal temporary custody order for the boys from Maurice Tito. That's all she said publicly. She's Methodist, of course, so I may be able to pick up bits and pieces more around church, even though the Reverend Mary Ellen is properly closemouthed about things like this. It'll be harder for her to keep Horace away from them at church than at home or school, though, since he's a Methodist too and has a perfect right to be there, so something may come up. I imagine that Mildred—that's Horace's mother—is just livid."