"She stood there looking at us for a little while. Then she left.
"The next week was worse than when we told our families we were getting married in the first place. Chad's father was dead by then, so the only oasis of calm was provided by Wes and Lena. They were back in Grantville by then. Wes had left the state government and taken the job with Marion County Parks and Recreation.
"I don't know what Wes said to your Gran, either, but I know he said something, because I know that Chad didn't have a chance to talk before we officially broke the news to her. She heard the news, nodded her head, called Chip and then stood stiffly with her lips closed tightly as Chip started bringing all the boxes of his stuff down from his room. They were already packed. She didn't like it, not one damn bit but knew that if we'd settled it between us, it was better this way. She's one tough lady."
"Why did Dad come back?"
Her mother looked at her. "I don't know, really. For the sake of you and Chip, I suppose. Chad never said. I'd said that I wanted to have things right with us again. Once we decided to get back together, it seemed to me as if asking more questions would be like picking at a scab. That things might never heal over if I kept trying to examine them under a microscope. Even if they weren't quite entirely right, that was better than an open sore.
"Of course, I never really understood why he married me in the first place. Why he wanted to. He told me he loved me, but guys always say that. He could have dated any girl in Grantville. Any girl in Fairmont or Clarksburg, for that matter. Someone he had met in Morgantown. And he did date a lot of different girls, up until the day in May he told me we were getting married. Out of a clear blue sky. Actually, it was cloudy and started to pour rain almost right away. So he could certainly have married someone younger. Someone without all the tribulations and problems I brought him. Anyone he wanted. Someone with whom things would be simpler. I always realized that."
Missy nodded. She had a lot to think about.
She wished that she had the guts to ask one more question. Were you ever in love with him? Did you love him, Mom? But she didn't. Not right now. She had a feeling that she'd pushed her mother about as far as she dared. It sure wasn't because you wanted to be Mrs. County Commissioner. Or Mrs. SoTF Senator. You hate the politics. Why did you marry him, Mom?
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.