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"Dad," Lenore said. "Dad. It wasn't…"

Her attempt to intervene didn't do any good.

Chandra? Both Clara and Chandra had known, but hadn't told him?

Wes and Clara were yelling at each other when the ambulance arrived. Still yelling when Mary Ellen left in it, with Lenore, carrying Weshelle herself.

Still yelling when they got home after locking up at Bryant's house.

Just yelling, though.

Mary Ellen sighed and left them to it, wondering how long it had been since anyone in Wes' family had stood up to him. Probably, if the stories she had heard were true, back when his mother tried to talk him out of marrying Lena. Which hadn't worked.

Wes would never have thought of himself as a domestic dictator. And, to give him credit, she thought, if that rubric applied in any way, he had certainly been the most benevolent dictator ever born in the human race. His efforts to elicit a point of view from Lena had been practically superhuman. He had nobly refrained from playing the heavy father to Lenore and Chandra, even when he clearly hadn't been pleased with the choices they made.

But still. He was pretty short on experience when it came to give and take on the home front. Lenore and Chandra hadn't had to fight for their choices. Wes had stood back and deliberately let them make them, which was a different kettle of fish.

Faye looked up from the phone. "That was Mary Ellen Jones," she said.

"Is it true?" Linda Beth asked. "What we heard that Bryant did to Lenore this time?"

Faye nodded. "Bad enough that she's going to have to be off work for several days."

"What do you think? Like your friend Bernadette Adducci says, Andrea, it's really hard to help someone who won't help herself."

"Personally," Faye said. "I think that Lola and Clara were right. She should have gotten out. Not that a protective order would have prevented him from hunting her down at Wes' house. But it sure would have made it less convenient for him to get to her if she had been living somewhere else, with other people around."

"Why on earth didn't she?" Catrina asked.

"She's a masochist?" Andrea suggested.

Linda Beth shook her head. "You have to know something about her family to understand, I think. I'm the same age as her grandparents. Lenore has been surrounded all her life by folks who are pretty nice. Not perfect, but the Jenkinses and the Days, both sides of her family, are basically good people. Lenore and Chandra are both alike, in that way. At some level, they simply expected to be-what's that word in the wedding vows?-yeah, to go on being cherished when they got married. Without even thinking about it. They'd been cherished since the day they were born, after all."

"Maybe you're right," Faye said. "That is sort of what it was like when Lola and I talked to her. When it came right down to it, I'm not sure she actually believed what was happening to her. That Bryant was completely off the deep end. Not even though Lola warned her back in March that he'd gone off it a couple of times before."

Wes said he would set up a folding bed for Lenore downstairs on the sun porch, next to the crib, so she could be with Weshelle. Clara brought sheets, blankets, an extra pillow, all from the linen closet.

While he was doing that, Clara moved her things out of the master bedroom.

Lenore wasn't going to be able to climb the stairs for quite a while. No one but themselves would know that she was sleeping on the single bed in Chandra's old room.

Not even if she cried herself to sleep at night, feeling… a little bit lonely, at times.

After all, she could scarcely stay in the master bedroom. It had been wonderful to sleep in Wesley's arms when his favor had been resting upon her. But she could scarcely perturb him with her presence when it was not.

When Wes came up that evening, he stopped at the door of the bedroom, a little startled. Whatever he might have expected to happen as the next stage in this disagreement with Clara-it wasn't this.

He hadn't really expected anything specific. He had never had a fight with Clara before. Some minor arguments about this and that, but no fights.

He had never had a fight with his wife before, for that matter. Lena had been compliant. Sometimes to the point that it tried his patience, but most certainly compliant. Lena had not been one to stand her ground.

On the other hand, if Lenore had picked up Weshelle and walked out, that night back in February, as Clara had advised her to, it would not have come to this.

Sometimes Lenore was so much like her mother that it was uncanny.

He stood there. Bitte, geh doch nicht weg. Bleib bei mir. It had been so… forlorn. But now, she had gone away. There had to be something that he wasn't understanding. Some piece of this puzzle was missing.

He looked down the hallway. All the other doors were closed. He wondered which room Clara had chosen.

Chapter 59

Grantville

"I hate to say that I'm relieved," Preston Richards said. "But I am."

Ed Piazza nodded.

According to the latest reports, Bryant Holloway had left town in a pickup truck stolen from the Grantville VFD lot.

"Wes Jenkins might have killed him if he had caught him here in town. He isn't likely to go chasing him down, however. Not with Clara's pregnancy so far advanced." Richards sighed. "I suppose part of it's the stress. Cumulative. That's what the Reverend Al says, at least. There's been more violence in Grantville in the four years since the Ring of Fire than we'd have expected in twenty or thirty years, up-time."

"Considering that we've got more than five times the population we did before…" Ed started to say.

"Do you have any idea where he might be headed?" Nasi asked.

Arnold Bellamy answered. "Steve Matheny-that's our fire department chief, if you haven't met him, Don Francisco-says maybe towards Frankfurt. He was over there some time back. Stayed with Chandra's husband, Nathan Prickett."

Don Francisco frowned slightly.

"Surely," Ed Piazza said, "Nathan isn't going to take him in after what he's done to Chandra's sister."

"How's Nathan going to know?" Richards asked. "Unless we radio to him. Which wouldn't be the most prudent thing, right at the moment. Without a SoTF consulate, the USE radio setup in Frankfurt isn't exactly confidential. Or reliable, for that matter."

"Additionally," Don Francisco said, "according to information I have obtained, it would appear that the man is carrying potentially important evidence with him. He was observed, on the way out of town, loading packets of papers into the truck."

"Dare I ask observed where, and by whom?" Arnold asked.

"Preferably not. But it would be desirable to get the papers back. Based on information received, some of them may well be pertinent to the trial of the various hooligans the police rounded up after the demonstration at Leahy Medical Center."

"What can he be planning to do with them?" Ed Piazza asked.

"At present, of course, we don't know. He might be trying to return them to Dumais. It is possible that he intends to try to use the material to make a plea bargain of some kind. Or, or course, he simply may not be thinking clearly."

Those who were sitting in on the meeting purely in the capacity of providers of miscellaneous factual information tried not to wiggle and twist on their chairs.

"How long do you think they're going to be looking at it from all the angles?" Missy asked at coffee break.

"For a long, long time, the way things are going. I must say that when Mike Stearns is around, things get decided faster than when he isn't." Ron grinned.

"It seems to me," Missy said, "that when you narrow down what they're saying, they'd be willing to do without Bryant, since he was sort of peripheral, but they really would like the papers that Pam saw him picking up behind Veda Mae's house."

Ron nodded. That seemed to be the essence of it. "Is there any reason that we can't chase him down and get them? Don Francisco is probably pretty much right that he's heading for Frankfurt. Even if he isn't, pickup trucks are still noticeable in rural Thuringia."