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."