Cory Joe was feeling uncomfortable. This had seemed like a much better idea before it involved his sister.
He began to understand why Ron and Wes Jenkins had argued so hard against it before the others had voted them down. Back when they'd been expecting Missy to do it on her own.
"Ditzy," Missy said indignantly. " 'Ditzy.' I'll get you for 'ditzy.' " She leaned down, made a snowball, and threw it at him.
He grinned, the snow all over his ski cap. "What about 'ditzy cheerleader'?"
They battled all the way from Pam's to St. Mary's, where a huge bank of snow had been thrown up behind the church. They climbed it, tossing snow all the way, and fell over into a little pit at the top, like a miniature volcano crater, with seven or eight inches of undisturbed fresh snow on top of that which had been cleared from the alley.
They were just kissing, to start with, enchanted by finding this magic little mini-world right in the middle of town, isolated from all the rest of it.
When they stood up, Ron took her hand. "I might make you cry someday. But not on purpose."
Shivering, they slid back down the pile. Missy picked up some snow at the bottom and threw another ball; they battled all the way to her house. By the time they practically fell through the kitchen door, they were sufficiently white that Debbie accused them of being a pair of yeti.
"Well," Missy said. "Look at it this way. We're considerate enough that we didn't come in the front door and aren't dripping all over the hardwood floor in the front hall."
"You're going to be considerate enough to mop the linoleum, too. Toss those things in the dryer. Ron can't walk out to Lothlorien with half his clothes sopping wet."
They started to strip, beginning with mittens and hats and continuing for quite a while. Winter in Thuringia during the Little Ice Age encouraged the layered look.
"How on earth did you get snow there, Missy?"
"Snow angels?" Missy offered, hoping her mother would not pursue the issue.
"Those ski pants, too," Debbie said firmly. "They're wet."
Ron looked at her. "They're the last layer before my boxers, Mrs. Jenkins."
In Debbie Jenkins' experience, epochal changes tended to turn around small things. "Toss them in. I'll get you an old pair of Chip's to wear while they're drying." She went upstairs.
When she came down, Missy was curled up on the floor, sitting with her head against the door of the dryer. Ron had the teakettle on. "She needs a cup of tea," he said. "With sugar or honey, if you have it."
"I'll make it," Debbie said. "I don't have any real tea, but I have some herbal concoctions. Use this to dry your boots."
"What's that?" Ron asked.
Debbie was startled. "It's a portable hair dryer. You can use it to blow hot air into your boots to dry the lining." She looked at the expression on his face. "Haven't you ever seen one before?"
"I didn't even know they existed," Ron answered. "I thought hair just dried."
"He didn't know about portable hair driers," Debbie said.
Chad turned a page of the newspaper. "Where would he have learned?" he asked. "There weren't any women out at Lothlorien while he was growing up. I doubt he ever read the ads for beautician's supplies in the Sunday paper."
"It's one of those things," Missy said. "WYSIWYG. With Ron, what you see really is what you get. It's just that every now and then, something a little unexpected surfaces. Something you haven't seen before.
"He says that according to his dad, a lot of the world's problems come from not cluing people in when you ought to. That's why he made me sit here and tell you what Don Francisco wants Pam and me to do. So we wouldn't have any misunderstandings."
Thinking, as she said it, that she was glad she had ratcheted the level of the project down to something she could clue them in on. The truth was that, "I'm going to be going with Pam to the Willard occasionally when she tries to pump Veda Mae Haggerty to see if the people she hangs around with have dropped any information about these anti-Jewish agitators" was something that her parents had swallowed, however unwillingly. "I'm going to go by myself to the 250 Club, pretending to be a fellow traveler, to try to pump information concerning anti-Jewish agitators out of a possible agent of Michel Ducos, who is the guy who tried to assassinate the pope" would have been thoroughly over the top. She could only imagine how they would have reacted.
"You really needed that tea," Debbie said.
"We ate at Cora's before we went over to Pam's. She doesn't earn enough that we can expect her to feed us. So it had been a while. And first contact with Don Francisco, even by way of Cory Joe, can be a bit unnerving. I'm going to bed."
She lay there, curled up.
She was so relieved that it hadn't come to that.
She wished so badly that it had.
No valentine from Ron. But a hand brushing her cheek, a voice saying, "No risks you don't want. It would be a pity if salty tears melted these snowflakes." Without those, the evidences of her virginity, as the down-time girls called it, would be in a snowbank behind St. Mary's this evening. She hadn't been going to push him away. She'd been pulling him down toward her.
She sooooo didn't need this kind of complication in her life right now.
"It's not very exciting," Missy said. "But it's odd."
"Everyone already knew that Dumais was dealing with Velma. He's the one who hooked her up with Mauger."
"It's those Theme things. But I guess you weren't back yet."
"What Theme things?"
"For a while before she left town, Velma was wandering around town talking about Themes and other sort of new age stuff."
"So?"
"About the only thing I've picked up so far is that she got those Themes from Dumais. So I sort of followed her trail. Where she repeated them. Picked up what she said from week to week. Tried to track them down."
"And?"
"And you're lucky that you guys picked a reference librarian to do this job. Not a 'ditz.' "
Ron had a feeling that "ditz" had really grated on Missy. She kept coming back to it.
"I really think you ought to bring it to Don Francisco's attention. Those Themes were quotations, almost all of them. Most of them from Seneca. Which makes it likely that Dumais has some kind of an academic background. That's not exactly typical for a garbage collector, is it? One of the things in the material that Cory Joe brought for Pam and me to study was to look for things that are out of character. If you ask me, Seneca quotations from a garbage collector are really out of character."
There was something to be said for the greenhouse at Lothlorien. For one thing, it was, for the time being, private. Over at the house, Bill was sitting in the living room studying an incredibly expensive herbal, or botanical manual, they had bought. The down-time cleaning woman, who did it as a second job and had no qualms of conscience whatsoever about working on Sunday afternoon, was racketing around with the vacuum cleaner.
Admittedly, the floor was brick. On the other hand, the air was warm. Part of Missy's pony tail had come loose, which was an increasingly common problem as time went on and the bands lost their stretch. The winter sun was catching it, making every individual hair glisten. They'd been here a while. The sun wasn't going to last much longer. Once it went down, that it was it for necking in the greenhouse. The artificial lighting would be like putting a spotlight on them.
Ron looked down. Her eyes were dreamy.
"What are you thinking?" she asked.
"That I'm getting positive feedback."
It wouldn't be a good idea to say exactly what he had been thinking. Which was that he had made out with a fair number of girls before Missy, but he'd sure never made out with one who appreciated his perfectly average and ordinary efforts at making love anywhere near as much as she did.
He had a suspicion that he wasn't likely to come across any other girl this appreciative in the future, either. Which meant that since he wanted continuing positive feedback, he ought not bring up other girls, past or future.