Annalise wondered why on earth she didn't need to know that. Then she started counting backwards from the date of little Anna Elisabetha's birth and came up with a pretty good idea. Idelette, who had apparently been conducting the same exercise in mental mathematics, winked at her. They then turned their minds to the obligations of mourning.
Someone pried Inez out from under the piano. The next step should have been taking her to the hospital, but there was still shooting going on down in that direction. They could hear it. Jenny Maddox ran out of the funeral home, saying to bring her inside there. With the lower panel of the piano console serving as a makeshift litter, a half dozen men carried her in. Wilton Blackwell, who during more than forty years as a mortician had gained a very sound working knowledge of basic human anatomy, splinted her leg. Without anesthetic, unfortunately. His regular clients, as he said rather apologetically, never needed it.
"I don't, either," Inez said. "I'm not feeling anything, yet. Maybe it's shock. Maybe there's something cutting off the pain the nerves down there are trying to send up to my brain. It's not getting through."
Jenny looked at her, frowning with worry.
Ellen Acton, Wilton's daughter and their billing clerk, closed the doors between the front and back parlors. She thought that Inez didn't need to see the men carrying Enoch and Henry in. And Buster. Definitely. Nobody needed to see Buster until her pa had a chance to work on him a bit. For Enoch and Henry, at least, the shots had been clean.
She'd told them to put the goons in the garage. It was cold enough that they would keep for a while and the police might want to go over their clothes and things. They were sending the policemen who went down at Leahy over to Genucci's. Central Funeral Home was out of space.
Ellen touched Jenny's shoulder. "Will's back," she said in a whisper. "I don't know when he got into town, but Bob saw him last night. He was eating at Marcantonio's Pizza with Skip Hilton. Should I call over to UMWA headquarters to see if they know where he is?"
Jenny bit the nail on the little finger of her left hand. "I guess you had better, seeing as he's the only one of Enoch and Inez's kids who came through the Ring of Fire. Even though he's been on the outs with them for years. Since he was in high school. They can at least let him know about this before it goes on the radio tonight. Call the power plant too. Gina works Sundays as a regular thing. She has for years, so she doesn't have to face the issue of whether Reverend Curtis would humiliate her if she showed up at church. Have someone out there get Gina, so she can pull Brette out of youth group over at the Church of Christ and tell her about her grandpa. That will take a while. They'll have to call someone else in to replace her for the rest of her shift."
Jenny hadn't really expected Will to come. He had been a bad boy since his early teens. "Rebel without a cause" style, except that he had a cause, at least to start with, which was that his dad had been so unreasonably strict with him. Unlike John Enoch, who had turned into an Episcopalian monk in response to Enoch's Calvinist child-rearing techniques, Will had reacted by going wild and then wilder.
Inez had felt obliged to agree with Enoch, so Will had fought with her, too.
Jenny had reason to know. Will Wiley was only three years younger than she was. He'd run around with her twin sisters, the ones left up-time. Maybe more than run around with Donna Jae, both before and after she got married, at least while Lee was overseas during the Gulf War. Will had been working in Fairmont and going to college part time. That was over before he married Gina and luckily Lee had never found out as far as Jenny knew, but it was the sort of thing Will did. The sort of thing that finally caused Gina to blow up.
But here he was.
For good or bad, so was Gina. The power plant had sent her downtown in one of its trucks.
Brette was standing there, her hands behind her back. What was she, now? About ten? She'd only been three when Will and Gina separated. Four when they divorced.
Gina's brother Drew used to pick her up and take her over to Will's for visitation; then pick her up at Will's and take her back to Gina. Brette probably didn't remember ever seeing her parents in the same room.
The last time the two of them had been in the same room, probably, was in the courthouse in Fairmont. And the time before that, Gina had taken a shot at Will. She'd missed, but not intentionally.
That had been back when Velma Hardesty was starting to notice the arrival of middle age and was going through her "younger man" phase. As it was, Will insisted to the judge, swearing under oath, that it was accidental. Gina got probation for reckless handling of a firearm.
The judge had to have been a very trusting type of person. When was the last time he had a case in which a wife had accidentally let off a gun at her buck-naked husband who was in bed with another woman? In the other woman's trailer? How many cases like that did a judge ever get?
Jenny cleared her throat. Damn, but Will Wiley was still a good-looking man.
She wondered what Gina was thinking. She glanced over that way. From the expression on Gina's face as she looked at Will, probably the same thing as she was.
Jenny's mind clicked along. In a way it was too bad that Gina hadn't shot Velma when she had a chance, before she messed up a couple of other marriages, but then who would have taken care of Brette? The judge had probably realized that Gina wasn't a danger to anyone but Will. He'd put a restraining order on her along with the probation.
Why had the UMWA sent Will over to Brandenburg, anyway? He'd been there, in Berlin or somewhere near it, for months. Politics. Jenny didn't even try to keep up with politics.
It was finally Inez who said something.
"You'll have to go home, Will. Over to the house and get his other suit. The keys are in my purse. That's back at the church. Ask Idelette Cavriani to take you to the committee room where the Red Cross was meeting. She's in the other parlor, with Veronica and Annalise. You haven't been there since we remodeled it so much. You'll have to bring his other suit for him to wear."
After Denise made her second call up to the storage lot, Christin George rode down to the bridge on her own motorcycle, ignored the "pedestrians only" prohibition, and pulled up right in front of Cora's. By then, Denise was waiting inside the cafe. As soon as Christin appeared, she ran out.
"They took him into Central Funeral Home," she said. "For the usual reason."
Christin looked her over. Denise's clothes were pretty well blood-soaked. "Are you okay?"
"Yeah, Mom, I'm fine. The blood's all Daddy's. Well. Some of it's probably from some of the men he killed."
Christin nodded. Like daughter, like mother. She wasn't given to public histrionics either. "We'd better go find out how much it will be, then."
"Daddy didn't believe in funerals. He always said he wanted to be cremated. Or just put out in a garbage bag."
"Grantville never had a crematorium. They'd have had to take him out of town, even up-time. I don't think they have them at all around here. Or plastic sacks, either. We ran out of those a long time ago."
"I don't want to see him in one of those satin-lined things. He'd have hated it, Mom. You know he would."
"Jenny ran out of those a long time ago, too. It's plain wood boxes now, and linen sheets. We'll do the best we can to keep the frills off, but this is going to hit Johnnie Ray hard, especially with Julia passing last fall. I ought to at least ask him what he wants, since he's Buster's grandpa."
By mid-afternoon, the Grantville police appeared at the synagogue in force, if somewhat belatedly, after finishing up at Leahy. They rounded up the casualties-in addition to the twenty-two dead goons and four badly injured ones who'd been involved in the fighting with Buster and the Hebraic defense guard, there were twelve others who'd been wounded earlier. Not badly enough to die, but badly enough not to run away. They were being held by the informal posse of Jewish defenders.