He found out. "In California, we try to treat everybody the same, no matter what people look like," Beckie said. "We don't always do it, but we try. It's . . . really strange being in a place where people don't even try to do that."
"Oh," Justin said, and then, before he thought about it, "I feel the same way."
Beckie stared at him. "You do?" she said. "Really? You're the first person here who ever said anything like that to me."
That meant he'd made a mistake. Virginians in this alternate were convinced they were doing the right thing by lording it over the African Americans in the state. And if those African Americans ever grabbed power, they wouldn't give whites a big smile. No—they would do what the blacks in Mississippi had done, and rule the roost themselves.
"Don't tell anybody," he said. "It would ruin my reputation." He wasn't kidding, either. Mr. Brooks would want to skin him alive if he heard about his falling out of character like that. And any white Virginian from this alternate would think he'd gone round the bend. Black Virginians were liable to think he was crazy, too.
Beckie looked at him—looked through him, he thought miserably. "All right," she said. "But it's too bad you have to be ashamed of a decent thought."
"Things are different here." Justin didn't just mean different from California, though Beckie couldn't know that. He also meant different from the home timeline.
"Are they?" she said. "Some things are decent and right no matter where you go, seems to me."
That could have been the start of a lovely argument. But Justin had to act like what he wasn't. "Things aren't as simple as they look, you know," he said. "There really are black terrorists here. People in places like Ohio really do run guns to them. Is that decent and right?"
She turned white. No—she turned green. The only time he'd ever seen people turn that color before was on a tour boat that went out into the Pacific from San Francisco Bay. The waves then were a lot heavier than the captain expected. What Justin said now hit a lot harder than he thought it would, too.
"Well, you're right," she said, and he didn't expect that, either. "I wish you weren't, but you are." She sounded like someone who knew what she was talking about.
"How come you're so sure?" he asked. Maybe they'd had a TV show that convinced her, or something.
Instead of answering, she turned even greener. He hadn't thought she could. She gulped a couple of times, and he wondered if she was going to be sick all over her shoes. "I don't want to talk about that," she said in a muffled voice. "I'm sorry, but I really don't."
"Okay. Whatever." Justin didn't know what kind of nerve he'd poked, but it was a sensitive one. He could see that.
He was trying to figure out what to say next when Ted Snod-grass stepped out onto the back porch and said, "I reckon you kids better come inside a minute."
Justin looked at Beckie. She was looking at Mr. Snodgrass, and seemed just as surprised and confused as Justin felt. He didn't know whether that was good or bad. He could try to find out—and he did, asking, "What's up?"
"Well, I turned on the noon news for a minute, and there's something you need to see," Mr. Snodgrass said.
In one way, Justin was glad to hear that. It meant Mr. Snodgrass and Mr. Brooks weren't quarreling. In another way . . . He hurried inside, Beckie right behind him.
In the home timeline, the newscaster's tie would have been too short and too wide and too loud. His jacket, with its little lapels and broad pinstripes, would have been almost too fashionable to stand in 1891. But his handsome, sober face and deep, smooth voice would have marked him as a TV performer anywhere.
"To repeat," he said, "outbreaks of this illness have been reported here at Richmond, at Newport News, and at Roanoke in the south-central part of the state. Doctors have declared that it is a genetically engineered disease. It seems to be highly contagious. Because of this, Consul Pendleton has ordered all unnecessary travel suspended until further notice. He has vowed that shipments of food and fuel will go through. Stay tuned for further bulletins."
The TV cut to a commercial. Justin stared at Mr. Brooks. Beckie was staring at Mr. Snodgrass. They both said the same thing at the same time: "Oh, my God! Does that mean we're stuck here?"
Sheriff Chester Cochrane was one of the biggest men Beckie had ever seen. He was several centimeters—no, they said two or three inches here—taller than Justin Monroe. He was wide-shouldered and narrow-waisted, and had a long, sad face that showed very little of what he thought. "Is this about where they were at?" he asked as he and Beckie paused near the top of Jephany Knob.
She looked down toward the road by the river. "I think so," she said. "Somewhere close, anyway." She pointed that way. "I was right about there when the shots went off."
"Okay." The sheriff had a metal detector. He swung it this way and that. After a moment, he grunted and swung it in a narrower arc. Then he walked over and bent down near a tree trunk. He reached out. When he straightened, he held a couple of cartridge cases. "These are new brass, Miss Royer, sure enough."
"I wasn't making it up," she said.
"Well, I didn't really reckon you were, but you never can tell." His voice was like a rumble from the bottom of a cave. "Even so, this doesn't prove anything. Folks could have been up here hunting or just to get some plinking in."
"I told you, I can't prove they were shooting at me—at me as a person, I mean," Beckie said, and Sheriff Cochrane nodded. She went on, "That's why I didn't come to you right away. But I think they were, so I figured I'd better tell somebody."
"Not the best marksmen in the world if they missed you at this range," Cochrane remarked. That wasn't what Beckie wanted to hear. She wanted sympathy, not scorn for the fools who couldn't shoot straight.
One look at Chester Cochrane told her he didn't care what she wanted. He was doing his job—that was all. She wondered how big a job he had to do most of the time. "Why would they shoot at me at all?" she asked.
"Don't rightly know," he answered. "Maybe they didn't get a good look at you. Maybe they reckoned you were a deer." He eyed her, then muttered to himself. "You're not built like any deer I ever saw. Still and all, you'd be amazed at the dumb things people can do."
A sheriff probably saw more of those dumb things than ten ordinary people put together. "I guess so," Beckie said.
"Let me ask you one other thing," Cochrane said. "These people who took those shots at you—were they white?"
Even hearing the question made Beckie want to go down to the Kanawha and wash herself off. She understood why Sheriff Cochrane asked it. She knew there was a lot of nasty history between whites and blacks in Virginia. She knew blacks had caused some of the nastiness, too, even if, in her judgment, they were provoked.
"I'm not sure," she answered, which was the truth. "It was a long way to tell something like that, and I wasn't paying a whole lot of attention."
"You what? How could you not be?" Chester Cochrane stopped. Then he gave her a long, measuring look, nothing like the one he'd used when he said she wasn't built like a deer. There wasn't even a hint of a twinkle in his eye as he went on, "That's right, you're from California. Furriners have some funny notions, don't they?"
Beckie wasn't about to let him get away with that. "I think some of the notions you've got here are the funny ones."
"Oh, you do, do you?" he growled. "We've been doing things our way here in Virginia for almost five hundred years. We aren't a bunch of johnny-come-latelies like some folks."
"Would you rather do things your way or the right way?" Beckie asked.
Try as she would, she couldn't faze Sheriff Cochrane. "We don't reckon there's any difference," he said—actually, it sounded more like ary difference. They headed back to town together. After a while, the sheriff went on, "You want to be careful what you say and do around these parts. Some folks don't cotton to furrin ways."