"How do you feel about Virginia's social system?" Senior Agent Jefferson asked.
I hate it. I think you deserve every pound's worth of trouble you've brought on yourselves, Justin thought. Sometimes the truth wasn't the best answer. If he told the truth here, they would haul him off to an unpleasant jail and do even more unpleasant things to him. He didn't like being a hypocrite, now or any other time. But the question rubbed his nose in the fact that you couldn't always say what you thought.
And so he gave what he thought was a casual response: "The same as anybody else does, I guess." It wasn't even completely a lie. Anybody else from the home timeline was likely to feel the same way he did.
Jefferson's face showed none of what he thought. He probably made a dangerous poker player. "Doesn't it bother you that Rebecca Royer plainly believes in the pernicious doctrine of Negro equality?" he asked.
No, it doesn't bother me, because I do, too. Again, Justin didn't say what he thought. Instead, he just shrugged. "She's from California. What can you expect?"
That was the right answer. All three VBI agents nodded. "Kid's got some sense," Agent Madison muttered.
"Why do you hang around with her, then?" Agent Tyler asked.
Now Justin looked at him as if he wasn't very bright. "We don't spend a whole lot of time talking about politics," he said. Let them use their imagination to figure out what he and Beckie did talk about.
Agent Madison snickered, then tried to pretend he hadn't. Agent Tyler turned a dull red. Senior Agent Jefferson, grinding as a glacier, said, "Miss Royer states that the two of you are just friends."
"Well, yeah," Justin admitted, and his sorrowful tone of voice made Madison snicker again. Justin went on, "But there's no law that says I can't keep trying, is there?"
"Maybe California has one—I don't know." Jefferson tried a smile himself. It didn't look quite natural on his face. He changed the subject: "Are you acquainted with Irma Davis?"
"Not any more—she's dead," Justin blurted.
"Well, yes. But were you acquainted with her?"
"Sure. She was the waitress at the diner across the street. Uncle Randy and I would eat breakfast over there all the time till she, uh, got sick."
"So you have been exposed to the biological agent Ohio wickedly unleashed on our innocent population?" Jefferson sounded as if he'd listened to too many Virginia newscasts.
"We hope we haven't," Mr. Brooks said before Justin could reply. No matter which of them said it, that was no lie.
"So do we," Agent Madison said. They weren't wearing gas masks and protective gear, the way the paramedics who put Irma in the ambulance had been. Maybe they had nostril filters that didn't show, but those could do only so much. Getting ordered to Elizabeth wouldn't have made the agents jump up and down with glee. Justin wondered if they'd have to get decontaminated after they drove away. He also wondered if that would help.
"What will you do in case of Negro unrest?" Jefferson asked.
"Hope things settle down before too many people get hurt," Justin answered. That seemed to satisfy the VBI men. Justin was afraid he knew why: when they thought about people, they didn't include African Americans. And the blacks in Virginia were as ready to hate him because he was white as whites would have been if he were black. Did that have any good answers? If it did, he couldn't see them.
Seven
The first time Mrs. Snodgrass sneezed, Beckie didn't pay much attention. But when she did it four or five times in a row, each sneeze more ferocious than the one before, Beckie said, "Good heavens! Bless you! Are you all right?"
"I... a-choo! . . . think so." Mrs. Snodgrass made a liar out of herself by sneezing three more times. She pulled a tissue from a box on the end table and blew her nose. Then she sank down onto the couch. "I hope I'm all right, anyway. All that sneezing kind of takes it out of you."
"I guess it would." Beckie looked at her. Was she flushed? Beckie thought so, but she wasn't sure—or maybe she just didn't want to dwell on what her being flushed might mean.
Mr. Snodgrass came into the room. "You trying to blow your head off, Ethel?" he asked. That made Beckie smile—her father and mother teased each other the same way. But he stopped teasing when he got a look at his wife's face. "You okay, sweetie?" Sudden worry roughened his voice.
"I think so," Mrs. Snodgrass said again, but she didn't sound so sure this time.
Mr. Snodgrass walked over, stooped, and pressed his lips to her forehead. Beckie's mom would do that when she or one of her brothers or her sister wasn't feeling well. The lines between Mr. Snodgrass' eyebrows and the ones that bracketed the sides of his mouth got deeper and harsher. All at once, he looked like an old man. "You're warm," he said. It sounded like an accusation.
"Well, maybe I do feel a little peaked." Mrs. Snodgrass screwed up her face and started sneezing again.
"You reckon I ought to call the doctor?" Ted Snodgrass asked.
"Now how would you get him to come out to Elizabeth with things the way they are?" His wife blew her nose again, as if to say how silly the idea was.
Gran walked in gnawing on a roll. She took one look at her cousin and said, "Ethel Snodgrass, are you coming down sick with that stupid plague?" There never was a situation that Gran couldn't make worse with a few ill-chosen words.
"Of course not," Mrs. Snodgrass, and started sneezing again as if it were going out of style.
"I reckon maybe I will call the doctor," Mr. Snodgrass said. "Just to stay on the safe side." He gave Gran a dirty look. Beckie didn't blame him a bit. He walked into the other room to use the phone. Beckie didn't blame him for that. He couldn't want his wife to hear how worried he had to be.
Beckie couldn't make out what he was saying, either. She could make out his tone of voice, though. If he wasn't scared to death, she'd never heard anybody who was.
She thought of Charlie Clark, and wished she hadn't. Talking about death wasn't the same when you'd seen the real thing. And then she thought about the waitress at the diner. What was her name? Irma, that was it. She was dead, too. Beckie looked at Mrs. Snodgrass, then looked away in a hurry. She didn't care for any of the directions her mind was going in right now.
Mr. Snodgrass walked into the front room again. He said,
"Well, hon, they're going to send an ambulance from Parkers-burg. Be here in twenty minutes, a half hour, they told me."
"That's silly," Mrs. Snodgrass said. "It's nothing but a summer cold."
Gran started to say something about that. Beckie kicked her in the ankle, accidentally on purpose. Gran jumped. "You be careful!" she said. "What in the world do you think you're doing?"
"I'm sorry, Gran," Beckie said, meek as you please. If Gran got mad at her . . . well, so what? Gran had got mad at her lots of times, and this wouldn't be the last one—not even close. However much Gran fussed and fumed, Beckie could deal with it. Poor Mrs. Snodgrass, on the other hand, really had something wrong with her. She wouldn't need Gran making things worse.
Mr. Snodgrass nodded to Beckie. "You're all right," he murmured. Gran—surprise!—never noticed.
Beckie started trying to figure out how she felt herself. Was she warmer than she should have been? Did she need to sneeze? To cough? To do anything she wouldn't normally do? She knew that was silly ... in a way. In another way, it wasn't. When you were with somebody who was all too likely to have a horrible disease, how could you not worry about coming down with it yourself?
She heard the ambulance's siren long before it got to the Snodgrasses' house. Sound carried amazingly far in Elizabeth. In Los Angeles, the constant background noise of cars and machinery and airplanes and everything else that went into a big city muffled and blunted distant sounds. Not here. Here, the background noise was birdsongs and the wind in the trees, and that was about it.