Grantville Gazette - Volume V (17 page)

"For my part," Dennis said, "I'd rather that she managed to think around and beyond that idea. Considering that I'm a Methodist. Not that I have anything to say about it."

"She's down in Franconia this summer working for the Department of Economic Resources. But she's thinking about it."

"God Almighty," someone yelled from outside. "Look out. Get down."

Bernadette turned and ran for the door, pushing Pat farther to the side and grabbing for her police revolver. She might be "only" a juvenile officer, but that didn't mean she was unarmed. Older juveniles could be dangerous, if only because they were so much more unpredictable than adults. Not to mention their parents.

Someone out there had a gun. Joe Stull and Tony Adducci headed for the door after Bernadette. A wild shot came flying into the parlor. Maybe not that wild; two more went into the weatherboarding near the door. Then another one inside.

In the parking lot, a man was down; another man on top of him.

"God on earth, Keenan, what is going on?" Bernadette screeched.

Keenan Murphy looked up. "He's been working himself up to it ever since he saw in the paper that old Mrs. Stull was dead. Saying over and over, 'She didn't come and stand by me at my father's bier. If she goes and stands by Dennis Stull at his mother's bier, I'll kill her.' He was over at Grandma's. She was trying to talk him out of it, but he's as drunk as a skunk."

"Damn you, Francis Murphy," Bernadette said as she handcuffed him. She sounded like she meant it quite literally. "Somebody call the station and have them send an on-duty patrol over here. Is anyone hurt?"

"I hope not," Keenan said. "I really couldn't see that it would help things if he caused trouble here today. They've been separated for a quarter of a century. That was what Grandma said. That it wouldn't help things if he caused trouble here today and I should try to get him to come back. So I came after him. I didn't know he had a gun. That's a whopper of a handgun. I just thought he'd be likely to try to beat her up. And then he saw her, getting out of Tony Adducci's car and walking inside, and he pulled the gun out, so I tackled him. If he hit someone, I hope it was a Kraut."

Bernadette looked down. Keenan was still sitting on the asphalt next to Francis. Keenan was hostile, not particularly bright, prejudiced, a 250 Club regular, one of the town's constant brawlers and troublemakers. He was not an ornament to the military of the State of Thuringia-Franconia in which he served. Before the Ring of Fire, he had been chronically unemployed. However, owing to the fact that he had chased Francis and brought him down before he got inside the funeral home, they had probably been spared several injuries or worse. So she swallowed her bile and said, "Thank you."

"You're welcome," he said. "It's not as if this is something we can blame on being here and now. He'd have probably done something of the sort whenever old Mrs. Stull died even if we'd all still been back home in West Virginia."

"Tony," someone called from inside the funeral home. "Joe."

Joe Stull and Tony Adducci ran back toward the door. Aura Lee was standing there.

"Nat and Twila took Eden and the babies home."

"I sure don't blame them," Tony said. "Especially considering that Francis Murphy's been working for Ollie Reardon since the army threw him out. Even the fact that he was one of our few genuine Viet Nam combat veterans couldn't make up for the way he drank."

Joe stopped next to Aura Lee, putting his arm around her. Tony went on inside.

Pat Murphy was sitting on the floor next to Dennis, crying.

Tony stood there, looking at her.

"It was Francis," he said. "Drunk, with a gun. It's under control."

She looked up. "The church absolved me for everything else. For leaving Francis. For loving Dennis, for having Noelle. But Dennis wouldn't live with us unless I divorced Francis and married him, and that was the one thing the church wouldn't ever have absolved me from. For that, they would have excommunicated me until the day I died and sent me to hell."

"Yeah," Tony said. He couldn't think of anything else to say. It wasn't anything except the truth, after all.

"They didn't hand annulments out back then they way they did later to Massachusetts politicians. And Father O'Malley said that even if I got one, the church would never let me marry Dennis because we had already committed adultery together and it was an 'absolute impediment to matrimony.' That we couldn't benefit from our sin. If I'd spit in his face then, we could have had these last twenty-five years together."

Denise handed the sling containing Rosemary over to Tony and knelt down next to her cousin. "Honey, I'm so sorry we talked you into coming."

Pat looked up. "I'm not. If I'd spit in their faces the first time Dennis asked me to marry him, back in 1965, we'd have had forty years and I'd have never been married to Francis at all. But no, it was my
duty
to marry a good Irish Catholic man and produce Irish Catholic children, Pa and Father O'Malley said. Marry Francis, so if he was killed in Viet Nam, at least he would leave a child behind him. See what it got me."

She looked toward the door. "What went on outside?"

"Keenan followed him from Maggie's. Tackled him," Tony said.

"Would you thank him for me? God knows, I've not been any kind of a mother to him. But I'm staying with Dennis. I figure that if I spit in their faces now, we might edge out five or ten years, still. More, if we're lucky."

An ambulance pulled up outside.

Bernadette, who was still standing there, not able to check on what was happening inside, said, "I asked for a patrol."

"They're on the way," Jenny Maddox yelled from inside the funeral home. "We called for the ambulance. The second bullet that came inside hit Dennis. He needs to go to the hospital. The other one glanced off Idelette Cavriani's shoulder and then hit Juliann in her coffin. I've done first aid for her. Idelette, I mean. Not Juliann. For Juliann, I just closed the coffin, considering that she was dead already. But if she hadn't been, she would be now."

Bernadette added "mutilation of a corpse" to the rest of the charges on which she was arresting Francis Xavier Murphy.

Once the ambulance and patrol car left, the visitation resumed, though only Joe and Aura Lee of the family remained to do the honors. And Billy Lee and young Juliann. Billy Lee went over to stand by the guest book, taking Dennis' place. Juliann went and stood by Idelette and Annalise.

"Maybe," Mary Ellen Jones was saying, "we should postpone the funeral until tomorrow."

"I don't think that would do any good," Joe said. "I don't think that Nat and Twila will be any happier to have Eden here tomorrow than to bring her back later today and it didn't look to me like Dennis will be up and about again by tomorrow."

Count August von Sommersburg had observed the entire event with considerable interest, admiring the general aplomb with which people had handled the shooting and feeling comfortably confirmed in his general Lutheran assumption that most of the bad things that happened in life were somehow the fault of the Roman Catholic church.

Now he found himself standing next to Charles Jenkins, whom he had already met through the Schwarza-Saalfeld Enterprise District and the Grantville Development Authority. Although not at that meeting in regard to a baseball stadium. On other occasions.

Jenkins' wife had come in with him, as had Willie Ray Hudson of the Grange. The wife of Joseph Stull had hugged them and called Jenkins' wife "Sis." Count August analyzed the family connection and decided this might be a favorable occasion to obtain some information.

Particularly in regard to the views of Secretary of Transportation Stull in regard to financial chicanery. The count was beginning to suspect that Cavriani had been quite correct in his assessment that a fair number of the up-timers had no patience with it at all, in spite of the assurances that Drachhausen had received from Daniel and Delton Cunningham that Stull could be "managed."

"What is the word?" he asked. "Righteous. Is Mr. Joseph H. Stull a righteous man?"

"'Righteous' is a mild word for it," Jenkins said. "Plus, Aura Lee is an auditor, you know."

The count had known that Stull's wife was an auditor already and had suspected the presence of righteousness, so he was not unduly disappointed. Cavriani had, after all, warned him.

"I'm not the favorite person of either Joe or Aura Lee," Jenkins went on, looking at the group gathered by the coffin. "Not that they haven't been perfectly polite over the years. They just don't particularly like me."

The count nodded.

"It goes back a long ways. Most things do, in a small town."

Count August understood that himself. The ongoing episode of the necklace bequeathed by his wife's aunt, for example, he thought absently.

"Aura Lee and I went all through school together in the same grade. She accused me once of 'taking advantage of my advantages.' Most of which consisted of unlimited access to cars. I've sometimes suspected that Debbie picked up Aura Lee's view that I was a 'lout' when I was in high school. I don't think I was worse than any other guy in my class. But Aura Lee was comparing me with Joe who was a couple years older and in the service. Debbie was enough older that she probably never noticed me back then. I was all of thirteen when she married Don Jefferson and quit school for a year to follow him to where he was stationed and then, when he shipped out to Viet Nam, to come back and have Anne.

"Aura Lee and I went to the same senior prom, naturally, since we were in the same class. May 1976. She pulled a surprise by showing up with Joe after she'd turned down every guy in the class who asked her. Which just about every guy did, naturally enough. All the ones who weren't either too shy or too intimidated."

Count August looked across the room toward the bier once more and nodded appreciatively. The two daughters of Herr Willie Ray Hudson were, even well into middle age, very pretty, like a pair of little ornamental figurines.

Jenkins looked in the same direction, fixing his eyes on Joe Stull. "He had managed to get home on leave. He was a couple of years older than us, in the army. He came in his dress uniform. At the time, I thought he was showing off. It was years later, after I'd married Debbie, that I realized that he probably didn't own a suit and couldn't afford to rent a tux."

Count August nodded, thinking of what Cavriani had told him of Stull's mother—the woman to whom, in theory, they were now paying their last respects.

"Anyhow," Jenkins continued, "a custom had grown up—the administration didn't like it, but it had grown up—that each couple at the prom dance would go into the spotlight and kiss during one particular dance. They didn't like it because of course a lot of the guys pushed it to the limit, almost pawing their dates. Including me. I'd brought Anita Shockley, who was a junior and willing to put up with quite a bit to have an invitation to the senior prom. She married Freddie Congden a year or so later, right after graduation, so being pawed by me was definitely not the worst thing that ever happened to her."

"Anita was?" the count asked.

Jenkins nodded. "The girl in regard to whom Aura Lee made that accusation about taking advantage of my advantages."

He smiled a bit sarcastically. "So that was how things were going. Then Joe and Aura Lee came up. They gave big smiles, clasped hands, and two-stepped out to the middle of the room, like 'promenade your lady' in square dancing, only it was something that he'd picked up down in Louisiana, where he was stationed. They got to the spotlight and he twirled her under his arm, he gave a formal bow, she curtsied, he brought her up, their lips barely brushed, he twirled her around again, back into place, and they promenaded to the other side. Well, that brought the house down. It really did. Everybody else looked pretty shabby after that performance."

"Ah," Count August said. "Perhaps they appeared somewhat more polished than the rest of you?"

"The rest of us were not very polished at all," Jenkins admitted. "So a while later at the punch table, I managed to remark to Joe that he really hadn't gotten much out of it. He gave me a disgusted look and said that Aura Lee was a princess and deserved to be treated like one. Added that the way I'd treated my date showed pretty well where I placed her on the food chain. Which pissed me off. Of course, he was a long way mentally from high school by then. But Joe still thinks I'm a clod. He thought so then and he still does. On the other hand, it demonstrates just how flexible his mind is. I'd never let a man like him work for me. All the flexibility of a rock. Doing what he does for the government, sure. But never for me."

Count August found it a little surprising that Jenkins was still so . . . discomfited . . . by his brother-in-law's opinion of him that he would remember that night so many years later. If Stull indeed had a personality that could create that kind of discomfort in an otherwise brash man and have it last for thirty years . . . But if they hadn't married sisters, it would probably be nothing more than a forgotten moment in time. Life was like that.

But. He pondered the situation for a few minutes, while continuing to make polite conversation.

It was useful to have confirmation of Cavriani's suspicion that there was another major obstacle, beyond Adducci, to Bolender's various plans. Jenkins was a deal-maker. Not unethical by the up-timers' standards, but a deal-maker. As was Willie Ray Hudson, for that matter. Stull?
All the flexibility of a rock.
 

He decided that he would accept Cavriani's advice in regard to procedures for purveying gravel and cement to the government of the State of Thuringia-Franconia. He concluded that he would refrain from investing in the baseball stadium project.

Elsewhere in the USE, of course, other options and procedures would continue to be open for his corporation.

Politely excusing himself to Jenkins as a couple he did not know approached them, Count August made his way across the room to Tony Adducci.

"In the spring," he said, "you offered to introduce me to your father, that I might hear more 'yarns' about your quasi-mythical Jock Yablonski from a man who had known him in person. If that offer still stands, I would like to have this opportunity."