Grantville Gazette - Volume V (20 page)

Annalise couldn't resist. "Sheryl Cunningham is Horace Bolender's niece and she left home too. She's been an apprentice engineer down at USE Steel for two years, but she's been taking the commuter bus from Grantville. Now she's moved out, down to Kamsdorf, into employee housing. She's been going with Ward Alberts for a while. He and several other of the military EMT trainees showed up at her house Saturday morning and just stood there looking at her father while she took her stuff out of her room."

Carol Koch frowned. "Sheryl is?"

"Dan and Laura Jo's oldest. Well, Laura Jo's oldest and probably Dan's. Anyway, he acknowledged paternity at the time. She was born in 1981, but they didn't get married until 1986. The two younger kids were born after they married. It was right after Delton went to prison that they got married," Natalie said. "A lot of people thought that Dan was taking out insurance—that Laura Jo knew something about his involvement in the corruption scandals and wanted to marry her to keep a wife from testifying against her husband, if it came to that."

"Sheryl and Ward are going to get married in January, after Ward finishes his training," Idelette contributed. "He's going to come back to the Presbyterian church because his mom wants him to and Sheryl's going to switch over from Methodist. They came to talk to the Reverend Enoch about it." She was hoping very hard that she had now demonstrated enough grasp of what Aura Lee defined as "reality" that she could attend the high school rather than being tutored.

Aura Lee picked up her coffee cup. "You'd better brief Tony on all of this, Carol," she said. "And I'll talk to Joe. It's the kind of thing that men, bless their hearts, tend to miss until it walks right up and slaps them in the face. There has to have been some kind of a blow-up."

"If Horace tried to get Dustin mixed up in his machinations somehow," Natalie said, "you can be damned sure that Fran blew up. Both those boys are good kids."

"Attempted rape?" Tony Adducci looked at his sister Bernadette. "We've been trying to get von Drachhausen for a lot of things, but that wasn't one that we expected."

Bernadette smiled back cheerfully. "The charge will do for the time being. It's definitely enough to hold him on, and Sheryl didn't come to any serious harm. Drachhausen still hasn't really come to terms with modern technology and didn't suspect a thing when she backed toward the telephone stand. That's where Dan keeps his handgun, too. So first she pulled the drawer open and got the gun. Then, with it on him, she went through the motions of dialing the police. Of course, she didn't have the safety off, but he found just the idea of the gun intimidating enough, particularly given where she was threatening to shoot him."

"Went through the motions? Safety on?" Tony shook his head.

"I'll get to that in a moment. Hold him a while and he may be prepared to sing songs about other topics. Especially if we manage to give the impression that Horace and the Cunninghams are throwing him to the wolves."

"What about his father-in-law? He is a state senator, after all. Or member of the House of Lords. Or whatever we're calling it in the latest change-of-names carousel."

"Count August von Sommersburg? He's definitely throwing Drachhausen to the wolves. His older daughter is in town, now, as well as Elena. She's established residence and gone down to take the citizenship class. The minute she takes her oath of allegiance, she's going to file for divorce." Bernadette had a very satisfied expression on her face.

"I believe Sommersburg said something about that possibility to me last spring. I didn't believe that he meant it."

"Whether he did or not at the time, which he may have or may not have, he definitely does now." Bernadette cocked her head to one side. "It could have just been a red herring he was dragging in front of your nose while he made up his mind whether or not to throw in with Bolender. I wouldn't put it past him, but as far as we know, he must have decided to stay out of it. Which is all to the good, since the prosecution of a sitting legislator is always messy."

"What's the background on the attempted rape? As much as you can tell me without undermining the prosecution, of course, Sis."

"According to what Sheryl is telling us, Dan deliberately took Laura Jo and the other kids out to supper on an evening when he knew that Ward was on duty and wouldn't be there with her. Thus giving Drachhausen open season on his daughter. Or step-daughter, as the case may be."

"Nasty." Tony frowned.

"A payoff for services received. The services being currently unspecified, but I have hopes that some further interrogation will elicit information about them."

"I do recall that Sommersburg said that von Drachhausen could be 'personally unpleasant.'"

"Sommersburg shares the basic ethical system of an Elizabethan privateer." Bernadette snorted. "It's just that his operations are land-based and run on wagons and gravel, concrete, and cement rather than ships and pieces of eight. If he said 'personally unpleasant,' there's probably not much a person could imagine that's beyond Drachhausen."

She stood up. "Horace Bolender told Dan to give Drachhausen his chance at Sheryl, since that was what the man wanted." Bernadette's voice was flat.

Tony looked up at her.

"He told Dan with Dustin in the room. Dustin went to Fran. Fran called Preston Richards, so the police were already in place at Dan's house by the time Drachhausen showed up. Which Drachhausen doesn't know, by the way. He thinks that they came bursting in as a result of Sheryl's dialing. Dustin's willing to testify, when we need him, but we don't want Horace to realize, yet, just how much we know."

Tony shook his head. After all the work they had been doing to get the goods in regard to what he and Joe and the others called the "grand scam" now, the corruption that was starting to run through the government of the State of Thuringia-Franconia like a spider web. After all their work that much of the time hadn't seemed to be going anywhere, Horace had been that dumb.

Of course, nine times out of ten, prosecutors got the guy on something like mail fraud rather than for what he actually did.

Life was like that.

"Ah," Count August von Sommersburg said, "Louisa, my dear daughter."

His dear daughter Louisa looked at him with considerable exasperation. It had been an utterly horrid trip. Eleonora and August had whined and cried the whole way, their nursemaid had become motion sick so she had to let her get out of the carriage and walk alongside, her usual lady-in-waiting had refused to come beyond Erfurt and stayed behind there, she was two months away from delivering her third child. She had been, at any rate, peacefully in residence at Sommersburg enjoying the fact that her husband was, whether peacefully or not, at least in residence somewhere else, when her father had written insisting that she come to Grantville.

"Papa," she said. "This had better be good."

"Oh, Louisa, it is," her sister Elena said. "It's just marvelous. Since Papa wrote you, Marcus tried to force his attentions upon the daughter of one of his up-time business associates, so we'll be able to get you a divorce with no trouble at all."

"If it's only 'tried to,'" Louisa answered sourly, "then it didn't go far enough for me to get rid of him on the grounds of adultery. Can't the man ever do anything right?"

"Oh, but Louisa," Elena said. "You haven't been reading all the little treatises I have been compiling so carefully and sending to you. Under the up-timers' law, he doesn't have to have succeeded. You can divorce him anyway. Then, really, all we have to do is wait. You wouldn't want to remarry until after the baby you're carrying is weaned, anyway, and that will give Marcus at least two years to do something so dreadful that the
Ehegericht
will divorce you from him, too. The up-timers have lovely proverbs. Jonas Justinus Muselius, the teacher at St. Katharina the Heroic, is collecting them. The one most applicable at the moment is, 'Give him enough rope and he'll hang himself.'"

Horace Bolender looked up with irritation. There were days that he thought that someone should issue an ordinance against humming while wandering up and down the halls of the Department of Economic Resources.

Unfortunately, the person who would have to issue it was his boss, Tony Adducci, who was currently humming the "Folsom Prison Blues."

There were days when Horace thought that Tony must have the world's largest inventory of country music songs that either started or ended up with someone in prison for any one of a variety of offenses. If he heard "The Green, Green Grass of Home" just one more time, he thought he would freak out. Tony had been on a kick, repeating that one over and over, for the past several days.

Maybe "Folsom Prison Blues" wasn't so bad.

Tony smiled to himself once he was safely past Horace's door. He really shouldn't do it, but he'd been making a sort of collection of prison songs. Benny Pierce had been a big help.

Tony Adducci's well-intentioned letter had been chasing Noelle Murphy all over the map of Franconia. She paid the fee, wondering why it was so thick. When she came to open it, she realized that another letter was stuck to the back of it. Carefully, she separated the two.

Tony's letter was old news by now. But she was grateful that her godfather had thought of her. She had sent her mother a very careful letter when she first got the news, which was by way of a message that Ed Piazza had radioed down to Steve Salatto in Wuerzburg. Steve and his wife Anita Masaniello had given her a bare bones version of the events at Juliann Stull's funeral because that was what they had.

It had been a very, very careful letter. Trying to say, "I love you a lot, Mom, but are you really sure about this?" Sounding more like an anxious parent than a child, she was afraid. What with the other three girls being left up-time and Keenan not being of much help about anything, she guessed that she was responsible now.

After all, under the will of God, she owed her very existence to the fact that her mom had no common sense at all when it came to Dennis Stull. And never did have. And probably never would have.

She hadn't known whether she should write anything to Dennis. Not at all. It was the kind of occasion when you missed printed greeting cards that had messages thought up by someone else. Finally, she had sent a little note wishing him a rapid recovery from his wound. That would have to do for the moment.

It wasn't as if she really knew him.

The second letter now, stuck to the one from Tony. She looked at it. Presumably, it had been stuck there since the day it left Grantville. The moisture in the glue on Tony's letter had completely blotted the address. She opened it, looking for some identification of sender or intended recipient.

Read through the contents. Smiled a blissful smile. Talk about a person digging his own grave. She reached for an envelope, dropped the item into it along with a cover note of her own, and sent it on its way back to Grantville and Tony.

"Jim's father, Duane Fritz, is my first cousin," Natalie Bellamy said. "His mother was Susan Bock. That was a bad idea. Bocks and Fritzes shouldn't marry each other. Both families have some little oddities. The Bocks more than the Fritzes, if I do say so myself. Laurene Bock, Mona Pennock's mother, who went out to California, was a little peculiar, too. Though nowhere near as much as Duane. As is Marjorie, Archie Mitchell's wife. The only branch of those Bocks that escaped it were the kids of Nancy, who married Phil Reardon. And I'm not so sure about Dude Reardon, either. Which would really mean that only Gary Reardon who married Gaylynn Murray is what a person might call not in any way dysfunctional."

"What's wrong with Jim?" Carol Koch asked.

"I can't give you a medical diagnosis. I'm not a psychologist or a psychiatrist. But just as a lay person with no more training than any teacher gets, I'd guess high-functioning autistic for both of them, Duane and Jim. Or Asperger's Syndrome. Somewhere in that area. Nothing that anyone in Grantville has the training to do anything about, or ever did."

She sighed. "Sometimes I'm not sure that I'm so different from them. People have been known to say that my social skills are lacking, even though I've been working on them for as long as I can remember."

"How do you mean that?" Carol asked.

"I could see patterns in math. That's why I liked it so much. But I couldn't see patterns in anything else, so none of the rest of what I studied in school ever made any sense to me. I survived in grade school and high school just by memorizing every single little individual fact and reciting it back to the teacher. Or recognizing it on true-false or multiple guess tests. But by the time I'd reached my junior year at WVU, I was just overwhelmed by it all. I was floundering and my grades were going down. So I went looking for a tutor for my humanities subjects. That's where I met Arnold." She looked at Carol and Aura Lee a little defiantly.

"Nat, honey," Aura Lee said, "the guys can think anything they like about Arnold. As long as you like him, that's fine with us."

"It had better be," Natalie said.

Aura Lee grinned. The essential Nat, once more rising to the surface.

"You see, he didn't think like I do, but he understood how I think," Natalie said. And he gave me patterns for other things when he tutored me. He showed how for poetry, if I ignored what the poet was writing about, there were patterns there—rhythms, rhyme schemes. Structures underneath all the messiness on top. And that stories came in certain kinds, whatever their specific content was, so that it was a coming of age story, or a space opera, or—something. Something that let a person classify it. It was so great."

Carol just sat there. Math was her own field, but what Natalie was describing certainly wasn't the way her own mind worked, even in math. Her mind jumped, made intuitive leaps, connected things that didn't apparently belong together. It drove Ron nearly crazy, sometimes. She was absolutely sure that engineers and mathematicians didn't think alike. Maybe not even all math people thought alike.