Rachel’s smile slipped. Eddie knew Rachel still grieved her mother. They both mourned their mothers, though Eddie’s was still alive.
When a waiter presented them with a tray of Coca-Colas, Eddie looked around for who ever had sent them. Food and drinks were expensive on the train.
A blond officer, tanned and broad-shouldered, sat smoking at a nearby table. On his uniform collar, twin silver bars. He raised his glass of amber liquid to her questioning eyes. She lifted her bottle and mouthed thank you.
They were singing about swinging on a star, carrying moonbeams in a jar when the conductor called, “Union Station, Washington, D.C., fifteen minutes.”
The singers let out a collective groan. The journey was over too soon. Eddie feared the whole summer would pass like their journey, and they’d be on their way back to Saltville and their old lives. The idea filled her with verzagen, despair.
Before leaving the club car, she glanced around to the man at the table. He crooked his finger at her, his battleship gray eyes hypnotic. Without a conscious decision to do so, she changed course and threaded her way through the crowd to him.
He set down his cigarette with its long worm of ash and pushed a small leather-bound notebook and an expensive fountain pen across the table to her. “Your name and telephone number, please, Miss.”
Her insides turned to jelly, a reminder she was not the wunderkind Saltville folks said she was. She was a fraud. People always remarked on her maturity, her intelligence, but she was no valedictorian when it came to men.
In her best penmanship, she wrote what he’d asked.
On her way back to her seat, in a vestibule between cars, the Washington Monument appeared in a rain-flecked window. “Hello Washington,” she whispered and placed her palm on the glass as if to embrace this city she loved already.
Yet cold dread crept up her spine, and she shivered at a danger she couldn’t name. Washington must have its salt flats, too, dangers that could suck you under. And unlike Saltville, she didn’t know where these were.
Beside Rachel again, she said, “I’ve become a floozy already. I gave my name and phone number to a man I don’t know.”
“You mean the handsome Marine Corps captain, who only had eyes for you?” Rachel winked. “If you didn’t give him your number, how would you see him again?”
4
Washington, D.C.
Special Agent Jessup Lindsay weeded the squash vines. He was too anxious to do anything else. On the last Sunday of every month since January, a government girl’s body had been found. And today was the last Sunday in May.
Let it not happen again, let it not happen, he repeated to himself.
Around him in the victory garden, dusk folded into night. The light was fading. If he wasn’t careful, he would pull out a vine instead of a weed.
No lights burned from the back of the three-story house on Georgia Avenue, where their landlady, Mrs. Trundle, lived. Behind her house was the bungalow, little bigger than a henhouse, but he and Alonso called it home and paid Mrs. Trundle, a war profiteer if ever there was one, a whopping thirty-five dollars a month for it and for the garage. At first, their bungalow hadn’t even been livable. Alonso, who Mrs. Trundle referred to as “your nigra manservant,” had screened its windows and run a wire from the house for electricity.
Mrs. Trundle’s back porch light came on. Jess straightened, dread coursing through him. This could be it.
Footsteps pounded down the porch steps. “Jess, Jess,” Bert, Mrs. Trundle’s adult son, called. Tall and stocky, Bert stood on the path in khaki trousers with Civil Defense pins attached to his shirt like military insignia.
Jess wiped his hand on his dark trousers and walked down the garden row. Bert’s eyes searched Jess’s for what…disapproval, scorn about his rigged uniform. Jess understood. Men not in uniform felt they owed folks an explanation.
Bert said, “Agent Friedlander’s on the phone for you.”
Jess’s heart tightened like a fist. Their boss calling on Sunday night meant only one thing. He looked up at the window above the garage, where Alonso stood, his palm lifted to Jess. Alonso knew, too.
Jess pivoted and ran to the house.
“Wait up, Jess,” Bert called. At the back porch, Bert reached around Jess to open the screen door as if Jess, who had only one arm, was helpless.
Jess, accustomed to people overdoing assistance, refused to take offense.
On a cabinet door in the kitchen, a calendar listed Bert’s Civil Defense meetings as well as the dinners of fried spam and canned peaches Mrs. Trundle had planned for them.
Bert stopped at the sink to wash his hands. He was a clean man, who appropriately enough worked for a laundry.
Jess strode into the hall, floorboards creaking under him, the smell of mothballs and furniture polish strong in the humid air. At the telephone table tucked beneath the staircase, he lifted the receiver. “Jessup Lindsay,” he said. Wedging the receiver between his shoulder and cheek, he motioned for Bert to give him privacy.
His hands red from washing, Bert pushed open the parlor door. Swing music spilled from the radio, the happy round notes of Benny Goodman’s clarinet.
Jess took the pad from his pocket and wrote. “Okay Fred,” he told Agent Friedlander. “We’re on our way.”
As soon as he hung up, squat Mrs. Trundle appeared in the parlor door, her face lifted to him, her white hair pulled into a bun so tight it made her eyes slant. She’d been eavesdropping. Again.
Mrs. Trundle considered this narrow strip of land on Georgia Avenue, the house, their bungalow behind it, and the garage fronting the alley, her kingdom, where she ruled like a tyrant. She believed everything that happened here was her business. He would never have rented from the busybody if they hadn’t been desperate for a place to live in crowded DC.
“Mr. Lindsay, I’m worried about my niece and her friend taking the streetcar late with their luggage.” She smoothed her dress over her big pillow of a bosom. “After you finish your business for the Bureau, would you kindly fetch them from Union Station?”
“No, Mrs. Trundle, I won’t. My car is strictly for government use. Sorry.” More polite than he felt. “The young ladies ought to take a taxi.”
A red dot bloomed in each pale cheek. “Well, I never…”
He rushed back, feeling a twinge of guilt for refusing to pick up her government girls, not that they were in danger, not together.
Inside the bungalow, he grabbed his badge, hat, and jacket.
From the garage, their Packard’s engine pierced the neighborhood’s quiet.
He sprinted down the path to the alley, the air sugared with honeysuckle. Thick vines climbed the garage’s brick wall and the wooden archway over the path, forming a leafy tunnel. Something shone among the vines: an electric wire.
Alonso backed the Packard out. Jess slid in beside him.
