I hear about it? Bertie would have told me about it in a letter.” He looked at Red’s uniform for the first time. “Where are your medals?”
Red shrugged. “It don’t matter. I’m alive. Before word could be carried back home that we were prisoners of war, we escaped in the middle of the night.”
Ivan gave a low whistle. “If that doesn’t beat all.”
“Just in time, too. I got the impression, picking up on some of their words, that they’d planned to kill us soon.”
“You speak German?”
Red nodded. “I learned some words from my pa years ago. I hadn’t even realized I remembered them until I listened to our captors talking to one another. There were five of them and only three of us. I thought we were goners.”
“How’d you get away?”
Red shrugged. He couldn’t talk about the whole thing. “The fifth night, after a long day’s march, we got loose from our bonds.” He couldn’t go into more detail without explaining more than he wanted to.
Ivan waited, eyes slightly narrowed in confusion. “Just like that?”
Red nodded. He’d never thought much about the humanity of the enemy. That wasn’t something they talked about in the foxholes or on the scoutin’ trail. All they did in the foxholes was curse the enemy, and do everything they could to make sure he died.
The rattle-clack-rattle-clack of the train filled the silence for a few long moments as the two men sat steeping in the ugliness they’d seen.
“Don’t mention that bit about the massacre to my parents,” Ivan said softly. “Why worry them about something that’s already happened? They’ve worried enough about me in the past three years.”
“Reckon there’s lots our families are never gonna know about.”
“Sometimes it seems the farther I get from the war, the more I remember,” Ivan said.
Red knew what he meant. All that loud commotion clattered around in his mind, along with pictures of mangled or dead friends. He still felt the pain of his own wounds—both in his flesh and in his heart.
“Maybe we have to remember,” Ivan said. “A man’s got to stay on the alert.”
Red agreed, but he couldn’t help wondering if he was already going soft. Since he was a German by blood, he couldn’t hate his former countrymen.
It was hard not to hate them when he heard about all those concentration camps, the awful things they did to other human beings. Torture? Gas chambers? Trying to stamp out a whole race of people? Genocide, it was called. Devilish. Straight out of the pits of hell.
As the thoughts started tormenting him once again, Red did what he always did to take his mind from them. He patted his shirt pocket, thick with letters.
Ivan, of course, knew without asking what was in Red’s pocket. “You still writing to Bertie?”
Red grimaced. “She’s been doin’ most of the writing.” Especially the past few weeks.
His sweet Bertie had a heart as tender and beautiful as spring violets, a face to keep a man alive through the worst of war, and a voice as warm and spicy as hot apple cider.
But he couldn’t keep thinking like that…not about her bein’ his.
“That little gal had a regular letter campaign going, you know,” Ivan told him. “She had all her friends writing to me, and any time I’d mention a buddy who hadn’t received mail in a while, sure enough, in a week or so he’d get a note from some stranger out of Culver City, California. Our Bertie’s all spunk. If she was president, this whole war would already be won.”
Red felt a quick rush of pride. “She’s kept me going, that’s for sure.”
“How’s Miss Lilly been getting on without you?”
“You know Ma,” Red said. “She says she’s doin’ fine, but it’s hard to tell ’cause she never complains.”
Ivan chuckled. “Strong as a Missouri mule and the best cook in Hideaway.”
Red returned his attention to the scenery sliding past the window. Now that Ivan had brought up the subject, Red remembered that he had someone else to fret about.
Until he was called up, he’d helped his mother run the Meyer Guesthouse in Hideaway. It had been a family operation since his pa’s death.
Lilly Meyer never let on about how hard it was to keep the place going without Red’s help—but he knew business must’ve gone slack without him to serve as fishing guide, hunting guide and storyteller, along with all the other chores he’d done for her every day.
Fishing along the James River had been a popular sport among their best and wealthiest customers, many of whom returned to Lilly’s guesthouse year after year for the fishing. These guests had gotten the Meyers through the depression.
But how much of the work could Red do now?
Ma’s letters were mostly filled with the goings-on in town, until this last one. Even the handwriting seemed to lack her usual pizzazz. Kind of shrunk in on itself, hard to read.
Red couldn’t quite figure it. Seemed like Ma was trying to avoid the subject of Hideaway altogether. Maybe Drusilla Short was telling tales again. That woman was the orneriest old so-and-so in the county, exceptin’ for her husband, Gramercy. Last time Red had been home on leave, Mrs. Short had the nerve to spread the rumor that Red was AWOL.
Ma, of course, had nearly come to blows with the old gossip about it—and Ma wasn’t a fighter, unless someone tried to hurt one of her kids. Then, she could whup a mad bull, and she was big enough to do it.
Red glanced out at the peaceful countryside, at the cattle grazing in a valley. Pa had actually taken on a mad bull twelve years ago—and lost. That ol’ bull had been raised on the farm as a pet, but then had turned mean, and caught Pa in the middle of the field where he couldn’t get away in time.
Ma had been left to raise Red and his brother and sister alone.
What was up with Ma now?
And how was Red going to break his news to Bertie?
Chapter Three
Bertie thought about her father as she held the fine sandpaper to the gear shaft turning in the lathe. She moved the paper back and forth to wear the metal of the shaft to smooth, even perfection—to ten thousandths of an inch of the final recommendations.
She couldn’t help feeling, again, that something wasn’t right back home. At seven o’clock, on the second Sunday night of every month since she’d come out here, she’d telephoned Dad. If she couldn’t reach him right away, he would phone her, and every time except once, he had been sitting beside the phone, waiting for her call. By the time their short talks were over—long distance cost too much to talk more than a few minutes—half of Hideaway knew what was happening in her life.
Everyone on their telephone
