The traitor beside her, p.28
The Traitor Beside Her, page 28
This time, his glare was for Jerry, who looked like he was preparing for a ferocious protest. Paul cut him off.
“This decision is not a personal one. I would say the same thing to three strangers. Now take them home, Jerry, so they can get a few hours of sleep. You get some sleep, too. Your odds will be better if you’ve all had some rest.”
Oddly, Justine found herself thinking of Ed and the game that he loved so well.
“The cards are dealt,” she said in a voice that seemed to come from somewhere outside herself. “It’s time to play the final hand and see who takes the tricks.”
* * *
Thelma crouched behind a bush as the car pulled to a stop in the Kansas Hall parking lot. It was far past midnight and getting on toward dawn. She’d waited until she thought nobody would see her, but she apparently hadn’t waited long enough to creep out into the open.
The front passenger door opened, and the new girl, Samantha, got out. Thelma supposed that the driver must be the handsome blond man who’d been chasing her around in his wheelchair. Samantha didn’t seem the type to be out at four in the morning. Then the door behind Samantha’s opened.
When she got a good look at the second woman leaving the car, Thelma rocked back on her heels in surprise. She wasn’t expecting to see Justine, but her blond updo was unmistakable. Neither of these women seemed like they went for all-night dates. Well, they’d moved to the big city, so she guessed that they were trying out big-city ways.
Thelma cradled a tote bag in her lap. It held the entire contents of the housemother’s pencil drawer—stapler, scissors, pens, pencils, erasers, carbon paper, and a banana. She hadn’t had time to pick and choose. She’d just upended the drawer over her bag when nobody was looking, then hurried away.
Thelma waited for the women to enter the dormitory and for the car to pass out of sight. Then she waited some more, just to be sure.
* * *
“Tomorrow’s going to be a hard day. Sally’s still gone, and we don’t know why,” Justine said from the bed where she lay flopped, still in her street clothes and still clutching her purse. She’d been there ever since they came upstairs.
This was to be expected after an attempt on her life, but Georgette was worried about her. “Yep,” she said. “Everybody at Arlington Hall’s going to be talking about Sally again tomorrow. She’s got a million friends.”
“There’s a good reason for that,” Justine said. “Nice people usually do have about a million friends.”
“Maybe that’s where she’s been all night and all day, with one of her friends. Maybe she’s comin’ in the lobby right now, and we’re all gonna laugh tomorrow about how scared we were.”
“Yeah.” Justine’s defeated voice broke Georgette’s heart. “How did things go with Nora this evening?”
“I didn’t learn much important—at least, not much that what’s-his-name would say was important—but I did enjoy her company.”
“Things can’t always go our way, I guess.”
“Naw,” Georgette said, but she didn’t really mean it, because things really did seem to be looking up for her. She felt guilty about it, though, because Justine was so down in the dumps.
Georgette knew that things with their mysterious boss weren’t going the way Justine wanted, although she never came out and said so. For a while that night, it had looked like he was ready to let down his guard and let her in. And then he wasn’t.
Justine’s stone-faced almost-boyfriend made Jerry look like the best boyfriend in the world. To be honest, though, Jerry probably was the best boyfriend in the world. Georgette was a good enough friend to wish that Justine could find the other best boyfriend in the world, whoever he might be.
Georgette also felt like things were going her way because she could still feel smooth ivory keys under her fingertips. She could still see how the long shiny strings looked when Nora lifted the piano’s lid to show her how its hammers and dampers worked. She could still hear the percussive, resonant sounds of those hammers hitting the strings and the soft thud of the dampers as Nora used a brass pedal to raise and lower them.
Georgette couldn’t believe that she was going to learn to play the piano. She was going to really play with both hands, and she was going to learn to read music instead of just mimicking her grandmother’s memorized hymn-playing. Even when she was a little girl, she’d understood that her parents would never be able to afford lessons, so she’d never asked for them. She hadn’t wanted them to know how badly she wanted something that they couldn’t give her. Georgette was afraid of the danger that would come with the sunrise for all the usual reasons, but she was also afraid because dying would take her away from Jerry and from Justine and from pianos and from all the things that the wide world outside of Des Allemands offered.
Georgette didn’t say any of this. She just said, “You should hear Nora play the piano. And she writes her own music. It’s published and everything.”
“Really? That’s nice.” Justine’s voice was sad, and that made Georgette sad.
“Do you know how to play the piano?”
“No. We had a piano and Mama liked to play, but I was never really interested. I like to listen, though.”
Georgette had figured the answer would be yes, because Justine could do everything. She could do all kinds of math, even calculus. She knew so much about physics that they couldn’t even talk about most of it, because Georgette didn’t know the language. Justine could weld. She was really good at German, and she could talk to Gloria pretty well in Polish. She said her French was terrible, but Georgette didn’t believe it.
She started to tell Justine that Nora was going to teach her to play, but something stopped her. Maybe it was because she was afraid that she would fail, and she didn’t want Justine to know it if she did. Maybe it was because she was afraid that Justine would decide she wanted to learn to play, too, and that it would only take her a week or so. And maybe it was because she knew she was a terrible person to feel this way.
Instead, she just said, “Get up and grab your shampoo and bathrobe. That’s what I’m gonna do. There’s a lot of shower stalls in Kansas Hall and plenty of hot water. It’s the best thing about this place. You’ll feel better after you wash off the dirt of the day.”
Not to mention that Justine would feel better after she’d washed off the last traces of somebody else’s blood.
“And then, after the shower, you need to sleep.”
* * *
Thelma felt the disappointment in her whole body. Her head sagged. Her shoulders drooped. Her stomach heaved.
She’d been so sure that she knew where Sally was hiding.
Thelma had spent hours creeping through the hallways and stairwells of Oklahoma Hall, the Arlington Farms dormitory that was under renovation. She’d been hoping to find a frightened young woman curled up on the floor under her winter coat. She’d found construction debris and some unidentifiable footprints on the dusty floor, but no Sally.
This was a disastrous turn of events.
Either Sally was somewhere else, and Thelma had no idea where that would be, or else Sally…
Or else Sally wasn’t anywhere.
Thelma almost dropped to the dirty floor of Oklahoma Hall in despair, but she didn’t. If Sally was hiding somewhere else, then she couldn’t help her. And if Sally was…gone…then she couldn’t help her. But if she was hiding here in this building, then she wasn’t beyond the help of someone who cared about her.
Rosy light was seeping in the windows of every room that Thelma passed through. She needed to go before the sun rose and revealed her.
She passed into the stairwell. There, she set down the tote bag filled with the housemother’s stolen possessions. Into the bag, she dumped the contents of her purse—five sandwiches, an orange, a letter, all of the money Sally had left behind, and all of Thelma’s cash. She had some crackers in her room that would keep her alive until payday. She wasn’t hungry, anyway, and she wouldn’t be until Sally was found.
Was this enough money to get Sally someplace safe? Thelma didn’t know, because she didn’t know why Sally had run. Maybe there wasn’t enough money in the world to make her safe.
Chapter 24
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 20, 1944
Justine woke after sleeping like a woman who had been bashed in the head.
She’d dreamed dreams—she knew that—but they had slipped out the window when daybreak came. The dreams left nothing behind but a certainty that she knew more than she realized. So many things nibbled at her mind, asking her why she couldn’t decipher the messages they were sending.
Nora’s piano playing bothered her.
Sally’s lockets bothered her.
Ed’s bridge playing bothered her.
Ike’s daily snub of Nora and her flowers bothered her.
Linda’s makeup bothered her.
Patsy’s slavish copying of Linda’s makeup bothered her.
Thelma’s insistence that Sally was missing mere hours after they’d been together bothered her.
Karl’s maps with their pushpins bothered her.
The Bees’ miniature clotheslines, clipped with classified military secrets, bothered her.
Patryk’s status as a mathematician, the science of codes and symbols, bothered her.
What did it mean, really, to pass information in secret? Passing information was an act of communication, certainly. But the secrecy…that required a shift in the mode of communication. Either the message had to be completely hidden from bystanders, or it had to be communicated in a way that was not understandable—not even recognizable, ideally—to anyone who didn’t share the secret language of the two people passing the message.
This was the very definition of a code. But it applied to written music. And spoken languages. It applied to the private cipher known only to her and Georgette, but it also applied to the implicit understanding between roommates that signaled a problem when a bystander would see nothing but a young woman enjoying her night out a little too much. This same understanding had brought Jerry and Georgette to her as she lay unconscious in a ditch. It may well have saved her life.
And wasn’t makeup a symbolic way to speak to potential mates from across the room, saying, “I’m available, honeycakes, and I’m looking for someone just like you”?
The Victorians had sent messages with flowers, and this meant that Nora could be doing the same with her daily bouquets.
Messages clipped to clotheslines could carry messages in the way they were arranged, like semaphore flags.
Pins stuck into maps could signify places, but their colors and patterns could send an entirely different signal.
The world was full of coded messages. But how was she to know which ones were deadly?
* * *
Justine felt wobbly on her feet. Maybe she really did have a concussion. Well, she hoped she still had enough of her wits to carry out the plan. She fluffed up the frilly collar hiding the bruises on her throat and kept moving across the campus of Arlington Hall
Jerry had picked up Justine and Georgette at Kansas Hall, giving the three of them a chance to speak freely in the car. They had a plan. They had an exit strategy if things went wrong. They were armed, even if this meant nothing more than two skirt pockets loaded with Stingers, pepper gas spray, and noisemakers. They had no weapons in their hair, unfortunately, because Paul had taken their pencil blades. She guessed he’d put them in his home arsenal. Now that the fake pencils’ real purpose had been revealed, there was too much of a chance that their adversary would amble by and pluck their weapons from their coiled locks.
Unsteadily, Justine walked to the door of her office and opened the door. Karl was there, rearranging the colorful pins scattered over the map on the wall behind her desk.
She’d rehearsed her lines. Now she had to say them casually, as if they weren’t rehearsed at all. “Dr. van Dorn’s assistant—you know her, my roommate Samantha—has asked if I can come help her for the day. She has a huge backlog of filing to do. If I help her, she’ll have a better chance at being ready for the next liaison meeting.”
Karl grumbled and harrumphed, then he waved her out of the room.
Thus, she had accomplished Part One of the day’s plan. What did she hope to accomplish by the end of the day? She intended to find the traitor who was passing the Allies’ secrets to the enemy. She intended to make the treason stop.
* * *
“Here let me help you with that,” Ed said, grabbing a corner of the desk she was dragging across the room. “Let’s put it right here by Samantha’s desk, so you can work together.”
Her heart clenched when she realized that the desk—bare-topped, empty-drawered, and tucked in a corner—might have been Bettie’s. At least it wasn’t Sally’s. Sally’s desk sat in its usual spot, covered with papers and pencils. She wondered if anybody had checked its drawers to make sure that Sally hadn’t left any apples behind. If not, the sickly smell of rotting fruit would fill Room 117 within days, unless Sally came back to eat the apple or throw it away.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” Ed said. Then he looked around the room and added a quick, “Because we can use the help,” for the benefit of his gossiping employees.
Nora entered, her tote bag slung over her shoulder. She carefully cradled a bouquet of pink dianthus and yellow daisies in both hands. Proceeding down the aisle to her desk, she looked straight ahead, which allowed her to avoid everybody’s eyes but Georgette’s. For Georgette, Nora had a small smile. Georgette returned it with a big one.
“You’re enjoying this,” Justine whispered as Georgette dumped pile after pile of loose papers and neatly labeled file folders in front of her.
“Karl gave you permission to work in here all day. I might as well make the most of your time,” Georgette chirped sweetly. “Here’s a copy of the file list.” She handed Justine a multi-paged document. “Here’s a stack of tracking forms. And here are some sharpened pencils. You’ll need a few.”
Justine had learned to file in school. She had hated it just as badly as she’d hated learning to keep a neat lab notebook. She wasn’t a naturally organized recordkeeper, and she knew it. The nuns who had taught her filing had been insistent on meticulous recordkeeping in an office, and her mother had been equally insistent on meticulous recordkeeping in the lab, so she knew how to keep track of details. She just didn’t like it. She sighed and spread her pencils and documents out in front of her. It was going to be a long day.
Patryk shuffled down the aisle, a dreamy expression on his face. She kept her eyes on her work. She had forgotten that her presence might cause him to break down again.
Thelma’s shoulders slumped as she dropped into her desk chair and lit a cigarette. The Bees looked almost as despondent as they took their own seats. None of them looked at Sally’s empty seat.
Ike wasn’t there. And the same thing was true thirty minutes later, when Justine had finished entering filing numbers on her first stack of documents. More time had passed while she’d slid most of them into file folders. Finally, Ike appeared. He was dressed as eccentrically as usual, with his woolen peacoat swinging open over an open-necked white sports shirt. His customary knit cap was on his head.
With Ike finally at his desk, the suspects were assembled. Nobody looked like they’d been stabbed by the blade that she’d kept hidden in a pencil, but they were all wearing conservative business wear. (Except for Ike and his out-of-place outerwear.) Thus, Ike’s arms, legs, shoulders, and chest were covered, and so were everybody else’s, except perhaps the lowest twelve inches of the women’s legs.
Nobody was limping and nobody was favoring a bad shoulder, but she needed to keep a close eye on whether that changed. People got tired as the day passed. Wounds started to ache. At any moment, somebody’s pain could give them away.
Nora fussed with her flowers. She snipped off the tips of the stems over her trash can, then she put the trimmed stems back into the paper cup of water that served as a vase. Three yellow daisy petals fluttered away from her hands. Wet, they stuck to the metal side of Nora’s wastebasket.
Beulah stood and picked up a box of long paper strips, as narrow as cellophane tape, and commenced clipping them to a taut string hung between wooden posts. She hung a few strips, adjusted them to be just where she wanted them, then hung a few more. Barbara was doing the same thing on another string. From a distance, it looked like they were hanging quarter notes on a musical staff.
Patryk stared abstractedly at the ceiling, his pencil eraser tapping out a syncopated beat. Every few minutes, Ike glanced at Patryk like he wanted to yell at him about the racket. Once, he even opened his mouth to speak, but he backed down rather than dragging Patryk back to the real world, where his losses waited for him. Even Ike was sensitive enough to deal gently with Patryk.
Justine was sitting close enough to Ed to sense that he was fidgety. She knew this was a problem for him, because breaking codes is not a task that lends itself to being fidgety. When his nerves became too much to bear, every ten minutes or so, he would stand up and make a circuit of the room. He probably thought that he looked like a supervisor managing his people, but Justine knew him better than that, even after a single date and a few intense conversations. He didn’t look like a conscientious manager to her. He just looked nervous. It crossed her mind that a nervous man should not keep a revolver, presumably loaded, in full view on his desk.
The clock in Room 117 ticked as loudly as the one in her office. It was a sound that faded into the background when she was calm and focused, but she was not, in fact, calm and focused. She was on the verge of jumping out of her skin.
* * *
Justine would always wonder if anyone saw her face when the first light of realization began to dawn. In particular, she would wonder whether the person who had brought a Browning Hi-Power 9mm semiautomatic handgun to work saw her then or whether recognition came later.
