Louise's Dilemma (13 page)

I located the telephone and lifted the receiver. It was dead. I’d have to drive to town to get help.

But where was Anne?

I called out Anne’s name, but still heard nothing but wind and ice cracking as it melted and fell from the trees. Perhaps she had run away?

It didn’t make sense that she’d been murdered, too. Why would murderers leave Leroy’s body in the middle of the living room floor, but not Anne’s? If she’d run, though, they might have left her where she fell, or she could still be running. I prayed that wherever she was she had a coat!

Out the sitting room window I noticed the shed where Leroy kept his gear. The padlock was hanging from its hasp.

I ran out the back door toward the shed. I’m sure I looked ridiculous, crashing across the icy grass, calling Anne’s name, clutching an open blade, as if I could fight off whoever had killed Leroy, a powerful man with guns and such to hand.

But I was so afraid for Anne that I ignored all that and made for the unlocked shed. If Anne was alive inside, she would be so terribly cold. She could be injured, too.

A few feet from the door I heard the sounds of muffled screams. Opening the door I saw her. Anne was tied to a framing post with heavy rope and gagged with a scarf. But thank God she had on her coat. When Anne saw me come through the shed door she tried to scream again, but little sound escaped the scarf. I pulled the scarf free, and words mixed with tears tumbled out of her.

‘A man came,’ she said. ‘I was adding crumbs to the bird feeders, and he grabbed me and knocked me down and tied me up in here!’

‘Who was he?’ I asked, sawing at the thick ropes that bound her. Her wrists were rubbed raw and black where she’d struggled with the bindings until they were loosened, and bruises on her face were forming.

‘I don’t know. He was behind me. Wearing a scarf, a hat, and gloves.’

Anne gulped in air as I freed her, panting as if she hadn’t been able to breathe properly while the scarf covered her face.

‘Where’s Leroy?’ she asked. ‘He hadn’t left for work yet. Is he all right?’

I pulled her to her feet, where she rocked unsteadily as blood returned to her legs.

‘Where’s Leroy?’ she asked again.

‘I’m sorry.’

Anne did as good a job of calming herself as I’ve ever seen anyone who’d just realized there was bad news. She straightened up and gazed at me with clear eyes. ‘He’s dead?’ she said.

‘Yes, I’m sorry.’

‘We need to call the police.’

‘The phone line is dead. We need to get out of here and get back to town so we can find Constable Long and Agent Williams. And you need a doctor.’

‘Please let me see his body.’

I hated to do that, not because I didn’t think she could bear it, but because I wanted to get law enforcement on the scene as possible. But I let her go inside.

Anne stared down at Leroy’s body. ‘You fool,’ she said to his lifeless corpse. ‘I warned you. I told you something like this could happen.’

Mrs Lenore Sullivan was one of the kindest women I had ever met. She welcomed Anne like a daughter.

‘Honey,’ she said, ‘you can stay here for a few nights. You shouldn’t go back to your house for a while. I’ll go make up a room.’

Collins and Williams had left. I’d come down from my own room, where I’d rested while they questioned her. Mrs Sullivan didn’t leave the two of us until after she’d stoked up the fire in her sitting room and brought us quilts and hot chocolate. Her dog, Lily, sensing the gravity of the situation, lay quietly at my feet, soothing us with her presence.

Anne’s eyes were so ringed with dark circles that it looked like she had two black eyes. She’d spent two hours being grilled by Constable Long in Lenore’s sitting room, with Agent Williams in an advisory capacity. And elderly and kind as Long was, I didn’t think I’d want to be interrogated by him.

I didn’t take part in the FBI’s search of Leroy’s house or Anne’s interrogation. I spent the time in my room napping and taking a long hot bath. We had turned up nothing that indicated any relationship between Leroy’s activities or death and Richard Martin’s postcard. Richard was a distant relative of Leroy’s who just happened to write him about the time Leroy got mixed up in whatever local shenanigans had led to his death. What those shenanigans were no one had explained to me yet.

At this point I was positive there wasn’t an ‘h’ in the word ‘St Leonard’ after all. The French and British censors had passed the postcard on, and they would know better than us anyway.

I would go back to Washington with Williams early tomorrow and back to work. In the files.

I went into the kitchen for more hot chocolate and found Mrs Sullivan shoving a chicken surrounded by vegetables into the oven to roast.

‘You and Anne and Agent Williams are eating here tonight,’ she said. ‘If you show up at the café it will turn into a circus. The entire town is riled up.’

‘Do you think Anne will be all right?’ I asked.

‘She’ll be fine. Think what she’s been through already.’

A
lot had happened in the two days I’d been away from ‘Two Trees’ and my job at the OSS Registry.

When I dropped off my suitcase at home before going to work Wednesday morning I found Dellaphine and Phoebe poring over ration books and recipe pamphlets, trying to unravel the complexities of the new food rationing system.

‘Hello there,’ Phoebe said to me, when I went to the kitchen to see her before I caught my bus. ‘Is your friend better?’

My friend? Oh, of course, Joan, who had a fever, whom I’d been nursing for the last couple of days. My cover story.

‘She’s fine,’ I said. ‘Is everything okay here?’

Phoebe gestured at the pile of ration books. ‘Trying to make our first grocery list,’ she said.

‘I don’t know how I can be expected to feed you all with two pounds of beef each per week,’ Dellaphine said. ‘It ain’t healthy to eat all that chicken and fish and beans and such.’

‘It’s so much worse in England,’ Phoebe said. ‘We’ll get by. Do you have time for a cup of coffee, Louise?’

‘Yes, please,’ I said. ‘A quick one.’

The café where Agent Williams and I had stopped for breakfast when we left St Leonard at the crack of dawn had been out of coffee. Retail grocery sales had been suspended until ration books were distributed, and the café owner hadn’t planned for it. The tea we’d ordered to accompany our pancakes hadn’t cleared my head the way coffee did.

Williams and I had left St Leonard early in the morning so he could file a report with the FBI and request to be assigned to Martin’s murder case. Officer Long could not possibly handle it himself, and Williams knew all the principals.

But I’d have nothing to do with finding out who had killed Leroy Martin. I was OSS, and we had no jurisdiction over domestic crime. I hated it. I wanted to know the answers to all the questions I still had about Leroy and Anne.

Williams had told me what he could about the inquiry into Leroy’s murder. Anne Martin, questioned by Long and Williams while resting in the lounge of Lenore Sullivan’s guesthouse while I was upstairs napping, had implied that Leroy was involved in criminal activity of some kind that had ended in his murder. Wisely, she professed not to know what that criminal activity was, or who Leroy’s accomplices were.

Our inquiry into the meaning of the postcard that Leroy Martin received from France was now closed, according to Williams. I had to agree with him. Leroy’s death made that moot. The postcard was addressed to him, and from his relative, and if it meant more than it actually said we would never know what that was.

So I had been unceremoniously dropped at my corner with my suitcase.

Before I’d left, Anne had thanked me for saving her life. Which I had, I supposed. If I hadn’t gone out to the Martin place, Anne might have frozen in that shed later that night, coat or no coat.

Mrs Sullivan had suggested I return to St Leonard for a nice weekend when the weather was better. I wondered how she would feel if I brought Joe? Just thinking about Joe caused my spirit to lift. Was it the coming weekend we would be together on the houseboat?

My stomach muscles clenched, and a flash of dizziness made me grasp at the kitchen doorjamb for support. I was nervous. How silly! I was a grown woman. I could do as I pleased.

As long as certain people didn’t find out about it.

My inbox was stacked inches high with reports and intelligence that needed to be evaluated and filed. I’d expected as much, but I hadn’t anticipated the air of overwork and anxiety that permeated the aisles and reading rooms of the Directory. My co-workers barely greeted me as I entered the vast cavern of file cabinets, just nodded and went back to their work.

Ruth passed by my desk with her trolley full of paperwork.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked. I felt that I needed to whisper, it was so quiet.

‘The news is bad,’ Ruth said. ‘Very bad. Convoy ON-166 has been attacked; they’ve lost fourteen ships in three days.’

Ruth dropped her voice even lower.

‘If we can’t stop the U-boats, everyone says we’re going to lose the war. We can’t invade Europe. We can’t supply North Africa. We can’t locate the U-boats when they are out at sea. Every person here has been assigned to search for targets in Europe that the RAF can bomb that might affect the Kriegsmarine’s ability to function. And have you heard about Hans and Sophie Scholl?’

Hans and Sophie were brother and sister, leaders of a German student non-violent resistance group called the White Rose at the University of Munich. They’d been arrested recently for handing out anti-war leaflets and charged with high treason.

‘What’s happened to them?’

‘They were executed, by guillotine.’

No wonder a pall hung over OSS. The student anti-Nazi resistance movement was our best path to infiltrate Germany. Without doubt OSS had been supplying the dissenters; perhaps we even had agents placed in the group. The Scholls’ execution was a disaster. Guillotined! I shuddered at the thought of those two young people dying so horribly.

‘Any more good news?’ I asked Ruth.

‘Just don’t look at a newspaper,’ she said. ‘It’s scary.’

I walked through the Reading Room on my way to my desk. Every chair was filled. Files crowded the tables, and library trolleys filled all the available space. Men, mostly in uniform, and a few women combed through documents seeking Nazi weaknesses. This railway station, were supplies for the submarines loaded here? That bridge, did supply trucks for submarine bases cross it? Was that building a torpedo factory? Possible targets would be fed to the RAF and American Army Air Force in Britain. Which got their supplies from the convoys. It was a vicious circle that had to be stopped.

I forced myself to forget everything else except my own work. I ploughed through two documents, analyzing and indexing them. Then I took a short break to write a brief report on
l’affaire de carte postale française
to deliver to my boss, Laurence Egbert. He would pass it on to the Foreign Nationalities Bureau.

I gave Egbert a straightforward account of my time in St Leonard and summarized Agent Williams’ conclusion that Leroy Martin had been murdered for reasons that had nothing to do with Richard Martin’s postcard. I was careful not to criticize Williams, but I did say that I was concerned that the murder of Leroy Martin had obscured OSS’s original inquiry about the postcard. Simply because we’d run into a domestic crime didn’t mean that there was no meaning to the postcard. I did agree with Williams that there was little that could be done now that Leroy Martin was dead, though.

As I dropped my report off with Egbert’s secretary I wondered if I’d ever have another chance to work in the field.

The bustle of the crowd and steady roar of conversation in the OSS cafeteria cheered me up a bit. I didn’t see any movie stars today, but I did catch sight of Joan waving her arms at me from a table across the way. Gripping my tray of chicken potpie, milk, and Jell-O, I forced myself through the crowd and slid onto a chair next to her.

‘Dearie,’ she said, holding my tray for me as I took off my coat, ‘it’s been as much as my life is worth to hold onto this seat for you.’

‘Thanks,’ I said, and realized how fond I was of this big hearty woman. She was about the only person in Washington I felt I could talk to without reservation. I needed badly to tell her everything that had happened to me in the last few days, but even the OSS cafeteria didn’t offer the privacy I needed.

‘So how was your adventure?’ she asked.

‘Less than adventurous.’

‘That’s too bad. How come?’

‘The company was terrible,’ I said, thinking of Williams and his condescension. ‘But the guesthouse we stayed in was lovely. We should go there for a weekend when the weather is better. And –’ here I leaned into her – ‘the subject of our investigations was murdered!’

Joan’s mouth dropped. ‘You’re joking!’

‘I am not. But it had nothing to do with our mission,’ I said. ‘It’s the FBI’s case now.’

Just as I raised a forkful of pot pie to my lips, an enormous Scotsman knocked my elbow, sending my bite of pot pie splat onto Joan’s shirt. I knew he was a Scotsman because of his tartan tam o’shanter. Otherwise he looked like any other British soldier. Then there was his accent, of course!

‘Oh, lassie!’ the guardsman said to Joan, dismayed. ‘I’ve dirtied your blouse!’

‘No worries,’ Joan said, ‘it will come out,’ as she scrubbed at her shirt with a napkin dipped in her water glass.

The two caught each other’s gaze and I could feel the current pass between them.

‘You take my seat,’ I said to the Scot. ‘it’s time for me to get back to work anyway.’

He didn’t object, sliding into the chair I relinquished.

Joan grasped at my arm as I left. ‘Meet me after work,’ she said. ‘Let’s get a martini.’

After remembering that it was Wednesday, when Joe was often late getting home, I agreed. ‘I really need to talk to you,’ I said. ‘Could we go somewhere other than a bar?’

The Scotsman had taken my seat by now, and his large body came between me and Joan, who had to lean around him to speak to me.