Romeo Blue (13 page)

“Yes,” said Gideon.

“So you will be posing as this man. You will arrive on February first, a day early, unexpectedly, at his prison post in Limoges. The man in charge, who will be leaving, is the only man who has met Colonel Ludswig face-to-face and knows what he actually looks like. Therefore we must make sure this man is off duty the night that Gideon arrives. Perhaps a woman agent of ours could invite him out to dinner.”

“We already have someone in place for that job,” said The Gram.

“Excellent,” said Big Bill. Now there were photos of the large, dark-looking prison. Nazi soldiers stood at attention outside the gate. “We’ll work it all out in advance. The whole procedure down to the smallest detail. We are building a simulation of the prison now. The movie-set designer from California is working on it. When you come up to the facility outside of Toronto, it should be all finished.”

I sat back against the wall. I held my hand over my mouth because I was afraid I might shout out. A terrible tornado was ripping through my heart. Then Derek pulled gently on my arm. “Hush,” he whispered. “Shhh.”

I was on my knees but I fell to my face. I put my hands over my ears. I didn’t want to hear any more. Then Derek tugged on my sleeve, pulling me back through the passageway. As soon as I was in his room, I dropped forward, facedown on the floor again. My tears fell on the wooden surface, my mouth pressed against the polished pine. “Why is Uncle Gideon going to a prison?” I whispered. Derek closed the closet door. I could feel more tears and sobs threatening to come up out of me in a howling sort of way.

Derek put his hand on the back of my head as I lay there. “Oh, Fliss, don’t think about it,” he said. “Don’t worry, Gideon will get them out.”

“Get who out?” I said, sitting up and shaking my head back and forth. “Who do you mean? Who?” I put my hands over my ears again.

“Flissy,” said Derek, “listen to me.”

“No, no. Leave me alone. You don’t mean Winnie and Danny. You don’t mean that Winnie and Danny have been caught? Are they in prison, Derek? Don’t say that. Don’t say one more word!”

The next morning, Big and Little Bill and Uncle Gideon were full of jokes. They were calling my father Colonel and asking him where his mustache went. “Lost it on the way to the races, did you, Colonel?” Big Bill said, slapping him on the back. We all went out on to the front porch before breakfast to see the sun rise. I hadn’t wanted to. Everyone kept making jokes but nothing seemed funny to me at all.

Even when Sir William Percy came flying in for some food, I wasn’t cheered. “You see, Gideon,” said The Gram, “I told you that seagull would become a nuisance.” When Sir William Percy took a liking to Little Bill and put his head in Little Bill’s jacket pocket and pecked at the top of his fountain pen, I still didn’t laugh. My beautiful Winnie and Danny were in prison in France. After all this waiting and hoping and wondering, now I knew. I knew and it hurt. It hurt more than any of the other hurts I had been feeling. It had come like a bomb and blown Brie and the dance away. It had swept away all the other worries that had seemed to be tumbling down on me in a constant stream. But at least they were not dead. No, not yet anyway.

During breakfast, I couldn’t eat a bite. Derek got all my toast and blueberry jam. I think he had been waiting for just such an opportunity. He gobbled up my scrambled eggs as well. Uncle Gideon was looking at me with soft brown eyes that for some reason reminded me of Wink again. Then he glanced up at The Gram quickly and shook his head. I did not know if I could bear the thought that he too would soon be in danger.

Little Bill was talking about when he was a fighter pilot during World War I. “Did you attack any enemy planes?” said Derek.

“Well, actually, I shot down the Red Baron’s brother. Didn’t kill him but he didn’t fly again for the rest of the war.”

“Hey, that’s pretty hotsy totsy,” said Derek, finishing off my portion of blueberry jam. It was very impressive the way he said that, but I didn’t feel like smiling.

I went to school then, but I couldn’t listen to anything anyone said to me. Winnie and Danny, my beautiful Winnie and Danny, were in prison. At the end of the day I couldn’t remember anything that had happened in class.

Stu Barker walked home from school with Derek and me in the afternoon. Stu was a devoted Boy Scout. He could start a fire by rubbing two sticks together. He could pitch a tent anywhere, even in the middle of a storm. He could make a water purifier out of an old coffee tin. Stu
Barker was quite a small fellow, the size of a fifth grader. Derek towered over him. But Stu was very bossy.

“You got to listen to me, kiddo,” he said as we walked along the road out of town. “I’m an Eagle Scout now. I’ve got everything figured out.” He looked way up at Derek and nodded his head at him. “I’m going to be a page next year and work at the state house part-time. You go to government studies program in the spring and when you’re done with it, you are an official page. Then you’re on your way to being a senator or even the president of the United States.” Then he nudged me with his little elbow. “Isn’t it the truth, Flissy? Come on, say it’s so.”

“I daresay I know nothing at all about government studies,” I said. They went rattling along, talking away, as if everything were hunky-dory (another Derek word). But everything wasn’t hunky-dory at all. Not at all. My beloved Winnie and Danny had been caught. They had been put in prison. Were they hungry or cold? Were they together? Were they in danger of being shot?

On top of my worries for Winnie and Danny, I had become more suspicious of Derek’s father, which caused a bit of a rift between Derek and me. He refused to hear my worries about this. When I had mentioned the Gray Moth, he had exploded and stormed out of the room. Whenever I brought it up, he would simply walk away.

“Derek,” I had cried when we were alone for a moment after school. “Why wouldn’t he take off his hat?”

“What!” he had almost yelled back at me. “He told us why. He likes his hat to keep its shape. You are meddling, Flissy.”

Derek had invited his father to the house again this week and I had begged him not to. And I felt we needed to tell someone about the invisible-ink letter. And the eyeglasses and everything else. No, nothing was hunky-dory. Not at all.

“And by the way, who are you going to the dance with, kiddo?” said Stu, putting his hands in his pockets and looking up at Derek.

“I’m going with Brie. You knew that, Stu,” Derek said.

“Oh, Brie,” said Stu, punching Derek’s good arm. “Brie’s the bee’s knees. Come on, put ’em up, buddy. Winner takes all. How’d you get so lucky?”

“Dunno,” said Derek, kicking a rock up into the brush ahead of us.

Nothing was worse than having two show-off American boys fighting over a snooty, pretty American girl, even if she did wear braces. I was standing there, feeling like a foreign pip-squeak. A twerp. A twerp who knew too much. And my parents were in prison.

When we got home, Derek and Stu went into the kitchen for a cup of Ovaltine, and I went up to the room I shared with Auntie. I sat on Auntie’s canopy bed. And then I flopped against her pillow. As I dropped back into the softness of it, I felt a crinkly paper at the back of my head. I turned round and picked up an envelope. It was a
letter addressed to Miami Bathburn from a USO Camp Show office in New York City. My heart dropped then, like a terrible submarine going down even farther to the very bottom of the ocean.
Oh, Auntie, don’t leave. Stay here forever. I couldn’t bear to wander about this house without your voice calling out, “Sweetest! Oh, sweetest, where are you?”

I held the letter up to the light, hoping to see through it. I did have a little bit of luck. I could almost read the typed words
Dear Miss Bathburn
. Then I thought I could read,
We are sneezed to inform you
. No, the words were too jumbled. I couldn’t make them out and so I just sat there holding the envelope. I knew quite well in all my dreadful American snooping how to steam open a letter and then reseal it. Derek had taught me how. But for once the better part of me got hold and I resisted, though I knew already it was an acceptance. My aunt was going to be an actress traveling round to entertain the soldiers in America. It rather killed me and thrilled me at the same time.

I felt so sad and worried for my Winnie and Danny that it almost didn’t matter that the dreadful rose corsage was finally taken out of the icebox. It now sat on the table in the hallway, its petals glowing, waiting to be pinned on Cousin Brie’s shoulder. How could Derek do this? Did he not hug me in the darkness on the road last week? Did he not hold my hand in Portland? Had he not spent weeks practicing dancing with me? How could he now be going to the dance with Brie?

It was evening and The Gram was in the garden taking the dry sheets off the clothesline. I could see her through the open window. There was the smell of burning autumn leaves in the air and the sun was going down, making The Gram and her sheets into dark shadows turning in the wind. How mysterious she seemed now to me after hearing her speak in the gymnasium with the two Bills. Somehow I was in the middle of something, as if in a dark funnel, everything circling round the Bathburn house.

Derek came down the stairs and stopped in the parlor. He was dressed in a dark blue suit with a bow tie at his throat. He kept his one paralyzed hand in his jacket pocket. When Uncle Gideon saw him, he said,
“Well, if it isn’t Humphrey Bogart from
The Maltese Falcon
!” Derek smiled. He had the corsage in his right hand.

Auntie was lying on the sofa, reading a script for
Romeo and Juliet
. Yes, she had been accepted into the theater troop and there would be tryouts for Juliet later. She had her hair in bobby pins for curlers. She sat up and loosely tied a silk scarf round her head and said, “Oh, Derek, you are simply handsome tonight. Oh, you must always wear a bow tie!”

I sat in the corner. I had a book propped up in front of my face and I am quite sorry to report that I was rather hiding behind that book and not reading one word of it. If anyone had looked closely, they would have known that I would never be reading a book called
The History of Linguistic Development in Northern European Civilizations
.

The Gram came back in the front screen door with the laundry basket full of folded sheets. Just then a car pulled into the driveway. Its lights rode up and down the walls, momentarily flashing across the portrait of the middle daughter, Ella Bathburn, painted when she was just my age — twelve and a half years old. Oh, if only Ella Bathburn could have helped me. If only she could have flown forward through the one hundred years between us. If only she could have told me what to do about Derek and Brie and how to stop this terrible night from happening. But Ella Bathburn was caught in her painted
portrait. She could not break free. She could only look at me with her serious face of warning.

“Well then, it’s time to close the blackout curtains,” I announced quite loudly over the top of my book. “And Brie’s mother should put red cellophane over her headlights. That’s what the air-raid warden told me.” Then I popped back down behind the heavy history of linguistics.

Suddenly, Brie and her mother were standing in the parlor. It was startling to see them all dressed up and sparkling as I nosed round my book. Brie was fresh, lovely, sure, hopeful, nervous, and snippy all at the same time. Brie waved to me. “Hi, L.C.,” she said. It sounded nice enough but I knew it stood for
Little Creep
.

Then Derek came forward with the glowing purple corsage and he pinned it to Brie’s dress. But perhaps he was a bit shy because he pinned the corsage in a crooked way by mistake and it then looked as if it were trying to leap off Brie’s shoulder and run away. And besides, the purple color didn’t quite match her dress, but Brie flashed her silver smile above the crooked, jarring corsage. Derek put his arm round her. He too gave me a great smile. He even blew me a kiss but I let it bounce against the spine of the book I was holding. I turned my cheek and let Derek’s kiss dissolve into nothing, because that was what it was. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.