'He's not my-' Reggie stopped. He'd been about to say that Brearley was no friend of his. The only reason they knew each other was that the ex-Navy man had married an old flame of his. But they shared a common foe: the Freedom Party. That might not make them friends, but it did make them allies.
Harmon noted Reggie's pause, nodded as if his assistant had spoken a complete sentence, and went back to work. A customer came into the drugstore, marched up to the counter, and demanded a ringworm salve. Reggie sold him one, knowing the best the store offered were none too good. Doctors and researchers had got pretty good at figuring out what caused a lot of ailments. Doing anything worthwhile about them was something else again.
Tom Brearley came by a couple of days later. He grinned a skeletal grin at Reggie. 'Still here,' he said in sepulchral tones.
Reggie made shooing motions. 'Well, get the hell out of here' he hissed. 'You think I want to be seen with you?'
His acting was too good; Brearley turned and started to leave. Only the laughter Reggie couldn't contain stopped him. 'Damn you,' Brearley said without heat. 'You had me going there. Freedom Party's still screaming about traitors. Seems to be the only song they know.'
'Anybody give you any real trouble?' Reggie asked.
Brearley shook his head. 'Not yet, thank God. The only people in the Freedom Party who know what I look like live down in South Carolina. But they know my name. They can find out where I live.' He patted the waistband of his trousers. His coat concealed whatever he kept there, but Reggie had no trouble figuring out what it was. Brearley said, 'They want to try and give me a hard time, I'm ready for 'em.'
'Good.' Reggie hesitated, then asked, 'How's Maggie doing?'
'Pretty well,' Brearley answered. 'She doesn't take the whole business as seriously as I do. She hasn't paid that much attention to politics, and she doesn't really know what a pack of nasty… so-and-so's join the Party.'
Reggie wasn't sure he took the whole business as seriously as Brearley did, either. Then he recalled his relief at not getting into the newspaper. Maybe-evidently-he took things seriously after all.
Unable to stomach his own cooking, he stopped in a greasy spoon for supper. He regretted it shortly thereafter; the colored fellow sweating at the stove knew less about what to do there than he did. When he got home, he gulped bicarbonate of soda. That quelled the internal rebellion, but left him feeling gassy and bloated. He read for a while, found himself yawning, and went to bed.
Bells in the night woke him. He yawned again, enormously, put the pillow over his head, and very soon went back to sleep. When morning came, he was halfway through breakfast before he remembered the disturbance. 'Those were fire bells,' he said, and then, 'Good thing the fire wasn't next door, I reckon, or I'd be burnt to a crisp right about now.'
Somebody had been burnt to a crisp. Newsboys shouted the story as they hawked their papers. 'Liar's house goes up in smoke! Read all about it!' a kid selling the Sentinel yelled.
A cold chill ran through Reggie Bartlett. He didn't buy the Sentinel; that would have been the same as putting fifty thousand dollars in the Freedom Party's coffer. Two streetcorners farther along, he picked up a copy of the Examiner and read it as he walked the rest of the way to Harmon's drugstore.
He shivered again as he read. The paper reported that Thomas and Margaret Brearley had died in 'a conflagration that swept their home so swiftly and violently that neither had the slightest chance to escape, which leads firemen to suspect that arson may have been involved.' It talked about Brearley's naval career in general terms, but did not mention that he'd served aboard the Bonefish.
Jeremiah Harmon had a newspaper in his hand when Reggie walked into the drugstore. Reggie didn't need to ask which story he was reading. 'You see?' the druggist said in his mild, quiet voice.
'Oh, yes,' Reggie answered. 'I see. God help me, Mr. Harmon, I sure do.'
Sylvia Enos sank into the trolley seat with a grateful sigh. She didn't often get to sit on her way to the galoshes factory. And, better yet, the seat had a copy of the Boston Globe there for the grabbing. She snatched up the paper before anyone else could. Every penny she didn't spend on a newspaper could go to something else, and she needed plenty of other things, with not enough pennies to go around.
Most of the front page was filled with stories about the inauguration of President Sinclair, which was set for day after tomorrow. Sylvia read all of them with greedy, gloating interest; she might not be able to vote herself, but the prospect of a Socialist president delighted her. She didn't quite know what Upton Sinclair could do about Frank Best, but she figured he could do something.
Another prominent headline marked the fall of Belfast to the forces of the Republic of Ireland. No wonder that story got prominent play in Boston, with its large Irish population. 'Now the whole of the Emerald Isle is free,' Irish General Collins was quoted as saying. The folk of Belfast might not agree-surely did not agree, else they wouldn't have fought so grimly-but no one on this side of the Atlantic cared about their opinion.
Sylvia opened the paper to the inside pages. She picked and chose there; the factory was getting close. A headline caught her eye: REBEL ACCUSER PERISHES IN SUSPICIOUS FIRE. Most of the story was about the death of a man whose name was spelled half the time as Brierley and the other half as Brearley. He had drawn the wrath of the Freedom Party, a growing force in the CSA, the Globe's reporter wrote, by claiming that a leading Party official in one of the Carolinas was, while in the C.S. Navy, responsible for deliberately sinking the USS Ericsson although fully aware that the war between the United States and Confederate States had ended. The Freedom Party has denied this charge, and has also denied any role in the deaths of Brierley and his wife.
The trolley came to Sylvia's stop. It had already started rolling again before she realized she should have got off. When it stopped again, a couple of blocks later, she did get off. She knew she should hurry back to the factory- the implacable time card would dock her for every minute she was late, to say nothing of the hard time Frank Best would give her-but she couldn't make herself move fast, not with the way her mind was whirling.
Not a British boat after all, she thought. It was the Rebs. They were the ones George worried about, and he was right. And they did it after the war was over, and the fellow who did it is still running around loose down there. She wanted to scream. She wanted to buy a gun and go hunting for the submarine skipper. Why not? He'd gone hunting for her husband.
'Are you all right, dearie?' May Cavendish asked when Sylvia came in and put her card in the time clock. 'You look a little peaked.'
'I'm-' Sylvia didn't know how she was, or how to put it into words. She felt as if a torpedo had gone off inside her head, sinking everything she thought she'd known since the end of the war and leaving nothing in its place. Stunned and empty, she went into the factory.
Frank Best greeted her, pocket watch in hand. 'You're late, Mrs. Enos.'
Most days, she would have apologized profusely, hoping in that way to keep him from bothering her too much. Most days, it would have been a forlorn hope, too. Now she just looked at him and nodded. 'Yes, I am, aren't I?' She walked past him toward her station near the molds. If he hadn't quickly stepped out of the way, she would have walked over him. He stared after her. She did not look back over her shoulder to see.
After a while, he came up to her carrying a pair of rubber overshoes. 'Thought you could slip these by me, did you?' he said: his usual opening line.
She looked at the galoshes. The red rings around the top looked fine to her, which meant they'd look fine to a customer, too. 'They're all right, Mr. Best,' she said, brushing a wisp of hair back from her eyes with the sleeve of her shirtwaist. 'I really don't have time to play games today. I'm sorry.'
He stared at her again, in complete astonishment. 'I could have you fired,' he said. 'You could be on the street in fifteen minutes.'
'That's true,' she said calmly, and bent to paint a couple of overshoes coming down the line at her.
'Have you gone out of your mind?' the foreman sputtered.
'Maybe.' Sylvia considered it for a moment. 'I don't think so, but I rather wish I would.'
'You're kid-' Frank Best began. He studied Sylvia. She wasn't kidding. That must have been obvious, even to him. He started to say something else. Whatever it was, it never passed his lips. He walked away, shaking his head. He was still carrying the galoshes about which he'd intended to give her a hard time.
So that's the secret, she thought. She'd been drunk only a few times in her life, but she had that same giddy, headlong, anything-can-happen feeling now. Act a little crazy and Frank will leave you alone.
But she hadn't been acting. She didn't just feel drunk. She felt crazy. The world had turned sideways while she wasn't looking. Everything she thought she'd known about who'd killed George turned out to be wrong. Now she
