Breakthroughs

a Distinguished Service Cross myself, but the stick-in-the-muds at the War Department started having kittens. This is the best I could do. Congratulations, Mrs. Semphroch: a grateful country thanks you for your brave service.”

He slipped the medal over Nellie’s head. Dazedly, she watched him put a hand in his pocket again and produce another velvet box. When he opened it, the Maltese cross inside was of silver, with inlaid gold stripes. The ribbon attached to it was also of the colors of the national flag, but not quite so wide as the one on Nellie’s medal.

“Order of Remembrance, Second Class,” he said, putting the decoration over Edna’s head. “For you, Miss Semphroch, for helping your mother gather information from the foe and pass it on to the United States.”

Edna gaped. So did Nellie. Maybe Roosevelt didn’t know Edna had been on the point of marrying Confederate Lieutenant Nicholas H. Kincaid-would have married him if the U.S. bombardment hadn’t turned the ceremony into a bloody shambles. Maybe he did know and didn’t care.

No sooner had that thought crossed Nellie’s mind than, as if on cue, a photographer strode into the coffeehouse. President Roosevelt put one arm around Nellie, the other around Edna, and Nellie realized the photographer’s appearance wasn’t as if on cue at all. It was on cue. The fellow touched off his tray of flash powder. Foomp! As a glowing purple smear made hash of Nellie’s eyesight, the shutter clicked.

“Can we do one more?” the photographer asked, beginning to set up again.

“I’m standing here with my arms around two lovely ladies, and you ask me a question like that?” Roosevelt said. “By all means, sir, by all means. Take all day if you need to-but make sure you do the job right.”

Edna laughed at the president’s joke. Had Roosevelt shown any interest in more than her laugh, she probably would have given him that, too. Nellie did not like being touched without having invited it, but she endured it. She’d endured worse in her time, and Roosevelt took no undue liberties.

Of one thing Nellie was very, very sure: he had no more idea than did Hal Jacobs of how Bill Reach had died. Nor did she intend to let either of them ever learn.

Thinking that, she was smiling when the flash powder went Foomp! again. So was Theodore Roosevelt. So was Edna. “Great!” the photographer said. “The newspapers’ll eat this one up.”

“Bully!” Roosevelt said again. He let the women go and then turned to them. “Now I must depart, I fear. I have to look over this poor tormented town and try to decide how we can set it to rights once more. But now that I have had a cup of your excellent coffee and given you some small portion of the reward you so richly deserve, I do hope any and all slanders against you on the part of your neighbors shall cease forthwith. A very good day to you both.”

And he was gone, a human hurricane in a black suit and straw boater. His bodyguards followed him out. So did the photographer, who had the grace to tip his hat. Nellie felt as if she’d survived yet another bombardment.

As soon as that feeling faded even a little, though, she went to a counter and pulled out a can of red paint and a brush. Roosevelt’s limousine was still making its slow way around the corner when she painted a message on the boards covering her shattered window: OUR COFFEE IS FINE ENOUGH FOR THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. HOW ABOUT YOU?

“Oh, that’s good, Ma,” Edna said, the medal still around her neck.

“It’s better than good,” Nellie said. “It’s bully!” Mother and daughter smiled, at ease with each other for one of the rare times since the shooting started.

A horse-drawn cab driven by a white man whose right arm ended in a hook carried Anne Colleton across the bridge from the Georgia mainland to Jekyll Island. “I hope the weather at the hotel will be a little nicer than this,” she said; down near the Florida border, Georgia could give South Carolina lessons in heat and humidity.

“Which hotel were you at again, ma’am?” the driver asked.

“The Laughing January, it’s called,” she answered.

“Oh, yes, ma’am, that’s on the ocean side. It’s always cooler there. Place got the name on account of, before the war, rich Yankees’d come down here to get away from winter. I had to live up in Yankee country and I had the money, reckon I’d do the same thing.”

The road did not go directly to the Laughing January, but meandered around the rim of the island. Most of the interior was swamp and salt marsh and, on the rare ground that rose slightly higher, woods of pine and moss- draped oak. Egrets and herons, their wings as broad as a man was tall, rose from the marshes and flew off with ungainly haste. A cardinal perched on a branch outthrust from an oak added a splash of brightness.

It caught the driver’s eyes, too. “My blood was about that color when the damnyankees blew up my arm,” he remarked, and then, “You got any kin in the war, ma’am?”

“They gassed one of my brothers,” Anne answered. “He’s dead now. The other one’s an officer on the Roanoke front. He was well, last I heard.” If the driver had been on the point of making any cracks along the lines of a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight, that forestalled him. He kept quiet the rest of the way to the hotel.

Not all the rich-Yankee and Confederate-had stayed at hotels. Their villas had crushed-shell driveways leading off from the road. Some of the fancy houses were in fine shape, with servants bustling about. Some looked abandoned, forlorn, weather-beaten: men from the United States had probably wintered in them. And some, these days, were charred ruins like Marshlands. She wondered how bad the Red risings had been here. She didn’t ask. She didn’t really want to know.

“Here we are,” the cab driver said at last. “The Laughing January.” The place seemed more like a village than a hotel, with individual cottages surrounding a larger building to the north, the south, and the east, toward the ocean. The driver had been right about the weather. Even inside the cab, Anne could feel as much. It wasn’t cool. It wasn’t dry. It was better than it had been.

After hitching the horse, the driver carried her bags into the lobby. He was handy with his hook but used his right arm only for the lighter pieces. Inside, a colored bellhop took charge of them all. And what were you doing, there toward the end of 1915? Anne thought, looking at him. He was all deference now. Under that deference, who could guess what went through his mind? Anne had once thought she could. She didn’t any more.

At the desk, the clerk-a woman-confirmed that her reservation was in order and handed her a shiny brass key with a large 8 stamped onto it. “You’ll have a grand sea view from that cabin, ma’am,” she said, “and the netting on the porch is fine enough to keep out the mosquitoes and the nasty little no-see-’ems, too.”

“That’s good,” Anne said. She got directions on how to find cabin 8, then headed off down the walk with the colored attendant pushing her bags on a little wheeled cart behind her.

“You jus’ here by your lonesome, ma’am?” he asked. “You didn’t bring no servants or nothin’?”

“No,” she said tightly. After folk who had been her servants tried to kill her, she neither wanted anything to do with them nor wanted to acquire new ones, lest they prove to have similarly unfortunate habits.

She gave the attendant half a dollar once he set the bags down on the floor of the front room of her cottage. It would have been an extravagant tip before the war, and was still a good one; he went back toward the main building whistling and with a spring in his step Anne didn’t think was assumed. Would that save her if the Negroes planned another uprising? Her laugh had broken glass in it. She knew better.

She was hanging up a white tennis dress when someone knocked on the frame to the screen door. Maybe it was the bellhop again. Had she dropped or forgotten something? Or maybe-

A Navy officer in tropical whites stood there, his cap under one arm, a cigar dangling from his mouth at a deliberately rakish angle. “Why, Commander Kimball,” Anne drawled, exaggerating her accent to the point of burlesque. “What a pleasant surprise.”

To her genuine rather than assumed surprise, Roger Kimball glared at her instead of grinning. “I didn’t get interested in you because you were cute and sweet and helpless,” he growled. “If I want that, I can buy it on a streetcorner any time I please. I got interested in you because I think you’re the only woman I ever met who’s every bit as ornery and uppity as I am. You don’t like that, I’ll head back to Habana.”

He meant it. She could see as much. She almost did send him packing; if there was one thing she couldn’t stand, it was being upstaged. But he was one of the few men she’d ever met who came close to being as ornery and uppity as she was. She didn’t think he matched her, but he did come close.

And so, when she spoke again, it was in tones she might have used with her brother: “All right, Roger. It takes one to know one, I expect. Come in. How long do you have in Georgia?”