The Dreeson Incident(139)

"Who else would have? Miss Methodist who refused to obey my wishes and join the Baptist church? Tell me that."



"Maybe Brother Green thought of it by himself. I'll clear off and do the dishes."



He sat there at the table, watching her.



"I guess I'll go on, now. I'll sleep on the cot in Weshelle's room."



"No." He grasped her arm. "Damned if you will."



"Bryant, I don't want this."



"I don't give a fuck what you want."



"I guess I knew that already."



"If you think I'm going to let you near that phone again and sit through a rerun, think again."



"I do not want this."



"You gave up the right to 'don't want' the day you said 'I do.' "





She got up the next morning and got Weshelle ready to take to Chandra's. Got herself ready to go to work.



Chandra came to the door and looked at her. "I still have some cover stick," she said, brushing the small birth mark on her cheek. "If you want to use it. Silly to try to save it for special occasions. I don't go to that many parties. It's probably a little dried up already."



Lenore looked at herself in the hall mirror. "Maybe I'd better."



"You'd better," Chandra said. "You don't want to accidentally run into Dad looking like that. Or have someone tell him."





Bryant stayed in town a couple of weeks this time. He wasn't home much, though. He spent a lot of his time at the fire department, of course. That was why he had come back. For lunches, he was at the Willard, talking to Veda Mae Haggerty and that Dumais man.



As far as Lenore was concerned, that was fine. He was welcome to be anywhere as long as he wasn't home.



She really wished that he would never come home again. She wasn't even unhappy that he spent his evenings at the 250 Club.



He came home at night, though. But she had the cover stick.



He was not going to make her quit work.



She was glad when he went back to Naumburg, even though it would only be for ten days. He would be back early in March.



And she managed to avoid her father.



She managed to avoid Lola, too. Lola did not have the kind of temperament to go along with pretending that nothing was wrong. She'd have rung the curtain down, Bryant's sister or not.





"We ought to have done something right away," Donella Hardy said. She looked around at the small group of women who worked with Lenore. "We all suspected that something was wrong. Knew it, really. We ought to have told someone the first time. It's not as if we couldn't tell. Even with the makeup."



"Especially with the makeup," Catrina said. "Lenore doesn't usually bother to wear any at all. Maybe if we had done something then, it wouldn't have come to this."



"So are we all agreed to be ashamed of ourselves?" Andrea Constantinault had a tendency to take charge of things.



"Yeah," Faye said. "But I think we ought to do something more than that. Let's talk to Judge Riddle and Preston Richards. Maurice Tito. There ought to be something we can do. We've got a couple of weeks to get something in place before Bryant comes back again."



"Preferably something that keeps Wes Jenkins out of it," Linda Beth Rush added. "Wes has a temper. He always has had. Personally, I think we ought to call Lola."



"Lola?" Andrea had been one of the guests at Tom and Rita Simpson's wedding, not someone native to Grantville. Even nearly four years after the Ring of Fire, she didn't always come up with the connections right away.



"Bryant's sister. She works for Jim McNally, the optician."



"Won't she be more likely to try to shield him?"



Linda Beth shook her head. "There were problems with Bryant, even when he was a kid. Torturing kittens kinds of problems. He seemed to be normal enough when he grew up, as far as I know. But he had problems with a couple of his girlfriends over in Fairmont. Lola's a realist. She'll want Weshelle out of there."





Pastor Kastenmayer looked out over the gathering. It had ended up being a couple of dozen people, even though nearly half of them were his up-time catechumens and their girlfriends. A full half of them, counting sisters of the girlfriends. Walpurga Hercherin had arranged it.



Walpurga was perfectly capable of arranging such a thing. She would be capable of managing a household. A large household, with servants. That, of course, was what she had been expected to do, as the daughter of a village councilman, a Vollbauer. What she had been prepared to do, before the destruction of Quittelsdorf. She was standing behind Hedwig Altschulerin, a determined expression on her face.