He was turning away, trying to concentrate on what he was doing, half-blocking her voice. Then what she was saying penetrated. He almost jumped back toward her.
"Please, Blake. If I leave, I'll lose a lot of what I'm marking. Can't you go into Cora's? Call Benny. Call Mr. Pallavicino from the school. If they come down and believe what I'm telling them, then maybe someone in the police will pay attention."
"I'm paying attention," Blake said. "Believe me, I'm paying attention right now." He paid more attention when she pointed and he could see, misshapen by the ripples of the water in the creek, the wavering outline of a gun.
His immediate superior dismissed it as "a fool girl trying to attract attention and get some publicity."
Blake wasn't supposed to go out of the chain of command. But he went over to Marvin Tipton, interrupted what he was doing, summarized the situation, and requested permission to go into Cora's and call Benny and Joe.
"For one thing," he said, "Minnie's half frozen already. She was dressed for noon and the temperature really starts dropping once the sun goes down. If nobody pays attention to her, she's prepared to stand on that bridge all night."
"Why?" Marvin asked.
"The mayor gave her that eye. Old Jim Dreeson's artificial eye from World War I, in place of the one she lost at that riot in Jena. As far as Minnie is concerned, she owed Henry. Owed him a lot."
Jacques-Pierre Dumais was truly very relieved when he returned to Madame Haggerty's garage at the end of the day to find that Mademoiselle Hardesty had disappeared. If not mysteriously disappeared, given the hole in the back of the building. He wondered how she managed it. He stood there briefly, deciding upon the most prudent course of action.
Which would be the least conspicuous. He nailed the two broken boards lying at the back of the garage into place, rubbing some dirt over the new, shiny, nail heads. Then he moved the three garbage cans in which he was keeping his records. Not far. Just onto Madame Haggerty's enclosed back porch. It was not difficult to carry them. There were only one or two packets in each. Partly because he had sorted them by topic; partly because even he had no particular desire to try to wrestle anything as heavy as a garbage can packed solid with paper from one place to another.
Then he went home to his trailer to listen to the news on the radio. Tomorrow, he thought, each of the newspapers would publish a special edition. He would need to buy a copy of each.
As he listened to the reports, Jacques-Pierre's dominant emotion was annoyance. The whole thing had been poorly handled, from start to finish. During his time in Grantville, he had read every police procedural novel in the "mystery" section of the public library. He certainly understood how the local authorities felt, up-time, when the feds had moved in on one of their cases.
If only Locquifier had left it to him! He could have managed it all much better.
But, of course, if Locquifier had left it to him, there would have been no attack on the synagogue and no killings.
This was going to be a disaster.
To be fair, though, the miserable debacle at the hospital was his own fault. His own disaster. Somehow, he should have found out about the anti-autopsy group and prevented them from coming.
But the other. Didn't the fools ever learn?
Possibly not, it seemed. He would have to think about that.
He wrote up a report to send to the duke.
"The hard thing, sometimes," Pam said, "is trying to remember how much of what you have reported to whom. Just in case any of the recipients come around asking questions again."
"It was easier back when there were copy machines," Missy said wistfully. "Just put a sheet of paper on the glass, press a button, and there you were."
She got up and looked out the window, then turned around. "Do you know what, Pam? There are kids coming into middle school now who don't remember copy machines at all. The first year middle school students, the fifth graders, were only six or seven years old when the Ring of Fire happened."
Ron walked over and put his arm around her. "You two have diddled around with these reports for long enough, now. One version for Cory Joe, one for the police. They're as done as you're ever going to get them."
"I don't really want to do this," Missy said. "But I guess that I will." The thought of having to go to the two funeral homes, much less the morgue at the hospital, had been looming over her head all day.
"You will, though," Ron said. "Not because you want to. But because you have to."
Missy and Pam didn't recognize any of the bodies in the garages at Central Funeral Home. None of the bodies at Genucci's, either. Those were the men who had been in front of the synagogue. At the hospital, both of them were able to identify one of the anonymous corpses as one of the men who had been taking signs out of Veda Mae's garage and putting them on a handcart. He was the one who had dragged Pam into the garage and had rushed at Missy, but been dragged away by another man wearing a ski mask.