Denise hadn't intended to waste any of her energy crying. She could hear his voice now. "Don't get mad; get even."
Don't worry, Daddy, I plan to. Minnie saw the guy who started it. Killing the mayor and the preacher, I mean. The reason I had to call you. Don't worry, Daddy. I'm your Princess Baby. I'm your pip. Minnie saw him. We'll take care of it. Starting as soon as possible.
"Don't get mad; get even." Denise ignored her tears. But Daddy had never said anything about "Don't get sad," now that she thought about it. Maybe he wouldn't have minded. It had never come up.
Gerry Stone, who had walked all the way from Rudolstadt, loaned her a clean handkerchief. Then another. He had remembered to put a half dozen in his pocket that morning, he had said before the service. She had wondered why.
Minnie's voice went on.
After Jenny's people had removed the casket, Christin thanked everybody for coming. Especially Ronnie and Inez, considering the circumstances, and that the ambulance had to bring Inez downtown again.
There wasn't going to be a graveside service. Christin had told Jenny to take care of the rest of it without any fuss.
It had been a considerable shock to Christin's parents, Mike and Amina George, when they read the obituaries and biographies, to find out that she and Buster actually were married and had been for years.
They showed up at the memorial service. They waited in the lobby afterwards.
Christin was in no mood for a reconciliation. "If you weren't willing to accept me with Buster when you thought he was a live bum, you don't have any business trying to claim some of the reflected glory now that he's a dead hero."
"Mom," Denise said.
"Plus the first thing you'll say is that if I need to, I can bring the kid home and you'll support me. I know the business as well as Buster did and can damn well keep on running it myself. I don't need you, or anybody else."
She hadn't fought it, though, when Benny, with Louise and Doreen, and Minnie, had taken Denise over to meet her grandparents. Christin herself refused to have anything to do with it, but she hadn't fought it.
Benny introduced Denise to her grandparents, her aunt, and her aunt's husband Bob Atkins. She vaguely recognized her cousin Amina from seeing her at school, but she hadn't known that they were cousins. Amina was almost two years older and separated by three grades. She nodded at her cousin George Atkins, who was older.
It was all pretty stiff. It was unsatisfactory for everyone.
She didn't offer to shake hands. Both of her hands were hanging onto Gerry's elbow. Then she went back to Mom, who asked Minnie to please ride her cycle home, because she wasn't sure she could handle it safely right now.
Christin was perfectly calm. West Virginia women were not given to wailing in public.
"Do you need a lift?" Louise asked her.
"We'll be all right," Denise answered. "I have my cycle here. I'll take Mom home in the sidecar. But if you like, you could follow us and pick up Minnie after she drops Gerry off at Lothlorien and garages Mom's, so I don't have to bring her back to town. I'd—well, I'd really thank you for that."
The general Grantville reaction was of two minds. The ones who thought that Mike and Amina had meant well and that Christin's way of looking at it was a little bit skewed. The ones who thought that Christin had hit it right on the nose. Either way, it was pretty clear that she wasn't going to change her mind.
There wasn't a lot of "give" in Christin George.
Most people agreed that Denise had quite a bit of her mother in her, and not just the good looks, either. That was the consensus at Cora's, anyway.
Chapter 51
Erfurt, March 1635
Mathurin Brillard always enjoyed his morning paper.
This morning's was truly fascinating. Being a stranger to Grantville, he had not realized at the time that he had not merely assassinated the mayor of Grantville, precisely as Locquifier had told him to do, and the Calvinist minister, more or less as a bonus, but that it was significant that he had fired those two shots in the general direction of a dozen or so middle-aged to elderly ladies standing next to a rolling cart and on the steps of the synagogue. Given his marksmanship, the women really hadn't been in any danger. But he realized now that the residents of Grantville didn't know that, so their fury was all the greater than if he'd simply shot the two men.
The group of women included . . .
In addition to the Calvinist minister's wife: Annabelle Graham, the wife of the SoTF president, Ed Piazza; Eleanor Jenkins, who was now the SoTF Red Cross president, and her daughter-in-law Deborah, who was wife of the increasingly prominent industrialist Charles Jenkins who had just won election as West Virginia County's senator to the SoTF congress. It appeared that Jenkins' wife also ran the town's teacher training program and was the daughter of Willie Ray Hudson, well known as the first president of the Grange movement. Not to mention Veleda Riddle, the mother of the chief justice of the SoTF Supreme Court, who was also the president of the SoTF League of Women Voters and reorganizer of Grantville's Episcopalian Church; her daughter-in-law Kathryn, wife of the chief justice of the SoTF Supreme Court; Mary Jo Kindred, the wife of Grantville's senior newspaper publisher; Claudette, the wife of the Reverend Al Green of the First Baptist Church, and Linda Bartolli, organist at St. Mary Magdelene Catholic Church.