The Dreeson Incident(52)

"This Beckworth, then, is your brother-in-law."



"Not any more. They're divorced and both looking, sort of. They've been stuck at that level for five years, though, so I'm not holding my breath that either one of them will get married again. She caught his eyes wandering while she still hadn't quite gotten her figure back from the second kid. Well, more than his eyes wandering. She caught him and this other gal doing the horizontal tango, ten toes up and ten toes down."



"She initiated the divorce procedure, then?"



"Damn tootin'. Hell, but she was mad. Called Mom and Dad, who drove over from Clarksburg. Called me—I was working in Fairmont then. Called Latham's father. It's got to be humiliating for a woman when her husband goes out and diddles a woman a dozen years older than she is. The stuff she said about Velma, you would hardly believe."



"Velma?" Jacques-Pierre asked tentatively.



"Velma Hardesty," Bryant answered. "You know her. I've seen you talking to each other."



"Yes, I do know her. We were introduced by Veda Mae Haggerty."



"Just like us, huh?" Bryant commented.



Jacques-Pierre nodded. He was thinking that Velma Hardesty could become a liability. More than merely a cause of la migraine. When Mauger got back . . .



Jacques-Pierre did not particularly like the fat Netherlander, but the man was rich. Certainly rich enough to attract Madame Hardesty. Certainly, if all went well, rich enough to remove her from this town.



That wasn't part of his assignment, of course. But in some things, a man had to look out for his own welfare. Take the initiative. Much more of Madame Hardesty's conversation and he would run out into the night, screaming.



Mauger had not tried to lay a hand on Madame Hardesty. When he left town the morning after their introduction, though, she had come to the hotel to tell him good-bye. He had assured her that he would be back in a few weeks.



That was a possibility with some potential. If properly managed, it might even offer some hope.





Chapter 18





Grantville


Simon Jones stood at the livery stable next to the still-under-construction St. Thomas the Apostle Lutheran Church, right outside the Ring of Fire, on the main road to Badenburg. Really the not-yet-much-more-than-a-foundation St. Thomas the Apostle church. With winter coming on, it would probably keep that status until next spring.



They had come into Grantville from the west. The trip back had been shorter. The Duchy of Tirol had granted them safe-conducts. It seemed that among the changes in the political picture, the duchess-regent there, who was Italian, was sending out feelers to the USE. Probably nervous about Maximilian of Bavaria.



Coming through Bavaria would not have been prudent. Not at all. Swabia was still really uneasy, too. So they'd gone northwest through Switzerland, and then down the Rhine. Whatever else Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar might be up to, he was keeping the river open for commercial traffic. Then, up the Main to Frankfurt, the Imperial Road to Erfurt, and then the Erfurt-Badenburg-Grantville route.



The crews had done a lot to improve the Badenburg-Grantville road since the embassy left for Venice last winter. Of course, Thuringia had been through another prime road-improvement season since then. Now the road was not only graded and ditched, with a single wagon-width of gravel for bad weather, but macadamized on a double track, starting right where Route 250 came to an end and going all the way to Badenburg. Same thing from there up to the trade route.



After he had transferred the Gentileschis' luggage, he looked down toward the trolley stop just inside the Ring of Fire's border. He was very glad to be getting off a horse and onto a trolley. Very. He understood the priorities that were pushing the railroad north past Magdeburg. It would be great when a spur went west. It would be worth a big detour not to have to travel from Erfurt by horseback.



Pushing it south was so far off that there wasn't even any point in dreaming. He'd probably be dead before people could get on the train in Nürnberg and get off again in Grantville.



Ron and Gerry Stone, ignoring the trolley, were starting off for Lothlorien on foot. He looked after them, a little wistfully. Thirty or forty years ago, he would have had that much energy, too. At the age of fifty-two, he welcomed a seat on the trolley. A seat in which he could sit and worry about Gerry until he got home and finally saw his wife and kids again.



The trolley station had a pay phone. Not one that accepted coins. You paid the station attendant and got to use his phone. Simon called Mary Ellen and told her that he was on the very final leg of the trip back.



She said that she would let everyone at First Methodist know. And call the Nobilis and let Prudentia know that her mother was on her way.