Читать книгу The Last Government Girl - Ellen Herbert - Страница 8

2

Sunday, March 26, 1944

Three miles outside Washington, DC

In that gray in-between when night has slipped away and dawn waits on the doorsill, Vernon Lanier found the girl on the towpath beside the C&O Canal. She lay stomach down, her head to one side, her skirt hiked up, showing her thighs. Lines had been drawn on the backs of her bare legs to look as if she wore seamed stockings.

“Miss?” His own voice startled him. “Miss?”

She didn’t move. Her coal black hair had unraveled from the roll that wreathed her head. A high heel dangled off one foot, her other foot bare, her sole pink as the inside of a seashell.

A well of sorrow rose in Vernon. What had brought her to this place? But he knew, oh he knew. He was young once, full of sap and desperate to be alone with Bess.

He knelt beside her, dampness seeping into the knees of his overalls. Around him, the world went silent, even the doves hushed, and the skin on the back of his neck prickled. He brought his fingertip to her face. Her skin felt cold and firm and dead.

He leapt to his feet. He could not help her. He picked up her baby blue coat lying nearby and read its label: This garment was sewn with love for Doris R. Reynolds by her mother. He covered Doris in her coat made with love.

From the towpath something glinted. He dug out a piece of jewelry, two joined silver bars, familiar somehow. High boy voices sounded behind him. Probably kids going fishing, but he wasn’t waiting to find out.

He dropped the pin in his pocket, flung his feed sack over his shoulder, and took off, splashing through swampy woods a few hundred yards until he reached the Potomac, the river he loved like a friend. Here it was wide, studded with rocks, its current treacherous. Fog rose from it as if the river were breathing heavy.

He skittered along its shore and scrambled up the embankment to the Chain Bridge.

While he felt awful about Doris, he wished he hadn’t walked so close to her on the towpath, its dirt soft from recent rain. Mud had seeped into the bottoms of his work boots. He’d pushed tacks through their soles to keep from slipping when he shingled the roofs of tempos on the National Mall. He’d taken the tacks out, but tiny holes remained. His soles were like fingerprints. They identified him.

Just as the sun pushed up from the horizon, he ran onto the bridge.

“What’s your hurry, mister?” called a fisherman, his hat stuck with lures, fishing line angled into the rapids. “Seen you running hell bent for leather upriver.”

Vernon tugged his cap low. No sense giving this man a better look. The police liked to find some tramp to haul in and charge. While Vernon might look like a tramp, he was just a mountain man come down the Potomac to work for the war effort.

“Catch anything?” Vernon tried to sound casual.

“Grandpappy catfish long as your arm.”

Fishermen and their lies, not that Vernon would challenge him.

Usually he took the towpath to Great Falls, Maryland, but today he needed to travel far from the canal. Soon police would be swarming around Doris. He listened for a siren. None came.

Once over the bridge on the Virginia side, he felt eyes watching him. He kept looking over his shoulder. He walked fast, not quite a run but almost.

The sun had climbed into the blue dome when an engine revved behind him.

A delivery truck was barreling downhill toward him. The road’s shoulder narrowed here. He had nowhere to go.

The engine drowned all sounds. White metal filled his vision. He stood paralyzed, heart kicking at his chest. He was going to die. When the truck’s bumper was almost upon him, he leapt the guardrail, tumbling downhill through soft weeds. A sycamore’s red trunk stopped him. Dazed, he opened his eyes and stared into the sycamore’s bare branches, scratching at the sky.

“Hey buddy,” a man called from the road. “You all right?”

“I reckon.” Vernon patted the tree trunk in thanks and crawled up. The man offered his hand over the guardrail. Vernon hesitated. Was this the driver who almost hit him?

Vernon let the man haul him onto the road. “Your brakes give out?”

“We weren’t the ones tried to run you over.” He was a bald man in overalls dirty as Vernon’s. “Never seen a man fly till you went over into that ravine.”

Vernon heard the mountains in his voice and accepted the bandana he offered. “Thanks.” He wiped blood from his chin. His arms were scratched up good, too.

A horn honked. An empty chicken truck idled ahead. The driver and another man sat in the cab. “We’re headed the other side of Martinsville,” the man said. “Where you going?”

“Going home,” Vernon said. “Not far over the West Virginia line.”

“Then hop aboard, brother.”

Vernon grabbed his sack and climbed into the truck bed among empty chicken cages. Once they started moving, feathers flew like a snow storm. While his body ached from his tumble, cool wind blew sense into him. With tires and so much else rationed, a lot of vehicles on the road were unsafe. That delivery truck’s brakes probably gave out, and the driver was too scared to come back and check on Vernon.

Returning home usually cheered him, but not this time. In his mind’s eye, he saw Doris’s neck with its red burns the width of a man’s belt and her frightened eyes. She was murdered only a few hundred yards from the abandoned lockkeeper’s cottage, where he had slept last night. She must have screamed, but he didn’t hear her.

He took the twin silver bars from his pocket. Captain’s bars. Did the pin belong to her killer? It might be a clue. He wished he could put it back. It was wrong for him to take it. He vowed to find a way to make this right.

A little before midnight, his wife, Bess, in her nubby beige bathrobe opened the door. “Welcome, Vernon. Bet you’re hungry. Got stew and biscuits right ready for you.”

All that was home rushed at him. “Glad to be back, Bess.” Once he finished eating, they sat on the sofa, where he told Bess about finding Doris.

“She was probably drunk and sleeping it off.” Bess’s tone was sharp. “Don’t go back to sin city, Vernon. Plenty of jobs right here. Farms need laborers, and there’s the new Pet Milk plant in Shepherdstown.”

He sighed. How quickly they slid into their old argument. They sat side-by-side, their shoulders touching, but not their hearts or minds.

“I’m a roofer, Bess, and needed in Washington.” He lowered his voice. “Laugh if you want, but our foreman Red tells us we’re fighting Hitler one shingle at a time.” By day’s end when Vernon’s back felt permanently bent, Red’s words made him stand straighter.

Bess turned to him. “I worry, Vernon. You shouldn’t stay in a place where no one knows you. What if you go sleepwalking again?”

He sandwiched her face between his hands and kissed her hard, hoping to ignite the white hot flame that once burned between them.

She pushed him away as usual. “You’re almost fifty, Vernon. Act your age.”

Aching for what they’d once had, he sat back, rolled a cigarette, and lit it.

He wouldn’t argue about Washington, but he wanted her to understand about the girl. “She wasn’t drunk, Bess. Girls like her are coming from all over the country to work for government agencies.” He tugged smoke deep into his lungs. “They do office jobs to free up men to go fight in the war.”

The world was involved in a great struggle, and he had taken a side. The military wouldn’t accept him, but he found a way to do his part. He had roofed acres of government buildings and would roof acres more.

Bess hugged her bathrobe tighter. “Don’t kid yourself, Vernon. These gals come to Washington to get away from their folks and go wild, not because they’re patriotic. And that gal you found was a floozy who got right what she deserved.”

“You’re wrong, Bess. She was no floozy. She’s what they call a government girl.”