Ring of Fire II

by Eric Flint

  "She's still going by 'Murphy.' Don't you want her to be a Stull? As I said, she's triple sharp."

  "I hadn't really thought about it."

  "Maybe you ought to," Amber Lee advised.

  "She frightens me a little."

  "How?"

  "When I first saw her standing there in the doorway at Ma's place, I thought she was another Pat. A little taller, a little sturdier, a shade less blonde, but Pat. Until she shook my hand and looked at me with those eyes. Not blue like Pat's. Dark gray. Not judging, exactly. Measuring. Assessing. Evaluating."

  Amber Lee examined him. "She's yours, too. Have you ever looked at your eyes in the mirror? Are you going to claim her?"

  "The day after the shooting, in the hospital, Joe was wondering if she would be willing to claim me after all these years."

  "That's probably what she's evaluating," Amber Lee went back to her paperwork.

  "I think we're done." Noelle closed the ledger she had been using. "At least, as done as we can get until we go through some more of the records tomorrow. Bolender, Bell, Cunningham. I knew that I was looking for those names. But with the peculiarities and discrepancies in these requisitions for machine parts, I keep thinking I should add a couple more. Barclay. Myers."

  Amber Lee frowned. "Maybe I should talk to my mother about this. I have a feeling that Barclay and Myers have some kind of a family tie, but it escapes me. I don't know either of them, myself. Maybe you ought to ask Scott, too."

  Noelle raised her eyebrows.

  "Scott Blackwell, my ex. You must have met him when you were down in Franconia."

  "Oh. Sure. But why would he know?"

  "He and Stan Myers were both in the fire department. And in the National Guard together. So he may know what kind of a person he is. Or I can ask Dennis to do it, if you don't want to. I just feel a little odd about asking Scott myself, now that I've remarried."

  "Yeah." Noelle tucked one foot underneath her, making her perch on the high three-legged stool a little precarious. She balanced by leaning one elbow on the podium desk that held the ledger.

  "Not that we're on bad terms. We married in '93 and divorced five years later. Married because we were getting to that age and everyone said we were so well suited and every now and then we had sex, which was, errr, nice, because neither of us was having sex with anyone else. And we had known each other a long time and each of us knew that the other one didn't have herpes or genital warts or any of the other nasty STDs to which human flesh is heir. So my parents paid for us to get married with all the usual trimmings. Then after five years and no kids we realized that we bored each other so thoroughly that we could scarcely remember why we got married, so we divorced."

  Noelle raised her eyebrows.

  "Sorry to disillusion you, kid. Just having a lot in common really doesn't mean that a couple ought to get married. Scott and I tried to make it work. Counseling, various things that were supposed to put the zip back in a marriage like going out on dates, or having getaway weekends. We worked on communication. All that stuff. We bored each other just as much on a date or at a resort as we did at home. We didn't fight. He'd go and find a golf game or head for the library to do homework for his classes and I'd go to the gym and talk to the other aerobics instructors."

  Noelle said, "I see." But she didn't.

  "I heard he's married again. A German woman. All I know about her is that she works for Veronica Dreeson's schools. I hope he hasn't chosen someone else just because she seems to be suitable. Not again."

  "I haven't met her, but she's pregnant, I know. Should be very close to term, by now."

  "That's good. But, ah, Sterling still feels a little bad about it all because Scott had a couple years of college and he only has a GED, plus Scott's the top military administrator down in Würzburg and Sterling's just an ordinary soldier, so sometimes he starts worrying that he's a comedown for me. So I'd rather not ask Scott myself. Especially since Sterling's up north in Wismar and I'm here in Erfurt."

  "Is he?" Noelle asked.

  "Is who what?"

  "Is Sterling a comedown?" Noelle asked.

  "You don't beat around the bush, do you, honey?"

  "Well, I sort of need to know. I expect they're going to send me back to Franconia. We haven't seen the last of this scam yet. So it's better if I figure out where the pitfalls are, if I'll be working with both of you—with you here and with Scott down in Würzburg."

  Amber Lee looked at her. "Depends on how you look at it, I suppose. Economically, Sterling's something of a comedown from what I had when I was married to Scott, but not all that much. Scott wasn't a top military administrator back then. He was working as a security guard at night and going to college during the day. In any case, I hadn't been married to Scott for a couple of years before the Ring of Fire and I didn't have alimony or anything. I was self-supporting and not all that high-paid. Then when I got caught in the Ring of Fire, I joined the army as a private. Grantville didn't have much use for aerobics instructors in 1631. That's not high-paid, either."

  Noelle nodded.

  Amber Lee went on. "Sterling's not a comedown from a personal point of view, for sure. I was married to Scott for five years and never wanted to get pregnant. I was on the pill the whole time. Once I started sleeping with Sterling, I never even tried to get hold of birth control, whatever they have here down-time. I wanted to have a baby as soon as I could. By him. Whether he married me or not. He hadn't said anything about marriage in advance. But he hadn't said anything about birth control, either and he sure wasn't using anything, so I figured that I was playing fair enough. And when I told him, he thought about getting married right away. In fact, he said that he'd been trying to get me pregnant so that I might think about getting married to him. He couldn't believe that I would for any other reason."

  Noelle giggled. "Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments."

  "What?"

  "It's poetry. One of Shakespeare's sonnets. Whenever I'm in Grantville, I get Father Smithson at St. Mary's to read some Shakespeare out loud to me, so I can hear how it would have sounded at the Globe Theater."

  "Poetry always left me cold. No matter how much of it they made me read in English class." Amber Lee smiled. "I just wish they'd send Sterling back so I'd have a chance at getting pregnant again. I'm thirty-four, so I don't want to put it off any longer than I have to. But, I suppose, since I'm still nursing the twins and they're only five months old, my chances wouldn't be all that good."

  "Oh." Noelle looked at the playpen behind Amber Lee's desk. "They're so sweet. Jamie and Pel, that is. If you need a babysitter while I'm here in Erfurt . . ."

  "I may take you up on that. But back to what you asked first, about whether Sterling is a 'comedown.' One thing to keep in mind is that the way you feel about a guy doesn't necessarily make sense to anyone else."

  "That is one thing that I've never doubted. Considering the way Mom has run her life."

  "Which sort of brings us back to your parents." Amber Lee twisted her braid around her index finger. "I scarcely know Pat. I only met her since Dennis brought her up to Erfurt after Maurice Tito dismissed the divorce case. But you do know her—grew up with her. As for him . . . Actually, Dennis is a very good boss. One of the best I've ever had. Fair and really concerned about his employees. You might want to give him a chance, so to speak. You might get to like him."

  "I'm trying." Noelle unwound her feet and stood up. "I'm trying."

  "I'd rather," Noelle put her coffee cup down. "Rather have a place of my own than take up a room in Juliann's house, since you and Mom are using it whenever you're in Grantville. And I'm pretty sure that Mom would rather that I did. Have a place of my own, I mean. Uh. It seems to embarrass her a little having me there when the two of you have . . . ah . . . taken up with each other again. Even if you both spend most of the time here in Erfurt."

  Dennis thought, a little reluctantly, that Noelle was probably right about that. Almost certainly r
ight about that. In Erfurt, Noelle was staying in temporary employee housing, to Pat's obvious relief. His place only had one bedroom. It wasn't as if he had needed more than that before Pat came up, so he had let couples with children have the larger apartments.

  "The Casa Verde apartments are nice," Noelle went on. "Not as fancy as Casa Blanca, but nice. Almost as new and a lot more affordable. So I'll rent an efficiency there as soon as I can get the money saved up. That's all I'll need when I spend so much time out of town. I just thought I ought to let you know that I don't intend to perch on your doorstep indefinitely."

  "You do have money. Quite a bit of it, as a matter of fact."

  Noelle looked at Dennis blankly.

  "Part of it's in the bank in Grantville. Part of it's in real estate, though most of that was in Clarksburg and got left behind in the Ring of Fire. Part of it's invested in the business." He looked at his fingernails.

  "Where did it come from?"

  "Pat wouldn't take child support from me."

  "Why on earth not?" Noelle exploded. "God knows, there were plenty of times we could have used it."

  "She said that she didn't want to set up a situation where you were better off than the other girls." Dennis sighed. "I told her that would be fine. That she should just use the money for whatever she needed. For all of you. That she didn't have to spend it just on you. But . . ."

  He shook his head. "It was just one more of those eternal head-banging arguments that we used to get into. She didn't want any of the privileges of being a wife, she said, unless she was carrying out the duties." He looked at Noelle with a kind of helpless frustration.

  "Never mind. Yeah, I recognize the way Mom thinks. That a wife paid her husband to support her and the kids by letting him have sex whenever he wanted it. And then she apologized to God for having sex by having the kids and needing to change diapers for them and such. Going around in a circle. She learned that was how it was supposed to be. That's what they taught her when she was growing up. She never thought she deserved anything from you because, um, she never felt dutiful about you. You, uh, had maybe better ask Bernadette and Denise about that stuff, not me, if you want to find out more. All I know is what I wasn't supposed to overhear."

  "So I just set it aside for you." Dennis thought he would ignore the rest of what she had just said, at least for the time being. "When you were getting ready to start college, when you were eighteen, I wanted to give it to you. So you could pick the school you wanted and not have to scrape and scrimp. But Pat got upset about the other girls again."

  Noelle folded her hands on the table in front of her and closed her eyes, trying not to clench her fists. The money had been there. She could have gone to a four-year college for a four-year degree. She could have gone to WVU in Morgantown, like Jen Richards. Could have majored in what she was interested in, instead of making the hard calculations about what field would bring her a living wage as soon as possible. But then she would have probably been left up-time like Jen and Mom would have been here with no one, really. It was hard to count Keenan, and Aunt Suzanne had her own family and was busy. So did Denise. Even if Mom and Dennis had gotten back together, there would still have been a couple of years when Mom was alone.

  "That's okay," she said. "Don't worry about it. But the others didn't want to go to college, anyway. Maggy's grades weren't good enough, to start with. They could have been, but she just didn't focus, and she was as happy as a clam working at the riding stables. Pauly got married right out of high school. She and Dillon bought a tow truck together and she drove it from his father's garage for Triple-A. Patty just wasn't interested. She made quite a bit of money waiting tables at the lounge, right away—more than a beginning teacher makes. And she liked to party."

  "Anyway." Dennis came back to the topic at hand. "The money's there, in your name. If you'll come down to the bank with me one of these days, when we're both in Grantville, I'll have Coleman Walker put your signature on the account instead of mine. I'll take you to talk to Huddy Colburn so you can find out what's coming in from the real estate that's left in more detail. I've just been having him reinvest it in more when enough built up and checking the quarterly reports. I'll give you those. They already have your name on them and I can have him take mine off. And if you want to draw on the part that's in the business, just give me a couple of months' notice. There's more there, really. It's more profitable than drawing interest in the bank. But what's in the bank should be enough to cover just about anything reasonable that you need right away."

  "Okay. Uh. Thanks a lot."

  "You're welcome." Dennis didn't want to push things with the girl. He was just glad that he had been able to help her out with this.

  When Noelle looked at the papers covering the bank account, she thought that there certainly was enough to cover anything she needed right away. Including the safety deposit and three months' advance rent on an apartment of her own. It was more money than she had ever expected to see at one time in her life.

  Of course, that hadn't been much. Her financial expectations had been pretty modest.

  Grantville

  October 1634

  "How did it go in Erfurt, Noelle?" Tony asked.

  "I got to know Dennis a little better."

  "Did you like him?" Denise asked. She put down saucers with fruit cobbler on the coffee table.

  "I'm not sure. Juliann used to talk about him some, and his brothers. She said that he was different from Joe. That when storms came down, Dennis was like a tough old tree with deep roots growing into a cliff side. That he'd bend over before the wind and water and then, when the calm came, manage to stand up straight again. With some scars and gouges, the worse for wear, but stand up again and keep going."

  "Interesting." Bernadette put down her cobbler. "What about Joe?"

  "That he was like a flint boulder. He wouldn't bend in a storm. He'd just sit there and part the waters. Until they eroded the ground out from under him. Then he'd crash down the cliff and break into a thousand fragments." Noelle put down her empty saucer. "Thanks for having me over, but I really do have to go."

  "It's odd." Tony sat down again after seeing her out the door. "When she first came back from Franconia, I was thinking to myself how unexpectedly resilient Noelle had been as a field agent, considering how young she still is. We've mostly still been thinking of her as Pat's. There may be more of Dennis in her than we thought. Maybe Juliann Stull spotted that. Of course, Juliann knew Dennis a lot better than any of us did."

  "Noelle's not like Pat." Denise gathered up the cups to take them into the kitchen. "Don't be fooled by her looks. She's been feeling responsible for Pat for the last ten years. Totally responsible for her since Patty finished high school in '95 and moved out."

  Bernadette picked up the forks and saucers. "If you ask me, the greatest kindness Dennis could do her is somehow convince her that he'll really take Pat's problems over now, for good, and cut her loose to live a life of her own without that constant worry."

  "What do you think, Joe?" Aura Lee asked.

  "Hard to tell. Noelle seems friendly enough. A little reserved, I guess, but that's not so surprising under the circumstances. That she's a little hesitant."

  "Do you think that she might be a little more . . . forthcoming . . . maybe, with someone younger. Maybe if Eden talked to her?"

  "We could try it, I guess. But Economic Resources keeps her pretty busy. She doesn't have a lot of time to socialize. They'll probably be sending her back to Franconia one of these days."

  Aura Lee looked at him. "Doesn't that tell you that we ought to get a move on?"

  Eden Stull decided to leave the dishes for the time being. Supper hadn't gone badly. But it hadn't gone particularly well, either. So far, she hadn't found any opening to bring up the question of whether Noelle would be willing to change her name to Stull. "I was there. When Francis Murphy shot Dennis, I mean. With the babies. My parents were really ticked off that he shot into the parlor of the fun
eral home with the five of us there. As if we ought to be immune to that sort of thing happening."

  She stood up. "Help me get the kids to bed, will you? After that, if there are any questions you want answered, fire away. That's why I asked you over."

  "I'm not sure you can answer my main question at all." Noelle got up too. "Considering that you weren't even born back when it was going on and Harlan was just a baby. Why did my mom fall in love with your husband's uncle, who's my father, to start with?"

  "Well." Eden started to shoo her sons in the direction of the stairs. "That's a good one. You might as well ask why Julia fell for Tom. Those are Harlan's parents—they were left up-time. Or Aura Lee for Joe. Or why I went nuts over Harlan. Or, for that matter, why Blanche Leek fell for Ben—he's the guys' first cousin, son of Juliann's sister Lula. They're up in Magdeburg. I suppose you don't see any obvious reason or you wouldn't be asking."