"Yeah, okay," Magnus muttered, tearing the napkin into further tiny strips. By now he had what looked like an enormous mound of confetti in front of him. "I guess I'll go tell her she isn't stupid, okay?"
I hope she takes that in the spirit that it's intended. "Yeah," Eric said. "That would be a good start."
* * *
When they got outside, Eric walked around a bit, looking for the others. He finally located Ace over by the gas pumps, talking to a man standing in the back door of a Winnebago that was pulled up to the pumps.
He ambled over in that direction. As he got closer, he could see that the 'bago had been custom-painted on the side, with the legend "Wild Bill's Geese." But instead of the wildlife picture Eric expected to go along with something like that, there was a design of a gold laurel crown surrounding a sable oval on which was placed a gold spearhead, point up.
Now, Eric was familiar with both SCAdians and Rennies, and this didn't look like anything that either of those groups would have painted on the side of an RV. And while there were a fair number of SCAdians who were getting long in the tooth these days, he didn't think too many of them were collecting Social Security.
Besides, there were none of the other medievaloid trappings that the SCAdians tended to bedeck their vehicles with. No "I Stop For Dragons" bumper stickers, no rack of rattan weapons tied to the back, or pavilion lashed down to the top. In fact, the bit of art had a sort of military precision about it, as if it was some sort of insignia.
Okay. That's a little freaky, Eric thought. Those geese must be really fighting back.
The man was quite old—Eric judged him to be well over eighty—and his skin was dappled with the spots of age. He held himself erect with the aid of an aluminum cane. What little hair he had left was snow white. But for all the fragility of age, there was a vitality and good humor about him that made Eric smile in spite of his current problems. And he was treating Ace with gentlemanly courtesy that was, at the same time, not at all condescending.
"Eric!" Ace called, waving at him. "This is Mr. Jedburgh. He and his son are going up to Atlantic City to see a show, and he says he'd be more than happy to give all of us a ride."
Eric approached, trying to get more of a feel for the man, and getting nothing but good vibrations. "Not a problem, sonny," Jedburgh said. "I had more than one set of wheels, ah, give out on me in my time. Always at the worst possible moment, too. There are five of you, the young lady said?"
"And a dog," Eric said.
"Always liked dogs. Adam Jedburgh, at your service, as the young lady told you," he added, holding out his hand.
"Eric Banyon. This is my—" Whoops! He caught himself just in time, and finished smoothly "—son, Magnus." It wouldn't do to blow his cover story now. They had to live with it all the time, not just in the courtroom.
Eric shook the proffered hand. For all the man's age, his grip was dry and firm.
"You look a little young to have a son that age," Adam Jedburgh said shrewdly. "I'd have taken you for brothers."
"I'm a youthful indiscretion," Magnus said promptly.
"Very youthful, and very indiscreet," Eric said, with a grin. "Thank you very much, Mr. Jedburgh. We really appreciate this. Ace, Magnus, you stay here, and I'll go round up Hosea and Kayla. I'll be back in a minute." And that would give him a little time out of sight to toss a bit of glamourie over himself so he looked a bit closer to the age he ought to be by the World's Time.
"Don't dawdle. Slot machines wait for no man," Adam Jedburgh called cheerfully after him.
Eric found Kayla and Hosea over in the designated dog-walking area. Hosea had Jeanette slung over his back in her soft carry-case, and Kayla had the end of Molly's red-leather leash looped over her wrist as the pug wandered aimlessly about. She glanced up as Eric approached, her gaze turning expectant as she saw his expression.
"Believe it or not, Ace found us a ride," Eric said. "Not just that, but a comfortable and friendly ride."
Hosea grinned. "She said she'd do better at it without me around to scare people off, and Ah guess she was right after all."
Kayla grinned. "Girl power!"
Eric shrugged. "Something like that, I guess."
"Let's go, then," Kayla said. "Come on, Molly. Manners."
When they got back, the Winnebago had pulled up past the pumps and was waiting among the parked eighteen-wheelers. Another man—a younger version of Adam—climbed down from the driver's side door and walked back toward them.
"I'm Douglas Jedburgh, Adam's son. Is this the rest of you?" He looked friendly, but cautious. Eric didn't blame him. He was taking a risk, no matter what his father had promised. Five strangers, three of them young men—could be trouble.
Then again—five strangers and a pug? Not the kind of combination you expected to be pulling carjackings. . . .
Molly barked cheerfully and he reached down to ruffle her ears.
"This is all of us," Eric agreed. "I'm Eric, this is Kayla and Hosea. You've already met my son"—he'd nearly tripped himself up again, and once again, caught himself at the last moment—"Magnus, and Ace. We're really grateful for the ride."
"Well, we were going that way anyway. Dad said I should get out of the house and stop moping just because Mary wasn't there, and he wanted to see the fleshpots—we're from Minnesota, you see," he added, as if that explained everything. "Normally I wouldn't pick up hitchhikers, but Dad's a good judge of character. He's had to be."
Eric glanced sideways at Kayla. She looked perfectly serene. Whatever had motivated Douglas and his father to take off for the wicked city, it wasn't Douglas's grieving widowhood, though that would be a reasonable guess for a man his age. So the wife probably wasn't "the late."
"So where is your wife?" Eric asked. "If I'm not being too nosy."
"Well, I did lay myself open to the question. Climb on in and we'll get moving. Dad'll be happy to answer it in great detail."
As they walked up to the RV, Eric saw Hosea blink in startlement at the design on the side, but the big man climbed in without comment, and Eric and Kayla followed, climbing in through the middle door.
A lot of the more well-off Rennies Eric had known had possessed RVs. Some of them had gutted the insides and completely redone them. Some of them had left them pretty much the way they were. They'd run the gamut from shabby-but-serviceable to works of art, like Suleika the dancer's vintage Airstream trailer.
This one had a military neatness to it. While obviously several years old, well-used and well-loved, everything was well-cared-for and in its place. The cabinets were secured with widgets to keep the doors from flying open accidentally when the RV was moving, and seatbelts—bolted to the frame of the vehicle—had been added to the couches in case of extra passengers.
"Belt up and we'll get rolling. It's going to take us at least ninety minutes to get to Atlantic City," Douglas Jedburgh said. When he'd heard the clicking of seatbelts, he shifted into gear, and pulled out onto the access road leading to the Parkway.
Follow us and don't be seen, Eric told Lady Day silently, and felt the elvensteed's equally silent assent.
Driving an RV was like driving a small house, and it accelerated about as well. But by the same token, it was pretty hard to miss, so they weren't really in any danger of being hit, and fairly soon they'd reached cruising speed.
"He was asking where Mary was," Douglas said to his father companionably.
"You were complaining again," Adam Jedburgh corrected him good-naturedly. He turned his seat—the passenger seat in the Winnebago could turn to face the back—and grinned cheerfully at Eric. "This young feller was going to sit around the house and mope for six weeks just because Mary was off helping Kimberly bring my great-grandbaby into the world and making sure Kimmie had a little help around the place. Oh, it's not that Mason's a bad boy, you understand, for a grandson-in-law, but he's on the road six days out of seven, and Kimmie's at home, and with the new baby, what girl—even a great big grown-up girl that we're all su
pposed to call 'women' these days from the time they can walk—wouldn't want her mother there to help out and tell her that new babies don't break? So Mary went, and I didn't see any reason for Dougie to sit around the house waiting for her to get back like a retriever pining for duck season when he could be indulging me instead of driving his neighbors crazy. The way he carries on, you'd think Mary'd gone to Heaven instead of Amarillo."
Douglas Jedburgh grinned, but said nothing to contradict his father.
"Boy or girl?" Hosea asked with interest.
"Doctors say she's going to have a boy," Adam said promptly. "We'll know for sure in a week or so. In my day, you had to wait until the baby was born and take what you got."
"Ah guess that's still the way, when you come right down to it," Hosea said. "Ah don't think we've been rightly introduced, sir. Ah'm Hosea Songmaker, and Ah couldn't help but notice what you have painted on the side of your RV. Ah guess you were in the OSS in the war?"
Adam looked surprised, then pleased. "Well, Mr. Songmaker, that's a pretty good guess. Not too many people remember the OSS anymore."
"Didn't have to guess," Hosea said modestly. "Mah grandaddy served with them. Name of Jeb Songmaker."
"Jeb Songmaker!" Adam did a double-take, and a grin spread across his face until it nearly met at the back of his head. "Dougie, this is Jeberechiah Songmaker's grandson! You remember I told you about him!" Adam said excitedly. "Good Lord, Jeb's grandson! Talk about a small world—I never would have thought it!"
"Oh, wow, this is just . . . weird," Kayla said in an undertone.
"The OSS wasn't that large an organization," Eric said. "Not like the CIA is today. It isn't all that unlikely that two agents would know each other." At Magnus's blank look, he explained further. "The OSS was the first American intelligence agency, formed by William Donovan during World War II. At the end of the war, it was replaced by the Central Intelligence Agency."
He was trying to be unobtrusive, but he could have been shouting his explanations for all the attention that Adam was paying to them. No, it was Hosea that had all of his attention. Hardly surprising. Meeting Hosea must make Adam feel as if he was somehow catching up to an old comrade.
"So what happened to Jeb?" Adam asked eagerly. "We lost track of each other—"
"He got through the war right enough," Hosea said, with a nod. "Went on home to his farm—he must of talked about his parcel o' land—and married my gran'ma Dora. My gran'parents had the raisin' of me, but Gran'pa Jeb never did talk much about what he did during the War, leastways not to me."
"I'm glad he got back," Adam Jedburgh said simply. "A lot of good men didn't. I met Jeb during training in England—a long skinny drink of water with a hill-country accent you could cut with a knife. Me, I was there for the same reason a lot of other guys were: German had been the first language in my house growing up, and I spoke it like Uncle Adolf's brother."
"Dad—" Douglas Jedburgh said warningly.
"Dougie, I'm too old to change my spots. Oh, I know, I know: we won the war and they're all our friends now, and every one of them is a Good German. But they weren't then. Or do you think I'm boring our guests?"
"Please," Eric said quickly. "Nobody's bored. And we'd all like to hear about this." It was fascinating—how often did you get a chance to listen to living history? Especially living secret history; a lot of what the OSS did was still under lock and key. Besides, this had to be good for Adam Jedburgh, to find out what had happened to an old friend. And if Adam Jedburgh was talking, neither he nor his son would be asking awkward questions about Eric and his friends—questions they might not be able to answer. He'd already come close to slipping up twice over Magnus, and none of them had known they'd need a cover story.
"There. You see? As I was saying, there was Jeberechiah, looking like he'd never had shoes on before in his life—no offense, Hosea, but back in '41, a lot of kids joined up who'd never been off the farm and still had straw in their hair, and your granddaddy looked like a prime example—with his old violin and an ugly yellow dog that none of us knew how he'd managed to smuggle onto the troopship, let alone get it onto the base, but there it was, and an accent that just about ensured he'd be shot the moment he set foot anywhere in Europe—and as far as any of us knew, he didn't speak a word of anything but English, and that not very well, and I could not imagine how he had managed to talk his way into Wild Bill's command. I remember one time . . ."
For the next several miles Adam Jedburgh had them all laughing helplessly with anecdotes of clever—and highly trained—young men on the loose in wartime England. Eric wasn't sure how much of these stories to believe, but apparently Jeb Songmaker had been the ringleader in a series of practical jokes that would have put the pranks of any collection of modern college students to shame.
There was the still-fondly-remembered incident of the local farmer's prize cow smuggled into the colonel's office.
The exceptionally-well-concealed (and exceptionally productive) still.
The exploding mashed potatoes.
The night maneuvers that had left the "enemy" searching for them all night in a freezing downpour while Jeb's team had spent the night sleeping warmly in a barn ten miles outside the combat area—and sitting down to a good country breakfast cooked by the farmer's wife in the morning.
But one thing puzzled Adam Jedburgh greatly, and he returned to it once more.
"Thing was, if Jeb Songmaker was with us in England, he had to be heading for somewhere in the European Theater. And he had to have already gotten through our training course back home. Well, I worried about how he was going to manage. There was no way he was going to sound like anything but a GI Joe—heck—begging your pardon, girls—the local folks could barely understand a word he said, he came from that far back in the hills—and that wasn't going to do him any good east of Calais. I tried to teach him enough German to get by, but it was hopeless. So one night when we were down at the local pub, I asked him what he was going to do if he had to talk to anybody over there. And he said, in that country twang of his, 'I'll get by.'"
The old man shook his head, obviously still unable to believe it even after all these years. "And I guess he did, because he always came back, no matter where they sent him."
"But Ah guess you lost touch with him?" Hosea asked.
"Oh," Adam said off-handedly, "I went over to France to help out the Resistance, and I decided to stay for a while. We had to do a little improvising when our supplies ran out, but our biggest hole-card against Johnny Boche was always laughter. The one thing fascists of all stripes hate most is being ridiculed, and we found out that we could do as much damage if we could make people laugh at them as by blowing something up. I owe that lesson to your grandfather, Hosea, and I'm happy to be able to pay it back, even in this little way."
They'd been seeing signs for Atlantic City for the last several miles, but now they were starting to get close.
"Well," Adam said, after clearing his throat and glancing at an exit sign, "looks like we're about to drink that parting glass, so to speak."
"We're staying at the Trump Taj Mahal—Dad says if you're going to go to the devil, you might as well do it up brown," Douglas Jedburgh said with a small smile. "We could take you there—or is there some other place we could drop you?"
Eric had been thinking about how to answer that one for almost an hour. "You can just drop us at any parking lot along the way that's convenient, thanks. We can call a cab from there." That much was perfectly true—they did intend to call a cab—and a touch of Bardic Magick encouraged their Good Samaritans not to ask any of the obvious questions, like where their hotel was, and why they shouldn't just drop them there.
Going back to Ace and Hosea's hotel room would have been logical and easy—but it was also fairly likely that it was staked out by goons either mortal or Unseleighe.
"You're sure you'll be okay?" Douglas Jedburgh asked.
"They're sure, Dougie," Adam told his son firmly. "Probably can't wait
to get away from all your chatter," he added, winking at them. "But if you need anything else, you come around to the Taj Mahal and ask for Adam Jedburgh. Dougie and I will be there for a week, seeing the sights before we head on down to Texas. Figure we'll give Mary and Kimmie a little surprise and I'll get an early look at my great-grand-baby."
"We'll do that, sir," Hosea said. "Iff'n there's need. That's a promise. An' here—" He paused to fish in his pocket, and came up with one of the business cards Eric had insisted he have printed up. Because you never know when you'll need one. It looked good to have them when you were busking, and better still to have them in case someone actually might offer you a gig. They were simple enough, just his name, a phone number and address, and Musician: blue-grass, country, and folk. "You cain always get ahold of me here."
Eric sighed with relief. This was even better. Hosea had just proved that they had permanent addresses. Adam would be a lot less curious now.
"Well, good," Adam said firmly. "Wild Bill's Geese stick together, and that goes for their families as well."
A few minutes later, Douglas Jedburgh found a place to stop, and expertly maneuvered the Winnebago into a strip-mall parking lot. He stopped the RV, and the five of them got out.
As he drove away, Kayla turned to Hosea. "You know the weirdest people," she said, setting Molly down.
"Ah wasn't the one who knew him, but mah gran'pappy. Ah guess it was in the family, though," Hosea said reasonably. "Ah sort of suspected things might fall out that way when Ah saw what was painted on the side of the RV. Gran'pa didn't talk about the war all so very much, but he did have his unit patch, an' it looked just like that. They weren't authorized, and they were all supposed to be destroyed, but Ah guess one or two of them got away."
"He was there to help us when we needed help," Ace said, as if she were pronouncing a sort of judgment.
Magnus sighed. "It wasn't a dumb idea, okay. But it was kind of a long shot."
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