Liza came forward first, with a shaky smile, and then she hurried to embrace Betty. “I'm so scared,” Liza said. “They got to Richard. If he puts one syllable out of line, they'll yank him off the air and execute him for disobeying a direct order. And you know Richard, you know how he is, it doesn't matter he's not military, he lives here and that's enough. I wish he'd agreed to leave with me, but he wouldn't, he wouldn't.”
And all Betty could do was make little shushing noises and hold Liza while she cried, because there was no doubt in her mind that Welch would do exactly as he pleased, consequences be damned. He'd chosen his boat, and he wouldn't jump off the ship because someone told him to. Betty stroked Liza's hair until she wiped her eyes, blew her nose, and said she'd best be going.
Betty stayed by herself for a minute, grappling with her own emotions which Liza had stirred up. Then she looked around for the centaur who had come to see her, and she wandered around a bend.
It was there she saw Tetrametrius, whose face focused on hers as though he'd been expecting to see her. Despite the intensity of his expression, he approached her timidly.
“Betty Cratchet?” He paused as though expecting her to confirm her own identity. “May I introduce you to someone, please?”
Hope burst in her chest, thinking it was Clarkin. Betty wouldn't believe that he'd just abandoned her, and she couldn't think that he was dead, yet both those thoughts had gone through her mind over the last many days.
“Yes, who?” Betty realized that he had already introduced her to Clarkin in November, so it couldn't be him, and Tetrametrius wasn't playing with her. Dispirited, Betty nevertheless followed him through the snowy yard until they came to a mausoleum.
A woman waited there, her hair dark and sleek, wearing large sunglasses, a blue silk scarf about her neck, and a red and white polka dot dress. She smelled familiar. Sweet, and florally.
“You sent the letters?”
Bright red lips curved into a smile. “Why do you think that?”
“There can't be very many people who make black locust perfume.”
The woman laughed, a merry sound. “Indeed not. I did not send you the letters, though I did make the cologne, on special request, for a very esteemed friend.”
The woman's gaze flickered to the centaur, and he backed away, to stand guard.
“I wanted to thank you for the warning.”
Betty hesitated. “You are the Ladybird.”
“And you are the Bell.”
Betty paused an instant, then said, “What do you know about the vandalism on my front door?”
“Vandalism?” The woman looked confused. “I remember hearing of a commotion on your street. I will ask about it.”
The two women considered their standing, then Ladybird reached into her caplet lining and pulled from it a journal. “Read this. Maybe you can prevent others from befalling Exica's fate.”
Betty froze, hand suspended over the plain black book. “What do you mean?”
“You have not heard?” Ladybird frowned and said slowly, “Your mate was injured when his team received mixed signals. We have not seen or heard from him in days.”
“How?” Betty demanded, though she knew the answer already: Alpha. The journal pressed into her palm, and Ladybird said, “I am terribly sorry. I wish he would surface, as well.”
As an afterthought, she added, “You see, I am his sister.”
With that, she left, and Betty did, too, feeling more than a little dazed, clutching the book to her chest, hoping it was something written by Clarkin.
Betty went home. There seemed nothing else to do, and she didn't want to talk to anyone yet. When she stood at the door, she was stunned, not remembering the rather long walk in the snow to get there.
But at the door, she stopped, knowing that she wouldn't be able to get any rest. Pure rage boiled through her veins, and Betty instead knocked on the neighbour's door and asked to be driven to town.
“You want to borrow the car?” asked Geri.
“I'm too furious to drive.”
Geri nodded. “Where to?”
“Stanford's Bar. Come get me in fifteen minutes.”
Chapter 25
Betty's father sat in the shade of a corner booth, smoking a cigar and chortling with his officers. For once Slim wasn't among them. At Betty's stern stare, her father ordered the men away and motioned for her to sit.
She refused.
“Take a seat, child, I have much to discuss with you. Bungled letters, mysterious night time visits from a demon. James doesn't know that he didn't leave until morning. I haven't told him.” There was a threat implied.
Betty put her knuckles on the table. “You lost men last week. Top men, your best.” She didn't know it was true until he blanched. Betty resumed, “They don't listen to Alpha anymore and they're too scared to listen to Tango. Tell me I am wrong.”
Father snarled. “How do you know? Who told you?”
“I have eyes and ears in places, papa, but that doesn't mean they tell me things. I know because everyone knows. Like I know we'll be going up against the Bear in greater force, soon, unless this is taken care of now.”
“That is obvious.”
“And the troops won't listen to your wave talkers. Not anymore.”
Father drained his whiskey.
“But they'll listen to me. And I'll talk for you because I like Sanctuary and I want to see men come home to their children. If you agree, give me no more of this Slim shit and hand over the user's manual.”
“Ever the diplomat.”
“Got that right, pops,” Betty said and at that moment, she saw Geri's car flash by to park on the street.
Without saying goodbye, Betty left the bar.
The knock roused Betty from hanging up laundry across the kitchen, thankfully nothing but hand towels and blouses, for when she opened the door, she found a man with a 42” chest towering over the remains of her now very dead sunflower. In his fist he gripped a journal, holding it as awkwardly as a machine-gunner could hold a book.
“Betty Cratchet?” he asked in a burly, rough voice.
“Maybe. Maybe not. Show me your identity card first.”
He took it out of the pages of the book, Betty inspected that the seal was current, the colors proper, the name in the correct typeface, and finally that it had her father's coffee stain on the back. As this met with her approval, she handed the card back and said, “What work does my father have for me to refuse?”
The man held out the book. “He said this was for you, and I was to remain within five feet of you at all times.”
Betty snorted. “Come in, then, but understand that I'm not leaving the bathroom door open for you to keep the five foot notice thing.”
To her satisfaction the man looked suitably embarrassed. She smirked to herself and took him to the kitchen so she could finish putting up her towels. The man coughed.
“It is a matter of national security, Ma'am.”
“Don't ma'am me. I'm young enough to be your kid sister.” But Betty did hasten in hanging up her last of her laundry, just not so much that the man might have reason to think she was anything but a fast worker.
She took the bed and laid the code book out on the sheets as well as all her notes and other books, arranging them to her satisfaction before she began reading the code book her father had sent her. In truth she was marginally surprised about two things. First that he even had a code book, when the code was supposed to be all verbal, and second that he would see fit to give it to her.
Betty read Slim's handwriting in the first several pages, and realized that it had been him who had decided to keep a record. Doubtless it was for his own reference, as the notes seemed sketchy in some places and random lists in others. It wasn't meant to be an educational text, but there was still too much here to have risked being given to an enemy. Betty skimmed through half the book, and saw that the meaning of certain words morphed over time, and every now and then she caught sight of a l
egitimate date. She copied down the lists, cutting them out and compiling them in groups until she made sense of what they were.
Betty soon had a decent idea of what had been going on, and she was gratified that she'd picked out two of the three articles that they were using to communicate with each other in. Then at around three hours in, Betty put down the book and started digging for pans and potatoes.
“Aren't you supposed to be working?” asked the guard.
She frowned at him, trying to decide if he would be with her for more than a few hours, and if it would be worth it to memorize his name if relief came. “No. Rests must be taken in between sessions, otherwise the meaning becomes mixed up. And we couldn't risk that, could we?”
The guard grumbled something that didn't make any sense and might not have been an actual coherent sentence. Betty asked, “Will you be here for dinner? I feel strange eating without offering you something.”
The man at first denied being hungry, but Betty added extra to the pot, and tossed a couple of potatoes in the oven for good measure. Come supper time, she could hear his stomach growling, and so she served him up chili over a baked potato, and found a batch of cheese to top it off with.
Betty knew a few things about cooking, and that was very literal. She'd learned more recipes by digging through Slim's code book than she had by experimenting. For what it was worth, Slim really had learned to do more cooking since he went away, and he'd jotted down the successful recipes right there in the midst of code making. Typical.
It was only after she'd finished dinner that she saw that he had been working out a way to incorporate the code into recipes, denoting them by putting an absurd typographical error in the recipe. She doubted that he'd had much success with this attempt at the code because he soon gave up using it, but she noted down what recipes meant what.
When Betty returned to the last half of the book, she stumbled across something that gave her pause.
Granna's Sticky Caramel Buns.
Welch had talked about those. But Betty wasn't sure what the message being conveyed was, but she'd keep it in mind.
Before the night was over, or rather once the sun had scarcely set, she had other visitors: Her father and a crew of others, filling her house so full that she had to take down the laundry and the line so people could move without stringing themselves up on it. All the while, Betty muttered that they wouldn't have such trouble if her father didn't hire such tall men, but no one seemed to hear her.
Betty was not happy with the intrusion of so many people, but she tolerated it as best she could. They sat down together, gathered in the den, with people sitting as much on the floor as they were on chairs or the sofa, and they began to practice talking, interpreting messages back and forth, not very sophisticated messages, but difficult ones filled with nuances. She had to remember things Slim had taught her long ago, and then learn new things altogether. Betty included Never Were words in practice so that she could communicate to them in the same sentence without raising alarm on air.
Betty did not talk to her father. Her father resisted the urge to talk to her. It was an awkward affair, much the same as being the new wife of Henry VIII must have been in a bygone era.
When she got tired, she did not hold the matter up for debate, simply grabbed a blanket, rolled up in it like a caterpillar preparing a cocoon, and went to sleep. Eventually, they let her be.
Betty would have been more concerned about her neighbours, but Clarkin had called one thing very correct: Her walls were thin. And if anyone had been curious what she was saying, they only had to place an ear to the wall to hear every single word. It was likely, too, that they wouldn't have even had to do that, just kept the household quiet and pulled the chair into the right location in the room and listen through the wall like that. Betty took some comfort in this.
Her father and all the General's men were still there in the morning. They had eaten her icebox and cold pantry clean of everything, so Betty ate a small portion of toast and jam for breakfast since the men had eaten every egg and scrap of ham or sausage. The one advantage to their presence was that she did not have to ride or walk into work, just got in someone's car and let herself be driven there.
When they were driving out of her street, she saw a neighbour on a walk, and they waved. Betty doubted that they were on the road taking a walk at four a.m. for the fun of it, and she knew for certain it was not in anyone's routine except for hers.
Once in the station, they dropped Betty off to her usual routine, and for a time it was as though nothing was different from usual.
Then during her break, she wandered into the break room, and found both day hosts and Welch seated around the table. Welch looked like a cat who had been petted the wrong way, and the other two were less rested and looked more like a cat who had been dunked by the tail in a creek then blow-dried. They sounded like it, too.
Betty left the break room without her coffee.
She didn't have long to ponder events as the commercials were over and she ran through the weather again. But when the songs came on again, she heard low voices in the hallway, and when she next saw it, they had maps too close-up for her to know what country it was set in, and corresponding maps of smaller scale where they had circles and x's and all kinds of swoopy lines to indicate movement. In some places they had viciously scribbled away to erase a movement, or to protest it. Betty would have found it amusing to have listened in to a particular scribble which looked like a Snoopy tumbleweed.
“Right,” one of the generals said. “We need to move this squadron here. “
And they spoke of the code names of the units and the directionality and distance and speed. Betty pondered how to use all the key phrases without sounding too strange, and on the next news on the hour, she began to use the relevant information. She also added words of caution to the Never Weres who were going to be taking their units nearby one of the scribble zones. She riddled this in a speech about team work and the difficulties of being alone, unless you have someone you can count on to help you work through the hardest times.
She repeated the same keywords again in the next set, stressing trust and healthy relationships. How much they listened to her, she didn't know, but she hoped that troops would cooperate and put both halves of the messages together, so that the fewest people possible died.
Time passed. She received and sent more messages, and she wondered how people were responding to them.
During her next break, the reports must have come back. They must not have been positive, from the look on her father's face. When she set her jaw and raised a brow, he said, “They are confused and rebellious. They don't want to follow their leaders. It's hell out there.”
Betty had no idea what he meant by that, how true it was, or what sort of problems the troops were facing.
But her soft hearted speeches stopped this time, and became railing reprimands, citing all kinds of folklore and an anecdote about her dog who refused to listen to her mother, and how that dog would eat the garbage, and it would always get sick and never learned its lesson. Betty said it was because the dog was too much of an animal to learn from mistakes like that, and she couldn't believe that some fully aware adults were every bit as bad as that dog.
Near the end, her father interrupted her with a thumbs up.
She cheered up considerably.
Ten minutes later, she was stretching and just turned off the mic for songs when her father once more looked in, and he had a piece of paper. “There was a strike. We need to move these men here.”
Betty looked at the map. They had moved the primarily Never Were units straight into the tumbleweed scribble. It had earned a few more scribbles, which oddly enough did not make her feel any better about moving troops precisely there.
“That doesn't look safe.”
“We need them on the ridge. They're a relay unit.”
“How much information do you have for these maps?” Betty asked.
“We have photog
raphs.”
“But how good?”
Her father frowned, and her suspicions were confirmed.
When she went back on the air, she gave the General's message, but also stressed that they needed to be up high, and warned of their bell being in danger at that place.
Less than an hour later, they yanked her off the air mid-sentence.
Betty jumped upright, furious, and slammed the door open to the hallway. “What happened?”
“With me.” A man took her by the elbow, and they went into a quiet room off to the side where all the papers were stored together in filing cabinets.
Before Betty could be shut in with no answers, she shouted, “You are required to send a representative! Explain this behavior at once.”
The man grunted and shut the door. Once it was shut and locked, locked for goodness grief, where did they think she was going to go? Betty let out a shriek muffled by her fists clutched to her face and she wished that she could let that shriek fell to tears.
Betty groaned, then for a while she paced this way and that around the silent room, wondering who they would send or if they would even bother with it after all. She really wasn't sure why they'd taken her off the air, if things were going well. But the longer that they made her wait, the less certain she was that she had done no harm. What if she'd mistaken the circumstances, or said the wrong thing at the wrong time?
Perhaps she really had goofed it up. Betty bit her lip and swallowed a half-formed sob which the filing cabinets wouldn't have cared about if they'd heard.
What had she done?
For a time, she sat on the shortest of the filing cabinets, focusing on taking deep breaths and nothing else, and she worried. Had she done the right thing? Would Clarkin survive? Had she been right to have used Slim the way she had?
Outside, she heard a man yell, “Strike's a hit!”
And then came corresponding yells. Betty swallowed another long gulp of air, and gazed out the window where the moon gazed down on her.
Black Locust Letters Page 15