The Last Government Girl. Ellen Herbert

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.”

      3

      Sunday, May 28, 1944

      Saltville, Virginia

      “Sir, why haven’t we left yet?” Eddie asked the conductor, who hurried down the aisle without answering.

      The world awaited 300 miles north in Washington, D.C. Eddie felt its pull, a force strong as gravity. What was the hold up? Why were they still here?

      Rachel sat next to the window in an emerald dress drenched in sunlight, her curly black hair tamed into victory rolls on top, the rest of her hair cascading down her back. “The longer the train stays here, the more time Papa has to change his mind.”

      Their reflections, overlapping in the glass, were a study in contrasts. Eddie, a head taller, was a lanky, green-eyed blonde, while Rachel had curves in all the right places with eyes the color of chestnuts that turned anthracite hard when she got angry. But beneath their surfaces, they were alike. Eddie sensed Rachel’s heart thudding in time with her own. They wanted to be gone, gone, gone.

      Together, their fathers watched them from the depot platform. Their shadows reached downhill to the train as if to hold their daughters in Saltville.

      The rest of their lives depended on the next few moments. Had the train broken down? Would they be forced to stay?

      Too much tension, Sturm und Drang in German, Eddie’s college minor. At one time, German had comforted her, but that was before Hitler. Now she seldom spoke her grandmother’s language, except to Rachel.

      “Don’t look at your father,” she told Rachel. “If we look, we turn into salt like Lot’s wife and get stuck in Saltville forever.”

      An old joke between them, but Rachel didn’t smile. Instead, she rubbed her silver heart-shaped locket, “go, go, go,” her incantation.

      Out the edge of her eye, Eddie saw that the shorter shadow on the platform disappear, and she tensed. “Rachel, I think your father’s coming down to the train.”

      Rachel linked her arm through Eddie’s. “I’m going with you, no matter what he says.”

      “Of course,” Eddie said as if she was certain.

      Months ago, Rachel told Eddie about her nightmares the Nazis had invaded Saltville and were coming for her because she was Jewish. Eddie had promised to hide her on Smith land so deep in the mountains no one would ever find her.

      Yet