Louise's Dilemma Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  A Selection of Titles from Sarah R. Shaber

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Epilog

  A Selection of Titles from Sarah R. Shaber

  The Professor Simon Shaw series

  SIMON SAID

  SNIPE HUNT

  THE FUGITIVE KING

  THE BUG FUNERAL

  SHELL GAME

  The Louise Pearlie Series

  LOUISE’S WAR *

  LOUISE’S GAMBLE *

  LOUISE’S DILEMMA *

  * available from Severn House

  LOUISE’S DILEMMA

  Sarah R. Shaber

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First published in Great Britain and the USA 2013 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

  eBook edition first published in 2013 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2013 by Sarah Shaber.

  The right of Sarah Shaber to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Shaber, Sarah R. author.

  Louise’s Dilemma. – (A Louise Pearlie mystery; 3)

  1. Pearlie, Louise (Fictitious character)–Fiction.

  2. United States. Office of Strategic Services–Employees–Fiction.

  3. Suspense fiction.

  I. Title II. Series

  813.6-dc23

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8295-0 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-452-2 (epub)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This eBook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  In honor of Nancy and Jim Olson and the extraordinary bookstore they founded, Quail Ridge Books, in Raleigh, North Carolina.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I am always so grateful to my family for their support and encouragement of my writing. My daughter Katie is my first reader and my son Sam my expert on computer issues and social media. Steve, my husband, is my arm candy and dearest friend.

  I could not write these books without the Women of Weymouth, my writing buddies, Margaret Maron, Katy Munger, Diane Chamberlain, Alexandra Sokoloff, Kathy Trochek (Mary Kay Andrews) and Bren Witchger (Brynn Bonner). Our retreats at the Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities are always productive, and fun!

  For this particular book I relied on The Calvert County Historical Society for research I could not travel to Maryland to do myself. And many thanks to Dan Cooper and Leah Bowman for finding answers to several questions that stymied me.

  I am so fortunate that Vicky Bijur is my agent and friend, and that Quail Ridge Books is my home bookstore.

  ONE

  Was it an ‘h’? Or just a smudge? I pulled a magnifying glass out of my desk drawer. The mark in ‘St Leonard’ did look something like an ‘h’, or ‘St Leonhard’, although the rest of the address was in English. Mr Leroy Martin, near St Leonard, Maryland, United States of America, the address read.

  ‘I just don’t know,’ I said. ‘It could be.’

  ‘Obviously, we would like to know why a postcard written in English and mailed from occupied France to an American contains a German word,’ the lieutenant said. ‘If that’s what it is.’

  The message seemed harmless enough. Dear Leroy, I read, I am well and working here, no need to worry. Mother is safe too. Wishing your wife Anne a happy birthday on February 13th. Your cousin, Richard Martin.

  Thousands of people living in Axis-occupied Europe used a neutral mail service through Lisbon to correspond with friends and family in Allied countries. But I could see why the censor had passed this particular postcard to OSS – the Office of Strategic Services. If the writer was French, and Richard Martin could be a French name, why would he spell ‘St Leonard’ as ‘St Leonhard’?

  Every odd or suspect piece of mail the U.S. censor intercepted could be an Axis coded message. Who were Leroy and Anne Martin? Who was Richard Martin? Who was ‘Mother’? Was that a German spelling of ‘St Leonard’, and why did the writer include the date Leroy’s wife’s birthday? Surely the woman knew the date of her own birthday!

  ‘I’m Art Collins, by the way,’ the thin lieutenant said, extending his hand to shake mine. ‘Foreign Nationalities Branch. I mean, Lieutenant Arthur Collins. I’m not used to being in the Army yet.’

  Collins’s uniform was brand new. I could still see the creases where his shirt had been folded over cardboard. He was quite young, attempting but failing to grow a mustache.

  Most of the men at OSS were in uniform now. The Army had taken to drafting everyone in sight, including the staff of the Office of Strategic Services. After boot camp the draftees were returned to ‘temporary’ duty at their old stations. So now most of the men in the building wore uniforms. And got paid less! Women weren’t being drafted yet, or I’d be in a WAC uniform myself and living in a barracks by now.

  ‘The postmark,’ Collins said, tapping the card, ‘is from Nantes, not far from the St Nazaire submarine pens in Brittany. We can’t ignore any questionable mail that comes from that area.’ Collins ran his hand through his short hair and bit his lip, distracted by worry and exhaustion. Hitler’s U-boat Wolf Pack was stalking Allied convoys in the North Atlantic, sinking so many transport and supply ships that our victory against Rommel in North Africa and our future European invasion plans were in serious jeopardy.

  The OSS mission had shifted substantially since the early days. Instead of writing and distributing broad reports, we were now engaged in target analysis and estimates of enemy forces. OSS had reorganized appropriately.

  The Research and Analysis Branch, where I’d worked since coming to Washington, was split into four desks: Europe/Africa, Far East, USSR and Latin America. Each had an Economics, Political and Geographic Section. The Central Information Division, or Registry, where I now worked, was created as the reference library of OSS, where all classified and unclassified material was catalogued and stored. I was one of dozens of women who worked long days analyzing and indexing intelligence so that it could be accessed by generals, assistant secretaries of state and our own OSS operatives. Our vast card catalog contained two million index cards at last count. We maintained a War Room and a Reading Room for OSS staff. The Registry held thousands of intelligence documents, the best map collection in the world, almost a million maps, a library of 50,000 books on specialized subjects and countless captioned photographs. We mai
ntained and added new information to thousands of biographical files.

  Most of our resources these days were spent acquiring and reviewing the intelligence needed to defeat the Nazi U-boat assault on our convoys in the North Atlantic.

  ‘This could be important,’ Collins said, tapping the postcard.

  As if I didn’t know that. Every request that passed through this office was critical, vital to the war effort, and needed to be completed yesterday! I had an inbox full of critical documents to analyze and index. Fine, I would deal with Collins’s job first thing tomorrow. I was too tired right now to even focus my eyes.

  After work I waited with my fellow employees, shivering in the glacial cold, for a bus. Despite wearing wool trousers, a heavy cardigan, my beloved fur-collared wool coat, a scarf wound so many times around my face that I could barely see, and heavy gloves over the fingerless mittens I wore all day every day to keep my joints warm, I still shivered. Phoebe’s thermometer had read six degrees this morning. Six degrees! I’d grown up on the coast of North Carolina, and I’d never experienced these kinds of temperatures before.

  Noticing my dismayed expression, a young woman in a WAC uniform and cloak spoke up. ‘It’s going to be a long wait,’ she said. ‘The streetcars still aren’t running. Ice has shorted out the electric current to the rails.’

  Last night I’d eaten the macaroni and cheese special at a diner nearby and waited until the crowds thinned out to catch a bus, finally boarding one an hour after dark. I’d stood up in the aisle all the way and arrived at my boarding house about eleven. I couldn’t tolerate the thought of waiting that long again! It wasn’t that I was afraid; I still carried the Schrade switchblade I’d been issued at the Farm, the OSS training camp outside Washington, and often practiced the close fighting techniques I’d learned there.

  An icy gust of wind blew through the crowd, and we all muttered and huddled together in misery. I didn’t want to walk home, damn it! I had a sudden mental picture of myself frozen solid waiting for the light to change at the corner of ‘K’ Street and Pennsylvania Avenue.

  ‘I heard the Army is sending extra buses from Fort Myer, and the police are ticketing anyone driving a car without passengers,’ said a man standing near me with his head scrunched deep into his coat. His breath froze into frost on his collar.

  ‘Maybe when the Pentagon gets out,’ someone else said. ‘All those cars headed north, they’ll have to pick people up off the slug lines, or they’ll get pulled over.’

  ‘Pentagon traffic doesn’t come this way,’ another voice responded. ‘They use the highway bridge further south.’

  A gay jingling interrupted us. Two sleds appeared, each drawn by a matched pair of Belgian horses, occupied by a crowd of bright young things headed for any fancy hotel or supper club that might be open. The horses, blowing steam from their nostrils, wore red plaid blankets and harnesses with bells. Their passengers, wrapped in blankets, held martini glasses aloft as the horses thundered by us, cheering and laughing as they went by. The sight raised all our spirits, but as soon as the bells and laughter ebbed away and the sleds turned onto 23rd Street, our collective mood crashed again.

  Just as I despaired of a warm and early night, I heard a familiar jolly voice calling out to me.

  ‘Halloo, Louise!’ It was Joan Adams, my closest friend at OSS. Since I’d been promoted I had seen little of her, or of the scholar/spies who once worked on my floor.

  ‘Over here!’ Joan called out again, and I stood on my toes to see her waving at me from the back seat of an Army Jeep. ‘Come on! We’ll take you home!’ Joan was General Donovan’s secretary, which came in handy at times. I pushed my way through the crowd to the curb and stepped cautiously into the icy street.

  An Army corporal at the wheel of the Jeep extended a hand to help me climb into the back seat. ‘Isn’t this swell!’ Joan said, pulling me further into the seat beside her. The Jeep’s top was up, but afforded little protection from the cold. Joan drew half of her motor blanket over my lap, and we snuggled together to combat the cold. ‘General Donovan requisitioned a ride for me as long as this artic weather lasts. We’ll have you home in no time.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I was about to go back to my office and curl up on my desk to sleep, I’m so damn tired!’

  ‘You would have frozen solid,’ she said. ‘They turn off the heat at nine.’

  Dellaphine lifted the whistling kettle off the range and poured steaming water into the mixing bowl, quickly dissolving the Epsom salts mounded in the bottom.

  I waited for the water to cool, spending the time peeling bandage tape off my fingers after stripping my mittens and gloves from my aching hands.

  ‘Best wait longer, baby,’ Dellaphine said, but I ignored her and shoved my sore fingers into the hot water, massaging the pain away. Flipping through index cards and file jackets all day every day caused more pain in my hands, arms and shoulders than anyone who’d never done it before could possibly imagine. And then there was the typing. By the end of a workweek my hands and fingers felt like they barely belonged to my body.

  ‘Better?’ Dellaphine asked.

  ‘Much,’ I said, drying my hands on a dishtowel. I’d feel even better once I got upstairs to my bedroom and applied my own home remedy.

  ‘So how was your day?’ Dellaphine asked. Which was a rhetorical question, seeing how she had no idea where I worked. Few people in Washington were free to share any information about their jobs. I was a government girl, just a file clerk, one of thousands jammed into office buildings all over the city, typing and filing endlessly. It was a miracle the city didn’t slide into the Potomac from the weight of all those file cabinets!

  I was different from most government girls, though. I worked for the Office of Strategic Services, America’s spy agency, created after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. I had real secrets to protect. I had even more to keep my mouth shut about now that my job had changed from supervising a branch clerical office to analyzing and cataloging intelligence. This was a big career jump for me. Most of the female analysts in the Registry had college educations from places like Smith or Vassar. I had a junior college degree in business – code words for advanced secretarial studies.

  ‘My day was the same as always,’ I answered. ‘Typing, filing. How was yours?’

  ‘I queued at the Western Market all morning and ironed sheets in the afternoon,’ Dellaphine said. ‘I reckon my feet are sore as your hands.’

  Dellaphine was Phoebe Holcombe’s colored housekeeper and cook. She and Phoebe managed the boarding house on ‘I’ Street where I lived. ‘Two Trees’ had been Phoebe’s home since she was a young married woman with children. Somehow she had hung on to it despite the Depression and her husband’s death.

  ‘At least when we get our ration books everyone will get their fair share without having to get up at the crack of dawn to wait in the cold all day,’ I said.

  Dellaphine opened the oven door, and the savory aroma of pot roast wafted into the kitchen.

  ‘Is that beef?’ I asked. ‘Where did you find it?’

  Dellaphine rolled her eyes. ‘Mr Henry,’ she said. ‘He bought it out in the country over the weekend.’

  Black-market beef. Purchased directly from a farm instead of through a butcher or a grocery store in town, where shortages drove up the price.

  ‘It’s supposed to be Grade A Prime. It ain’t, I know grass fed beef when I see it,’ Dellaphine said. ‘But we be eating it anyway. I’ve cooked it long and slow. It should be tender enough even for Mr Henry.’

  ‘Henry will be lucky if he doesn’t wind up in jail,’ Phoebe said, coming up from the basement. ‘Dellaphine,’ Phoebe said, ‘the towels are washed, and I hung them on the clothes line near the furnace. I don’t know if they’ll dry any time soon, but they’re clean.’

  ‘It’s been over a month, Phoebe,’ I said. ‘If Henry was going to get arrested they’d have come for him by now.’

  In January Henry had asked Phoebe if he cou
ld borrow her car. She agreed. She didn’t drive much herself and the car needed to be driven. Henry was gone a long time; he’d gone over a hundred miles away, because Joe had checked the car’s odometer after he’d returned. Henry returned from wherever he went with jerry cans of gasoline packed into the trunk and the back seat. Without saying a word he’d unloaded them all and lined them up against the back wall of the garage. We didn’t say anything to him either. What could we do? Clearly, he’d bought them on the black market. If we reported him to the Office of Price Administration he’d be arrested, and none of us wanted to be a part of that. I wasn’t without guilt myself. I bought sugar on the black market; I couldn’t learn to drink coffee or tea without it.

  We just prayed that no one from the Gas Rationing Board or the Tire Allotment Committee decided to inspect Phoebe’s garage. We consoled ourselves with the knowledge that we had plenty of gasoline!

  The comforting warmth of the cozy old townhouse vanished as I climbed the stairs to my room. All the radiators upstairs were shut off to conserve fuel oil. For about an hour before bedtime, Phoebe, Ada and I would cheat, pulling the rug off the floor vent in the hall to allow some heat to rise from the first floor so that we could sponge off and get ready for bed. A real bath was out of the question. Which was why we didn’t need Phoebe’s clean towels anytime soon.

  Henry Post and Joe Prager, our two men boarders, had slept downstairs in the lounge the last few nights. Their third floor attic bedroom had gotten so frigid that frost settled on their bedcovers.

  I was willing to tolerate the chill for the chance to be alone and quiet for a time at the end of my workday. Thank God I had my own room. Most government girls had at least one roommate, but Phoebe wasn’t in the boarding-house business for the money. She opened her home to four boarders out of patriotism, and to help keep her mind off her two sons, who were stationed with the Navy in the Pacific.