She turned away from that kind of speculation. From torturing herself. She wasn’t the only one suffering because of the war. Now and again, like so many others, she had to remind herself of that fact.

Betsy found the two-wheeled wire cart she used to transport groceries, took it up to sidewalk level, then dragged the wooden box up after it.

She was breathing hard from the effort, and her legs were trembling. Barrage blimps that sagged and looked partly deflated were visible beyond the end of the block, trailing what from this distance looked like slender cables.

The morning was quiet except for the steady, distant hum of traffic. A siren wailed forlornly from the direction of the hospital, where she would soon be helping to tend to the wounded, and comforting the dying.

She managed to lay the rectangular wooden box sideways across the top of the wire basket. Avoiding pits and cracks in the paved sidewalk, she began rolling the cart with surprising ease.

Here was something, at least, that was easier than she’d anticipated.

There was a fine morning mist in the air that smelled vaguely of charred wood, and something Betsy didn’t want to dwell on.

She opened her mouth slightly and pulled in deep breaths of the air for whatever clean oxygen it contained. Now and then someone on the street—usually a man—would pause and look and seem to contemplate helping her. She shook her head to refuse them, and they went on about their business. A few of them gave her approving smiles. She continued on her way to ship her wooden box, knowing that Henry Tucker, if he were alive, would appreciate her faith and tenacity.

And love.

Only a few hours later Betsy reported for duty at the hospital. The shipping of the backpack and its contents seemed in a sad way to have severed all of her ties with Henry Tucker. At the same time, it freed her from some of her grief. If he could rest easy in his grave, then, when the time came, so would she.

How very often she thought about death in this war.

What had being so close to it, day after day, done to her?

It was almost 1:00 A.M. when Betsy stumbled, exhausted, up to her apartment and undressed for bed. She removed her nurse’s uniform and put it in the washstand in cold water with soap. Tomorrow morning, before leaving for the hospital, she would hand wring the uniform, then hang it up to dry.

She took off her slip, then her garter belt and white cloth stockings. Her knickers and the stockings she wadded and tossed so they landed near the washstand. She would retrieve them tomorrow and let them soak while she was on duty at the hospital in her second uniform.

Wearing only her nightgown and padded slippers, she ran enough water from the tap to capture in her palm and used it to wash down one of several white pills she’d brought home from the hospital. She didn’t so much need the pills to help her get to sleep, but they aided sometimes in preventing the dreams from invading her slumber. Without them, she might experience some of the horrors of the day again, and wake up sweating and shivering. Afraid. So afraid . . .

The physical effort of what she had done today, starting so early in the morning, had taken its toll. As had being with men in various stages of their dying. She had tried desperately to be offhand and make them smile. Sometimes she’d been successful. But all the time she knew they would be leaving her as had Henry Tucker, changing for their survivors the world in which they’d lived.

For too long Betsy had suffered a lonely and miserable existence without Henry. Without understanding. Without love.

England was fighting for its survival, and there was no time for romance, but that’s when the most irresistible kind of romance found a way.

To be on the safe side, Betsy swallowed a second pill.

After making sure the blackout curtains were secure, she dropped backward onto the bed as if launching herself sightless into a dark abyss.

She so welcomed the escape of sleep.

Only a few minutes after lying down, she heard air raid sirens. The raids were occurring more and more often, almost becoming routine. Unless you happened to be in the target zone. Then nothing routine might happen ever again.

Fate. That was all it was about. Good luck or bad.

Betsy knew she should wake up all the way. Go to the building’s lower level, or to the underground stop a block away. But she didn’t want to be in the crowded train tunnel, or alone in the musty basement, or share her terror with old Colonel Tattersilk from upstairs who, when they were sheltered, seemed to be hoping for loud near misses so he had an excuse to hug her close in the night.

She didn’t want to get up. She was so, so tired . . . Exhaustion was an antidote for fear. That and the mind-numbing regularity and frequency of the air raids. The waves of German bombers, with smaller fighter planes sometimes flying escort. More and more often they were engaged by RAF fighters, leaving twisting, turning white contrails hanging like indecipherable messages in the sky.

Betsy lay motionless in the darkness, waiting for tonight’s crisis to pass. Maybe the Luftwaffe wouldn’t visit England tonight. Even Germans had to rest.

After a while the air raid sirens seemed to be fading. Sleep was about to claim her, and she was willing.

Betsy might have been dreaming the throbbing hum of the marauding German aircraft. Dreams and reality were becoming almost interchangeable.

It sounded as if there were a lot of planes, but they were well off in the distance, to the south, perhaps still out over the channel.

Too far away to care about. So spent was Betsy that she decided to ignore the German bombers. Britain was winning the war in the air. Churchill had said so just yesterday. The raids were becoming less frequent, and the odds that bombs would fall where she was were slim.

She slipped back into sleep, and didn’t awaken even when aircraft engines pounded directly overhead.

She never woke up.

24

New York, the present

Building super Fred Charleston and his wife, Serri, sat side by side on the sofa, trying not to look frightened. That wasn’t easy, with the big cop and the busty beauty with the intense dark eyes sitting in chairs opposite them.

They were in the super’s cramped apartment on the first floor. The big cop, Frank Quinn, was slouched in the chair where Serri usually sat, reading her papers or watching TV and bitching about how badly the world was being run. The Middle East, especially, concerned her.

Charleston was a stocky, fidgety man in his forties, with unruly black hair and a face made to look pinched by an oversized nose that left him little upper lip. He wore a gray outfit that was more or less his super’s uniform. His wife, Serri, was also in her forties. She had blond hair that was lighter than her eyebrows. She would have been attractive were it not for an air about her, as if she minute by minute detected a different suspicious odor.

“So you figure you and Serri began this big argument about seven thirty?” Quinn said to Fred Charleston. Cops’ eyes, neutral yet at the same time unnerving, bore into Charleston.

“I know it was around seven thirty,” the super said. “Serri was upset about poison gas in the Middle East, and it got so I couldn’t finish my dinner, which we always start to eat at seven on the dot.”

“Why is that?” Pearl asked.

“So the tenants know,” Serri said. “That way they won’t be pestering Fred and me during our dinner. You wouldn’t believe some of the shit they pull.”