Heroes, David Hagberg [me reader .txt] 📗

“Yeah. In the medicine chest is a bottle of henna rinse. Throw it in.”

“What is that?”

She smiled. “By morning I’ll be a short-haired redhead with long, thin eyebrows and thick ruby lips. My mother wouldn’t even know me.”

He found the things in the bathroom, and ten minutes later she was ready. There was no one on the third-floor corridor as they headed down the stairs. Nor were they met by anyone coming upon the ground floor they hurried out the back door and across the parking lot to Schey’s Hudson. He tossed Eva’s bag in the back seat and climbed in behind the wheel. When the woman was in and the door closed, he started the car, backed out of his slot, and headed slowly around to the street at the same moment a black and white police cruiser slid up to the front door of the building they had just left.

“Down,” Schey said. He kept going. He turned onto the street toward the cruiser as its doors opened and two uniformed police officers got out.

As Schey passed them, they were going up the walk and entering the building.

“It’s clear now,” he said when they turned the next corner.

Eva got up and cautiously looked back the way they had come.

Then she turned to Schey. “It’s that fat bitch Leona, from down the hill.”

“The one at the door?”

“She called the cops. I know damned well she called the cops on me. She hates me.”

The police would go up and talk to the woman. Then they’d knock on Eva’s door. He didn’t think they’d break in. Not simply for a call of domestic troubles, of excessive noise. Eva shattered that notion, however.

“Leona is the housemother. She’s got the keys. She’ll let them in when I don’t answer.”

Schey turned north again and headed up toward the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. The car’s gas tank was nearly full; he had a few dollars and some ration coupons in his pocket. The radio and most of his things were in the trunk. And presumably the package he had fetched from beneath Eva’s bathroom contained more money, ration booklets, and identifications. There was nothing holding them in the city. Nothing to return for.

By the time they connected Montisier’s murder and Eva Braun’s disappearance with him, if they ever did, he and she would be long gone.

“We can’t go back,” she said forlornly, something of her earlier uncertain mood coming back to her.

“What did you forget?” Schey asked sharply.

“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing. It was all in the package under the toilet.” She looked out the window. “Nothing but a job and friends and a life.”

They passed the medical center, then crossed into Maryland, in Silver Spring, where Schey took the highway around to the northeast, finally picking up Maryland 190, which roughly paralleled the river.

As he drove away from the city, out into the dark countryside, he got the overwhelming sense that now his life with Catherine was really over. Seeing her lying on the floor of their house in Oak Ridge, blood down the front of her dress, simply had not been real to him. Nor had his run to Knoxville, and then here to Washington. For some reason all of that had been blanked out of his mind. Or rather it had unfolded like a motion picture on a screen—representative of reality, but nothing more.

Now, however, driving through the night, heading to the southwest and whatever lay there, he felt as if he were beginning a new life.

They were on their honeymoon.

Around six in the morning they crossed into North Carolina from Danville, in a blowing snowstorm that had been cutting their speed for the past three hours.

Schey knew he could not go on much longer. He was exhausted.

They were well out of what he considered to be the danger zone around Washington, D.C. And no one would recognize Eva, in any event.

He looked at her. She had fallen asleep again. Her hair was very short and was colored a deep reddish brown from the henna rinse. Sometime in the night she had crawled into the back seat, where she had carefully cut her long golden hair, tossing it out the window as she clipped.

Later they had stopped beside the road, and in the cold she had wet her hair with snow, had applied the rinse, then had cleaned her hair again with the snow and dried it with a reasonably clean rag from the trunk.

At first it had looked awful, but as it finally dried in front of the car’s defroster vent, she had managed to brush it out and it didn’t look so bad.

She redid her eyebrows and her lipstick at a gas station somewhere in Virginia. Now she was a different woman. Evelyn Baker, her driver’s license, Social Security card, and Red Cross blood donor card all said.

He had become Robert Stromberg, 4F because of a heart problem. His occupation was journalist with the War Information Bureau in New York. No such bureau actually existed, of course.

But if he was asked, he would tell anyone who wanted to listen that his job was to report on the attitudes of the country.

The cover was ingenious. It allowed him a logical reason to travel across the country.

This evening he had a second reason to be traveling: He and Eva (Evelyn) had just been married. They were heading south for some sun.

A couple of miles south of the Virginia border they passed slowly through a very tiny town. The signboard identified it as Pelham, North Carolina. Just at the edge of town was a gas station, a diner with its lights on, and a half-dozen tiny cottages in the back. A couple of trucks were parked around the side.

They couldn’t go on any longer, Schey figured. If he fell asleep at the wheel and they had an accident, it would be all over for them. It was better to stop here and continue after they had had a few hours of sleep.

Eva stirred when