Chapter 4
Despite her misgivings, Thorn found herself in a car with Monroe and Johnson, headed for Johnson’s private residence.
“How did your daughter get into the West?” asked Thorn for the third time. So far, the other two had merely looked uncomfortable. Johnson stared ahead at the road; Monroe looked close to tears.
“Just . . . there’s someone at the house who can explain everything,” said Monroe at last before dissolving into sobs.
Thorn took a deep breath. She didn’t think Monroe and Johnson were liable to do something to physically harm her, but her unofficial position here in the East made things awkward. If they wanted to draw her into something illegal, she’d have to go to Aileen or someone even higher, and explain what was going on. She couldn’t risk the tentative relationships she’d managed to cultivate, or either government’s trust in her.
Sometimes, Thorn laughed at the ridiculousness of it. That she, Delilah Thorn, former video analyst, who had never dreamed of anything beyond a small promotion to a different floor and possibly a slightly larger cubicle, should be the ranking Union agent in the Free States! The job rightly belonged to someone more sophisticated, like Porter, except he was black and therefore unacceptable to the Free States, or her former field agent partner Dane Rook, who had recovered from his wounds and was healthy enough for the job, but the Union didn’t necessarily trust him due to his roots in the Occupied Territories.
So it had fallen to Thorn. She hoped that, this summer, after the East had its referendum on giving minorities the right to vote in state and federal elections, some of the turmoil would die down, and the Union and the Free States could hammer out an agreement for a more official ambassador, and an official embassy, that would not involve Thorn. Or would at least not make her the ranking official. She liked Atlanta, and wouldn’t mind staying. But there was so much more to the world.
Thorn had met ambassadors from other nations and now had ambitions to go there herself and see something of the rest of the world. The Australian ambassador had, quite sincerely, offered to show her around Canberra, and the German ambassador had tempted her with stories about the wonders of Vienna and Berlin and Munich. If Thorn had anything to say about her future assignments, she would want to go abroad. While she’d been studying security tapes all day long, foreign lands had merely been an abstraction. Then she had gone to the Western Confederacy and her eyes had been opened. New York was not the world. Not even close.
The sun was high in the sky as they pulled into the long driveway of Johnson’s Dunwoody home. The driveway was lined with small flowering bushes covered in yellow blooms which Thorn couldn’t identify. The circle drive in front of the house sported a fountain and more flowers. That was one thing Thorn had yet to really get used to: Atlanta seemed saturated with floral colors and scents every month of the year. The car pulled in front of the house and stopped.
The house itself was two stories, faced with brick, and sported wide windows and shutters. More flowers sprouted from window boxes. Thorn almost felt like she were being assaulted by the bright colors and explosions of blooms that came from every carefully manicured patch of lawn and window.
Clearly, Johnson, like many of the people Thorn encountered in and around the Brown building, belonged to the class of hereditary wealth. That seemed to be where most politicians, lawyers, and doctors originated in Atlanta. Thorn had no idea if that were the case elsewhere in the Free States, but she suspected it might be. The old plantation system had been dismantled in a way, but had really only been transformed into something not dependent on the labor of blacks in cotton and tobacco fields.
Thorn waited impatiently for Johnson to open the car door for her. She had made the mistake of hopping out of a car by herself in her first days in Atlanta, and had been schooled by Aileen shortly thereafter on a few of the social niceties she would need to observe while in the Free States.
Waiting to be let out of a car was one of them. Thorn had no patience for it, but she knew better than to buck a system her government was trying to form an alliance with.
Thorn exited the car after Johnson opened the door, and then participated in the choreographed march to the front door. Johnson, of course, allowed her and Monroe to walk in front of him, though he then had to awkwardly reach around them to push the door open. Thorn merely plastered on the small smile that she had mastered over the past year and followed Monroe into the house.
The foyer sported another, smaller, fountain, and a chandelier hung from the two-story vaulted ceiling. A black maid came to take Thorn’s light jacket. Thorn handed over her coat without thanking the woman, which was another thing she’d had to get used to. Even the maids had seemed embarrassed that she spoke to them, as if she were singling them out for some unusual behavior. She knew the woman was an employee, not a slave, but the pervasiveness of exclusively black help in the homes of the wealthy still made her uncomfortable.
“All right,” said Thorn, a little tired with dancing around Free State sensibilities. “What’s the issue here?”
“Come,” said Johnson. “Olivier is waiting in the drawing room.”
Drawing rooms were another thing Thorn had been introduced to in the big houses where many of the parties she’d been required to attend were held. Johnson gestured for her to walk through a nearby doorway, but of course, he wouldn’t precede her. Thorn took the lead and strolled through to the other room.
She stopped in surprise. A tall black man stood to the side, dressed in a smart suit and wearing a warm smile, though his eyes were ringed with worry. Johnson and Monroe were part of a pro-suffrage movement, but she’d never seen any blacks in their organization. Yet this man was clearly not house staff.
Johnson stepped around her, only now permitted by etiquette to stand before Thorn so that he might introduce her to this other man. “Delilah Thorn, this is Olivier Crandall. He is one of the financiers of our group.”
“Hello,” Thorn managed to say. She didn’t extend her hand as she would have in the Union since Confederate men were generally reluctant to accept it, but Crandall stretched out his hand, and Thorn shook it firmly.
“Thanks for coming,” he said in a sonorous voice. “We’re all desperately worried about Lucy.”
“Yes, I’ve heard you have a missing girl,” said Thorn. “But I haven’t been told more than that.”
“Please,” said Johnson, “everyone, sit. Refreshments will be out shortly.”
Crandall indicated Thorn should sit on the sofa next to him. Thorn sat down on the overly soft piece of floral furniture. She felt as if she were being swallowed by pillows.
Johnson perched in an uncomfortable-looking straight-backed chair near a darkened fireplace, while Monroe perched on a wingback chair across the room. She dabbed at her eyes, which were red.
“You may have heard about the Southern Alliance Mission Trips?” asked Crandall. “Small groups of teenagers volunteer to build homes or repair churches in towns just across the border. The border is fairly porous, at least in some places.”
Thorn nodded. While in the West, she had heard tales of Easterners who had crossed over the border and been swept up into the detention camps the West had set up to rid themselves of those deemed undesirable. Church-oriented teens would not seem to be in that category, however.
“So I’ve heard,” she said when Crandall didn’t continue.
He glanced at Monroe. “Lucy was part of a group from the Third Baptist Church of Dunwoody that went to help repair some churches damaged by winter storms. She was with the others for two days before she didn’t show one morning. The people she was staying with said she’d eaten breakfast and walked out the door as usual, so we know she was fine until she left her lodgings.”
“All right,” said Thorn. “So why not just ask the local sheriff to locate her? Or ask Alabama’s governor if that fails?”
A sob escaped Monroe. Thorn pretended not to have heard; the woman was clearly trying to be as quiet as possible.
Johnson looked at Monroe with misery in his own eyes. It was the most human expression Thorn had ever seen on the man, normally such a pretentious stuffed shirt. He rose a notch in her estimation. At least he had a heart, even if he didn’t like to show it outside his house.
“We did,” said Crandall. “He said that the Easterners deserved whatever they got for messing in things they didn’t understand. And there was more about being traitors to the Confederacy. I’m sure you can fill in the blanks. The folks in the border towns have always been resentful of the East’s successes since the War.”
Thorn could well believe it. How could one live just a few miles from towns that had reliable running water, electricity, sewage treatment plants, stores stocked with groceries, cars, and even airplanes, and not want some of that for themselves? The people in Perdition, Arkansas, where Thorn had been assigned before, had not seen any of those things, and as far as Thorn had been able to determine, either didn’t know or didn’t believe that people lived different lives across the border. They probably would have laughed if Thorn had tried to describe the skyline of Manhattan to them: the gleaming spires, the glass-and-steel needles that reached for the heavens, the wide boulevards clogged with taxis, buses, and pedestrians, including tourists from around the world. Nothing like that existed in the West.
But the border between the Union and the West was nearly airtight, so it wasn’t easy for someone in Arkansas to hear stories about what was on the other side of the border. The border between East and West was not nearly so strong. Families often crossed for illicit visits, and there were outreach efforts like these mission trips. It wouldn’t take much for those a few miles away from Georgia to know what they were being denied.
Though that wouldn’t explain the kidnapping, or, heavens forbid, the murder of a Baptist teenager from Atlanta who was guilty of nothing more than performing charity work.
“So the locals won’t help. That doesn’t explain why you haven’t gone over their heads.”
Crandall shrugged. “We have. We got the same response, more or less. No help is coming from any official sources on the Western side of the border. On this side, there’s little that can be done. Small mission trips operate on an understanding that they’re not really legally sanctioned; it’s just that no one dreamed any of the kids would be in much danger so close to home.”
And when they’re white thought Thorn.
“I’m not sure I understand why you want to involve me in this,” said Thorn. “Wouldn’t it be better to send some of your own agents? I know you have some operating over there.”
“We’d love to, but that would take an acknowledgement from Atlanta that they needed to intervene. So far, Governor Randolph and President Zane feel this hasn’t risen to the that level.”
Thorn chewed on that a moment. She was pretty sure President Zane was, at least personally, pro-suffrage for blacks, but Georgia’s governor had made it clear he thought the government had already done more than enough. “Blacks in our neighborhoods, blacks in our schools. What’s next: blacks in our churches?” had been repeated often enough during his last campaign. Georgia’s governor was powerful, and the position of President of the Free States was deliberately hampered by their Constitution, which had been written by anti-Unionists shortly after the war. The vision of a strong Union had terrified those men enough to fortify their northern border, but not enough to install a president with any real power.
“So Randolph won’t go along with this . . . whatever this is,” said Thorn. “And that leaves me.”
“You’ve been to the West before. You’ve seen what it’s like, you know what Birmingham is capable of. You know that even a white girl isn’t safe there.”
Thorn sighed. “Sure. I know that. But what do you want me to do about it? I don’t have any contacts this far east. As you are aware, my mission was in Arkansas.”
The part about a lack of contacts wasn’t entirely true. Porter and Rook had both made a little headway there, and had shared their knowledge with Thorn. But it wouldn’t do to play her hand like that.
“Couldn’t you just go and look around?” asked Monroe. The words seemed wrenched out of her gut. “My baby’s over there and no one will help her.”
Monroe finally dissolved into full-blown sobbing. Johnson looked uncomfortable, as if he might flee. The black maid from the foyer wordlessly brought Monroe a handkerchief.
“Think about it,” said Crandall. “I don’t think you have another scheduled event for a few days. You could go, look around, and come right back. Let us know if you find out anything.”
Oh, is that all? Thorn wanted to ask. Field work was unpredictable. Thorn remembered Rook once mumbling something about battle plans never survive first contact with the enemy, or something like that. He ascribed the saying to some German general, but had added it was true for field work, too. You could plan everything down to the last detail, but as soon as you were in enemy territory, you were going to have to toss out any ideas about following your plan.
It was best to be prepared for anything, and then rely on your own intuition to get yourself out of whatever danger presented itself.
Monroe finally broke and rushed over to Thorn. She knelt on the plush carpet and grabbed Thorn’s left hand. Her blue eyes were red with tears and her make-up had smeared down her face. “Please,” she said, pressing a photograph of a young redheaded girl with a wide smile into Thorn’s hands. “Please, if you won’t find my daughter, could you at least try to find out where she is? Take this with you. You could show it to people. Find my Lucy.”
Thorn wavered. She could imagine that being kidnapped and alone would be terrifying. The mission had been hard enough on her, but for Rook, it had been far worse. Being tortured had put a mark on his very soul that Thorn had seen torment him ever since. Even after his wounds had physically healed, he had been paralyzed by fear and an internal agony Thorn couldn’t understand and had no idea how to help. This girl would be marked the same way, if she even survived.
However, traveling to the West was a bad idea. Her presence there could completely torpedo everything the Union and the East had been trying to accomplish. She’d probably be shipped back to New York in disgrace, and end up in a small cell in the Citadel’s basement, with other enemies of the state who had no rights and disappeared from the memory of everyone outside the building’s lower floors.
Besides which, she didn’t owe anyone in this house anything. If Monroe wanted her daughter to be safe, why had she allowed her to go over the border in the first place? This wasn’t a situation of Thorn’s making, nor was it her problem. She couldn’t do it.
Thorn opened her mouth and surprised herself by saying, “Point me to the border.”