and announced: “We have cars for people like you, Commander. Welcome home, Sir!”
It probably is unfitting and childish of me, Ed Bitter thought, but under circumstances like these, there is much to be said for being a hero returned from the wars.
He had the driver take him to the Peabody Hotel rather than to the newspaper. He didn’t really want to see Ann Chambers. He wanted to see Sarah Child and get her off somewhere before Ann could guess his intentions and throw up obstacles. With a little bit of luck, Sarah Child would be alone at the Peabody.
He drew a blank with the hotel operator when he asked for Miss Child, but when he asked for Miss Chambers, she said, “Oh, you meant Mrs. Schild. I’ll ring.”
Who the hell is Mrs. Schild?
“Hello?”
He recognized Sarah’s voice, and his heart jumped.
“Hello yourself, pen pal,” he said. There was silence on the line for a long moment. “Sarah? That is you, isn’t it?”
“Where are you, Ed?” Sarah asked, calmly, distantly.
“In the lobby.”
My return, he thought, has not sent the lady into paroxysms of ecstasy.
“Give me fifteen minutes, Ed,” Sarah said. “Make it twenty.”
“And then what?”
“And then come up.”
“Caught you in the shower, did I?”
Maybe I am getting lucky!
“Twenty minutes,” she replied, and hung up.
He went into the bar and had a Scotch, and then another. There were a number of possibilities. She could have been in the shower, or had her face covered with mud, or any of the other things that females did to achieve beauty. Or she could have some guy up there. If she had a guy up there, a likely prospect considering her hot pants, she would either have to get rid of him or explain me to him.
It was a dumb idea coming here in the first place. I should have left things as they were. Pen pals, nothing more.
He waited precisely twenty minutes from the time he had spoken with her on the house phone and then walked across the lobby to the elevators.
He had just given the floor to the operator when he heard a familiar female voice shout, “Hold that car!”
It was Ann Chambers.
That’s why Sarah had needed twenty minutes. To summon Ann. Sarah was afraid that I would open the door, carry her to the bedroom, tear off her clothes, and rape her.
“If you say ‘Hello, Ann,’” Ann said, “I will say, ‘Hi, there, Cousin Edwin. How’s tricks?’”
“She called you, right?” Ed Bitter snapped.
“Right.”
“What the hell for?”
“I don’t really know,” Ann said. “Did Dick Canidy get home yet?”
A year before, when both Ed Bitter and Dick Canidy were flying instructors—and roommates—at the Navy base in Pensacola, Florida, Ed had brought Dick to The Plantation in Alabama. The Plantation was an antebellum mansion and several hundred thousand acres of pine trees her father, Ed’s uncle, hoped one day to turn into newsprint.
Dick Canidy looked like the answer to a maiden’s prayer in his white Navy uniform with the gold wings of a Naval Aviator pinned to his manly breast, and she would have cheerfully given him her pearl of great price right there on the carpet in the library of The Plantation had he asked for it. Or shown a slight interest in it.
But he hadn’t. He had made it perfectly clear that he regarded her as a college girl, beneath his consideration, and a relative of Eddie to boot. But an hour after Ann Chambers had first set eyes on Dick Canidy, she had decided that didn’t matter. She was going to marry him.
His disinterest in her hadn’t changed that decision, only made her realize that the way to capture this man was not to stare soulfully at him and wiggle her tail. She would have been perfectly willing to do that, too, but that wasn’t going to work. The way to catch this man was, she knew, to become his pal, his friend, a buddy in skirts. The birds-and-the-bees business would come later. She barely managed to start this, by talking flying with him—she had her commercial single-engine license, an Instrument rating, and 520 hours in her father’s stagger-wing Beechcraft—asking intelligent questions, putting him at ease, when Dick and Ed set off for China to save the world for democracy.
That had reduced her campaign to letter writing. Funny letters, the envelopes containing more clippings she thought would interest him than text. But she did just happen to mention that she had quit college and was working for the Memphis Advocate and hoped