Donovan said. “If she thinks that’s too much to ask of her, you can see about getting someone to drive the car.”
“Oh, she can drive it,” Canidy said. “She can even fly. I mean, really. Not just a Piper Cub. She’s got a commercial ticket, an instrument rating, and five hundred-odd hours. She’s really a very capable young woman.”
“Not bad-looking, either,” Donovan said.
“Yeah,” Canidy said noncommittally.
Maybe it’s chemical, Donovan thought. Maybe as there is a chemical attraction between young people of opposite sexes, there is also a chemical repulsion. Obviously, Ann Chambers does not ring bells in Dick Canidy.
2
SUMMER PLACE
DEAL, NEW JERSEY
0015 HOURS
JULY 5, 1942
Ann Chambers had not been asleep, although she had pretended to be when Charity had finally, about eleven, returned to their room. Charity had been spending considerable time with Doug Douglass in Canidy’s room above the boathouse during the clambake. And Ann—in her current state of mind—did not want to listen to Charity’s impassioned rhapsodies about it.
The problem was that, unlike Charity’s dashing hero, hers, rather than leaping enthusiastically into her bed, seemed oblivious to her very existence. How could she look soulfully into his eyes when she couldn’t get him to look at her?
When the luminous hands on the traveling alarm clock lined up at midnight, Ann was really faced with doing what she had decided to do that afternoon. It was different now. It was not an intellectual exercise.
She thought some more, and when the hands of the clock reached fifteen minutes after midnight, she finally made up her mind. She would forget she was a nice girl, a virgin, an Episcopalian, and that good Episcopalian virgins who find themselves awake at midnight roll over and go back to sleep.
Opportunity knocks but once, she told herself quietly as she swung her legs out and searched for her shoes under the bed with her toes. If not now, then probably never. There is absolutely no chance I’ll ever get invited back here, and where else would there ever be the opportunity again?
There was enough light in the room for her to see Charity clearly. She was on her stomach, with her nightgown up to her waist. She was in a deep sleep.
Ann pulled a high-collared cotton robe over her baby-doll pajamas, buttoned it, and then, her lips tight in determination, reached under it and pulled the cutesy-poo balloon-leg pajama pants off. The one thing she didn’t want Dick Canidy to think was that she was a cutesy-poo college girl.
Though it was a little wicked to leave her bedroom half naked under a thin robe, it gave her determination. There was no turning back now.
She went down the stairs to the foyer. A civilian security guard was sitting in an upholstered chair by the door to what had been a closet but now held a switchboard. Presuming everyone had gone to bed, he had pulled down his tie, removed his seersucker jacket, and hung his shoulder holster over the back of his chair. He looked up from his copy of The Saturday Evening Post, his face expressionless.
“Can’t sleep,” Ann said. “I think it’s probably the corn. I ate two dozen ears.”
He smiled. It was a friendly smile.
“That was nice, wasn’t it?” he said. “I had four lobsters. I think there’s some baking soda in the kitchen.”
“I think I’ll try a walk,” Ann said. “Then the baking soda.”
He leaned down then and came up with a flashlight. There were half a dozen of them, the funny-looking kind they had in the military services, with the lens and bulb at right angles to the battery case, lined neatly against the baseboard.
“Here,” he said.
“I won’t need that,” she said.
“The sailors may be a little nervous,” he said practically. “Better they see you coming than think somebody—like the officer of the guard—is sneaking around to check up on them.”
“Thank you,” she said, and took the light and walked out toward the boathouse.
If he’s not there already, it won’t be long.
They left Summer Place at half past seven. It was fifteen minutes to Lakehurst, and maybe another fifteen minutes to put everybody in the airplane, file a flight plan, and take off. It was about a hundred seventy-five air miles to Washington. At, say, a hundred fifteen knots, that was an hour and a half to Anacostia, call it two hours before they were on the ground. Then another two hours back to Lakehurst. He should be back about half past midnight.
Halfway to the boathouse, startling her, one of the sailors