The people who hit it off were Carol Koch and Aura Lee Stull. They had seen one another at meetings before, but their paths had not really crossed previously. While Cavriani, Inez, and Idelette watched with fascination, they sank deeply into shop talk, digressed into the fact that they both missed jogging even though it really wasn't necessary in a world where most people walked everywhere they went, and then meandered into children.

Although they were only two years apart in age, with Carol actually the younger, her children were several years older, so she started discussing opportunities for higher education, down-time apprenticeship possibilities, and similar matters that were clearly of enthralling interest to both women. After which they went back to shop talk and provided an entertaining version of what each knew about the adventures of the three draconian lady auditors who had taken on Franconia and triumphed over it, more or less.

"I have been lonely, a little," Carol was saying. "Almost all my friends were over in Fairmont, in the church there, and clubs. Or wives of men we knew through Ron's work, though those were more acquaintances. Pleasant to see, now and then, but not really friends. We hadn't had our house in the country here very long before the Ring of Fire and I'd never really had any reason to come west, over to Grantville. The only thing that kept me sane, that first year, was that Ron is really my best friend and always has been, ever since we met."

That led to a discussion of their meeting while she was an exchange student in Germany, the fact that they had known right away, "um, about ten minutes later," that they really must marry each other just as fast as they could persuade their respective families that it was a good idea, the negotiations with the families that took quite some time since they thought that this decision was too impulsive to be wise, and the like.

Aura Lee reciprocated with her own confidences. Her friends, too, had been in Fairmont. At the time of the Ring of Fire, they had only recently purchased a house on the far eastern edge of the territory included in it. "It's near the Edgertons," she said. "In fact, it was Ardelle Edgerton who told us it was on the market. It's been interesting, I suppose, but overall, I wish now that we'd stayed in Fairmont."

She paused. "Except, of course, that Joe has done so well here. This time suits him. He has a real career, not just a job. Not that he wasn't doing fine up-time. Joe's fifteen years younger than Tom, you know-that's Harlan's father, Tom and his wife were left up-time-and thirteen years younger than Dennis. Far from a spoiled youngest. That's not really irrelevant. He went into the army in 1973. Missed the fighting in Viet Nam. Spent his whole time in transportation and then went to work for the state highway department when he got out in 1979 and finished his technical course. Joe's not the . . . smoothest . . . guy in the world. His edges have filed down quite a bit over the fifteen years since we got married, just maturing, but . . . when I got out of college-that's nearly twenty-five years ago now-he certainly wasn't what my folks, especially not my mother, would have preferred for me. Much less five or six years before that, when we started dating."

"Family problems?" Carol asked sympathetically.

"I wasn't going to sneak around the fact that I liked Joe a lot better than I liked any other guy. We wrote. Perfectly harmless letters, once a week. Spring of my junior year in high school, he'd written back in October about a racial problem that had broken out in the barracks in Louisiana. I was taking American Government, and I asked him if I could use the letters as part of a cla.s.s presentation on the general topic of race relations in the armed forces. He said that was fine, so I did. There wasn't anything embarra.s.sing in our letters-I took those two to cla.s.s and used them as one of the exhibits. The teacher actually called Pop and asked him if he knew that Joe and I wrote to each other. When Pop said that yes, he knew, and the letters went out on Monday morning as regular as clockwork, that sort of took the excitement out of it for everybody else, I think."

After some time, Inez cleared her throat and suggested that they really ought to come to the topic of the meeting, which was the training of Idelette.

Leopold Cavriani smiled. "Tweedledum and Tweedledee went forth to fight a battle," he said.

Inez looked at him with some confusion.

"Papa has come to love your nonsense rhymes," Idelette told her solemnly. "I think he means that Mrs. Koch and Mrs. Stull are very alike. Such as both of the Tweedles had a common interest in the rattle. I do not think he means that they are likely to battle. Are Mrs. Fodor or Mrs. McIntire or Mrs. Utt back in Grantville yet?"

"No," Aura Lee said. "All three of them are still in Franconia."

"I would like to mentor, or be mentored if that is how it is said, with one of them," Idelette said. "It seems that their lives are more interesting than learning to be an accountant here in Grantville."

Leopold looked at her and said, "No." Quite simply, "No."

"I had a fight in an alley in Jena at the end of the Rudolstadt Colloquy," Carol offered helpfully. "The police actually put me in jail. Ed Piazza had to bail me out."

Idelette looked at Mrs. Koch with distinctly increased interest.

"Carol will be starting a new job," Aura Lee said. "I already have one trainee, so it would be less stressful for me to take a second than for Carol to try to mentor Idelette while she is starting a new job. Plus, she's pretty well finished dealing with teenagers and I have one who's fifteen and one who's twelve, so I'm still in the middle of it."

Carol looked at her gratefully. "Of course, that doesn't say that Idelette couldn't come over to the SoTF administration building occasionally, if something out of the ordinary is going on. Plus, I do have experience in mathematics tutoring, if she needs more work in theory."

Cavriani had a strange feeling that the decision had been taken out of his hands. And he wasn't even sure how.

This was not a common experience for him.

He was, at least, sure by now that either of these women, or both of them, would make a suitable "role model" for Idelette. He thought of one of the strange, wailing songs that Ed Piazza's wife Annabelle was accustomed to play on the mechanical music reproduction system in their home, the "stereo," about a "one man woman." These two, though, were each securely in possession of the husband she wanted rather than mourning for "the man who got away." He had no further qualms in regard to, as Mrs. Wiley had put it to the elder Mrs. Stull, "morals; ethics."

Not, in either case, a conventional role model. But then, by bringing Idelette to Grantville, he had determined already that her life would not be the conventional one of the daughter of an Italian merchant from Geneva.

"I do advise you, from a professional standpoint, that in the long run you will do better if you have somewhat less sticky fingers. As long as you are doing business in the SoTF. Specifically as long as you are doing business in the immediate region of Grantville itself. There are certainly a more than sufficient number of perfectly legitimate opportunities for making a profit. Such as the sale of gravel and concrete to the government at a reasonable price, without bribery to obtain the contract. If you are underbid, look elsewhere to make your sales. Presuming that you have presented an honest estimate, the contractor who underbid you will shortly be bankrupt and you will be able to obtain the contract the next time the state issues a request for proposals."

August von Sommersburg looked at his consultant. Facilitator.

Cavriani looked back. The Genevan was clearly unimpressed by the fact that he was addressing a member of the higher n.o.bility of the Holy Roman Empire. Or, these days, of the United States of Europe. The hereditary head of the county of Sommersburg within the SoTF, at any rate.

"Owing to the fact," Cavriani continued, "that people like Adducci appear to have little patience with some of the scams currently under way in which certain individuals are tempting you to partic.i.p.ate. It is also my impression that Mrs. Stull's husband, the secretary of transportation, has minimal tolerance for manipulation and rigging. Just because you have ascertained from statements made by your son-in-law that corruption was far from unknown in that up-time world does not mean that it would be prudent for you to engage in it here. As I read in the report that Marcus von Drachhausen provided to you concerning his conversation with Horace Bolender and his a.s.sociates, those convicted and imprisoned in West Virginia included several legislators. They will not consider you immune because you are a senator."

"I will take your advice under consideration," Count August said rather mildly.

"Specifically," Cavriani concluded, "it is my impression that the project being floated for the construction of a baseball stadium in the Grantville-Rudolstadt-Saalfeld 'metro corridor' is something that the lovely up-time stories define as a 'tarbaby.'"

Count August fingered his beard. "In the meantime, I wish you well on your journey to the Upper Palatinate."

"So your a.s.signment, should you choose to accept it . . ." Tony Adducci grinned at Carol Koch.

"Is to burrow into the Department of Economic Resources and get the goods on Horace Bolender at this end, while the auditors you have in the field get it in Franconia."

"I've specifically sent Noelle Murphy off to Franconia in the company of a couple of down-timers to see what she can turn up there. I told her to concentrate on the bid-rigging specifically rather than doing general auditing the way the gals have to. It's almost amusing that we have the cloak-and-dagger business stashed away in Economic Resources, right under Horace's own nose."

"I have to admit," Carol said, that I'm a little surprised to find out what family she belongs to. No one would dream that Noelle and that oaf Keenan Murphy who hangs around the 250 Club came from the same parents."

"They didn't," Tony said, almost a little reluctantly. He always felt a little bit like he was betraying the home team when he had to put one of Grantville's generally known but not officially public pieces of history into words for people like the Kochs who had not really been a part of the town before the Ring of Fire.

"Noelle's officially a Murphy, but Francis and Pat-you may have met Pat; she works for the sanitary commission-had been separated for a couple of years when Noelle was born. Pat took the three girls right after Patty was born and moved to Fairmont. She'd had it up to here with Francis' drinking. He came in thoroughly soused one Friday, four hours after he'd gotten off work, picked Patty up, and dropped her." Tony was uncomfortable. The episode of the Murphy separation had not been one of the high points of the history of St. Vincent de Paul parish in Grantville, the way it had been handled.

But he went on. "Keenan was a handful, even then. Now they would call it hyperactive, I guess. ADHD or something. He stayed with Francis' parents here in Grantville, but Paul and Maggie never could handle him. Never could control him."

"Oh," Carol said.

Tony chewed on his mustache a minute. "That was, I guess, about three years before Denise and I got married. Everyone at St. Vincent's was talking about it. Old Father O'Malley preached a homily about it, trying to shame Pat. Talk about a pre-Vatican-Two priest. Her parents walked out of ma.s.s. Anyway, Francis and Pat haven't lived with each other for twenty-five years, even though they're still legally married. Not divorced. Irish Catholic families, not Italian Catholic families-bunch of uptight Puritans, if you ask me. My wife Denise excepted, of course. She's Pat's cousin. Pat got Noelle baptized over in Fairmont. Denise and I are her G.o.dparents, so I feel some extra responsibility for shipping her off somewhere potentially dangerous."

"Nice men!" Carol said. "If they had their way, the women in their families would spend their lives neatly wrapped in cellophane, padded with cotton batting, and securely locked in a bank vault to make sure that no harm would come to them." Her tone was rather tart.

Tony looked at his new recruit a little dubiously. It was sometimes a bit hard to follow her train of thought. But he went on. "Pat only moved back to Grantville three or four years before the Ring of Fire, looking for someplace cheaper to live because Noelle wanted to go to college. Something had to give, money-wise. The three older girls were on their own by then. They didn't come through the Ring of Fire; they were living in Fairmont."

"I'll take the job on," Carol said. "Starting as soon as the semester is over in Jena. Even if I don't come up with any indictable dirt for you, Economic Resources has enough on its platter that they can keep me gainfully employed and I'll be earning my salary fair and square. But I'm going to have to ask around. Put some questions here and there. Not being a native of Grantville, I don't really know where all the bodies are buried and which closets have skeletons that rattle."

Tony nodded agreement. "Just be discreet."

"How close is Elaine Bolender who's the head of the state library to Horace Bolender and that bunch? Carol Koch asked. "You know, she's married to Albert Wilson, but she's gone back to using her maiden name since the Ring of Fire."

"Let me think. She's Pam Bolender's sister." Aura Lee started working her way through the complex web of Grantville relationships. "They're d.i.c.k Bolender's daughters. d.i.c.k and Jim are brothers, so they're first cousins."

Idelette sat listening, drinking a root beer and absorbing the things that she would need to know to meet the expectations that her father had for her when he brought her to this town.

"Elaine's married to Albert Wilson. Before the Ring of Fire, he taught industrial arts at the high school in Fairmont; he's been up at the oil field in Wietze now for almost two years, in the military. He was a veteran. Pam's married to Lowry Eckerlin, Lowry Junior. He's down in Franconia, doing law enforcement."

"Elaine and Pam aren't as close personally to Horace and Laura Jo as you might think, though, for first cousins," Inez Wiley inserted into the conversation. "Oveta and Mildred, d.i.c.k and Jim's wives, have always sort of rubbed each other the wrong way. Mildred's a Jenkins-some kind of cousin of Chad Jenkins' father. You've probably met Chad."

Carol nodded her head, glancing at Aura Lee. The expression of mild distaste on her face was quickly replaced by one of controlled neutrality.

One more thing that Aura Lee and Carol have in common, Inez thought. It was amazing how many women didn't particularly like Chad Jenkins. Well, perhaps not amazing. A lot of women, especially those who were securely attached to someone else, were annoyed by a man who was always more or less testing the waters. Not with serious intent, but just automatically taking their temperature.

What Inez said aloud was, "Oveta's a Sanderlin. They're from Marion County, but not from right around here. They didn't move to Grantville until the Depression."

Of course, Carol thought to herself. They've only been "right around here" for seventy-five years or so. I wonder how Inez cla.s.sifies the Kochs. I'll have to ask Aura Lee when we're talking tete-a-tete some time.

What she said was, "In that case, I think that I will ask Elaine some questions in regard to Laura Jo Cunningham. Horace Bolender's sister, that is, who is the executive secretary of the Grantville Research Center. I haven't been on the job very long, but it seems to me that almost every new economic development proposal that comes along has gone through the research center at some point. It's often their researchers who put the actual paperwork together on behalf of the would-be investors. Somebody is feeding inside information to Horace Bolender before the proposals come up before the board. In a lot of cases, people I think are fronts for him are managing to tie up just one little thing that's crucial for each proposal before the boards ever consider them. Which means that once they are approved, he has leverage to get himself in on the ground level to take some shares or it can't go forward."

Carol sat in the back of the room, trying to look as inconspicuous as possible. There was to be a joint hearing. The Schwarza-Saalfeld Enterprise District, for tax implications of the project. The Grantville Development Authority, for funding of the proposal. Both of them to consider the zoning aspects. She was representing Tony Adducci, who was ex-officio a member of both. As such, she would not be expected to say anything. Just to observe. In fact, Tony hoped that the mere fact that he had sent her rather than coming himself would send a signal that this was a low priority item as far as he was concerned. Not worth his personal attention. Useful as a training exercise for a new hire with little experience or expertise in the field.

Similarly, Henry Dreeson was not there. Mich.e.l.le Mastroianni, his clerk, was.

The administrations of the SoTF and Grantville hoped that this apparent inattention would tempt the investors to become incautious.

She looked around. Marcus von Drachhausen was here. Interesting. He was certainly not here in his capacity as Tony's deputy. If he was representing Count August, his father-in-law, that would const.i.tute a conflict of interest. Neither Horace Bolender nor his sister Laura Jo Cunningham. However, next to Drachhausen, Beverly Kay Cunningham, who was in charge of the resources overview section of the Grantville Research Center which Laura Jo ran. And who was married to Delton Cunningham, in Grantville's Streets and Roads Department. And Delton and Laura Jo's husband Daniel were brothers.

The members of the two boards overlapped quite a bit. A batch of them, naturally enough, were real estate types. Bunny Lamb was the chairperson.

Carol thought irreverently that any woman whose nickname was Bunny must have been pa.s.sionately in love to marry a man named Lamb.

Huddy Colburn and Thurman Jennings, the other two important real estate agents.

Then the wheeler-dealers who always managed to deal themselves in on this kind of thing, she thought cynically, even if serving on committees and boards caused them some actual work. Keith Trumble, Chad Jenkins, Hugh Lowe.

Edgar Zanewicz, the vice president of the bank. Mary Ruth Caldwell, secretary to the Authority and also Thurman Jennings' daughter. She was bearing up well after the terrible injury her husband had suffered early the previous winter.

The baseball stadium proposal, with all its a.s.sociated implications for rerouting of roads and traffic, was on the floor. Carol took meticulous notes.

Count August von Sommersburg did not appear at the hearing in regard to the baseball stadium proposal. Indeed, on that very morning, he and his unmarried daughter Elena were running completely unrelated errands at the SoTF administration building.

Starting in Ed Piazza's office, they left vases of fresh flowers everywhere they went. To greet the coming of spring, the count said gallantly, as he flirted with the staff, pointing out to them as he bowed that they were so essential to the smooth operation of the government, but alas so often underappreciated.

Liz Carstairs giggled. Her husband was one of those to whom Tony Adducci had pa.s.sed a comforting word about the count's unfortunate medical problems. From across the room, Mary Kathryn Riddle, just married in February to Derek Utt who was over in Fulda, winked at her. Megan Trumble, as befitted a recent widow, was subdued, but Mallory Pierpoint flirted back without the least sense of shame.

Jamie Lee Swisher and Tanya Newcomb, who had been deemed too young and innocent to be clued in about what was going on by the others, just looked at the tableau in some confusion.

The "guys" on the President's immediate staff, who were all down-timers, sat transfixed by the count's daughter. Elena von Sommersburg was a truly bodacious twenty-two-year-old redhead. As Tony Adducci had said to Howard Carstairs, if the count's late wife had looked anything like that, a fellow could see why he had opted to marry a girl who wasn't standesgemaess.

Aura Lee Hudson looked up. Idelette Cavriani was peeking around the door. She smiled.

"Can we come in?"

"Sure," Aura Lee said, "but who is the rest of 'we'?"

"This is Annalise Richter. Do you know her? She is the granddaughter of Mayor Dreeson's wife and she is running the St. Veronica's schools this summer while her grandmother is away."

Idelette paused. She was beginning to learn how to swim in the fluid currents of Grantville's various Protestant denominations with their fluctuating boundaries, matrimonial conversions, and overlapping theologies, so different from Geneva. When she met Annalise, she had at first been a little cautious, fearing that Mrs. Wiley might disapprove of friendship with a Catholic as beyond the acceptable limits. However, Mrs. Wiley had pointed out that Annalise was also the step-granddaughter of Henry Dreeson, the mayor, who was a member of their own church. Relieved, if even more confused, Idelette had been happy to have a new friend.

Now she asked, "Do you have time to help us?"

A half hour later, Aura Lee looked at them. "I do not believe this! Do you mean to say that she just dumped all of this on your shoulders and took off?"

Annalise nodded. "My grandmother showed great confidence in me. And told me not to bother the mayor unless I had to because he is a very busy man. And most of it is truly all right. The part that they call policy decisions. In that, I try to think what would be best and then do it. But for all this . . ." She gestured to the piles of papers spread out on Aura Lee's desk.

"I agree. You need some help. Yes, I will approve that as part of Idelette's training; she can a.s.sist you with the business end of running your grandmother's schools this summer."

She thought that it was not every girl who would jump with delight and clap her hands at the prospect of taking on what was going to amount to several long evenings of extra bookkeeping per week, but Idelette did.

Carol, that evening, mother of children who were older than Aura Lee's, asked a meaningful question. "Are you really sure that two heads are better than one when both of the heads are seventeen years old?"

"Not really. But I am sure that Annalise probably needs some mentoring as much as Idelette does. Maybe even more. Idelette has Inez at home, at least. Annalise is trying to be a house mother, too."

Aura Lee and Carol decided that the girls were in need of mentoring in a lot more areas than just accounting, mathematics, and business procedures. Especially Idelette before she was tossed into the wilderness of a coeducational high school the next fall. Annalise at least had some experience at that. They started having regular dinners with talk once a week at Carol's.

"Now Annalise," Carol said, "is sort of immunized. That is, she's persuaded herself that she is deathlessly in love with Heinrich Schmidt. Since Major Schmidt, the possibly idealized object of her affections, is safely immured at the siege of Amsterdam, she can fantasize about him all she likes without coming to any harm and it gives her a socially acceptable excuse to fend off other advances."

Annalise did not take particularly well to this description of an infatuation that she had, with the a.s.sistance of innumerable Harlequin Romances, pumped up in her own mind to the status of an immortal love affair.

"You, on the other hand," Aura Lee said, pointing to Idelette, "are seventeen, currently unattached, and totally inexperienced at sorting out the nice guys from the jerks. Which means that you have a lot to learn between now and the end of August. And you either learn it or, I swear, I will home school you myself."

Carol giggled.

"I'm not joking, Carol," Aura Lee said a little impatiently. "You at least got engaged to Ron before you started sleeping with him. Even though you were too much of an innocent to get birth control first."

"But we didn't intend to . . ."

"Self-delusion. 'Nice girls don't and I'm a nice girl so I won't.' Can you look me in the face and say the real words. Not 'We didn't intend to' but 'I honestly didn't expect that we would'?"

Carol chewed on that one a while. "No," she finally said. "Of course, I didn't have any real experience in holding it off before we got engaged."

"How come?" Aura Lee asked.

"Because we got engaged two weeks after we met," Carol admitted. "And that was official, after we'd told our families. Ron actually proposed the night we met each other. About ten minutes after we met each other."

This time Aura Lee giggled. "How long were you engaged?"