He made sure he turned off the hot plate. He didn't want to burn down the building by accident. Then he went out to his auto. His hand stayed in the overcoat pocket with the pistol, but he wasn't very worried. Nobody could reasonably expect him to leave at this hour. He might even be back before the mailman got to the apartment building where he lived.
As usual, he parked around the corner from the building. Even though he didn't expect trouble, it was one of those days where he would almost have welcomed it. He felt as if he were trouble's master. He remembered that for a very long time. The thought filled his mind as he turned the corner. That was when the explosion knocked him off his feet.
"Holy Jesus!" he said. Bright shards of glass glittered in the snow, blown out of nearby windows. He picked himself up and ran toward the sound of the blast. If anyone needed help, he'd do what he could.
He hadn't gone more than a few steps before he realized his building was the one that had suffered. The hole in the front wall gaped from his floor. And…
"No," Moss whispered. But that was his apartment. Or rather, that had been his apartment. Not much seemed left of it. Not a whole lot seemed left of the ones to either side, either. Smoke started pouring out of the hole as broken gas lines or wires set things ablaze.
"Call the police!" someone shouted. "Call the fire department!" somebody else yelled. Jonathan Moss heard them as if from very far away. He ran toward the front steps of the building where he'd lived for so long. Try as he would, though, he couldn't go up them, because all the people who'd lived in the apartment building were flooding out. Some of them were bloodied and limping. Others just had panic on their faces.
"Laura!" Moss shouted. "Dorothy!"
He didn't see them anywhere. He hadn't really thought he would. But hope died hard. Hope, sometimes, died harder than people. People, as he knew too well, could be awfully easy to kill.
A man who lived on the same floor as he did pushed him away. "You don't want to try to go in, Mr. Moss," he said. "The whole goddamn building's liable to fall down."
"My wife! My little girl!"
"Wasn't that your place where it happened?" his neighbor asked. Helplessly, he nodded. The other man said, "Then there's nothing you can do for 'em now, and that's the Lord's truth. If they come out, they come out. If they don't…" He spread his hands.
More people pushed out of the building. More bricks fell off it. Some landed in the snow. One hit a man in the shoulder. He howled like a wolf. Moss tried again to go into the building. Again, he failed. People took hold of him and dragged him back by main force.
Sirens screamed in the distance, rapidly drawing closer. Screams bubbled in Moss' throat. Why they didn't burst out, he had no idea. Everything he cared about had been in that flat. Now the flat was gone, and twenty-five years of his dreams and hopes with it.
He tried to think, though his stunned wits made it next to impossible. He'd been getting threats for a long time. He hadn't taken them too seriously till the bomb went off in the occupation center. After that, he realized disaster really could happen to him. And now it had.
"Who?" he muttered. Who would have wanted to blow up a woman and a child? For if this was a bomb, as seemed horribly likely, whoever had sent it must have addressed it to Laura or Dorothy. Had it had his name on it, they would have left it alone. He would have opened it. And it would have blown up in his face.
Fire engines howled to a stop. The police came right behind them. And soldiers in green-gray helped clear people away from the building. "Move it!" they shouted. "The whole thing may collapse!"
"Get out of the way!" the firemen shouted. They began playing streams of water on the spreading flames. A lot of the water splashed down onto the people who had lived in the building. That moved them away faster than the soldiers could have.
A major called, "Whose place was it that went up?"
"Mine," Moss said dully.
"You weren't inside there." The officer stated the obvious. "You'd be hamburger if you were."
"Hamburger." My wife is hamburger. My little girl is hamburger. Moss managed to shake his head. "No. I was doing some work at the office. I had just got out of my auto when… when it happened. Laura… Dorothy…" He began to weep.
"Christ! You're Jonathan Moss." Recognizing him, the major suddenly put two and two together. "This wasn't a gas leak, or anything like that. This was a bomb, or it probably was a bomb, anyway."
Now Moss' head moved up and down as mechanically as it had gone back and forth. "Yes. I think you're right. Somebody killed them." He could say it. It didn't sound as if it meant anything. He was still deep in shock. But part of him knew it would mean something before long. The major seemed to sense it was too soon for questions. He led Moss down the street. Docile as a child, Moss went with him. Behind them, the building fell in on itself.
XVIII
"Alec!" Mary Pomeroy called. "Don't you dare pull the cat's tail. If he scratches you or bites you, it's your own fault."
Mouser was, on the whole, a patient cat. Little boys, though, were liable to drive even patient cats past the limits of what they'd put up with. Mouser had bitten Alec only a couple of times, but he scratched whenever he thought he had to. Alec was still learning what would annoy him enough to bring out the claws. Sometimes his experiments seemed deliberately hair-raising.
Mary turned on the wireless just ahead of the hour to catch the news. The lead story was a bomb that had blown up a police station in Frankfort, Kentucky. Seventeen policemen were dead, another two dozen wounded. A group called the American Patriots-a group, the newscaster said sarcastically, that no one had ever heard of till they committed this outrage-was claiming responsibility.
And the president of the Confederate States was all but foaming at the mouth. Jake Featherston claimed the bombing proved Kentucky was full of pro-U.S. fanatics who refused to accept the results of the plebiscite. The newscaster poured more scorn on that idea. Mary was willing to believe it, simply because this smooth-voiced stooge for the Yanks didn't.
"In another bombing case," the broadcaster went on, "investigators continue to probe the ruins of a Berlin, Ontario, apartment building, seeking clues to the perpetrator of the atrocity. A mother and child, Laura and Dorothy Moss, are confirmed dead. Several other persons were injured in the blast, and three remain missing…"
A mother and a child. That wasn't how Mary had thought of them. A traitor and her half-American brat was more what she had in mind. That way, she didn't have to remind herself that the woman who'd been born Laura Secord-born with the name of a great Canadian patriot-had been a person as well as a political symbol. She didn't want to think of the late Laura Moss as a person. If she did, she had to think about what she'd done.
She couldn't remember the last time she'd physically hurt anyone, aside from spanking Alec when he needed it. Maybe when she was little, in a fight with her older sister. But Julia had several years on her, so she might not have managed it even then.
Well, she'd managed it now. She'd blown a woman and her little girl to kingdom come, and she'd hurt some other people with them. Not bad for a package she'd mailed from Wilf Rokeby's post office. Not bad? Or not good?
This is war, she told herself. Look what the Americans did to my family. Why should I care what happens to them, or to the people who collaborate with them?
Had the Americans blown up women and children? Mary nodded defiantly. Of course they had, with their bombs and their artillery. She didn't feel guilty. She paused, too honest to go on with that. The trouble was, she did feel guilty. Unlike the Yanks-or so she insisted to herself-she had a working conscience. At the moment, it was working overtime.