Winter of Discontent by Jeanne M. Dams Page B

restless and wanted to do something, anything. Getting no answer to my knock at the back door, I poked my head in. The dogs, for once, only whined instead of setting up a cacophony of barking.
    Jane was asleep in the kitchen rocking chair. She looked, suddenly, very old, and somehow defenseless. I felt like a peeping Tom. She would hate my seeing her without her usual stoic armor. I backed away as quietly as I could, hoping the dogs would stay still, and went back to Alan.
    “Sleep is the best thing in the world for her,” he said when I told him.
    “Yes, but I’m antsy. I feel like Don Quixote. I’m itching to run off in all directions at once, tilting at whatever windmills present themselves.”
    “Well, then, suppose I go get a copy of the letter, and we can worry over that for a while.” So he went over to the police station and came home with not one copy, but two.
    We sat down in front of the fire with them. “I can’t believe Derek is letting me look at this,” I said, shaking my head.
    “Only tangential evidence, as I said before, love. And don’t forget you have a few special privileges.”
    “Wife of VIP. Right.” I grinned at him and stuck out my tongue.
    “Ah, a prophet is not without honor save in his own home. All right, let’s see what this can tell us.”
    “Read it out loud, Alan. I’m still not too good at English handwriting, and this is old and dirty, besides.”
    He cleared his throat. “No return address. No date. Here is the text:

    Dear Waffles, Good to get your last letter. Sounds as though things are fairly quiet there, ha-ha. I heard from an old friend of yours the other day, Sam Smith. He’s going on a little trip soon. Do I recall that you used to know some people in the States? He’s going to try to get to Indiana, though travel is difficult these days. Plans to visit some pleasant little towns called Donaldson, Tiosa, Spring Grove, Laketon, and Rolling Prairie. I’ve not beard of any of them, have you? Then it’s on to Mount Auburn—he says be may visit there twice—before he sees Orestes and then rests from his travel in Dabney or Manson. Sounds frightfully dull to me, but if you have friends that way, you might warn them that Sam’s toddling through. They might want to be ready”
     

    Alan stopped reading.
    “Be ready for what?”
    “I don’t know. The letter ends there.”
    “‘Be ready to entertain him,’ I suppose. Well. That surely isn’t very interesting, is it?”
    “Dull as ditch water. Which makes one wonder all the more why Bill thought it worth hiding.”
    “And worth copying onto a map of Indiana. I wish that atlas weren’t lost.”
    “I think I brought back the Indiana map we bought when we went to the States for that visit. I’m afraid I haven’t the least idea where it might be, however.”
    “I suppose we could order one from W H. Smith or somebody. Or I could get my friend Doc Foley to buy one and send it to me.” I went back to the letter. “‘ … though travel is difficult these days.’ What do you suppose that means?”
    “I thought it might refer to the austerity program after the war.” He didn’t need to say which war. To people of our generation, there is only one war. “Do you know about the currency restrictions and so on?”
    “Just from old Agatha Christie novels. You were allowed to take only a few pounds out of the country, right?”
    “So few that most people couldn’t travel abroad at all, unless they had bank accounts in another country, or wealthy friends.”
    “Why, in that case, would an Englishman want to go to all that trouble to visit a bunch of boring places in Indiana? Besides, it doesn’t sound as though he was planning to go and stay with anybody, so how could he possibly have managed the money angle?”
    Alan shrugged. “There was a thriving black market, of course.”
    “In Europe, probably. But in the wilds of Indiana?” I shook my head. “Anyway, I had another thought. What if the letter