• 25 •

IT WOULD BE cold in the woods that night. Beulah warned Fleurette not to wear the filmy green dress she’d chosen for the evening, but Fleurette was always beautifully turned out, even when it meant sacrificing comfort. She had her sights set on Hack, the tall one, the good-looking one, if you liked a man who looked like he’d been cut out of a page in a magazine.

Beulah didn’t care for him herself. He would want something from her: men like Hack always wanted something from girls like Beulah, eventually. Soldiers in particular were a little too expectant for Beulah’s tastes. They made much of the fact that they might go off to war and never come back, which is to say that they wanted a little something extra from a girl purely out of sympathy. There was nothing in it for the girl, unless she could justify an act of intimate generosity on patriotic grounds, which Beulah could not. The soldiers made it sound as if they might never see a girl again once they left for France, but as far as Beulah knew, Paris was full of pretty girls. They hadn’t all been evacuated in advance of the Germans.

She liked Clarence. He was barely eighteen, and still a little soft. He wasn’t embarrassed to say that he missed his mother and his sisters, which Beulah appreciated. Any man who spoke well of the women in his family could be expected to behave honorably toward other women. It occurred to her, when Clarence talked wistfully of his younger sister, to whom he’d only just begun to give piano lessons the summer previous, that Henry Clay never said a kind word about his mother or any other woman in his family, even his wife. Especially his wife.

That should’ve been a sign.

But how different was Henry Clay, really, from any other man down on Mayo Street? Most of them were just like him, except that they never went on to do what Henry Clay had done. They lived out rather ordinary lives. They never made the papers.

Beulah shuddered. She’d managed to go years in New York without ever letting Henry Clay’s name flit across her mind, without ever summoning his face or trying to recall the sound of his voice. She wanted nothing more than to put him behind her, but something about being at this camp, within spitting distance of Richmond, brought him back.

It wasn’t good for her to relive the past like this. That’s what Mabel told her soon after they met. Beulah wasn’t as adept, back then, at hiding her identity, and Mabel quickly came to understand that Beulah had been lying to her. It took the better part of a bottle of cheap wine — nasty stuff, far worse than anything she drank back in Richmond — for Mabel to extract a full confession from Beulah. Once she did, she made it her job to help Beulah craft a new identity for herself.

“You have to tell yourself a different story,” Mabel insisted. “Every time you think about the past, put something else in your head.”

When Beulah asked what, exactly, she ought to put in her head, Mabel said, “Imagine yourself as another girl, with a different name, who had good parents and a nice apartment uptown.”

Beulah did just what Mabel told her to do, and it worked, mostly. After a while, she felt a little less dirty. A little less tainted. She wasn’t the poison in the soup anymore. She could look people in the eye, give them one of her new names, and let slip a little about an imagined past, one that held no shameful secrets. She discovered that as long as she believed the story she was telling, everyone else did, too.

But now it was as if the curtain had slipped, and Beulah could see directly through a window into those old days. She couldn’t convince herself that she was Roxie Collins of Park Avenue, and she probably hadn’t convinced anyone else, either. In class, her mind tended to drift. At night she dreamt about Meemaw, and woke up wondering whether her grandmother was dead or alive. If she had died, who would tell her? No one from Richmond even knew where to find Beulah.

Sidling up to her old terrors was turning Beulah back into the fretful and anxious girl she’d once been. She’d forgotten how hard it used to be for her to eat, and how her wrists were like sticks when she came out of jail. Now she was back to her old habits, nibbling on a roll while everyone else in the mess hall devoured their rations. She could live on tea and crackers. It was the only thing that ever settled her stomach.

And she had to force herself to smile at the other girls, much less to talk to them. When she first arrived at camp, she thought she would make a sensation, with her glamorous stories and her light-hearted laugh. She expected to be at the center of the camp’s social life. It would be a game to fit in with these girls, a deceptive little entertainment that would lift her spirits after she gave up on New York.

But in fact, she could hardly stand to be around them. It was painfully obvious that she wasn’t one of them, and never would be. To make matters worse, as the weeks went by, it was ever more apparent that a voyage to France was not on offer — at least, not for her. She tried not think about what she’d do next, but the future pressed against her just as urgently as the past did. That made the present a miserable place to be.

She didn’t even particularly want to go out with Fleurette to watch Constance and the others take their target practice, but she also didn’t want to be left alone in the tent with Norma, who had a tendency to raise her right eyebrow at everything Beulah said. She’d never met such a mistrustful woman in her life as Norma Kopp. The less time Beulah spent under her wary gaze, the better.

So she waited while Fleurette put on her green dress and did up her hair. She wore most of her uniform over it — the jacket, the long skirt, the canvas hat, but she intended to slip out of it once they were in the woods.

Beulah resisted Fleurette’s efforts to dress her up for the evening. She’d taken a liking to her uniform, finding it a relief not to have to think about her style of dress anymore.

“Wear a pin, at least,” Fleurette said, and pressed a red cotton geranium into her collar.

The two of them left the tent about fifteen minutes before curfew, so they could slip away without attracting attention. It was a bright night, with a clear sky and a half moon. There were still plenty of girls going back and forth between the tents. Constance would be busy for quite a while, rounding them up and herding them all to bed.

“Oh, there’s Hack, down by the mess hall,” Fleurette said. She floated down the hill toward him, like a leaf dropped into a fast-moving river. Beulah went along. They caught up with him just as he was going into the supply shed. It was just a little wooden lean-to, knocked together when camp opened and meant to be taken down when it was over.

“You girls shouldn’t see where these are hidden,” Hack said, but he did nothing to conceal what he was doing. The guns were kept in a wooden case behind some paint cans and covered up by tarps and tent stakes. Hack hauled the case out with him.

“Why bother with the case? Don’t you soldiers know how to wear a firearm?” Fleurette asked. She managed to sound flirtatious when she said it, but Hack was taking his responsibility seriously.

“When it’s a training exercise, we keep them in the case,” he said. “I don’t recall Miss Kopp inviting you two along.”

“She told me just now that she expected us out there with the others,” Fleurette said. “She thinks we ought to have the training, too. I told her that I wouldn’t be doing anything but seamstressing during the war, and wouldn’t need to know how to shoot a German, but she insisted.” Fleurette looked almost sorrowful about it, as if she hated to sacrifice a good night’s sleep for a shooting lesson in the woods.

Beulah admired how effortlessly Fleurette told lies. They had that in common, at least.

She followed Fleurette and Hack — walking side-by-side, as if they were already a pair — around behind the camp and into the woods. There was no guarantee that they hadn’t been seen, but Fleurette seemed to feel that she was immune from punishment because she was Constance’s sister. Beulah decided that she, too, would be afforded some protection because of her association with the two of them.

Behind the barn, past the broken fence post, down the little trail, and into the clearing they went. Margaret was waiting for them there, as were the other women Beulah had seen a few nights earlier when she stumbled into their training session. Only Constance and Sarah were missing, but they came along a few minutes later, having finished nightly rounds together. Clarence was back at camp, standing guard.

“I don’t have to tell you how easily you can be spotted coming and going,” Constance said, once they were all gathered together. They stood in a circle around her lantern, which cast up a yellow light on their chins. From above came the thin blue light of the moon. It made for an otherworldly effect. Beulah wouldn’t have been surprised if one of them had started chanting a spell.

But they all listened quite seriously to Constance. “The camp was designed to keep anyone from sneaking in and out, for good reason. But it means that we must all assume that someone will see us going in and out of the woods. To that end, I’m going to appoint each and every one of you to take up a nightly patrol as my deputy. You’ll work in shifts, but occasionally we’ll go out together. Tell anyone who asks that you’re in training to run a camp like this one someday, and that’s why I’ve put you all on duty. That way, it won’t be as obvious if you’re spotted out after curfew.”

The women seemed satisfied with that.

“Tonight we’ll go deeper into the woods and work on our stances and the handling of unloaded guns. I’ll let you each fire off a single shot, but no more. I’ve asked Norma to listen from camp and tell me if we can be heard. If we can, that’s the end of it.”

“You didn’t tell Norma!” Fleurette protested.

Constance shot a look at her of the type that passed between sisters and said, “She’s the only one in this entire camp whom I can trust completely with a secret, and that includes you. I don’t know why the two of you are here tonight, by the way.”

Hack said, “I brought them, miss. I thought they were to train with the others.”

Constance wasn’t fooled. She frowned at that but said, “Well, they’re not, but you might as well come along. I don’t want you going back by yourselves.”

Margaret was the one who found the route deeper into the woods, and she showed them the way. The others followed silently, in a straight line, putting their feet down in each other’s footsteps as Hack demonstrated. He led the group with his lantern. Constance took up the rear with hers.

It seemed to Beulah that they trudged for hours in those dark woods, but when they emerged in a wide, flat, hilltop clearing, Hack checked his watch and announced that only twenty minutes had passed.

“Let’s get on with this,” Constance said. “First let me see your stances.”

Constance went from one girl to the next and showed them how to put one foot in front, and to anchor the other foot behind. Fleurette and Beulah tried to stand alongside and imitate them, but Constance said, “Go sit over there where I can see you, both of you,” and they did.

While they worked on their stances and passed a pistol around, Hack walked the edge of the clearing.

“There’s not a house or a road or anything out here,” he said to Constance. “You won’t wake up anybody but the birds.”

Constance nodded but went and checked for herself.

“Your sister doesn’t trust a soul,” Beulah whispered to Fleurette.

“Not when it’s her responsibility,” Fleurette said. “If she can be blamed for it, she does it herself.”

That gave Beulah an idea about Constance and her mysterious past. Perhaps she’d been blamed for some mishap. “Sometimes people blame you for things that aren’t your responsibility,” she proposed.

Fleurette nodded. “She doesn’t like it when that happens.”

It was cold on the damp grass, but they’d been ordered to sit there and didn’t dare move now that guns were being passed around. Fleurette never did relieve herself of her uniform to show off her green dress: there wasn’t a minute to do it when Hack wasn’t watching, and it would’ve been awfully strange, even on this already strange night, for her to start stepping out of her clothes. A little bit of green silk hung below the hem of her uniform, and she fingered it absently as the girls took their places in line.

Beulah was sleepy, in spite of the cold. She leaned against Fleurette for warmth. The sensation of a shoulder and elbow next to her, faintly reminiscent of those early years when she shared a bed with Claudia, was so soothing that her eyes started to droop.

She’d hardly slept the night before: she’d awoken several times in a terror over what she would do when camp ended. Where would she go, on the very last day? When the gates opened and the parents came to retrieve their daughters, what would happen to her? If she could make her way back to New York, she could borrow a few dollars from Mabel and resume her old life, but if that was all she had waiting for her, why stay at the camp? She was doing poorly in her classes. She hated to sew and couldn’t manage the telegraph codes. She was too squeamish for nursing and bored by cooking. There was nothing for her, if France was out of reach. But she’d have to walk back to New York if she wanted to leave now. She hadn’t a penny in her pocket.

Such were the thoughts running around in her head at night. Sometimes they raced into the past, too, where they hadn’t been allowed to go for so many years: back to Meemaw, and Claudia, and Henry Clay, even, when he was sweet and tender to her, before everything went so terribly wrong.

Nestled against Fleurette, she was halfway back to her dreams when the first girl fired her gun.

Beulah jerked away from Fleurette and gasped with such force that she nearly choked.