Louise's Dilemma Read Online Free PDF

sleeping together. Without being engaged, without wanting to be engaged. And I wasn’t even sure I wanted to remarry, ever! I felt a flood of emotion, almost a river of feeling, pour through my body, and suddenly Joe’s voice seemed very far away.
    ‘It won’t be this weekend. Maybe the next. But we can go see the boat, would you like that?’
    Not this weekend! Thank God. But if I wanted this so badly, why was I relieved?
    I felt my body regain control of itself. ‘Sure,’ I said, ‘I’d like to see it.’
    ‘If it’s not so frigid this weekend we’ll go,’ he said.
    We drove home in the crisp cold moonlight and said goodnight to each other in the hallway. Ada and Henry were still in the lounge, so we couldn’t kiss. But it wouldn’t be long before we would be spending the night together. Something I still could hardly imagine!

THREE
    ‘S o, Mrs Pearlie, I see that you have field experience.’
    Lawrence Egbert was the Assistant Chief of CID and my boss. He was one of the few men in the Research and Analysis Division with military experience. Most were academics or civil servants. He’d been in the U.S. Naval Reserve since 1918 and was an instructor in nautical astronomy.
    ‘Yes, sir,’ I said.
    Egbert referred to the file in his hand. My personnel file, I assumed. What was this all about? A new assignment? Please God, let me escape this prison built of file cabinets even for a day!
    ‘Your case officer was Colonel Melinsky. He’s given you the highest commendation. And,’ he said, leafing through a few more pages, ‘you’ve been to the Farm. And passed all tests.’ He closed the file and tossed it on his desk.
    ‘Foreign Nationalities Branch has requested that you be temporarily transferred to them, under the supervision of Lieutenant Arthur Collins,’ he said, ‘to investigate a suspicious communication from France to an American in Maryland. We cannot spare you. We are seriously understaffed.’
    Damn it!
    ‘But,’ he said, ‘so is every division of OSS. The Head of FNB assures me that he’ll need you for just a few days. So consider yourself transferred.’
    ‘Yes, sir, thank you, sir,’ I said.
    ‘You may report immediately,’ he said.
    I floated out of his office, passing by my desk long enough to collect my coat and pocketbook before I found my way to the Foreign Nationalities Branch.
    On my way out I passed Ruth, filing, of course. I’d worked with Ruth before. She was once a hoity toity Mt. Holyoke graduate. Now she spent her days filing like a machine. Her fingers were double-wrapped with first-aid tape.
    ‘You look pleased,’ she said.
    My training kicked in. I couldn’t tell her any details about my assignment. ‘On an errand for Egbert,’ I said. ‘Might be out of the office for a couple of days. If someone asks where I am …?’
    ‘I’ll take care of it,’ she said. ‘Have fun.’
    ‘Fun’ was a completely inappropriate word to assign to an OSS assignment, but I was already enjoying myself! A break from the tedium of office work was just what I needed.
    Collins offered me his chair and perched on his desk, one of a dozen squeezed into an office in a corner of the building that housed the Foreign Nationalities Branch on the OSS campus.
    ‘Cigarette?’ he asked, pulling out a packet of Luckies and holding the package out to me.
    ‘No, thanks,’ I said.
    Collins extracted a cigarette from the packet with his lips and lit it, striking his match across the wood of his desk, already deeply scarred. He inhaled deeply, and I noticed his shoulders slump with relief.
    ‘Poole wants me to interview the Martins,’ Collins said. DeWitt Poole, who’d run the American intelligence network in Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution, was the head of the Foreign Nationalities Branch. ‘The specificity of the date concerns him. And the address, right on the Chesapeake Bay, near the Solomons Island naval base and an air base.’
    ‘I understand that,’ I said.
    Collins