Black Locust Letters Read Online Free Page A

seemed to drive up and down her street an
awful lot. At least no one had been about her windows or
doors.
    “ Betty.”
    She
yelped. Liza stood in the doorway, giving her a startled
expression. Liza, unlike Betty, was whiskey in a teacup. She had
limbs like bone china and painted green eyes and red hair, and a
way of speaking and moving as abrupt as a coiled
rattler.
    “ Sorry, I'm a little jumpy today. Rough night,” Betty
said.
    Liza
nodded. “Boss man wants to see you. I told him to wait until you
were done with your food, and you've been staring at the wall for
ten minutes.”
    “ Oh.” Betty stood and moved.
    Down
the hallway by five doors past the recording studio, where Emma and
Joe were already going through their greetings, Betty knocked on
her boss's door.
    “ Enter.”
    Mr.
Gresley sat stretching his neck behind the desk, a metal table with
papers cluttering it. It was a temporary solution until he got
something which wasn't military surplus. He'd been waiting for
years, and would be waiting for years more. She stared at him,
trying to see something in those brown eyes that would suggest he
was a Never Were sympathizer, but he looked, as always, like an
almost-retired grump who had forgotten to take his codfish liver
oil.
    “ Liza said you wanted to see me?” Betty asked.
    “ Here,” he grabbed a manilla envelope, one of the large
rectangular ones without a label, and held it out for her. Betty
took it and looked inside, seeing what looked like a wood plank.
“It's your invitation to the Pixie Carnival thing that's being held
in the forest.”
    “ The
Autumn Moon Festival?” Betty asked, to clarify, which she knew
would annoy him. It did.
    “ Hrm. Yes. That thing. I want you to go represent
TLR.”
    He
did that a lot, used elementary school ways of pronouncing the
letters, but Betty had never called him out on it. Today she
scarcely stopped herself in time. “I thought Thomas was
going?”
    Mr.
Gresley blinked. He swished some tobacco from one cheek to the
other. “He was.”
    She
waited for him to elaborate, but he didn't, so she said, “And why
isn't he still?”
    “ He's no longer with us.”
    What
did Mr. Gresley mean by that? Had he transferred to a sister
station, got fed up with Mr. Gresley's coarse manners and refusal
to obey the regulations and quit, or was there a more sinister
undertone to it all?
    Mr.
Gresley spat into a small blue flowerpot which he kept by his desk
and emptied when it got to smelling horrid. Today it was pretty
clean. “You're next up. So off with you, unless you're going to say
you're scared to go.”
    “ No,” Betty said. “I'd be glad to go.”
    He
thought women needed to cook and clean, and maybe teach children.
He certainly didn't understand why Betty hogged a whole house to
herself, or why she worked, so he gave her what he called the Shit
Shift.
    So
Betty would go, to prove to him once more that she was every bit as
capable as the men in the station. And perhaps, to have a bit of
fun. Her mind involuntarily went to Clarkin's face and she forbade
herself from hoping she would meet him again.
    At
the bus stop, a doppelganger noticed her long face. She didn't see
anyone else around other than the blue-coated policeman swinging
his hat at a small bird swooping down at him time and
again.
    Betty had talked with this doppelganger before; or perhaps it
was a different one. They all looked the same—well, the same to the
person observing them, at least. They look like your shadow. They
sound the same. And they listen. Though what they say back, if
anything, changes from time to time.
    This
one said nothing, and that was strangely comforting. Then the
will-o-the-wisps arrived on time five minutes later. Betty stepped
into the center of the lights, they spun, and she went back
home.
    The
police officer had somehow beat her home. As she passed, he spoke
to a green man in a tree, “I don't care if you are guarding the
apples. You are giving the little one quite the