Dead Lock Read Online Free

“happen” to drop by whenever they saw a strange car in the driveway on the chance it might belong to a Detroit Tiger.
    When the team went on the road, Dad went with them, logging more rail miles than Casey Jones. That became a sore point between him and his second wife Rose until she threatened to leave him and move back to Denver, where her parents lived.
    Dad refused to take her seriously until one day at the start of the Tigers’ swing to the east coast, Rose put me on a train to Sault Ste. Marie and took one herself, west to Colorado.
    Just after filing for divorce.
    She had called my uncle, of course, to make sure I had a place to stay in the Soo. G.P. was familiar with the strains a newspaper career could put on a marriage, his own having survived nearly forty years before my Aunt Susan passed away.
    After my senior year of high school, I accepted a journalism scholarship to Columbia University. Dad would visit whenever the Tigers played the Yankees, but sadly he died during my junior year of college. That left me an orphan; my real mother had been killed in a car accident when I was barely three years old.
    A voice on the phone jarred me back to the present.
     
     
     
     
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    “Soo Morning News.” The woman sounded very business-like.
    “G. P. Brennan, please.”
    “One moment.”
    Another wait. I watched two small boys play catch on the far side of the huge waiting room. They dressed alike in red shorts, white shirts and blue caps, a reflection of the patriotism that had swept the country after that shocking December day nearly two years ago. I couldn’t help hoping this damn war would be over before they and other kids like them would be called to serve in some foxhole on the other side of the world. The soldiers doing the fighting and dying now had tossed baseballs just a few years ago.
    “Brennan.”
    “G. P., it’s Kate.” I had called him G. P. instead of “Uncle George” since childhood. “G. P.” was his nickname, and much easier for a three-year-old to say.
    “Kate! It’s grand to hear from you. Say, you sound like you’re next door.” His voice sounded full of the warmth I remembered so well.
“I am, practically. I’m in Mackinaw City.”
“Mackinaw? Why, what in blazes are you doing there?”
“Coming to visit you.”
    There came a pause at the other end, then, “Oh?” Strange. My beloved Uncle George didn’t sound overjoyed to hear I had come to see him.
“What’s wrong, G. P.? You always said I had a job with your paper anytime I wanted it.”
Another pause. “It’s not the job, Kate; it’s finding you a place to stay.”
“How about where I always stay...the upper flat in your house?”
“Why, it’s rented out. Jack Crawford, my new managing editor, is living there until his house is built.”
“I’ll find a room somewhere in town.”
    “Impossible. There are no rooms. The War Department has stationed seven thousand troops here to guard the locks. Soldiers are everywhere. Fort Brady can’t house them all and people are renting out their basements and garages.”
    I felt as though one of those huge rolling white caps out in the Straits had knocked me over. I knew the strategic importance of the Soo Locks, but I hadn’t counted on this.
    The iron ore from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and Minnesota’s Mesabi Range was critically vital to the Allied war plants. Every lake freighter carrying ore to the steel mills in Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania passed through one of four locks in the St. Marys River. If anything happened to those locks, every factory in America making tanks, munitions or anything else vital to the war effort, would shut down.
“Kate...” G. P.’s voice came from somewhere in the distance. “Kate, are you there?”
“I’m here. G. P.”
“Take my advice and turn around for home. The Soo is no place for you right now.”
    “Neither is Detroit, I’m afraid.” Blow by blow I recounted my latest experience. I started with the