With Every Letter (43 page)

She escaped from the tent into the morning sun. A dozen air base bicycles stood outside the tent, available for anyone.

Mellie mounted one and pedaled a wobbly course through the base. When was the last time she’d ridden a bike? Probably not since grade school.

By the time she reached the access road, her course straightened. But the course of her thoughts wavered.

She’d earned the friendship of Georgie and Rose. Even Kay. If Kay didn’t care, she wouldn’t confront her. And the squadron liked her. So she wasn’t unlovable, and she had to stop seeing herself that way.

Mellie rode through an olive grove, and the shade of the trees speckled her vision. Her decision to refuse Tom’s ultimatum seemed right, but was it selfish at the core?

She loved Tom. But what was best for him? What did he need most of all?

Tom didn’t think anyone could love his complete self. He already knew Annie loved him—inner self to inner self. But he didn’t know that all of Mellie loved all of Tom.

Didn’t he deserve to know? Didn’t he deserve to know he’d earned someone’s love, name and all?

Mellie wiped the sheen from her eyes and turned left onto the road into town. Somewhere there had to be a turnoff for the beach, where she could sit in the sand and pray. “Lord, what’s best for him? Please help me make the right decision.”

Tom’s face swam in her mind. He needed to know he was capable of winning a woman’s heart.

A sob burst out. But the price. To give him what he needed, she had to set her heart before him. She had to offer the look of love in her eyes while absorbing the rejection in his.

“It’s too much, Lord. How can I?” The bike sped downhill past low stone walls draped with magenta bougainvillea. “It’s too much.”

She stopped and planted her feet. Too much what? Too much mercy?

Hadn’t the Lord shown the greatest mercy of all? Hadn’t he offered the world the depths of his love while absorbing the ultimate rejection in his beaten and crucified body?

Mellie buried her face in her hands. If Jesus bore the cross to show his love, couldn’t she bear Tom’s polite rejection to show her love? He deserved the gift, whether or not he chose to accept it.

She pedaled down the road and navigated a series of hairpin turns toward the Mediterranean. Offering Tom her love was the right thing to do. It was merciful. And it would be the most difficult and painful thing she’d ever done.

Mellie rounded the last turn and stopped short. She stared at the sight and imagined the wonder on Tom’s face if he saw it.

A plan bubbled in her mind, a tiny spring, and it flowed in a little ribbon, meandering and widening and gathering strength from other streams.

She turned her bicycle around and pedaled hard, up the road, across the access road, and onto the base. Her lungs screamed for air and sweat dribbled down her sides, but she kept going.

Outside the mess tent, Kay chatted with Vera and Alice.

Mellie hopped off the bike, let it clatter to the ground, and strode up, panting hard. “Do you . . . have that . . . letter?”

Kay’s green eyes widened. “Um, yeah.” She pulled it from her trousers pocket.

Mellie ripped it in half. “Would you . . . please help me?”

Kay smiled. “Again?”

46

Milazzo Airfield
Sicily
August 17, 1943

“What a mess.” Tom took off his helmet, ran his fingers through his hair, and plunked his helmet back on.

“Made perfect sense to me.” Sergeant Ferris jutted out his chin, but the hollow look in his eyes told the truth. He’d made a whopping mistake.

Tom inspected the bomb crater on the runway they’d built only the day before. Milazzo lay at the base of a narrow spit of land that thrust north into the Tyrrhenian Sea less than twenty miles from Messina. The flat terrain made a perfect location for an airfield complex close to the Italian mainland. Today both American and British troops converged on Messina, and the Twelfth Air Force was fit to be tied that their brand-new airfield was down on a crucial day.

Larry kicked a rock into the crater. “What do you think, Gill?”

Tom shook his head and clipped Sesame’s leash to his belt. The bomb severed the telephone line that ran in a culvert under the runway from the control tower to the tent complex. If the line had been left in place, they could have spliced it
together and used it to pull a new line through. But Ferris had ordered his squad to pull out the old line.

Larry groaned. “We’ll have to cut away the PBS, lift the square mesh track, lay new line, put it back together again. Good thing PBS is easy to mend.”

“Yeah,” Tom said. “But that’s half a day’s work.” They couldn’t afford to have the runway down when the men at the front needed coverage by fighter planes.

“Better get started, huh?” Larry said.

“There’s got to be a better way.” Tom squatted at the end of the culvert and peered through. Too narrow for a man.

Sesame nudged him. Whenever Tom got low to the ground, it meant playtime.

Light filled his head. “It’s not playtime, boy. It’s work time.”

Tom beckoned to a Signal Corps man standing by a spool of telephone line. “Rosen, isn’t it? Bring the line here. Ferris, get your men to clear the rubble from the culvert. I need a straight path.”

Larry squatted next to him. “What’s up?”

“Sesame.” He unhooked the leash from the collar and tied telephone line in its place. “He’ll fit in there.”

“You think he’ll go in?”

“He’ll need a nudge. But he’ll come to you. Go to the other end of the culvert and call him when I tell you.” Tom opened a ration tin and cut Spam with his pocketknife. “Ferris, fetch some square mesh track. Enough to cover the crater so Sesame won’t take the easy way out in the middle.”

Head down, Ferris recruited a handful of men to roll over a seven-and-a-half-foot wide roll of square mesh track.

Tom checked the line on Sesame’s collar. “Want some Spam?”

His stubby tail wagged like a metronome.

“Yeah, that’s a good boy.” Tom looked over to the center of the runway. Ferris’s men rolled SMT over the crater. “Ready?”

“Ready.”

“Okay, boy. Here’s the Spam.” Tom tossed a couple of cubes into the culvert.

Sesame licked his chops and ran into the tunnel. Now to keep him in and coax him through.

“Call him, Larry.” Tom held his clipboard over the entrance, leaving a slit for the line to pass through. “Rosen, give him plenty of slack.”

“Here, boy!” Larry called from the other side of the runway. “Here, Sesame!”

Tom beckoned to Bill Rinaldi and had him hold the clipboard. “Don’t let him out.”

“Here, Sesame,” Larry said. “Who loves you? Larry loves you, not mean old Gill.”

Tom grinned and jogged to the covered crater. No openings big enough for little dogs. He clapped Davis and Fitzgerald on the back. “Looks good. Don’t let him escape.”

“Here, boy!” Larry called. “I’ll get you a steak, not that Spam mean old Gill gives you.”

“Where are you going to get that?” Tom joined his friend.

“I’ll carve it out of Ferris’s behind.”

Tom laughed. “I’ll help. We’ll have a fine barbecue.”

Soon a little nut-brown face poked out of the tunnel, and Sesame scrambled into Larry’s arms. The dog gave Tom a wounded look and licked Larry’s face.

Tom brushed dirt off the white stripe down his dog’s nose. “Yeah, Ses, you love him now. Wait till you ask for your steak, and he’s in the brig for cannibalism.”

“Not cannibalism. Ferris is a weasel not a human.”

Tom glanced at his squad leader across the runway. He might be a weasel, but he was a humbled weasel.

Rinaldi ran over with Tom’s clipboard. “Let’s hear it for the lieutenant, boys! He saved us hours of work.”

The men cheered, and even Ferris joined in, if halfheartedly.

The applause felt good. Instead of cheering bloodshed, they cheered a job well done. Things were shifting. Tom raised Sesame’s paw. “Here’s your real hero.”

“Yeah,” Rinaldi said. “And he’s a whole lot better looking.”

“I’ll say.” Tom walked out to the crater. “Okay, Ferris. You know what to do. Fix the culvert wall, fill in the crater, lay new SMT and PBS. Let’s get this strip up and running.”

“You heard the man,” Ferris yelled. “Get to work, you clods.”

Yep, Ferris would take out his frustrations on his squad, but the runway would open soon.

Tom gazed to the west, where toast-colored hills met blue sky and blue sea. Would any cargo planes come today? Any mail?

Each day another layer of resignation settled heavy on his heart. Over two weeks had passed since he’d sent his ultimatum. Annie didn’t want to meet him or tell him her name. She wouldn’t even say why. Almost a year of friendship was just fading away.

“Gill, I need to speak to you.” Captain Newman stood at the side of the runway with a stern look on his face.

Tom frowned. What had he done now? Things had improved. He walked over to his CO. “Yes, sir?”

From the nose down, Newman looked fierce, but humor played around his brown eyes. “I told you I wouldn’t deliver any more letters.”

Tom searched his commander’s face, the odd mix of humor and ferocity. His mind turned to mush. “Letters?”

Newman pulled an envelope from behind his back.

The stark white jolted Tom’s heart. “A letter?”

“She addressed this to me. There’s an envelope for you, but most of it’s for me, instructions, requests. Does she know I outrank her?” Newman lifted one eyebrow but failed to look imposing.

“Requests?” Tom eyed the breathtaking white. What had she written? A kind excuse why she wouldn’t reveal her identity? Or did she sign her name and send her picture?

“I’ve had it for a few days.”

Tom’s gaze jerked up to his commander. “A few days?” Did Newman know how he’d suffered the last few days?

“Her idea. She told me to give you the letter the day we secured Sicily. We just got a telegram. Patton entered Messina at 1000—beat the Brits to the prize. It’s over. Sicily’s secure.”

“Great news.” Tom held out his hand for the letter. His fingers twitched.

“Your little nurse pleaded for you to have a forty-eight-hour pass, arranged a plane ride for you. What could I say? You’ve got a pass, starting tomorrow at 0800. Use it well.”

A pass? A plane ride? That could only mean one thing.

“She wants to meet me?” Tom’s breath came out in little bursts. He grabbed the letter, ripped it open, and broke out in laughter. “She wants to meet me!”

August 18, 1943

Tom wiggled his nose under the blindfold. About fifteen minutes before, Clint Peters had come back to the C-47 cabin and tied a bandanna around Tom’s head. Tight.

His hands slapped out a nervous beat on his thighs. Smooth khaki cotton greeted his fingers rather than the herringbone twills he’d lived in for almost a year. Deep in the recesses of his barracks bag, he’d located his khaki dress shirt and trousers,
and his olive drab service coat and garrison cap. Rinaldi, a barber in the real world, gave him a good cut and shave.

In a few minutes he’d meet his Annie.

With the stupid blindfold, Tom couldn’t see his destination, and he couldn’t read Annie’s letter for the hundredth time. She’d meet him at the plane, wearing a civilian dress, welcome him, and invite him to a party. That’s how he’d know who she was.

She hadn’t written what would happen next, but Tom knew. He’d take her in his arms and kiss her long and hard.

Or would he? Something hitched in his gut. What if she’d only invited him here to let him down face-to-face, the honorable way? Or what if her fears were founded, and they didn’t share a mutual attraction? Was it enough to love her heart and soul?

Her letter warned him strongly. She worried that he’d built an unrealistic image in his mind and she’d disappoint him.

“She’s unattractive,” he said. “Not pretty. Not at all.”

He contorted his mental image of her, changed dark hair and eyes to pale, padded her figure, stretched her a foot taller than him, gave her black teeth and a hunchback and warts on her nose.

He groaned. A useless exercise. He wouldn’t know until he saw her.

The plane wheels bumped onto the runway, and Tom’s heart thumped along in rhythm. In just a minute. Just a minute.

In the blindfold’s blackness, Tom squeezed his eyes shut even harder. “Lord, if it’s your will for us to be together, let us see each other with your eyes. If it isn’t your will, show us now.”

The plane shuddered still. The engines whined, then sputtered to a stop.

Tom ran his sweaty hands up and down his thighs. Clint gave him strict orders not to move until told. Annie went through a lot of work, and Tom wanted to follow her plan. His insides warmed. She planned this out of love for him.

And out of caution.

The door to the navigator’s room opened. “You ready?” Clint asked.

“Absolutely. When can I take this thing off?”

“When I tell you. Come on, let’s go. I’ve got your bag.”

“Thanks.” Tom had packed his half-shelter and bedroll, a change of clothes, his toiletry kit, and his swim trunks, at Annie’s intriguing request.