“But life with Lena has been strange,” she told herself now.
Yes, there had been the whispered words on that first night at Fort Des Moines, Lena’s apparent friendship with the Spanish hairdresser and that startling affair of the self-locking door at night in a Des Moines repair shop.
Then, too, she had quite recently heard a man at the back of the photographer’s studio say, “You must!” and had heard a voice, which she was sure must be Lena’s say, “I will not!” That Lena was there at the photographer’s studio at one time or another was certain, for a picture had been taken there for her identification card.
“But why not?” Norma whispered now, almost fiercely. What did she, Norma, have against that photographer. He was undoubtedly a German, yet there were hundreds of thousands of loyal German-Americans. He looked like her mental picture of a spy she had heard Lieutenant Warren tell about, yet her mental picture of that spy of India might be all wrong. She had never seen him. Both these men were photographers, yet there were many like them in the world. Both kept black pigeons. She didn’t know a great deal about pigeons so, for all she knew, there might be a million black ones in America.
Even the Spanish hairdresser had not been convicted of espionage. She had disappeared from Fort Des Moines, that was all. Some woman, with a Spanish look, had showed up at night at the Sea Tower with a faked identification card and dressed in a WAC uniform. But was this the Spanish hairdresser? Who could answer that question?
This brought her around to the missing picture from her film developed by Carl Langer.
“That was a picture of the Spanish hairdresser,” she assured herself. “The film for it is still in his studio and I am going to have it even if I have to break in and steal it.” At that she sprang out of bed and raced for the showers.
This, she recalled with sudden thrill, was their last day of training and probation. Today for the last time she would sit for eight hours with Sergeant Tom McCarthy at her elbow making sure that she marked on her chart the exact spot where an airplane had been spotted and seeing to it that she checked correctly with the representative of the Army, Navy, and Civil Aeronautics Authority to make sure that the plane really belonged where it had been spotted.
“Tomorrow,” she told herself, “I’ll be there all alone, doing my bit.”
Ah, yes, and that was not all. Rosa, Betty, Millie, Lena, and all the rest would be there at their appointed hours. And ten sturdy young men would oil up their guns and go marching off.