Chapter 15
Much to Peggy’s relief, satellites weren’t so complicated that her 1940s mind couldn’t comprehend them.
“The idea of a telecommunications satellite is pretty simple,” Agent Burk explained, a strange little man with glasses and a receding hairline and a passion for these things. “Just like radios and television work by sending out signal waves to receivers, satellites do the same thing. They are a relay for those waves.”
He was at her glass board, dry eraser in hand, as he drew something that vaguely resembled a cupped flower with a stamen sticking out labeled A, then matching on the other side labeled B and above and between them something that may have been a winged plunger. “So the idea is that a powerful signal is sent out via a ground station. It is shot up into the atmosphere, where the satellite is orbiting.”
He drew a dashed line up to the winged plunger - she supposed it was his idea of a satellite. “The satellite reads the data and then retransmits it down to another ground station so they get the signal wherever they are.”
He drew another line to the flower labeled B. “The idea is that we can use the satellites to bounce signals from one place on Earth to another.”
“So it’s like using mirrors to reflect light from one place to another?”
Agent Burk grinned at that. “Exactly! Trying to get a signal across the globe using terrestrial means requires a ton of relays and the hope and a prayer that nothing interferes between them. A satellite is easy: beam it up one place, beam it down another, no fuss, no muss, and because they have onboard computers to hold the data, you can tell a satellite to stream data whenever you want, wherever you want. This is part of how we have this global media market, media is shared, boosted, and broadcast all over the world all the time, all day.”
“You know, it wasn’t so very different back in my day,” Peggy sniffed, cheekily. “I could get radio signals from Europe on a clear night if the skies were right.”
That made the other man grin. “I used to do that when I was a kid with my grandpa’s old ham radio. It’s how I got into this business.”
“It’s nice to know for all that everything has changed, some things have stayed the same.” She eyed the diagram on the board, feeling somewhat more secure in her understanding of all of this. “So the cellular phones everyone has here, they work on a similar principle?”
“More or less, a little different, but yeah. Pretty much all data on the planet works under these principles. It’s either sent through ground-based lines or shot up through satellites, but it’s always a combination of the two.”
“So, if Tony Stark wanted to make a call to someone in the US from Afghanistan…”
“That would have had to go through a satellite for sure. Afghanistan, especially where he went missing, doesn’t have a strong telecommunications network and no towers. Knowing Stark and his sort of crazy, he likely can directly uplink his phone into one of his company's satellites, probably one that is dedicated specifically for his personal use. I guess that he interfaces it with the artificial intelligence program he has running. He’s famous for having developed it.”
Even that idea made Peggy’s brain hurt. “Do we know which satellite is his specifically?”
Burk capped the dry-erase pen as he ruminated thoughtfully. “We would know most of them, yeah, he has a lot of them. The UN requires that all member nations keep a registry of anything they launch into space, mostly so they can make sure no one nation puts something into the sky that will nuke another nation, so the US keeps a list of everything that gets shot up for anyone, even Stark Industries. But, the truth of the matter is that if Stark wanted to, he could sneak something up there under the guise of something else if he wanted something more private or off the grid, in which case it won’t be on any registry.”
“How would we find it?”
“Tracking signals back and forth mostly. If he used his phone on his private network to call someone who has a phone via an outside carrier, we could backtrack it from the receiving end.”
“Perhaps a call to Obadiah Stane?”
Burk shrugged, nodding. “Sure, but that’s if Stane isn’t on the private system too. I’d guarantee that he was, being COO of Stark Industries. You’d have better luck with someone like Stark's assistants or others he is in contact with. Chances are higher they use commercial carriers.”
“Right,” she sighed, realizing they may have followed this to its logical end. “We’d have to know who Stark was calling the last few weeks before he disappeared, and I don’t think that short of getting the US federal government involved, we will be getting that information.”
“It’s easier to get since 9/11, but yeah, SHIELD is still not the US government, and we’d have to play nice to get it.”
Peggy nodded, studying the crude diagram on the board. “In theory, if we do find it, could we then track his cell phone signal to find him?”
Burk seemed pleased she had sussed this piece out for herself. “Sure, if his cell phone was still even working after the attack. Honestly, there is no guarantee it was. If it was as destroyed as I’m hearing it was, then it could be toast, and that’s not going to get you anywhere.”
“Right,” she sighed, realizing that her brilliant idea wasn’t as brilliant as she thought it was. “Well, it’s a better shot than I’ve had in weeks, and I must thank you for that, Agent Burk.”
“Pleasures all mine, Director Carter.” He shook her hand with a bit of a bashful grin. “You know, the grandpa who taught me how to use that radio, he served in the 107th. He knew the Howling Commandos. I was buddies with Jim Morita. They stayed in touch after the war.”
That fact gave Peggy pause as she found her first real smile of the day. “Really! Did you ever meet him?”
“Once at some get-together in the 80s. It was crazy to hear those stories. I was a nerdy little kid who was too in awe of them all to make an impression, but I think of them a lot. I wonder what he’d have to say about half of this.”
Peggy wondered that herself. “Knowing Jim, he’d take it all in stride.”
“Yeah,” he grinned, softly. “Anyway, if you have any further questions, let me know. I’m happy to help.”
“Thank you.” She waited till he was out of the door before sitting back down to stare at the board quietly, wondering. They knew Stark had made a call to Stane sometime right before the attack. What they didn’t know was if he made any other communications or to whom. Perhaps his assistant? From what Sharon said, he relied on her to even manage his life, an idea that Peggy might have found abhorrent if it weren’t for seeing how Mr. Jarvis and Howard operated. Was there anyone on any of Cassie’s lists that perhaps would have been in conversation with him?
“If you keep staring at the board like that, your eyes are going to cross.” Sharon leaned on the doorway, a plastic bag slung over her wrist and two bottles of water in hand. Peggy smiled at her as she waved her in, happily taking the water as Sharon settled herself and a bag of delicious-smelling food onto the desk between them.
“Sorry, was just...thinking.”
“I could tell,” she teased, pulling out cartons to set in between them. “You had that look Grandpa sometimes got when he was working on the New York Times crossword section.”
Peggy only chuckled, glancing again at the board. “I thought I had something there...maybe I didn’t.”
“Tracing Stark’s phone,” Sharon asked, opening the containers carefully. The food smelled savory and pungent, and it caught Peggy’s attention finally as her stomach rumbled.
“That was the idea, anyway. You know we could do phone tracing back in my day, right?”
“I didn’t say a thing,” Sharon shot back, though perhaps a hint of a guilty flush colored her cheeks. “Anyway, take a break, eat some food. Mom always said it was the best way to brainstorm.”
“I appreciate your mother’s way of thinking.” She eyed the paper containers with curiosity. “What culinary oddity have you brought for me today?”
“You say that as if it is a bad thing!” Sharon handed her a plastic fork but chose for herself a pair of pale, thin wooden sticks. “I brought you Thai food. Don’t worry, it’s nothing spicy. I figure a good old-fashioned pad thai and some spring rolls would be safe enough for you.”
“Thai?” She tried to correlate the name with the shifts and changes on the global map that she had been learning. “Thailand used to be Siam until the war.”
“And its immigrants brought one of my favorite drunk foods ever,” Sharon sighed wistfully, digging into something that smelled suspiciously like a curry. “The amount of this I lived on in college is obscene.”
Peggy could admit she’d never had it herself. She gingerly prodded the container of what looked to be long, thin noodles with some sort of sauce on top before twirling a bit on the plastic tines. Until she had stepped into this century, she’d never considered herself picky or skittish about food, but then again, American food in the 1940s wasn’t different than food you could get anywhere in Europe, and with a war going on and rations, any food was better than no food. But by comparison to the panoply available to her now, the food of her youth now looked basic and bland. Peggy was just British enough to admit that some things made her nervous to put in her mouth. Still, as she tasted the noodles with their sweet and savory flavor, she discovered it wasn’t all that bad.
“That’s...surprisingly good.”
“Did you think it wouldn’t be?” Sharon laughed at her over her dish of reddish, thin curry over a bed of rice.
“I don’t know! Remember I was raised on basic, English fair and then survived on rations and more potatoes than I thought were possible. Until you’ve had to eat US Army K-rations and drink Timothy Dugan’s coffee, you can’t possibly know what the hell of war is like.”
“Thank God for that, I might have starved.” Sharon spoke with the utter assurance of someone who had never had to know a day of hunger in her life. “I only ever heard the old guys talk about how much better things were back then. To hear my mother’s father, Papa Georgie, carry on about the pie back in the day, you’d have thought we had forgotten the art of it somehow.”
Peggy thought of Scott Lang and how he had carried on about the pie at the automat. Looking back, it had been damn good pie. “Well, I don’t know if it was an organic pie made from specially grown wheat and locally sourced fruit and butter, so perhaps it can’t compare.”
“Which reminds me, while I’m in town we need to do dinner with Juan and Julio sometime. I loved that restaurant.
Peggy only chuckled, digging into the noodles more. “There was a restaurant I used to practically live at when I first moved to the city permanently, an automat called L&L, not far from downtown. It was a nice place, mostly basic fair, but the pie was outstanding. I would go in to grab a slice and a cup and coffee and chat with Angie…”
As her friend’s name fell from her lips it occurred to Peggy that it had been weeks since she had even thought about her. Frankly, it had been that long since she thought about Daniel, or Edwin and Ana, all save Howard who now had become the central focus in the drama of his now missing son. Friends who had been dear to her just months ago now were forgotten as she struggled through the new world she wandered into, lost as she tried to figure out how to manage cell phones and computers, looking at Fury’s database, and understanding how satellites worked. It hit her then, with a finality that she hadn’t felt even as she looked Scott Lang in the eye, that her friends were gone and would be forever.
“Peggy?”
She blinked at the worry in her niece’s voice, realizing that Sharon had been speaking to her and she hadn’t been listening. “I’m sorry...what?”
Sharon eyed her with quiet concern. “You had been talking about pie and someone named Angie and then you spaced out.”
“Angie...right...yes.” She cleared her throat, prodding the noodles before her gently, her appetite suddenly somewhat gone. “I’d go and grab a piece of pie because sugar had been so limited back home that it was a treat to have it in America, so it was sort of a special reward at the end of the day. And Angie...she’d been my roommate for a time there when I worked at the SSR, she and I would talk about our days, her annoying customers, my annoying co-workers, her failed auditions, and...she was a friend. I think my first real female friend I ever had as an adult. I’d been around the Army and the boys for so long, and the few women I did know, we weren’t close. But Angie was different...just a sweet, kind soul. I didn’t tell her goodbye either, just a note, like everyone else, that I was out on a mission and may never come back.”
She wondered, vaguely, if this was how Tony Stark was feeling wherever he was, wishing he had thought to call one more person before his entire world was bombed into oblivion.
Sharon, sensing her mood, pushed her food aside for a moment. “She sounds like she was a very good friend.”
“One of the best,” Peggy confirmed, chuckling as random memories surfaced. “She started chatting me up because I came in one day over lunch, looking down. She always had that habit, of talking to customers who were in a bad mood. She’d comp a coffee or a pie and just give an ear to listen. When I had a spot of trouble with the SSR after one of Howard’s escapades, she didn’t think twice about giving me a hand hiding from them, even when it got us both tossed out of our lodging on our ears. She was from the Bronx, a huge Italian family, and every so often she’d drag me up for dinners with them. Her mother would make this pasta that was to die for and always insisted on sending some home with us because she was convinced we were too skinny and not eating enough, which wasn’t untrue as I couldn’t and still can’t cook. And all she ever wanted to be was an actress! She tried...heavens she tried, I think for everything, radio, stage, you name it, and she couldn’t get anyone to look at her twice. I finally begged Howard to give her something. He owned a film company after all, the least he could do to pay her back after dragging her into his arms-dealing fiasco was to give her a role in something. She didn’t take it at first, Angie had her heart set on Broadway, but eventually, I persuaded her to give it a shot. She’d just left a few months before...well all of his happened. The last I heard from her was a Christmas card, saying she was homesick and that the beaches in Los Angeles were lovely, but she missed it being cold for the holiday.”
Peggy never knew if she got a role with the studio or not.
“Anyway, another casualty of my decisions, I suppose.” Peggy stabbed the noodles viciously, perhaps more so than was needed. Scallions and some sort of long, thin, white crispy vegetable scattered on her desk in its wake. “I have that habit, you see, throwing myself into something and sucking in people I care for, often to their detriment.”
Sharon was polite enough to leave her to sulk for a moment as she stirred at her lunch carefully. They ate in silence for several moments, Peggy’s thoughts dark, on Ana, on Angie, on Daniel who had made such a show of kneeling on his one good leg and been so dear about it, considering how her impetuousness and insistence on living her life on her terms had its consequences. She’d had that argument with Mr. Jarvis while stuck in the desert, not long before all hell broke loose again. Some days she wondered if she hadn’t been right, she was better off alone. But...for all that she carried on about that like some melodramatic schoolgirl, she did seem to have the habit of picking up new friends left and right. Sharon for example was one example, and Cassandra working somewhere downstairs was another. Out a few blocks from there was Juan Machado who had messaged her for brunch over the weekend with Julio. It seemed she was always destined to draw people into her orbit.
“You know,” Sharon finally sighed around a bite of her curry. “The one thing that I always remember hearing about you growing up was just how compassionate you are, how determined you are to ensure people are cared for and safe. That sort of person attracts friends. It just so happens that you like saving the world, and that gets dicey at the best of times, but if there is one thing that I’ve learned about saving the world is that no hero can do it by themselves, whether it’s thanks to a friend who serves them coffee of a day or a niece who is kind enough to temporarily transfer to a new city and buys them pad thai for lunch. No one can go about this alone, not even when they think they can - especially when they think they should.”
Mr. Jarvis had told her something similar once. “If I had any doubt you were my niece, which I didn’t, I think that right there dispelled it.”
Sharon grinned. “Well, now I'm on a mission for the best pie in New York. I wonder if Juan has any recommendations.”
“I’m sure he does, something made with the magic fairy dust of pampered and massaged cows or something.” She was laughing at the very notion when the phone on her desk sounded, catching them both. Out of habit, she reached for it, all business in an instant. “Carter?”
“Director Carter,” the young woman she had met the very first time she had dragged into the SHIELD offices months ago was on the other end of the line. “There is a Colonel James Rhodes here to see you. He says he doesn’t have an appointment, but you two have been in communication.”
“Yes,” she smiled, glancing at the mess on her desk. “Send him on up, would you?”
“Of course, Director.”
Peggy hung up, reaching for napkins to wipe up the worst of it. “Rhodes is here to see me.”
Sharon arched an eyebrow but began gathering cartons to close up neatly. “I hadn’t heard he was stateside.”
“I hadn’t either.” Peggy tossed the crumpled mess. “Let’s see what he has to say about all of this.”
“I doubt it’s anything good,” Sharon snorted, carrying out the evidence of their lunch.
Considering it was he who had reached out to SHIELD in the first place, Peggy highly doubted it was anything good either. Minutes later, there was a knock on her open door, a man she could only presume was James Rhodes standing stiff and tall in a blue military uniform. The Air Force uniform, if she recalled, they’d since broken off from the Army with their more drab colors. Older than her, but still youthful enough to be out in the field, it was comforting to see someone with a military background for a change. She smiled as she beckoned him in, rounding her desk to make introductions. “You must be the Colonel.”
He took her hand firmly. “Director Carter, I presume.”
“At your service.” She pointed him to the chair Sharon had vacated earlier. “Have a seat. I’m glad you could swing by to see me.”
“Was in DC, ma’am, so it wasn’t so out of my way.” He smiled affably despite his severe demeanor. “My apologies, I’ve been mostly on the West Coast and overseas trying to coordinate efforts.”
“If it wasn’t for you, we’d not be manning this search to begin with.” She leaned back in her chair as she considered where to start. “Why did it take the Defense Department so long to admit Stark was gone?”
Irritation flickered in Rhodes's expression, schooled behind military calm. “When we came up on the sight of the attack and didn’t find Tony the first thought was that he’d been taken. The protocol was then to keep silent about it till we had more information, let them come to us, or let us find out where he is. The minute we make an announcement and the press gets involved is the minute we have every reporter and freelancer who thinks they know the Afghan mountains better than we do in the middle of a situation that might blow up in a lot of faces. It’s better to control the situation if we have the upper hand in it.”
“Understandable, Colonel, but it was weeks before anything was said by anyone.”
Another glimmer showed under the facade. “Yeah, well by that point it was out of my hands. Command in the region took control and shut me out of it, despite my many requests through the chain of command. I turned to you guys because after a month with no word and Pepper calling me nearly every hour of every day waiting for word, something had to be said. Mind you, no one on my end knows I did that, it just so happens that an ex-CO of mine happens to have served with Colonel Fury back in the day.”
“Duly noted,” Peggy assured him with a hint of a smile, remembering well her escapades with stepping outside of the military chain of command. “That’s a lot of trust to put into an outside agency.”
Rhodes shrugged. “Honestly, we all know you are where 90% of our intelligence comes from. If anyone has any information on the area, it would be SHIELD.”
He was smart. Peggy liked him immediately. “We do have operatives on the ground looking. Have you heard of the Ten Rings?”
“Somewhat, yeah, an insurgent group like any other.”
“We think that’s who has Stark.”
Rhodes took in the information with an equanimity she didn’t think he felt under the surface. “Any idea as to why?”
“It’s hard to say. It could be as simple as they found out a wealthy American industrialist was in the area and they thought they could take him and trade him for something valuable or make a political deal.”
“If that were the case they would have reached out and said something by now. We’ve not heard a word out of them, so I don’t think they want a trade.”
“You’re right,” she replied. “Which makes me believe they want him for something else. He was in the area demonstrating a new weapons system, correct?”
“Yeah, the Jericho, could blow the hell out of a whole mountain range.” His gaze turned shrewd as he studied Peggy. “You don’t think they want that out of him?”
“Who was the primary engineer on it?”
“He was, something that insane could only come out of Tony’s brain,” Rhodes replied, wheels spinning. “And if he is the primary architect they could take him and have him recreate it for them.”
Peggy let the penny drop quietly as Rhodes shifted in his seat. His sharp eyes turned to her, half in alarm, half in denial. “Tony would never do it, not in a million years.”
“He may have no choice.”
“You don’t know Tony Stark,” he replied firmly, shaking his head. “He’s never done anything he doesn’t want to do, not even when bribed. I saw him walk away from a multi-billion dollar weapons deal because a senator wanted to subcontract to a manufacturer in his state and Tony said no. He doesn’t just give in to demands.”
“It is one thing when you are safe and free in your own home country where you are protected by law and a large bank account, Colonel, it’s different when you are a prisoner in someone else’s domain.”
Doubt rose for just a second before Rhodes quashed it. “Not Tony.”
Peggy was sure Rhodes was more right than wrong, but she felt she had to float the possibility out there. “Were you part of the plans to do the demonstration in Afghanistan?”
“Yes, ma’am. I thought it was dangerous, but like I said, Tony is stubborn. He had been working on this system for a while, it was his baby. He wanted to demonstrate it to the military and the board.”
“Was it his idea to try it out in Afghanistan?”
“Not originally, no. He wanted to do something in California or Nevada, out in the desert and away from a populated area. None of his technology uses anything radioactive, so there isn’t a chance of fall out, but people still are nervous when you are blowing up mountain faces in their neighborhood. The governors of both states declined, so Obadiah suggested Afghanistan. It’s where our military operations are being directed right now and they would be the ones most eager to see it and try it out.”
“And they decided to override your concerns?”
She thought she could see the other man just swallow an eye roll. “Like I said about Tony, when he gets something into his head, he runs with it and you can’t convince him otherwise. Of course, I told him it was a bad idea but he did it anyway. It took him two months to plan it, and by that I mean Pepper and me.”
“And you were the only two who knew the plans?”
“No, there was of course the DOD, the commander of operational forces in Afghanistan, the head of security, a host of soldiers pulled into the detail. It wasn’t precisely a presidential visit, so they didn’t keep it as tightly under wraps.”
“So any one of them could have tipped off someone?”
Rhodes shifted uncomfortably. “Could have, but unlikely. Honestly, we’ve spent weeks questioning everyone and no one has found anything, and that’s not including the normal information sources we’ve tapped into to find anything, and I mean anything, on Tony’s whereabouts. If someone knows, they aren’t talking, because we’ve looked everywhere.”
“And nothing on the Ten Rings?”
Rhodes shook his head. “That’s the thing there, groups like that, they are like gangs here. Sure they terrorize the populace, but they do it because they have lots of big guns and weapons and no one is willing to cross that. Even if they do know, and some might, no one is talking.”
And therein lay the problem. “Do you know if Mr. Stark has a private network he communicates on?”
Her question came out of nowhere for Rhodes who blinked in mild surprise at it. “His network?”
Peggy pointed to Agent Burk’s diagram on her glass board. “His network.”
He hit on instantly why she asked. “You are trying to track Tony's phone.”
“The hope is it will provide some data for his location. If he has his own network, then it would only be his signal we would be looking for, correct?”
“Yeah, and you aren’t wrong, though I’m a bit surprised you all figured it out. Tony doesn’t advertise that.”
“I must admit I didn’t figure it out, but someone else here did. So he does have a satellite he uses that is private?”
“It’s part of existing satellites used for Stark Industries, but yeah, he does it so he doesn’t have to compete for bandwidth. Means he gets signal just about anywhere.” Excitement underscored his words as he sat up straight, considering. “We never found his phone in the debris. If it’s still live then it would still be pinging off the network, but it’s private and his lawyers will never give us access in a million years...but Pepper would.”
Spoken like a man who was willing to do whatever it took to get things done. “His last phone call that we know of was to Obadiah Stane right before the attack. It means that at least he was connected to the signal at some point while in the country. Perhaps it is a means by which to find him.”
The colonel’s relief was palpable, the stiffness of his carriage relaxing slightly as a hint of a smile pulled up on his face. “We could find him.”
It was clear that whatever his duty in working with Stark, the man considered him a friend. “You are close to him.”
“Yeah,” he chuffed, both in affection and exasperation. “I’ve known Tony since he was a kid, I mean a real kid. We were at MIT together. I tried to keep him out of trouble with varying degrees of success, considering it was Tony. After he took over at Stark Industries, my hire-ups decided to capitalize on our friendship and connection and assigned me to be his handler on military matters, which was good, because I don’t think there is anyone else in the US military who is crazy enough to try and handle Tony Stark.”
For Peggy, who had done much the same thing with his father, she understood Rhodes' position far too well. She found herself grinning at him, more than sympathetic to the other man’s plight. “It either means you are insane or endlessly patient, but whatever the case you strike me as a loyal and true friend.”
His affection turned into appreciation for her sentiment. “Well, he doesn’t make it easy, but yeah. Honestly, Tony makes a career out of poor life choices, and he’d have been flat on his ass - pardon the expression - if it weren’t for people who have his back. Me, Pepper, Rhodey, Obi...these are who have kept Tony together for years. What my worst fear, my biggest fear is that when we do find him he will either be so broken he won’t ever be himself ever again or worse, that he’s beyond all hope and we lost him. And I don’t know how I feel about that.”
“We’ll find him,” she assured him with a confidence she had no right to give him but felt nonetheless. After all, she had come into this future with the determination to save the world, and Tony Stark was supposed to be a part of that future. She had no idea what they would do if no sooner than she arrived one of the key pieces of this plan - these Avengers - was removed before she even had an opportunity to do...well, whatever it was she was supposed to do.
Still, it was at least comfort to Rhodes, who sighed in deep relief. “You know, I take my oath I swore, the command I answer to, all very seriously, but...I am not going to lie, I’m so glad right now that I went around them to you.”
“If they found out, would it make it hard for you?”
“Only if we find him dead,” he replied, pointedly. “If we find him alive, they get all the credit and glory.”
“Does it matter then?”
“No, it doesn’t, but just so you know, I wasn’t here and we never spoke.”
“Of course not, Colonel Rhodes. Will you speak to Miss Potts about access to that satellite?”
“I’ll have her talk with your people. Anyone in particular?”
Peggy glanced at the diagram again. “Agent Burk, I think. He will be able to parse it out far better than I can. We will reach out to you with further information when we get it. Are you going back to Afghanistan?”
“Edwards first, then back out there, yeah.” It was clear the mileage on him was wearing. “Anything you have to share with me, here’s my direct contact.”
He passed a card over with a personal number and what she now recognized as an email addressed handwritten in tight, cramped writing at the bottom. She took it and set it by her phone. “We’ll contact you as soon as we hear something.”
“I appreciate it.” He rose, shaking Peggy’s hand as he did. “Listen, that SHIELD stepped up...it means a lot. I’ve never known where to fall on you all if you were useful or not, but in this instance, I’m glad I did.”
“Thank you for your vote of confidence.” James Rhodes struck her as an impossibly good man dragged into the insanity of his friend’s life. It was only later, after she had seen him out, as she sat at her desk studying his card that she thought of Angie again, and how she’d been dragged into Peggy’s insanity. It was never easy being the friend of someone like that. She studied Rhodes’ card, heart heavy, as she realized how much she missed the steadfast, practical, patient kindness of her friend. Had she, like Rhodes, waited in the hope that someone would bring word of her return? Had she mourned the loss and moved on? Had she even remembered her mad friend from New York who was always in more trouble than ever seemed wise?
It all left Peggy longing for a piece of pie and a coffee and a willing ear to pour her troubles in.