“What’s your wife think about your activities outside of the house?” Dash asked hotly, though there was a quiver in her voice.
All at once he closed the distance between them, backing her against the wall, his thick forearm pressed against her windpipe. She clawed at it, but he was locked on tight, his face inches from hers.
“Get off me,” she growled.
“Don’t talk about my wife,” he hissed through bared teeth.
Dash wheezed. “I can’t breathe.”
“Lemme help with that.” His arm was like an iron bar, holding her in place. She couldn’t move when he started kissing her, scraping his teeth against hers. She twisted her face sideways and gasped for air, but he kept his hold on her.
“See?” Despite the freezing room, the sweat on his cheeks shone in the dim light. “I’m not such a bad guy. Just relax. You might enjoy yourself.”
“Get off!” she screamed. Her knee swung up toward his groin, but she missed. The pressure on her throat increased until stars floated in her vision.
“Come on, baby.”
Bang!Jim’s eyes popped wide open for an instant, then he crumpled to the floor. Behind him stood Ginny, a shocked expression on her face and a shovel in her hands. It dropped with a clang, and she rushed to Dash’s side.
“We have to report this,” she insisted, holding Dash upright. “Right now. Let’s get out of here. He’ll wake up soon. I didn’t hit him too hard.”
“Hard enough. Thank you, Ginny.”
seventeenDOT— HMCS Saint-Hyacinthe, Québec —
The only thing better than going to HMCS Saint-Hyacinthe for five weeks of training was doing it with Alice. She, Dot, and four others from Conestoga hit the ground running as soon as they arrived. This time it was Alice who started off a little nervous, but Dot reassured her.
“There’s nothing we can’t do, isn’t that what you told me when we first started?”
Their days at Saint-Hyacinthe were much like they had been at Conestoga: practical lessons, history classes, and the gym, but everything was more focused. They were drilled on signalling and Morse code, taught radio theory and repair, and they learned the locations and call signs of the German Navy’s coastal stations. Endless letters and numbers were placed in front of the girls, and they translated what they saw both into and out of Morse code as quickly as possible. Sometimes they used semaphore flags or lights to change things up. When it came time, Dot didn’t hesitate to climb a ten-foot-tall signals mast to keep up her training for semaphore. A few of Dot’s classmates drooped under the concentrated hours, but she could not have been more in her element. At the end of the month every girl would be expected to achieve a minimum oftwenty words per minute in Morse code. Dot was determined to leave that number far behind, and Alice took that as a challenge.
They still hadn’t been introduced to the headphones with those magical sounds pattering through them, but Dot took heart, knowing that was coming.
And there was even more good news. Yesterday, she had received a letter from Dash, and it had felt like an early Christmas present.
I saw Gus!Dash had written.He was walking down the street and I kidnapped him. We spent hours talking in the diner. Oh, Dot! It felt so good to see him and be able to scold him in person. He said he misses you so much, and he said he would try to write to us, but I have learned not to hold my breath…
Gus was alive. He was well. Dot had cried tears of relief into her pillow at the news.
At Saint-Hyacinthe, they had a new commanding officer, Chief Wren Stevens. She was shorter than Dot, and heavyset, with a sharp, direct gaze that could mean she was either paying close attention, or she was furious. Dot didn’t quite understand her yet, but she wasn’t intimidated. Chief Wren Merrivale had been scary in the beginning, too, and by the end Dot had quite liked her. This morning, Chief Wren Stevens stood at the front of the classroom and announced that it was time for the girls to learn about radio signals and wireless telegraphy. Dot sat up straight, pencil in hand, ready to go.
When the Chief Wren turned to the blackboard and began to outline the physics of both the atmosphere and the ionospheres, Dot wilted, disappointed. She didn’t understand a thing. She snuck a peek at the girls around her and was slightly relieved to see her own confusion reflected in their strained expressions. Chief Wren Stevens did not appear to notice.
“Physics,” she was saying, “helps us understand how wireless telegraphy works, and how it is possible to obtain line bearings for use in direction finding. Though it is complicated in theory, it is vital for those interested in the field to understand, since pinpointing specific locations based on a single radio signal is our job.”
The Chief Wren drew a square on one side of the blackboard, which she tapped with the chalk. Dot quickly copied it in her notebook.
“This is us. I shall mark it ‘Station.’ Out here,” she said, drawing a circle some distance away, “is the ship whose messages we are monitoring. Let’s imagine this is the Mediterranean Sea. You might think that communicating between here and there would be too far, but I will demonstrate that it is accessible from any distance.”
Still facing the board, Chief Wren Stevens drew a line connecting the two shapes, calling it their “line of sight,” then she added two arcing lines around it. Determined not to fail, Dot blocked out every sound in the room but the chief Wren’s voice and copied the diagram exactly.
“The area inside these arcs is what is called a Fresnel zone. It accounts for anything that might interfere with the line of sight, like an underwater mountain, another ship, or something like that.” She turned back to the girls. “Does anyone understand what I just said?”
So far, Dot was following along, but she wasn’t sure where it was leading, so she kept quiet. No one else said a word.
The chief Wren smiled. “You will. Have you drawn this in your books?”
There was a quick shuffling while the other girls grabbed their pencils, and the chief Wren gave them a few moments to copy it for themselves.
