Lipstick and Lies Read Free

reflection in the rearview mirror as if searching for a flaw. “You said you couldn’t find a ride when you got here?” she asked archly. “What’s that about? Part of a cover you’re practicing?”
    “
What?
”
    “Sure had me buffaloed. Never would have expected someone so dedicated to country and to flying would”—she fluttered a hand—“run off, take an extended break from her duties like that.”
    I bit my lip. She hadn’t yet bothered to explain why I’d been summoned, but surely she had not dragged me here to slap my wrists for the OSS training stint?
    Another angle hit me like a severe blow. Was she jealous that I’d been singled out for the specially tailored course? That our government had in mind giving me the occasional home front undercover girl assignment? I looked over at her. All the while I’d been thinking she’d summoned me here to discuss a mission. Was the opposite true? Did she hope to toss a monkey wrench into the government’s plans?
    “I wasn’t away for long,” I said, a little too sharply. “It was a condensed course. I was out of action for just three weeks.”
    With the lift of an eyebrow, she returned to the mirror.
    Diplomacy was not my strong suit. I’d learned to live with the effect my directness had on some, but Miss C had never been among those unstrung by it. Not hardly. She respected standing up for your rights and was bothered by women who were “blahs.” So what had her so peeved? What was my sin?
    Life as a PK, Pastor’s Kid, can be tricky. There’s a pressure, especially in public, to maintain an image. But I was always more chaff than seed. And trying to be what I wasn’t wore on me. In my teens, I started imagining scenarios from my future life as a commercial pilot. We lived in Chilton, a one-horse suburb of Cleveland, and dreaming big in a small town was not that easy. At least until Civilian Pilot Training came to our community college. Eventually I earned my pilot’s license, but while I’d always pictured myself one day ferrying passengers to Africa or Alaska, too soon I discovered that, as a woman, my dream to fly professionally was just that: a dream. A degree in journalism was my hole card. With it, I planned to make a living the way other lady pilots did, by writing for magazines about flying.
    A position knocking out spec sheets at an aircraft factory followed. I had begun to accept that I would be eternally chained to a desk, when along came the WASP. I owed my luck to Miss C, the program’s founder. In hindsight, how could I have been so thick-headed as to miss why she was so upset?
    “Miss C,” I began softly. “I hope you don’t think I applied for intelligence school behind your back. I would never do that. There was an oversight, wasn’t there? My orders came through OSS channels, direct. They ought to have come through you. I’m sorry. I should have realized sooner.”
    Her dark eyes bored into mine. She didn’t speak, but I knew I’d hit home.
    She smoothed a wave in her perfectly permed hairdo. “Forget it, Lewis. Not your fault. There was no clear line for you to follow. But you’re right. I
should
have been involved.” She leaned back with a shrug. “Well, boys will be boys. Guess one of them wanted to be sure I remembered it’s still the men who run the show.”
    A company bus pulled up at the sidewalk in front of us. The doors parted and our attention momentarily shifted to watch the passengers, all of them factory workers, spill out. The flow stopped while a small man, around four feet tall, making a slow descent, hopped off the bottom step.
    This must be one of the dwarfs Twombley had told us about while describing an early production problem involving the Lib’s main wing. The interior space was so cramped, he’d said, that an average-sized person could not get in there to buck the rivets needed to fasten the outer wing to the center section near the end of the assembly process. He had solved the problem by