“She seemed like the sweetest thing,” Corinne put in, shaking her head. “The last one you’d expect to do anything to hurt her own family.”

“She wasn’t sweet at all,” snapped Judy. She jabbed her needle into the quilt. “She always pretended.”

Chapter 14

THE BABYLON BALLROOM
La Crosse, Wisconsin
Saturday, February 13, 1943

The ballroom was hot-packed with soldiers and girls, swirling, turning, swinging, stomping, to music as glint-bright as the trumpets, trombones, saxophones, of the band on the red-spangled stage under blazing lights. More than one of the uniformed boys was inclined to lift his partner above his head, then swing her down suddenly, legs knifing between legs, then just as quickly lift her up face-to-face again, his smile bright in her vision. There she’d find herself clutched tight and breathless in his arms, until he spun her out again in a twirl, her skirt flaring. Oh, they were good dancers, these soldiers! The best Elissa Mickelson had ever seen. Boys from Pine Rapids were apt to drop a girl, attempting such moves.

“I told you it was the limit, didn’t I?” said Betty, the cousin of Elissa’s friend Muriel. Betty, a La Crosse native, had invited the Pine Rapids girls Elissa and Muriel down to La Crosse to experience the Babylon Ballroom, and she now grabbed Elissa’s elbow. Of Muriel there was, at the moment, no sign.

“Oh, yes!” Elissa shouted, still overwhelmed by the sight of it all, though they had been there more than an hour. Inside a frame of elegant arched porticos, the dance floor pulsed with the heat and movement of several hundred people, the dazzling sounds of Ben Greten and his orchestra flooding the place to the farthest corners of the viewing balcony.

A soldier appeared in front of her out of the crowd, a smile on his pink face. “Like to dance?” he said. Before she could so much as nod, he had grabbed Elissa and pulled her out onto the floor. At the mercy of his sweaty hands, she twisted, turned, and dipped, and the stranger who held her waist laughed above the music like he’d unearthed buried treasure.