Chapter 31

I hadn't told Lee about this part of the plan, and she was pretty surprised when the next morning I remarked about expecting company that evening.

She'd been released after only about four hours; as I'd anticipated, neither the locals nor the Feds wanted the public opprobrium of locking up the pregnant wife of one of Charleston's leading citizens and benefactors. Through our lawyer she'd confirmed my tale of how we came to be married and denied emphatically that I was Jack Heyward or that she knew anything at all about Jack Heyward's current whereabouts. They'd asked her to take a lie-detector test, but the lawyer had vetoed that immediately, and ultimately the lawyer drove her home about 2:00 in the morning.

Then she'd spent three really fretful days worrying constantly that my plan had been too ambitious, that they'd wear me down or break me down or find something I'd overlooked to punch holes in the Carstairs identity. She said she'd been continually after Spook for updates, requests that he accepted calmly and patiently even though he really had little information to give her; there wasn't much electronic traffic about me.

So it was a complete surprise when I walked in the door. She'd run over and thrown her arms around me so hard I could actually feel my rib cage give a little. She'd kept holding me until suddenly the baby kicked, strongly enough that we could both feel it. Then she'd burst into laughter, which became tears for a while and finally laughter again.

Brownie seemed equally pleased at my homecoming. She wagged herself silly, not just her tail but her whole rear end, and stayed right at my side most of the rest of the day. I petted and praised her extravagantly, which suited her just fine; she was always sure she deserved such treatment.

I'm a bit of a klutz in the kitchen—Lee was the cook in the family—but that night I helped as much as I could in my clumsy way as she put together a dinner of steak, oven-roasted corn and wild mushrooms. We didn't want to be separated even for a few minutes. And I ate everything on my plate and a bit of leftover steak from hers; I'd missed good food nearly as much as I'd missed her in my days in durance vile.

Then we went to bed and made joyous, albeit careful because of her condition, love for a long, languorous time.

The next morning I was a little annoyed when I finally got to my study and found the place in considerable disarray. They'd returned the laptop and various other electronic components they'd temporarily confiscated, but all the connections—and I had a lot—were unplugged, and wires and connectors were strewn haphazardly about. It took me several hours to set everything right again, and, most annoying of all, Spook told me the laptop had come back with a virus on board. He disabled and wiped it, but I was quite unhappy that the cops had been so care­less.

By dinnertime, though, I had everything in readiness. Spook and I had of course talked the whole idea over. He'd readily agreed that there was no real risk, either to him or to Lee and me, but he couldn't see why I wanted to do it. Even when I'd explained that I thought we might be putting too many eggs in one basket—what if something were to happen to Lee or me or even both of us?—he couldn't really grasp my point. But he'd had no objection, and we were primed.