He’s not with them and yet I’ve never seen Lucy more worried than she is right now. It doesn’t make sense. She and Janet are devoted to him. If anything they’re overly protective. So why isn’t he with them? They don’t want him to witness what they’re doing. That’s the obvious answer but it’s not a good enough one, and I hear Marino on his phone as I watch Lucy crazed by panic and rage like a snake at the first metallic touch of the shovel blade. That’s what comes to mind as I spy. Another second goes by. Then two. Then ten, and she steps on various stone tiles as if they might be loose. She lightly jumps up and down on them.

“Completely undetectable. You can walk across these tiles all day long like those assholes did and you can’t tell.” Lucy jumps again for good measure.

She’s obsessed with the FBI. She’s fixated on outsmarting the Feds and that’s not wise. Lucy knows better. Certainly Janet does.

“And even if they’d ever found this, which I knew they wouldn’t, they’d still have to go under a certain undetectable area of the metal flooring and dig down about three feet for the gun case,” Lucy says. “I hate to tell you I told you so.”

“I agree they shouldn’t have put us in this position,” Janet says strangely.

It’s as if she’s disassociating herself from whatever she and Lucy may have done earlier that has caused them to be in this part of the house right now. Janet continues to make comments in a stiff stilted way as if she knows someone is listening.

“But you don’t have to do this,” she’s saying and I continue to be bothered by the way she sounds and acts. “Let’s go upstairs, pack up and get to Kay’s.”

It’s subtle but I see it. Janet is performing. It’s as if she’s onstage and doesn’t want to be. Like a deer in the headlights, it occurs to me, and I wonder if Erin Loria talked to her alone. I wonder what the FBI might have said to Janet while they were searching the property. They might have made a deal with her. If so it won’t be one that has a good payoff for Lucy. I know about such bargains. You can have immunity as long as you throw your own mother under the bus, and my vigilance kicks up another notch.

“Let’s go upstairs,” Janet encourages Lucy but she isn’t pushy about it. “I don’t want you getting into any more trouble.”