I laughed weakly, but I was fretting about Billy and Josie. Morrell asked if I would feel better if they went to stay with Mr. Contreras. “He’s aching to do something, and if he had them to fuss over, it would help him not mind so much that you’re staying here with Lotty.”

“I don’t know if he can keep them safe,” I worried.

“For this weekend, Grobian, at any rate, will still be in custody. By Monday, believe it or not, you’ll feel a lot stronger, and you’ll be able to figure out a better plan.”

I had to agree: I didn’t have the strength to do anything else right now. I even had to agree to let Morrell send Amy Blount down to Mary Ann’s to collect the runaway pair; I hated not looking after them myself, hated Morrell for adding I couldn’t manage the world all by myself, so to stop trying.

I slept the rest of the day away. When I woke in the evening, Lotty brought me a bowl of her homemade lentil soup. I lay in her guest room, luxuriating in the clean room, the clean clothes, the peace of her loving care.

It wasn’t until the next morning that she showed me Marcena’s red recording pen. “I took your foul clothes to the laundry, my dear, and found this inside. I assumed you want to keep it?”

I couldn’t believe it had still been on my body after all I’d gone through—or that Bysen and Grobian hadn’t found it when they had me unconscious and in their power. I snatched it from her. “My God, yes, I want this.”

47

Office Party

“If the shock gives him a stroke and kills him, I’ll be singing at his funeral.”

William’s thin fussy voice hung like a smear of soot in my office. Buffalo Bill’s full cheeks were sunken. His eyes under their heavy brows were pale, watery, the uncertain eyes of a feeble old man, not the fierce eagle stare of the corporate dictator.

“You hear that, May Irene? He wants me dead? My own son wants me dead?”

His wife leaned across my coffee table to pat his hand. “We were too hard on him, Bill. He never could be as tough as you wanted him to be.”

“I was too hard on him, so that means it’s all right that he wants me dead?” His astonishment brought some of the color back into his face. “Since when did you sign up for that liberal swill, spare the rod, spoil the child?”

“I don’t think Mrs. Bysen meant that,” Mildred murmured.