Jesse sat there. Had she just shared more than she should have? Was there a chance that the director of the FBI was somehow keeping an operation off the books? He wanted to ask Ethel, but Lisa had taken him into her confidence. Lisa of the quiet bedsprings.

***

Ethel heard Jesse leave for campus. Douglas hadn’t returned since he’d driven by early that morning, and she wondered what that was about. She thought Lisa was working upstairs on her FBI computer, one that could be used securely in the field, but she suspected Rudy Hauser had told her to stick close as his eyes and ears. Neither Rudy nor Cory Bradshaw were the subtlest of agents to pass through her house.

She unfolded a small stepladder she kept in the back of her bedroom closet and climbed three steps to where she could reach the top closet shelf. Remembering her brief dizzy spell, she leaned against the doorjamb for extra support as she lowered an old leather-bound scrapbook, the kind with protective plastic sleeves and a binder that allowed pages to be added.

She sat on the bed and ran her forearm across the cover to wipe away the dust. She wasn’t sure how long ago it was that she’d last looked at it. Not since Douglas and Lisa moved in. Maybe six months. Maybe a year. She smiled as she recalled one of the older agents who had taken her under his wing. He’d told her, “Life is like a roll of toilet paper—the closer you get to the end, the faster it goes.” At the time it was funny; at the present it was truth.

She opened the book to the first page of pictures. They were black-and-whites. The oldest was of her and her father. He wore a double-breasted pinstripe suit. She was in a frilly dress and bonnet. Her aunt had to have picked it out. A penciled date in the white border read, “Easter—1949.” She was two. The motherless child of the family. They would have gone out to the cemetery after church. Although she didn’t remember that trip, she remembered the other times. The stone had been scary. Accusatory. Her mother’s death date was her birth date. She and her father had always celebrated her birthday one day early.

She flipped forward through the years. Her favorite picture was of her and her father standing in front of the little single-wing Cessna 195, vintage 1951, but fourteen years old at the time. She was eighteen and had just soloed. From their grins, it was harder to tell who was prouder, father or daughter.