Chapter 12: Home Again

I read it twice.

Lawton was already up off the floor.

He took the phone out of my hand and read it standing in his wet jeans.

He didn't say a word.

He picked up his own phone and dialed.

It went straight to voicemail.

"Libba," he said, very quietly. "Take it down."

He hung up and dialed the newsroom.

I took the phone out of his hand.

"Don't," I said.

"She's calling you a thief on every screen in Charleston."

"From a hotel room in Nassau? And say what? That your dead wife's alive and sailing around on your boat?"

"Yes."

"With a video of a woman in a big hat? While the person who keeps every record in your company calls it a lookalike?"

He stopped.

He hated it.

He could see I was right.

"We take the video to somebody who can't be talked out of it," I said. "When we can prove where the money went. Not before."

"So what do we do now?"

"Now we go home."

"And then?"

"Then I go to work. I've got a shift tonight."

Clancy had the Piper fueled by noon.

The storm had blown itself north and left the sky scrubbed clean.

Nobody sang on the flight back.

"They're at the airport," he said, over Georgia. "Somebody tipped them which strip we land on."

"Libba," Lawton said.

"Libba," Clancy agreed.

We came down at the little airport on Johns Island at four.

Through the window I could see them past the fence.

A dozen reporters, two TV vans, a man up on a ladder with a long lens.

My stomach rolled.

The baby didn't care for it either.

Lawton turned in his seat.

"I'll go first. You can wait in the plane till they're gone."

"No."

"Rue."

"I'm not hiding in a plane. I didn't do anything."

I unbuckled.

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