Read Liberty or Death for Free Online Page B

bristling dark hair, I'd temporarily become deaf and blind to the clamoring of my hungry customers. Instead, I'd seen Andre, my tough, burly state trooper, kneeling in the breakdown lane beside the car, oblivious to the passing traffic, asking me to be his wife.
    I shut my eyes against the wash of tears, biting my lip and fighting for control as a nondescript brown car pulled in swiftly beside me. As soon as the garage door was shut, a slim, handsome, red-haired woman came around to knock on my window. I opened my own door and got out to meet her. My legs felt shaky and undependable. I felt like a total scatterbrain next to her neat, self-contained calm. Maybe it only made sense that I wouldn't feel like myself, when I was pretending to be someone else.
    "Norah Kavanaugh," she said, shaking my hand firmly. "You look beat. Hard day?"
    "I'm not as young as I used to be. If they had asked me to carry one more teeny sandwich, I would have burst into tears and quit."
    "One day and you're ready to quit?" Maybe she didn't mean it, but I heard an implicit criticism of someone who was ready to quit after just one day. Another time, I might have gotten my back up, but tonight I was too tired to take offense. She didn't know me, and probably my tenacity wasn't legendary in the state of Maine yet. It wasn't the kind of information Jack Leonard was likely to share. I shrugged. It must have been a pitiful gesture, because she actually put a comforting hand on my shoulder. "None of us do very well," she said, "when stuff like this is going on."
    She pulled out a notebook and flipped it open. "Got anything for me?"
    I shifted my aching shoulders and searched my weary brain for information. "I don't know. Maybe." I told her about the break-in where the guns had allegedly been taken, pleased to note that she wrote that down, and then I told her about Jed Harding's mother, Mary, and the trouble she was having with his son, Lyle. She wrote that down, too.
    "There are a lot of people, not just militia people, who think Jed Harding's a saint. They can't understand why we don't let him go."
    I realized that in the craziness of the last two days I'd never learned about Jed Harding, other than his name and the fact that Andre's kidnappers had demanded that he be let out of jail in exchange for Andre's release. Five pounds of remedial reading about militias and the religious right, black helicopters and the New World Order, and one sentence about Harding. "They never told me anything about Jed Harding. What's his story, anyway?"
    "Jack didn't tell you?"
    "Jack wants me to stay home and crochet pink and blue baby blankets."
    Kavanaugh's eyes dropped to my waist. "You're pregnant?"
    It sounded a little too much like, "You're stupid." I folded my arms over my chest and glared. "The failure rate of even the best birth control is eight to ten percent. I'm a statistic."
    "Don't get your back up," she said calmly. "I'll bet Lemieux's happy as a clam digger at low tide. He loves kids. I just didn't know and I like to know the facts about my witnesses." She stopped and stared down at the floor.
    Funny. She thought I was her witness. I thought I was a spy and she was my contact. Possibly we were both wrong and I was just wasting our time on this wild-goose chase when we should have been doing more useful things. I could have been unpacking my new office while she went out hunting bad guys. There were always plenty of bad guys and there was always plenty of work to be done, especially with the whole office in chaos.
    How odd, I thought. That was the first time I'd thought about work—my own work—in days. Normally, I'm an obsessive workaholic. And since we'd just moved the whole shebang from outside Boston up to Maine, there was plenty to obsess and be a workaholic about. Yet despite the boxed-up files and the waiting desks and cabinets, I'd thought about little beyond pie and coffee all day. But awash with hormones and steeped in fear, who knew what I