He felt her grin on the other side of the palisade. "You're sure wishing Uncle Frank was here so you could ask him about it, don't you, Charles?"
He sure was. He wiped his brow, suddenly clammy.
Kennedy couldn't come along. One, he wasn't responsible. Two, he might have to be Charles' cover-story. They weren't too dissimilar in build, age, or coloring. Charles had a beard by now that sufficiently obscured his features, and two years absence should have softened recollections of Kennedy. Interrogated, Charles could take refuge in an imitation of Kennedy's lunacy.
"Charles, the one thing I don't get is this Lee dame. She got a spell on her? You don't want to mess with that."
"Listen, Martha, we've got to mess with her. It isn't a spell—exactly. Anyway I know how to take it off and then she'll be on our side."
"Can I set off the explosion? If you let me set off the explosion, I'll quit my bitching."
"We'll see," he said.
She chuckled very faintly in the dark. "Okay," she told him. "If I can't, I can't."
He thought of being married to a woman who could spot your smallest lie or reservation, and shuddered.
Kennedy was snoring by now and twilight was deepening into blackness. There was a quarter-moon, obscured by over-cast. He hitched along the sand and peered through a chink at a tiny noise. It was the small scuffling feet of a woods-rat racing through the grass from one morsel of food to the next. It never reached it. There was a soft rush of wings as a great dark owl plummeted to earth and struck talons into the brown fur. The rat squealed its life away while the owl lofted silently to a tree branch where it stood on one leg, swaying drunkenly and staring with huge yellow eyes.