But she didn't look grief-stricken. She looked excited, and determined, and a little bit frightened.
She scarcely glanced at me. She went right up to Lucy and took both Lucy's hands in hers.
"Well," she said in a clipped, tense voice, "we made it."
Then Lucy broke for the first time. The tears ran down her face and she didn't even wipe them away. "Are you certain?"
"Positive. And I got word to him. We'd agreed on a code. That's why he didn't want me there today—we couldn't trust ourselves not to betray it, either way."
I stood there staring at them, bewildered.
"What's this all about?" I demanded. "Have you two cooked up some crazy scheme to rescue Hal? I hope to heaven not! It would ruin all of us, including him!"
The wild daydreams I'd had myself flashed through my mind—the drug that would seem to kill him and wouldn't, the anonymous false accusation of subversion, the previous secret marriage. All impossible, all fatal.
Lucy disengaged her hands from the girl's and slipped her arm through mine.