"Hey, Dawson!" The boys came charging over the dunes, toting pails and shovels. Hunter was the first to reach them. "Can we build the battleship now?"

Grant was bouncing again. "No, I want to build the castle first."

Dawson, his angry gaze still locked with Amelia's, arched an eyebrow by way of asking permission.

She said, "What choice do you leave me?"

He told the boys to start filling their buckets with wet sand. As they raced off, he replaced his sunglasses and said to her, "You and I aren't done with this discussion."

"You're damn right we're not."

She returned to her office and finished the e-mail even though there was no urgency to it because George wouldn't read it until after the holiday. Attached was a proposal for a new exhibit that she'd been thinking about for a while. She expected resistance to the idea. It would require a combination of diplomacy and arm twisting to convince him and the board of directors that it would be a viable and important addition to the museum. She'd wanted to draft the memo while her thoughts were still fresh.

But also she'd come back from the beach shaky and angry and very much in need of putting some distance between herself, Dawson, and his intrusion on her family.

After killing an hour, she determined that she was calm enough to return to the beach and watch him undermine her and dazzle her children. Dressed in a pair of loose white cotton pants and a red tank top, she decided against changing into a swimsuit. She grabbed her hat and joined the party on the beach.

And it was a party. The battleship was splendid. Stef was christening it with a bottle of apple juice. Hunter, the first to notice her, shouted, "Hey, Mom! We named it after you." Proudly he pointed to the name crookedly etched into the side of the ship.

She bent down to inspect the lettering that read, USS Amelia. "Did you print that all by yourself?"

Proudly, he bobbed his head.

She ran her fingers through his unruly mop of hair, now matted with saltwater and sand. "Thank you. I love it. That was very sweet of you."

"Dawson said to."

"Oh." She looked up. He was silhouetted against the bright sunlight, so she couldn't read his expression. "That was nice of him."

"Can we go in the ocean now?"

"I'm not dressed for it. Stef?"

"On it." Telling the boys she'd race them into the water, the three took off.

Grant plunged in, then called back, "Dawson, are you coming?"

"In a minute."

"If you need to go to the bathroom, it's okay if you tinkle in the ocean, just not in a swimming pool."

He chuckled. "Thanks. I'll keep that in mind."

Amelia retreated to the umbrella and sat down in one of the beach chairs. Dawson rescued his T-shirt from the maw of the dragon, shook sand from it, and pulled it on. It was a faded, threadbare thing with the neck and sleeves cut out, forming large armholes that extended halfway down his torso. As he walked slowly up the beach toward her, the thin cloth molded to his damp chest. So much for his nod toward propriety. His calves and feet were coated with sand.

When he reached the umbrella, he looked at the empty chair beside hers, then at the quilt, but decided against pushing his luck, or so she assumed, and sat down in the sand just outside the circle of shade.

She cut to the chase. "This morning before anyone else was up, I did a Google search on you."

"Yeah?"

"It took a while for me to read everything. Impressive."

"Thanks."

"You didn't tell me that you'd spent months in Afghanistan."

"You didn't ask."

Up to that point she'd been watching the boys and Stef playing in the ocean with an inflatable dolphin. Now she looked at him. "Right. You're the one who asks questions."

He pulled his knees up and looped his arms around his shins. "Ask me anything."

In spite of her ire, she was curious. "Some of your stories covered particular firefights. Were you actually there, in the thick of the fighting?"

"Not often. A few times. If the fighting was in a real hotbed, the military wouldn't allow me in. I'd interview the troops when they came back." He frowned thoughtfully. "The trouble with that war, most often you can't predict where the fight is going to be. It can be the lobby of a hotel, an open highway, a heavily guarded checkpoint. The enemy isn't always obvious, either."

"But when you could, you placed yourself in harm's way."

"That's where the stories were."

She felt it only fair to acknowledge how good they were. "Your writing is very moving. You made the men and women you wrote about seem real to the reader."

"I'm glad to hear that. They are real. Their stories deserved to be told."

She paused to study him. He'd taken off his sunglasses, so his eyes were squinted almost shut to block the glare. But his attention was fixed on her. "Did you meet Jeremy in Afghanistan?"

She could tell the question surprised him. "No. How could I have? I just got back two weeks ago. I'd never heard of him until Willard Strong's murder trial was brought to my attention."

"By whom?"

"I can't reveal a source."

"How convenient."

"Ask me something else."

She picked at the fringe on the beach towel lining her chair. "Why didn't you approach me through normal channels?"

"Could I have found you?"

"Through the museum. Through Lemuel Jackson. On the Internet, for that matter. Anybody can be found. How about Glenda? She would have found me."

He cracked a smile, but quickly pulled it back in. "Would you have agreed to an interview?"

"You know the answer to that. I'd like an answer to my question, please."

"What didn't I try a straightforward approach? Honestly, I wasn't sure I wanted to write a story about Jeremy. I was urged to come down here, sit in on the trial, check it out. By the third day, I was basically bored, ready to cash in, go home, and find another topic of more interest to me. But I changed my mind and decided to stay, at least for a while longer. Take it to the next step." He shrugged. "You know the rest."

"I caught you at taking it to the next step."

"It wasn't my proudest moment when I came out of the bathroom yesterday and realized I'd been caught spying, with my pants down, literally."

She resisted the appeal of his crooked smile. "You always have an answer ready, don't you?"

"Not always, no."

"That hasn't been my experience. All of your answers are self-deprecating, designed that way to be disarming, I'm sure."

He turned completely serious again. "I haven't 'designed' my answers, Amelia, and I think you're anything but disarmed right now. In fact, you seem locked and loaded. Are you that mad at me for playing with Hunter and Grant?"

"Why would a grown man want to waste his time that way?"

"I don't consider it a waste of time."

"Even worse. That's an admission that you have an ulterior motive. I hazard to guess what it is."

"You think I'm into little boys?"

She didn't say anything.

"I took just as many pictures of you."

Recalling one in particular sent a rush of heat through her. "That's supposed to reassure me?"

"It should reassure you that I'm not a deviant."

"Perhaps. But it doesn't rule out that you're a slick opportunist."

He tipped his chin down and stared at his sandy bare feet. Or maybe he was staring at hers, their bare toes being only inches apart. In any case, it was several moments before he raised his head.

"You don't know me, so I don't blame you in the slightest for being suspicious. In fact, I admire you for being ultraprotective and careful of who you let near your children. But I would never harm those boys, or you. Please trust me on that."

His words were stirring and persuasive, and she resented her strong inclination to believe them. "Why should I trust you when you so blatantly lied to me?"

"About what?"

"The photos. What kind of game are you playing?"

"Game?"

"I'd call it that. All those creepy things you did to work on me, play on my mind. Returning my lost watch, the porch light, the beach ball."

"Beach ball?"

"And then there's the photographs. Why come on so sincerely apologetic about them and tell me you'd returned them, when clearly you didn't?"

"I don't understand."

Thoroughly exasperated, she said, "There was nothing under the doormat when I got home last night. As you well know."

He became very still and stared at her for a count of ten. Then quietly he said, "I swear to you, I clipped all the photographs together and put them under your doormat."

Diary of Flora Stimel-June 5th, 1980 It's taken me weeks to open this diary and begin to write about this. Up till now, I haven't been able to put words on paper. Or do much of anything except cry. I've cried an ocean.

When I'm not crying, I sit and stare into space, unable to make myself move. I don't care what I look like, or if I'm clean or not, or hungry, or sleepy. I don't care if the world comes to an end. I've even wished for that. I know now what it means when people say somebody has "shut down."

I knew the day would come. I've had years to get ready for it, but that didn't help. I wasn't ready at all. As the date got closer, even Carl would turn quiet and thoughtful, like he was reconsidering. I knew he wouldn't change his mind, though, so I didn't even try to talk him into it.

But I couldn't leave Jeremy as easy as he did, and when I started carrying on, pleading with him to let him stay with us, he got mad. So I stopped begging. It was only making the separation harder on all of us.

Of course, I see the sense of it. It will be best for Jeremy. If I didn't think so, I would have fought Carl tooth and nail over it. Jeremy has to go to school. It will be good for him to make friends with other boys and do the things they do. Baseball and stuff. But, all the same, when I had to let go of him for the last time, I thought I would die. No mother should have to go through that.

Randy is a good choice to play his daddy. He helped us out that one time down in MS. I guess he formed an attachment to Jeremy then, because Jeremy was sick and had a terrible cough. Randy is kindhearted and still thinks the world of Carl. He shares the same ideas, but he doesn't have the "guts," he says, to do the things Carl is willing to do for our cause.

I thought he was going to faint when Carl asked him to raise our son. He said he was honored. He even cried a little and said he felt "anointed." I thought Carl would laugh at that, but he didn't. He told Randy he was playing his part, that he was as much a Ranger of Righteousness as anybody who carried a gun. He just wouldn't be fighting on the battlefront, so to speak.

Randy's gotten married since that time we stayed with him in MS. Patricia is also one of us, because she hates cops and everything government related. Here's her story: Her stepdaddy abused her and wound up killing her mother when she stood up to him. He went to the pen for it. Patricia was put into the foster care system. I gather it wasn't all that good for her. She doesn't talk about everything that happened to her, but her face turns hard and mean-looking whenever the subject is brought up. (Usually she's pretty.) She's been on her own since she ran away at fifteen. She also doesn't talk about the things she did in order to survive, but I don't hold anything against her, because look at what all I've done. Anyhow, for being such a slight little thing, she knows how to take care of herself.

People Carl knows faked IDs for them. They've got new identities. They're going by the name of Wesson, which Carl picked out of the phone book. They've rented a house in a town in Ohio.

Patricia, who's also smart as a whip, is going to school to learn to be a court reporter. We laughed our heads off about that! What an inside joke. Here she'll be, sitting in courtrooms recording the words of lawyers, cops, and judges, while we're out breaking every law there is. Or just about.

But that job will be a good cover. Randy could sell ice cubes to Eskimos because of his easy, soft-spoken way. He got a job at a car dealership. His coworkers like him. They wouldn't believe it if somebody told them that mild-mannered Randy was raising the child of Carl Wingert and Flora Stimel, two of the FBI's Most Wanted!

Carl told them to go to church like the faithful. Randy was okay with it, but not Patricia. She said she wants no part of a God who'd put a kid through the shit she'd been put through. But she finally agreed to pretend to worship, because she knows it makes them look like ordinary folks, and Carl says that's the main thing.

They plan to join the PTA the day they enroll Jeremy in kindergarten in the fall. It breaks my heart that I won't be there to see him off on his first day of school. I hope he doesn't cry. Carl says he won't. He calls him his "good little soldier" because even when we were hugging him good-bye, his lower lip was trembling, but he didn't shed a tear.

He knows Carl has big plans for his future. He understands why we can't all live together. He also knows-because I've told him often enough-that even though he'll be living with Patricia and Randy and pretending to be their little boy, I'm his real mother and Carl is his real daddy. He'll call Patricia and Randy Mom and Dad, but he's our flesh and blood. Nothing will ever change that. We love him.

I hope he grows up understanding how things must be. I'm not sure I do.

Chapter 8.

The boys had had such a full day, they practically fell asleep at the dinner table, and didn't object to an early bedtime. After getting them down, Amelia took a glass of wine out onto the porch and settled into one of the rocking chairs.

Stef joined her a few minutes later. "Kitchen's done. Unless you need me for anything else, I'm going up to bed."