State Secrets Read Online Free Page B

and I don’t want you to get mugged.”
    Holly felt warm. Protected. Though she cherished her independence, it was nice to have someone looking out for her that way. “Thank you,” she said.
    Her car was in a parking tower in the next block, isolated and in shadow. It probably wasn’t safe, walking there alone, but she hadn’t thought of that in her hurry to get to the store and conduct her class. She was glad David was with her.
    He waited beside her sporty blue Toyota until she had found her keys, unlocked the door and slid behind the wheel. Toby’s model airplane, a miniature Cessna flown by remote control, was on the seat, and she moved it in order to set down her purse and the small notebook she always carried.
    “Is that yours?” David asked with interest, his eyes on the expensive toy.
    “Actually—” Holly grinned “—it belongs to my nephew, though I do admit to flying it now and then up at Manito Park.”
    Again there was an unsettling alertness in David, as though he was cataloging the information for future reference. But why would he do such a thing?
    “I have a plane like that,” he said, and Holly ascribed her instant impression that he was lying to weariness and an overactive imagination.
    David Goddard was a kind, attractive man, not a reporter or an FBI agent. She was going to have to stop letting her fancy take over at every turn or she would become paranoid. She said goodbye, started the car and backed out of her parking space.
    There was a light snow falling and Holly drove up the steep South Hill at a cautious pace, her mind staying behind with David Goddard.
    He could be a reporter, she thought distractedly as she navigated the slick, slushy streets. He could even be an FBI agent hoping to find Craig.
    Holly laughed at herself and shook her head. “You’d better take up writing fiction, Llewellyn,” she said aloud. “You’ve got the imagination for it.”
    But even as she pulled the car to a stop in her own driveway, even as she turned off the engine and gathered up her purse, her notebook and Toby’s airplane from the seat, she couldn’t shake the conviction that David Goddard was something more than a second-time law student who liked to cook.
    Inside the house, Holly found her housekeeper and favorite baby-sitter working happily in front of the living room fireplace. Madge Elkins was a middle-aged woman, still trim and attractive, and her consuming passion was entering contests.
    Now, she was busily writing her name and address on one plain white 3-by-5-inch piece of paper after another.
    “What are you going to win this time, Madge?” Holly asked pleasantly, putting down the things she carried and getting out of her snow-dampened coat.
    “A computer system,” Madge replied, tucking a paper into an envelope and sealing it with a flourish. “Printer, software, monitor, the whole shebang.”
    Another person might have laughed, but Holly had known Madge for several years and in that time had seen her win more than one impressive prize in contests. A car, for instance, and a mink coat. “Is Toby sleeping?”
    “Like the proverbial log,” Madge answered, gathering a stack of envelopes, all addressed and stamped, into a stack. “You had a couple of phone calls—one from Skyler and one from a man who wouldn’t leave his name.”
    Again Holly felt uneasy. “What did he say? The man who wouldn’t give you his name, I mean?”
    Madge shrugged, fussing with her contest paraphernalia. “Just that he’d call back. Skyler wants you to call him.”
    Holly was suddenly testy. If Skyler wanted to talk to her, he could darned well call back. She saw Madge to the door and then headed off toward the kitchen, planning to take one of her experiments out of the freezer and zap it in the microwave. She’d been running late before cooking class and hadn’t had a chance to eat dinner.
    Just as the bell on the microwave chimed, so did the telephone. Muttering, Holly dived for the receiver,