Free By the Book by Mary Kay McComas

minute, trying to decide if she should tell the truth about what she was thinking or come up with something else to keep him distracted. The little green book didn’t say she should always go in the opposite direction. Only when it suited her purpose, and this time it didn’t.
    She leaned toward him in earnest. “I was wondering if you’d had a chance to talk with anyone else in town? If you’ve told anyone else what you’ve told me tonight. About your job?”
    He shook his head. “No. Not really. Between the hospital and the shop, I’ve been sticking pretty close to home. Why?”
    “Not your father’s lawyer? Or someone who’s come into the shop? You haven’t told anyone else in town about your job?”
    “No,” he said, at a loss. “No one. I—”
    He was about to explain that he wasn’t an extrovert, that he could talk to someone for hours and never mention anything personal if he wasn’t in the mood to share—and he was rarely in the mood—but she smiled and shook her head. She didn’t need an explanation. She already knew.
    “I was just thinking that if you hadn’t told anyone in town about your job before now, that it was sort of interesting how close all the speculation about you really was.” He frowned. “The mercenary/war hero/CIA-FBI-spy guy that was either a loving son or nephew that no one seemed to know anything about.” He started to laugh. “No. Think about it. It’s like that gossip game that kids play where one whispers something into the next person’s ear and he whispers into the next person’s and so on down the line. And when the last person tells what he’s heard, it’s completely false or a garbled mess of the truth. You’re not a mercenary or a war hero but you’re in the military. You’re not with the CIA or the FBI but you work with them, and where you work is referred to by its initials. You’re not a spy, but you do spy work ... sort of.” She bobbed her head. “You’re a relative—a son or a nephew.”
    For an intelligence analyst he didn’t seem to be computing very quickly.
    “Don’t you see? You said you and your father had lost touch long ago, that you didn’t even know where he was until after he’d had his stroke. But someone in this town knew all about you and told someone else, who told someone else, and that’s how things got so confused but still held some element of the truth. And how did whoever it was that notified you, know where to reach you?”
    His gaze slipped away from her face, roamed a bit, and then returned.
    “You think my father kept tabs on me?”
    “Who else?”
    “And he might have told someone about me.”
    “I’d say he bragged about you.” When his expression turned ambivalent, she hurried on to convince him. “Come on. Mercenary, war hero, CIA, FBI, spy? Those are all fascinating and heroic and dangerous. That’s the truth and pride getting blown out of proportion on its way through the grapevine. If he’d never said anything about you, there wouldn’t have been any rumors at all, or maybe just that you were his son, from your meeting with the lawyer. Or if he hadn’t been proud or known exactly what you were doing all that time, he might have casually mentioned to someone that you were a sailor, and the rumor would have gone through the mill and come out that you were a bum from the docks somewhere.”
    “You’re really reaching here,” he said. “And I appreciate what you’re trying to do and all ...”
    She could tell he didn’t appreciate it at all. “I’m not doing anything but telling you what I really think. You said I should.”
    If she was right, and if for one second he started to believe she was right, a whole new bag of bugs would open up, and he wasn’t sure he’d want to look into it. Still, there she was, her honesty and sincerity as plain in her expression as the pale scattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose. She was a thoughtful woman—he’d seen a hundred examples of