From the Bangladeshi came a Mississippi accent so thick that Betsy couldn’t understand it. Hank looked around, enjoying the surprise on her face, and said, “I was a theater major at Ole Miss. Couldn’t make it on the stage. Ended up joining Hennessey’s li’l group.” He waved his hand dismissively. “Heck, Renaissance Man, I guess I’ll tell you my life story some other time.”
Paul Moses had emerged from the restaurant and was standing there looking sheepishly at Betsy. He and Hennessey exchanged nods, and then Hennessey got back into the cab with Hank and drove away, leaving the two of them standing on the sidewalk staring awkwardly at their shoes.
Paul had handled all of the details after Kevin’s death, even flying out to Idaho with the body. He had presumed nothing, had given Betsy plenty of space, and had been flawlessly polite and professional from start to finish. He had stayed at the Days Inn in Nampa and dedicated one day to driving up to the Palouse to visit his parents, then, after making sure that Betsy needed nothing more, had flown back to D.C. Betsy had been back for almost a week now but hadn’t seen him yet. For that matter, she hadn’t seen any of the other members of the gang—not even Cassie, who had been out of town on TDY.
“Welcome back,” Paul said. “We put together a little shindig for you, if you’re not too alienated to come in and say hi.”
She could not keep from feeling a wave of affection for him. What had happened that night in Wildwood said everything about his character. He had been hard as a lead pipe for two hours while they’d necked on the couch, but when the time had come to actually do it, he had lost his erection and been unable to get it back. Betsy understood that there were many factors that could cause male impotence. But she liked to think that in Paul’s case, on that night in Wildwood, it had been caused by his own feelings of shame—shame over the deception that he and Hennessey’s other people were practicing on Betsy. Paul had talked in Wildwood about how much he looked forward to escaping from D.C., and while that might have been part of the deception—a way of getting Betsy to drop her guard—she was convinced that he had been sincere.
“I might as well at least poke my head in,” she said.
Paul led Betsy into the restaurant and straight back to a private function room, where several people jumped up and shouted, “Surprise!” Cassie was there, and Marcus Berry, and so were their friends Jeff and Christine who had been on the Wildwood trip. They’d hung up a banner: WELCOME BACK IDAHO!
Hennessey had chosen his words carefully in the cab: he had allowed that some of these people genuinely liked Betsy and hadn’t been faking it the whole time. Looking around at their faces, Betsy could rapidly tell who really cared for her (Paul and Cassie) and who had just shown up to be social (everyone else). And, indeed, most of them drifted away after having a drink and shaking her hand, and the party dwindled to Paul and Cassie and Betsy. After an hour or two Paul gave the women a ride back to the Bellevue, and finally Betsy and Cassie were left to themselves, sprawled out on the furniture, staring across the living room at each other.
“Sorry,” Cassie said after several long minutes had gone by.
“Cassie,” Betsy said, “it doesn’t even register on my emotional Richter scale.”
They talked for an hour or so, about nothing in particular, and both were reassured to see that the friendship was much the same as it had been before. Cassie had gone through a striking change in demeanor: cooler, more sober, much less the party girl, but still with a perverse sense of humor.
“How about you and Marcus? Is that for real? I can’t resist asking you,” Betsy said.
Cassie got a hint of a smile on her face. “Marcus is gay. So am I. We’re probably the only two gay black agents in the whole damn Bureau. So it’s a natural we’d end up in Hennessey’s shop.”
“Why? Is Hennessey black and gay?”
Cassie laughed. But she didn’t throw back her head and scream with laughter as the old Cassie would have. “Straight and Irish,” she said. “But he hires unconventionally.”
“Why’d he pick me as his Trojan horse? Because I’m single and alone and a Mormon from Idaho?”
“Partly that,” Cassie said without hesitation. “Partly because you had already been working on the Iraqi thing. But when he found out that you had a brother working in Larsen’s shop, that was it.” Cassie winced. “Sorry. Sore subject.”
“I’m over it, Cassie,” Betsy said. “As much as I’ll ever be.”
Chapter Fourty-Five