Judas Horse_ An FBI Special Agent Ana Grey Mystery - April Smith [83]
Steve and I ordered Cokes, which came with lime and lots of ice in a narrow bar glass that contained the sweet carbonation perfectly. The dinner rolls were soft and fluffy white. Things were looking up. Steve’s thigh, hard inside the perfectly creased dress slacks, edged reassuringly close to mine.
Poppy decided the following day would be an excellent time to visit Manassas National Battlefield Park, forty miles away.
I protested. “Tomorrow is graduation.”
“Not until three-thirty in the afternoon, according to the schedule.”
“I have to get ready.”
“How long does it take you to get ready?”
“I want to take the morning off, and pack, and take a shower and—”
“I came all the way out to the other side of the country to find Joseph Grey.”
“Is he a relative?” Steve asked genially.
“A dead one. Poppy thinks he has a great-great-uncle who fought for the Union and died in the first battle of Manassas. So he wants to go there.” I rolled my eyes.
“Can’t you find old Joseph on a computer?” Steve suggested.
“A computer is not the same as being present on a field of honor. What is wrong with you?”
“Sorry, sir.”
“No need to be sorry,” I murmured as a waiter in a white dinner jacket offered the appetizers.
I took a glistening bite of a farm-fresh tomato with onions and tarragon.
“How about we drive up to Baltimore and see the Orioles instead?”
“No, ma’am,” Poppy replied. “We are on a mission.”
I groped Steve’s hand under the table. It was damp.
“Sir, you should know that Ana and I are serious.”
“Serious what?” He scraped the bottom of his bowl of mushroom soup.
“We care for each other and we want to get married.”
Poppy shocked me by simply asking, “When?”
It threw us both off. “Well,” said Steve, coloring red, “we don’t know exactly when. We just haven’t set a date. One day, I’ll wake up and I’ll turn to Ana and say, ‘Let’s get married.’”
“So in the meanwhile, you’re shacking up, is that what you’re saying?”
“No, sir—”
“We’re planning to get married in the chapel at the Academy,” I interjected quickly.
“Aren’t you the one who said that soon-to-be Special Agent Crawford has been assigned to Miami and you’ll be in L.A.?”
“Yes, but—”
“I’m just a dumb cop, so explain to me. Exactly which bed is it where Special Agent Crawford turns to my granddaughter and says, ‘Let’s get married’? Because I can’t figure anything but a Motel 6 in the middle of Texas.”
“One of us will be reassigned.”
“And that’ll be who?”
“We don’t know who,” I said.
“It’ll be you, that’s who,” said Poppy. “When it comes down to it, he’ll be like any man; he’ll say, ‘My job is more important. You’re only the wife.’”
“So what?” Steve said angrily. “If we love each other.”
“You’d ask me to give up my career?”
“Not give it up.”
“But—what?”
“We’ll work it out,” said Steve.
“How?”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t know.
My mouth had set in that shut-down way. Steve was watching with distaste. He’d never seen that expression on my face. It made me look like Poppy.
And I had never seen the cold, self-centered steel in his character.
“You’re over twenty-one,” my grandfather said. “You can do as you damn well please.”
The morning of graduation, I picked Poppy up at the Days Inn (he was waiting outside—camera in hand, wearing Bermuda shorts, high socks, an FBI T-shirt and FBI cap) and we headed north. It was 10:00 a.m. and already we were drowning in the muggy, listless air.
Avoiding a revisit of last night’s dinner—how we ate quickly and skipped dessert, how it was endured in tense silence except for an argument about which exit Steve’s family should take from the airport—Poppy posed one of his “educational” questions: “What is Bull Run?”
“It refers to an Indian chief whose tribe was massacred by U.S. troops and who tried to run away. They thought he was a coward, but history proves he was outnumbered.”
Poppy was incensed. He liked to run these quizzes to demonstrate