think I’m going to need a little more to get Corvallis in a room with you again.”
“I’m going to give you Charles Robinson.”
“The guy you stole the dog from? Why would I want him?” she asks.
“You wouldn’t, but Corvallis would,” I say, and then it dawns on me that she may not know anything about all this. She is not a member of the task force assigned to Timmerman, and may be on the outside of a need-to-know situation.
I ask her straight-out if she knows what is going on, and she admits that while she has some suspicions, she is basically in the dark.
“Would you like to be brought into the light?” I ask.
“I would.”
“And can I count on you to keep everything I tell you in confidence, except the parts you don’t have to keep in confidence?”
“Not knowing what the hell you are talking about, I’ll say yes.”
I proceed to tell her everything I know, and everything I suspect, about the Timmerman case. I’m glad to do so, because I’m pretty far out on a limb here, and Cindy is really smart. If she thinks I’m way off base, she’ll tell me so and show me how.
She doesn’t. Instead she just says, “You could be right about this, Andy. I’ll call Corvallis; when do you want to meet?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow is Saturday,” she says.
“Boy, you FBI people are really sharp. Cindy, I would like to get moving on this before the jury delivers a verdict.”
“Okay, I’ll call you back.”
When I get off the phone, I update Laurie on what she said, and my request for a meeting tomorrow.
“If you get the meeting, I want to go with you,” she says.
“Why?”
“You’re starting to get into potentially dangerous territory, and dealing with danger is not exactly your forte.”
“Danger is my middle name,” I say.
“Robert is your middle name.”
“No, I changed it while you were in Wisconsin. I thought Danger would be more appealing to chicks.”
“I knew there was something exciting about you, I just couldn’t place it.”
I finally agree to let Laurie come with me to the meeting, because she’s smart and I value her opinion. Also, because I really hate saying no to Laurie. At least I think I would; I’ve never actually tried it.
Laurie tells me that she taught Waggy a trick, which she wants to show me. We go down to the basement, and she tells me to get him excited, which I do by throwing a tennis ball. He is firmly into his nut-job routine when she demonstrates the trick.
She puts her hand toward the floor, palm-down, and says, “Quiet time, Waggy. Quiet time.”
He doesn’t even bother to look up, just continues to roll around with the ball, in wild excitement.
Laurie makes her voice even sterner. “Quiet time, Waggy. Quiet time.”
Waggy yelps a few times as the ball rolls away from him, and then leaps on it, grabbing it in his mouth and violently shaking it and his head from side to side.
“It’s a great trick,” I say. “But you might want to perfect it before you do it on stage.”
“Do you want to watch a movie?” she asks, ignoring the dig.
“Did you teach Waggy to load a DVD also?”
“That’s for tomorrow,” she says.
We go back upstairs and watch The Natural, one of Laurie’s favorite movies. She’s not a big sports fan, but for some reason she loves sports movies. We watch the flick, and drink some wine, and pet Tara. It is perhaps my favorite way to spend time, not counting the NFL.
When we’re finished we go upstairs and make love, which on second thought is my favorite way to spend time, including the NFL.
Afterward Laurie looks at me, probably surprised that I haven’t fallen asleep within eight seconds. “What are you thinking?” she asks.
“That I want you to move back here and marry me.” These are words that I’ve said a thousand times, but they’re usually in my head, and never actually come out through my mouth. This time I involuntarily speak them, loud and clear, and even Tara looks over in surprise.
“Excuse me?” Laurie asks, meaning she didn’t hear me the first time or she wants to give me an easy out to pretend I never said it.
Since I have no way of retreating, I push ahead, rephrasing it as a question. “Will you move back here and marry me?”
Ten seconds that feel like ten years go by before she answers. “Is it all or nothing?”