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“Stop finding excuses for her, Susan,” Matt said. “If you’re facing life in prison, you don’t get pregnant.”

“Okay,” she said. “I told you, she’s all fucked up.”

“Okay. Where were we? I was telling how this will go down. You’re on the FBI’s list. The moment they arrest Chenowith, they’ll have you picked up as an accessory after the fact. The same day, probably, if they don’t have one already, they’ll get a search warrant for your house, your office, the place in the Poconos. . . . Where is the money?”

“In my safe-deposit box,” she said. “In the Harrisburg Bank and Trust Company.”

“And for that,” Matt said. “They will find the money, and since you have no other explanation for it, and there is evidence that you have been meeting with Chenowith, it will (a) be seized as recovered loot from bank robberies, and (b) used as evidence that you are an active accessory after the fact.”

“Oh, God!”

“For both, probably,” he went on as he thought about it. “I think they’ll probably try to make you an accessory to the bank robberies, too.”

“Why bother, if they are going to send me to prison for life for helping Jennie?”

“You, and Poor Little Jennie, and Bryan Chenowith, and the guy with the acne—Edgar Leonard Cole—and the other female. What’s her name? Eloise Anne Fitzgerald,” he said. “Where are they, by the way?”

“I don’t know, Matt.”

“You don’t know, or you’re overwhelmed with compassion because they had unpleasant childhoods?”

“I don’t know, Matt,” she said, half crying, looking at him. “I don’t know if I’d tell you if I did, but I don’t know.”

Then she started to cry.

“Jesus, please don’t do that,” Matt said.

Once she started, she couldn’t stop. It was soft, almost a moan, as she hugged her breasts and her chest heaved with sobs.

Matt moved to her, spilling the plate of roast beef, and put his arms around her.

“Come on, honey,” he said. “That’s not going to do any good.”

“I wish I was dead,” she spluttered.

“What is that, a commentary on our lovemaking?”

“You bastard!”

“Two things have happened,” he said.

“What two things?” she said, sobbing.

“I have asparagus in my pubic hair, au jus on my balls, and holding you like this is making me horny.”

She pushed herself away from him and looked.

It was all true.

Half crying, half giggling, she shook her head.

“Go take a bath,” she said.

“You got some of it, too,” he said, pointing. “Come with me.”

“Take a shower with you?”

“Why not? Or would you rather sit here in the roast beef and blubber?”