She grinned sadly at the road ahead of her. “It’s you and me now, kid. Just the two of us. We’ll give you another month of growing and time for us to be alone together, then I’m taking you home to Virginia.”
She looked at Baby to make sure he was listening, then turned her attention back to the road. “We don’t need anyone, especially not any man. Not Grey, or Michael, or even Jonathan.”
Grace carefully slowed the truck to make the turn into her driveway, remembering from her trip out that there was a large branch that had fallen halfway across it.
“And I’m making you this promise now, sweetie. You’re going to make some woman a perfect husband, and she’ll have me to thank for that.”
She stopped talking when she realized the branch was no longer there. Someone had cut it up into short sections and had stacked it on the side of the driveway in a neat little pile.
Remembering Mavis and Peter’s visit yesterday, Grace didn’t wonder who had done the chore for her.
There was probably more food in her fridge, and her animals had been looked after as well. This is what had happened nine years ago, during the days after her mother and father’s accident. Enough food had arrived at the house to feed eight grieving children who might not otherwise have eaten.
Grace suddenly pushed on the brakes a little harder than she intended when her now wet, blurry eyes discovered a car parked next to the back porch, blocking her way into the garage.
She wiped at the tears streaming down her cheeks and shut off the engine. The sound of sleet pelting the wind-shield drummed through the cab of the truck as she stared in dismay at the dark windows of her house. She distinctly remembered leaving the lights on, both on the porch and over the kitchen table.
The power must have gone out. Ellen had said it had been flickering all afternoon. The lines had finally lost their valiant battle with the ice.
It would probably be days, if not weeks, before the electricity returned. Pine Creek would not be at the top of the power company’s priority list. The town had no hospitals, no nursing homes, not even anything that would pass as a real firehouse. At best they had two stores, one gas station, a church, and a grange hall.
Grace unfastened the blissfully unaware Baby from his car seat. “My God, sweetie, you’ve had the worst kind of luck dogging you since birth, and you don’t even know it. It’s back to sleeping in the living room for us, next to the fire. And it will be lukewarm formula and sponge baths for another few days.”
If the smile he gave her was any indication, he didn’t seem to mind one bit. He was proud of his new trick and the response it got him, and he was playing it up for all it was worth.
She kissed his cheek to reward him for being such a steadfast little trooper, then tucked him under her jacket for the walk to the house.
She went in through the garage doors she had left open earlier but stopped before entering the house. A stack of wood, nearly half a cord’s worth, was neatly piled next to the entrance. She sent up a prayer of thanks to whichever thoughtful person had done this for her. She needed it now more than ever.
The house was unusually quiet, no sounds of fridge or furnace working. There was no sign of the owner of the car parked outside. The person was probably in the upper barn, tending the animals. Grace hoped he knew his way around goats.
She walked straight through the kitchen to the downstairs bedroom. Without putting Baby down, she grabbed the cradle and dragged it into the living room. She set Baby in it, stuck his pacifier in his mouth, took off her jacket, and threw it on the couch.
Grace was on her knees building the fire back up in the hearth when she heard the sound of footsteps coming down the stairs. She spun around just as Jonathan took the last step into the living room.
“Grace.”
“Jonathan,” she said, scrambling to her feet to face him. “What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be in Virginia, monitoring Podly.”
“I was. But something’s gone wrong. I grabbed the first available flight here but was only able to get as far as Boston.” He shook his head in disgust. “It took me all night and most of today to get from Boston to here. There weren’t any flights to Bangor, so I rented a car. I nearly killed myself trying to keep it on the icy roads.”
“But why?”
He walked up and took her by the shoulders, as if to brace her against something unpleasant. “It’s Podly, Grace. She’s malfunctioning.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“I don’t know,” he said, his hands tightening on her shoulders. “That’s why I’m here. The data Podly’s sending back are scrambled. And our computers can’t sort it out.”
She gaped at him. “That’s impossible. I ran several tests on that program before Podly even went up.
Everything was working fine.”
Jonathan let her go and paced across the room, running a hand through his hair before he turned back to her. “I know. It was the damnedest thing. We discovered the problem two days ago, and I’ve spent hours trying to straighten the mess out myself.”
He paced back to her, his expression desperate. “You’re the only chance we’ve got, Grace. You designed that software. You’re the only one who can unscramble the data.”
“But you didn’t have to come up here, Jonathan. I can link up with Podly, fix the glitch from here, and then you can start downloading to the computers back at the lab. I have the program in my laptop.”
“There’s something you don’t know, Grace, about Podly,” he said, suddenly pacing back across the room. He stopped and stood facing the window, his hands shoved into his pockets. He kept his back to her when he finally spoke.
“Do you remember six months ago, when Collins pulled his money out of our project?” he asked softly.
“I remember. But you said you found a new money-man.”
He turned toward her, still keeping his distance. “I did. But the new money came with a condition.”
“What kind of condition?” she asked, hugging herself against the sudden chill of the quiet house.
“A transmitter, Grace. Placed in Podly before she went up.”
The hair on the back of her neck stirred, and Grace felt something churn in the pit of her stomach.
“Transmitting what?” she whispered.
“Our data,” Jonathan said succinctly. He pulled his hands from his pockets and started toward her.
Grace took a step back.
Jonathan stopped. “Our competition gave me eighty million dollars for the data, Grace. And now they can’t get it.”
“You sold out StarShip Spaceline? To who?”
“AeroSaqii. But I didn’t sell out. I kept StarShip alive.” He shook his head. “Without Collins’s money, I would have been bankrupt in twelve months.”
“You will be anyway,” Grace snapped, her stomach now churning with the violence of a thousand angry bees. “They’ll win the race, and we’ll be left with nothing.”
He moved closer, holding one hand out beseechingly. “We’ve still got the shuttles, Grace. We can concentrate on those. AeroSaqii will contract with us to build them.”
Angry beyond words, Grace turned her back on Jonathan and returned to building the fire in the hearth.
The ion propulsion experiment was hers; she’d designed it, laid down the groundwork, and put the processor into Podly herself.
And Jonathan had sold it without telling her.
“That still doesn’t explain why you had to come all the way up here,” she said, her back to the room. “I could have just unscrambled the data and sent the results to you.”
“There’s something else, Grace,” Jonathan said from right behind her. He took her shoulders and lifted her up, turning her to face him. “I have reason to believe my deal with AeroSaqii is not exactly…well, it appears there’s more involved in this deal than I thought there was.”