The Way We Were (16 page)

They read the report together. Nathan W. Carson was a captain in the
army when McCarthy’s Communist-seeking bullets had hit him. He’d been one of the several U.S. Army officers brutally questioned in the infamous thirty-six hours of televised hearings.

“I wonder if the superintendent knew about Carson and that’s why he thought she’d balk,” Joe commented, almost to himself. “Those investigations included undercover work, phone tapping, infiltrations.”

“Not
to mention that he was found innocent.” Ludzecky’s tone was grave.

“There was almost no proof against anybody McCarthy accused. Didn’t matter, though, the damage had been done.”

“Click again, see what happened to Carson.” Ludzecky straightened and peered intently at the screen.

Joe brought up the next slide. “Damn.”

Luke sighed again, this time sympathetically. He had yet to develop
a hard veneer, which was one of the things that got him in so much trouble. That and his lack of plain common sense.

Suzanna Quinn’s father had committed suicide two months before she was born. He’d “involuntarily resigned” from the army and never bounced back.

“Well, I’m sure she can be managed effectively,” Joe commented.

“Goddamn it, Stonehouse, don’t you feel any sympathy for the
poor woman?”

Sick of the kid’s needling, he snapped back. “Sympathy gets in the way, Agent Ludzecky. It’s what keeps getting you in all that hot water.” He fiddled with the computer. “Let’s look at the other school personnel.”

A NEW YORK TIMES bestselling author, Kathryn Shay has been a lifelong writer and teacher. She has written dozens of self-published original romance titles, print books with the Berkley Publishing Group and Harlequin Enterprises and mainstream women’s fiction with Bold Strokes Books. She has won five RT Book Reviews awards, four Golden Quills, four Holt Medallions,
the Bookseller’s Best Award, Foreword Magazine’s Book of the Year and several “Starred Reviews.” Her novels have been serialized in COSMOPOLITAN magazine and featured in USA TODAY, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL and PEOPLE magazine. There are over five million copies of her books in print, along with hundreds of thousands downloaded online. Reviewers have call her work “emotional and heart-wrenching.”