“I don’t know!” she managed to say. Despite looking ghastly, humor glinted in his eyes. His black hair was so long that it was tied in a ponytail, but his beard was gone. Probably recently, given the nicks along his jaw. “I can’t believe you’re really here.”
“I just got in an hour ago. I was eating the remnants of a loaf of bread when I heard you coming home.”
“I think you need more than plain bread. Like an entire chicken and a chocolate cake. Maybe a side of steer.”
He laughed. “All in good time. I can’t keep much food down yet and have to go easy on it. Plain bread works.”
If Luke had somehow escaped the Cuban prison, she needed to get him out of here immediately, for this was the first place the military would look for him. Part of her wanted to send for a doctor, but the other part wanted to smuggle him into a wagon and out of town.
“How did you get out?” she asked.
“Orders of the president,” he answered.
Her eyes grew wide. President McKinley had been firm when he said he couldn’t help, but had he changed his mind? Had he put something in place to go into effect posthumously? “Did he ...did President McKinley...”
Luke shook his head. “No. It was the other guy. Mr. Roosevelt.”
“No!”
His eyes brightened with ironic amusement. “I was workingfor him all along. I think he felt pretty guilty about what happened.”
“Roosevelt?” she gasped. “What on earth were you doing for President Roosevelt?”
She listened in amazement as Luke recounted how closely Roosevelt had tracked developments in Cuba after leaving the island as a war hero three years earlier. Roosevelt suspected corruption had taken root among the occupying American forces and wanted an undercover man on the ground to look for it.
“You don’t send someone in the military to investigate the military,” Luke said. “That’s why they sent me. I always knew that if I was arrested I’d have to keep my silence. The vice president had no authorization to poke around, so it was a completely clandestine project, and he was running a big risk doing it. If I admitted I was in the middle of an undercover operation, it would endanger the whole plan, and there are lives on the line.”
He went on to say that he’d infiltrated the group of Cuban rebels, who were being paid by someone in the American military to keep the rebellion alive. Luke pretended to be sympathetic to their cause in an effort to learn who was funding them from Washington. That was why he’d had the names and contact information of the rebels in his possession when he was arrested.
Luke suspected Captain Holland in the procurement office was at the root of the problem, but it was hard for Caroline to concentrate on the political scheme he outlined. So many questions remained unanswered, but at the moment all she cared about was that he was out of jail and his name had been cleared.
“Did you give my letters to Philip?” he asked.
“Philip the Meek? Why would I do that?”
Luke vaulted off the sofa, knocking over the parlor table as he stood to full height. “You didn’t turn over my letters?” he asked, his eyes wide in horror.
She stood too. “You never told me to give them to Philip.”
“I told you in every letter!” he shouted in exasperation. “I told you to trust a good dancer. To tell the good dancer everything.”
“Is Philip a good dancer?”
Luke looked ready to implode. “Philip won statewide waltzing contests for three straight years!” he roared. “You were in the front row of the audience our sophomore year when he won first place! Why do you think everyone at the Naval Academy called him Twinkle Toes?”
“I thought they were teasing him for being a lightweight.”
“Philip isn’t a lightweight,” Luke snapped. “He’s the biggest spy in the American government. That’s why Roosevelt put him on the job.”
She gaped at him, unable to get her mind around it. “But he’s so bashful and timid!”
“He’s very good at letting you think that. Meanwhile he’s got spies all over the globe who send him information in that seedy little basement office, and he’s running rings around everyone.”
“And the second in command? Who did you mean by that?”
“The vice president, obviously!”
Caroline threw up her hands in frustration. “Why didn’t you just write directly to Philip or Roosevelt in the first place?”
