Karen followed us up to our office and came in. She said, "I have to go to work, or at least try. I'll be back at closing time."She stared at me for a... moment with a strange expression on her face. Then she finally turned and left.I turned to Blake and said, "Blake, this is getting to be too much. You are going too far. Please..."He turned and held my face in his hands and looked down at me. He put on that arrogant smile of his and said disdainfully, "I'll decide when we are going too far. I'm. I should have gotten two boxes." I turned around and was on my way back into the store when I realized what had just happened. Did I just have a conversation with a cat? How could he have known about the condoms? I don't ever remember telling a cat about my sex lifeI turned around and the cat was right behind me, in fact, I almost tripped over him. Oddly, he smelled like my boyfriend Allen. The strange feline rubbed up against my leg and purred. "You didn't have to tell me about your sex life,. Clarissa was waiting for me, and followed me to the nave of the cathedral.“Well?”“Let me digest everything and we’ll talk tomorrow afternoon, after we get home from the blessing of the waters. OK?”“OK.”January 6, 1984, West Monroe, Ohio“In the Russian tradition, the priest or bishop would throw the blessing cross into the river and young men would dive in to retrieve it,” I said.“‘Hold my cross and watch this?’” Clarissa teased.I laughed, “Nice.”“And I’m not sure ANY amount of blessing would. ”I’d learned from the spreadsheet on Donna’s tablet that Larry Aikman had paid her a total of something near twenty grand in cash for her and Zeb’s film roles. I’d found fifteen hundred in Zeb’s underwear draw, just had to locate the rest. I checked all the pockets of the clothes as we piled them into more garbage sacks to go to Goodwill, finding nothing, but at the back of the closet, an old-fashioned ladies overnight case was crammed with notes. Luckily Nat was carrying bags to the garage at.