Tribute

ELEVEN

We can take shifts.” Ford glanced over at Cilla as he drove. She hadn’t objected when he insisted she needed to go home, get some rest, have a meal. And that worried him. "They’re pretty strict in ICU anyway, and don’t let you hang out very long, so we’ll take shifts. Between you and me, Shanna and some of the guys, we’ll cover it.”

“They don’t know how long he’ll be in a coma. It could be hours, or days, and that’s if-”

“When. We’re going with when.”

“I’ve never had a very optimistic nature.”

“That’s okay.” He tried to find a tone between firm and sympathetic. “I’ve got one and you can borrow a piece.”

“It looked like he’d been beaten. Just beaten.”

“It’s the skull fracture. I talked to one of the nurses when you were in with him. It’s part of it.” Knowing it, even knowing it, he thought, hadn’t dulled the shock when he’d been allowed a minute with Steve. “So’s the coma. The coma’s not a bad thing, Cilla. It’s giving his body a chance to heal. It’s focusing.”

“You do have plenty of optimistic pieces. But this isn’t a comic book where the good guy pulls it out every time. Even if-or we can go with your rainbow when-he comes out of it, there could be brain damage.”

He’d gotten that, too, but saw no point in pushing through to worst-case scenario. “In my rainbow world, and in your darker version, the brain relearns. It’s a clever bastard.”

“I didn’t get the goddamn padlock.”

“If somebody got in the barn and went at Steve, why do you think a padlock would’ve kept them out?”

She curled her fingers into her palms as they approached her drive. “I took down the gates. And planted fucking trees.”

“Yeah, I figure the trees are what did it. Makes it all your fault.” He waited for her to take a shot at him-better, to his mind, than wallowing. But she said nothing. “Okay, again, if someone wanted in, how would a couple of wrought-iron panels stop them? What happened to pessimism?”

She only shook her head and stared at the house. “I don’t know what I’m doing here. That crazy old man was probably right. The place is cursed. My uncle died, my grandmother, and now Steve may die. For what? So I can buff and polish, paint and trim this place? Looking for that link, that click, that connection with my grandmother because I’ve got none with my own mother? What’s the point? She’s dead, so what’s the point?”

“Identity.” Ford gripped her arm before she could push the car door open. “How can we know who we really are until we know where we came from, and overcome it, build on it or accept it?”

“I know who I am.” She wrenched free, shoved the door open. Slammed it behind her.

“No, you really don’t,” Ford responded.

She strode around the side of the house. Work, she thought, a couple hours of sweaty work, then she’d clean up and go back to the hospital. The patio had been repaired, the new slate laid, with the walkways roped and dug except for the one she’d added to the plans. The one leading to the barn. Yellow crime-scene tape crossed over her barn door like ugly ribbon over a nasty gift. She stared at it as Shanna dropped her shovel and raced over the lawn.

Cilla willed her compassion back into place. She wasn’t the only one worried and distressed. “There’s no change.” She gripped Shanna’s extended hand.

The rest of the landscape crew stopped working, and some of the men from inside the house stepped out. “No change,” she repeated, lifting her voice. “They’ve got him in ICU, monitoring him, and they’ll be doing tests. All we can do is wait.”

“Are you going back?” Shanna asked her.

“Yeah, in a little while.”

“Brian?”

Brian gave Shanna a quick nod. “Go ahead.”

Yanking her phone out of her pocket, Shanna strode toward the front of the house.

“Her sister can pick her up,” Brian explained. He pulled his cap off his short brown hair, raked grimy fingers through it. “She wanted to knock off when you got here, go by and see Steve herself.”

“Good. That’s good.”

“The rest of us, and Matt and Dobby and such, we’ll go by, too. Don’t know as they’ll let us in to see him, but we’ll go by. Shanna had a jag earlier. She’s blaming herself.”

“Why?”

“If she’d let him stay the night, and so on.” Sighing, he replaced his cap. After one glance at Ford, he got the picture. Taking off his sunglasses, he focused his summer blue eyes on Cilla. “I told her there’s no ifs, and no blame except for whoever did that to Steve. Start hauling out the ifs and the blame, you could just as soon say if Steve hadn’t gone out to play pool, if he hadn’t gone in the barn. And that’s crap. Best thing is to hold good thoughts. Anyway.”

He took a bandanna out of his pocket to wipe the sweat from his face. “The cops were here, as I guess you can see. Asking questions. I can’t say what they’re thinking about this.”

“I hope they’ve stopped thinking he was drunk and did that to himself.”

“Shanna set them straight on the drunk part.”

“Good.” It loosened one of the multitude of knots in her belly. “I met your mother.”

“Did you?”

“At the hospital. She was a lot of help. Well.” Tears continued to burn the back of her eyes as she stared into the sunlight. “The patio looks good.”

“Helps to have work.”

“Yeah. So give me some, will you?”

“That I can do.” He shot a smile at Ford. “How about you? Want a shovel?”

“I like to watch,” Ford said easily. “And I’ve got to check on Spock.”

“Just as well. Give this guy a shovel or a pick?” he said to Cilla. “And if there’s a pipe or a cable in the ground, he’ll hit it, first cut.”

“That only happened once. Maybe twice,” Ford qualified.

WHEN THE CREW KNOCKED OFF, she knocked off with them and hit the shower. She wanted to say she felt human again, but was still well shy of the mark. Like an automaton, she pulled on fresh clothes. She decided she’d buy some magazines, something to occupy her mind at the hospital, and maybe snag a sandwich from a vending machine.

When she jogged downstairs, Ford stood in her unfinished living room.

“I’d say you’re making progress, but I don’t know that much about it, and it doesn’t look like it to me.”

“We’re making progress.”

“Good. I’ve got dinner out on the veranda. Spock sends his regards as he’s dining at home this evening.”

“Dinner? Listen, I-”

“You have to eat. So do I.” He grabbed her hand, pulled her out. “We’ve got my secondary specialty.”

She stared at the paper plates and cups, the bottle of wine and the can of Coke. And in the center of the folding table sat a dish of macaroni and cheese.

“You made mac and cheese?”

“Yeah, I did. That is, I put the package in the microwave and programmed according to directions. It’s mac and cheese if you aren’t too fussy.” He poured some wine in a paper cup. “And the wine’ll help it along.”

“You’re not having wine.”

“That’s ’cause I like the nuked version just fine, and I’m driving you to the hospital.”

A hot meal, companionship. Help. All offered, she thought, without a need for asking. “You don’t have to do that, do this.”

He pulled her chair out, nudged her into it. “It’s more satisfying to do something you don’t have to do.”

“Why are you?” She looked up, into his eyes. “Why are you doing this for me?”

“You know what, Cilla, I’m not entirely sure. But…” He pressed his lips to her forehead before he sat. “I believe you matter.”

She clutched her hands in her lap as he scooped out two heaping spoons of the macaroni and cheese onto her plate. Then, to clear her throat, she took a sip of wine. “That’s the second thing you’ve said to me today no one else ever has.”

Those eyes of his lifted, zeroed in on hers. “No one ever told you you mattered?”

“Maybe Steve. In different words, in different ways. But no, not just that way.”

“You do. Go on and eat. That stuff gets cold, it turns to cement.”

“The second thing-or the first, actually, that you said to me today was you wouldn’t leave me alone.”

He only looked at her, and she couldn’t tell if it was pity or understanding, or simply patience, on his face. Whatever it was, she knew it was exactly what she needed. And so much what she’d never expected to find.

“I guess you meant it, because here you are.” She stabbed up a forkful, slid it into her mouth and smiled around it. “It’s terrible. Thanks,” she said and stabbed another bite.

“You’re welcome.”

THERE WAS NO CHANGE when they arrived at the hospital, and no change when they left hours later. Cilla slept with the phone clutched in her hand, willing it to ring, willing the on-duty nurse to call to tell her Steve was awake and lucid.

But no call came. The dreams did.

SHENANDOAH VALLEY 1960

“This is how it looked, the first time I saw it. My little farm.”

In red capri pants, a white shirt tied at the midriff and white Keds, Janet strolled arm in arm with Cilla. Janet’s sunshine hair bounced in a jaunty ponytail.

“Of course, that’s not true-exactly-as when I first came here there were the trailers, the lights, the cables, the trucks. The city we make on locations. You know.”

“Yes, I know.”

“But we’re looking through that now. As I did then. What do you see?”

“A pretty house, with simple lines. A family home with wide, welcoming porches with old rocking chairs where you can sit and do absolutely nothing. Sweet little gardens and big shade trees.”

“Keep going.”

“The big red barn, and oh! Horses in the paddock!” Cilla rushed over to the paddock fence, thrilled with the breeze that fluttered through her hair and rippled the manes on the mare and her foal. “They’re so beautiful.”

“Did you always want a pony?”

“Of course.” Laughing, Cilla turned her head to smile at Janet. “Every little girl wants a pony. And a puppy, a kitten.”

“But you never got them.”

“No, I had call sheets and script changes. You know.”

“Yes, I know.”

“A chicken house! Just listen to them cluck.” The sound made her laugh again. “And pigs rooting in their pen. Look at the fields. Is that corn? And there’s a kitchen garden. I can see the tomatoes from here. I could grow tomatoes.”

Janet’s smile was both indulgent and amused. “And have a pony, a puppy and a kitten.”

“Is that what I want? I’m not ten anymore. Is that what I want? I can’t seem to figure it out. Is it what you wanted?”

“I wanted everything I didn’t have, and if I got it, it was never exactly what I wanted after all. Or in the long run. Even this place.” She swept out an arm, a graceful dancer’s gesture, to encompass the farm. “I fell in love, but then I fell easy and often, as everyone knows, and out again. And I thought, I have to have it.”

Lifting both her arms, Janet turned, circle after circle. “The family home with the wide, welcoming porches, the big red barn, tomatoes on the vine. That’s what I’ve never had. But I can buy it, I can own it.” She stopped spinning. “Then, of course, I had to change it. The gardens had to be lusher, the colors bolder, the lights brighter. I needed bright, bright lights. And even though I made it bolder, brighter, even though I brought the stars here to stroll like Gatsby’s ghosts across the lawn, it never really changed. It never lost its welcome. And I never fell out of love.”

“You came here to die.”

“Did I?” Janet cocked her head, looked up under her lashes, suddenly sly. “You wonder, don’t you? It’s one of the reasons you’re here. Secrets-we all have them. Yours are here, too. It’s why you came. You told yourself you’d put it back, as it was, and somehow put me back. But like me, you’ll make changes. You already have. It’s not me you’re looking for. It’s you.”

In the dream she felt a quick shiver, a chill from truth. “There is no me without you. I see you when I look in the mirror. I hear you when I speak. There’s a filter over it all, just enough to dim the brilliance, but you’re under there.”

“Did you want the pony or the call sheets, Cilla?”

“For a while, I wanted both. But I’d have been happier with the pony.” Cilla nodded, looked back toward the house. “Yes, and the family home. You’re right. That’s why I’m here. But it’s not enough. The secrets, the shadows of them. They’re still here. People get hurt in the dark. Steve got hurt in the dark.”

“Then turn on the lights.”

“How?”

“I’m just a dream.” Janet smiled, shrugged. “I don’t have any answers.”

WHEN SHE WOKE, Cilla grabbed the phone she’d dropped in her sleep and speed-dialed the hospital.

No change.

She lay in the dim light of predawn, the phone pressed between her breasts, wondering if she should feel fear or relief. He hadn’t died in the night, hadn’t slipped away from her while she slept. But he still lay trapped in that between world, that place between life and death.

So she’d go talk to him, nag him, browbeat him into waking up. She climbed out of bed, cleaned herself up. She’d make coffee, she thought, make lists for any of the subs she might miss while she was at the hospital.

As she passed the next bedroom she stopped, and studied Ford. He slept half in, half out of the sleeping bag. And what was out, she had to admit, was very nice.

The dog curled at the foot of the bag, snoring like a chain saw in mid-massacre. Ford hadn’t wanted Spock to spend the night alone, she remembered, and went to get him when they returned from the hospital. Went to get his dog, she thought, after he told her he’d be sleeping in the spare room.

He wouldn’t leave her alone.

She went down, made the coffee, drinking hers on the back veranda. There had been no patio in the dream, but her subconscious had known Janet had added that, and the walkways. The crops in the field, another given. The kitchen garden? She couldn’t remember if that had been original, or one of Janet’s additions. Either way, it was something she herself wanted.

And the barn? It was no longer red. That bright color had weathered away long ago. The coffee turned bitter in her throat as she stared at the yellow tape crossing the door. If Steve died, she’d tear the bastard down. Tear it down, burn it, and everything inside it.

Squeezing her eyes shut, she battled back the anger that wanted to scream out of her. If he lived, she told herself, if he came back whole, she’d paint it that bright, happy red again. Red with white trim.

“Please, God.”

Why God gave a damn if she burned the barn to the ground or painted it red with yellow smiley faces she couldn’t say. But it was the best she had.

She went back inside, poured another mug and carried it upstairs to Ford.

She sat cross-legged beside him and, sipping her own second cup of coffee, gave him a good study. Unlike his dog, he didn’t snore, which added points in his favor, but the way he sprawled indicated bed hog. Points deducted. He had a good growth of stubble going, considering he hadn’t shaved the day before, but she had to admit it added a sexy edge to the package.

He wasn’t what she’d call buff or ripped, but reasonably toned over a build that leaned toward skinny. Just a touch of gawkiness, she mused. Add a few cute points for that.

He had good arms. Strong, lean rather than bulky. Best, she thought, they knew how to hold on. Major points, she decided. He just kept racking them up.

And the lips-top score. Leaning over, she rubbed hers to his. He made a humming sound in his throat, reached out. When she eased back, his eyes blinked open.

“Hey.”

“Hey yourself.”

“Did you have a bad dream?”

“No. A strange one, but I’m prone to them. It’s morning.”

“Uh-uh.” He shifted enough to turn his wrist, blink at his watch. At the foot of the bag, Spock yawned, a high-pitched whine, then went back to snoring. “Nope. Six-forty isn’t morning. Crawl in here with me. I’ll prove it.”

“Tempting.” More so when he tugged her head down again and improved, considerably, on her casual wake-up kiss. “Very tempting,” she said. “But some of the crew should be pulling up in about twenty minutes.”

“I can get it done in twenty minutes.” He winced. “That probably didn’t translate to my advantage.”

“Have coffee.” She held out the mug, waved it slowly under his nose.

“You brought me coffee?” He sat up, took the first sip. “Now you have to marry me.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, and bear me eight young, dance naked for my pleasure every Tuesday and wake me with coffee-that’s after the sex-every morning. It’s the law of Kroblat.”

“Who’s Kroblat?”

“Not who. The planet Kroblat. It’s a very spiritual place,” he decided on the spot. “I try to live my life by its laws. So, we’ll have to get married and all the rest.”

“We’ll get on that, first chance.” She brushed her hand over his hair. “Thanks for staying.”

“Hey, I got coffee, a wife and eight kids out of it. You checked on Steve?”

“No change. I’m going to go see him. Maybe I can bitch-talk him awake, you know?”

“Maybe. Give me ten minutes, I’ll drive you.”

“No. No, I’m fine. I’m going to sit with him awhile, nag him awhile. Then I’m going to pick up some supplies and materials, drop them back here. I’ll be back and forth a lot today. Let me ask you something. If I made a bargain with myself-or with God, fate. Whatever. And it was that I’d paint the barn red, red with white trim if Steve comes out of this okay, would I be jinxing it if I bought the paint before… before he comes out of it?”

“No. In fact, it shows faith.”

She shook her head. “I knew you’d say that. I’m just the opposite. Too scared to buy the damn paint.” She pushed to her feet. “I’ll see you later.”

“I’ll be by the hospital.”

She stopped at the door, hesitated, then turned back to look at him. “I can pick up dinner for tonight, if you want.”

“That’d be great.”

“I really want to sleep with you.” She smiled when he nearly bobbled the coffee and when Spock’s tiny ears perked. What a pair they were. “I really want to know what it’s like, to just let go. But I guess it’s like buying the paint, for now.”

He kept his gaze on hers, and smiled. Slowly. “I’ve got time. For later.” Ford sat where he was, drinking coffee and making a mental note to write down that stuff about Kroblat. It could come in useful sometime, somewhere.

He felt pretty damn good for a man who’d slept on the floor, he decided. And one who’d had some trouble not thinking about the woman sleeping on the floor in the next room.

Now, since he was up at this ungodly hour, he’d drag his ass across the road, get in a workout, check on Steve, get a couple solid hours in on the novel, then drop by the hospital.

“You get your lazy ass up, too,” he said to Spock, and juggled the dog fully awake with his foot. He heard the first truck pull up as he pulled on his pants. By the time he was dressed and pouring a second cup of coffee, with Spock doing what Spock had to do in the backyard, the noise and activity level hit the red zone. Deciding he’d just borrow the mug and bring it back later, Ford headed outside with the coffee.

He saw Brian directing one of his men toward the back of the house with what looked like a load of sand. Ford shot up a wave. "Hey, Bri.”

“Well, hey.” With his thumbs in his front pockets, Brian strolled over and shot a meaningful look toward the house. “And hey.”

“Nah. Separate rooms. I didn’t want her to be alone.”

“How’s she doing?”

“Seems steadier this morning. She’s already on her way to see Steve.”

“Shanna called the hospital. No change yet. It’s the damnedest thing. Hell of a nice guy.”

“Yeah.” Ford looked over at the barn. “How much paint do you figure it’d take to do that barn?”

“Hell if I know. Ask a painter.”

“Right.” He glanced over as another car pulled up. “This place is a madhouse half the time. I’m going home.”

“Cops.” Brian jerked his chin. “Cops’re back. I hope to hell they don’t want to talk to Shanna again. It gets her going.”

“I’ll see if I can take it.”

Neither of the men who stepped out of the Crown Vic were the cop- Taney, Ford remembered-they’d talked to the day before. Neither of them wore a uniform, and instead sported suits and ties. Detectives, he assumed.

“Hey, how’s it going?”

The taller of the two, with snow-salted gray hair and prominent jowls, gave Ford a curt nod. The second, small, lean and black, eyed him coolly.

And both, he noted, stared down at the dog that stared up at them.

“Cilla-Miss McGowan’s-not home,” Ford began. “She left for the hospital about fifteen, twenty minutes ago.”

Tall White Guy studied him. “And you’d be?”

“Sawyer. Ford Sawyer. I live across the road. I spoke with Officer Taney yesterday.”

“You live across the road, but you stayed here last night. With Miss McGowan.”

Ford sipped his coffee, met Short Black Guy’s eyes while Spock grumbled. “Is that a statement or a question?”

“Your hair’s still wet from the shower.”

“So it is.” Ford offered an easy smile, then sipped his coffee.

Tall White Guy took out a notebook, flipped pages. “Can you tell us where you were night before last, between two and five A.M.?”

"Sure. Would you mind doing the ID thing? It’s not just for TV”

“Detective Urick, and my partner, Detective Wilson,” Tall White Guy said as they both produced their badges.

“Okay. I was in bed-over there-from about one A.M. until I heard the sirens yesterday morning.”

“Have company?”

“Yeah, Spock.” He gestured at the dog. “You could take a statement from him, but I’d have to translate so it probably wouldn’t work. Look, I get you have to check out everything and everyone, but the fact is somebody was out here a few nights before. I saw somebody skulking around with a flashlight.”

“We got that.” Urick nodded. “You’re the only one who claims to have seen anything. What’s your relationship with Miss McGowan?”

Ford beamed an exaggerated country-rube grin. “Friends and neighbors.”

“We have the impression, from other sources, that your relationship is more than friendly.”

“Not yet.”

“But you’d like it to be.”

As Ford blew out a breath, Spock began to circle the cops. He wouldn’t bite, but Ford knew if irritated enough, Spock would sure as hell lift his leg and express his opinion.

Bad idea-probably.

“Spock, say hello. Sorry, he’s feeling a little irritated and ignored. If you’d take a minute and shake, he’ll settle.”

Wilson crouched, took the paw. “How’s it going? Damnedest-looking dog I ever saw.”

“Got some bull terrier in there,” Urick commented, and leaned down to shake.

“Yeah, at least that’s what I’ve been told. Okay, back to would I like it to be more than friends and neighbors. Have you seen Cilla? Met her?

If so, you’d know I’d have to be stupid not to like it to be. What does that have to do with Steve?”

Urick gave Spock an absent scratch before straightening. “Miss McGowan’s ex-husband, staying with her. Three’s a crowd.”

“Again, only if you’re stupid. But you’ve made it clear that none of what happened was an accident.” Ford turned, studied the barn. “Somebody was in there, and whoever it was fractured Steve’s skull and left him there. Just left him there.”

The thought of that, just the thought of that stirred the rage he’d managed to hold still and quiet. “Son of a bitch. What the hell were they looking for?”

“Why do you think someone was looking for anything?” Urick demanded.

Ford’s eyes were cold green ice when he turned back. “Give me a fucking break. Not some scavenger, either, not some asshole poking around trying to score a pair of Janet Hardy’s shoes to sell on eBay. That doesn’t follow.”

“You’ve given this some thought.”

“I think a lot. Listen, look at me as long as you want, as hard as you want. If you’ve got more questions, I’ll be around.”

“We’ll find you, if and when,” Wilson called out.

No doubt about it, Ford thought as he headed for home with his dog.

TWELVE

He wanted to get into the barn, and Ford figured if he tried it, it would add a few more layers to the suspect cake the cops were baking for him.

He was a suspect. It was actually kind of cool.

God, once a nerd always a nerd, he thought as he went through a series of lats and flys.

Once he’d worked up a sweat and an appetite, he checked in with the hospital, downed some cereal. Showered, shaved, dressed, he stepped into his office, up to his workstation.

He closed his eyes, held up his hands and said, “Draco braz minto.” The childhood ritual put everything outside the work, and Ford into it. He sat, picked up his tools and began to draw the first panel for Brid.

CILLA HAD her chair angled toward the bed so she could look directly into Steve’s face as she spoke. And she spoke, keeping up a constant one-sided conversation, as if any appreciable stretch of silence could be deadly.

“So it’s moving. Clicking along better than I anticipated, even with the changes and additions I made to the original plans. The attic space shows real promise. Later on, I’m going to go pick out the flooring for up there, and the fixtures and tiles for that bath, and the master. We’ll be able to have a beer out on the patio, soon as you’re ready. What I need is pots. A couple of big-ass pots. Monsters. Oh, and I’m going to plant tomatoes. I think it’s about the right time to do that. And, like, peppers, maybe carrots and beans. I should wait until next year when the house is done, but I think I could scratch out a square for a little garden now. Then-”

“Miss McGowan.”

Cilla took a breath. When it hurt her chest to draw it in, it told her she’d been pushing too hard. “Yes.” What was the nurse’s name, the nurse with the curly blond hair and warm brown eyes? “Dee. It’s Cilla.”

“Cilla. The police are out there. A couple of detectives. They asked to speak to you.”

“Oh. Sure. Just a sec. I’ve got to do this thing,” she told Steve. “I’ll be back.”

Spotting the cops was the easiest thing she’d done all day, Cilla thought. She stepped up to them. “I’m Cilla McGowan.”

“Detective Wilson. My partner, Detective Urick. Is there somewhere we could talk?”

“There’s a little waiting room down here. They’ve got something they call coffee. You’re looking into what happened to Steve now,” she said as she led the way.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Then you know he didn’t trip over his own feet, bash himself in the head and fall under his own bike.” She hit the coffeepot, added powdered creamer. “Do you know what did happen?”

“We’re looking into it,” Urick said. “Do you know anyone who’d wish Mr. Chensky harm?”

“No. He’s only been here a few days. Steve makes friends, not enemies.”

“You were married.”

“That’s right.”

“No hard feelings?” Wilson prompted.

“None. We were friends before we got married. We’ve stayed friends.”

“He’s living with you.”

“No, he’s visiting me, and giving me a hand for a couple of weeks on the house. I’m rehabbing the house. He’s in the business.”

“Rock the House,” Urick commented. “I’ve caught the show.”

“Best there is. You want to know if we’re sleeping together. No. We have, but we’re not.”

Wilson pursed his lips, nodded. “Your neighbor, Mr. Sawyer, states that he saw a prowler on your property a few nights ago.”

“Yeah, the night Steve got in. Steve heard something outside.”

“You didn’t.”

“No, I sleep like a rock. But Steve woke me up, said he heard something. I brushed it off.” The guilt wormed its way back. “Then Ford mentioned the flashlight he’d seen. I was supposed to get a padlock for the barn, and I let it slip by.”

“We noticed you seem to be using the barn to store things. Boxes, furniture…”

“Junk,” Cilla finished, and nodded at Urick. “I brought it down from the attic. I’m having the attic finished off and needed to clear it out. I’ve been sorting, but it’s a big job. I thought I’d separated what struck me as potentially valuable, but it’s hard to tell on a couple of passes.”

“You didn’t notice anything missing?”

“Not at this point.”

“Some of the boxes were crushed, the furniture knocked over.” Wilson gestured. “It looked, possibly, as if Mr. Chensky drove his bike into the barn, lost control, went down.”

“That’s not what happened. You know he wasn’t drunk or stoned.”

“His alcohol level was well under the legal limit,” Urick agreed. “There were no drugs in his system.”

Inside her chest, her heart began a tripping beat. “A sober man, and one who’s straddled a Harley for about a dozen years, doesn’t get off the bike, open the door, get back on the bike and yee-haw drive in over a bunch of boxes and furniture.”

“The X-rays indicate Mr. Chensky was struck at the base of the skull. Probably a crowbar or tire iron.”

Cilla pressed her hand to her heart as it tightened to a fist. “Oh, God.”

“The force of the blow pitched him forward, dropped him so that he hit the concrete floor, which caused the second fracture. Our reconstruction indicates the Harley was rolled to where Mr. Chensky lay, then pushed over on top of him, breaking two of his ribs and bruising his kidney.”

Urick waited, watched as Cilla set her coffee down, as her hand trembled. Her color went from pale to ghostly. “Now, let me ask you again. Do you know anyone who’d wish Mr. Chensky harm?”

“No. No, I don’t know anyone who’d want to hurt him. Who’d do something like that to him.”

“How did Sawyer get along with him?”

“Ford?” For a moment she went blank. “Fine. They hit it off. Big-time. Steve’s a fan. He’s even got… Oh, for God’s sake.”

Understanding, Cilla pressed her fingers to her eyes, then dragged them back through her hair. "Okay, follow the dots, please. I am not and was not sleeping with Steve. I am not and was not sleeping with Ford, though that is on the table. Ford did not attack Steve in a jealous rage as I don’t think he has a lot of rage in the first place and, more importantly, he knew there was nothing to be jealous about. I was up front with him regarding my relationship with Steve, and in fact was out with Ford the night Steve got hurt. The night both myself and Ford knew Steve had gone out to sniff around Shanna Stiles. There’s no romantic or sexual triangle here. This isn’t about sex.”

“Miss McGowan, it looks as though someone was in your barn, and may have been lying in wait. You and Sawyer knew Mr. Chensky had gone out for the evening, and that he stored his motorcycle in the barn.”

“That’s right, that’s absolutely right, Detective Wilson. Just like we both knew he’d gone out to try to score with a very attractive brunette. Neither of us could know if he’d get lucky or bomb out. So you’re suggesting that after spending the evening with me, Ford snuck back, hid out in my barn, just in case Steve came back. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Shock, anger, guilt, annoyance all drained into sheer misery. “None of this makes any sense.”

“We’d like you to go through the items you have stored in the barn, see if anything’s been disturbed or taken.”

“All right.”

“Your grandmother left a deep mark,” Wilson continued. “I’d guess most people figured anything of hers in that house was taken away a long time ago. Word gets out, as word will, there’s still some things around, someone might be interested enough to break into a barn.”

“And fracture a man’s skull. Yeah. The thing is? Most of what’s in the barn is from the McGowans. The ordinary side of the family.”

She went back to Steve, but this time sat in silence.

When she left, walked to the elevator, she saw her father get off the car. “Dad.”

“Cilla.” He strode quickly toward her, took her shoulders. “How is he?”

“The same, I guess. He’s critical. He came through the surgery, and that’s a plus, but…A lot of buts and ifs and maybes.”

“I’m so sorry.” He pulled her tight for a moment. “I know I only met him a couple of times, but I liked him. What can I do?”

“I just don’t know.”

“Let me take you downstairs, get some food in you.”

“No, actually, I’m just leaving for a while. I have some errands.” To get out, to do, to stop thinking for just a couple of hours. “Maybe… Do you think you could go in and sit with him for a little bit? Talk to him? He liked you, too.”

“Sure, I will.”

“And when you leave? Remind him that I’ll be back later. I’ll be back.”

“All right.”

Nodding, she pressed for the elevator, hitched her bag on her shoulder. “I appreciate… I really appreciate you coming. You barely know him. Hell, you barely know me.”

“Cilla-”

“But you came.” She stepped into the elevator, turned, met her father’seyes. “You came. It means a lot,” she said as the doors closed between them.

WORK. WORK GOT HER THROUGH the day.And the next day. She was better at work, she thought, than at sentiment, at expressing emotions- unless they were scripted. She made her schedule, and stuck to it. So many hours on the house, on the landscaping, so many at the hospital, so many in the barn.

That left her so many hours to fall on her air mattress and clock out.

So far, she thought, so good.

Except Steve’s mother had jumped down off her broomstick and thrown the schedule into the Dumpster. So, more time for work, Cilla told herself. More time to get things done.

She picked up a pole lamp, scowled at the six funnel-shaped shades running down the spotted brass rod. “What were they smoking when they bought this?”

On impulse, she took a few running steps and launched it at the open barn doors like a javelin. Then yipped when Ford stepped into view. He jumped back so the lamp whizzed by his face with a few layers of dust to spare.

“Jesus Christ!”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I didn’t see you.”

“Shouldn’t you yell ‘fore,’ or something?” he demanded. “How the hell would I have explained that one? Yes, Doctor, I’ve been impaled through the brain by perhaps the ugliest pole lamp in the history of pole lamps.”

“I don’t think it would’ve impaled. More dented. Anyway, it offended my eye.”

“Yeah, mine too. Almost literally. What are you doing back here? It’s early for you,” he added when she frowned at him. “I saw your car. I thought maybe…”

“No. Nothing new. Except Steve’s mother’s there.”

“Yeah. I ran into her this morning for a minute.” He dipped his hands into his pockets, hunched a little. “She’s scary.”

“She hates me. For marrying Steve, for divorcing him. She doesn’t actually like Steve all that much, but me? She hates. So I cleared the field. Deserted, actually. I don’t do well with mothers.”

“You do okay with your stepmom. She sent over that nice casserole last night.”

“Tuna noodle. I’m not sure that’s a sign of affection.”

“It is, take my word.” He stepped through and around some of the mess to get to her, to touch her cheek. “You’re working too hard, beautiful blond girl.”

“I’m not.” She pulled away, kicked at one of the boxes. “The cops want me to go through this stuff, to see if anything’s missing.”

“Yeah. I think I’ve been bumped down the suspect list, which is oddly disappointing. Tall White Guy asked me to sign a copy of The Seeker: Indestructible for his grandson.”

“Tall… oh, Urick. I told them it wasn’t about you or Steve or me. But what the hell is here? What’s here somebody would want so damn bad? It’s junk. It’s trash. It should be tossed, all of it. I’m tossing it,” she decided in an instant. “Help me toss it.”

He grabbed her, pulled her back up as she started to drag up a box. “No. You don’t toss when you’re churned up. And you know that what someone might have wanted isn’t here. Because you already found it and put it somewhere else.”

“The letters.”

“That’s right. Did you tell the cops about the letters?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know, exactly. Partly because all I could really think about at first was Steve. And what would they do with the letters? Thirty-five-year-old letters, unsigned, no return address.”

“Fingerprints, DNA. Don’t you watch CSI?”

“Fact, fantasy. And it’ll leak. It always leaks, that is a fact. Letters from a lover, days before her death. Was it suicide? Was it murder? Was she carrying a love child? All the speculation, the print, the airtime, the reporters, the obsessed fans, it all pumps up. Any chance I had here, at peace, at a life, pretty much goes up in flames.”

“Why?”

“I don’t want to live like that, in the crosshairs of the camera lens. I want this to be my home.” She heard the edge of desperation in her own voice but couldn’t dull it. “I wanted to bring something back from her, and for her. But I wanted it to be mine at the end of the day.”

“You don’t want to know who wrote those letters?”

“Yes, I do. I do. But I don’t want to ruin his life, Ford, or his children’s lives because he had an affair, because he broke off the affair. Even if he was cruel about it. There has to be a statute of limitations. Thirty years should cover it.”

“Agreed.”

He said nothing more, just watched her, looked into her eyes until she closed them.

“How could anyone prove it?” she demanded. “If, if, if she didn’t kill herself. If, if, if some of the conspiracy theories have been close to true and someone-this someone-made her take the pills, or slipped them to her. How could we prove it?”

“I don’t know, but the first step would be asking the right people the right questions.”

“I don’t know the people or the questions, and I can’t think about this. Not now. I need to get through today, then get through tomorrow. I need-”

She threw herself against him, locking her arms around his neck while her mouth latched on to his. He wasn’t prepared for the eruption, the bursts of desperation and appetite. Who could have been? With quick, catchy gasps, low, sexy moans, she devoured. She hooked one of those long, long legs around him, sank her teeth into his bottom lip, tugged. And he went instantly, helplessly, hard as stone.

She rubbed her body against his until he could literally feel the blood draining out of his head and heading south. “Lock the door.” Her lips moved to his ear, parted on a breathless whisper. “Lock the door.”

He quivered, felt the shock of need ram into him-head, belly, loins- like fists. “Wait.” Even as he said it his mouth collided with hers again for one more greedy gulp. But he managed to order himself to pull back, to get his hands on her shoulders to peel her away, a couple of inches.

“Wait,” he repeated, and momentarily forgot his train of thought as those brilliant blue eyes burned into his.

“No. Now.”

“Cilla. Whoa. Jeez. I can pretty much feel myself growing breasts as I say this.”

She took his hands, pulled them down, pressed. “Those are mine.”

“Yeah.” Soft, firm. “They are.”And with considerable regret, and what he considered heroic restraint, he put his hands back on her shoulders. “Where was I? I meant to say, even at the risk of sounding like a girl, this isn’t right.”

She slid her hand over his crotch. “Then what’s this?”

“The penis has a mind of its own. And boy, oh boy,” he managed as he took her wandering hand and yanked it up. “I should get an award for this. A monument. Let’s just step back.”

“Step back?” Shock and insult leaped out with the words. “Why? What the hell is wrong with you?”

“The penis is asking those exact questions. But the thing is… wait,” he ordered, taking a firm hold of her arms when she started to jerk away. “The thing is, Cilla, you don’t toss stuff out when you’re churned up. Just like when you’re churned up, you don’t… lock the barn door.”

“It’s just sex.”

“Maybe. Maybe. But when it happens? It’s going to be just you and me. Just you.” He tested his willpower by leaning down and taking her mouth in a slow, soft kiss. “Just me. No Steve or Steve’s mom, no Janet Hardy, no letters. Just us, Cilla. I want lots of alone with you.”

She let out a sigh, gave one of the boxes a halfhearted kick. “How am I supposed to feel pissed off and rejected after that?” Hooking her thumbs in her pockets, she lowered her gaze deliberately to his crotch. “Looks like that’s still doing a lot of thinking. What are you going to do about it?”

“I just need to get a picture of Maylene Gunner in my head.”

“Maylene Gunner.”

“Maylene was mean as a snake, big as a battleship and ugly as homemade sin. She beat the living snot out of me when I was eight.”

No, she couldn’t possibly stay pissed off. “Why would Maylene do that?”

“Because I had drawn a very unflattering portrait of her. I didn’t possess the talent to draw a flattering one. Da Vinci didn’t possess that much talent. I drew her as a kind of Goodyear Blimp, soaring and farting. Very colorful. Little people on the ground clutching themselves or lying sprawled and unconscious, running for cover.”

“Cruel,” Cilla said as her lips twitched.

“I was eight. In any case, she got wind-so to speak-and ambushed me and proceeded to pound me to dust. So when I need to, I just picture that Jupiter-sized face, and…” He glanced down, smiled. “There we go. Retired from the field.”

Cilla studied him a moment. “You’re a very strange man, Ford. Yet oddly appealing. Like your dog.”

“Don’t get me started again. Even Maylene Gunner has only so much power. Why don’t I give you a hand here, then we’ll go see Steve together. Between the two of us, we can take his mama.”

Yes, she thought, a very strange and appealing man. “Okay. You can start by taking what’s left of that pole lamp out there to the Dumpster.”

SHE GOT THROUGH THE DAY, got through the night. And Cilla geared herself up for her second visit of the day, and second confrontation with Steve’s mother. Pacing in front of the hospital entrance, she gave herself a pep talk.

It wasn’t about her, wasn’t about old business, grudges, one-upmanship.It wasn’t about tossing a bucket of water on the Wicked Witch of the West.

It was about Steve.

She bounced her shoulders to loosen them like a boxer before a bout, and stepped toward the doors as someone called her name.

Relief at the temporary interruption might have been cowardly, but she’d take what she could get. Turning, she smiled at Cathy and Tom Morrow.

Cathy reached out to rub a hand along Cilla’s arm. “How’s your friend?”

“The same. Pretty much the same. I want to thank you again for your help when Steve was in surgery.”

“It was nothing.”

“It was a lot to me. Are you volunteering today?”

“Actually, we’re here to see our goddaughter. She had a baby.”

“That’s nice. Well…” Cilla looked back toward the doors.

“Would you like me to go up with you first?” Cathy offered.

“No, no, I’m fine. It’s just… Steve’s mother’s probably up there. She harbors extreme dislike for me. It makes it pretty tight in that room with both of us in there.”

“I can fix that.” Cathy held up a finger. “Why don’t I go up, lure her away for fifteen or twenty minutes.”

“How?”

“Volunteer mode. I’ll buy her a cup of coffee, lend a shoulder. It’ll give her a break and give you a few minutes alone with your friend.”

“She can do it,” Tom said with a shake of his head. “Nobody resists Cathy.”

“I’d be so grateful.”

“Nothing to it. Tom, keep Cilla company for a few minutes. Five should do it.” With a cheery wave, Cathy strode into the hospital.

“She’s great.”

“Best there is,” Tom agreed. “Let’s sit down over here, give her that head start. I was sorry to hear about your friend.”

“Thank you.” Three days, she thought. Three days in a coma.

“Do the police have any idea how it happened?”

“Not really. I guess we’re all hoping Steve can tell us if… when,” she corrected, “he wakes up.”

She caught a glimpse of a white van crossing the parking lot and, with a shudder, looked away.

“I hope that’s soon.” Tom gave her hand an encouraging pat. “How’s Brian doing on your place?”

“It’s shaping up. He does good work. You must be proud of him.”

“Every day. It’s an ambitious project you’ve taken on. The grounds, the house. A lot of time, money and sweat. Word gets around,” he added.

“It’ll be worth it. You should drop by sometime, look at the progress.”

“I was hoping you’d ask.” He winked at her.

“Anytime, Mr. Morrow.”

“Tom.”

“Anytime,” Cilla repeated, and pushed to her feet. “I’m going to sneak up, see if Cathy had any success.”

“You can take it to the bank. I’ll say a prayer for your friend.”

“Thanks.”

And this, Cilla thought as she crossed the lobby to the elevators, was the reason to make this home. People like the Morrows, and like Dee and Vicki and Mike, the ICU nurses she saw every day. People who cared, who took time.

People like Ford.

Hell, even people like cranky, dyspeptic Buddy.

She stepped off the elevator and spotted Mike at the nurses’ station. “How’s he doing?”

“Holding steady. Kidney functions are normal. That’s an improvement. ”

“Yeah, it is. Is anyone with him?”

Mike wiggled his eyebrows. “Mrs. Morrow breezed in and took Mrs. Chensky down for coffee. You got a clear road.”

“Hallelujah.”

Bruises still covered his face, but they were turning yellow at the edges. Thick stubble masked his jawline and pricked her when she leaned over to kiss him. “I’m back. It’s hot out this afternoon. Strip-it-off weather.”

She tuned out the machines, started to turn to the window to describe the view for him before she relayed construction progress. And she saw the sketch taped to the glass wall.

“What have we got here? Con the Immortal?” She glanced back at Steve. “Did you see this? Striking resemblance.”

Ford had drawn it. Cilla didn’t need to see the signature looped in the bottom corner to know it. Steve stood, wearing what she supposed was a loincloth, with thick black straps crossing over his chest, and knee boots. His hair flew out as if in a strong wind, and his face was set in a fierce, fuck-you grin. His hands rested on the hilt of a sword, with its point planted between his spread feet.

“Big sword, obvious symbolism. You’d love that. And the biceps bulging over the armbands, the tats, the necklace of fangs. Con the Immortal. He’s got you pegged, doesn’t he?”

Tears rose hot in her throat, were ruthlessly swallowed down. “You’ve really got to see this, okay?” She crossed back to take Steve’s hand. “You’ve got to wake up and see this. It’s been long enough now, Steve, I mean it. Goddamn it. This bullshit’s gone on long enough, so stop screwing around and… oh God.”

Had his hand moved? Had it moved in hers or had she imagined it? She let her breath out slowly, stared down at the fingers she held in hers. “Don’t make me yell at you again. You know if I cut loose I can out-bitch your mother. Who’s going to come back here pretty soon, so…”

The fingers twitched, curled. The lightest of pressure on hers.

“Okay, okay, stay there, don’t go anywhere.” She reached for the call button, held her finger down on it. “Steve, come on, Steve, do it again.” She lifted his hand, pressed her lips to it. Then, narrowing her eyes, bit. And laughed when his fingers twitched and curled again.

“He squeezed my hand,” she called out as Mike came in. “He squeezed it twice. Is he waking up? Is he?”

“Talk to him.” Mike moved to the side of the bed, lifted one of Mike’s eyelids. “Let him hear your voice.”

“Come on, Steve. It’s Cill. Wake up, you lazy bastard. I’ve got better things to do than stand around here and watch you sleep.”

On the other side of the bed, Mike checked pulse, pupils, BP. Then pinched Steve hard on the forearm. The arm jerked.

“He felt that. He moved. Steve, you’re killing me. Open your eyes.” Cilla grabbed his face, put her nose nearly to his. “Open your eyes.”

They fluttered, and she felt another flutter on her chin. More than his breath, she realized. A word.

“What? What? Say it again.”

She leaned down, her ear at his lips. She caught his slow, indrawn breath, and heard the hoarse, raw whisper of a single word. He said, “Shit.”

Cilla let out a sob that choked into a laugh. “Shit. He said shit!”

“Can’t blame him.” Quickly, Mike strode to the door to signal another nurse. “Page Dr. North. His patient’s waking up.”

“Can you see me?” Cilla demanded when his eyes opened. “Steve? Can you see me?”

He let out a weary sigh. “Hi, doll.”

SHE SPOKE to the doctor, even managed to smile genuinely at Steve’s mother before she locked herself in a bathroom stall for a jag of weeping relief. After she’d washed her face, slapped on makeup and sunglasses to hide the damage, she went back to the nurses’ station.

“He’s sleeping,” Mike told her. “Natural sleep. He’s weak, and he’s still got a lot of healing to do. You should go home, Cilla. Get a good night’s sleep yourself.”

“I will. If he asks for me-”

“We’ll call you.”

For the first time Cilla stepped into the elevator with an easy heart. As she crossed the lobby, she pulled out her phone and called Ford.

“Hey, beautiful blond girl.”

“He woke up.” She moved down the sidewalk toward the parking lot with a bounce in every step. “He woke up, Ford. He talked to me.”

“What’d he say?”

“ ‘Shit’ came first.”

“As it should.”

“He knew me, his name and all that. His left side’s a little weaker than his right, just now. But the doctor says he’s looking good. They have to do tests, and-”

“Looking good works. Do you want me to come by, bring you some dinner?”

“No, I’m heading home now. He’s sleeping. Just sleeping. I wanted to tell you. I just wanted to say that I saw your sketch, and I was teasing him about it right before… I think it might have done the trick.”

“Nothing stops Con the Immortal for long.”

“You are so- Oh God! Son of a bitch!”

“What? What was that?”

She stared down at the door of her truck. “I’ll be home in a few minutes. I’ll come by.”

She clicked off before Ford could respond. And read what someone had written on the driver’s-side door in black marker.

WHORES BEGET WHORES!

THIRTEEN

Ford watched Cilla take digitals of the pickup’s door. His rage wanted to bubble up, but he couldn’t figure out what he’d do with it if he spewed.

Kick the tires? Punch a couple of trees? Stalk around and froth at the mouth? None of the options seemed particularly helpful or satisfying. Instead he stood with his hands jammed in his pockets, and the rage at a low, simmering boil.

“The cops’ll take pictures,” he pointed out.

“I want my own. Besides, I don’t think Wilson and Urick are going to make this a priority.”

“It could be connected. They’ll be here in the morning.”

She shrugged, then turned the camera off, stuck it in her pocket. “That’s not coming off. The sun baked that marker on so it might as well be paint. I’ll have to have the whole damn door done. I haven’t had this truck three months.”

While he watched, she kicked a tire. He decided he’d been right. She didn’t look satisfied. “You can use my car until it’s fixed.”

“I’ll drive this.” Both the defiance and the temper glared out of her eyes. “I know I’m not a whore. I saw Hennessy’s van in the parking lot before I went in to visit Steve. He could’ve done this. He could’ve hurt Steve. He’s capable.”

“Did Steve say anything about it?”

“We didn’t ask him. He was still so weak and disoriented. Probably tomorrow, the doctor said. He’d be up to talking to the police tomorrow. Damn it!”

She stalked for a few minutes but, he noted, didn’t froth at the mouth or punch a tree. Then she stopped, heaved out a breath. “Okay. Okay. I’m not going to let some asshole spoil this really excellent day. Does the liquor store in town have any champagne in stock?”

“Couldn’t say. But I do.”

“How come you have everything?”

"I was a Boy Scout. Seriously,” he said when she laughed. “I have the merit badges to prove it.” She was right, he decided, no asshole should be allowed to spoil an excellent day. “How about we heat up a frozen pizza and pop the cork?”

From his perch on the veranda, Spock leaped up and danced.

“Sounds good to me, too.”As she moved in to kiss him, a horn beeped cheerfully.

“Well,” Ford said when a Mustang convertible in fire-engine red pulled in behind Cilla’s car, and Spock tore down the steps to spin in delirious circles, “it had to happen sometime.”

The vivid color of the car had nothing on the windswept red mop of the woman who waved from the passenger seat, who tipped down her big, Jackie O sunglasses to peer at Cilla over the top as she stepped out onto peep-toe wedges to greet the bouncing, spinning dog.

The driver unfolded himself. It was the height and the build that alerted Cilla, even before she got a good look at the shape of the jaw.

Her palms automatically went damp. This was definitely meet-the-parents. An audition she invariably failed.

“Hello, my cutie-pie!” Penny Sawyer clamped her hands on Ford’s cheeks once he’d walked down the slope to her. She kissed him noisily. Her laugh was like gravel soaked in whiskey.

“Hey, Mama. Daddy.” He got a one-armed bear hug from the man with hair of Cary Grant silver. “What are y’all doing?”

“Heading out to Susie and Bill’s. Texas Hold ’ Em tournament.” Penny poked Ford in the chest while Ford’s father squatted to shake hands with Spock. “We had to drive right by, so we stopped in case you wanted in.”

“I always lose at poker.”

“You don’t have gambling blood.” Penny turned her avid eyes on Cilla. “But you do have company. You don’t have to tell me who this is. You look just like your grandmama.” Penny moved forward, hands outstretched. “The most beautiful woman I ever saw.”

“Thank you.” Left with no choice, Cilla wiped her hands hurriedly on her pants before taking Penny’s. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“Cilla McGowan, my parents, Penny and Rod Sawyer.”

“I know your daddy very well.” Penny shot a sly glance at her husband.

“Now you cut that out,” Rod told her. “Always trying to make me jealous. Heard a lot of good things about you,” he said to Cilla.

“Heard hardly a syllable out of this one.” Penny poked Ford again.

“I am the soul of discretion.”

Penny let out her quick, rumbling laugh again, then dug into her purse. She pulled out an enormous Milk Bone that sent Spock into a medley of happy growls, grunts and groans while his body quivered and his bulging eyes shone.

“Be a man,” she said to the dog, and Spock rose up on his hind legs to dance in place. “That’s my sweetheart,” she crooned and held the biscuit out. Spock nipped it and, with a full-body wag, ran off to chomp and chew. “I have to spoil him,” she said to Cilla. “He’s the closest thing resembling a grandchild I’ve gotten out of this one.”

“You have two of the human variety from Alice,” Ford reminded her.

“And they get cookies when they visit.” She gestured to the house across the road. “It’s a good thing you’re doing, bringing that place back to life. It deserves it. Your grandfather’s going to be at the game tonight, Ford. My daddy was madly in love with your grandmother.”

Cilla blinked. “Is that so?”

“Head over. He has scores of pictures she let him take over the years. He wouldn’t sell them for any price, even when I had a notion to frame a few and display them at the bookstore.”

“Mama owns Book Ends in the Village,” Ford told Cilla.

“Really? I’ve been there. I bought some landscaping and design books from you. It’s a nice store.”

“Our little hole in the wall,” Penny said. “Oh now, look, we’re going to be late. Why do you let me talk so much, Rod?”

“I have no idea.” "Y’all change your mind about the game, we’ll make sure you get a seat at a table. Cilla, they’d just love to have you, too,” Penny called out as Rod pulled her down to the car. “I’m going to have Daddy bring those pictures over for you to look at.”

“Thank you. Nice to meet you.”

“Ford! You bring Cilla over for dinner sometime.”

“In the car, Penny.”

“I’m getting, I’m getting. You hear?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Ford called back. “Win a bundle.”

“I’m feeling lucky!” Penny shouted as Rod zipped into reverse, then zoomed on down the road.

Cilla said, "Wow.”

“I know. It’s like being lightly brushed by the edge of a hurricane. Leaves you a little surprised and dazed, and sure that much more and you’d be flat on your ass.”

“You look a lot like your father, who is very handsome, by the way. But your mother? She’s dazzling.”

“She is, as her own father likes to say, a corker.”

“Corker.” Cilla laughed as they walked into the house. With a polite burp, Spock trotted in with them. “Well, I like her, and I tend to eye mothers suspiciously. Speaking of corks. Where’s the champagne?”

“Spare fridge, mudroom.”

“I’ll get that, you get the pizza.”

Moments later, she came back into the kitchen with a bottle of Veuve Clicquot and a puzzled frown. “Ford, what are you doing with all that paint?”

“The what?” He looked over from setting the oven. “Oh that. There’s a zillion gallons of primer, a zillion of exterior red, and a slightly lesser amount of exterior white, for trim.”

As her heart did a slow somersault, she set the bottle on the counter. “You bought the barn paint.”

“I don’t believe in jinxes. I do believe in positive thinking, which is just really hope anyway.”

Everything inside her shifted, settled. Opened. She stepped to him, laid a hand on his cheek, laid her lips on his. Warm as velvet, tender as a wish, the kiss flowed. Even when he shifted so she pressed back against the counter, it stayed slow and silky, deep and dreamy.

When their lips parted, she sighed, then rested her cheek against his in a gesture of simple affection she gave to very few. “Ford.” She drew back, sighed again. “My head’s too full of Steve to meet your requirements for sex tonight.”

“Ah. Well.” He trailed a fingertip up her arm. “Realistically, they’re more loose guidelines than strict requirements.”

She laughed, caressed his cheek once more. “They’re good requirements. I’d like to stick to them.”

“Got no one to blame but myself.” He stepped around her to slide the pizza into the oven.

“So we’ll eat bad pizza, get a little buzzed on champagne and not have sex.”

Ford shook his head as he removed the foil and the cage on the bottle. “Almost my favorite thing to do with a beautiful woman.”

“I don’t fall for guys. It’s a policy,” she said when he paused and glanced over at her. “Considering the influence of inherited traits-and the track record of my grandmother and mother in that area-I’ve taken a pass. Steve was an exception, and that just showed how it can go. So I don’t fall for guys. But I seem to be falling for you.”

The cork exploded out of the bottle as he stared at her. “Does that scare you?”

“No.” He cleared his throat. “A little. A moderate amount.”

“I thought it might because it’s got me jumpy. So I figured heads-up.”

“I appreciate it. Do you have, like, a definition for the term ‘fall for’?” God, she thought as she looked at him. Oh my God, she was a goner. “Why don’t you get the glasses? I think we could both use a drink.”

SHE HIRED PAINTERS, and had some of the crew haul the paint to the barn. She talked to the cops, and made a deal with a local body shop to paint the door of her truck. Whenever she caught sight of the white van, she had no qualms about shooting up her middle finger.

No evidence, the cops said. Nothing to place Hennessy at the scene on the night Steve was attacked. No way to prove he decorated her truck with hate.

So she’d wait him out, Cilla decided. And if he made another move, she’d be ready.

Meanwhile, Steve had been bumped down to a regular room, and his mother had hopped back on her broomstick to head west.

Dripping sweat from working in the attic, Cilla stood studying the skeleton of the master bath. “It’s looking good, Buddy. It’s looking good for tomorrow’s inspection.”

“I don’t know why in God’s world anybody needs all these shower-heads. ”

“Body jets. It’s not just a shower, it’s an experience. Did you see the fixtures? They came in this morning.”

“I saw. They’re good-looking,” he said, grudgingly enough to make her smile.

“How are you coming with Mister Steam?”

“I’ll get it, I’ll get it. Don’t breathe down my neck.”

She made faces at his back. “Well, speaking of showers, I need one before I go in to see Steve.”

“Water’s turned off. You want this done, water’s got to stay off.”

“Right. Shit. I’ll grab one over at Ford’s.”

She didn’t miss the smirk he shot her, but opted to ignore it. She grabbed clean clothes, stuffed them in her purse. Downstairs, she had a few words with Dobby, answered a hail from the kitchen area, then spent another ten minutes outside discussing foundation plantings.

She dashed across the road before someone could catch her again, and decided to slip into the shower off the gym rather than disturb Ford.

It wasn’t until she was clean, dry and wrapped in a big white towel that she realized she’d left her purse-and the clothes in it-sitting on her front veranda.

“Oh, crap.”

She looked down at the sweaty, grungy clothes she’d stripped off and dragged a hand through her clean hair. “No, I am not crawling back into them.”

She’d have to disturb Ford after all. Bundling her underwear and baggy work shorts in her T-shirt, she tied it off and carried the bundle with her.

She opened the door to the kitchen, to a very surprised Ford.

“Oh, hi. Listen-”

“Ford, you didn’t tell us you had company.”

“I didn’t know I did. Hey, Cilla.”

Her expression went from slightly harried to mildly ill as she looked over and saw Ford’s mother sitting at the kitchen bar with an older man.

While she stood frozen, Spock dashed over to rub against her bare legs. “Oh God. Oh God. Just… God. I’m sorry. Excuse me.”

Ford grabbed her arm. “Back up like that, you’ll pitch right down the steps. You’ve met my mother. This is my grandfather, Charlie Quint.”

“Oh, well, hello. I apologize. I’m, well, what can I say? Ford, I didn’t want to interrupt you. I thought you’d be working. They had to turn the water off at my place for a while, so I ran over to use your shower downstairs-thanks for that. And then realized that when I was being distracted by varieties of spirea, I left my bag and my clothes sitting on the veranda. I came up to ask if you wouldn’t mind running over there and, you know, getting them. My clothes.”

“Sure.” He sniffed at her. “My soap smells better on you than on me.”

“Hah.”

“Cilla, I bet you’d like a nice glass of iced tea.” Penny rose to get a glass.

“Oh, don’t bother, I-”

“No bother. Ford, go on now, get this girl her clothes.”

“All right. But it’s kind of a shame. Isn’t it, Granddad?”

“Pretty legs on a pretty woman are easy on the eyes. Even old eyes. You look more like her in person than you do in pictures I’ve seen of you.”

How much more awkward could it be? Cilla wondered when Ford winked and slipped out. “You knew my grandmother.”

“I did. I fell in love with her the first time I saw her on the movie screen. She was just a little girl, and I was just a boy, and that was the sweetest kind of puppy love. You never forget your first.”

“No, I guess you don’t.”

“Here you go, honey. Why don’t you sit down?”

“I’m fine. Thanks.” She stared at the glass Penny offered and wondered how to take it as she had one hand holding the bundle of filthy clothes, and the other clutched on the towel.

“Oh, are those your dirty clothes? Just give those to me. I’ll toss them in Ford’s machine for you.”

“Oh, no, don’t-”

“It’s no trouble.” Penny pulled them away, pushed the cold glass into Cilla’s hand. “Daddy, why don’t you show Cilla the pictures? We were going to drop by to do just that,” Penny continued from the mudroom. “Just stopped to say hi to Ford first. My goodness! You must’ve worked up a storm today.”

Casting her eyes to the ceiling, Cilla moved closer to the counter as Charlie opened the photo album.

“These are wonderful!”

At the first look, she forgot she was wearing only a towel and edged closer. “I haven’t seen these before.”

“My personal collection,” he told her with a wistful smile. “This one here?” He tapped a finger under a picture. “That’s the first one I ever took of her.”

Janet sat on the steps of the veranda, leaning back, relaxed and smiling in rolled-up dungarees and a plaid shirt.

“She looks so happy. At home.”

“She’d been working with the gardeners-walking around with them, showing them where she wanted her roses and such. She got word I took pictures and asked if I’d come over, take some of the house and grounds as things were going on. And she let me take some of her. Here she is with the kids. That’d be your mother.”

"Yes.” Looking bright and happy, Cilla thought, alongside her doomed brother. “They’re all so beautiful, aren’t they? It almost hurts the eyes.”

“She shone. Yes, she did.”

Cilla paged through. Janet, looking golden and glorious astride a palomino, tumbling on the ground with her children, laughing and kicking her feet in the pond. Janet alone, Janet with others. At parties at the farm. With the famous, and the everyday.

“You never sold any of these?”

“That’s just money.” Charlie shrugged. “If I sold them, they wouldn’t be mine anymore. I gave her copies of ones she wanted, especially.”

“I think I might have seen a couple of these. My mother has boxes and boxes of photos. I’m not sure I’ve seen all of them. The camera loved her. Oh, this! It’s my favorite so far.”

Janet leaned in the open doorway of the farmhouse, head cocked, arms folded. She wore simple dark trousers and a white shirt. Her feet were bare, her hair loose. Flowers spilled out of pots on the veranda, and a puppy curled sleeping at the top of the steps.

“She bought the puppy from the Clintons.” Penny stepped beside her father, rested a hand on his shoulder. “Your stepmama’s people.”

“Yes, she told me.”

“Janet loved that dog,” Charlie murmured.

“You need to make copies for Cilla, Daddy. Family pictures are important.”

“I guess I could.”

“Granddad’s going to make copies for Cilla,” Penny announced as Ford walked in with Cilla’s bag. “He has the negatives.”

“I could scan them. If you’d trust me with them. Here you go.” Ford passed the bag to Cilla.

“Thanks.” Sensing Charlie’s hesitation, Cilla eased back. “They’re wonderful photographs. I’d love to look through the rest, but I have to get to the hospital. I’m just going to…” She held up the bag. “Downstairs.”

“You look more like her than your mother,” Charlie said when Cilla reached the door. “It’s in the eyes.”

And in his lived such sadness. Cilla said nothing, only slipped quickly downstairs.

CILLA DID a mental happy dance as the first tiles were laid in the new master bath. She glugged down water and executed imaginary high kicks through the first run of subway tiles in what would be her most fabulous steam shower.

The black-and-white design, retro cool Deco, added just the right zing. Stan, the tile guy, glanced over his shoulder. “Cilla, you gotta get the AC up.”

“We’re working on it. By the end of the week, I promise.”

It had to be running by week’s end, she thought. Just as the bed she’d ordered had to be delivered. Steve couldn’t recuperate in a steamy house, in a sleeping bag.

She went back to framing in the closet in the master bedroom. In a couple of weeks, she thought, if everything stayed on schedule, she’d have two completed baths, the third, fourth and the powder room on the way. She’d be ready for Sheetrock up in her attic office suite, the replastering should be about wrapped. Then Dobby could start work on the ceiling medallions. Well, he could start once she’d settled on a design.

She ran through projections while she checked her level, adjusted, shot in nails.

And in a few weeks, she’d take the contractor’s exam. But she didn’t want to think about it. Didn’t want to think if she didn’t make it, she’d have to ask one of her own subs for a job by the end of the year. If she didn’t make it, she couldn’t afford to buy that sweet little property down the road in the Village that she knew would make an excellent and profitable flip.

If she didn’t make it, it would be another failure. She really thought she was at her quota already.

Positive thinking, she reminded herself. That’s what Ford would say. No harm in trying.

“Gonna make it,” she stated aloud and stepped back from the framing with a nod of approval. “Gonna kick exam ass. Cilla McGowan, Licensed Contractor.”

Gathering her tools, she started out to check on the progress of her exterior office stairs with a quick peek at the tile work on the way. She joined the carpenter crew as the painters, working on her new scaffolding, added the first strokes of red to the barn.

The air smelled of the mulch freshly laid around new plantings, and salvaged ones. Roses, hydrangeas, spirea and old-fashioned weigela, and beds of hopeful new perennials, eager annuals already blooming insanely.

More to come, she thought, more to do. But here was progress. Tear-out time was done. Renewal time was here.

She thought of Charlie’s photo album. And breaking off from the work, ran in to get her camera to document.

Shirtless men slick with sweat and sunscreen high on scaffolding. Shanna in shorts and a bright pink T-shirt and ball cap working with Brian on a low, dry stone garden wall. The bones of her stairs, the half-finished back veranda. And around front, the completed one.

For a moment, in her mind’s eye, she saw Janet, leaning on the jamb of the open front door, smiling out.

“It’s coming back,” Cilla said softly.

Turning, she saw Ford and Spock walking down the drive.

The dog trotted up to her, leaned on her legs, then sat back to look up at her, all love and cheer. She rubbed, petted, kissed his nose.

“Brought you a present.” Ford handed her one of the two Cokes he carried. “I swung in to see Steve. He tells me they’re going to spring him in a couple days.”

“He’s coming back strong.” Like the farm, she thought. “I’m pushing to get the AC up, and I’ve got a bed coming.”

“You want him to recoup from having his skull fractured in a construction zone. Do you hear that?” Ford asked, tapping his ear.

Cilla shrugged off the buzzing, the banging, the whirl of drills. “To people like me and Steve, that’s chamber music.”

“I’ll have to take your word for it. But he could bunk at my place. I’ve got the bed, the AC. And digital cable.”

She took a long drink, watching him. “You really mean that.”

“Damn right. I pity anyone without digital cable.”

“I bet. But you’re not going to take on my ex-husband. He’ll need to be… Who’s this?” she wondered as a black Lexus turned cautiously into her drive.

“City car,” Ford commented. “Big city.”

“I don’t know who… Crap.”

Ford lifted his brows as men exited from both sides of the car. “Friends of yours?”

“No. But the driver’s my mother’s Number Five.”

“Cilla!” Mario, handsome as sin, Italian style, in Prada loafers and Armani jeans, threw out his arms and a wide, wide smile. His graceful forward motion was spoiled when he stopped, then sidestepped around the sniffing Spock.

The sunglasses hid his eyes, but she suspected they were dark and sparkling. Tanned, panther lean, dark hair flowing, he crossed to her, caught her in an enthusiastic embrace and kissed her cheeks. “Look at you! So fit, so competent.”

“I am. What are you doing here, Mario?”

“A little surprise. Cilla, this is Ken Corbert, one of our producers. Ken, Cilla McGowan, my stepdaughter.”

"It’s a real pleasure.” Ken, small and wiry, silver-winged black hair, pumped Cilla’s hand. “Big fan. So…” He scanned the farm. “This is the place.”

“It’s my place,” she said coolly. “Ford, Mario and Ken. I’m sorry, I can’t ask you in. We’re a work in progress.”

“So I see.” Mario’s smile never dimmed. “And hear.”

“Spock, say hello,” Ford ordered-after his dog had finished with the tires. “He wants to shake,” Ford explained, “to make sure you’re friendly.”

“Ah.” Mario studied the dog dubiously as he put the tips of his thumb and forefinger on the offered paw.

Spock didn’t appear to be impressed.

Ken gave Spock’s paw the same salesman pump he’d given Cilla’s.

“Lovely country,” Mario continued. “Just lovely. We drove down from New York. We had some meetings. Such scenery! Your mother sends her love,” he added. “She would have come, but you know how difficult it is for her. The memories here.”

“She’s in New York?”

“A quick trip. We barely have time to catch our breath. Fittings, rehearsals, meetings, media. But Ken and I must steal you away, a late lunch, an early drink. Where can we take you?”

“Nowhere, but thanks. I’m working.”

“Didn’t I tell you?” Mario let out a hearty laugh while Spock squatted on his haunches and stared at him with suspicious eyes. “Cilla is the most amazing woman. So many talents. You can spare an hour, cara.”

“I really can’t. Especially if this is about performing in Mom’s show. I told her I wasn’t interested.”

“We’re here to persuade you that you are. Perhaps you’d excuse us,” Mario said to Ford.

“No, he won’t.” Cilla pointed at Ford. “You won’t.”

“I guess I won’t.”

Irritation tightened Mario’s mouth briefly. The grumbling growl from Spock had him eyeing the dog with some trepidation. “You have a chance to make history, Cilla. Three generations performing together. You saw Céline perform with Elvis? We have that technology. We can bring Janet onstage with you and Bedelia. One extraordinary performance, live.”

“Mario-”

“I understand you’re reluctant to commit to doing the full set of duets with your mother, though I can tell you-as will Ken-what that would mean to the show, and to you. Your career.”

“The advertising and promotion we’ve got lined up,” Ken began. “We can all but guarantee sellouts in every venue. Then the cable special, the CD, the DVD. The foreign markets are already buzzing. We may be able to work a deal to attach a second CD, a special package, for you, solo. In fact, Mario and I were kicking around ideas for videos there. And you’re right, Mario, shooting here would add punch.”

"You’ve been busy, haven’t you?” Cilla’s voice was as soft, and as meaningful, as Spock’s growl. “And you’ve been wasting your time. No. I’m sorry, Ken, I don’t believe Mario made it clear. I’m not looking to be persuaded or revived or promoted. You have no business talking to producers, promoters, advertisers about me,” she said to Mario. “You’re not my agent or my manager. I don’t have an agent or a manager. I run the show now. And this is what I do. Houses. I do houses. Enjoy the scenery on the way back.”

She knew Mario would come after her. Even as she turned on her heel to stride away, she heard him call her name. And she heard Ford speak to Ken, caught the extra yokel he put in his voice.

“Spock, stay. So y’all drove down from New York City?”

“Cilla. Cara. Let me-”

“Touch me, Mario, and I swear I’ll deck you.”

“Why are you angry?” There was puzzled sorrow in his voice. “This is an insanely rich opportunity. I’m only looking out for your interests.”

She stopped, struggled with temper ripe to bursting. “You may actually believe that on some level. I can look after my own interests, and have been for a long time.”

“Darling, you were mismanaged. Otherwise you’d be a major star today.”

“I might be a major star today if I’d had the talent and the aptitude. Listen to what I’m saying to you: I don’t want to be a major star. I don’t want to perform. I don’t want that kind of work. I don’t want that kind of life. I’m happy here, Mario, if that matters to you. I’m happy with what I have, and I’m getting happy with who I am.”

“Cilla, your mother needs you.”

“And here it comes.” She turned away in disgust.

“She has her heart set. And the backers will do so much more with this addition. She’s so-”

“I can’t do it, Mario. And I won’t. I’m not just being a hard-ass. I can’t. It’s not in me. You should have talked to me before you came here, and brought him. And you should listen to me when I say no. I’m not Dilly. I don’t bullshit, I don’t play. And she’s already used up all her guilt points with me. I’m not doing this for her.”

His face, his voice, held nothing but sadness now. “You’re very hard, Cilla.”

“Okay.”

“She’s your mother.”

“That’s right. Which makes me, let’s see. Her daughter. Maybe, this time-this one time-she could think about what I need, about what I want.” She held up a hand. “Believe me, if you say anything else, you’ll only make it worse. Cut your losses here. You’re smart enough. Tell her I said knock them dead, break a leg. And I mean it. But that’s all I’ve got.”

He shook his head as a man might over a sulking child. He walked away in his excellent shoes, and got into the big city car with Ken to drive away.

Ford wandered over, stared off at the barn while Spock rubbed himself against Cilla’s legs. “That red’s going to look good.”

“Yeah. You’re not going to ask what that was about?”

“I got the gist. They want, you don’t. They pushed, you didn’t budge. They pissed you off, which is fine. But in the end it made you sad. And that’s not. So I don’t care about them or what they want. I say fuck ’em, and that red looks good going on that barn.”

It made her smile. “You’re good to have around, Ford.” She leaned down, ruffled Spock. “Both of you. Back in L.A., I’d have paid several hundred dollars for this kind of therapy.”

“We’ll bill you. Meanwhile, why don’t you show me what’s going on around here today?”

“Let’s go bug the tile guy. It’s my favorite so far.” She took Ford’s hand and walked into the house.

FOURTEEN

When Cilla showed Dobby the design she wanted for the medallions, he scratched his chin. And she saw his lips twitching at the corners.

"Shamrocks,” she said.

"I’ve had me a few beers on Saint Patrick’s Day in my time. I know they’re shamrocks.”

“I played around with other symbols. More formal, or more subtle, more elaborate. But I thought, screw that, I like shamrocks. They’re simple and they’re lucky. I think Janet would’ve gotten a kick out of them.”

“I expect she would. She seemed to like the simple when she was around here.”

“Can you do it?”

“I expect I can.”

“I’ll want three.” The idea made her giddy as a girl. “Three’s lucky, too. One for the dining room, one for the master bedroom, and one in here, in the living room. Three circles of shamrocks for each. I’m not looking for uniformity but more symmetry. I’ll leave it to you,” she said when he nodded.

“It’s good working on this place. Takes me back.”

They sat at a makeshift table, plywood over a pair of sawhorses. She’d brought him a glass of tea, and they drank together while Jack finished up the last of the plaster repairs.

“You’d see her around, when she came out to stay here?”

“Now and again. She always had a word. Give you that smile and a hello, how are you.”

“Dobby, in that last couple of years, when she came out, was there any talk about her being… friendly with a local man?”

“You mean being sweet on one?”

Sweet on, Cilla thought. What a pretty way to put it. “Yes, that’s what I mean.”

The lines and folds on his face deepened with thought. “Can’t say so. After she died, and all those reporters came around, some of them liked to say so. But they said all kinds of things, and most weren’t in the same neighborhood as the truth.”

“Well, I have some information that makes me think she was sweet on someone. Very sweet. Can you think of anyone she spent time with in that last year, year and a half? She came out fairly often during that period.”

“She did,” he agreed. “Talk was, after her boy died, the talk was she was going to sell the place. Didn’t want to come here no more. But she didn’t sell. Didn’t have the parties or the people, either. Never brought the girl out again-that’d be your mother-that I saw or heard about. The best I can recall, she came alone. If anybody had wind of her seeing a man from around here, their jaws would’ve been working.”

“Weren’t so many people around to jaw back then,” Jack commented as he set his trowel. “I mean to say there weren’t so many houses around the farm here. Isn’t that right, Grandpa?”

“That’d be true. Weren’t houses on the fields across the road back then. Started planting them back twenty-five years on to thirty years back, I guess it was, when the Buckners sold their farm off.”

“So there weren’t any close neighbors.”

“Buckners would’ve been closest, I expect. About a quarter mile down.”

And that was interesting, Cilla decided. How hard could it be to have a secret affair when there were no nosy neighbors peeking out the window? The media would have been an extra challenge, but reporters hadn’t been camped on the shoulder of the road seven days a week when Janet had traveled to the farm.

According to what she’d read or been told, Janet had been an expert at keeping certain areas of her private life private. After her death, facts, fallacies, rumors, secrets and innuendos abounded.

And still, Cilla mused, the identity of Janet’s last lover remained blank. Just how badly, she wondered, did she want to fill in that blank in her grandmother’s life?

Badly enough, she admitted. The answer to that single question could finally give clarity to the bigger question.

Why did Janet Hardy die at thirty-nine?

CILLA FOUND BRINGING Steve home both thrilling and terrifying. He was alive, and considered well enough to leave the hospital. Two weeks before, she’d sat beside his bed, trying to will him out of a coma. Now she stood with him as he studied the farmhouse. He leaned on a cane, a ball cap on his head, dark glasses over his eyes, and his clothes bagging a bit from the weight he’d lost in the hospital.

She wanted to bundle him inside, into bed. And feed him soup.

The terror came from wondering if she was competent enough to tend to him.

“Stop staring at me, Cill.”

“You should probably get inside, out of the sun.”

“I’ve been inside, out of the sun. Feels good out here. I like the barn. Barns should always be red. Where the hell is everybody? Middle of the day, no trucks, no noise.”

“I told all the subs to take me off today’s schedule. I thought you’d need a little peace and quiet.”

“Jesus, Cilla, when did I ever want peace and quiet? You’re the one.”

“Fine, I wanted peace and quiet. We’re going in. You look shaky.”

“Goes with the territory these days. I’ve got it,” he snapped at her when she started to take his free arm. He managed the stairs, crossed the veranda.

The scowl smoothed away when he stepped inside the house, took his first look around.

“The plastering looks good. Getting rid of that door over there, widening the opening, that works for you. Better flow.”

“I’m thinking of using that area as a kind of morning room. It gets nice light. Then later on, if I’m still inclined, I could add on a sunroom, put in a hot tub, a couple of machines, some nice plants. Down the road.”

“Be sweet.”

And because she heard the strain in his voice, she nearly fussed about taking him up to bed. Instead she tried a different tack. The first step would be to get him upstairs.

“We’ve done a lot on the second floor. The master suite’s really coming along. You’ve got to see it.”

These steps were longer. She all but felt his weaker left side begin to tremble on the journey up. “We should’ve taken Ford up on his offer. You’d be more comfortable at his place.”

“I can walk up a damn flight of steps. Got a headache, that’s all. Goes with the territory now, too.”

“If you want to lie down… I’ve got your pills right here.”

“I don’t want to lie down. Yet.” He pushed her offered hand aside. Again, some of the strain eased on his face when he studied the new bedroom space. “You always had an eye. Good lines, good light. Nice closet, doll.”

“A girl’s best friend. I built the organizer yesterday.” She opened the door, gave a Vanna White flourish.

“Cedar paneling. Good work.”

“I learned from the best.”

He turned away to limp toward the bath, but she’d seen the look in his eyes. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Sexy, classy,” he said of the bathroom. “Deco deal. Glass block for the shower wall? When did you decide on that?”

“Last-minute change. I liked the effect, and the way it looks with the black-and-white tiles.” She gave up, just leaned her forehead on his shoulder. “Please tell me what’s wrong.”

“What if I can’t do this anymore? If I can’t handle the tools? It takes me longer to think, and these headaches about drop me.”

She wanted to hold him, hug him, nuzzle him into comfort. And instead flicked at him with mild annoyance. “Steve, it’s your first day out of the hospital. What did you think, you’d walk out swinging a hammer?”

“Something like that.”

“You’re on your feet. You’re talking to me. The doctor said it’s going to take time. Just as he said you’ve already made an amazing recovery, and there’s every reason to believe you’ll get it all back.”

“Could take months. Even years. And I can’t remember.” A trace of fear eked through frustration. “Goddamn it, I can’t remember anything that happened that night after I left here. Can’t remember going to the bar, or hanging out, trailing Shanna home like she says I did. It’s blank. I can remember getting on the bike. I can remember thinking I might just score with Shanna of the big brown eyes and amazing rack. Next thing I remember is you yelling at me, and your face leaning down over mine. Everything between is gone. Just gone.”

She shrugged, as if it was no big deal. “If you’re going to forget something, that would be the night.”

He smiled a little. “Fricking ray of sunshine, aren’t you? I’m going to crash awhile, take some drugs and crash.”

“Good idea.”

He let her take his weight to lead him to the guest room. Then stopped at the doorway. The walls were painted a soft and restful blue, as was the beadboard wainscoting. The original walnut trim, stripped and restored by her own hands, framed the windows. The floor gleamed, deep, rich and glossy. The iron headboard and footboard in dignified pewter suited the simple white and blue quilt, the star-patterned rug with its blue border. White daisies sprang up out of a cobalt vase on a table in front of the window.

“What the hell’s this?”

“Surprise. I think it’s marginally more appealing than a hospital room.”

“It’s a great room.” Even as he jabbed a finger at her, pleasure shone on his face. “What are you thinking, getting the floors refinished in one room?”

“I’m thinking it’s nice to see one room finished-or nearly. Need some art for the walls, and I have to finish the rest of the trim, but otherwise. And check it out.” She opened an old wardrobe, revealed a flat-screen TV. "Got cable.” She grinned at him. “Digital, at Ford’s insistence. The bath’s finished, too. And looks great if I say so myself.”

Steve sat on the side of the bed. “Going at rehab this way screws up the schedule.”

“I’m not in a hurry.” She poured a glass from the pitcher she’d placed on the nightstand, then got out the pill bottle. “Bottoms up, then we’ll get you undressed and into bed.”

The faintest twinkle winked in his eyes. “Time was you’d’ve gotten in with me, doll.”

“Time was.” She crouched down to take off his shoes.

“I want those subs back here tomorrow.”

“Who made you job manager?” Rising, she gestured so he lifted his arms. But she smiled as she drew off his shirt. “They’ll be back. They wanted to have a welcome-back party. Beer and subs. I scotched that. I guess I shouldn’t have.”

“I don’t think I’m ready to party.” He lay back so she could take off his jeans. “The day I can have a woman strip me down and not want to return the favor’s not a day for partying.”

“I give you a week.” Now, no longer able to resist, she stroked his cheek. “I heard how you hit on all the nurses.”

“It’s expected. I skipped Mike.” He gave her a wan smile. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

She turned down the bed, eased him into it, slipped off his shades, took the cap off his shaved head. The smooth dome marred by the line of stitches hurt her in every cell of her body. “I’m going to be downstairs doing some paperwork. You need anything, just call. If you want the TV, there’s the remote. If you want anything, Steve, I’m right here.”

“Just a few z’s for right now.”

“Okay.” She kissed his forehead, then slipped out.

Alone, he stared up at the ceiling. And, sighing, closed his eyes.

Cilla took her laptop outside to work. Though she snuck up to check on Steve twice in the first hour, she made headway with bills and cost projections. When she heard the crunch of feet on gravel, she glanced up to see Ford and Spock.

“Hi, neighbor,” he called out. “I figured if you were out here, the returning hero’s doing all right.”

“Sleeping.” She looked at her watch. “God, how did it get to be five o’clock?”

“The earth orbits around the sun as it turns on its axis, thereby-”

“Smart-ass.”

“Present. And speaking of.” He shook the bag in his hand. “I’ve got something for Steve. Some DVDs, since you’ve got the set up in his room.”

Cilla cocked her head. "DVDs? Porn?”

Ford’s eyebrows drew together. “Porn’s such a hard word. Just hear how it comes out of the mouth. That short, hard syllable. Spider-Man, the three-movie box set. It seemed appropriate. And a couple of others that involve naked women and motorcycles, which I’d call adult entertainment. Spock picked those out.”

She slid her glance down to the dog, who cocked his head and looked innocent. “I’m sure Steve will appreciate them.”

“Spock believes Sleazy Rider was very underrated.”

“I’ll take his word.” She heard the footsteps first, sprang to her feet. She pulled open the screen door as Steve reached for it from the inside. “You’re up. Why didn’t you call me? You shouldn’t take the steps by yourself.”

“I’m fine. I’m good. Ford.”

“Good to see you out.”

“Good to be. Hey, Spock. Hey, boy.” He sat on one of the white plastic chairs, stroking the dog, who laid his front legs on Steve’s knee.

“You look better,” Cilla decided.

“Magic pills and sleep. I nap like a three-year-old these days, but it does the job.”

“You’re probably hungry. Why don’t I fix you some food? Something to drink? Get you-”

“Cill.” He started to tell her not to bother, changed his mind. “Yeah, I could use a sandwich or something. Not hospital food or smuggled-in goods. Maybe you could throw something together for all of us.”

“Sure. Give me a few minutes.”

When she dashed inside, Steve shook his head. “She’s hovering, man.”

“I talked her out of the little bedside john.”

“I owe you. What’s in the bag?”

Ford passed it over, and after a quick look, Steve broke out in a grin. “Now we’re talking. Thanks. Listen, I need to get the exercise in. You spot me on a walk around?”

“Okay.”

Ford waited until Steve handled the stairs, then walked with him away from the house. “Something on your mind?”

“Lots of shit, man. It still gets a little bogged coming through the channels. Cops don’t have dick, right?”

“That’d be about it.”

“It looks like a one-time thing. Just bad luck. I mean, nothing’s happened since.”

“No.”

Steve stared at Ford’s profile. “You’d tell me straight?”

Ford thought of Cilla’s car door, but set it aside. “Nobody’s broken into the barn, bothered the house.”

“You were bunking here while I was in the hospital. I got word on that.”

“Hey. My sleeping bag.”

“So you and Cilla aren’t in the sack?”

“Not quite yet.”

“But you’re into her. Look, that’s your business, her business and all that bullcrap, but I’m asking because I need to know if you’re going to look out for her when I’m gone.”

Ford paused as Steve did. “Going somewhere?”

“I haven’t said anything to her yet. I was going to when we got back, but Jesus, she fixed up the room for me. Down to flowers, you know. Oh, and thanks for the push on the cable.”

“It’s only right.”

With a nod, Steve began to walk again. “The thing is, I should’ve headed back last week, latest. Plans changed on account of brain surgery. I’d stay if I thought she needed me to watch out for her, or I could help out. She can take care of herself, that’s Christ’s truth, but… Hell, maybe it’s the near-death experience. Whatever. I want to get home. I want to sit on the beach, soak up the rays. But I need to know somebody’s got her back.”

“I’ve got her back, Steve.”

Steve stopped to stare at the barn. “She said you bought the paint. While I was still out of it.” He nodded, as if satisfied. “You’re all right, Ford. Totally not the type she usually lets get a taste. It’s about time. She digs on candles. When you’re making it,” Steve added. “She digs on lots of candles around. Doesn’t mind music, either. Doesn’t need it, like some do, but she’s good with it. Lights on, lights off; she’s okay either way. But she does dig on the candle thing.”

Ford cleared his throat. “Appreciate the tips. How are you getting back to L.A.?”

“The doc wants to see me Friday, so I’m going to stick till Saturday. I’ve got a friend in New Jersey who’s coming down in an RV. We’ll load me and the bike up, head west. Don’t say anything to her, okay? I want to tell her myself.”

Cilla whistled from the veranda. “You guys want to eat?”

Spock’s answer was to run toward her as if hellhounds were on his heels.

“The mountains are cool,” Steve commented as they turned back.

“That’s part of what pulled her out east. She told me how the mountains seem like home. Me? I miss the ocean.” He nudged Ford with his elbow. “And the women in very small bikinis.”

SHE SLEPT POORLY, with one ear cocked for Steve, and her mind niggling over the fact he planned on leaving in a matter of days.

How could she take care of him if he was three thousand miles away?

One day out of the hospital, and he was planning cross-country trips. In an RV? It was so like him, she thought as she tossed over onto her back. Always had to move, never stay in one place too long. That’s where the whole flipping houses came from, she reminded herself. You didn’t have to settle on one if you kept turning them.

But he wouldn’t listen to reason on this. And the fact that he was just out of the damn hospital made it impossible to kick his ass. Who’d check on him two or three times a night as she’d done? So he’d been fine when she had. What if he hadn’t been?

She rolled over again, punched her pillow. And gave up.

Dawn was about to break anyway. She’d go check on him again, then go down and make some coffee. She’d have her quiet time outside before the crew started piling in.

As she heard Steve snoring before she reached his doorway, she headed straight for coffee. In another few months, she thought, she’d have an actual kitchen. Refitted antique appliances, countertops, cabinets. Actual dishes. And damn if she wasn’t treating herself to a fancy espresso maker.

Maybe she’d actually learn how to cook. She’d bet Patty could teach her some good basics. Nothing fancy and gourmet. She’d tried that route and failed spectacularly. But your basic red sauce, or meat and potatoes. Surely she could learn how to cook a chicken breast.

Once the house was finished, she promised herself. Once she had her license, geared up for business, found a routine. She’d learn how to cook for herself instead of living on sandwiches, canned soup and takeout.

She carried the coffee outside, drawing in its scent as the first sleepy light played over her new gardens, over earth still turned and waiting. She sipped while the mists rose off the pond she still had to clean.

Every day, she thought. She wanted to do this every day. To step out of her home in the soft, sleepy light and see what she could do, what she had done. What had been given to her.

Whatever she’d paid her mother for this place, this life, didn’t count. In that soft and sleepy light, she knew everything she could see and smell and touch had been a gift from the grandmother she’d never met.

She would’ve taken coffee on a morning walk, Cilla thought as she stepped off the veranda to wander. Accounts spoke of her as an early riser, used to the demands of filming. Often up at dawn.

Often up till dawn, too, Cilla admitted. But that was another side of the woman. The party girl, the Hollywood queen, the star who drank too much and leaned too heavily on pills.

In the quiet morning, Cilla wanted the company of the Janet Hardy who fell in love with this little slice of Virginia. Who brought home a mongrel pup and had roses planted under the window.

The big red barn made her smile as she strolled around the house. The police tape was gone, the padlock firmly in place. And Steve, she thought, was snoring in the pretty iron bed in the pretty room upstairs.

That nightmare was done. A scavenger looking for scraps who’d panicked. The police believed that to be the case, so who was she to argue? If she wanted to solve a personal mystery, it would be the author of the letters inside Gatsby. And in that way, she’d put another piece of Janet’s together, for her own knowledge. Her own history.

The light grew as she neared the front of the house. Birdsong sweetened the air as did the scent of roses and turned earth. Dew tickled coolly on her bare feet. It pleased her more than she could say to know she walked on her own land, over dewed grass, wearing a tank and cotton pajama pants.

And no one cared.

She finished the coffee on the front veranda, gazing out over the lawn.

Her smile faded slowly, changing into a puzzled frown as her eyes scanned the front wall.

Where were her trees? She should be able to see the bowing tops of her weeping cherries from the veranda. As the frown deepened, she set her mug on the rail, stepped down to walk along the lawn beside the gravel drive.

Then she began to run.

“No. Goddamn it, no!”

Her young weepers lay on the narrow swatch of green between her wall and the shoulder of the road. Their slender trunks bore the hack marks of an ax. It wouldn’t have taken much, she thought as she crouched down to brush her fingers over the leaves. Three or four swings at most.

Not to steal. Digging them up would have taken a bit more time, a bit more trouble. To destroy. To kill.

The sheer meanness of the act twisted in her belly in a combination of sorrow and fury. Not a scavenger, she thought. Not kids. Kids bashed mailboxes along the road, so she’d been warned. Kids didn’t take the time to hack down a couple of ornamental trees.

She straightened to take a steadying breath, and looked over at the broken stump of one of her dying trees. That breath caught. Her body trembled, that same combination of sorrow and fury. Black paint defiled the old stone wall with its ugly message.

GO BACK TO HOLLYWOOD BITCH!

LIVE LIKE A WHORE DIE LIKE A WHORE

“Fuck you,” she said under her breath. “Goddamn it, Hennessy, fuck you.”

Riding on pure fury now, she stormed back to the house to call the police.

WITH BLOOD IN HER EYE, Cilla warned every one of the crew that anyone who mentioned the trees or the wall to Steve would be fired on the spot. No exceptions, no excuses.

She ordered Brian back to the nursery. She wanted two new trees planted, and she wanted them planted that very day.

By ten, when the cops had come and gone, secure that her threat would hold and that the crew would keep Steve busy inside, she went out to work with the mason on cleaning the stone.

Ford saw her, scrubbing at the stone, when he stepped out with his first cup of coffee. And he saw the message sprayed over the wall. As she had done earlier, he left his coffee on the rail and jogged down to her in bare feet.

“Cilla.”

“Don’t tell Steve. That’s the first thing. I don’t want you to say a word about this to Steve.”

“Did you call the cops?”

“They’ve been here. For whatever good it does. It has to be Hennessy, it has to be that son of a bitch. But unless he’s got black paint and wood chips under his goddamn fingernails, what are they going to do about it?”

“Wood…” He saw the stumps then, swore. “Wait a minute. Let me think.”

“I don’t have time. I have to get this off. Can’t risk sandblasting this stone. It’s too harsh. It’d damage the stone, the mortar, do as much harm, potentially, as the stupid paint. This chemical’s the best alternative. Probably have to have the wall repointed, but it’s all I can do.”

“Scrub at the stone with a brush?”

“That’s right.” She attacked the C in BITCH like she would a sworn enemy. “He’s not going to get away with this. He’s not going to soil or damage what’s mine. I wasn’t driving the goddamn car. I wasn’t even born, for Christ’s sake.”

“And he’s eighty if he’s a day. I have a hard time seeing him chopping down a couple of trees and tagging a stone wall in the middle of the night.”

“Who else?” She rounded on Ford. “Who else hates me or this place the way he does?”

“I don’t know. But we’d better work on finding out.”

“It’s my problem.”

“Don’t be an ass.”

“It’s my problem, my wall, my trees. I’m the bitch.”

He met her hot glare with a cool stare. “I wouldn’t argue with the last part right at the moment, but as for the rest? Bullshit. You don’t want to tell Steve, fine. I get it. But I’m not leaving. I’m not heading back to L.A. or anywhere else.”

He grabbed her arm, pulled her back around to face him. “I’m staying right here. Deal with it.”

“I’m trying to deal with this, and with having my best friend leave when he can hardly walk more than five yards at a time. I’m trying to deal with making a life I didn’t even realize I wanted until a few months ago. I don’t know how much more I can deal with.”

“You’ll have to make room.” He cupped her face, kissed her hard. “Got another brush?”

FIFTEEN

Cilla sweated over the long, tedious process most of the day, with breaks to handle scheduled work. She concentrated on the ob-scenities first as people slowed on the drive by, or stopped altogether to comment or question.

Sometime during the process, the burning edge of her rage banked down to simple frustration. Why had the asshole written so damn much?

She picked up the task again the next morning, before the mason or any of the crew arrived. Two new trees flanked her entrance. She thought of them as defiant now rather than sweet. And that pumped up her energy.

“Hey.”

She glanced around to see Ford, ratty sweatpants and T-shirt, standing on the opposite shoulder of the road with a red bandanna-sporting Spock quivering, but sitting obediently at his feet. “Early for you,” she responded.

“I set the alarm. It must be love. Come over here a minute.”

“Busy.”

“When aren’t you? Honey, you can wear me out just watching. Come on, take a minute. I got coffee.” He held up one of the oversized mugs he carried.

He’d set the alarm, and though she didn’t know quite what to think about that, she owed him for it. And for the time he’d put in the day before, even after she’d been rude and snarly. She set the bristle brush down, crossed the road.

He handed her the coffee, gestured to the wall as she greeted Spock. “Read it from here. Out loud.”

She shrugged, turned, and even as she took a gulp of the coffee felt a little bubble of amusement rise in her throat. “Go to Hollywood, live like an ore ike.”

“Ore-ike,” he mused. “I can use that. Seems to me he tried to hurt and intimidate you, and you’ve made him a joke. Nicely done.”

“Unexpectedly ridiculous. I guess that’s a plus. I’ve nearly run out of mad. You don’t have to get into this again today, Ford. How are you going to make me a warrior goddess if you’re scrubbing off graffiti?”

“That’s cruising along pretty well. I can give you a couple of hours before I get back to it. Spock’s looking forward to being what Brian and Matt call a job dog today. He’s just going to go over and hang out with the guys. Hence the bandanna.”

“You know, I’m probably going to have sex with you, without the offer of manual labor.”

“I’m hoping.” He gave her an easy, uncomplicated smile. “You know I’d offer the labor even if you weren’t going to have sex with me.”

She took a contemplative sip of coffee. “I guess that evens it out. I do better on even ground. Well.” She started back across the street, and he and Spock fell into step beside her. “My father heard about this, called me last night. What could he do? How could he help? Why didn’t I come stay there for a while, until the police figured it out? Which is looking like, hmm, never. Then my stepmother got on the phone. She wants to take me shopping.”

“For a new wall? This one’s cleaning up okay.”

“No, not a new wall.” She gave him a light punch, then handed him protective gloves. “Patty, Angie and Cilla do the outlets. Like trolling for bargains would solve my problem.”

“I take it you’re not going?”

“I don’t have the time or the inclination to search out peek-toe pumps or a flirty summer dress.”

“Red shoes, white dress. Sorry,” he added at her quiet stare. “I think in visuals.”

“Uh-huh. The point, I guess, is that I’m not used to people offering- time or company or help-without any number of strings attached.”

“That’s a shame, or perhaps living like an ore-ike.”

She laughed, began to scrub.

"Go play,” he told Spock, who trotted off toward the house in his red bandanna.

“I’m trying to learn to accept the offers without the lingering haze of cynicism. It’s going to take a little while.”

He worked for a few moments in silence. “You know what I see when I look over here?”

“Trucks, big-ass Dumpster, a house in desperate need of paint?”

“Sleeping Beauty’s castle.”

“How? Where? Why?”

“First, I risk impinging my manhood by admitting I dug on those kind of stories as a kid, as much as I did the Dark Knight, X-Men, and so on. And consider Disney’s version solid, with Maleficent one of the top villains of all time. Anyway.”

He shrugged as she continued to stare at him. “You know how the evil Maleficent cast the spell, and surrounded the castle with giant briar, those big, wicked thorns. Closed it in to a dark, forbidding place that held sorrow and, well, trapped beauty.”

“Okay.”

“The hero had to fight his way through the blocks, the thorns, the traps. A lot of risk, a lot of work, but when he reached the goal, the castle came back to life. And, you know, peace reigned across the land.”

She worked her wire brush against the wall. “I have to kiss the princess?”

“Okay, new visual. Interesting. There are some flaws in the metaphor, but basically, the trapped, sleeping castle needs a hero to wake it up. Some people like having a part in that. And some…” He tapped his brush on a large black E. “They like to fuck it up.”

“I find myself fascinated by a man who admits to enjoying fairy tales and uses the word ‘impinge’-and barely misses a beat while indulging in a brief girl-on-girl fantasy. You’re a man of layers, Ford.”

“Me and Shrek, we’re onions.”

Oh yeah, she thought. Falling for him, and falling fast.

She stopped as Buddy’s truck pulled up beside them. The plumber leaned out the window, scowled. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“According to Ford, it means some people like to mess things up.”

“Damn kids. No respect.”

“I don’t want Steve to hear about this. He’s got enough on his mind. I need to talk to you about the venting for the steam shower. I took another look last night, and… I really need to go over this with Buddy on site,” she said to Ford.

“Go ahead. I’ve got this for a while.”

“Thanks. Give me a lift, Buddy.” She hopped into the cab of the truck, and as Buddy turned in the drive, tried to imagine the house as Sleeping Beauty’s castle, with about half of the briars hacked away.

FORD GOT IN a solid day before stepping back from the work to take a long look at the panels and the pencils. The story had turned on him a bit, but he considered that a good thing. He’d edit the script later that evening to suit the new images and action that had come to mind.

To do that, he needed to let it stew. To stop pushing while it cooked on one of the back burners of the brain. Which meant, for his process, it was probably time for a beer and a little PlayStation.

Downstairs, he opened the front door to take a quick look at what he thought of as Cilla World before wandering back to the kitchen. He saw Steve picking his way up the walk, the cane in one hand, a six-pack in the other.

“This is what I call superior timing.”

Beside Ford, Spock all but jumped up and applauded.

“I escaped. The warden had to make a supply run, so I stole her beer and booked.”

“Who could blame you?” Ford took the beer, flicked a thumb at a chair.

“Doc cleared me. I’m heading out tomorrow.” He sat, with an audible whoosh of breath, then scrubbed his hand over Spock’s head.

“You’ll be missed.” Ford popped the tops on two beers, passed one over.

“I’m going to try to come back out in the fall, if I can manage it. The way she’s going, she’ll be down to punch-out work.”

Ford glanced dubiously across the road. “If you say so.”

“I’m mostly in her way now.”

“She doesn’t see it that way.”

Steve took a long pull on the beer. “She reamed my ass for going up in the attic to hang out with the guys. Wanted to set me out in a rocker like her grandfather, and give me a paint fan to play with. Jesus, next thing it’ll be crossword puzzles or some such shit.”

“Could be worse. Could be knitting.”

With a grunt, Steve frowned at the stone wall across the road. “What’s your take on what went down on that?”

“Sorry?”

“Don’t bullshit. My brain’s not that damaged. Guys on construction crews gossip like girls. I heard some asshole tagged the wall. Got about six different versions of what it said, but all the same basic idea.”

“My take is some asshole tagged the wall, and he’s got a mean streak. It might be the same one that went after you, or it might not. She thinks it’s old man Hennessy.”

“And you don’t.”

“Old man’s the defining term. Then again, I can’t think of anybody who has anything against her except him. And he’s tough. Stringy, but tough.”

“If I was a hundred percent-or closer to it-I’d stay. But I wouldn’t be much help to her right now.” He tipped his beer at Ford. “Up to you, Sparky, and your little dog, too.”

“We’ve got it.”

“Yeah.” Steve took another sip of beer. “I think you do.”

SHE DIDN’T CRY when Steve climbed into the passenger seat of the RV on the cool and wet Saturday. She censored herself from making any suggestion he wait until the weather cleared to begin the long trip cross-country. Instead, she kissed him goodbye and stood in the rain to wave him off.

And felt horribly, painfully alone.

So alone, she closed herself in the house. The rain took planting or painting off the slate. She considered moving her things into the guest room Steve had vacated, but that struck her as too much housekeeping. She wanted work, not chores.

She switched on the radio, turned up the volume to fill the house with sound. And got down to the business of building the shelving and framing out the storage closet for the utility room off the kitchen. The task wasn’t on the agenda for weeks yet, but it was exactly the kind of job that smoothed out nerves, soothed the mind.

She measured, marked, sawed, lost herself in the rhythm of carpentry. Content again, she sang along with the radio as her cordless screwdriver spun a wood screw home.

She nearly dropped the drill on her foot when she turned and caught a movement out of the corner of her eye.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” Patty threw up her hands, as if the tool were a loaded gun. “I didn’t mean to scare you. We knocked, but… It’s so loud in here.”

Cilla walked over to shut off the radio. “I need it loud to hear it over the tools.”

“I got worried when you didn’t answer the door, and there was all the noise, and your car out front. So we just came in.”

“It’s all right. You just startled me. We?”

“Angie and Cathy. We tried to get Penny, but she’s covering the store. It’s such a poopy day we decided we’d brave the mall, then catch a movie and round it out with dinner. We came to kidnap you.”

“Oh, that sounds like fun.” Like torture, she thought. “I appreciate it, but I’m in the middle of this.”

“You deserve a day off. My treat.” "Patty-”

“I can hardly believe…” Cathy stepped in, trailed off with a wide-eyed stare at Cilla. “We’ve invaded. Gosh, you look so HGTV. I’m nervous about banging a nail into the wall to hang a picture, and look at you.”

“My sister, the handyman.” Perky in a pink hoodie, Angie beamed at her. “Can we look around? Is it all right? The buzz is the action’s on the second floor.”

“Sure. Um, it’s got a ways to go. Actually, it all has a ways.”

“I confess, I’ve been dying to get a look inside this place for years.” Cathy glanced around at the bare walls, the bare floors, the stacks and piles of lumber and supplies. “How do you manage without a kitchen?”

“I’m not much of a cook anyway. I’m having the stove and refrigerator that were in here retrofitted-they’re fairly fabulous. It takes time, so the kitchen’s way down on the list. Ah, the dining area’s over there, so it makes it an open floor plan. It’s good light, nice views.”

“The back gardens look so pretty!” Patty stepped closer to the French doors. “Was this patio here?”

“It needed work, and we redesigned it. The gardens have been a job. Your son does good work,” she said to Cathy. "And he’s got a real talent for landscape design.”

“Thank you. We certainly think so.”

“The dining room opens to the patio, and from the interior flows into this area I’m going to use as a sort of sitting/TV room off the living area. Powder room there’s getting new tiles, new fixtures. Coat closet here off the entryway. It’s a lot of space. It’s good space.”

“I love that you can step outside from every room.” Angie turned a circle.

Cilla led them upstairs where the three unexpected guests cooed over the tiles and fixtures of the completed bath, chattered over the projected master.

“I don’t know what I’d do with a steam shower, but I would love heated tile floors in my bathroom.” Patty beamed at Cilla. “I don’t know how you know all of this, and figure it out, but the two finished rooms are just beautiful. Like something out of a magazine.”

“The resale value’s going to skyrocket,” Cathy commented.

“I think it would, if I were planning on selling.”

“Sorry, my husband’s influence.” Cathy chuckled. “And I know without asking him he’d want first crack if you ever change your mind about selling. What wonderful views. It seems so solitary, even with the other houses around. I admit I like the convenience and the security of living closer to town, but if I had more country girl in me, this would be the spot.”

“Do you ever feel her around? Janet?”

“Angie.”

At her mother’s frown, Angie blinked. “I’m sorry. Is that the wrong thing to ask?”

“It’s all right,” Cilla told her. “I do sometimes. I like to think she’d approve of what I’m doing, even the changes I’m making. It matters to me.”

“There’s such history in this house,” Cathy added. “All the people who came here, the parties, the music. The tragedy, too. It makes it more than a house. It’s a legend, isn’t it? I remember when it happened. I was pregnant with my middle child-just a couple months along, and had such morning sickness. I’d just had a bout, and Tom was trying to feed Marianna-our oldest-breakfast. She wasn’t quite two, and there was oatmeal everywhere. My next-door neighbor-Abby Fox, you remember her, Patty?”

“I do. If there was a drop of gossip, she squeezed out more.”

“Knew everything first, and this was no exception. She came over and told us. I burst right into tears. Hormones, I guess. I got sick again, and I remember how Tom was at his wit’s end trying to figure out how to deal with me and the baby. It was an awful day. I’m sorry.” She shook herself. “I don’t know why I started on that.”

“The house stirs it up,” Patty decided. “Go on, Cilla, get cleaned up and come with us. This rain and gloom’s going to make us sad. We’re just not taking no for an answer.”

She supposed she went along as it was three against one, and because Cathy’s memory had made her sad. It surprised her that she enjoyed herself, poking around a mall, sitting through a weepy chick flick, drinking margaritas and eating grilled chicken Caesar salad.

In the restaurant ladies’ room, Angie joined her to fuss with her hair and lip gloss. “It’s no Rodeo Drive, premiere and dinner at the latest hot spot, but it was a pretty good day, huh?”

“I had fun. And Rodeo Drive wasn’t my usual stomping grounds.”

“It would be mine, if I lived out there. Even if I could only window-shop and fantasize. You really don’t miss it?”

“I really don’t miss it. I- Sorry,” she said when her phone rang. Drawing it out, Cilla saw her mother’s number on the readout, put it away without answering.

“You can take it. I’ll step out.”

“No. It’s the kind of call that’s guaranteed to spoil my nice, subtle margarita buzz. Do you do this a lot? Hang out with your mother on a rainy Saturday?”

“I guess. She’s fun to be around. We always tried to have a day together, and since I went to college, we try harder when I’m home on break. Sometimes we have friends along, sometimes just the two of us.”

“You’re lucky.”

Angie laid a hand on Cilla’s arm. “I know she’s not your mother, but I know, too, she’d really like to be your friend.”

“She is my friend. We just don’t know each other very well.”

“Yet?”

“Yet,” Cilla agreed, and made Angie smile.

WHEN SHE GOT HOME, Cilla checked her voice mail. Two from Ford, she noted-probably when she’d turned off her phone in the movie- and one from her mother.

She got her mother’s over with. It ran long, as expected, covering the gamut from cold disdain to angry resentment, with a short stint of teary tremor between.

Cilla deleted it, played Ford’s first.

“Hey. My mother decided to cook up spaghetti and meatballs, and told me to come over to pig out and bring a friend. You didn’t answer the door, and you’re not answering this. So now I’m wondering if I should worry, mind my own business or be insanely jealous because you ran off with some piece of beefcake named Antonio. Anyway, give me a call so I know.”

She played the second. “Ignore that message. My father ran into your father, so have fun with the girls. Ah, that was your father’s term. The girls. You’re going to miss some seriously awesome meatballs.”

“God, you’re so cute,” Cilla murmured. “And if I wasn’t so tired, I’d walk right over there and jump your bones.”

Yawning, she climbed the steps with two shopping bags. A real bed waited upstairs, she remembered. She could curl up on an actual mattress with actual sheets. Snuggle right in, sleep as late as she liked. The idea shimmered like heaven in her mind as she turned into the guest bath.

It was like being struck in the heart. The lovely floor lay broken-tiles chipped, shattered, heaved up from long cracks. The bowl of the new sink lay scattered over it in pieces. Shocked, she staggered back, the bags dropping out of her hands. The contents spilled out as she turned, with a fist twisting in her belly, to run to the newly tiled master.

The same senseless destruction met her.

A sledgehammer, she thought, maybe a pick. Someone had pounded, chipped, gashed the tiles, the glass block, the walls. Hours and hours of work, destroyed.

With ice coating that fist in her belly, she walked downstairs and outside into the rain to make the now familiar call to the police.

“CAME IN THROUGH the back door,” Wilson told her. “Broke the glass, reached in, turned the lock. It appears he used your tools-that short-handled sledgehammer, the pickax-to do the damage. Who knew you’d be out for the evening?”

“Nobody. I didn’t know I’d be out. It was spur of the moment.”

“And your car remained here, in full view from the road?”

“Yes. I left the veranda light on, and two lights on inside-one up, one down.”

“And you left here about two in the afternoon, you said?”

“Yes, about then. We went to the mall, to the movies, to dinner. I got back about ten-thirty.”

“The three women you were with knew your house would be vacant?”

“That’s right. My neighbor knew, as he called me while I was out. My father knew, and my neighbor’s parents. I suppose Mrs. Morrow’s husband knew, or could have. Basically, Detective, pretty much anyone who had any interest in my whereabouts could have known or found out.”

“Miss McGowan, I’m going to suggest you get yourself a security system.”

“Is that what you’d suggest?”

“This area is lightly developed, it’s part of its charm. You’re relatively remote here, and your property has been a repeated target of vandalism. We’re doing what we can. But if I were you, I’d take steps to protect my property.”

“You can believe I will.”

Cilla pushed to her feet when she heard Ford’s voice, raised in obvious frustration as he argued with one of the cops currently prowling her house and grounds. “That’s my neighbor. I’d like him to come in.”

Wilson signaled. A moment later Ford rushed in. “Are you hurt? Are you all right?” He took her face in his hands. “What happened now?”

“Someone broke in while I was out. They did a number on two of the second-floor bathrooms.”

“Mr. Sawyer, where were you this afternoon and evening, between two and eleven?”

“Detective Wilson-”

“It’s okay.” Ford took Cilla’s hand, squeezed it. “I was home working until about four. I went out to buy some wine and some flowers for my mother. I had dinner at my parents’, got there about five. Got home, I don’t know, about nine, maybe nine-thirty. I watched some TV, fell asleep on the couch. When I surfaced, I started upstairs. I looked out the front door-it’s a habit now-and I saw the cops.”

“Ms. McGowan stated you knew she wasn’t home.”

“Yeah, I called her to invite her to dinner at my parents’. No, walked over first to invite her. She didn’t answer, and I got a little worried with everything that’s been going on. Then I called. And a little while later, I talked to my father; my mother wanted me to stop and pick up some milk. I told him I was trying to reach Cilla to ask her over, and he said he’d run into her dad, and that she was out with girlfriends.”

“What time did you come over here?”

“Ah, about three, some after, I guess. I walked to the barn when you didn’t answer, but the lock was on, and I walked around the house. I was worried, a little. Everything looked okay. Where did they break in?”

“Back door,” she told him.

“The back door was fine when I did the walk-around. How bad is it?”

“Way bad enough.”

“You can fix it.” He reached for her hand. “You know how.”

She shook her head, walked over to sit on the steps. "I’m tired.” After scrubbing her hands over her face, she dropped them into her lap. “I’m tired of it all.”

“Why don’t you go over to my place, get some sleep? I’ll bunk here so somebody’s in the house.”

“If I leave, I’m not going to come back. I need to think about that. I need to see if staying here matters anymore. Because right now? I just don’t know.”

“I’ll stay with you. I’ll take the sleeping bag. Are you going to leave any cops here?” Ford demanded of Wilson.

Wilson nodded. “We’ll leave a radio car and two officers outside. Ms. McGowan? I don’t know if it makes any difference to the way you’re feeling, but this is starting to piss me off.”

She offered Wilson a sigh. “Get in line.”

WHILE FORD WENT over to get the dog, she fixed plywood over the broken glass herself-a kind of symbol. At that moment, Cilla wasn’t sure if it was a symbol of defense or defeat. When she set down the hammer, all she felt was brutal fatigue.

“You don’t have to take the sleeping bag. It’s a big bed, and you’re too decent a guy to try anything under the circumstances. And the fact is, I don’t want to sleep alone.”

“Okay. Come on. We’ll figure everything out tomorrow.”

“He used my own tools to ruin things.” She let Ford lead her through the house, up the stairs. “It makes it worse somehow.”

In the bedroom, she toed off her shoes. Then pulled off her shirt. And had just enough left in her to be touched and amused when Ford cleared his throat, turned his back.

Spock, on the other hand, cocked his head and-if it was possible- ogled.

“He didn’t bust up the johns,” she said as she changed into a tank and cotton pants. “I don’t know if he ran out of steam, or if he knew the tiles, the sinks, the block were all more expensive and would take more time and trouble to replace. He’d be right about that. But you don’t have to go outside if you have to pee.”

“I’m good, thanks.”

“You can turn around now.”

She crawled onto the bed, didn’t bother to turn it down. “You don’t have to sleep in your clothes. I don’t know if I’m as decent as you, but I’m too damn tired to start up anything.”

Taking her at her word, he stripped down to his boxers, then stretched out on the bed, leaving plenty of space between them.

She reached out, turned off the light. "I’m not going to cry,” she said after a few moments of silence. “But if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like you to hold on to me for a while.”

He shifted to her, turned, then, draping an arm around her, drew her back against his body. “Better?”

“Yeah.” She closed her eyes. “I don’t know what to do. What I want, what I need, what I should, what I shouldn’t. I just don’t know.”

He kissed the back of her head, and the quiet gesture pushed tears into her throat. “Whatever it is, you’ll figure it out. Listen, it’s starting to rain again. It’s a nice sound, this time of night. It’s like music. You can just lie here and listen to the music.”

She listened to the music, how it played on and around the house she’d come to love. And, with his arm curled around her, slipped into exhausted sleep.

SIXTEEN

There was music when she woke. The same steady drum and plink of rain that had lulled her to sleep greeted her when she stirred. He’d held on to her, she thought-a little dreamily- when she’d asked. Just held on to her while the rain played and sleep took her under.

Though she had a dim memory of just dropping down on top of the bed, she found herself cozily tucked in.

And alone.

The part of her that didn’t want to face it, didn’t want those memories to clear, urged her to sink down again, to just let the rain and the watery gloom stroke her back to sleep.

Come too far for that, Cilla, she reminded herself. You’ve come too far for the slide and stroke. Pull it up, face the facts. Decide. Then deal.

As she pushed herself up to sit, she thought that nagging, practical voice in her head a coldhearted bitch.

Then she saw the coffee.

Her insulated travel mug sat on the nightstand. Propped against it, one of her notepads sported a mercilessly accurate and wincingly unflattering sketch depicting exactly how she imagined she looked at that precise moment. Tousled, heavy-eyed, rumpled and scowling. Beneath, in bold block letters, the caption read:

I AM COFFEE!!

DRINK ME!

(THEN TURN THE PAGE)

“Funny guy,” she grumbled. She picked up the pad, tossed it on the bed before lifting the mug. The coffee it held was only a few degrees above lukewarm, but it was strong and sweet. And just what the doctor ordered. She indulged, sitting, sipping, letting the coffee give her system that first kick start.

And idly, turned the page in the notebook.

She hadn’t expected to laugh, wouldn’t have believed anything could cut through the fog of depression to pull a quick, surprised chuckle out of her.

He’d drawn her vivid, wide-eyed, exaggerated breasts and biceps bulging out of her sleep tank, hair streaming in an unseen wind, smile full and fierce. The travel mug, a hint of steam puffing out of the drink hole, gripped in her hand.

“Yeah, you’re a funny guy.”

Laying the notepad back down, she went to find him.

She heard the clattering sound when she opened the bedroom door. Glass-no, broken tiles, she decided-against plastic. She wended her way to the master bedroom, pushed open that door, then crossed to the doorway of the bath.

He’d dug up work gloves, she noted, and a small spade, several empty drywall compound buckets. Two of them were filled with tile shards. It struck her almost harder than it had the night before, to stand there and see the methodical clearing of destruction.

“You’re losing your status as a morning slug.”

He dumped another handful of shards, straightened. He scanned her face. “You may have ruined me for life. How’s the coffee?”

“Welcome. Thanks. You don’t have to do this, Ford.”

“I don’t know anything about building, but I know a lot about cleaning up.”

“We’re going to need a lot more than a couple of buckets and a spade.”

“Yeah, I figured. But I also figured I might as well get started because lying in bed with you on a rainy Sunday morning had me… energized.”

“Is that what you call it?”

His face remained very solemn. “In polite company.”

She nodded, stepped over to stare at the cracks and breaks in her glass-block wall. She’d loved the look of that, the patterns in the glass, the way the light stole through. She’d imagined painting the walls a sheer, subtly metallic silver to pick up the glints of chrome. Her classy oasis, and yes, maybe a personal salute to old Hollywood.

The roots of her roots.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do yet. I honestly don’t know if I want to put this back together. If I’ve got it in me to fight this war someone’s declared on me. I didn’t come here to fight wars. I wanted to build something for myself, and for her. Maybe to build something for myself from her. But you know, when the foundation’s cracked, things keep falling down.”

“It didn’t fall down, Cilla, it was knocked down. That’s a different thing.” He tipped his head to one side, then the other, making a deliberate study of her face. So she saw he understood she meant herself as much as-maybe more than-the room. “I don’t see any cracks.”

“She was a junkie, a drunk. Maybe she was made into one, exploited, used. Pampered and abused. I know what that’s like. Not on her level, but enough to have a glimmer of what it was for her. I could have tried to build anywhere, but I made a deliberate choice to come here. She’s part of the reason. This place is part of the reason. My own wounded psyche and need to prove my own worth on my own terms. All part of the reason.”

“Those are good reasons.” He shrugged in that easy way of his. “So you stay, you clean it up. And you build it. On your terms.”

She shook her head. “You have no idea how screwed up I am.”

“I’ve got a few clues. How about you? Any idea how strong you are?”

How could she argue against that straight-line, stubborn conviction? “It vacillates. I’m on a low ebb right now.”

“Maybe you just need a boost.”

“More coffee?”

“A hearty Sunday breakfast.” He pulled off the work gloves, tossed them on the lid of the john. “You don’t have to decide the rest of your life this minute, or today, or tomorrow. Why don’t you give yourself a break? Take a little time. Let’s blow off the day. We’ll get Spock from outside where he’d be chasing his cats about now. Gorge ourselves at The Pancake House, go… to the zoo.”

“It’s raining.”

“It can’t rain forever.”

She stared at him a moment, at that relaxed smile, the warm, patient eyes. He’d held on to her, she thought. He’d left her coffee, and made her laugh before she was fully awake. He was cleaning up her mess, and demanding absolutely nothing.

He believed in her, in a way, on a level no one, not even she, had believed in before.

“No, it really can’t, can it? It really can’t rain forever.”

“So, get dressed and we’ll go overload on carbs, then go check out the monkeys.”

“Actually, the pancakes sound pretty good. After.”

“After what?”

She laughed, and this time the sound didn’t seem so surprising. She took hold of the front of his shirt, watched the awareness come into his eyes. “Come back to bed, Ford.”

“Oh.”

She backed up, tugging him with her. “It’s just us. Right this minute, I’ve got nothing else on my mind. And I really could use that boost.”

“Okay.” He scooped her up, closed his mouth over hers.

When her head stopped spinning, she smiled. “Really nice start.”

“I’ve been planning it out. Change in venue and basic approach,” he said as he carried her to the bedroom. “But I’m flexible.”

Her smile was slow, like a long, low purr. “So am I.”

“Oh, boy.”

She was laughing as she hooked her arms around his neck, caught his mouth with hers. Just them, she thought as they tumbled onto the bed. Everything else was later. Just them, and the music of the rain. In the soft and lazy light, on the rumpled bed, she let herself sink into the here and now. She drew his shirt up, away, hooked her legs around him and said, “Mmmm.”

He could have lingered on her mouth, the taste, the shape, the movement of it, endlessly. That wonderful deep dip in her top lip held a world of fascination for him. The sexy, seeking slide of her tongue against his could have held him enthralled for hours.

But there was so much more. The graceful stem of her neck allured him, the curve of her cheek, the smooth skin just under her jaw offered him countless pleasures as he roamed, as he sampled before finding her lips again.

The flavors there had become familiar over the weeks since they’d begun this dance, and only the more desirable to him. Now, finally, there would be more.

He could glide his lips down her, learn the tastes and textures, madden himself with the subtle swell above simple cotton. He teased and tormented them both, lingering there even as she arched up in invitation. He found warmth and silk and secrets while her heart beat strong against his lips. And when his tongue slid under the cotton, when she moaned in approval, he found more.

He eased the tank up, inch by torturous inch, fingers gliding light as moth wings as he lifted his head to look into her eyes.

Her heart stuttered. Her body simply sighed.

“You’re really good at this.”

“If something’s worth doing… I’ve looked at you a lot. In an artistic capacity.” His gaze shifted down as his fingers brushed over her breasts. “I’ve thought about you a lot.”

Thumbs, fingertips sent shivers through her.

“I’ve imagined touching you. Watching you while I did. Feeling you tremble under my hands. You’ve been worth waiting for.”

He lowered his mouth to hers again, taking the kiss deep. Lowered his body to hers. Heat spread where flesh met flesh, sent her pulse to pound. Now her body quivered as he journeyed down it, slow and easy, hands and lips.

She thought she’d let go when they tumbled onto the bed. But she’d been wrong. That had been acquiescence. This, what he seduced from here, was surrender.

He touched with a care, a curiosity, as if she were the first woman he’d touched. And made her feel as if she’d never been touched before. Sensations swam and coiled inside her, shimmered over her skin until pleasure coated her like light. And the light bloomed with such intensity she gripped the tangled sheets to anchor herself in the glow.

He guided her up, up where the light flashed, where in the quick, stunning blindness pleasure turned on its edge and shot through her.

He steeped himself in the shape of her, even as she quaked under him. The slender line of her torso that curved into her waist enchanted him. The feel of her hips, rising up as she peaked, thrilled. Long, lovely thighs led him to gorgeous calves that flexed at the light nip of his teeth.

She moaned, and the sound of it seeped into him when he roamed up again to explore that warm, wet, welcoming center. She said his name when she came, a quick, breathless gasp. Her fingers raked through his hair, then down his back on the coil and release. Damp flesh slid over damp flesh until he looked back down into her eyes.

She touched his face, held the look, trembling, trembling as he slipped into her. And as those icy blue eyes glazed, he took her with long, slow thrusts.

She ached, every part of her. She rose to him, helplessly caught. Swamped in needs he met, stirred and met once more. When they built again, impossibly, she held on.

And she let go.

Limp, loose, languid, she lay under him. The world eked back so she heard the drumming rain again, felt the hot twisted sheet under her back. When the mists cleared from her brain enough to allow random thoughts to wind through, she wondered if the fact that she’d just had the best sex of her life meant it was all downhill from here.

Then he turned his head, rubbed his lips against her shoulder, and she swore she felt her skin glow.

He lifted his head, brushed her hair away from her cheek as he smiled sleepily down at her. “Okay?”

“Okay?” She let out a mystified laugh. “Ford, you seriously deserve a medal, or at least a certificate of excellence. I feel like every inch of me has been… tended,” she decided.

“I’d say my job is done, but I really like the work.” He dipped his head, and the kiss sent sparkles dancing in her brain to go with the glow. “Probably need, ah, a coffee break though.”

Deciding she’d never been more relaxed or content in her life, she hooked her arms around his neck. “Understandable. When my bones resolidify, I could use a shower. And it just occurs to me we can’t shower here.”

He saw the worry come back into her eyes and, rolling away, pulled her up to sitting. “We’ll go over to my place.” Where what had happened wouldn’t keep slapping her in the face, he thought. “Toss something on, grab what you want. It turns out I’ve also imagined you wet and slippery. Now I’ll find out how close I was to right.”

“All right. There was a mention of pancakes, too, as I recall.”

“Stacks of them. We’re going to need fuel to get through the rest of the day.”

THEY DIDN’T MAKE it to The Pancake House. After a long, steamy, energetic shower, the idea struck to stay in and make pancakes. The result was messy but reasonably edible.

“They just need a lot of syrup.” Sitting at the kitchen counter in Ford’s T-shirt, Cilla drowned the oddly shaped stack on her plate.

If the sounds from the mudroom were an indication, Spock had no trouble with his share.

“They’re not so bad.” Ford forked a dripping pile. “And more fun than Eggos. I had this other idea. Instead of going out to see monkeys, we stay in and have monkey sex.”

“So far your ideas are working out pretty well. Who am I to argue? What do you usually do on rainy Sundays?”

“You mean when I’m not eating pancakes with gorgeous blondes?” He shrugged. “I might work some, depending on how that’s going, or fat-ass around and read. Maybe hang out with Brian or Matt, or both. If I had absolutely no choice, I’d do laundry. How about you?”

"Back in L.A.? If I had a project going, I’d tackle some interior work, or paperwork, or research. If I didn’t have a project, I’d scour the Internet and real estate ads looking for one. That’d pretty much sum up my life for the past few years. That’s pitiful.”

“It’s not. It’s what you wanted. A lot of people thought it was pitiful I’d rather hole up scribbling and sketching than, say, play basketball. Being tall, you know. I sucked at basketball. Never got it. On the other hand, I was good, and got better, at the scribbling and sketching.”

“You’re frighteningly well adjusted. Or maybe just compared to me.”

“You seem pretty steady from where I sit.”

“I have abandonment issues.” She gestured with a dripping forkful of pancakes. “I have a drug phobia due to a family history of drug abuse that has me sweating taking an aspirin. I suffer from acute stage fright that escalated in my teens to the point that I could barely cope with being in the same room with three people at a time. The only way I can cope with my mother, sanely, is to stay away from her, and I spent the majority of my life alternately blaming myself or my father for the fact that we didn’t-don’t, really-know each other.”

He made a pfft sound. “Is that all?”

“Want more?” She ate pancakes, stabbed more. “I got more. I have dreams where I engage in detailed conversations with my dead grandmother, whom I never met, and to whom I feel closer than I do to any living member of my family. My best friend is my ex-husband. I’ve had four stepfathers, and countless ‘uncles,’ and being not stupid, understandthat is part of the reason that I’ve never had a long-term, healthy relationship with a man other than Steve. I expect to be exploited and used, or I expect the attempt, and, as a result, have successfully sabotaged any potentially long-term, healthy relationship I might have had. Fair warning.”

He forked more pancakes, ate them. “Is that the best you can do?”

With a laugh, she shoved her plate away, picked up her coffee. “That’s probably enough over breakfast.” She rose, held out a hand. “Let’s take a walk in the rain. Then we can come back and dive in your Jacuzzi.”

They left the mess, took a long walk with the dog. Was there anything more romantic than being kissed in the rain? Cilla wondered. Anything more lovely than the mountains, shrouded in clouds and mist? Anything more liberating than strolling hand in hand through the summer rain while all the world huddled inside, behind closed doors and windows?

Drenched, they raced back to the house to strip off dripping clothes. In the hot, bubbling water, they took each other slowly.

Drained, they went upstairs to curl together like puppies to sleep on Ford’s bed.

She woke him with love, the sleepy joy of it, the warm tangle of limbs and soft press of lips. When they dozed again, the rain slowed to a quiet patter.

Later, Cilla slipped out of bed. Tiptoeing to Ford’s closet, she found a shirt. Pulling it on, she eased out of the room. She intended to go down to search out a bottle of water-preferably ice cold-but detoured to his studio. Thirst could wait for curiosity.

When she switched on the light, the drawings pinned to his display board pulled her forward. So odd to see her face, she thought, on the warrior’s body. Well, her body, she admitted.

He’d added her tattoo, but as she’d once suggested, it rode on Brid’s biceps.

Wandering over to his workstation, she frowned at the papers on his drawing board. Small sketches covered them-sparse sketches, she mused, all in separate boxes, and each with a dotted vertical line running top to bottom. Some of them had what she thought she recognized as speech balloons, with numbers inside. She spread them out for a better look.

It was like a storyboard, she realized. The characters, the action, some staging. Blocking. And if she wasn’t mistaken, the sizes and shapes of the boxes had been calculated mathematically as well as artistically. Balance, she mused, and impact.

Who knew so much went into a comic?

On the other side of the board, a larger sheet lay on the counter. More squares and rectangles, she noted, holding detailed drawings, shaded and… inked. Yes, that was the word. Though no dialogue had been added, the setup, the art, drew the eye across, just as words in a book would do.

In the center, Dr. Cass Murphy stood in what Cilla thought of as her professor suit. Conservative, acceptable. Bland. The clothes, the dark-framed glasses and the posture defined personality in one shot. That was a kind of brilliance, wasn’t it? she thought. To capture and depict in one single image the character. The person.

Without thinking, she picked up the panel, took it to the display board to hold it against the sketch of Brid.

The same woman, yes, of course the same woman. And yet the change was both remarkable and complete. Repression to liberation, hesitation to purpose. Shadow to light.

When she started to walk back to replace the panel, she saw another stack of pages. Typewritten pages. She scanned the first few lines.

FORD WOKE HUNGRY, and deeply disappointed Cilla wasn’t beside him to slake one area of appetite. Apparently, he decided, he couldn’t get enough of her.

She was all beautiful and sexy and wounded and smart. She knew how to use power tools, and had a laugh that made his mouth water. He’d watched her hang tough, and fall to pieces. He’d witnessed her absolute devotion to a friend, watched her handle acute embarrassment and lash out with temper.

She knew how to work, and oh boy, she knew how to play.

She might be, he mused, pretty damn close to perfect.

So where the hell was she?

He rolled out of bed, snagged a pair of pants and stepped into them on his way to hunt her down.

He was just about to call her name when he spotted her. She sat at his work counter, legs tucked up and crossed, shoulders hunched, one elbow propped. He had the quick and fleeting thought that if he sat like that for more than ten minutes, his neck and shoulders would lock up for days.

Walking over, he set his hands on her shoulders to rub what he imagined would be knotted muscles. And she jumped as if he’d swung an ax at her head.

She pitched forward, caught herself, reared back as her legs scissored out. Then, spinning around in his chair, she clutched her hands at her chest as her laughter bubbled out.

“God! You scared me!”

“Yeah, I picked that up when you nearly bashed your head on my drawing board. What’re you up to?”

“I was… Oh God. Oh shit!” She shoved the chair back, dropped her hands into her lap. “I’m sorry. I completely breached your privacy. I was looking at the sketches you had sitting out, and I saw the book. I just meant to skim the first page. I got caught up. I shouldn’t have-”

“Whoa, whoa, save the self-flagellation. I told you before you could read it sometime. I just hadn’t written it yet. If you got caught up, that’s a plus.”

“I moved things around.” She picked up the panel, held it out. “I hate when people move my things around.”

“I know where it goes. Obviously, you’re lucky I’m not as temperamental and touchy as you are.” He lay the panel back in its place. “So, what do you think?”

“I think the story is fun, exciting and entertaining, with a sharp thread of humor, and with strong underpinnings of feminism.”

He lifted his brows. “All that?”

“You know damn well. The character of Cass behaves in certain ways, and expects certain behavior and attitudes toward her because she was raised by a domineering, unsympathetic father. She’s sexually repressed and emotionally clogged, has been reared to accept the superiority of men and accept a certain lack of respect in her male-dominated field. You see a great deal of that in the single portrait. The one you just put back.

“She’s betrayed, and left for dead, because she’s so indoctrinated to taking orders from male authority figures. To subverting her own intellect and desires. And by facing death, by fighting against it, she becomes a leader. Everything that’s been trapped inside her, and more, is released in the form of Brid. A warrior. Empowerment, through power.”

Fascinating, he thought, and flattering, to listen to her synopsize his story, and his character. “I’m going to interpret that as you like it.”

“I really do, and not just due to the recent sexual haze. It’s like a screenplay, a very strong screenplay. You even have camera angles and direction.”

“It helps remind me how I saw it when I wrote it, even if that changes.”

“And you add in these little boxes like the ones on the art.”

“Helps with the layout. That may change, too. Just like the story line took some turns on me.”

“You added Steve. You added the Immortal. He’s going to be so… well, insane over that.”

“She needed the bridge, the link between Cass and Brid. A character who can straddle her worlds, and help the two sides of our heroine understand each other.”

Not unlike, Ford thought now, how Steve helped Cilla. “Adding him changed a lot of the angles, added a lot of work, but it’s stronger for it. And something I should’ve thought of in the first place. Anyway, it’s still evolving. The story’s down, and now I have to tell it with art. Sometimes, for me anyway, the art can shift the story. We’ll have to see.”

“I especially like the one up there, of Brid in what’s almost a fouetté turn, as I assume she’s about to kick out her leg against a foe.”

“Fouetté turn?”

“A ballet move.” Cilla crossed over to tap the sketch she spoke of. “This is very close, even the arms are in position. To be precise, the supporting foot should be turned out slightly more, but-”

“You know ballet? Can you do that?”

“A fouetté? Please. Eight years of ballet.” She executed a quick turn. "Of tap.” And a fast-time step. “Jazz.”

“Cool. Hold on.” He opened a drawer, pulled out a camera. “Do the ballet thing again.”

“I’m mostly naked.”

“Yeah, which is why I’ll be posting these on the Internet shortly. I just want the feet business you were talking about.”

He had no idea what an enormous leap of faith it took for her to do the turn as he snapped the camera.

“One more, okay? Good. Great. Thanks. A fouetté turn. Ballet.” He set the camera back down. “I must’ve seen it somewhere, sometime or other. Eight years? I guess that explains how you did those high leaps in Wasteland Three, when you were running through the woods, trying to escape the reanimated psycho killer.”

“Grand jetés.” She laughed. “So to speak.”

“I thought you were going to make it, the way you were flying. I mean you got all the way back to the cabin, avoiding the death trap and the flying hatchet, only to pull open the door-”

“To find the reanimated psycho killer had taken a convenient shortcut to beat me there. Sobbing relief,” she said, miming the action, “shock, scream. Slice.”

“It was a hell of a scream. They use voice doubles for that stuff, right? And enhance.”

“Sometimes. However…” She sucked in her breath and let out a bloodcurdling, glass-shattering scream that had Ford staggering back two full steps. “I did my own work,” she finished.

“Wow. You’ve got some lungs there. How about we go down, have some wine, while we see if my eardrums regenerate.”

“Love to.”

SEVENTEEN

She didn’t think about the vandalism. Or when thoughts of what waited for her across the road crept into her mind, Cilla firmly slammed the door. No point in it, she told herself. There was nothing she could do because she didn’t know what she wanted to do.

There was no harm in a day out of time. A fantasy day, really, filled with sex and sleep inside the bubble of rain-slicked windows. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been content to spend the day in a man’s company, unless it had been work-related.

Even the idea of wine and video games held an appeal. Until Ford severely trounced her for the third time in a row.

“She-what’s her name?-Halle Berry.”

“Storm,” Ford provided. “Halle Berry’s the actress, and really hot. Storm is a key member of the X-Men. Also really hot.”

“Well, she just stood there.” Cilla scowled down at the controls. “How am I supposed to know what to push and what to toggle, and whatever?”

“Practice. And like I said, you need to form your team more strategically. You formed your all-girl alliance. You should’ve mixed it up.”

“My strategy was gender solidarity.” Under the coffee table, Spock snorted. “That’s enough out of you,” she muttered. “Besides, I think this controller’s defective because I have excellent hand-eye coordination.”

“Want to switch and go another round?”

She eyed him narrowly. “How often do you play this?”

“Off and on. Throughout my entire life,” he added with a grin. “I’m currently undefeated on this version of Ultimate Alliance.”

“Geek.”

“Loser.”

She handed him her controller. “Put your toys away.”

Look at that, she thought when he rose to do just that. Tidy hot guy. Tidy straight hot guy. How many of them were there in the world?

“Saving the world worked up my appetite. How about you?”

“I didn’t save the world,” she pointed out.

“You tried.”

“That was smug. I see the smug all over you.”

“Then I’d better wash up. I got leftover spaghetti and meatballs, courtesy of Penny Sawyer.”

“You’ve got a nice setup here, Ford. Work you love, and a great house to do it in. Your ridiculously appealing dog. The tight circle of friends going back to childhood. Family you get along with, close enough you can cop leftovers. It’s a great platform.”

“No complaints. Cilla-”

“No, not yet.” She could see in his eyes the offer of sympathy and support. “I’m not ready to think about it yet. Spaghetti and meatballs sounds like just the thing.”

“Cold or warmed up?”

“It has to be exceptional spaghetti and meatballs to warrant cold.”

He crossed back, took her hand. “Come with me,” he said and led her around to the kitchen. “Have a seat.” He took the bowl out of the fridge, peeled off the lid, got a fork. “You’ll get yours,” he told Spock as the dog danced and gurgled. Turning back, he set the bowl on the bar, then wound some pasta on a fork. “Sample.”

She opened her mouth, let him feed her. “Oh. Okay, that’s really good. Really. Give me the fork.”

With a laugh, he passed it to her. After adding some to Spock’s dish, he topped off both glasses of wine. They sat at the counter, eating cold pasta straight from the bowl.

“We had this cook when I was a kid. Annamaria from Sicily. I swear her pasta wasn’t as good as this. What?” she said when he shook his head.

“Just strikes me weird that I know somebody who can say, ’We had a cook when I was a kid.’”

She grinned around more pasta. “We had a butler.”

“Get out.”

She raised her brows, inclined her head and stabbed at a meatball. “Two maids, chauffeur, gardener, under-gardener, my mother’s personal assistant, pool boy. And once, when my mother discovered the pool boy, whom she was banging, was also banging one of the maids, she fired them both. With much drama. She had to go to Palm Springs for a week to recover, where she met Number Three-ironically, by the pool. I’m pretty sure, at some point, he also banged the pool boy. The new pool boy, whose name was Raoul.”

He gestured at her with his fork until he swallowed. “You grew up in an eighties soap opera.”

She thought it over. “Close enough. But, in any case, Annamaria had nothing on your mother.”

“She’ll get a kick out of hearing that. What was it like, seriously? Growing up with maids and butlers?”

“Crowded. And not all it’s cracked up to be. That sounds snotty,” she decided. “And I imagine some woman with a house and family to run, a full-time job and the need to get dinner on the table would be tempted to bitch-slap me for it. But.” She shrugged. “There’s always somebody there, so genuine privacy is an illusion. No sneaking a cookie out of the jar before dinnertime. Actually no cookies for the most part as the camera adds pounds. If you have a fight with your mother, the entire household knows the details. More, the odds are that those details will be recounted sometime down the road in a tabloid interview or a disgruntled former employee’s tell-all book.

“All in all,” she concluded, “I’d rather eat leftover spaghetti.”

“But, if I remember right, you don’t cook.”

“Yeah, that’s a problem.” She reached for her wine. “I’ve thought about maybe asking Patty for pointers in that area. I like to chop.” She hacked down a few times with the flat of her hand to demonstrate. “You know, vegetables, salads. I’m a hell of a chopper.”

“That’s a start.”

“Self-sufficiency, that’s the key. You manage.”

“True, but I’ve been butler-free all my life. I do have a biweekly cleaning service, and am well acquainted with the primary and alternate routes to all takeout facilities. Plus, I have a direct line to Brian and Matt and Shanna, who will handle small household emergencies for beer.”

“It’s a system.”

“Well oiled.” He tucked her hair behind her ear.

“If and when I learn to cook something other than a grilled cheese sandwich and canned soup, I’ll have reached another lofty personal goal.”

“What are some of the others?”

“Lofty personal goals? Rehabbing a house and selling it at a profit. I hit that one. Having my own business and having said business generate an actual income. Which first requires reaching the goal of getting my contractor’s license, which in turn requires passing the test for same. In a couple weeks, actually, if I-”

“You’ve got to take a test? I love tests.” His eyes actually lit up. “Do you need a study buddy? And yes, I capitalize the N in nerd.”

She paused with what she swore would be her last bite of pasta halfway to her mouth. “You love tests?”

“Well, yeah. There are questions and answers. True or false, multiple choice, essay. What’s not to love? I kill on tests. It’s a gift. Do you want any help?”

“Actually, I think I’m good. I’ve been prepping for it for a while now. I think I met your kind during my brief and unfortunate college experience. You’re the one who screwed the curve for me, every time. You are, therefore, one of the primary reasons I’m a one-semester college dropout.”

“You should’ve asked my kind to be your study buddy. Besides, you should thank my kind for putting you exactly where you want to be right now.”

“Hmm.” She deliberately nudged the bowl toward him and away from herself. “That’s very slick and clever. Previous humiliation and failure lead to current spaghetti-and-meatball-induced contentment.”

“Or, condensing, sometimes shit happens for the best.”

“There’s a bumper sticker. I have to move.” She pressed a hand on her stomach, slid off the stool. “And I’ll demonstrate my self-sufficiency and gratitude for current contentment by doing the dishes, which includes everything back to breakfast, apparently.”

“We were busy with other things.”

“I guess we were.”

For a moment, he indulged himself with wine and watching her. But watching wasn’t enough. He stood and crossed to her, turned her to face him. She had a wooden spoon in her hand and an easy smile curving her lips. He wrapped her hair around his hand-and saw her eyes widen in surprise, heard the spoon clatter to the floor-as he used it like a rope to tug her head back.

And ravished her mouth.

A new and rampant hunger surged through him, a whip of need and now. He released her hair to drag off her shirt. Even as his mouth crushed back down to hers, he yanked her pants down her hips.

It was a tornado of demand and speed. It seemed she was naked before she could catch the first breath. Plucked up off the ground while her head spun and her heart lurched. He dropped her down on the counter, shoved her legs apart.

And ravished her.

Her hand flailed out for purchase. Something shattered; she wondered if it was her mind. His fingers dug into her hips as he pounded into her, pounded greed and scorching pleasure. Mad for more, she locked her legs around his waist.

His blood pounded under his skin, a thousand brutal drumbeats. The hunger that had leaped into him seemed to snap its teeth and bite even as he drove himself into her to slake it. Its dark excitement pushed him to take, to fill her with the same wild desperation that burned in him.

When it broke, it was like shooting out of the black, into the blind.

Her head dropped limply onto his shoulder while her breath came in short, raw gasps. She felt him tremble, found herself pleased she wasn’t the only one.

“Oh,” she managed, “God.”

“Give me a minute. I’ll help you down.”

“Take your time. I’m fine where I am. Where am I?”

His laugh muffled against the side of her neck. “Maybe it was something in the spaghetti sauce.”

“Then we need the recipe.”

Steadier, he leaned back, took a good look at her.“Now I really want my camera. You’re the first naked woman to sit on my kitchen counter, which I now plan to have sealed in Lucite. I’d like to document the moment.”

“Not a chance. My contract specifies no nude scenes.”

“That’s a damn shame.” He stroked her hair back. “I guess the least I can do after playing Viking and maiden is help you with the dishes.”

“The least. Hand me my shirt, will you?”

“See, I’ve confiscated your clothes. You’ll have to do the dishes naked.”

Her head cocked, her eyebrows lifted. On a sigh, Ford scooped up her shirt. “It was worth a shot.”

HE WOKE in the dark to a quiet house and an empty bed. Groggy and baffled, he rose to look for her. One part of his brain reserved the right to be pissed if she’d gone back across the road without waking him.

He found his front door open, and saw the silhouette of her sitting in one of the chairs on his veranda with Spock stretched at her feet. He smelled coffee as he pushed open the screen.

She glanced over. “Morning.”

“As long as it’s still dark, it’s not morning.” He sat beside her. “Give me a hit of that.”

“You should go back to bed.”

“Are you going to give me a hit of that coffee or make me go get my own?”

She passed him the cup. “I have to decide what to do.”

“At…” He took her wrist, turned it up and squinted at her watch. “Five-oh-six in the morning?”

“I didn’t deal with it yesterday, didn’t think about it. Or not much. I even left my phone over there so the police couldn’t contact me. So no one could. I ducked and covered.”

“You took a break. There’s no reason you can’t take a couple more days before you try to figure it all out.”

“Actually, there are real and practical reasons I can’t take more time. I have subs coming in about two hours, unless I call them off. If I take them off for a couple of days, it’s more than screwing up my schedule, which is, of course, already screwed. It messes up theirs, and their employees’. And subs are always juggling jobs, so I could lose key people for more than a couple of days if I hold them off. If that decision is to walk away, I have to tell them that.”

“The circumstances aren’t of your making, and no one’s going to blame you.”

“No, I don’t think anyone would. But it still creates a domino effect. I also have to consider my budget, which is also screwed. I have insurance, but insurance has a deductible that has to be factored into the whole. I’m already over the high end of my projections, but that was my choice, with the changes and additions I made.”

“If you need-”

“Don’t,” she said, anticipating him. “I’m okay financially, and if I can’t make it on my own, I can’t make it. If I really needed extra, I could make a few calls, grab a couple voice-over jobs. Bottom line is I can’t leave the place the way it is, half done. I’ve got custom cabinets I ordered back in March, and the balance due when I take delivery. The kitchen appliances will be back in another couple months. Other details, small and large. It has to be finished, that’s not really a question. The questions are do I want to finish it, and do I want to stay? Can I? Should I?”

He took another hit of her coffee. Serious conversations, he thought, required serious attention. “Tell me what you’d do if you decided to turn it over to someone else to finish. If you left.”

“There are a lot of places I could slip into without the baggage I have here. Stick a pin in a map, I guess, and pick one. Take some of those voice-overs to thicken the bankroll, if I need to. Find a place with potential to flip. I can get a mortgage. Regular and very nice residuals from Our Family look good on an application. Or if I don’t want the stress of that, I could get a job with a crew. Hell, I could work for Steve’s new New York branch.”

“You’d be giving up your lofty personal goals.”

“Maybe I’d just postpone reaching them. The problem is…” She paused, sipped the coffee he’d handed back to her. “The problem is,” she repeated, “I love that house. I love what it was, what I know I can make it. I love this place, and how I feel here. I love what I see when I look out my windows or step out my door. And I’m pissed off that someone’s meanness makes me consider giving that up.”

Something that had tightened inside him relaxed. “I like it better when you’re pissed off.”

“I do, too, but it’s hard to hold up the level. The part of me that isn’t pissed off or discouraged is scared.”

“That’s because you’re not stupid. Someone’s set out to deliberately hurt you. You’re going to be scared, Cilla, until you know who and why, and make it stop.”

“I don’t know where to start.”

“Do you still think it’s old man Hennessy?”

“He’s the only one I’ve met or had contact with around here who’s made it clear he hates me. Which, if this were a screenplay, means he couldn’t be behind all this because he’s the only one who hates me. But-”

“We’ll go talk to him, face-to-face.”

“And say what?”

“It’ll come to us, but basically you’re sticking, you’re making your home here, and neither you nor a house is responsible for something that happened over thirty years ago. And words to that effect. I’m also going to make copies of those letters you found. I’m going to read them more carefully and so are you. You need to think about passing them to the cops. Because if it’s not Hennessy, the next best possibility is it’s someone connected to those letters who got wind they still exist and you have them. Janet Hardy’s married secret lover revealed? That’d be news. Big, juicy, scandalous news.”

She’d thought of that. Of course she’d thought of that. But… "They aren’t signed.”

“Might be clues in there about the identity. Might not be, but we’re talking thirty-five years ago. Do you remember everything you wrote thirty-five years ago?”

“I’m twenty-eight, but I get what you’re saying.” In the still, softening dark, she stared at him. “You’ve given this a lot of thought.”

“Yeah. The first, the prowler in your barn. That could’ve been somebody hoping to pick up a few Janet Hardy souvenirs. I’ve got to weigh in the place has been empty for years now, and sure I’ve seen some people poking around now and then. Against that, I’ve got to factor most people didn’t know there was anything left inside, and any who did probably thought it was worthless junk left by tenants, not the woman herself. But then you come along.”

“I clear it out, store it in the barn, and it’s clear and obvious that I’m sorting through it, culling out anything that belonged to my grandmother. ”

“Somebody gets curious, a little greedy. Possibility. The second, the attack on Steve, could come from the same root. Poking around, somebody’s coming. Panic. But that takes it way over harmless if annoying trespass. Also above, if the letters are the goal, trespass to preserve reputation. It’s up to assault, arguably attempted murder.”

She shivered. “Of discouraged, pissed and scared, scared just leaped way into the lead.”

“Good, because then you’ll be more careful. Next, your truck door.

That one’s personal and direct to you. So was the message on the stone wall. Maybe there are two separate people involved.”

“Oh, that really helps. Two people who hate me.”

“It’s another possible. Last, the destruction inside the house. It’s more personal, more direct, and it’s ballsier. So today, you’re going shopping for a security system.”

“Is that what I’m going to do?”

The cold bite in her tone didn’t break his skin. “One of us is. Since it’s your place, I assume you’d rather do it yourself. But if you don’t, today, I will. I’m now authorized as I’ve had you naked on my kitchen counter. No point in whining to me if you didn’t bother to read the fine print.”

She said nothing for a moment, struggling against the urge to stew. “I intended to arrange that anyway-stay or go.”

“Good. And you don’t care for ultimatums. Neither do I, but in this particular case, I’m making an exception. I can sleep over there with you. Happy to. But sleep is a foregone conclusion at some point, just as the house being empty at some time or other for some period of time is inevitable. You need to be safe, and to feel safe. You need to protect your property.

“And Cilla, there’s no ‘go.’ You’ve already decided to stay.”

She really did want to stew, she thought, and he was making it damn hard to indulge. “How come you’re all macho and pushy with your ultimatum, but you’re not all macho and pushy telling me to flee to safety while you slay the dragon?”

“My shining armor’s in the shop. And maybe I just like the sex, which would be hard to come by with all the fleeing. Or it could be I don’t want to see you give up something you love.”

Yeah, he made it damn hard. “When I came out here to sit, I told myself it was just a house. I’ve put a lot of myself into other houses-it’s what makes the rehab worthwhile-and I’ve let them go. It’s just a house, wood and glass and pipes and wire, on a piece of ground.”

She looked down when he laid his hand over hers, when the gesture told her he understood. “Of course it’s not just a house, not to me. I don’t want to let it go, Ford. I’d never get it back, never get back what I’ve found if I let it go.”

She turned her hand over, laced her fingers with his. “Plus, I like the sex.”

“It can’t be overstated.”

“Okay then.” She took a deep breath. “I’ve got to get back. Get ready. Get started.”

“Let me get some shoes on. I’ll walk you home.”

MATT STOOD in the center of the master bath, hands on his hips, face grim. “I’m awful damn sorry about this, Cilla. I don’t know what gets into people, I swear I don’t. We’re going to fix that wall for you, don’t worry. And Stan’ll come back and do the tile. I can get one of my men to chip out what’s damaged in place, but it’d be better to leave the glass block for Stan. I’ll give him a call for you.”

“I’d appreciate that. I need to go pick up the replacement tile and block, some supplies. Arrange for a security system.”

“I hear that. People didn’t lock their doors half the time around here when I was a kid. Times change. Another damn shame when it comes to things like this. You said they busted out a pane in the back door? I’ll get somebody to replace that for you.”

“I’m going to order a new door, and a lock set for that and the front. The plywood’s okay for now. You’ll need to take down that drywall rather than try to repair it. There’s enough on site.”

“Sure there is. Anything else I can do, Cilla, you just let me know. Got the other bathroom up here, too?”

“Yeah. Got it good.”

“I guess we’d better take a look.”

They assessed damage, talked repairs. As she gathered her lists and checked on other areas of the project, crew offered sympathy, asked questions, expressed outrage and disgust. By the time she left, her ears were ringing from it, and with the more comforting sound of whirling drills and buzzing saws.

INEVITABLY, SHE HAD to explain to her usual consultant at the flooring center why she needed to buy considerable square footage of tile she’d already bought, as well as grout. It slowed the process, but Cilla supposed that, too, was inevitable. Even in L.A. she’d formed relationships with specific tile guys, lumber guys, appliance guys. It went with the trade, and good relationships paid off the time spent.

She ran into the same situation at the home supply store when she stopped in to buy the replacement sink and other items on her list. While she waited for the clerk to check stock, she cruised the faucets. Chrome, nickel, brass, copper. Brushed, satin, antiqued. Single handles, vessel style. Matching towel bars, robe hooks.

All the shapes, the textures, the tones, gave her the same rush of pleasure others might find browsing the glittery offerings in Tiffany’s.

Copper. Maybe she’d go with copper on her office bath. With a stone vessel-style sink and-

“Cilla?”

She broke off from her visualization to see Tom Morrow and Buddy coming down the aisle. “I thought that was you,” Tom said. “Buying or deciding?”

“Both, actually.”

“Same for me. I’m outfitting a spec out. Usually my bath and kitchen designer takes care of this, but she’s out on maternity leave. Plus, I like to get my hand in occasionally. You know how it is.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Got my consultant here,” he said with a wink. “Buddy’ll make sure I don’t go buying a center set when I need a wide, or vice versa.”

“You’ve done it before,” Buddy pointed out.

"And you never let me forget. I heard you ladies had a fine time on Saturday.”

“We did.”

“Cathy always says shopping’s her hobby. I’ve got golf, she’s got the mall and the outlets.”

“Don’t see the point in either.” Buddy shook his head. “Fishing’s got a point.”

“Excuse me.” The clerk strode up. “Everything’s in stock, Ms. McGowan. You got the last we have of the wall-hung sink.”

“What wall-hung?” Buddy wanted to know. “I’m plumbing for a pedestal in the third bath.”

“It’s a replacement. The sink you installed in the second-floor guest bath was damaged.”

If he’d been a rooster, Cilla thought, Buddy’s cockscomb would have quivered.

“How the hell did that happen? Nothing wrong with it when I put it in.”

Okay, Cilla thought, one more time. “I had a break-in Saturday. Some vandalism.”

“My God! Were you hurt?” Tom demanded.

“No, I wasn’t home. I was out with your wife and Patty and Angie.”

“They busted up a sink?” Buddy pulled off his cap to scratch his head. “What the hell for?”

“I couldn’t say. But both second-floor baths we’d finished took a hit. They used my sledge and pickax from the look of it, smashed a lot of tile, one of the walls, the sink, some glass block.”

“This is terrible. It’s not the sort of thing that happens around here. The police-”

“Are doing what they can,” she said to Tom. “So they tell me, anyway.” Since she wanted the word spread, she kept going. “I’ll be installing a security system.”

“Can’t blame you. I’m so sorry to hear this, Cilla.”

“Wouldn’t want my daughter living out that far on her own.” Buddy shrugged. “Just saying. Especially after what happened to Steve.”

“Bad things happen everywhere. I’ve got to get my supplies and finish my run. Good luck with the spec.”

“Cilla, if there’s anything we can do, Cathy or I, you just give a call. We’re a growing area, but that doesn’t mean we don’t take care of our own.”

“Thank you.”

It warmed her, and stayed warm inside her, even as her supplies were loaded, even as she drove away.

Our own.

EIGHTEEN

Cilla gave herself the pleasure of removing the old, battered doors with their worn or missing weather stripping, and installing their replacements. She salvaged the old, stored them in the barn.

You just never knew, to her mind, when you might need an old door.

She’d opted for mahogany-damn the budget-in an elegantly simple Craftman style. The three-over-three seeded glass panes on the entrance door would let in the light, and still afford some privacy.

Sucker fit, she thought with pleasure after one of the laborers helped her haul it into position. Fit like a fricking dream. She waited until she was alone to stroke her hands over the wood and purr, “Hello, gorgeous. You’re all mine now.” Humming under her breath, she went to work on the lock set.

She’d gone with the oil-rubbed bronze she’d chosen for other areas of the house and, as she began the install on the lock set, decided she’d made the perfect choice. The dark tones of the bronze showed off well against the subtle red hues in the mahogany.

“That’s a nice-looking door.”

She looked over her shoulder to see her father stepping out of his car. Cilla was so used to seeing him in what she thought of as his teacher clothes, it took her a minute to adjust her brain to the jeans, T-shirt and ball cap he wore.

“Curb appeal,” she called back.

“You’re certainly getting that.” He paused to look over the front lawns. The grass had been neatly mowed, with its bare patches resowed and the tender new shoots protected by a thin layer of straw. The plantings had begun there, too, with young azaleas and rhododendrons, a clutch of hydrangeas already heading up, a slim red maple with its leaves glowing in the sunlight.

“Still got some work, and I won’t put in the flower beds until next spring, unless I manage to put in some fall stuff. But it’s coming along.”

“You’ve done an amazing job so far.” He joined her on the veranda, close enough she caught a whiff of what she thought might be Irish Spring. He studied the door, the lock set. “That looks sturdy. I’m glad to see it. What about the security system? Word gets around,” he added when she raised her eyebrows.

“I was hoping that word would. It might be as much of a deterrent as the system itself. Which went in yesterday.”

His hazel eyes tracked to hers, solemnly. “I wish you’d called me, Cilla, about the vandalism.”

“Nothing you could’ve done about it. Give me a second here, I’m nearly done.” She whirled the last screws in place, then set aside the cordless screwdriver before admiring the result. “Yeah, it looks good. I almost went with a plate style, but thought it would look too heavy. This is better. ” She opened and closed the door a couple of times. “Good. I’m using the same style on the back entry, but decided to go with an atrium on… sorry. You couldn’t possibly be interested.”

“I am. I’m interested in what you’re doing.”

A little surprised by the hurt in his tone, she turned to give him her full attention. “I just meant the odd details-knob or lever style, sliding, swinging, luminary. Do you want to come in?” She opened the door again. “It’s noisy, but it’s cooler.”

“Cilla, what can I do?”

“I… Look, I’m sorry.” God, she was lousy at this father-daughter thing. How could she be otherwise? “I didn’t mean to imply you don’t care what I’m doing.”

“Cilla.” Gavin closed the door again to block off the noise from inside. “What can I do to help you?”

She felt guilty, and a little panicked, as her mind went blank. “Help me with what?”

He let out a sigh, shoved his hands into his pockets. “I’m not a do-it-yourselfer, but I can hammer a nail or put in a screw. I can fetch and carry. I can make iced tea or go pick up sandwiches. I can use a broom.”

“You… want to work on the house?”

“School’s out for the summer, and I didn’t take on any summer classes. I have some time to help, and I’d like to help.”

“Well… why?”

“I’m aware you have plenty of people, people who know what they’re doing, that you’re paying to do it. But, I’ve never done anything for you. I sent child support. I was legally obligated to. I hope you know, or can believe, I’d have sent it without that obligation. I didn’t teach you to ride a bike, or to drive a car. I never put toys together for you on Christmas Eve or your birthday-or the few times I did you were too young to possibly remember. I never helped you with your homework or lay in bed waiting for you to come home from a date so I could sleep. I never did any of those things for you, or hundreds more. So I’d like to do something for you now. Something tangible. If you’ll let me.”

Her heart fluttered, the oddest combination of pleasure and distress. It seemed vital she think of something, the right something, and her mind went on a desperate scavenger hunt. “Ah. Ever done any painting?”

She watched the tension in his face melt into a delighted smile. “As a matter of fact, I’m an excellent painter. Do you want references?”

She smiled back at him. “I’ll give you a trial run. Follow me.”

She led him in and through to the living room. She hadn’t scheduled painting this area quite yet, but there was no reason against it. “The plasterwork’s done, and I’ve removed the trim. Had to. Some of it needed to be stripped, and that’s done. I’m still working on making what I need to replicate and replace damaged areas, then I’ll stain and seal. Anyway, you won’t have to tape or cut in around trim. Oh, and don’t worry about the brick on the fireplace, either. I’m going to cover that with granite. Or marble. There’s no work going on in this area right now, so you won’t be in anyone’s way, and they shouldn’t be in yours. We can drop-cloth the floors and the supplies stored here.”

She set her fists on her hips. “Got your stepladder, your pans, rollers, brushes right over there. Primer’s in those ten-gallon cans, and marked. Finish paint’s labeled with the L.R. for living room. I hit a sale on Duron, so I bought it in advance. You won’t get past starting the primer anyway.”

She ran through her mental checklist. “So… do you want me to help you set up?”

“I can handle it.”

“Okay. Listen, it’s a big job, so knock off anytime you get tired of it. I’m going to be working on the back door if you need anything meanwhile. ”

“Go ahead. I’ll be fine.”

“Okay. Ah… I’ll check in after I’m done with the kitchen door.”

She pulled away twice during the process of replacing the door-once for the sheer pleasure of walking up and down her newly completed outside stairs. They required staining, sealing, and the doorway cut into what would be her office suite would be blocked with plywood until she installed that door. But the stairs themselves delighted her so much she executed an impromptu dance number on the way down, to the applause and whistles of the crew.

Her father and the painting slipped her mind for over three hours. With twin pangs of guilt and concern, she hurried into the living room, fully expecting to see a weekend DIYer’s amateurish mess. Instead, she saw a competently dropped area, a primed ceiling and two primed walls.

And her father, whistling a cheery tune, as he rolled primer on the next wall.

“You’re hired,” she said from behind him.

He lowered the roller, chuckled, turned. “Will work for lemonade.” He picked up a tall glass. “I got some out of the kitchen. And caught your act.”

“Sorry?”

“Your Ginger Rogers down the stairs. Outside. You looked so happy.”

“I am. The pitch, the landings, the switchbacks. An engineering feat, brought to you by Cilla McGowan and Matt Brewster.”

“I forgot you could dance like that. I haven’t seen you dance since… You were still a teenager when I came to your concert in D.C. I remember coming backstage before curtain. You were white as a sheet.”

“Stage fright. I hated that concert series. I hated performing.”

“You just did.”

“Perform? No, there’s performing and there’s playing around. That was playing around. Which you’re obviously not, here. This is a really good job. And you?” She walked over for a closer inspection-and damn if she couldn’t still smell the soap on him. “You barely have a dot of paint on you.”

“Years of experience, between painting sets at school and Patty’s redecorating habit. It looks so different in here,” he added. “With the doorway there widened, the way it changes the shape of the room and opens it.”

“Too different?”

“No, honey. Homes are meant to change, to reflect the people who live in them. And I think you’ll understand what I mean when I say she’s still here. Janet’s still here.” He touched her shoulder, then just left his hand there, connecting them. “So are my grandparents, my father. Even me, a little. What I see here is a revival.”

“Want to see where the stairs lead? My garret?”

“I’d like that.”

She got a kick out of showing him around, seeing his interest in her design and plans for her office. It surprised her to realize his approval brought her such satisfaction. In the way, she supposed, it was satisfying to show off to someone ready to be impressed.

“So you’ll keep working on houses,” he said as they started down the unfinished attic steps.

“That’s the plan. Rehabbing either for myself to flip, or for clients. Remodeling. Possibly doing some consulting. It hinges on getting my contractor’s license. I can do a lot without it, but with it, I can do more.”

“How do you go about getting a license?”

“I take the test for it tomorrow.” She held up both hands, fingers crossed.

“Tomorrow? Why aren’t you studying? says the teacher.”

“Believe me, I have. Studied my brains out, took the sample test on-line. Twice.” She paused by the guest bath. “This room’s finished-for the second time.”

“This is one that was vandalized?”

“Yeah. You’d never know it,” she said, crouching down to run her fingers over the newly laid tile. “I guess that’s what counts.”

“What counts is you weren’t hurt. When I think about what happened to Steve…”

“He’s doing good. I talked to him yesterday. His physical therapy’s going well, which may in part be due to the fact that the therapist is a babe. Do you think Hennessy could have done it?” she asked on impulse. “Is he capable, physically, character-wise?”

“I don’t like to think so, when it comes to his character. But the fact is, he’s never stopped hating.”After a pause, Gavin let out a sigh. “I’d have to say he hates more now than he did when it happened. Physically? Well, he’s a tough old bird.”

“I want to talk to him, get a sense. I just haven’t decided how to approach it. On the other hand, if it was him, I’m not sure that wouldn’t get him even more riled up. I haven’t had any problems for nearly two weeks now. I’d like to keep it that way.”

“He’s been out of town for a few days. He and his wife are visiting her sister. Up in Vermont, I think it is. My neighbor’s boy mows their lawn,” Gavin explained.

Convenient, she thought as her father went back to painting.

And since the living area was getting painted, she decided to set up her tools outside and get to work on the trim.

IN THE MORNING, Cilla decided she’d been foolish and shortsighted to bar Ford from the house the night before. She hadn’t wanted any distractions while she reviewed her test manual, and had planned on an early night and a solid eight hours’ sleep.

Instead she’d obsessed about the test, pacing the house, second-guessing herself. When she slept, she tossed and turned with anxiety dreams.

As a result she woke tense, edgy and half sick with nerves. She forced herself to eat half a bagel, then wished she hadn’t as even that churned uneasily in her stomach.

She checked the contents of her bag three times to make absolutely certain it held everything she could possibly need, then left the house a full thirty minutes early, just in case she ran into traffic or got lost. Couldn’t find a parking place, she added as she locked the front door. Was abducted by aliens.

“Knock it off, knock it off,” she mumbled as she strode to her pickup. It wasn’t as if the fate of the damn world rested on her test score.

Just hers, she thought. Just her entire future.

She could wait. She could take the test down the road, wait just a little longer. After she’d finished the house. After she’d settled in. After…

Stage fright, she thought with a sigh. Performance anxiety and fear of failure all wrapped up in a slippery ribbon. With her stomach knotted, she opened the truck door.

She made a sound that was part laugh, part awww.

The sketch lay on the seat, where, she supposed, Ford had put it sometime the night before.

She stood in work boots, a tool belt slung from her hips like a holster. As if she’d drawn them from it, she held a nail gun in one hand, a measuring tape in the other. Around her were stacks of lumber, coils of wire, piles of brick. Safety goggles dangled from a strap around her neck, and work gloves peeked out of the pocket of her carpenter pants. Her face carried a determined, almost arrogant expression.

Below her feet, the caption read:

THE AMAZING, THE INCREDIBLE CONTRACTOR GIRL

“You don’t miss a trick, do you?” she said aloud.

She looked across the road, blew a kiss to where she imagined he lay sleeping. When she climbed into the truck and turned on the engine, all the knots had unraveled.

With the sketch riding on the seat beside her, Cilla turned on the music and drove toward her future, singing.

FORD SETTLED on his front veranda with his laptop, his sketchbook, a pitcher of iced tea and a bag of Doritos to share with Spock. He couldn’t be sure when Cilla might make it back. The drive to and from Richmond was a bitch even without rush hour factored in. Added to it, he couldn’t be sure how long the exam ran, or what she might do after to wind down.

So around two in the afternoon, he stationed himself where he couldn’t miss her return and kept himself busy. He sent and answered e-mail, checked in with the blogs and boards he usually frequented. He did a little updating on his own website.

He’d neglected his Internet community for the last week or two, being preoccupied with a certain lanky blonde. Hooking back in entertained him for a solid two hours before he noticed at least some of the crew across the road were knocking off for the day.

Matt pulled out, swung to Ford’s side of the road, then leaned out the window. “Checking the porn sites?”

“Day and night. How’s it going over there?”

“It’s going. Finished insulating the attic today. Fucking miserable job. Yeah, hey, Spock, how’s it going,” he added when the dog gave a single, deep-throated, how-about-me bark. “I’m going home and diving into a cold beer. You coming by for burgers and dogs on the Fourth?”

“Wouldn’t miss it. I’ll be bringing your boss.”

“I thought that’s how it was. Nice work, dog. Not you,” he added, pointing at Spock. “Don’t know what she sees in you, but I guess she settled since she knows I’m married.”

“Yeah, that was it. She had to channel her sexual frustration somewhere. ”

“You can thank me later.” With a grin and a toot of the horn, Matt pulled out.

Ford poured another glass of tea and traded his laptop for his sketch pad. He wasn’t yet satisfied with his image of his villain. He’d based Devon/ Devino predominantly on his tenth-grade algebra teacher, but turns in his original story line made him think he wanted something slightly more… elegant. Cold, dignified evil played better. He played around with various face types hoping one jumped out and said: Pick me!

When none did, he considered a cold beer. Then forgot the work and the beer when Cilla’s truck pulled into his drive.

He knew before she got out of the truck. It didn’t matter that her eyes were shielded by sunglasses. The grin said it all. He headed down, several paces behind a happy Spock, as she got out of the truck, then braced himself as she took a running leap into his arms.

“I’m going to take a wild guess. You passed.”

“I killed!” Laughing, she bowed back recklessly so he had to shift, brace his legs, or drop her on her head. “For the first time in my life, I kicked exam ass. I kicked its ass down the street, across county lines and out of the goddamn state. Woo!”

She threw her arms into the air, then around his neck. “I am Contractor Girl! Thank you.” She kissed him hard enough to vibrate his teeth. “Thank you. Thank you. I was a nervous, quivering mess until I saw that sketch. It just gave me such a high. It really did.” She kissed him again. “I’m going to have it framed. It’s the first thing I’m going to hang in my office. My licensed-contractor’s office.”

“Congratulations.” He thought he’d known just how much the license meant to her. And realized he hadn’t even been close. “We have to celebrate.”

“I’ve got that covered. I bought stuff.” She jumped down, then scooped a thrilled Spock into her arms and covered his big head with kisses. Setting him down, she ran back to her truck. “French bread, caviar, a roasted chicken with trimmings, stuff, stuff, stuff, complete with little strawberry shortcakes and champagne. It’s all on ice.”

She started to muscle out a cooler, before he nudged her aside.

“God, the traffic was a bitch. I thought I’d never get here. Let’s have a picnic. Let’s have a celebration picnic out back and dance naked on the grass.”

The stuff she’d bought had to weigh a good fifty pounds, he thought, but looking at the way she just shone made it seem weightless. “It’s like you read my mind.”

HE DUG UP a blanket and lit a trio of bamboo torchères to add atmosphere, and discourage bugs. By the time Cilla spread out the feast, half the blanket was covered.

Spock and his bear contented themselves with a ratty towel and a bowl of dog food.

“Caviar, goat cheese, champagne.” Ford sat on the blanket. “My usual picnic involves a bucket of chicken, a tub of potato salad and beer.”

“You can take the girl out of Hollywood.” She began to gather a selection for a plate.

“What is that?”

“It’s a blini, for the caviar. A dollop of crème fraîche, a layer of beluga, and… You’ve never had this before?” she said when she read his expression.

“Can’t say I have.”

“You fear it.”

“Fear is a strong word. I have concerns. Doesn’t caviar come from-”

“Don’t think about it, just eat.” She held the loaded blini to his lips. “Open up, you coward.”

He winced a little but bit in. The combination of flavors-salty, smooth, mildly sweet-hit his taste buds. "Okay, better than I expected. Where’s yours?”

She laughed and fixed another.

“How do you plan to set up?” he asked as they ate. “Your business.”

“Mmm.” She washed down caviar with champagne. “The Little Farm’s a springboard. It gets attention, just because of what it is. The better job I do there, the more chance people see I know what I’m doing. And the subs I’ve hired talk about it, and about me. I need to build on word of mouth. I’ll have to advertise, make it known I’m in business. Use connections. Brian to Brian’s father, for instance. God, this chicken is great. There are two houses within twelve miles up for sale. Serious fixer-uppers that I think are a little overpriced for the area and their conditions. I’m keeping my eye on them. I may make a lowball offer on one of them, see where it goes.”

“Before you finish here?”

“Yeah. Figure, even if I came to terms with the seller straight off, there’d be thirty to ninety days for settlement. I’d push for the ninety. That’d put me into the fall before I have to start outlaying any cash. And that’s seven, eight months into the Little Farm. I juggle the jobs, and the subs, work out a realistic time frame and budget. Flip the house in, we’ll say, twelve weeks, keeping the price realistic.”

She loaded another blini for both of them. “Greed and not knowing your market’s what can kill a flip just as quick as finding out too late the foundation’s cracked or the house is sitting in a sinkhole.”

“How much would you look to make?”

“On the house I’m looking at? With the price I’d be willing to pay, the budget I’d project, the resale projection in this market?” She bit into the blini while she calculated. “After expenses, I’d look for about forty thousand.”

His eyebrows shot up. “Forty thousand, in three months?”

“I’d hope for forty-five, but thirty-five would do it.”

“Nice.” She was right about the chicken, too. “What if I bought the other one? Hired you?”

“Well, Jesus, Ford, you haven’t even seen it.”

“You have. And you know what you’re doing-about houses and picnics. I could use an investment, and this has the advantage of a fun factor. Plus, I could be your first client.”

“You need to at least look at the property, calculate how much you’re willing to invest, how long you can let that investment ride.” She lifted her champagne glass, gestured with it like a warning. “And how much you can afford to lose, because real estate and flipping are risks.”

“So’s the stock market. Can you handle both houses?”

She took a drink. “Yeah, I could, but-”

“Let’s try this. Figure out a time when you can go through it with me, and we’ll talk about the potential, the possibilities, your fee and other practical matters.”

“Okay. Okay. As long as we both understand that once you’ve seen the property and we’ve gone over those projections, and you tell me you’d rather buy a fistful of lottery tickets than that dump, no harm, no foul.”

“Understood and agreed. Now, with the business portion of tonight’s program out of the way.” He leaned over to kiss her. “Do you have any plans for the Fourth?”

“The fourth what? Blini?”

“No, Cilla. Of July. You know, hot dogs, apple pie, fireworks.”

"Oh. No.” My God, she thought. It was nearly July. "Where do people go to watch fireworks around here?”

“There are a few options. But this is the great state of Virginia. We set off our own.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen the signs. You all are crazy.”

“Be that as it may, Matt’s having a cookout. It’s a short walk from his place to the park where the Roritan band plays Sousa marches, there’s the world-famous pie-eating contest, won four years running by Big John Porter, and other various slices of Americana before the fireworks display. Wanna be my date?”

“Yes, I would.” She leaned over the picnic debris, linked her arms around his neck. “Ford?”

“Yeah.”

“If I eat another bite of anything, I’m going to be sick. So…” She leaped up, grabbed his hands. “Let’s dance.”

“About that. My plans were to lie here like a dissipated Roman soldier and watch you dance.”

“No, you don’t. Up, up, up!”

“There’s just one problem. I don’t dance.”

“Everybody dances. Even Spock.”

“Not really. Well, yes, he does,” Ford admitted as Spock got up to demonstrate. “I don’t. Did you ever catch Seinfeld? The TV deal.”

“Of course.”

“Did you see the one where Elaine’s at this office party, and to get people up to dance, she starts it off?”

“Oh yeah.” The scene popped straight into her mind, made her laugh. “That was bad.”

“I make Elaine look like Jennifer Lopez.”

“You can’t be that bad. I refuse to believe it. Come on, show me.”

Those gold-rimmed eyes showed actual pain. “If I show you, you’ll never have sex with me again.”

“Absolutely false. Show me your moves, Sawyer.”

“I have no moves in this arena.” But with a heavy sigh, he rose.

“Just a little boogie,” she suggested. She moved her hips, her shoulders, her feet. Obviously, to Ford’s mind, to some well-oiled internal engine. Clutching the bear between his paws, Spock gurgled his approval.

“You asked for it,” he muttered.

He moved, and could swear he heard rusty gears with mismatched teeth grind and shriek. He looked like the Tin Man of Oz, before the oil can.

“Well, that’s not… Okay, that’s really bad.” She struggled to swallow a snort of laughter, but didn’t quite succeed. The disgusted look he shot her had her holding up her hands and stepping quickly to him. “Wait, wait. Sorry. I can teach you.”

This time, Spock snorted.

“Others have tried; all have failed. I have no rhythm. I am rhythmically impaired. I’ve learned to live with it.”

“Bull. Anyone who has your kind of moves horizontally can have them vertically. Here.” She took his hands, set them on her hips, then put hers on his. “It starts here. This isn’t a structured sort of thing, like a waltz or quickstep. It’s just moving. A little hip action. No, unlock your knees, it’s not a goose step, either. Just left, right, left. Shift your weight to the left, not just your hip.”

“I look and feel like a spastic robot.”

“You don’t.” She shot Spock a warning glance, and the dog turned his head away. “Relax. Now, keep the hips going, but put your hands on my shoulders. That’s it. Feel my shoulders, just a little up and down. Feel that, let that go up your arms, into your shoulders. Just up and down. Don’t stiffen up, keep those knees loose. There you go, there you are. You’re dancing.”

“This isn’t dancing.”

“It is.” She put her hands on his shoulders, then slid them down his arms until they held hands. “And now you’re dancing with me.”

“I’m standing like an idiot in one spot.”

“We’ll worry about the feet later. We’re starting slow, and smooth. It would even be sexy if you took that pained expression off your face. Don’t stop!”

She did a quick inward spin so her back pressed into him, and lifted an arm to stroke it down his cheek.

“Oh, well, if this is dancing.”

Laughing, she spun back again so they were front to front. “Sway. A little more.” She wrapped her arms around his neck, lifted her lips to a breath from his. “Nice.”

He closed the distance, sliding slowly into the kiss while his hands ran down her back to her hips.

“Feels like dancing to me,” she whispered.

He surfaced to see he was facing in the opposite direction, and several feet away from where they’d started. “How’d that happen?”

“You let it happen. You stopped thinking about it.”

“So, I can dance, as long as it’s with you.”

“Just one more thing.” She danced back with a provocative rock of hips, and began unbuttoning her shirt.

“Whoa.”

“I believe the celebration called for naked dancing.”

He glanced in the direction of his closest neighbors. Dusk had fallen, but torches tossed out light. He glanced down at his dog, who sat, head cocked, obviously fascinated.

“Maybe we should move that event inside.”

She shook her head, and her blouse slid down with the movement of her shoulders. “In the grass.”

“Ah, Mrs. Berkowitz-”

“Shouldn’t spy on her neighbor, even if she could see through that big black walnut tree.” Cilla unhooked her pants, kicked off her shoes, which Spock retrieved and carried territorially to his ratty towel. “And when we’ve finished dancing naked, there’s something else I’m going to do on the grass.”

“What?”

“I’m going to give you the ride of your life.” She stepped out of her pants, continued to sway, turn as she ran her hands over her own body, marginally covered now in two tiny white swatches.

Ford forgot the dog, the shoes, the neighbors. He watched, all of the blood draining out of his head as she flicked open the front hook, opened her bra inch by delicious inch. The torchlight glimmered gold over her skin, danced in her eyes like sun on a pure blue sea.

When the bra floated to the ground, she ran a fingertip under, just under the low-riding waist of her panties. “You’re still dressed. Don’t you want to dance with me?”

“Yeah. Oh yeah. Can I just say something first?”

She trailed her fingers down her breasts, smiled at him. “Go ahead.”

“Two things, actually. Oh Christ,” he managed when she lifted her hair, let it fall over those glowing shoulders. “You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. And at this moment? I’m the luckiest man in the known universe.”

“You’re about to get luckier.” Tossing her hair back, she started toward him. She pressed her naked body to his. “Now, dance with me.”

NINETEEN

On the morning of the Fourth, Ford rolled out of Cilla’s bed. It didn’t surprise him she was already up, even on a holiday. He considered it his duty as an American to sleep in, but apparently she didn’t share his staunch sense of patriotism. He groped his way downstairs, and followed the now familiar sound of whoosh-bang! to the living room.

She stood on a ladder shooting nails into window trim.

“You’re working.” It was an accusation.

She glanced back. “A little. I wanted to see how this trim looks against the paint since my father finished it. I still can’t believe he painted all this, and so well. If he didn’t have a job, I’d hire him.”

“Is there coffee?”

“Yes, there is. Spock’s out back. He fears the nail gun.”

“Minute.”

He heard more whoosh-banging behind him as he dragged himself into the kitchen. The coffeemaker stood on a small square of counter as yet undemoed. Shielding his eyes from the sunlight blasting through the windows, he found a mug, poured. After the first couple sips, the light seemed more pleasant, and less like an alien weapon designed to blind all humankind.

He drank half the mug standing where he was, and after topping it off felt mostly awake. Carrying it with him, he walked back to the living room and watched her work for a few minutes while the caffeine wove its magic.

She stood on the floor now, fitting the diagonal edges of the bottom piece to the sides she’d already nailed up. In what struck him as wizard-fast time, the dark, wide trim framed the window.

She set the gun down, took several steps back. He heard her whisper, “Yes, exactly.”

“It looks good. What did you do with what was there before?”

“This is what was there before, or mostly. I had to build the sill to match because it was damaged.”

“I thought it was white.”

“Because some idiot along the way slapped white paint on this gorgeous walnut. I stripped it. A little planing, a little stain and a couple coats of poly, and it’s back to its original state.”

“Huh. Well, it looks good. I didn’t get the paint color until now. Thought it looked a little dull. But it looks warmer against the wood. Like, ah, a forest in the fog.”

“It’s called Shenandoah. It just seemed right. When you look out the windows in this room, it’s the mountains, the sky, the trees. It’s just right.” She walked back, picked up another piece of trim.

“You’re still working.”

“We don’t have to leave for…” She looked at her watch, calculated. “About ninety minutes. I can get some of this trim run before I have to get ready.”

“Okay. I’m taking the coffee and my dog and heading across the road. I’ll pick you up in an hour and a half.”

“Great. But you might want to put some pants on first.”

He glanced down at his boxers. “Right. I’m going to put on pants, possibly shoes, take the coffee and so on.”

“I’ll be ready.”

HE DIDN’T EXPECT her to be ready. Not because she was female, but because he knew what often happened when he himself got lost in the work. If he didn’t set an alarm, being late, or in fact missing an appointment or event altogether, was the norm.

So it surprised him when she came out of the house even as he stopped in front of it. And her appearance left him momentarily speechless.

She’d left her hair down, as she rarely did, so it spilled dark, aged gold, down her back. She wore a dress of bright red swirled against white, with a kind of thin and floaty skirt and thin straps that set off those strong shoulders.

With his paws planted on the window, Spock leaned out. Ford translated the series of sounds the dog made as the canine version of a wolf whistle.

He got out of the car-he just had to-and said, “Wow.”

“You like? Check this.” She did a turn, giving him a chance to admire the low dip of the back with the flirt of crisscrossing ties.

“And again, wow. I’ve never seen you in a dress before, and this one pulls out some stops.”

Instant distress ran across her face. “It’s too much, too fussy for a backyard cookout. I can change in five minutes.”

“First, over my dead body. Second, ‘fussy’ is the last word I’d use. It’s great. You look all summery sexy, ice-cream-sundae cool. Only now I wish I’d thought to take you out where you’d wear dresses. I feel a fancy dinner coming on.”

“I prefer backyard picnics.”

“They are permanently top of my list.”

SHE’D EXPECTED IT to be awkward initially, the introductions, the mixing. But she knew so many of the people there that it was as easy and pleasant as Matt’s backyard with its generous deck and smoking grill.

Josie, Matt’s pretty and very pregnant wife, snatched Cilla away from Ford almost immediately. “Here.” Josie handed Ford a beer. “Go away. Wine, beer, soft?” she asked Cilla.

“Ah, I’ll start with soft.”

“Try the lemonade, it’s great. Then I’m going to steal you for ten minutes over there in the shade. I’d say walk this way, but waddling’s unattractive unless you’re eight months pregnant. I’ve been dying to meet you.”

“You’re welcome to come by the house, anytime.”

“I nearly have a couple times, but with this.” She patted her belly as they walked. “And that.” And pointed toward a pack of kids on a swing set. “The little guy in the blue shorts and red shirt squeezing Spock in mutual adoration is mine. So between this and that, and a part-time job, I haven’t made it by. Either to welcome you to the area, or to poke my nose in to see what’s going on. Which Matt claims is pretty great.”

“He’s terrific to work with. He’s very talented.”

“I know. I met him when my family moved here. I was seventeen and very resentful that my father’s work dragged me away from Charlotte and my friends. My life was over, of course. Until the following summer when my parents hired a local contractor to put an addition on the house, and there was a young, handsome carpenter on the crew. It took me four years,” she said with a wink, “but I landed him.”

She sat with a long, heartfelt sigh.

“I’ll get this out of the way. I adored Katie. I had a Katie doll. In fact, I still do. It’s stored away for this one.” She ran a gentle circle over her belly. “We’re having a girl this time. I’ve seen most if not all of your grandmother’s movies and have Barn Dance on DVD. I hope we come to like each other because you’re seeing Ford and I love him. In fact, Matt knows if I ever get tired of him and decide to ditch him, I’m going after Ford.”

Cilla sipped her lemonade. “I think I already like you.”

IN THE HEAVY, drowsing heat, people sought out the shade of deck umbrellas or gathered at tables under the spread of trees. Seemingly unaffected by spiraling temperatures and thickening humidity, kids clambered over the swing set or raced around the yard like puppies with inexhaustible energy. Cilla calculated that Matt’s big yard, sturdy deck and pretty two-story Colonial held nearly a hundred people spanning about five generations.

She sat with Ford, Brian and a clutch of others at one of the picnic tables, plates loaded with burgers, hot dogs, a wide variety of summer salads. From where she sat, she could see her father, Patty and Ford’s parents talking and eating together on the deck. As she watched, Patty laughed, laid a hand on Gavin’s cheek and rubbed. He took his wife’s hand, kissed her knuckles lightly as the conversation continued.

It struck, a dull blade of envy and its keener edge of understanding. They loved each other. She’d known it, of course, on some level. But she saw it now, in the absent gestures she imagined neither of them would remember, the steady and simple love. Not just habit or contentment or duty, not even the bonds of-how long had they been together? she wondered. Twenty-three, twenty-four years? No, not even the bonds of half a lifetime.

They’d beaten the odds, won the prize.

Angie walked by-so young, fresh, pretty-with the gangly guy in baggy shorts she’d introduced to Cilla as Zach. Angie stopped, and for a moment Cilla was stunned to realize how much she wished she was close enough to hear the quick, animated conversation. Then with her hand resting on her mother’s shoulder, Angie leaned down to kiss her father’s head before moving on.

That said it all, Cilla decided. They were a unit. Angie would go back to college in the fall. She might move a thousand miles away at any point in her life. And still, they would always be a unit.

Deliberately, she looked away.

“I think I’ll get a beer,” she said to Ford. “Do you want one?”

“No, I’m good. I’ll get it for you.”

She nudged him back as he started to rise. “I can get it.”

She wandered off to the huge galvanized bucket filled with ice and bottles and cans. She didn’t particularly want a beer, but figured she was stuck now. She fished one out and, thinking of it as a prop, crossed over to where Matt manned the grill.

“Do you ever get a break?” she asked him.

“Had a couple. People come and go all day, that’s how it is at these things. Gotta keep it smoking.”

His little boy raced up, wrapped his arms around Matt’s leg, chattering in a toddlerese Cilla was incapable of interpreting. Matt, however, appeared to be fluent. “Let’s see the proof.”

Eyes wide, the boy pulled up his shirt to expose his belly. Matt poked at it, nodding. “Okay then, go tell Grandma.”

When the boy raced off again, Matt caught Cilla’s puzzled expression. “He said he finished his hot dog and could he have a big, giant piece of Grandma’s cake.”

“I didn’t realize you were bilingual.”

“I have many skills.” As if to prove it, he flipped a trio of burgers expertly. “Speaking of skills, Ford told me you ran some of the living room trim this morning.”

“Yeah. It looks, if I must say-and I do-freaking awesome. Is that your shop?” She gestured with the beer to the cedar building at the rear of the property.

“Yeah. Want to see?”

“You know I do, but we’ll take the tour another time.”

“Where are you going to put yours?”

“Can’t decide. I’m debating between putting up something from scratch or refitting part of the existing barn. The barn option’s more practical.”

“But it sure is fun to build from the ground up.”

“I never have, so it’s tempting. How many square feet do you figure?” she continued, and fell into the comfortable, familiar rhythm of shoptalk.

As evening drifted in, people began the short pilgrimage to the park. They crowded the quiet side street, carting lawn chairs, coolers, blankets, babies and toddlers. As they approached, the bright, brassy sound of horns welcomed them.

“Sousa marches,” Ford said, “as advertised.” He shifted the pair of folding chairs he had under his arm while Cilla led Spock on a leash. “You having fun?”

“Yes. Matt and Josie put on quite a cookout.”

“You looked a little lost back there, just for a couple minutes.”

“Did I?”

“When we were chowing down. Before you got up to get a beer, and I lost you to Matt and Tool Time Talk.”

“Probably too much pasta salad. I’m having a really good time. It’s my first annual Shenandoah Valley backyard July Fourth extravaganza. So far, it’s great.”

The park spread beneath the mountains, and the mountains were hazed with heat so the air seemed to ripple over them like water. Hundreds of people scattered through the park, sprawling over its greens. Concession stands did a bustling business under the shade of their awnings, in offerings of country ham sandwiches, sloppy joes, funnel cakes, soft drinks. Cilla caught the scents of grease and sugar, grass and sunscreen.

Over loudspeakers came a whine of static, then the echoey announcement that the pie-eating contest would begin in thirty minutes in front of the north pavilion.

“I mentioned the pie-eating contest, right?”

“Yes, and four-time champ Big John Porter.”

“Disgusting. We don’t want to miss it. Let’s grab a square of grass, stake our claim.” Stopping, Ford began to scan. “We need to spread out some, save room for Matt and Josie and Sam. Oh hey, Brian’s already homesteaded. The girl he’s with is Missy.”

“Yes, I met her.”

“You met half the county this afternoon.” He slanted Cilla a look. “Nobody expects you to remember names.”

“Missy Burke, insurance adjuster, divorced, no kids. Right now she’s talking to Tom and Dana Anderson, who own a small art gallery in the Village. And Shanna’s strolling over with Bill-nobody mentioned his last name-a photographer.”

“I stand corrected.”

“Schmoozing used to be a way of life.”

They’d barely set up, exchanged more than a few words with their companions, before Ford dragged her off to the pie-eating contest.

A field of twenty-five contestants sat at the ready, white plastic bibs tied around their necks. They ranged from kids to grandpas, with the smart money on Big-an easy two-fifty big-John Porter.

At the signal, twenty-five faces dropped forward into crust and blueberry filling. A laugh burst straight out of her, drowned away in the shouts and cheers.

“Well, God! That is disgusting.”

“Yet entertaining. Man, he’s going to do it again! Big John!” Ford shouted, and began to chant it. The crowd picked up the rhythm, erupting with applause as Big John lifted his wide, purple-smeared face.

“Undefeated,” Ford said when Porter was pronounced the winner. “The guy can’t be beat. He’s the Superman of pie-eaters. Okay, there’s the raffle in the south pavilion. Let’s go buy some chances on the ugliest, most useless prize.”

They settled, after considerable debate, on a plastic rooster wall clock in vibrant red. Target selected, Ford moved to ticket sales. “Hi, Mrs. Morrow. Raking it in?”

“We’re doing well this year. I smell record breaker. Hello, Cilla. Don’t you look gorgeous? Enjoying yourself?”

“Very much.”

“I’m glad to hear it. I imagine it’s a little tame and countrified compared to the way you usually spend your holiday, but I think we put on a nice event. Now, how much can I squeeze you for? I mean…” Cathy gave an exaggerated flutter of lashes. “How many tickets would you like?”

“Going for twenty.”

“Each,” Cilla said and pulled out a bill of her own.

“That’s what I like to hear!” Cathy counted them off, tore off their stubs. “Good luck. And just in time. We’ll start announcing prizewinners over the loudspeaker starting in about twenty minutes. Ford, if you see your mama, tell her to hunt me up. I want to talk to her about…”

Cilla tuned out the conversation when she saw Hennessy staring at her from the other side of the pavilion. The bitter points of his hate scraped over her skin. Beside him stood a small woman, with tired eyes in a tired face. She tugged at his arm, but he remained rigid.

The heat went out of the day, the light, the color. Hate, Cilla thought, strips away joy. But she wouldn’t turn away from it, refused to allow herself to turn away.

So it was he who turned, who finally bent to his wife’s pleas to stride away from the pavilion across the summer green grass.

She said nothing to Ford. The day would not be spoiled. She soothed the throat the silent encounter had dried to burning with lemonade, wandered through the crowd as the sun began to dip toward the western peaks.

She talked, laughed. She won the rooster wall clock. And the tension drained away. As the sky darkened, Sam climbed up into Ford’s lap to hold a strange, excited conversation.

“How do you know what he’s saying?” Cilla demanded.

“It’s similar to Klingon.”

They announced “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and the crowd rose. Beside her, Ford hitched the boy on his hip. Around her, under an indigo sky, with the flicker of glow tubes and fireflies in the dark, mixed voices swelled. On impulse, out of sudden need, she took Ford’s hand, holding on until the last note died away.

Moments after they took their seats again, the first boom exploded. On the sound Sam leaped out of Ford’s lap and into his father’s. And Spock leaped off the ground and into Ford’s.

Safe, Cilla thought, while lights shattered indigo. Where they knew they’d always be safe.

“GOOD?” Ford asked as they drove down the quiet roads toward home.

“Very good.” Amazingly good, she realized. “Beginning, middle and end.”

“What are you going to do with that thing?” He glanced down at the clock.

“Thing?” Cilla cradled the rooster in her arms. “Is that any way to speak about our child?” She patted it gently. “I’m thinking the barn. I could use a clock out there, and this is pretty appropriate. And I like having a memento from my first annual Fourth. It’ll be way too late in the year for a cookout when my place is done. But after today, I think I’m going to plan a party. A big, sprawling, open-house-type thing. Fire in the hearth, platters of food, flowers and candles. I’d like to see what it’s like to have the house filled with people who aren’t working on it.”

She stretched out her legs. “But tonight, I’m partied and festived out. It’ll be nice to get home to the quiet.”

“Almost there.”

“Want to share the quiet with me?”

“I had that in mind.”

They glanced at each other as he turned into her drive. When he looked back, the headlights flashed over the red maple. “What’s that hanging-”

“My truck!” She reared forward, gripping the dash. “Oh, goddamn it, son of a bitch. Stop! Stop!”

She was already yanking off her seat belt, shoving at the door before he’d come to a complete stop behind her truck.

Loose clumps of broken safety glass hung in the back window. More sparkled in the gravel, crunching under her feet as she ran.

Ford had his phone out, punching in nine-one-one. “Wait. Cilla, just wait.”

“Every window. He smashed every window.”

Cannonball holes gaped in the windshield, erupted into mad spiderwebs of shattered glass. As the cold rage choked her, she saw her headlights had been smashed, her grille battered.

“A lot of good the alarm did me.” She could have wept. She could have screamed. “A lot of damn good.”

“We’re going to go in, check the alarm. I’m going to check the house, then you’re going to stay inside.”

“It’s too much, Ford. It’s just too damn much. Vicious, vindictive, insane. The crazy old bastard needs to be locked up.”

“Hennessy? He’s out of town.”

“He’s not. I saw him tonight, at the park. He’s back. And I swear to God if he could’ve used the bat or pipe or whatever he used here on me then and there, he would have.”

She whirled around, riding on the fury. And saw in the car’s headlights what Ford had seen hanging from a branch of her pretty red maple.

Ford grabbed her arm when she started forward. “Let’s go in. We’ll wait for the cops.”

“No.” She shook off his hand, crossed from gravel to grass.

She’d been six, Cilla recalled, when they marketed that particular doll. She wore her hair-a sunny blond that hadn’t yet darkened-in a pair of ponytails tied with pink ribbons above her ears. The ribbon sashing the pink-and-white gingham dress matched. Lace frothed at the white anklets above the glossy patent leather of her Mary Janes.

Her smile was as sunny as her hair, as sweet as the pink ribbons.

He’d fashioned the noose out of clothesline, she noted. A careful and precise job, so that the doll hung in horrible effigy. Just above the ribbon sash, the cardboard placard read: WHORE.

“Optional accessories-sold separately-for this one included a scale model tea set. It was one of my favorites.” She turned away, picked up a whining, quivering Spock to hug. “You’re right. We should go inside, check the house just in case.”

“Give me the keys. I want you to wait on the veranda. Please.”

A polite word, Cilla thought. How odd to hear the absolute authority under the courtesy. “We know he’s not in there.”

“Then it’s no problem for you to wait out on the veranda.” To close the issue, he simply opened her purse, pulled out the keys.

“Ford-”

“Wait out here.”

The fact that he left the door open told Cilla he had no doubt she’d do what he ordered. With a shrug, she stepped over to the rail, nuzzling Spock before she set him down. No one had been in the house, so there was no harm in waiting. And no point in arguing about it.

Besides, from here she could stare at her truck, brood over the state of it. Wallow in the brooding. She’d felt so damn good the day she bought that truck, so full of anticipation when she loaded it up for her trip east.

The first steps toward her dream.

“Everything’s okay,” Ford said from behind her.

“It’s really not, is it?” Some part of her, some bitchy, miserable part of her, wanted to shrug off the comforting hands he laid on her shoulders. But she stopped herself.

“Do you know how it felt to me today? Like I was in a movie. I don’t mean that in a bad way, just the opposite. Little slices and scenes of a movie I actually wanted to be part of. Not quite there yet, still pretty new on the set. But starting to feel… really feel comfortable in my skin.”

She drew in a long breath, let it out slowly. “And now, this is reality. Broken glass. But the odd thing, the really odd thing. That was me today. It was me. And this? Whatever this is directed at? That’s the image, that’s the mirage. The smoke and mirrors.”

FOREST LAWN CEMETERY

1972

The air sat hot and still while the smog lay over it like a smudge from a sweaty finger. Graves, housing stars and mortals alike, spread, cold slices in the green. And all the flowers, blooming tears shed by the living for the dead.

Janet wore black, the frame within the dress shrunk from grief. A willow stem gone brittle. A wide black hat and dark glasses shaded her face, but that grief poured through the shields.

“They can’t put the stone up yet. The ground settles first. But you can see it, can’t you? His name carved into white marble, the short years I had him. I tried to think of a poem, a few lines to have carved, but how could I think? How could I? So I had them carve ‘Angels Wept.’ Just that. They must have, I think. They must have wept for my Johnnie. Do you see the angels that look down on him, weeping?”

“Yes. I’ve come here before.”

“So you know how it will look. How it will always look. He was the love of my life. All the men, husbands, lovers, they came and went. But he? Johnnie. He came from me.” Every word she spoke was saturated with grief. “I should have… so many things. Can you imagine what it is for a mother to stand over the grave of her child and think, ‘I should have’?”

“No. I’m sorry.”

“So many are. They pour out their sorry to me, and it touches nothing. Later, it helps a little. But these first days, first weeks, nothing touches it. I’ll be there.” She gestured to the ground beside the grave. “I know that even now because I’ve arranged it. Me and Johnnie.”

“And your daughter. My mother.”

“On the other side of me, if she wants it. But she’s young, and she’ll go her own way. She wants… everything. You know that, and I have nothing for her now, not in these first days, first weeks. Nothing to give. But I’ll be there soon enough, in the ground with Johnnie. I don’t know when yet, I don’t know how soon it comes. But I think of making it now. I think of it every day. How can I live when my baby can’t? I think about how. Pills? A razor? Walking into the sea? I can never decide. Grief blurs the mind.”

“What about love?”

“It opens, when it’s real. That’s why it can hurt so much. You wonder if I could have stopped this. If I hadn’t let him run wild. People said I did.”

“I don’t know. Another boy died that night, and the third was paralyzed.”

“Was that my fault?” Janet demanded as bitterness coated the grief. “Was it Johnnie’s? They all got into the car that night, didn’t they? Drunk, stoned. Any one of them could’ve gotten behind the wheel, and it wouldn’t have changed. Yes, yes, I indulged him, and I thank God for it now. Thank God I gave him all I could in the short time he lived. I would do it all again.” She covered her face with her hands, shoulders shaking. “All again.”

“I don’t blame you. How can I? I don’t know. Hennessy blames you.”

“What more does he want? Blood?” She dropped her hands, threw out her arms. And the tears slid down the pale cheeks. “At least he has his son. I have a name carved into white marble.” She dropped to her knees on the ground.

“I think he does want blood. I think he wants mine.”

“He can’t have any more. Tell him that.” Janet lay down beside the grave, ran her hands over it. “There’s been enough blood.”

TWENTY

Cilla told no one. As far as anyone knew, she’d taken the loaner her insurance company arranged to do a supply run.

She pulled up in front of the Hennessy house, on a shady street in Front Royal. The white van sat in the drive, beside a ramp that ran to the front door of the single-story ranch house.

Her heart knocked. She didn’t question if it was nerves or anger. It didn’t matter. She’d do what she needed to do, say what she needed to say.

The door opened before Cilla reached it, and the woman she’d seen the night before came out. Cilla saw her hand tremble on the knob she clutched at her back. “What do you want here?”

“I want to speak to your husband.”

“He’s not home.”

Cilla turned her head to stare deliberately at the van, then looked back into Mrs. Hennessy’s eyes.

“He took my car into the shop. It needed work. Do you think I’m a liar?”

“I don’t know you. You don’t know me. I don’t know your husband any more than he knows me.”

“But you keep sending the police here, to our home. Again this morning,with their questions and suspicions, with your accusations.” Mrs. Hennessy drew in a ragged breath. “I want you to go away. Go away and leave us alone.”

“I’d be happy to. I’d be thrilled to. You tell me what it’s going to take to make him stop.”

“Stop what? He’s got nothing to do with your troubles. Don’t we have enough of our own? Don’t we have enough without you pointing your finger at us?”

She would not back down, Cilla told herself. She would not feel guilty for pushing at this small, frightened woman. “He drives by my home almost every day. And almost every day he parks on the shoulder, sometimes for as long as an hour.”

Mrs. Hennessy gnawed her lips, twisted her fingers together. “It’s not against the law.”

“Trespassing is against the law, cracking a man’s skull open is against the law. Breaking in and destroying private property is against the law.”

“He did none of those things.” The fear remained, but a whip of anger lashed through it. “And you’re a liar if you say different.”

“I’m not a liar, Mrs. Hennessy, and I’m not a whore.”

“I don’t know what you are.”

“You know, unless you’re as crazy as he is, that I’m not responsible for what happened to your son.”

“Don’t talk about my boy. You don’t know my boy. You don’t know anything about it.”

“That’s absolutely right. I don’t. Why would you blame me?”

“I don’t blame you.” Weariness simply covered her. “Why would I blame you for what happened all those terrible years ago? There’s nobody to blame for that. I blame you for bringing the police down on my husband when we did nothing to you.”

“When I went over to his van to introduce myself, to express my sympathy, he called me a bitch and a whore, and he spat at me.”

A flush of shame stained Mrs. Hennessy’s cheeks. Her lips trembled as her eyes shifted away. “That’s what you say.”

“My half sister was right there. Is she a liar, too?”

“Even if it is so, it’s a far cry from everything you’re laying at our door.”

“You saw the way he looked at me last night, in the park. You know how much he hates me. I’m appealing to you, Mrs. Hennessy. Keep him away from me and my home.”

Cilla turned away. She’d only gotten halfway down the ramp when she heard the door shut, and the lock shoot home.

Oddly, the conversation, however tense and difficult, made her feel better. She’d done something besides calling the police and sitting back, waiting for the next assault.

Pushing forward, as that was the direction she was determined to go, she swung by the real estate office to make an offer on the first house she’d selected. She went in low, a fair chunk lower than she felt the house was worth in the current market. To Cilla, the negotiations, the offers, the counters, were all part of the fun.

Back in the loaner, she contacted the agent in charge of the second listing to make an appointment for a viewing. No point, she decided, in letting the moss grow. She drove back to Morrow Village, completed another handful of errands, including a quick grocery run, before heading back toward home.

She spotted the white van before Hennessy spotted her. Since he came from the direction of the Little Farm, she assumed he’d had time to go home, talk to his wife and drive out while she’d been running around Front Royal and the Village.

He caught sight of her as their vehicles passed, and the flare of recognition burned over his face.

“Yeah, that’s right,” she muttered as she rounded a curve, “not my truck, since you beat the hell out of it last night.” She shook off the annoyance, took the next turn. Her gaze flicked up to the rearview mirror to see the van coming up behind her.

So you want to have this out? she wondered. Have what Ford called a face-to-face? That’s fine. Great. He could just follow her home where they’d have a-

The wheel jerked in her hands when the van rammed her from behind. The sheer shock didn’t allow room for anger, even for fear, as she tightened her grip.

He rammed her again-a smash of metal, a squeal of tires. The truck seemed to leap under her and buck to the right. She wrenched the wheel, fighting it back. Before she could punch the gas, he rammed her a third time. Her tires skidded off the asphalt and onto the shoulder while her body jerked forward, slammed back. Her fender kissed the guardrail, and her temple slapped smartly against the side window.

Small bright dots danced in front of her eyes as she gritted her teeth, prayed and steered into the skid. The truck swerved, and for one hideous moment she feared it would flip. She landed with a bone-jarring thud, nose-down, in the runoff gully on the opposite shoulder as her air bag burst open.

Later, she would think it was sheer adrenaline, sheer piss-in-your-face mad that had her leaping out of the truck, slamming the door. A woman ran across the lawn of a house set back across the road. “I saw what he did! I saw it! I called the police!”

Neither Cilla nor Hennessy paid any attention. He shoved out of the van, fists balled at his sides as they came at each other.

“You don’t come to my house! You don’t talk to my wife!”

“Fuck you! Fuck you! You’re crazy. You could’ve killed me.”

“Then you’d be in hell with the rest of them.” Eyes wheeling, teeth bared, he knocked her back with a vicious shove.

“Don’t you put your hands on me again, old man.”

He shoved her again, sending her feet skidding until she slammed into the back of the truck. “I see you in there. I see you in there, you bitch.”

This time he raised his fist. Cilla kicked him in the groin, and dropped him.

“Oh God. Oh my God!”

Dazed, adrenaline seeping out like water through cracks in a dam, Cilla saw the Good Samaritan racing down the road toward her. The woman had a phone in one hand, a garden stake in the other.

“Are you all right? Honey, are you all right?”

“Yes, I think. I… I feel a little sick. I need to-” Cilla sat, dropped her head between her updrawn knees. She couldn’t get her breath, couldn’t feel her fingers. “Can you call someone for me?”

“Of course I can. Don’t you think about getting up, mister. I’ll hit you upside the head with this, I swear I will. Who do you want me to call, honey?”

Cilla kept her head down, waiting for the dizziness to pass, and gave her new best friend Ford’s number.

He got there before the police, all but flew out of his car. She’d yet to try to stand, and would forever be grateful that Lori Miller stood like a prison guard over Hennessy.

Hennessy sat, sweat drying on his bone-white face.

“Where are you hurt? You’re bleeding.”

“It’s okay. I just hit my head. I think I’m okay.”

“I wanted to call for an ambulance, but she said no. I’m Lori.” The woman gestured in the direction of her house.

“Yeah. Thanks. Thanks. Cilla-”

“I’m just a little shaky. I thought I was going to be sick, but it passed. Help me up, will you?”

“Look at me first.” He cupped her chin, studied her eyes. Apparently what he saw satisfied him enough for him to lift her to her feet.

“Knees are wobbly,” she told him. “This hurts.” She laid her fingers under the knot on her temple. “But I think that’s the worst of it. I don’t know how to thank you,” she said to Lori.

“I didn’t do anything, really. You sure know how to take care of yourself. Here they come.” Lori pointed to the police car. “Now my knees are wobbly,” she said with a breathless laugh. “I guess that’s what happens after the worst is over.”

SHE TOLD the story to one of the county deputies as, she imagined, Lori gave her witness statement to the other across the road. She imagined the skid marks told their own tale. Hennessy, as far as she could tell, refused to speak at all. She watched the deputy load him into the back of the cruiser.

“I’ve got stuff in the truck. I need to get it out before they tow it.”

“I’ll send someone back for it. Come on.”

“I was nearly home,” she said as Ford helped her into his car. “Another half mile, I’d have been home.”

“We need to put some ice on that bump, and you need to tell me the truth if you hurt anywhere. You need to tell me, Cilla.”

“I can’t tell yet. I feel sort of numb, and exhausted.” She let out a long sigh when he stopped in front of his house. “I think if I could just sit down for a while, in the cool, until I, I guess the phrase is collect myself. You’ll call over, ask a couple of the guys to get the stuff out of the truck?”

“Yeah, don’t worry about it.”

He put his arm around her waist to lead her into the house. “Bed or sofa?”

“I was thinking chair.”

“Bed or sofa,” he repeated.

“Sofa.”

He walked her into the lounge so he could keep an eye on her while he got a bag of frozen peas for her temple. Spock tiptoed to her to rub his head up and down her arm. “It’s okay,” she told him. “I’m okay.” So he planted his front paws on the side of the couch, sniffed at her face, licked her cheek.

“Down,” Ford ordered when he came in.

“No, he’s fine. In fact… maybe I could have him up here for a while.”

Ford patted the couch. On cue, Spock jumped up, bellied in beside Cilla and laid his heavy, comforting head below her breasts.

Ford eased pillows behind her head. He brought her a cold drink, brushed his lips lightly over her forehead, then laid the cold bag at her temple.

“I’ll make the calls. You need anything else?”

“No, I’ve got it all. Better already.”

He smiled. “It’s the magic peas.”

When he turned away, stepped out onto the back veranda to make the calls, the smile had turned to a look of smoldering fury. His fist pounded rhythmically against the post as he punched numbers.

“Can’t go into it now,” he said when Matt answered. “Cilla’s here. She’s all right.”

“What do you mean she’s-”

“Can’t go into it now.”

“Okay.”

“Her truck’s about a half mile down, headed toward town. I need you to send somebody down to get whatever she picked up today out of it. Hennessy was at her, and now the cops have him.”

“Holy sh-”

“I’ll call you back later when I can talk about it.”

He clicked off, glanced at his hand and saw he’d pounded it often and hard enough to draw some blood. Oddly, it helped.

Deciding he was calm enough, Ford stepped back inside. Because she lay quiet, eyes closed, one arm over the dog, he opened the window seat to take out one of the throws stored inside. Her eyes opened when he draped it over her.

“I’m not asleep. I was trying to remember how to meditate.”

“Meditate?”

“California, remember? Anyone living in California over a year must meet minimum meditation requirements. Unfortunately, I always sucked at it. Empty your mind? If I empty part of mine, something jumps right in to fill the void. And I know I’m babbling.”

“It’s okay.” He sat on the edge of the couch, turned the bag of peas over to lay the colder side on her temple.

“Ford, he really wanted to kill me.” Her eyes clung to his, and he saw the shadow of pain in them as she pushed herself up to sit. “It’s not like doing grand jetés through the woods while the reanimated psycho killer chases you. I’ve had people dislike me. My own mother from time to time. I’ve even had people try to hurt me. I dated this guy once who slapped me around good one night. One night,” she repeated. “He never got the chance to do it again. But even he didn’t hate me. He didn’t want me dead.

“I don’t know how to resolve that someone does. I don’t know how to fit that into my life and deal with it.”

“You don’t resolve it. You don’t resolve something that has no sanity or logic. And, Cilla, you are dealing with it. You did. You stopped him.”

“A really lucky kick into seventy-, maybe eighty-year-old balls. I was so pissed, Ford, that I didn’t think. Do I stay in the truck, lock the doors, call nine-one-one, or you, or the half a dozen guys a half mile away like a rational person? No, I jump out and confront this… this lunatic who’s just tried to run me off the road, like he’s going to fear the sharp lash of my tongue. And I’m still so pissed when he starts shoving me, I don’t take off. Like I couldn’t outrun a man old enough to be my grandfather?”

“You’re not a runner.” He laid his finger over her lips when she started to speak. “You’re not. Do I wish it had occurred to you to lock yourself in the truck and call me? Maybe. Because then I could’ve come speeding to the rescue. I could’ve kicked him in the balls. But the fact is, I feel some better knowing that when somebody tries to hurt you, you know how to take care of yourself.”

“I could go a long time without having to take care of myself like that again.”

“Me too.” He stroked her hair when she laid her head on his shoulder. “Me too.”

And maybe he could’ve gone a little while longer without realizing he was in love with her. He could’ve strolled into that, the way he strolled across the road to her house. Casual and easy. Instead, he’d had it slammed into him, clutched in the meaty fist of fear and rage, in one hard and painful punch when he’d seen her sitting on the side of the road.

Nothing to do about it now, he told himself. Bad, bad timing. What she needed now was a shoulder to lean on, somebody to get her a bag of frozen peas and offer a quiet place to… collect herself.

"How’s the head?”

“Strangely, it feels like I bashed it against a window.”

“Will you take some aspirin?”

“Yeah. And maybe a session in your hot tub. I’m a little stiff and sore. I got jostled around pretty good.”

He had to fight to keep his grip on her from tightening, to stop himself from squeezing her against him. “I’ll set you up.”

“Thanks.” She turned her head to brush her lips against his throat. “Thanks especially for helping me stay calm. You too,” she said, and kissed Spock.

“All part of our post-trauma service here at the House of Sawyer.”

He helped her downstairs. He flipped back the lid of the hot tub, hit the jets, while she took off her shirt. “Want the iPod?”

“No, thanks. Maybe I’ll give meditation another shot.” She winced as she reached back for the hook of her bra. “Definitely stiff and sore.”

“Let me. I have experience with these devices.”

She smiled, let her arms drop as he moved behind her.

Fresh fury gushed into him, one hot blast of blind, mindless rage. Bruises purpled across her back, along her shoulder blades, in angry storm clouds. More bruising mottled the skin high on her left biceps, and a raw, red line like a burn rode over her shoulder.

“Having trouble with the mechanics?” Cilla asked him.

“No.” Amazing, he thought, how calm his voice sounded. How matter-of-fact. “You’ve got some bruises back here.”

“So that’s what I feel. It must be from when he shoved me against the truck.” She tipped her head to the side, down, then sucked in some air as she brushed her fingers over her shoulder and across her chest. “Seat belt burn, too. Shit. Well, better than the alternative.”

“Fuck that.” He said it softly, but still she shifted to look around at him.

“Ford.”

“Fuck. That.” He bit off the words now as that gush of fury spewed out, a raging, boiling geyser. “You’ll have to get your calm and your Zen somewhere else, because I’m not up for it. Goddamn it. Goddamn it! The son of a bitch came at you. You’re all bruised and bashed up. He did that to you. Did you see your truck? For Christ’s sake, did you see what he did, what he tried to do? He hurt you.”

She’d turned to face him, to stare at him. With hands stunningly gentle in contrast to his face, his voice, he unhooked her work pants, crouched to ease them down her legs.

“Your truck’s in a fucking ditch, and the only reason you’re not is because you took him out. There were skid marks on the road as far as I could see.” He took off her shoes, her socks, lifted her foot, then the other to free them of the pants.

“Better than the alternative? Better comes when I kick that crazy, murderous bastard’s teeth down his throat. That’s when better comes.” He turned her around, unhooked her bra.

He picked her up, eased her into the bubbling water where she just sat, staring at him.

“I’ll get the aspirin and that robe you brought over.”

After he strode away and up the stairs, Cilla let out a long breath. “Wow,” was really all she could think of.

Meditation might not have worked very well for her, but Cilla found fifteen minutes in hot water with pulsing jets helped considerably. Especially with the image of Ford’s anger playing behind her closed lids.

Steadier than she’d have believed possible, she carefully climbed out. As she wrapped herself in a towel, she heard him coming back down the stairs.

“I’ll do that,” he said when she started to flip the lid back over the tub. “Here.”

He handed her pills, water, and when she’d taken them, helped her into the white terry robe she’d left at his place.

“Sorry about before. You don’t need the ravings of another maniac.”

“You’re wrong. You helped me, you gave me exactly what I needed by staying calm when I was the shakiest. You stayed steady, and took me to the cool and the quiet. You gave me magic peas, and you let me lean on you. There have been a very limited number of people in my life that let me lean on them.”

She laid her hands on his chest, on either side of his heart. “And after I got through the worst of it, you gave me something else. The outrage, the anger, the blind thirst for revenge. It helps to know someone could feel that on my behalf. That while he was feeling all that, he could still take care. It’s no wonder I fell for you.”

“I’m so in love with you, Cilla.”

“Oh.” She felt a jolt, nearly as violent as she had while under attack. “Oh, Ford.”

“Maybe it’s lousy timing, but that doesn’t change a thing. It’s not what I was looking for. It’s not simple and easy, just picking which bed we use and who walks home in the morning. That’s how I figured it, and I was wrong.”

“Ford-”

“I’m not finished yet. When that woman-Lori-called, she was careful to let me know right off you were okay. But all she had to do was say accident, and my heart stopped. I never really understood what it was to be afraid until that moment.”

Everything he’d felt, and was feeling now, swirled in his eyes. So much, Cilla thought. So much in there.

“When I got there, and I saw you sitting on the side of the road. So pale. The relief came first, waves of it. Waves. There she is. I didn’t lose her. Waves of relief, Cilla, and this lightning strike at the same time. There she is. And I knew. I’m in love with you.”

It had been a day for shocks and jolts, and huge moments, Cilla thought. “You’re so steady, Ford, and I’m so disordered.”

“That’s just another way of saying, ‘It’s not you, it’s me.’”

“It doesn’t make it less true. I’m caught right now between the thrill, and the terror, of having someone like you tell me he loves me. And mean it. And that’s complicated because I have such strong, real feelings for you. I think I’m in love with you, too. Wait.”

She threw up a hand as he stepped toward her. “Just, wait. I probably have a mild concussion. I’m at a disadvantage. You’re steady,” she repeated. “And I bet you know exactly what you want out of being in love.

I’m disordered, and I don’t. What I do know, or at least what I’m pretty sure of, is you’ll want, expect things to change.”

“Yes. But they don’t have to change today, or tomorrow. Part of being steady might be as basic as knowing how to appreciate what you’ve got, in the moment.” He framed her face. “There she is,” he murmured, and brushed his lips to hers.

Cilla closed her eyes. “Oh, God. I’m in such trouble.”

“It’s going to be fine. Now let’s go up. You should get off your feet.”

He lay her on the living room sofa this time, and as he’d expected, within twenty minutes the emotional and physical upheaval dropped her into sleep. He took his phone out onto the veranda, leaving the door open so he’d hear her if she stirred. Sitting where he could watch her through the window, he started his calls with her father.

When he spotted Matt heading up Cilla’s drive toward his house, Ford figured his friend had been keeping an eye out for any sign. He finished up the call-this one to a friend, an RN, just to make sure he handled Cilla’s injuries correctly.

He gestured Matt to a chair as he disconnected.

“What the hell, Ford?”

“Hennessy,” he began, and ran through it.

“Jesus. Crazy bastard. Are you sure she’s okay?”

“I just talked to Holly. Remember Holly?”

“Nurse Holly?”

“Yeah. She thinks it’d be better if I could talk Cilla into getting checked out. But in the meantime, heat, cold, rest, ibuprofen. Got that covered so far. You saw the truck.”

“Yeah, did a number on it. His own van, too. She got him with a nut shot?”

“Apparently.”

“Well, goddamn good for her,” Matt said with both heat and admiration. “I’d like a shot at him myself.”

“Take a number.”

“Well, listen, you need anything, she needs anything, you know where I am. There are a lot of people across the road there who’d say the same.”

“I know it.”

“And tell her not to worry about the work. We’ve got it covered. You’ll want to come over and set her alarm if she’s staying here tonight.”

“Yeah, I’ll take care of it.”

“Any questions, messages, whatever, I’ll make sure I leave them in her famous notebook, and I’ll pass the word to Brian. I’ll check with you tomorrow.”

At the two-hour mark, Ford debated rousing her just in case she actually did have a concussion. Before he could decide, he saw the unmarked car pull into her drive. So he waited, watched Wilson and Urick get out, go in. Come out, get back into the car and pull across into his driveway.

“Mr. Sawyer.”

“Getting to be a habit, isn’t it?”

“Miss McGowan’s here?”

“Yeah. Banged up, worn out and sleeping. Where’s Hennessy?”

“He’s in a cell. Do you want a list of the charges against him?”

“No, as long as there’s enough to keep him in a cell.”

“We’d like to speak to Ms. McGowan, go over her statement.”

“She’s sleeping,” Ford repeated, and rose. “And she’s had more than enough for one day. More than enough period. If Hennessy had been in a cell where he belonged, he wouldn’t have had a chance to try to kill her.”

“If we’d had any evidence, we’d have put him in a cell before this.”

“So what?” Ford shot back. “Better late than never?”

“Ford.” Cilla pushed open the screen. “It’s all right.”

“Hell it is.”

“Well, you’re right. It’s not. But I’ll talk to the detectives. Let’s get it done.” She opened the door wider. “Would you wait in the living room a minute?” she asked Wilson and Urick.

After they passed, she let the screen door close behind her, and laid her hands on Ford’s shoulders. “No one’s ever shielded me.” She kissed him. “In my whole life, no one ever stood between me and something unpleasant. It’s an amazing feeling. It’s amazing to know I don’t even have to ask if you’ll stay with me while I do this. You can leave your silver armor in the shop. You don’t need it.”

She took his hand, and walked inside with him to get it done.