by Nora Roberts
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 that 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. Bird-song 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 i
n 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 obscenities 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.
