Tribute

by Nora Roberts

  “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 ea ting 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.

&n
bsp; 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