Tribute

by Nora Roberts

  getting to know each other, through interior latex, eggshell finish.”

  “Why stop there? How about we go take a look at the exterior.”

  “You can’t paint the house. The rooms, that’s one thing.”

  Lips pursed, he scanned the room. “I think I passed the audition.”

  “Interiors. It’s a three-story building. A really big, three-story building. Painting it’ll require standing on scaffolding and really tall ladders.”

  “I used to do my own stunts.” He laughed as she rolled her eyes in a way he could only describe as daughterly. “Maybe I didn’t, and maybe that was a long time ago, but I have excellent balance.”

  She tried stern. “Standing on scaffolding and really tall ladders in the dog-day heat of August.”

  “You don’t scare me.”

  Then simple practicality. “It’s not a one-man job.”

  “True. I’ll definitely need some help. What color did you have in mind?”

  And felt herself being gently steamrolled. “Listen, the old paint needs to be scraped where it’s peeled, and—”

  “Details, details. Let’s take a look. Do you want it painted by Labor Day, or what?”

  “Labor Day? It’s not even on the schedule until mid-September. When it’s, hopefully, a little cooler. The crew who painted the barn—”

  “Happy to work with them.”

  Completely baffled, she set her hands on her hips. “I thought you were kind of—no offense—a pushover.”

  His expression placid, he patted her cheek. “No offense taken. What about the trim, the verandas?”

  She puffed out her cheeks, blew the breath out. She saw it now. Pushover, her ass. He just ignored the arguments and kept going. “Okay, we’ll take a look at the samples I’m thinking about. And once I decide, you can work on the verandas, the shutters. But you’re not hanging off scaffolding or climbing up extension ladders.”

  He only smiled at her, then dropped his arm over her shoulders the way she’d seen him do with Angie, and walked her downstairs.

  Though it wasn’t on her list—and she really wanted to get up to her office and check on the progress of her floors, see if Stan had finished the tile, start running the bedroom trim—she opened the three pints of exterior paint. “Could go deep, with this blue. The gray in it settles it down a few notches, and white trim would set it off.” She slapped some on the wood.

  “Makes a statement.”

  “Yeah. Or I could go quiet and traditional with this buff, use a white trim again, or a cream. Cream might be better. Softer.”

  “Pretty and subdued.”

  “Or I could go with this more subtle blue, again gray undertones keeping it warm, and probably go with a soft white for the trim.”

  “Dignified but warm.”

  She stepped back, cocked her head to one side, then the other. “I thought about yellows, too. Something cheerful, but soft enough it doesn’t pop out of the ground like a big daffodil. Maybe it should wait. Maybe it should just wait.” She gnawed on her lip. “Until . . .”

  “I’ve seen you make decisions, over everything that has to do with this house, with the grounds. Why are you having such a hard time with this?”

  “It’s what everyone will see. Every time they drive by on the road. A lot of them will slow down, point it out. ‘That’s Janet Hardy’s house.’ ” Setting down the brush, Cilla wiped her hands on her work shorts. “It’s just paint, it’s just color, but it matters what people see when they drive by on the road, and think of her.”

  He laid a hand on her shoulder. “What do you want them to see when they drive by here?”

  “That she was a real person, not just an image in an old movie, or a voice on a CD or old record. She was a real person, who felt and ate, who laughed and worked. Who lived a life. And she was happy here, at least for a while. Happy enough she didn’t let it go. She held on, so I could come here, and have a life here.”

  She let out an embarrassed laugh. “And that’s a hell of a lot to expect from a couple coats of paint. Jesus, I should probably go back into therapy.”

  “Stop.” He gave her shoulder a quick shake. “Of course it matters. People obsess over something as mundane as paint for a lot less important reasons. This house, this place, was hers. More, it was something she chose for herself, and something she valued. Something she needed. It’s been passed to you. It should matter.”

  “It was yours, too, in a way. I don’t forget that. That matters more now than it did when I started. You pick.”

  He dropped his hand, actually stepped back. “Cilla.”

  “Please. I’d really like this to be your choice. The McGowan choice. People will think of her when they pass on the road. But when I walk the grounds or drive in after a long day, I’ll think of her, and of you. I’ll think of how you came here as a little boy, and chased chickens. You pick, Dad.”

  “The second blue. The warm and dignified blue.”

  She hooked her arm with his, studied the fresh color over the old, peeling paint. “I think it’s going to be perfect.”

  WHEN FORD WALKED over late in the day, he saw Gavin on the veranda, scraping the paint on the front of the house.

  “How’re you doing, Mr. McGowan?”

  “Slow but sure. Cilla’s inside somewhere.”

  “I just bought a house.”

  “Is that so?” Gavin stopped, frowned. “You’re moving?”

  “No. No. I bought this, well, this toxic dump that Cilla says she can fix up. To flip. The seller just accepted my offer. I feel a little sick, and can’t decide if it’s because I’m excited, or because I can see this big, yawning money pit opening up under my feet. I’m going to have two mortgages. I think I should probably sit down.”

  “Pick up that scraper, give me a hand with this. It’ll calm you down.”

  Ford eyed the scraper dubiously. “Tools and I have a long-standing agreement. We stay away from each other, for the good of mankind.”

  “It’s a scraper, Ford, not a chain saw. You scrape ice off your windshield in the winter, don’t you?”

  “When I must. I prefer staying home until it thaws.” But Ford picked up the spare scraper and tried to apply the process of scraping ice from glass to scraping peeling paint off the side of a house. “I’m going to have two mortgages, and I’m going to be forty.”

  “Did we just time-travel? You can’t be more than thirty.”

  “Thirty-one. I have less than a decade until I’m forty, and five minutes ago I was studying for the SATs.”

  Gavin’s lips twitched as he continued to scrape. “It gets worse. Every year goes faster.”

  “Thanks,” Ford said bitterly. “That’s just what I needed to hear. I was going to take my time, but how can you when there isn’t as much as you think there is?” Turning, he waved the scraper, and nearly put it through the window. “But if you’re ready, and she’s not, what the hell are you supposed to do about that?”

  “Keep scraping.”

  Ford scraped—the paint and his knuckles. “Crap. As a metaphor for life, that sucks.”

  Cilla came out in time to see Ford sucking his sore knuckles and scowling. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m scraping paint and a few layers of skin, and your father’s philosophizing.”

  “Let me see.” She took Ford’s hand, studied the knuckles. “You’ll live.”

  “I have to. I’m about to have two mortgages. Ouch!” he said when Cilla gave his sore fingers a quick squeeze.

  “Sorry. They accepted your offer?”

  “Yeah. I have to go into the bank tomorrow and sign a bunch of papers. I’m going to hyperventilate,” he decided. “I need a bag to breathe into.”

  “November settlement?”

  “I followed the company line.”

  She gave him a poke. “Scared?”

  His answering scowl was both sour and weak. “I’m about to go into debt. The kind that has many zeros. I’m having a few moments. Do y
ou know that the olfactory sense is the strongest of the five senses? I keep having flashes of how that place smells.”

  “Put that down before you really hurt yourself.” She took the scraper out of his hand, set it on the window ledge. “And come with me a minute.” She gave her father a quick wink, then drew Ford into the house.

  “Do you remember what the kitchen looked like in here when you first saw it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Ugly, dingy, damaged floors, cracked plaster, bare bulbs. Got that picture in your head?”

  “I got it.”

  “Close your eyes.”

  “Cilla.”

  “Seriously, close them, and keep that picture in there.”

  He shook his head but obliged her, and let her lead him back. “Now I want you to tell me what you see when you open your eyes. No thinking it through, no qualifying. Just open your eyes and tell me what you see.”

  He obeyed. “A big room, empty. A lot of light. Walls the color of lightly toasted bread. And floors, big squares of tile—a lot of honey tones on cream with pipes poking up through them. Big, unframed—untrimmed—windows that open it up to a patio with a blue umbrella, and gardens with roses blooming like maniacs, and green gone lush. And the mountains against the sky. I see Cilla’s vision.”

  He started to step forward, but she tugged him back. “No, don’t walk on the tiles yet. Stan only finished the grout an hour ago.”

  “We can do this.”

  “We absolutely can. It takes planning, effort, a willingness to find a way around unexpected problems, and a real commitment to the end goal. We’ll turn that place around, Ford, and when we do, we’ll have something we can both be proud of.”

  He turned to her, kissed her forehead. “Okay. Okay. I’ve got some scraping to do.”

  She walked out with him, baffled when he signaled so long to her father and kept walking.

  “Well, where’s he going? He said he was going to do more scraping.”

  Gavin smiled to himself as Cilla shook her head and went back inside. It was good to know his daughter had found her place, her purpose, had found a man who loved her.

  It was good to know she was out of reach of the man who’d wished her harm.

  THE NEXT MORNING, Cilla walked over from Ford’s to find her tires slashed. On the ground by the left front tire, another doll lay facedown, a short-handled paring knife stabbed into its back.

  “You should’ve come back for me. Damn it, Cilla.” Ford paced down the drive, then back to where she sat on the steps of the veranda. “What if he—she—whoever—had still been here?”

  “They weren’t. The cops were here within fifteen minutes. They’re pretty used to the run by now. I didn’t see the point in—”

  “Because I can’t run a skill saw or a damn drill I’m no use?”

  “I didn’t mean that, and you know I didn’t mean that.”

  “Simmer down, Ford.” Matt stepped between them.

  “No way. It’s the second time somebody killed one of those damn dolls to scare her, and she sits over here alone waiting for the cops and lets me sleep. It’s goddamn stupid.”

  “You’re right. Simmer down anyway. He’s right,” Matt said to Cilla. “It was goddamn stupid. You’re a hell of a job boss, Cilla, and one of the best carpenters I’ve worked with, but the fact is someone’s dogging you and threatening you, and standing around here alone after you come across something like this doesn’t show much sense.”

  “It was a cowardly bully tactic, and nobody asked you to go running across the road dragging Ford out of bed so the pair of you can gang up on me. I’m not stupid. If I was afraid, I’d have run across the road and dragged Ford out of bed. I was mad, damn it.”

  She shoved to her feet, as sitting and looking up at two annoyed males made her feel weak and small. “I’m still mad. I’m pissed and I’m tired of being dogged and threatened, as you put it. Of being run off the road and having good work destroyed, and the whole rest of it. Believe me, if whoever did that had still been here, I’d have probably yanked that knife out of that idiot doll and stabbed him in the throat with it. And still been pissed.”

  “If you’re so smart,” Ford said, very coolly, “then you know it was stupid.”

  She opened her mouth, shut it and gave up. Then she sat back down. “I’ll give you rash. I won’t give you stupid.”

  “Hardheaded and rash,” Ford countered. “That’s my final offer.”

  “Have it your way. Now if you’d go back to bed, and you’d go get to work, I could sit here and wallow in my brood.”

  Saying nothing, Matt walked up, patted Cilla on the head and continued inside. Ford came over, sat beside her.

  “Like I care if you can run a skill saw.”

  “Thank God you don’t.”

  “I didn’t think about coming to get you. I was too mad. I don’t get it, I just don’t get it.” Shifting, she indulged herself—and him—by pressing her face to his shoulder a moment. “Hennessy’s in psych. If his wife’s doing this, why? I know he’s doing two years, but how is that my fault? Maybe she’s as crazy as he is.”

  “And maybe Hennessy didn’t do it. Ran you off the road, no question. Is crazy, no argument. But maybe he didn’t do any of the rest. He wouldn’t admit to it.”

  “That would be just great, meaning I have at least two people out there who’d like to make my life hell.” She leaned forward, propped her elbows on her thighs. “It could be about the letters. Someone else knows about them, knows I found them, that they still exist. If Andrew wrote them, someone might know about them, about the affair, the pregnancy . . . His name’s still prominent around here. To protect his reputation . . .”

  “Who, Brian’s father? Brian? Besides, it doesn’t look like Andrew Morrow wrote them. I sent copies to a graphologist.”

  “What?” She jerked straight again. “When?”

  “A couple days after Brian brought the card over. Yes, taking that on myself without telling or consulting you was . . . rash. We’ll call it even.”

  “God, Ford, if the press gets ahold of this—”

  “They won’t. Why would they? I found a guy in New York, one who doesn’t know Andrew Morrow from Bruce Wayne. And the copy of the page of one of the letters I sent him had nothing in it that referred to Janet or the location, even the time frame. I was careful.”

  “Okay. Okay.” He would have been, she admitted.

  “The conclusion was, not the same hand. Guy wouldn’t stake his reputation on it because they were copies, and because I told him they were written about four years apart. But he wouldn’t document them as the same hand. He did say they were of similar style, and both might have been taught to write by the same person.”

  “Like a teacher?”

  “Possibly.”

  A whole new avenue, Cilla realized. “So it might have been someone who went to school with Andrew. A friend. A close friend. Or someone who went to the same school, with the same teacher later. And that really narrows the field.”

  “I could look into that, or try. Talk to my grandfather. He and Andrew would be about the same age. He might remember something.”

  Cilla studied her four flat tires. “I think that’s a good idea. If you want answers, you have to ask questions. I have to go to work. And you have to go to the bank.” She bumped his shoulder with hers. “Have we made up?”

  “Not until we have sex.”

  “I’ll put it on my list.”

  FORD PULLED UP in front of the little suburban house. He heard the purr of a lawn mower as he stepped out of the car, so with Spock he walked around to the side of the house and through the gate of the chain-link fence.

  His grandfather, dressed in a polo shirt, Bermuda shorts and Hush Puppies, pushed the power mower across the short square of lawn between and around the hydrangeas, the rosebushes and the maple tree.

  From the gate, Ford could see the sweat trickling down his