Tribute

by Nora Roberts

  laughed at.

  “I’ll shoot you if you don’t drink. They’ll call it another break-in. A tragic one this time.” She reached back into her purse, pulled out the large plastic bag, and the doll trapped inside it. “In case you’d rather go with the bullet, I’ll leave this behind. I bought several of them years ago. I couldn’t resist. I never knew why until you came here.”

  Struggling against the dizziness, Cilla lifted the glass, wet her lips. “You staged her suicide.”

  “She made it easy. She invited me in, like an old friend. Apologized for what she’d done. She was sorry she’d hurt me, or caused me any pain. She couldn’t undo it, wouldn’t if she could. Because that would undo the baby. All she wanted now was the baby and a chance to make up for past mistakes. Of course, she’d never reveal the name of the father. Lying bitch.”

  “You drugged her.”

  “When she started to slide, I helped her upstairs. I felt so strong then. I nearly had to carry her, but I was strong. I undressed her. I wanted her naked, exposed. And I gave her more pills, gave her more vodka. And I sat and I watched her die. I sat and I watched until she stopped breathing. Then I left.

  “I’d drive by here. After they’d taken her away to where she never belonged, I’d drive by. I liked watching it decay while I . . . emerged. I starved myself. I exercised until every muscle trembled. Beauty salons, spas, liposuction, face-lifts. He would never look at me and want her. No one would ever look at me with pity.”

  An image, Cilla thought. An illusion. “I’ve done nothing to you.”

  “You came here.” With her free hand, Cathy added more pills to Cilla’s glass, topped it off with wine. “Cheers!”

  “I was wrong,” Cilla mumbled. “You’re as crazy as Hennessy after all.”

  “No, just a lot more focused. This house deserved to die its slow, miserable death. She only went to sleep. That was my mistake. You brought her back by coming here, shoved it all in my face again. You had my own son plant roses for her. You seduced Ford, who deserves so much better. I’d have let you live if you’d gone away. If you’d let this house die. But you kept throwing it in my face. I won’t have that, Cilla. I see what you are. Hennessy and I are the only ones.”

  “I’m not Janet. They’ll never believe I killed myself.”

  “She did. Your mother attempted it—or pretended to—twice. You’re fruit from the tree.” Casually, Cathy tucked back her swing of hair with her free hand. “Pressured into becoming engaged, distraught over causing the death of a man whose life your grandmother ruined. I’ll be able to testify how anxious you were for everyone to leave you alone. If only we’d known.”

  “I’m not Janet,” she stated, and tossed the remaining contents in her glass into Cathy’s face.

  The action had Spock leaping up, the grumbling going to a snarl. As his head rammed against Cathy, Cilla grabbed for the bottle, saw herself smash it against Cathy’s head. But, impaired by the pills, she swung wide and barely grazed her temple.

  It was enough to have Cathy tipping in the stool. Cilla lurched forward, shoved while the dog jumped against the teetering stool. The gun went off, plowing a bullet into the ceiling as the stool toppled.

  Fight or flight. She feared she had little of either in her. As her knees buckled, she let herself fall on Cathy, raked her nails down Cathy’s face. The scream was satisfying, but more was the certainty that even if she died, they’d know. She had Cathy Morrow under her nails. She grabbed Cathy’s hair, yanked, twisted for good measure. Plenty of DNA, she thought vaguely as her vision dimmed at the edges. And Spock’s snarling barks went tinny in her ears.

  She swung out blindly. She heard shouting, another scream. Another shot. And simply slid away.

  FORD’S HEART SKIDDED when he saw Cathy’s car in his drive. He wouldn’t be too late. He couldn’t be. He slammed to a stop behind the Volvo and ran halfway to his door before his instincts stopped him.

  Not here. The farm. He spun around, began to run. It had to be at the farm. He cursed, as he’d cursed for miles, the fact that his phone sat on Brian’s bar.

  When he heard the shot, the fear he thought he knew, the fear he thought he tasted, paled against a wild and mindless terror.

  He threw himself against the door, shouting for Cilla as he heard Spock’s manic barks. Someone screamed like an animal. He flew into the kitchen. It flashed in front of him, etched itself forever in his memory.

  Cilla sprawled over Cathy, fists flailing as if they were almost too heavy to lift. Cathy with blood running down her face, her eyes mad with pain and hate as Spock snapped and growled. The gun in her hand. Turning, turning toward Cilla.

  He leaped, grabbing Cathy’s wrist with one hand, shoving Cilla clear with the other. He felt something, a quick bee sting at his biceps, before he wrenched the gun from Cathy’s hand.

  “Ford! Thank God!” Cathy reached for him. “She went crazy. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know what she’s on. She had the gun, and I tried—”

  “Shut up,” he said coldly, clearly. “If you move, I swear to God, for the first time in my life, I’ll hit a woman. Spock, knock it off! And I’ll make it count,” he told Cathy. “So shut the fuck up.” He aimed the gun at her as he edged toward Cilla. “Or I may do worse than knock you out. Cilla. Cilla.”

  He checked for wounds, then lifted her eyelid as Spock bathed her face frantically with his tongue. “Wake up!” He slapped her, lightly at first. “Move one more inch,” he warned Cathy in a voice he barely recognized himself. “Just one more. Cilla!” He slapped her again, harder, and watched her lids flutter. “Sit up. Wake up.” One-handed, he pulled her up to sit. “I’m calling for an ambulance, and the cops. You’re all right. Do you hear me?”

  “Seconal,” she managed, then braced herself with one hand. And shoved her fingers ruthlessly down her throat.

  LATER, A LONG TIME LATER, Cilla sat under the blue umbrella. Spring had gone, and summer nearly, she thought. She’d be here when the leaves changed and burned across the mountains. And when the first snow of the season fell, and the last. She’d be here, she thought, in all the springs to come, and the seasons to follow.

  She’d be home. With Ford. And with Spock. Her heroes.

  “You’re still pale,” he said. “Lying down might be a better idea than fresh air.”

  “You’re still pale,” she countered. “You were shot.”

  He glanced down at his bandaged arm. “Grazed” was the more accurate word. “Yeah. Eventually, that’ll be cool. I got shot once, I’ll say, rushing in—just a little too late again—to save the love of my life before she saved herself.”

  “You did save me. I’d lost it. I CSI’d her,” she added, wiggling her fingers. “But I was done. You and Spock—fierce doggie,” she murmured as she bent down to nuzzle him. “You saved my life. Now you have to keep it.”

  He reached over, took her hand. “That’s the plan. I nearly went in the wrong house. That’s it, Cilla. No more two households for us. I nearly went to the wrong one. Then I would’ve been too late.”

  “You figured it out, and you came for me. You can draw all the heroes you want. You’re mine.”

  “Hero, goddess and superdog. We’re pretty lucky, you and me.”

  “I guess we are. Ford, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry for Brian.”

  “We’ll help him get through it.” No question there, Ford thought, no choice. “We’ll find a way to help him get through it.”

  “She carried that betrayal with her all these years. And couldn’t stand what I came here to do. In a way, this house was a symbol for both of us.” She studied it—her pretty home, the fresh paint, the windows glinting in the early morning sun.

  “I needed to bring it back; she needed to watch it die. Every fresh board, every coat of paint, a slap in the face to her. The party? Can you imagine how that must have gnawed at her? Music and laughter, food and drink. And wedding talk. How could she stand it?”

  “I knew them both all
my life and never saw through it. So much for the writer’s power of observation.”

  “They put it away. Locked it in a closet. She watched Janet die.” That still twisted in her heart. “She had it in her to watch. And she had it in her to put it away, to remake herself. To raise her family, to shop with her friends, to bake cookies and make the beds. And to drive by here, every once in a while, so she could let it out.”

  “Like a pressure valve.”

  “I’d say so. And I locked down the valve. My grandmother didn’t commit suicide. That’s going to be major news. Cameras, print, movie of the week—perhaps a major motion picture. More books, talk shows. Much.”

  “I think I’ve got the picture by now. No warning necessary. Your grandmother didn’t commit suicide,” he repeated.

  “No, she didn’t.” When her eyes filled, the tears felt like redemption. “She didn’t leave my mother, not in the way Mom always thought. She bought a lipstick-pink couch with white satin cushions. She grieved for a lost child and prepared for another.

  “Not a saint,” Cilla continued. “She slept with another woman’s husband, and would have broken up his family without a qualm. Or much of one.”

  “Cheating’s a two-way street. Tom betrayed his wife, his family. And even when he claimed he’d broken it off, he slept with Janet again. He had a pregnant wife and a child at home, and slept with the image—and refused to take responsibility for the consequences.”

  “I wonder if it was the brutality of that last letter that snapped Janet’s feeling for him, had her come back, face him down with the facts. ‘I’m pregnant, the baby’s yours, but we don’t want or need you.’ ”

  She let out a breath. “I like to think so.”

  “Plays, doesn’t it? Sure jibes with what Tom told me. Cathy took and destroyed the pregnancy results, but she didn’t know about the letters. She didn’t know about Gatsby.”

  “Janet kept the letters, I think, to remind her that the child was conceived in at least the illusion of love. And to remind herself why it would belong to only her. I think, too, she made certain the farm couldn’t be sold because she wanted the child to have it one day. Johnnie was gone, and she knew my mother had no real ties to it. But she had another chance.

  “And maybe there will always be questions, but I have the answers I needed. I wonder if I’ll still dream of her, the way I always have.”

  “Do you want to?”

  “Maybe. Sometimes. But I think I’d like to start dreaming about what might happen, about what I hope for, rather than what used to be.” She smiled when he brushed his lips over her fingers.

  “Take a walk with me.” He got to his feet, drew her to hers. “Just you. Just me.” He looked down at Spock as the dog did his happy dance. “Just us.”

  She walked with him across the stones, over the grass still damp with dew, with roses madly blooming and the last of the summer’s flowers unfolded like jewels. Walked with him while the sweet, ugly dog chased his invisible cats around the pond strung with lily pads.

  With her hand in his, she thought this was dream enough for her. Right now. With the three of them happy and safe and together.

  And home.

  Turn the page for a special preview of

  BLACK HILLS

  by Nora Roberts

  Available July 2009 from G. P. Putnam’s Sons

  SOUTH DAKOTA JUNE 1989

  Cooper Sullivan’s life, as he’d known it, was over. Judge and jury—in the form of his parents—had not been swayed by pleas, reason, temper, threats, but instead had sentenced him and shipped him off, away from everything he knew and cared about, to a world without video parlors or Big Macs.

  The only thing that kept him from completely dying of boredom, or just going wacko, was his prized Game Boy.

  As far as he could see, it would be him and Tetris for the duration of his prison term—two horrible, stupid months—in the wild freaking west. He knew damn well the game—which his father had gotten pretty much right off the assembly line in Tokyo—was a kind of bribe.

  Coop was eleven, and nobody’s fool.

  Practically nobody in the whole U. S. of A. had the game, and that was definitely cool. But what was the point in having something everybody else wanted if you couldn’t show it off to your friends?

  This way, you were just Clark Kent or Bruce Wayne, the lame alter egos of the cool guys.

  All of his friends were back, a zillion miles back, in New York. They’d be hanging out for the summer, taking trips to the beaches of Long Island or down to the Jersey Shore. He’d been promised two weeks at baseball camp in July.

  But that was before.

  Now his parents were off to Italy and France and other stupid places on a second honeymoon. Which was code for last-ditch effort to save the marriage.

  No, Coop was nobody’s fool.

  Having their eleven-year-old son around wasn’t romantic or whatever, so they’d shipped him off to his grandparents and the boondocks of South holy crap Dakota.

  Godforsaken South Dakota. He’d heard his mother call it that plenty of times—except when she’d smiled and smiled, telling him he was going to have an Adventure, get to know his roots. Godforsaken turned into pristine and pure and exciting. Like he didn’t know she’d run off from her parents and their crappy little farm the minute she’d turned eighteen.

  So he was stuck back where she’d run from, and he hadn’t done anything to deserve it. It wasn’t his fault that his father couldn’t keep his dick in his pants, or that his mother compensated by buying up Madison Avenue—information Coop had learned from expert and regular eavesdropping. They screwed things up and he was sentenced to a summer on a horse-shit farm with grandparents he barely knew.

  And they were really old.

  He was supposed to help with the horses, who smelled and looked like they wanted to bite you. With the chickens who smelled and did bite.

  They didn’t have a housekeeper who cooked egg-white omelettes or picked up his action figures. And they drove trucks instead of cars. Even his ancient grandmother.

  He hadn’t seen a cab in days.

  He had chores, and had to eat home-cooked meals with food he’d never seen in his life. And maybe the food was pretty good, but that wasn’t the point.

  The one TV in the whole house barely got anything, and there was no McDonald’s. No Chinese or pizza place that delivered. No friends. No park, no movie theaters, no video arcades.

  He might as well be in Russia or someplace.

  He glanced up from the Game Boy to look out the car window at what he considered a lot of nothing. Stupid mountains, stupid prairie, stupid trees. The same view, as far as he could tell, that had been outside the window since they’d left the farm. At least his grandparents had stopped interrupting his game to tell him stuff about what was outside the window.

  Like he cared about a lot of stupid settlers and Indians and soldiers who hung around out here before he was even born. Hell, before his prehistoric grandparents had been born.

  Who gave a shit about Crazy Horse and Sitting Bullshit. He cared about the X-Men and the box scores.

  The way Coop looked at it, the fact that the closest town to the farm was called Deadwood said it all.

  He didn’t care about cowboys and horses and buffalo. He cared about baseball and video games. He wasn’t going to see a single game in Yankee Stadium all summer.

  He might as well be dead, too.

  He spotted a bunch of what looked like mutant deer clomp ing across the high grass, and a lot of trees and stupid hills that were really green. Why did they call them black when they were green? Because he was in South crappy Dakota, where they didn’t know dick about squat.

  What he didn’t see were buildings, people, streets, sidewalk vendors. What he didn’t see was home.

  His grandmother shifted in her seat to look back at him. “Do you see the elk, Cooper?”

  “I guess.”

  “We’ll be getting to the Chance spread
soon,” she told him. “It was nice of them to have us all over for supper. You’re going to like Lil. She’s nearly your age.”

  He knew the rules. “Yes, ma’am.” As if he’d pal around with some girl. Some dumb farm girl who probably smelled like horse. And looked like one.