Tribute Part 44

Because he wanted her back, he walked over, crouched in front of her. Those spectacular eyes stared for another instant, two more, at what was away, then came back, came back to him.

"There was a Christmas party," she said. "It must have been the last Christmas party she gave, because it was the Christmas before Johnnie was killed. There were lights and music, crowds of people. Beautiful people. Canapes and champagne. She sang for them, with Lenny Eisner on the piano. She had a pink couch. A long, bright pink couch with white satin pillows. Cathy told me about it. It sounds so Doris Day, doesn't it? Bright pink, lipstick pink. It would never go in here now, that bright pink with these foggy green walls."

"It's just paint, Cilla; it's just fabric."

"It's statements. Fas.h.i.+ons change, go in and out, but there are statements. I'd never be a pink couch with white satin pillows. I changed it, and I'm not sorry about that. It'll never be as elegant or bold and bright as it was, with her. I'm okay with that, too. But sometimes, when it's me in here, I need-and I know this sounds completely insane-but I need to ask her if she's okay with it, too."

"Is she?"

She smiled, laid her brow against his. "She's thinking about it." She sat back, sighed. "Well, since I'm making crazy statements, I might as well lead up to asking you a crazy question."

"Let's sit outside on the crazy-question section of the veranda. There's too d.a.m.n much of me to squat down this way for long." He pulled her to her feet.

They sat on the veranda steps, legs stretched out, with Spock wandering the front yard. "You're sure this is the crazy-question section?"

"I have season tickets."

"Okay. Did you know Brian's grandfather? His father's father?"

"Barely. He died when we were just kids. I have more of an impression of him. Big, strapping guy. Powerful."

"He'd have been about, what, sixty that Christmas? That last Christmas party."

"I don't know. About, I guess. Why?"

"Not too old," Cilla considered. "Janet liked older men, and younger, and just about any age, race or creed."

"You're thinking Bri's grandfather and Janet Hardy?" His laugh was surprise and wonder. "That's just ... weird."

"Why?"

"Okay, imagining grandparents having affairs, which means imagining grandparents having s.e.x, is weird to begin with."

"Not so much when your grandmother is forever thirty-nine."

"Point."

"Besides, grandparents have s.e.x. They're ent.i.tled to have s.e.x."

"Yeah, but I don't want to fix the image in my head, or the next thing I'll be imagining my grandparents doing it, and see? See?" He gave her a mock punch on the arm. "There it is, in HDTV, in my head. Now I'm scarred for life. Thanks very much."

"Yes, definitely the crazy section of the veranda. Ford, he could've written the letters."

"My grandfather?"

"No. Well, yes, actually, now that you mention it. He had a crush on her, by his own admission. He took all those photographs of her."

Ford simply dropped his head in his hands. "It's a terrible, terrible series of images you're putting in my brain."

"Would he tell you if you asked?"

"I don't know, and I'm not going to ask. Not in any lifetime. And I'm moving out of the crazy section of the veranda."

"Wait, wait. We'll switch grandfathers. Brian's. It's hard to see yours holding so fondly on to all those photos if their affair ended so badly. But Brian's was the type, wasn't he? Powerful, important. Married. Married with a family, a successful-and public-career. He could've written those letters."

"Seeing as he's been dead for about a quarter century, it'd be hard to prove either way."

It was an obstacle, she thought, but didn't have to be insurmountable. "There are probably samples of his handwriting somewhere."

"Yeah." Ford let out a sigh. "Yeah."

"If I could get a sample, and compare it to the letters, then I'd know. They're both gone, and it could end there. There wouldn't be any point in letting it get out. But ..."

"You'd know."

"I'd know, and I could put away that part of her life that I never expected to find."

"If they don't match?"

"I guess I'll keep hoping I'll ask the right question of the right person one day."

"I'll see what I can do."

IT TOOK FORD a couple of days to figure out an approach. He couldn't lie. Not that he was incapable of it; he was just so freaking bad at it. The only way he'd ever gotten away with a lie had been when the person being lied to felt pity for him and let it slide. He'd learned to sink or swim in the truth.

He watched Brian and Shanna turning a load of peat moss into the soil behind the completed stone wall.

"You could get a shovel," Brian told him.

"I could, but there is also value in the watching and admiring. Especially in the watching and admiring of Shanna's a.s.s."

She wiggled it obligingly.

"We all know you're watching my a.s.s," Brian shot back.

"It's true. Shanna is only the beard. To be more convincing, maybe she could bend over just a little more and ... I'm sold," he said when she did so and laughed.

It came, Ford supposed, from being friends all their lives. Only one more reason a lie wasn't an option. But stalling was.

"What are y'all putting up there?"

Brian straightened, swiped a forearm over his sweaty forehead, then pointed to a group of shrubs in nursery pots. "Make yourself useful, since you don't seem to have anything better to do. Haul them up here so we can start setting them, see how they look."

"He's just b.i.t.c.hy because I'm taking ten days off. Going out to L.A. to visit Steve."

"Yeah?" Ford hefted an azalea. "So ... ?"

"'The future has not been written.'"

You had to love a woman who quoted from The Terminator . "Tell him hey, and all that."

He waited while they arranged the plants he handed up, rearranged them, argued about the arrangement, and eventually jumped down to study and critique the arrangement.

"Okay, you're right," Shanna admitted. "We'll switch that rhodo and that andromeda."

"I'm always right." Smugly, Brian poked himself in the chest with his thumb. "That's why I'm the boss."

"As boss, can you take a minute?" Ford asked. "There's this thing."

"Sure," Brian replied as they walked away.

"Okay, this has to stay between you and me," Ford began. "Cilla found some letters written by a guy her grandmother had an affair with."

"So?"

"Big, secret affair, married guy, went sour right before she died."

"I repeat: So?"

"Well, they weren't signed, and Janet kept them and hid them away, so they became Mysterious Letters. In fact, we thought maybe, until Hennessy melted down, that the break-ins were an attempt by the mystery man to get the letters back."

"Wouldn't he be, like, a hundred years old?"

"Maybe, but not necessarily. And plenty of guys in their seventies once banged women not their wives."

"That's shocking," Brian said drily. "Hey, maybe it was Hennessy, and he had this wild fling with the beautiful, s.e.xy movie star. Except I think he was born a dried-up a.s.shole."

"It's not beyond the realm. But, ah, a little closer into the circle of logical possibility ... See, she knew your grandfather, and he was an important man around here, and came to her parties."

Ford stood, scratching his head while Brian bent over double and laughed. "Jesus. Jesus!" Brian managed. "The late, great Andrew Morrow doing the nasty with Janet Hardy?"

"It's close to the circle of logical possibility," Ford insisted.

"Not in my world, Saw. I don't remember him all that well, but I remember he was a hard-a.s.s, and self-righteous."

"In my world, the self-righteous are often the ones sneaking around getting b.l.o.w. .j.o.bs before they go home to the wives and kiddies."

Brian sobered, considered. "Yeah, you got a point. And G.o.d knows my grandmother must've been hard to live with. Water was never quite wet enough for her. G.o.d, she ragged on my mom all the d.a.m.n time. Right up till she died. It'd be kind of cool," he decided, "if Big Drew Morrow had a few rounds with Janet Hardy."

It wasn't lying not to mention the claims of pregnancy, and the ugly tenor of the last letters. It was just ... not mentioning. "Do you have anything he wrote? Birthday card, letter, anything?"

"No. My mother would, I guess. She keeps family papers and that kind of stuff."

"Can you get a sample of his handwriting without letting her know what it's for?"

"Probably. She's got a box of my stuff out in the garage. School papers, cards, that kind of s.h.i.+t. There might be something in there. She's been after me to take it to my place for years. I could get it out of her way, take a look through."

"Cool. Thanks."

"Hey!" Shanna shouted over. "Are you guys about finished or do I have to plant this whole terrace myself ?"

"Nag, nag," Brian shouted back.

Ford studied her. Built, bawdy, beautiful. "How come you never went there?"

"Window of opportunity pa.s.sed, and she became my sister." He shrugged. "But we've got a deal. If we're both single when we hit forty, we're going to Jamaica for a week and spend the whole time engaged in mad, jungle s.e.x."

"Well. Good luck with that."

"Only nine years to go," Brian called out as he strode back toward Shanna.

For a moment, Ford was simply struck dumb. Nine years? Was that it? He didn't think about being forty. Forty was another decade. The grown-up decade.

How did it get to be only nine years off?

Jamming his hands in his pockets, he veered toward the house to find Cilla.

In the kitchen, where even the slices and chunks of counter had been torn out and hauled away, and odd-looking pipes poked out of a floor that might have been snacked on by drunken rodents, Buddy worked at a wide slice in the plaster wall.

He turned with some sort of large tool in his hand that made Ford think of a metal parrot head mated with a giraffe's neck.

"Who the h.e.l.l puts a G.o.dd.a.m.n faucet over the G.o.dd.a.m.n stove?" Buddy demanded.

"I don't know. Ah, in case of fire?"

"That's a load of c.r.a.p."

"It's the best I've got. Is Cilla around?"

"Woman's always around. Check up in the attic. Toilets in the attic," Buddy muttered as he went back to work. "Faucets over the stove. Want a tub in the bedroom next."

"Actually, I've seen ... Nothing," Ford said when Buddy turned slitted eyes on him. "I see nothing."

He trooped his way through the house, noted that the trim was nearly finished in the hall, the entryway. On the second floor, he poked into rooms. He could still smell the paint in a room with walls of a subtle, smoky brown. In the master, he studied the three colors brushed on the wall. Apparently, she hadn't yet decided between a silvery gray, a gray-blue and a muted gold.

He wandered down the hall, then up the widened, finished stairs. She stood with Matt, each holding a sample of wood up to the light streaming through the window.

"Yeah, I like the contrast of the oak against the walnut." Matt nodded. "You know what we could do? We could trim it out in the walnut. You've got your ... Hey, Ford."

"Hey."

"Summit meeting," Cilla told him. "Built-ins."

"Go right ahead."

"Okay, like this." With his pencil, Matt began to draw on the drywall, and Ford's attention s.h.i.+fted to the swaths of paint brushed on the opposite wall. She had the same silvery gray here, and a warm cheery yellow competing with what he'd call apricot.

He took a look in the bathroom, at the tiles and tones.