Cold Fire

Thorne.”
    “I need to talk to you.”
    “We have nothing to talk about.”
    “Hah!”
    He went back inside and slid the door shut. She heard the latch click.
    After lying on her stomach for almost an hour, dozing instead of reading, she decided she'd had enough sun. Besides, at three-thirty in the afternoon, the best tanning rays were past.
    She moved the lounger, cooler, and the rest of her paraphernalia onto the shaded patio. She opened a second diet soda and picked up the MacDonald novel again.
    At four o'clock she heard the family-room door sliding open again. His footsteps approached and stopped behind her. He stood there for a while, evidently looking down at her. Neither of them spoke, and she pretended to keep reading.
    His continued silence was eerie. She began to think about his dark side—the eight shotgun rounds he had pumped into Norman Rink in Atlanta, for one thing—and she grew increasingly nervous until she decided that he was trying to spook her.
    When Holly picked up her can of soda from the top of the cooler, took a sip, sighed with pleasure at the taste, and put the can down again all without letting her hand tremble even once, Ironheart at last came around the lounge chair and stood where she could see him. He was still slovenly and unshaven. Dark circles ringed his eyes. He had an unhealthy pallor.
    “What do you want from me?” he asked.
    “That'll take a while to explain.”
    “I don't have a while.”
    “How long do you have?”
    “One minute,” he said.
    She hesitated, then shook her head. “Can't do it in a minute. I'll just wait here till you've got more time.”
    He stared at her intimidatingly.
    She found her place in the novel.
    He said, “I could call the police, have you put off my property.”
    “Why don't you do that?” she said.
    He stood there a few seconds longer, impatient and uncertain, then reentered the house. Slid the door shut. Locked it.
    “Don't take forever,” Holly muttered. “In about another hour, I'm gonna have to use your bathroom.”
    Around her, two hummingbirds drew nectar from the flowers, the shadows lengthened, and exploding bubbles made hollow ticking sounds inside her open can of soda.
    Down in Florida, there were also hummingbirds and cool shadows, icy bottles of Dos Equis instead of diet cola, and Travis McGee was getting into deeper trouble by the paragraph.
    Her stomach began to grumble. She had eaten breakfast at the airport in Dubuque, surprised that her appetite had not been suppressed forever by the macabre images burned into her mind at the crash scene. She had missed lunch, thanks to the stakeout; now she was famished. Life goes on.
    Fifteen minutes ahead of Holly's bathroom deadline, Ironheart returned. He had showered and shaved. He was dressed in a blue boatneck shirt, white cotton slacks, and white canvas Top-Siders.
    She was flattered by his desire to make a better appearance.
    “Okay,” he said, “what do you want?”
    “I need to use your facilities first.”
    A long-suffering look lengthened his face. “Okay, okay, but then we talk, get it over with, and you go.”
    She followed him into the family room, which was adjacent to an open breakfast area, which was adjacent to an open kitchen. The mismatched furniture appeared to have been purchased on the cheap at a warehouse clearance sale immediately after he had graduated from college and taken his first teaching job. It was clean but well worn. Hundreds of paperback books filled free-standing cases. But there was no artwork of any kind on the walls, and no decor pieces such as vases or bowls or sculptures or potted plants lent warmth to the room.
    He showed her the powder room off the main entrance foyer. No wallpaper, white paint. No designer soaps shaped like rosebuds, just a bar of Ivory. No colorful or embroidered handtowels, just a roll of Bounty standing on the counter.
    As she closed the door, she looked back at him and said, “Maybe we could talk over an early supper. I'm starved.”
    When she finished in the bathroom, she peeked in his living room. It was decorated—to use the word as loosely as the language police would allow—in a style best described as Early Garage Sale, though it was even more Spartan than the family room. His house was surprisingly modest for a man who had won six million in the state lottery, but his furniture made the house seem Rockefellerian by comparison.
    She went out to the kitchen and found him waiting at the round