High Noon

his shoulder. “I’m sorry Josie can’t be here.”
    “Me, too. She’ll be here for dinner if she can.”
    Her baby brother, she thought, a married man. “You two ought to stay the night, avoid the holiday traffic and the insanity of revelry.”
    “We like the insanity of revelry, but I’ll see if she’d rather. Remember the first time we stood up here and watched the parade? That first spring after Reuben.”
    “I remember.”
    “Everything was so bright and loud and foolish. Everyone was so happy. I believe even Cousin Bess cracked a smile or two.”
    Probably just indigestion, Phoebe thought, with lingering bitterness.
    “I felt, really felt, maybe everything would be all right. That he wasn’t going to break out and come for us, wasn’t going to kill us in our sleep. Christmas didn’t do that for me, not that first year, or my birthday. But standing here all those years ago, I thought maybe everything was going to be all right after all.”
    “And it was.”
    She took his hand so they were linked, right down the line of the rail.

2
    Cleaned up and hung over, Duncan sat at his kitchen counter brooding over his laptop and a cup of black coffee. He’d meant to keep it to a couple of beers, hanging with some of the regulars at Slam Dunc before heading off to catch the music, another beer or two at Swifty’s, his Irish pub.
    When you owned bars, he’d learned, you were smart to stay sober. He might bend that rule of thumb a little on St. Patrick’s Day or New Year’s Eve. But he knew how to coast through a long night with a couple of beers.
    It hadn’t been celebration that put the Jameson’s with a bump of Harp back into his hand too many times. It had been sheer relief. Joe wasn’t a smear on the sidewalk outside the bar.
    I’ll drink to that.
    And it was better to be hung over due to good news than hung over due to bad. You still felt like shit, Duncan admitted as the horns and pipes throbbed in his abused head, but you knew it would wear off.
    What he needed to do was get out of the house. Take a walk. Or a nap in the hammock. Then figure out what to do next. He’d been figuring out what to do next for the past seven years. And he liked it.
    He frowned at the laptop another moment, then shook his head. If he tried to work now, even pretend to work, his head would probably explode.
    Instead, he carried his coffee out to the back veranda. The mourning doves were cooing, bobbing heads as they pecked along the ground under the bird feeder. Too fat and lazy, Duncan thought, to bother to fly up into it. Rather take leavings.
    A lot of people were the same.
    His gardens were thriving, and he liked knowing he’d put a little of his own sweat and effort into them. He considered walking through them now, winding his way under the live oaks and the thick spider-webs of moss to the dock. Take a sail maybe, cruise the river.
    Damn pretty morning for it, if you paid attention. One of those sparkling clear, hint-of-a-breeze mornings you’d wish you’d prized come July.
    Or he could just go down and sit on the dock, look out toward the salt flats and watch the sun play on them. Take the coffee down and just sit and do nothing on a pretty spring morning—a damn good deal.
    And what was Joe doing this fine morning? Sitting in a cell? A padded room? What was the redhead up to?
    It was no use pretending it was just an ordinary day in the life when he couldn’t get yesterday out of his head. No point thinking he wanted to sit on the pier nursing a hangover and pretending everything was just fine and dandy.
    So he went up the back steps to his bedroom, hunted out clean jeans and a shirt that didn’t look like it had been slept in. Then he pulled his wallet, keys and other pocket paraphernalia out of the jeans he had slept in after he’d dragged his half-drunken ass to bed.
    At least he’d been smart enough to take a cab, he reminded himself as he scooped his fingers through his shaggy mass of brown hair.
    Maybe he should wear a suit. Should he wear a suit?
    Shit.
    He decided a suit was a kind of showing off when worn to visit a former employee in Joe’s current situation. Besides, he didn’t feel like wearing a damn suit.
    Still, the redhead might like suits, and since he had every intention of tracking her down, a suit could play to his advantage.
    Hell with it.
    He started out, jogged down the sweeping curve of the main staircase, across the polished sea of white tiles of the grand foyer. When he