River’s End

shield as a piece of paper would be,” he pointed out as she stormed around the room. “She’ll lose interest quicker if I lie back a bit, then she’ll latch onto some other poor bastard. The fact is, I’m going to be doing a lot of traveling over the next several months. I’m heading up to San Francisco in a few days.”
    “Well, I hope you don’t come back to a pile of ashes,” Celia snapped, then blew out a breath. “I’m so angry, and I’ve got nowhere to put it.”
    He smiled, opened his arms. “Put it here, pal.”
    She sighed again, hugely, then walked over to wrap her arms around him. “I want to punch her, just once. Just one good shot.”
    He had to laugh, and tightened his grip into a fierce squeeze. “If you ever get the chance, I’ll go your bail. Now stop worrying about me.”
    “It’s my job. I take my work very seriously.” She eased back, looked up. Despite the man’s face, the man’s stubble of beard, he was still her little boy. “Now, I guess we move on to phase two. I know you and your father are tiptoeing around each other.”
    “Let it go, Mom.”
    “Not when it involves the two most important people in my life. The two of you were like a couple of polite strangers at my birthday dinner.”
    “Would you rather we’d fought about it?”
    “Maybe. Boy, I seem to have latent violent tendencies.” She smiled a little, smoothed a hand over his hair, wished she could smooth out his troubles as easily. “I hate seeing both of you unhappy and distant.”
    “This is my job,” he pointed out. “And I take it very seriously.”
    “I know you do.”
    “He doesn’t.”
    “That’s not true, Noah.” Her brow furrowed because she heard the unhappiness under the anger. “He just doesn’t completely understand what you do and why you do it. And this particular case was—is—very personal to him.”
    “It’s personal to me, too. I don’t know why,” he said when she studied him. “It just is, always has been. I have to follow through.”
    “I know that, and I think you’re right.”
    The tension and resentment eased off his shoulders. “Thanks.”
    “I only want you to try to understand your father’s feelings on it, and actually, I think you’ll come to as you go deeper into the people and the events. Noah, he ached for that little girl. I don’t think he’s ever stopped aching for her. There’ve been other cases, other horrors, but that child stayed with him.”
    She stayed with me, too, he thought. Right inside me. But he didn’t say it. He hadn’t wanted to think it. “I’ll be going up to Washington, to see if she’s still there.”
    Celia hesitated, suffered through the tug-of-war with loyalties. “She’s still there. She and your father have kept in touch.”
    “Really?” Noah considered as he got up to pour more coffee. “Well then, that should make things easier.”
    “I’m not sure anything will make this easier.”
    An hour later, when he was alone and slightly queasy from having inhaled four pastries, Noah decided it was as good a day as any to travel. This time he’d drive to San Francisco, he thought as he went to the bedroom to toss what few clothes he had in a bag. It would give him time to think, and he could make arrangements on the way for a few days at River’s End.
    It would give him time to prepare himself for seeing Olivia again. 

Sixteen
    Sam’s nerves slithered under his skin like restless snakes. To keep them at bay he recited poetry—Sandburg, Yeats, Frost. It was a trick he’d learned during his early stage work, when he’d suffered horribly, and he had refined it in prison, where so much of the life was waiting, nerves and despair.
    At one time he’d tried to calm himself, control himself, by running lines in his head. Bits and pieces of his movies in which he would draw the character up from his gut, become someone else. But that had led to a serious bout of depression during the first nickel of his time inside. When the lines were done, he was still Sam Tanner, he was still in San Quentin and there was no hope that tomorrow would change that. But the poetry was soothing, helped stroke back that part of himself that was screaming.
    When he’d come up for parole the first time, he’d actually believed they would let him go. They, the tangled mass of faces and figures of the justice system, would look at him and see a man who’d paid with the most precious years of his life. He’d been nervous then, with