Tribute

back for me. Damn it, Cilla.” Ford paced down the drive, then back to where she sat on the steps of the veranda. “What if he—she—whoever—had still been here?”
    “They weren’t. The cops were here within fifteen minutes. They’re pretty used to the run by now. I didn’t see the point in—”
    “Because I can’t run a skill saw or a damn drill I’m no use?”
    “I didn’t mean that, and you know I didn’t mean that.”
    “Simmer down, Ford.” Matt stepped between them.
    “No way. It’s the second time somebody killed one of those damn dolls to scare her, and she sits over here alone waiting for the cops and lets me sleep. It’s goddamn stupid.”
    “You’re right. Simmer down anyway. He’s right,” Matt said to Cilla. “It was goddamn stupid. You’re a hell of a job boss, Cilla, and one of the best carpenters I’ve worked with, but the fact is someone’s dogging you and threatening you, and standing around here alone after you come across something like this doesn’t show much sense.”
    “It was a cowardly bully tactic, and nobody asked you to go running across the road dragging Ford out of bed so the pair of you can gang up on me. I’m not stupid. If I was afraid, I’d have run across the road and dragged Ford out of bed. I was mad, damn it.”
    She shoved to her feet as sitting and looking up at two annoyed males made her feel weak and small. “I’m still mad. I’m pissed and I’m tired of being dogged and threatened, as you put it. Of being run off the road and having good work destroyed, and the whole rest of it. Believe me, if whoever did that had still been here, I’d have probably yanked that knife out of that idiot doll and stabbed him in the throat with it. And still been pissed.”
    “If you’re so smart,” Ford said, very coolly, “then you know it was stupid.”
    She opened her mouth, shut it and gave up. Then she sat back down. “I’ll give you rash. I won’t give you stupid.”
    “Hardheaded and rash,” Ford countered. “That’s my final offer.”
    “Have it your way. Now if you’d go back to bed, and you’d go get to work, I could sit here and wallow in my brood.”
    Saying nothing, Matt walked up, patted Cilla on the head and continued inside. Ford came over, sat beside her.
    “Like I care if you can run a skill saw.”
    “Thank God you don’t.”
    “I didn’t think about coming to get you. I was too mad. I don’t get it, I just don’t get it.” Shifting, she indulged herself—and him—by pressing her face to his shoulder a moment. “Hennessy’s in psych. If his wife’s doing this, why? I know he’s doing two years, but how is that my fault? Maybe she’s as crazy as he is.”
    “And maybe Hennessy didn’t do it. Ran you off the road, no question. Is crazy, no argument. But maybe he didn’t do any of the rest. He wouldn’t admit to it.”
    “That would be just great, meaning I have at least two people out there who’d like to make my life hell.” She leaned forward, propped her elbows on her thighs. “It could be about the letters. Someone else knows about them, knows I found them, that they still exist. If Andrew wrote them, someone might know about them, about the affair, the pregnancy . . . His name’s still prominent around here. To protect his reputation . . .”
    “Who, Brian’s father? Brian? Besides, it doesn’t look like Andrew Morrow wrote them. I sent copies to a graphologist.”
    “What?” She jerked straight again. “When?”
    “A couple days after Brian brought the card over. Yes, taking that on myself without telling or consulting you was . . . rash. We’ll call it even.”
    “God, Ford, if the press gets ahold of this—”
    “They won’t. Why would they? I found a guy in New York, one who doesn’t know Andrew Morrow from Bruce Wayne. And the copy of the page of one of the letters I sent him had nothing in it that referred to Janet or the location, even the time frame. I was careful.”
    “Okay. Okay.” He would have been, she admitted.
    “The conclusion was, not the same hand. Guy wouldn’t stake his reputation on it because they were copies, and because I told him they were written about four years apart. But he wouldn’t document them as the same hand. He did say they were of similar style, and both might have been taught to write by the same person.”
    “Like a teacher?”
    “Possibly.”
    A whole new avenue, Cilla realized. “So it might have been someone who went to school with