Tribute

yell ‘fore,’ or something?” he demanded. “How the hell would I have explained that one? Yes, Doctor, I’ve been impaled through the brain by perhaps the ugliest pole lamp in the history of pole lamps.”
    “I don’t think it would’ve impaled. More dented. Anyway, it offended my eye.”
    “Yeah, mine too. Almost literally. What are you doing back here? It’s early for you,” he added when she frowned at him. “I saw your car. I thought maybe . . .”
    “No. Nothing new. Except Steve’s mother’s there.”
    “Yeah. I ran into her this morning for a minute.” He dipped his hands into his pockets, hunched a little. “She’s scary.”
    “She hates me. For marrying Steve, for divorcing him. She doesn’t actually like Steve all that much, but me? She hates. So I cleared the field. Deserted, actually. I don’t do well with mothers.”
    “You do okay with your stepmom. She sent over that nice casserole last night.”
    “Tuna noodle. I’m not sure that’s a sign of affection.”
    “It is, take my word.” He stepped through and around some of the mess to get to her, to touch her cheek. “You’re working too hard, beautiful blond girl.”
    “I’m not.” She pulled away, kicked at one of the boxes. “The cops want me to go through this stuff, to see if anything’s missing.”
    “Yeah. I think I’ve been bumped down the suspect list, which is oddly disappointing. Tall White Guy asked me to sign a copy of The Seeker: Indestructible for his grandson.”
    “Tall . . . oh, Urick. I told them it wasn’t about you or Steve or me. But what the hell is here? What’s here somebody would want so damn bad? It’s junk. It’s trash. It should be tossed, all of it. I’m tossing it,” she decided in an instant. “Help me toss it.”
    He grabbed her, pulled her back up as she started to drag up a box. “No. You don’t toss when you’re churned up. And you know that what someone might have wanted isn’t here. Because you already found it and put it somewhere else.”
    “The letters.”
    “That’s right. Did you tell the cops about the letters?”
    “No.”
    “Why not?”
    “I don’t know, exactly. Partly because all I could really think about at first was Steve. And what would they do with the letters? Thirty-five-year-old letters, unsigned, no return address.”
    “Fingerprints, DNA. Don’t you watch CSI ?”
    “Fact, fantasy. And it’ll leak. It always leaks, that is a fact. Letters from a lover, days before her death. Was it suicide? Was it murder? Was she carrying a love child? All the speculation, the print, the airtime, the reporters, the obsessed fans, it all pumps up. Any chance I had here, at peace, at a life, pretty much goes up in flames.”
    “Why?”
    “I don’t want to live like that, in the crosshairs of the camera lens. I want this to be my home.” She heard the edge of desperation in her own voice but couldn’t dull it. “I wanted to bring something back from her, and for her. But I wanted it to be mine at the end of the day.”
    “You don’t want to know who wrote those letters?”
    “Yes, I do. I do. But I don’t want to ruin his life, Ford, or his children’s lives because he had an affair, because he broke off the affair. Even if he was cruel about it. There has to be a statute of limitations. Thirty years should cover it.”
    “Agreed.”
    He said nothing more, just watched her, looked into her eyes until she closed them.
    “How could anyone prove it?” she demanded. “If, if, if she didn’t kill herself. If, if, if some of the conspiracy theories have been close to true and someone—this someone—made her take the pills, or slipped them to her. How could we prove it?”
    “I don’t know, but the first step would be asking the right people the right questions.”
    “I don’t know the people or the questions, and I can’t think about this. Not now. I need to get through today, then get through tomorrow. I need—”
    She threw herself against him, locking her arms around his neck while her mouth latched on to his. He wasn’t prepared for the eruption, the bursts of desperation and appetite. Who could have been? With quick, catchy gasps, low, sexy moans, she devoured. She hooked one of those long, long legs around him, sank her teeth into his bottom lip, tugged. And he went instantly, helplessly, hard as stone.
    She rubbed her body against his until he could literally feel the blood draining out of his head and heading south. “Lock the