Tribute

the whole flipping houses came from, she reminded herself. You didn’t have to settle on one if you kept turning them.
    But he wouldn’t listen to reason on this. And the fact that he was just out of the damn hospital made it impossible to kick his ass. Who’d check on him two or three times a night as she’d done? So he’d been fine when she had. What if he hadn’t been?
    She rolled over again, punched her pillow. And gave up.
    Dawn was about to break anyway. She’d go check on him again, then go down and make some coffee. She’d have her quiet time outside before the crew started piling in.
    As she heard Steve snoring before she reached his doorway, she headed straight for coffee. In another few months, she thought, she’d have an actual kitchen. Refitted antique appliances, countertops, cabinets. Actual dishes. And damn if she wasn’t treating herself to a fancy espresso maker.
    Maybe she’d actually learn how to cook. She’d bet Patty could teach her some good basics. Nothing fancy and gourmet. She’d tried that route and failed spectacularly. But your basic red sauce, or meat and potatoes. Surely she could learn how to cook a chicken breast.
    Once the house was finished, she promised herself. Once she had her license, geared up for business, found a routine. She’d learn how to cook for herself instead of living on sandwiches, canned soup and takeout.
    She carried the coffee outside, drawing in its scent as the first sleepy light played over her new gardens, over earth still turned and waiting. She sipped while the mists rose off the pond she still had to clean.
    Every day, she thought. She wanted to do this every day. To step out of her home in the soft, sleepy light and see what she could do, what she had done. What had been given to her.
    Whatever she’d paid her mother for this place, this life, didn’t count. In that soft and sleepy light, she knew everything she could see and smell and touch had been a gift from the grandmother she’d never met.
    She would’ve taken coffee on a morning walk, Cilla thought as she stepped off the veranda to wander. Accounts spoke of her as an early riser, used to the demands of filming. Often up at dawn.
    Often up till dawn, too, Cilla admitted. But that was another side of the woman. The party girl, the Hollywood queen, the star who drank too much and leaned too heavily on pills.
    In the quiet morning, Cilla wanted the company of the Janet Hardy who fell in love with this little slice of Virginia. Who brought home a mongrel pup and had roses planted under the window.
    The big red barn made her smile as she strolled around the house. The police tape was gone, the padlock firmly in place. And Steve, she thought, was snoring in the pretty iron bed in the pretty room upstairs.
    That nightmare was done. A scavenger looking for scraps who’d panicked. The police believed that to be the case, so who was she to argue? If she wanted to solve a personal mystery, it would be the author of the letters inside Gatsby . And in that way, she’d put another piece of Janet’s together, for her own knowledge. Her own history.
    The light grew as she neared the front of the house. Birdsong sweetened the air as did the scent of roses and turned earth. Dew tickled coolly on her bare feet. It pleased her more than she could say to know she walked on her own land, over dewed grass, wearing a tank and cotton pajama pants.
    And no one cared.
    She finished the coffee on the front veranda, gazing out over the lawn.
    Her smile faded slowly, changing into a puzzled frown as her eyes scanned the front wall.
    Where were her trees? She should be able to see the bowing tops of her weeping cherries from the veranda. As the frown deepened, she set her mug on the rail, stepped down to walk along the lawn beside the gravel drive.
    Then she began to run.
    “No. Goddamn it, no!”
    Her young weepers lay on the narrow swatch of green between her wall and the shoulder of the road. Their slender trunks bore the hack marks of an ax. It wouldn’t have taken much, she thought as she crouched down to brush her fingers over the leaves. Three or four swings at most.
    Not to steal. Digging them up would have taken a bit more time, a bit more trouble. To destroy. To kill.
    The sheer meanness of the act twisted in her belly in a combination of sorrow and fury. Not a scavenger, she thought. Not kids. Kids bashed mailboxes along the road, so she’d been warned. Kids didn’t take the time to hack down a