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She wiggled it obligingly.

“We all know you’re watching my ass,” Brian shot back.

“It’s true. Shanna is only the beard. To be more convincing, maybe she could bend over just a little more and . . . I’m sold,” he said when she did so and laughed.

It came, Ford supposed, from being friends all their lives. Only one more reason a lie wasn’t an option. But stalling was.

“What are y’all putting up there?”

Brian straightened, swiped a forearm over his sweaty forehead, then pointed to a group of shrubs in nursery pots. “Make yourself useful, since you don’t seem to have anything better to do. Haul them up here so we can start setting them, see how they look.”

“He’s just bitchy because I’m taking ten days off. Going out to L.A. to visit Steve.”

“Yeah?” Ford hefted an azalea. “So . . . ?”

“ ‘The future has not been written.’ ”

You had to love a woman who quoted from
The Terminator
. “Tell him hey, and all that.”

He waited while they arranged the plants he handed up, rearranged them, argued about the arrangement, and eventually jumped down to study and critique the arrangement.

“Okay, you’re right,” Shanna admitted. “We’ll switch that rhodo and that andromeda.”

“I’m always right.” Smugly, Brian poked himself in the chest with his thumb. “That’s why I’m the boss.”

“As boss, can you take a minute?” Ford asked. “There’s this thing.”

“Sure,” Brian replied as they walked away.

“Okay, this has to stay between you and me,” Ford began. “Cilla found some letters written by a guy her grandmother had an affair with.”

“So?”

“Big, secret affair, married guy, went sour right before she died.”

“I repeat: So?”

“Well, they weren’t signed, and Janet kept them and hid them away, so they became Mysterious Letters. In fact, we thought maybe, until Hennessy melted down, that the break-ins were an attempt by the mystery man to get the letters back.”

“Wouldn’t he be, like, a hundred years old?”

“Maybe, but not necessarily. And plenty of guys in their seventies once banged women not their wives.”

“That’s shocking,” Brian said drily. “Hey, maybe it
was
Hennessy, and he had this wild fling with the beautiful, sexy movie star. Except I think he was born a dried-up asshole.”

“It’s not beyond the realm. But, ah, a little closer into the circle of logical possibility . . . See, she knew your grandfather, and he was an important man around here, and came to her parties.”

Ford stood, scratching his head while Brian bent over double and laughed. “Jesus. Jesus!” Brian managed. “The late, great Andrew Morrow doing the nasty with Janet Hardy?”

“It’s close to the circle of logical possibility,” Ford insisted.

“Not in my world, Saw. I don’t remember him all that well, but I remember he was a hard-ass, and self-righteous.”

“In my world, the self-righteous are often the ones sneaking around getting blow jobs before they go home to the wives and kiddies.”

Brian sobered, considered. “Yeah, you got a point. And God knows my grandmother must’ve been hard to live with. Water was never quite wet enough for her. God, she ragged on my mom all the damn time. Right up till she died. It’d be kind of cool,” he decided, “if Big Drew Morrow had a few rounds with Janet Hardy.”

It wasn’t lying not to mention the claims of pregnancy, and the ugly tenor of the last letters. It was just . . . not mentioning. “Do you have anything he wrote? Birthday card, letter, anything?”

“No. My mother would, I guess. She keeps family papers and that kind of stuff.”

“Can you get a sample of his handwriting without letting her know what it’s for?”

“Probably. She’s got a box of my stuff out in the garage. School papers, cards, that kind of shit. There might be something in there. She’s been after me to take it to my place for years. I could get it out of her way, take a look through.”

“Cool. Thanks.”

“Hey!” Shanna shouted over. “Are you guys about finished or do I have to plant this whole terrace myself?”

“Nag, nag,” Brian shouted back.

Ford studied her. Built, bawdy, beautiful. “How come you never went there?”

“Window of opportunity passed, and she became my sister.” He shrugged. “But we’ve got a deal. If we’re both single when we hit forty, we’re going to Jamaica for a week and spend the whole time engaged in mad, jungle sex.”

“Well. Good luck with that.”

“Only nine years to go,” Brian called out as he strode back toward Shanna.

For a moment, Ford was simply struck dumb. Nine years? Was that it? He didn’t think about being forty. Forty was another decade. The grown-up decade.

How did it get to be only nine years off?

Jamming his hands in his pockets, he veered toward the house to find Cilla.

In the kitchen, where even the slices and chunks of counter had been torn out and hauled away, and odd-looking pipes poked out of a floor that might have been snacked on by drunken rodents, Buddy worked at a wide slice in the plaster wall.

He turned with some sort of large tool in his hand that made Ford think of a metal parrot head mated with a giraffe’s neck.

“Who the hell puts a goddamn faucet over the goddamn stove?” Buddy demanded.

“I don’t know. Ah, in case of fire?”

“That’s a load of crap.”

“It’s the best I’ve got. Is Cilla around?”

“Woman’s always around. Check up in the attic. Toilets in the attic,” Buddy muttered as he went back to work. “Faucets over the stove. Want a tub in the bedroom next.”

“Actually, I’ve seen . . . Nothing,” Ford said when Buddy turned slitted eyes on him. “I see nothing.”

He trooped his way through the house, noted that the trim was nearly finished in the hall, the entryway. On the second floor, he poked into rooms. He could still smell the paint in a room with walls of a subtle, smoky brown. In the master, he studied the three colors brushed on the wall. Apparently, she hadn’t yet decided between a silvery gray, a gray-blue and a muted gold.

He wandered down the hall, then up the widened, finished stairs. She stood with Matt, each holding a sample of wood up to the light streaming through the window.

“Yeah, I like the contrast of the oak against the walnut.” Matt nodded. “You know what we could do? We could trim it out in the walnut. You’ve got your . . . Hey, Ford.”

“Hey.”

“Summit meeting,” Cilla told him. “Built-ins.”

“Go right ahead.”

“Okay, like this.” With his pencil, Matt began to draw on the drywall, and Ford’s attention shifted to the swaths of paint brushed on the opposite wall. She had the same silvery gray here, and a warm cheery yellow competing with what he’d call apricot.

He took a look in the bathroom, at the tiles and tones.

He tuned back in to hear Matt and Cilla come to an agreement on material and design.

“I’ll get started on this in my shop,” Matt told her.

“How’s Josie feeling?”

“Hot and impatient, and wondering why the hell she didn’t do the math last winter and realize she’d be going through the summer pregnant.”

“Flowers,” Ford suggested. “Buy her flowers on the way home. She’ll still be hot, but she’ll be happy.”

“Maybe I’ll do that. I’ll check, make sure the flooring’s coming in on Tuesday. Barring another screwup, we’ll start hammering it out up here. Roses always work, right?” he asked Ford.

“They’re a classic for a reason.”

“Okay. I’ll let you know about the flooring, Cilla.”

As Matt went down, Ford stepped over, tapped Cilla’s chin up, kissed her. “The pale silver up here, the dull gold in the master.”

She cocked her head. “Maybe. Why?”

“Streams better with the bathrooms than your other choices. And while they’re both warm tones, the gray gives a sense of coolness. It’s an attic, however jazzed up you make it. And in the bedroom, that color’s restful but still strong. Now tell me why Buddy’s putting a faucet over your stove.”

“To fill pots.”

“Okay. I talked to Brian.”

“You often do.”

“About the letters. His grandfather.”

“You . . . you told him?” Her mouth dropped open. “You just told him I think his grandfather might have broken commandments with my grandmother?”

“I don’t think commandments were mentioned. You wanted a handwriting sample. Brian can probably get one.”

“Yes, but . . . Couldn’t you have been covert, a little sneaky? Couldn’t you have lied?”

“I suck at sneak. And even if I gold-medaled in the sneak competition, I can’t lie to a friend. He understands I told him in confidence, and he won’t break a confidence to a friend.”

She blew out a breath. “You people certainly grew up on a different planet than I did. Are you sure he won’t say anything to his father? It’s a stew pot of embarrassment.”

“I’m sure. He did have an interesting comment though. What if Hennessy wrote the letters?”

Cilla went back to gape. “Kill-you-with-my-truck Hennessy?”

“Well, think about it. How crazy would you get if you’d been having an affair with a woman, then the son of that woman is responsible—in your eyes—for putting your son in a wheelchair? It’s way-fetched, I agree. I’m going to reread the letters with this in mind. Just to see how it plays.”

“You know what? If it turns in that direction, within a mile of that direction, I don’t think I want to know. Imagining my grandmother with Hennessy just gives me the serious eeuuwws.”

She sighed, started downstairs with him. “I talked to the police today,” she told Ford. “There won’t be a trial. They did a deal, Hennessy took a plea, whatever. He’ll do a minimum of two years in the state facility, psychiatric.”

Ford reached for her hand. “How do you feel about that?”

“I don’t honestly know. So I guess I’ll put it aside, think about now.”

She moved into the master, studied the paint samples. “Yeah, you’re right about the color.”

TWENTY-FIVE

C
illa used Sunday morning to pore through home and design magazines, scout the Internet for ideas and vendors and tear out or bookmark possibilities and potentials. She could hardly believe she’d reached the stage where she could begin considering furniture.

Weeks away, of course, and she needed to add in trolling antique stores, even flea markets—and possibly yard sales—but she was approaching the time when ordering sofas and chairs, tables and lamps, wouldn’t be out of line.

Then there was bedding, she mused, a kitchen to outfit, an office, window treatments, rugs. All those fun, picky little details to fill in a house. To make a house a home. Her home.

Her first real home.

The closer it came to reality, the more she realized just how much she wanted home. All she had to do was step outside, look across the road and see it.

Sitting here now, at Ford’s counter, with her laptop, her magazines, her notebooks, she thought of just how far she’d come since March. No, well before March, she corrected. She’d started this journey on that long-ago trek through the Blue Ridge, one she’d taken specifically, deliberately to see, firsthand, her grandmother’s Little Farm, to see where her own father sprang from, and maybe to understand, a little, why he’d come back, and left her.

And she’d fallen in love, Cilla thought now, with the hills that bumped their way back to the mountains, the thick spread of trees, the little towns and the big ones, the houses and gardens, the winding roads and streams. Most of all, she’d fallen in love with the old farmhouse sagging behind a stone wall, closed in by its desolate, overgrown gardens.

Sleeping Beauty’s castle, maybe, she mused, but she’d seen home, even then.

Now, what she’d dreamed of, yearned for, was very nearly hers.

She sat at the counter, sipping coffee, and imagined waking in a room with walls the color of a glowing and hopeful dawn, and of living a life she’d chosen rather than one chosen for her.

Ford gave a sleepy grunt as he walked in.

Look at him, she thought. Barely awake, that long, long, lean, edging-toward-gawky body dressed in navy boxers and a tattered Yoda T-shirt. All that sun-streaked brown hair rumpled and messy, and those green eyes groggy and just a little cranky.

Wasn’t he just unbelievably adorable?

He dumped coffee into a mug, added sugar, milk. Said, “God, mornings suck through a straw,” and drank as if his life balanced within the contents of the mug.

Then he turned, to prop his elbow on the counter. “How come you look so lucid?”

“Maybe because I’ve been up for three hours. It’s after ten, Ford.”

“You have no respect for the Sunday.”

“It’s true. I’m ashamed.”

“No, you’re not. But real estate agents also have no respect for the Sunday. Vicky just called my cell and woke me from a very hot dream involving you, me and finger paints. It was really getting interesting when I was so rudely and annoyingly interrupted. Anyway, the sellers came down another five thousand.”

“Finger paints?”

“And as an artist I can say it was the beginning of a master-piece. We’re only ten thousand apart now, as Vicky the dream killer pointed out. So . . .”

“No.”

“Damn it.” He looked like a kid who’d just been told there were no cookies in the jar. “I knew you were going to say no, which you did not say when I was swirling cobalt blue around your belly button. Couldn’t we just—”

“No. You’ll thank me later when you have that ten K to put into improvements and repairs.”

“But I really want that ugly dump now. I want it for my own. I love it, Cilla, like a fat kid loves cake.” He tried a hopeful smile. “We could split the difference.”

“No. We hold firm. No one else has made an offer on the property. The seller isn’t interested in making any of those repairs and improvements. He’ll cave.”