no great talent for deception; he was just determined to preserve his
privacy As a reporter who had ever-increasing doubts about a
journalist’s right intrude in the lives of others, Holly sympathized
with his reticence. When she glanced at him, she could only laugh
softly. “You’re good.”
“So are you.”
As she stopped at the curb in front of the terminal, Holly said, “NO, if
I were good, by now I’d at least have found out what the hell you do for
a living.” He had a charming smile. And those eyes “I didn’t say you
were as good as I am just that you were good.” He got out and retrieved
his suitcase from the back seat, then returned to the open front door.
“Look, I happened to be in the right place at the right time. By sheer
chance, I was able to save that boy. It wouldn’t be fair to have my
whole life turned upside down by the media just because I did a good
deed.”
“No, it wouldn’t,” she agreed.
With a look of relief, he said, “Thank you.”
“But I gotta say-your modesty’s refreshing.”
He looked at her for a long beat, fixed her with his exceptional blue
eyes.
“So are you, Miss Thorne.”
Then he closed the door, turned away, and entered the terminal.
Their last exchange played again in her mind: Your modesty’s refreshing.
So are you, Miss Thorne She stared at the terminal door through which he
had disappeared, and he seemed too good to have been real, as if she had
given a ride to a hitchhiking spirit. A thin haze filtered flecks of
color from the late-afternoon sunlight, so the air had a vague golden
cast of the kind that sometimes hung for an instant in the wake of a
vanishing remnant in an old movie about ghosts.
A hard, hollow rapping noise startled her.
She snapped her head around and saw an airport security guard tapping
with his knuckles on the hood of her car. When he had her attention, he
pointed to a sign: LOADING ZONE.
Wondering how long she had sat there, mesmerized by thoughts of Jim
Ironheart, Holly released the emergency brake and slipped the car in
gear.
She drove away from the terminal.
Your modesty’s refreshing.
So are you, Miss Thorne All the way back into Portland, a sense of the
uncanny lay upon her, a perception that someone preternaturally special
had passed through her life. She was unsettled by the discovery that a
man could so affect her, and she felt uncomfortably girlish, even
foolish. At the same time, she enjoyed that pleasantly eerie mood and
did not want it to fade.
So are you, Miss Thorne That evening, in her third-floor apartment
overlooking Council city park, as she was cooking a dinner of angel-hair
pasta with pesto sauce pine nuts, fresh garlic, and chopped tomatoes,
Holly suddenly wondered how Jim Ironheart could have known that young
Billy Jenkins was in danger even before the drunken driver in the pickup
truck had appeared over the crest of the hill.
She stopped chopping in the middle of a tomato and looked out the
kitchen window. Purple-red twilight was settling over the greensward
low. Among the trees, the park lamps cast pools of warm amber light on
the grass-flanked walkways.
When Ironheart had charged up the sidewalk in front of McAlbery School,
colliding with her and nearly knocking her down, Holly started after
him, intending to tell him off By the time she reached the intersection
, he was already in the street, turning right then left, looking a
little agitated. . . wild. In fact he seemed so strange, the kids
moved around him in a wide arc. She had registered his panicked
expression and the kids’ reaction to him a second or two before the
truck had erupted over the hill like a daredevil’s car flying off the
top of a stunt ramp.
Only then had Ironheart focused on Billy Jenkins, scooping the boy out
of the path of the truck.
Perhaps he had heard the roar of the engine, realized something was
approaching the intersection at reckless speed, and acted out of an