of a Manhattan penthouse, Ironheart could easily have afforded better
than he had purchased: It looked like a little more than two thousand
square feet, the smallest model in the neighborhood; creamy-white
stucco; large-pane French windows but no other apparent custom features;
a lush green lawn, but small with azaleas and impatiens and a pair of
willowy queen palms that cast lacy shadows on the walls in the temperate
morning sun.
She drove by slowly, giving the house a thorough looking over. No car
stood in the driveway. The drapes were drawn at the windows. She had
no way of knowing if Ironheart was home–short of going up to his front
door and ringing the bell. Eventually, she would do just that.
But not yet.
At the end of the block, she turned around and drove past the house
again. The place was attractive, pleasant, but so ordinary. It was
hard to believe that an exceptional man, with astonishing secrets, lived
behind those walls.
Viola Moreno’s townhouse in Irvine was in one of those park-like
communities the Irvine Company had built in the sixties and seventies,
where the plum-thorn hedges had entered woody maturity and the red-gum
eucalyptuses and Indian laurels towered high enough to spread a wealth
of shade on even the brightest and most cloudless of summer days. It
was furnished with an eye to comfort rather than style: an overstuffed
sofa commodious armchairs, and plump footstools, everything in earth
tones, with traditional landscape paintings meant to soothe rather than
challenge the eye and mind. Stacks of magazines and shelves of books
were everywhere at hand. Holly felt at home the moment she crossed the
threshold.
Viola was as welcoming and easy to like as her home. She was about
fifty, Mexican-American, with flawless skin the shade of lightly
tarnished copper and eyes that were merry in spite of being as
liquid-black as squid ink. Though she was on the short side and had
broadened a little with age, it was easy to see that her looks would
once have turned men’s heads hard enough to crack vertebrae; she was
still a lovely woman. She took Holly’s hand at the door, then linked
arms with her to lead her through the small house and out to the patio,
as if they were old friends and had not just spoken for the first time
on the phone the previous day.
On the patio, which overlooked a common greensward, a pitcher of icy
lemonade and two glasses stood on a glass-topped table. The rattan
chairs were padded with thick yellow cushions.
“I spend a lot of my summer out here,” Viola said as they settled into
chairs. The day was not too hot, the air dry and clean. “It’s a
beautiful little corner of the world, isn’t it?”
The broad but shallow green vale separated this row of townhouses from
the next, shaded by tall trees and decorated with a couple of circular
of red and purple impatiens. Two squirrels scampered down a gentle slop
and across a meandering walkway.
“Quite beautiful,” Holly agreed as Viola poured lemonade into their
glasses.
“My husband and I bought it when the trees were just sticks and the
Hydroseeded greenbelt was still patchy. But we could visualize what it
would be like one day, and we were patient people, even when we were
young.” She sighed. “Sometimes I have bad moments, I get bitter about
his dying so young and never having a chance to see what this all grew
up into. But mostly I just enjoy it, knowing Joe is somewhere better
than this world and that somehow he takes pleasure in my enjoyment.”
“I’m sorry,” Holly said, “I didn’t know you’d been widowed.”
“Of course you didn’t, dear. How could you know? Anyway, it was a long
time ago, back in 1969, when I was just thirty and he was thirty-two My
husband was a career Marine, proud of it, and so was I.
So am I, still, though he died in Vietnam.”
Holly was startled to realize that many of the early victims of that
conflict would now have been past middle-age. The wives they left
behind had now lived far more years without them than with them. How