open can of soda.
Down in Florida, there were also hummingbirds and cool shadows, icy
bottles of Dos Equis instead of diet cola, and Travis McGee was getting
into deeper trouble by the paragraph.
Her stomach began to grumble. She had eaten breakfast at the airport in
Dubuque, surprised that her appetite had not been suppressed forever by
the macabre images burned into her mind at the crash scene. She had
missed lunch, thanks to the stakeout; now she was famished. Life goes
on Fifteen minutes ahead of Holly’s bathroom deadline, Ironheart
returned. He had showered and shaved. He was dressed in a blue boatnec
shirt, white cotton slacks, and white canvas Top-Siders.
She was flattered by his desire to make a better appearance.
“Okay,” he said, “what do you want?”
“I need to use your facilities first.”
A long-suffering look lengthened his face. “Okay, okay, but then we
talk, get it over with, and you go.”
She followed him into the family room, which was adjacent to an open
breakfast area, which was adjacent to an open kitchen. The mismatched
furniture appeared to have been purchased on the cheap at a warehouse
clearance sale immediately after he had graduated from college and taken
his first teaching job. It was clean but well worn. Hundreds of
paperback books filled free-standing cases. But there was no artwork of
any kind on the walls, and no decor pieces such as vases or bowls or
sculptures or potted plants lent warmth to the room.
He showed her the powder room off the main entrance foyer. No wall
paper, white paint. No designer soaps shaped like rosebuds, just a bar
of Ivory. No colorful or embroidered handtowels, just a roll of Bounty
standing on the counter.
As she closed the door, she looked back at him and said, “Maybe we could
talk over an early supper. I’m starved.”
When she finished in the bathroom, she peeked in his living room.
It was decorated-to use the word as loosely as the language police would
allow -in a style best described as Early Garage Sale, though it was
even more Spartan than the family room. His house was surprisingly
modest for a man who had won six million in the state lottery, but his
furniture made the house seem Rockefellerian by comparison.
She went out to the kitchen and found him waiting at the round breakfast
table.
“I thought you’d be cooking something,” she said, pulling out a chair
and sitting opposite him.
He was not amused. “What do you want?”
“Let me start by telling you what I don ‘t want,” she said. “I don’t
wan to write about you, I’ve given up reporting, I’ve had it with
journalism Now, you believe that or not, but it’s true. The good work
you’re doing can only be hampered if you’re being hounded by media
types, and lives will be lost that you might otherwise save. I see that
now.”
“Good.”
“And I don’t want to blackmail you. Anyway, judging by the
unconscionably lavish style in which you live, I doubt you’ve got more
than eighteen bucks left.”
He did not smile. He just stared at her with those gas flame-blue eyes.
She said, “I don’t want to inhibit your work or compromise it in any
way. I don’t want to venerate you as the Second Coming, marry you, bear
your children, or extract from you the meaning of life. Anyway, only
Elvis Presley knows the meaning of life, and he’s in a state of
suspended animation in an alien vault in a cave on Mars.”
His face remained as immobile as stone. He was tough.
“What I want,” Holly said, “is to satisfy my curiosity, learn how you do
what you do, and why you do it.” She hesitated. She took a deep
breath.
Here came the big one: “And I want to be part of it all.”
“What do you mean?”
She spoke fast, running sentences together, afraid he would interrupt
her before she got it all out, and never give her another chance to
explain herself “I want to work with you, help you, contribute to your
mission, or whatever you call it, however you think of it, I want to