Nora Roberts - Tribute

“Oh.” Damn. “I was working late, saw you head out there. I just figured-”

“I didn’t go out there. Man, it’s dark out there. In-the-sticks dark. I’m a city boy.” He cocked his head. “You saw somebody out there?”

“I saw a flashlight, the beam. I think. It was late, maybe I-”

“No freaking way!” He slammed a hand to Ford’s arm hard enough to make Ford stumble back. “I told her I heard something, but she’s all shut up and go to sleep. What time was this?”

“I don’t know. Ah… little after two.”

“That’s it . Going for the barn? We gotta go check this out.”

“Crap.” Ford downed more coffee. “I guess we do. I need to get a shirt, shoes.”

“Can I come up? I’m digging on the house.”

“Whatever.” It was annoying to feel himself tugged into friendship with the guy who was having sex with the woman he wanted to have sex with. But there didn’t seem to be a way to dig in his heels and hold it off. “So… you didn’t bring your own sleeping bag, I guess.”

“Shit, man, I stay in hotels. Room service, bars, pillow-top mattresses. Cill’s the one for roughing it. You don’t have a spare, do you?”

“Actually-”

“Whoa! Holy shit! That’s Cilla.”

Before Ford could respond, Steve strode into his office and to the sketches pinned and hanging.

“Super Cilla. Dude.” Steve tapped a finger to a corner of a sketch. “These are awesome. You’re a genius. This isn’t Seeker stuff.”

“No. New character, new series. I’m just getting started.”

“With Cill as the… what, like, model? Does she know?”

“Yeah. We worked it out.”

Nodding, Steve continued to grin at the sketches. “I got the vibe when you came over there yesterday. But seeing this? I totally get why she turned down the on-site booty call last night.”

“She-” Mentally, Ford pumped his fist. “So… the two of you aren’t…”

“Road’s clear there, man. I’m going to say, straight out, doing her’s one thing-if she’s down with that. Messing with her? That’s another. Do that, I’ll rip your still-beating heart out. Otherwise? We’re cool.”

Ford studied Steve’s face and decided every word spoken was the silver truth. “Got it. I’m going to get my shoes.”

Steve poked his head in the bathroom, then into Ford’s bedroom. “You’ve got good light in here. How come you’re not tapping that yet?”

“What? Tapping the light?”

“Come on.” Steve shook his head as Ford pulled on a T-shirt. “Cilla. How come you’re not tapping that yet? I’d know if you were. And she’s been over there about a month now.”

“Listen, I don’t see how that’s your business. No offense.”

“None taken. Except I see how it is, because there’s nobody who matters more to me. I don’t want to say she’s like my sister, because that would just be sick, considering.”

Ford sat on the side of the bed to pull on his shoes. “The lady seems to want to take it slow. So I’m taking it slow. That’s it.”

“That’s solid. I like you, so I’m going to give you a tip. She’s tough, and what you’d call resilient. She handles herself and what comes at her. But she’s got depths, and in some of those deep places she hurts. So you’ve got to be careful there.”

“She wouldn’t be doing what she’s doing over there if she didn’t have depths, and if some of them didn’t hurt.”

“Okay. Let’s go be men and check out the barn.”

IN WHAT WOULD be her laundry/mudroom, Cilla straightened to stretch out her back. As she’d suspected, the old and yellowing linoleum covered a scarred but salvageable hardwood floor. She’d rather be upstairs having fun with power tools, but it made more sense for her to focus her sweat equity into ripping up the linoleum. Her carpenter didn’t need her up there, especially with Steve on site, so…

Through the window she spotted Steve, who obviously wasn’t upstairs, walking toward her barn with Ford. Setting aside her tools, she headed out to find out why Steve was out for a morning stroll instead of supervising the master suite rebuild.

The barn door stood open, and the two men were inside by the time she got there. They appeared to be debating which one of them should climb the ladder into the hayloft.

“What the hell are you doing?” she demanded.

“Checking it out,” Steve told her. “Can you tell if anything’s missing?”

“No, and why should it be?”

“Ford saw somebody skulking around out here last night.”

"I didn’t say ’skulking.’ I said I saw someone out here with a flashlight last night.”

“You’re out on somebody else’s property in the middle of the night, with a flashlight, that’s skulking.” Steve pointed at Cilla. “I told you I heard something.”

Cilla shook her head at Steve, turned to Ford. “From all the way across the road, in the dead of night, you saw someone skulking around my barn?”

“While I have to agree with the definition of ‘skulking,’ what I said was I saw a light, the beam of it. The beam of a flashlight, moving toward the barn.”

“It was probably a reflection. Moonlight or something.”

“I know what a flashlight beam looks like.”

“Plus,” Steve interrupted, “when we opened the door, it groaned. That’s the sound I heard last night. Somebody came in here. You’ve got a lot of shit in here, Cill.”

“And it’s pretty clear the lot of shit is still here.”

“Maybe something, or some things, aren’t,” Ford pointed out. “There’s a lot of inventory here, and I’d say a valiant attempt to organize it, but I doubt you know everything that’s here, or exactly where you put it the last time you worked in here.”

“Okay, no, I don’t.” She set her hands on her hips to study the piles and stacks, the arrangement. Had she stacked those boxes that way? Had she turned that broken rocker to the left?

How the hell did she know?

“I’ve got a lot to go through, but I haven’t found anything especially valuable yet. And okay,” she continued before Steve could speak, “a teaspoon Janet Hardy dipped into a sugar bowl would be worth a spot of breaking and entering for a lot of people.”

“Who knows you’ve got stuff in here?”

“Everyone.” Ford answered Steve’s question. “There’s a bunch of people working in the house, and that bunch of people saw Cilla hauling this stuff out here-even helped. So anyone any of them talked to knows, and anyone the anyones talked to and so on.”

“I’ll get a padlock.”

“Good idea. How about the letters?”

“What letters?” Steve wanted to know.

“Did you tell anyone besides me about the letters you found in the attic?”

“My father, but I hardly think-”

“You found letters in the attic?” Steve interrupted. “Like secret letters? Man, this is like one of those BBC mystery shows.”

“You never watch BBC mysteries.”

“I do if they have hot Brit chicks in them. What letters?”

“Letters written to my grandmother by the man she had an affair with in the year before she died. And yeah, secret letters. She had them hidden. I’ve only told Ford and my father-who probably told my stepmother. But it wouldn’t go further than that.” She hoped. "Except…” She blew out a breath. “I realized when I was telling my father we were standing right beside an open window so I pulled him away to finish. But if one of the men was anywhere near the window, they would have heard enough.”

She rubbed her eyes. “Stupid. Plus, I pushed my mother yesterday morning about whether Janet had a lover-and one from out here- before she died. She’d blab, if the mood struck. Added to that, she’s pissed at me.”