“I’m a good listener. What you say to me, stays with me. I think you know that.”
“I know you like to collect information. Numbers, facts, details.”
“I like order. Trying to make sense out of things the only way I know how.”
“I’m betting you already know that someone vandalized the door of my apartment in Washington.”
He nodded. “Look, give it a couple more days and people won’t remember Frog Marvin or why you fought for his life. The bastards’ll move on to a new fight to pick. You’ll be left alone.”
He was right, unfortunately. No one really cared in a world where death, destruction and injustice could be reduced to an entertaining melee with the help of the media. But when you had been there first hand, outside the lights, inside the misery and suffering of another human being, the caring punched you in the stomach every day. I put a hand over mine and fought nausea. Solo took one look at my stricken face and said quickly, “That doesn’t mean none of what you did was important.”
“Was it? Did Frog’s life or death mean anything, solve anything, change anything? Did I help in any way to make things better in his world or the world in general? No. He’s dead, and I can’t change that.” I bent and snatched the remote control, then jabbed it at Karen’s image on the television. “And there’s someone I love, but I can’t help her, either. And that’s just the tip of my personal iceberg, Mr. Solo. I fail the people who depend on me and I can’t seem to make a difference to the people I love.” I snapped the television off and threw the remote on the couch.
Solo got up, stepped around the coffee table and took me by the shoulders. I froze at the personal contact. His angular face and dark eyes were serious, almost angry. “If I knew how to forget the dead and hold onto the living, I’d tell you the secret to it. I saw you on TV last week, too. I heard what you said—that watching death isn’t the hard part. That living with it is. You were right.”
“You’ve lost people you loved?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“How did you get over it?”
“I’m not sure I ever have or ever will.”
He let go of me, then walked to the big glass doors that filled the back of the house and stood looking out at the ocean with his hands on his hips and his shoulders slumped. I followed him. “Tell me what happened. Please.” We stood together, looking out at the endless water.
“I saw my father die.”
The floor seemed to tilt beneath my feet. No wonder this man made me think of Eli. “How?” I asked gently.
“In a . . . fight.” It was clear he measured every word, and didn’t like to let go of any. He turned and studied my reaction as he spoke. “Maybe he deserved it, but it wasn’t fair.”
“You blame him for his own death?”
“I guess I do. Not much of a son, am I?”
“I expect you were a very good son. These things get complicated. It’s easy to spend the rest of your life trying to understand.”
“I don’t know that I ever will, like you said. I’m always looking for answers I’ll never get. The rest of my family never really recovered from it. I’ve made it my business to take care of ’em and let ’em believe what they need to believe.”
“That he didn’t deserve it?”
“Yeah.”
“But you really think he brought the trouble on himself?”
“I don’t know. Probably. Either way, there’s always a part of him—and me—I can’t find. Out there.” He gestured toward the ocean, the world. “He took it, and he didn’t leave the answers.”
“You hate him but you love him.”
“Yeah. And that’s hard.”
I nodded, my brain on fire as I searched for discreet ways to describe my relationship with Swan, and Clara’s death, and its effect. Solo was the first person I’d ever found who might understand. “Someone was . . . murdered in my family.”
He went very still, searching my face. “Who?”
“A close relative. I can’t . . . it’s hard for me to talk about, even now. I was a child when it happened. I felt I was responsible for the chain of events that led to it. If I’d only done or said one thing differently.” I lowered my gaze, defeated. “The same thing I’ve been thinking since Frog was executed.”
“But you were just a kid.”
I lifted my head and stared at him. “Even children know right from wrong. And I was a very odd, very old-minded child. I knew what was right, and what was wrong, and what I should have done.”
“Did they find the killer?” He spoke in a low voice, as I did. As if we were holding the lid shut on a seething Pandora’s Box of memories still capable of destruction.
“The man who was accused of the murder,” I said carefully, “didn’t get much of a trial.”
He stepped closer to me, scouring my face. “But you were sure he did it?”
I clamped down on my tongue, then felt the cool numbness of control come over me. It frightened me sometimes, how I could go stone-cold, giving away no shred of emotion, just like Swan. I stepped back from him. “Let’s just say the system didn’t work very well—for either side—and I learned early on that it’s easier to accuse someone than to prove his innocence. That’s why I became a defense attorney, instead of a prosecutor. I need the challenge of proving my innocence.”
He tilted his head. “Your innocence?”
“I mean the accused’s innocence.” I turned, deeply agitated, and faced the window. His gaze continued to bore into me. Redemption. I was looking to this irresistible stranger for redemption. He was becoming a stand-in for the one person whose forgiveness I needed desperately. Eli. I abruptly turned away, glancing over the tiled floor until I found the leather sandals I’d left near one of the room’s couches. I shoved my feet into them. “We need a change of scenery.”
Solo calmly slid his feet into old loafers he’d left near the doors to the lower deck. “I noticed a beach bar on the drive here. I’ll buy you dinner. We’ll watch the sunset.”
“Good. Let’s not talk, anymore.”
Either unoffended or unapologetic, he merely shook his head.
We sat on the sand beyond the deck of a beachside tavern, watching a purple-and-gold sunset over the ocean’s western horizon. Dusk sifted into the air. Oldies poured from speakers mounted on driftwood posts. Solo had polished off two imported beers. I drank only a bottled water, fearing I’d lose control all together. I sat defensively, with my arms wrapped around my knees. The ocean breeze ruffled my hair and swept moisture from my skin. Beside me, Solo leaned back on his elbows, with his long legs stretched in front of him. A tiny ghost crab skittered over his bare ankle and perched for a moment on the tongue of his loafer before darting away. Solo watched it with his eyes half-shut, and I watched Solo. “Nothing rattles you,” I said.
“Plenty rattles me,” he corrected.
“I watched you from my balcony this morning, when you walked to the beach. What were you making notes about?”
He turned his half-shuttered gaze on me. “I was calculating wave volume and velocity. Guessin’ at the ratio of waves per minute, per hour, per millenium. It was just a game. I solve math puzzles to relax.” He gave me a droll look. “Go ahead and laugh. Go ahead and say it. I was countin’ water.”
I unfurled my arms and swiveled to look at him closely, shaken by every surprising charm of him and the poignant familiarity welling anew inside me. I remembered his fuel calculations during the flight to the island. I thought of the robot, the computer expertise, the encryption skills—all based on an intricate aptitude for electronics, engineering, and most of all, advanced mathematics. “I used to know someone who loved numbers and calculations the way you do.”
Solo uttered a dry laugh. “Kind of an idiot savant, like me? A man of few talents?”
“
He was the sweetest person I’ve ever known. He happened to be a math prodigy, as well.”
“Hmmm. What did he do with that kind of brain? Become a professor? Engineer? Doctor? What?”
I scooped a bit of sand onto my palm, then watched it drain through my fingers. “No, unfortunately he became a professional gambler and bookie.”
Solo sat up. When I looked at him, he hooked his arms around an updrawn knee and faced the ocean. His profile was clean and strong, his expression, troubled. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Gettin’ old and creaky.” He hunched his shoulders, then stretched and nodded toward the uneven little hummocks of sand beneath us. “I made my bed and I have to lie in it. But just now I realized how hard it was, all along.”
I regarded his odd words with a frown. He clasped his knee again and continued looking away from me, at the ocean. “So this good, sweet man, this genius, he didn’t turn out so well?”
“I wouldn’t say that. I only know he ended up in the Caribbean running a very lucrative offshore betting business. I hired an investigator to find him ten years ago, and that’s where he was.”
“He must have been important, if you looked for him that hard. Old boyfriend?”
I hesitated. “You could say that, yes.”
“You never looked him up, again?”
“No. It was an illegal business. He targeted Americans and used domestic phone systems. The same laws are applied to Internet gaming now.”
“You couldn’t love a man who broke the rules a little?”
“It’s not that. It’s none of my business. I’m not sure gambling should be against the law. If people want to waste their money, let them.”
“But you were disappointed that he didn’t turn out respectable.”
“I think he did what he had to do to take care of his family. He had a hard childhood. I won’t judge him.” I looked at Solo quietly. “You said you lost your father and had to take care of your family. Would you tell me more about that?”
The look on his face was both restrained and wishful. He shook his head. “But if I was goin’ to tell anybody, it’d be you.”
I sat back and considered that for a moment. “You and I seem to sink into dark conversations and stop just short of admitting anything. I’m as bad as you.”
We were quiet, after that. The night sky filled with stars. He asked me if I minded whether he smoked a cigar. I told him to go ahead. “I’m compulsive and rigid, but I’m not politically correct,” I said.
“Good girl.” He pulled a small cigar with an expensive label from a scuffed silver tube in his back pocket. I inhaled the fine aroma of the cigar and watched the smoke curl from his lips. It was such a masculine icon, so simple to ridicule but so appealing. “Do you hunt and fish?” I asked.
He squinted at me. “Do a little fishin’. Don’t own a gun.”
“Pacifist?”
“No. I’ve just seen enough killin’.” The darkness in that simple statement broke the breath in my throat. I looked at him hard in the faint mist of the salt air. “I do understand,” I said.
After a quiet moment, Solo spoke gently. “Don’t sit around thinkin’ about how Frog Marvin died. It won’t do him any good, and you got a life to live. You got work to do for others like him. They need you. Look, I’m not telling you anything you can’t read in the Bible or anywhere else people hunt for reasons on faith. But it is just so.”
“Tell me how you do that. How do you live in the valley of the shadow of death without fearing any evil? How to keep from losing everything good about yourself?”
“You keep hoping. You keep trying to make things right.”
I smiled wearily. “It’s all about the journey, not the destination. I see.”
“It’s all about the hope,” he repeated. “And the love.”
I met his eyes. This man had loved, and was loved. I was sure of that. Whether the loving included cadres of adoring women, or a close family, or dear friends, or all of those, he had a mantel of experience I apparently lacked. I thought of Swan and Matilda and Karen. Together we made broken pieces of what a loving family might be. “Stop that,” Solo ordered. I looked at him. “Stop that hard thinkin’. You gotta feel, not think.” He lifted his hand with the cigar pinched between his thumb and forefinger, and passed the gently drifting smoke over my head in a ceremonial circle. “Smoke carries bad thoughts away. That’s an old Cherokee Indian idea.”
Now I at least pegged his origins. With that tribal reference and his high-ridge drawl, he had grown up somewhere in the Appalachians. “You’re a mountain man,” I said.
He nodded. “Hillbilly.”
“I wish your ceremonies really worked.”
“You don’t get it, do you? You gave Frog Marvin hope. And you gave him love. And he died happy. You did what you were put in his life to do.”
He carefully placed the remnant of his burned-down cigar back in the silver tube, as methodical as a minister, the calm of his small ritual seeping inside me. I stared at him in desperate wonder. “That’s the easy answer.”
He shook his head. “Answers are usually easier than we want to think. It’s the questions that’ll tear a person apart.”
I propped my elbows on my updrawn knees and my chin on my hands, and looked up at the stars above the ocean. “Thank you,” I managed finally.
A heart-wrenching ballad by The Righteous Brothers began to play over the bar’s outside sound system. Solo pivoted to cast a doubtful gaze on several couples who were wound around one another on the deck’s small dance floor. “You want to know what rattles me? Dancing.”
I sat perfectly still for a few seconds, watching him and watching the couples barely sway to the languid, romantic music. Don’t do it. Don’t encourage this. “I was raised by my very-Southern grandmother. She sent me to ballroom dance classes in Asheville, North Carolina, the land of the genteel Southern two-step. I’m an expert.” I held out a hand. “Would you like to try?”
“I’ll trample you.”
“I’ll take off my shoes if you’ll take off yours. Bare feet can’t hurt.”
“Well, damn. If you insist.” With feigned defeat, he took my hand and helped me up.
We slid out of our shoes then faced each other. My heart pounded. He still held my hand, his grip both snug and careful. I put my left hand on his shoulder. “Now, your right hand goes on my waist.” He slowly clasped my left side just above the hip, pressing his fingers gently into the sheer white shift. I tucked his left hand, still holding my right one, against his chest, making certain to keep a buffer zone between our bodies. “We needn’t be as clingy as the deck crowd.”
“You’re takin’ the fun out of it.”
“Humor me.”
“Look, I’m just glad to be here.”
We stepped slowly to the seductive, throbbing ballad. He did know how to move, regardless of his protest. My hand softened inside his. The slightest flex of his fingers registered on my flesh. I fixed my gaze on the collar of his blue shirt. In the middle of the song a small misstep on the uneven ground brought my bare foot atop one of his. “Hey,” he said drily. “I’m not rough trade, lady, so watch your feet.”
I couldn’t help a quick laugh. He urged me to move closer with a subtle tug of his hand against my side, and I did. His breath brushed my face, and the clean, masculine scent of him filled my senses. He was comfort and sex and danger and faith. I raised my eyes to his as if he were a cathedral. We lost ourselves in looking at each other, hardly moving to the music at all.
As we drove up to the beach house the outside lights automatically activated, filling the parking area beneath the stilted home with glaring light. When we reached a back staircase I hurried up the dimly lit stairs, quickly reaching a narrow landing, where my feet plowed into a small cardboard box. Solo heard the soft so
und of the collision and leapt up the stairs.
“Don’t touch it,” he ordered, and pulled me behind him. My gaze fell on the embossed, gold-and-white packaging label of Hardigree Marble Company. My name and the Florida address were written in elegant cursive script. Above the typeset return address for the marble company the same hand had written the initials SHS. Swan Hardigree Samples.
“It’s from my grandmother in North Carolina,” I said wearily. “I doubt she’s sent me a bomb.”
Solo picked up the package. A muscle flexed in his jaw as he examined it. “Your grandmother must be worried about you. I guess you’ve called her by now. Haven’t you?”
“We don’t talk much. I don’t go home very often.”
“But you’re close.”
“We’re . . . inseparable, but not close.” A shiver went down my spine. As if she’d known I was feeling weak-willed, Swan had intervened. “My grandmother wouldn’t have sent me something here if it weren’t important. I need to go upstairs and open it.”
After another moment spent scrutinizing the package, his expression went completely, carefully neutral. He insisted on carrying the package as we climbed. As if it really might explode.
My dear Darl, the enclosed note on Swan’s embossed stationary began. I realize you have no intention of asking for my sympathy or support, but I have been gathering the news about you and do have concerns about your well-being. Having contacted the Phoenix offices in Washington, D.C., I was told by Irene Branshaw that you hope to bring Mr. Marvin’s ashes to Burnt Stand for burial. I’ve taken the liberty of arranging for a place in our own church lot, and I’ve enclosed a sample of marble for Mr. Marvin’s urn and grave plaque. It comes from one of the finest slabs I’ve ever seen. With your approval, I’ll have the carvers begin work right away. You see, I am proud of you, and I do care.