Free Tribute by Nora Roberts Page B

eyes. “God, cold beer after a long day. It should be the law of the land.”
    “I seem to be in the habit of giving you alcohol.”
    She glanced at him. “And I haven’t reciprocated.”
    He kicked out his legs, smiled. “So I’ve noticed.”
    “My place isn’t fit for even casual entertainment at the moment. Neither am I. You see that iron gate?”
    “Hard to miss.”
    “Do I have it restored, or do I have it replaced?”
    “Why do you need it? Seems like a lot of trouble to be stopping the car, getting out, opening the gates, driving through, getting out, closing them again. Even if you put in something automatic, it’s trouble.”
    “I told myself that before. Changed my mind.” Spock bumped his head against her hand a few times, and she translated the signal, went back to scratching him. “They’re there for a reason.”
    “I can see why she needed them, your grandmother. But I haven’t noticed you using them since you moved in.”
    “No, I haven’t.” She smiled a little as she sipped her beer. “Because they’re too much trouble. They don’t fit the feel of the place, do they? The rambling farmhouse, the big old barn. But she needed them. They’re just an illusion, really.” God knew she’d needed her illusions. “Not that hard to climb over them or the walls. But she needed the illusion of security, of privacy. I found some old letters.”
    “Ones she wrote?”
    She hadn’t meant to say anything about them. Was it two sips of beer that had loosened her tongue, Cilla wondered, or just his company? She wasn’t sure she’d ever met anyone so innately relaxed. “No, written to her. A number of them written to her in the last year and a half of her life. By a local, I’d say, as the majority of the postmarks are from here.”
    “Love letters.”
    “They started that way. Passionate, romantic, intimate.” She angled her head, studied him over another sip of beer. “Why am I telling you?”
    “Why not?”
    “I haven’t told anyone else yet. I’ve been trying to figure them out, figure him out, I guess. I’m going to talk to my father about it at some point, as he was friendly with Janet’s son—my uncle. And the affair seems to have begun the winter before he was killed—and appears to have started to go downhill a few months after.”
    “You want to know who wrote them.” Ford rubbed the dog lazily with his foot when Spock shifted to bump against him. “How’d he sign them?”
    “ ‘Only Yours’—until he started signing them with varieties of ‘up yours.’ It didn’t end well. He was married,” she continued as Spock, apparently rubbed enough, curled up under Ford’s chair and began to snore. “It’s no secret she had affairs with married men. From flings to serious liaisons. She fell in love the way other women change their hairstyle. Because it seemed like a good idea at the time.”
    “She lived in a different world than most women.”
    “I’ve always considered that a handy excuse or justification for being careless, for being selfish.”
    “Maybe.” Ford shrugged. “Still true.”
    “She craved love, the physical and the emotional. As addicted to it as she was to the pills her mother started feeding her when she was four. But I think this one was real, for her.”
    “Because she kept it secret.”
    She turned back to him again. He had good eyes, she thought. Not just the way they looked with that rim of gold around the green, the flecks scattered in it. But the way he saw things.
    “Yes, exactly. She kept it to herself because it was important. And maybe Johnnie’s death made it all the more intense and desperate. I don’t know what she wrote to him, but from his letters I can feel her desperation, and that terrible need, as easily as I can read his waning interest, his concerns with being found out and his eventual disgust. But she didn’t want to let go. The last letter in the stack was mailed from here ten days before she died.”
    Now she