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Daniel chuckled as he stirred cream substitute into his last permitted cup of coffee for the day. “I think it adds a dash of mystery and romance.”
She scoffed at that. “He’s a pain in the butt.”
“No doubt. Contrariness falls under the character description of a good writer. Or a bad one, for that matter.”
As he contemplated the enigmatic author, Maris studied her father. When did he get so old? she thought with alarm. His hair had been white almost for as long as she could remember, but it had only begun to thin. Her mother, Rosemary, had been the widowed Daniel’s second wife and fifteen years his junior. By the time Maris was born, he was well into middle age.
But he’d remained physically active. He watched his diet, grudgingly but conscientiously. He’d quit smoking cigarettes years ago, although he refused to surrender his pipe. Because he had borne the responsibility of rearing her
as a single parent, he had wisely slowed down the aging process as much as it was possible to do.
Only recently had the years seemed to catch up with him. To avoid aggravating an arthritic hip, he sometimes used a cane for additional support. He complained that it made him look decrepit. That was too strong a word, but secretly Maris agreed that the cane detracted from the robust bearing always associated with him. The liver spots on his hands had increased in number and grown darker. His reflexes seemed not to be as quick as even a few months ago.
But his eyes were as bright and cogent as ever when he turned to her and asked, “I wonder what all that was about?”
“All what, Dad?”
“Failing to provide a return address or telephone number. Then the telephone call this morning. His claims that the prologue was crap. Et cetera.”
She left her chair and moved to a potted geranium to pluck off a dead leaf that Maxine had overlooked. Maris had urged the housekeeper to get eyeglasses, but she claimed that her eyesight was the same now as it had been thirty years ago. To which Maris had said, “Exactly. You’ve always been as blind as a bat and too vain to do anything about it.”
Absently twirling the brown leaf by its stem, she considered her father’s question. “He wanted to be sought and found, didn’t he?”
She knew she’d given the correct response when Daniel beamed a smile on her. This was the method by which he had helped her with her lessons all through school. He never gave her the answers but guided her to think the question through until she arrived at the correct answer through her own deductive reasoning.
“He didn’t have to call,” she continued. “If he hadn’t wanted to be found, he could have thrown away my telephone numbers. Instead he calls at a time of day when he’s practically guaranteed to have the advantage.”
“And protests too loudly and too much.”
Frowning, she returned to her wrought-iron chair. “I don’t know, Dad. He seemed genuinely angry. Especially about the deputy sheriff.”
“He probably was, and I can’t say that I blame him. But he couldn’t resist the temptation to establish contact with you and hear what you had to say about his work.”
“Which I think is compelling. That prologue has me wondering about the young man in the boat. Who is he? What’s his story? What caused the fight between him and his friend?”
“Envy,” Daniel supplied.
“Which is provocative, don’t you think? Envy of what? Who envied whom?”
“I can see that the prologue served its purpose. The writer has got you thinking about it and asking questions.”
“Yes, he does, damn him.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Try and establish some kind of professional dialogue. If that’s possible to do with such a jerk. I don’t fool myself into thinking it will be easy to work with this character.”
“Do you even know his telephone number?”
“I do now. Thanks to caller ID. I checked it this morning and recognized the area code I called yesterday.”
“Ah, the miracles of advanced technology. In my day—”
“In your day?” she repeated with a laugh. “It’s still your day.”
Reaching for his speckled hand, she patted it fondly. One day he would be gone, and she didn’t know how she was going to survive that loss. She’d grown up in this house, and it hadn’t been easy to leave it, even when she went away to college. Her bedroom had been on the third floor—still was if she ever wanted to use it. Daniel’s bedroom was on the second floor, and he was determined to keep it there despite the pain involved in getting up and down the stairs.
Maris recalled Christmas mornings, waking up before daylight, racing down to his room and begging him to get up and go downstairs with her to see what Santa Claus had left beneath the tree.
