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“Got it.” Jecca yawned again. “I bet she’s still in the car. The keys are—” Nell was already out the door.
Jecca could see lights on in the living room, so it looked like the others were up. Considering what Roan thought of her, she thought it was better not to lie about in bed—as a city girl would do.
She quickly dressed, made a trip to the bathroom, then went to the kitchen. A minute later, Roan came out of the bedroom.
“There you are!” he boomed in his professor’s voice. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
Jecca didn’t know if that was good or bad.
“Did you do that?!” He pointed to the chainsaw, now put back together.
“Yes,” she said cautiously.
Roan strode across the room and lifted her in a bear hug. “And here I thought you were one of Tris’s Yeeww Girls.”
She pushed at his shoulders, and he let her down. “What is a Yeeww Girl?”
“You know,” he said, “they say ‘yeeww’ at everything. Bait a hook, hike a trail, fry the fish, it’s all yeeww.”
Jecca laughed. “I grew up with my father and a brother I call Bulldog. If I’d ever yeewwed even once they’d still be laughing at me.”
“So you only look like a city girl?”
“I only look city to you people. New Yorkers think I’m fresh from the country.”
Again Roan laughed. “What do you want for breakfast? We have—”
“I found her!” Nell said as she burst in through the front door. She held up a very cute little doll dressed like Alice in Wonderland. “I have to put her to bed,” she said as she went to the bedroom and shut the door.
Jecca looked at Roan. “Why don’t I make breakfast?” She glanced at the closed bedroom door. “Is Tris asleep?”
“Yeah. Sleeps like the dead. When we were kids Colin and I used to throw a bucket of water on him to wake him up. How come you don’t know that about him?”
“Because when I’m around, he doesn’t sleep.”
Laughing, Roan shook his head. “Now I’m beginning to understand.” The kitchen was a long galley type, and he stepped between the two counters. “What can I do to help?”
“Stay on that side,” she said. Having him there was like having a bear in the way. “Why don’t you sit at the counter and tell me about your book?” She’d guessed right when she thought he loved to talk because within seconds he was telling her in detail about the novel he was trying to write. For all that he looked like a mountain man, when he started talking, she knew he was a professor and was used to having a silent, adoring audience.
While Jecca rummaged in the refrigerator for the crepe batter Lucy and Mrs. Wingate had sent, she listened to him. He said he wanted to write a series of mystery novels about a professor of philosophy who could figure out the mind of any criminal.
Jecca got out the little nonstick skillet the ladies had sent—“Roan will only have cast iron,” they’d said?
?and put it on to heat. At first, Roan’s book sounded interesting.
As Jecca began pouring batter and making crepes, Roan got more into his plot plan. His hero would reason with the criminals and outsmart them that way.
“And of course he’d commit the fallacy of ignoratio elenchus.” Like the teacher he was, he explained that that was a point made that was irrelevant to the issue at hand. “But I—I mean my protagonist—would point out the error to him. As Thomas Aquinas used to say—” He lapsed into a lecture about philosophers.
She so lost interest in what he was saying that her mind began to wander. She began to plan what she hoped to paint that day. When she got back to Edilean, she wanted to have some solid ideas of what to do for Kim’s ads.
Roan’s voice droned on. Every other sentence he seemed to name-drop: Heidegger, John Locke, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer. Jecca had heard of some of them, but a lot of the people he named were unknown to her.
When Nell opened the bedroom door, dragging a heavy cardboard box across the floor, Jecca was relieved. “I’m ready to go,” Nell said.
Jecca placed the last of the crepes on the pile, turned off the stove, and went to her. Behind her, Roan at last stopped his monologue.
“What is this?” Jecca asked, looking at the box.
