by Mary McBride
Not quite ready to dive back into work, Holly took the rank coffee cup to the ladies' room, where she flushed the moldering dregs and then washed the cup with hot water. While she was rinsing it, Maria Bianchi from research came in to freshen her makeup.
“Hey, Holly. When did you get back?”
“Just a few minutes ago,” Holly said.
“You were where?” Maria leaned toward the mirror over the sink and studied her bronzed eyelids. “Arizona? Oklahoma?”
“Texas.”
“Ha. Same difference,” the researcher said as she reached into her handbag and came up with a tube of mascara. “So, how was it?”
“Oh, fine. Nice, actually.” There wasn't a shred of sarcasm in her tone, but Maria seemed to hear otherwise.
“Yeah. I'll bet.” While she stroked more black gloss on her lashes, her gaze strayed to Holly in the mirror. “What's that say? On your shirt. The Lohengrin Café?”
“Longhorn. The Longhorn Café.”
“Gawd,” Maria moaned. “You must really be glad to be back.”
Not as glad as I thought I'd be, Holly almost said. She gave the coffee cup a final swipe with a paper towel. “Well, I better get back to my desk. There's a week's work waiting for me.”
“I noticed. I put a copy of that pool tape you wanted, the one of the assassination attempt, right by your phone. Did you see it?”
“No. I'll go take a look. Thanks, Maria.”
“Sure.” She managed to talk at the same time she was dragging lipstick across her lower lip. “I'm still trying to come up with some more footage for you. There was a guy there with a video cam but he's jerking everybody around over the price. If CNN comes up with it in the next week or two, maybe I can get you a sneak peek. I'll let you know.”
“Great. Thanks.”
When Holly got back to her desk, she saw the tape right where Maria said it was, next to her phone. Other than the film from the private citizen's video cam, this pool tape was the only visual record of that day in Baltimore. A cameraman from CBS had been on duty then for what was supposed to be an uneventful afternoon. Then Thomas Earl Starks and his M-16 had changed all that.
Holly sat down and just stared at the black rectangular box. She'd seen the footage dozens, maybe even hundreds of time. It was practically all any station showed for a couple weeks last September in the media's typical overkill of a big story. She'd watched it almost clinically, wishing the cameraman had been just a little closer, that he'd remained standing throughout the incident instead of hitting the pavement like everybody else in the line of fire.
Except for Cal, of course.
Oh, God. All of a sudden she could hardly breathe. How was she going to be able to watch the man she loved get shot again and again? It would kill her. It would be like taking a bullet herself. It would…
Whoa, Nellie. Where did that come from? The man she loved? Had those words actually passed through her brain?
The man she loved. Holly tried out the thought once more. It made her stomach flip and her mouth kind of slide into a grin she couldn't control and her heart almost tickle inside her ribs. She glanced at her watch, wondering where he was right now, deciding he was at the track with Bee while the sun beat down on him and bounced off the chrome of the T-bird parked nearby. She pictured the stupid roses in her room at Ellie's and the big bed, empty now, maybe freshly made up for another guest.
She wanted to cry, but that was the last thing she should do, so instead she reached for the stack of pink messages. None of them struck her as earth-shattering or in need of immediate replies. Several of them intrigued her.
There were five—no, six!—messages from a Diana Koslov. One of them was written with three names. Diana Koslov Griffin. All of them were marked Urgent. That had to be Cal's ex-wife, but why in the world, Holly wondered, would the woman be calling her? And what the hell was so damned urgent? Then, just as she was sitting there, literally scratching her head, the phone on her desk chirped. She answered it with her usual greeting.
“This is Holly Hicks.”
“Oh, thank God you're back,” a husky voice exclaimed.
Holly didn't recognize it. “May I help you?”
“I hope so, Ms. Hicks. This is Diana Koslov. Well, actually Diana Griffin. I want to talk to you about this biography you're putting together on my husband.”
Husband. The word sort of ricocheted inside Holly's head. Husband. “Your husband?”
“Yes. That's right. My husband. Cal. Calvin Griffin. I don't suppose you're aware of it. Well, actually hardly anybody knows. Not that it's a great secret or anything.”
A husky, sexy, supremely self-confident laugh filtered through the phone. It struck Holly as the way a lioness would laugh. Well, if lionesses laughed.
And then the woman stopped laughing and said quite clearly, “Cal and I are back together.”
Chapter Sixteen
It's nice having you back at the dinner table, Cal,” Ruth said, setting a final serving bowl on the table before she sat down herself. “I mean that. I really do. Maybe we should open a bottle of wine.”
With Holly gone, Cal didn't feel much like celebrating, but then neither did he want to announce his newfound sobriety only to be reminded—at length—of his father's major sins and shortcomings. He gestured toward the tall glass beside his plate. “Iced tea's fine with me, Ruthie.”
“Yeah, honey,” Dooley said. “I just poured myself this great big glass of milk.”
“Oh, all right.” Not bothering to hide her disappointment, she helped herself to some rice, and passed the bowl to Cal. “Those are fresh peas in the risotto. From the MacCauleys' garden. Bev brought them over this morning. And here, Cal. Take some broccoli now. There's just butter and lemon juice on it. Nothing fancy or scary.”
Actually he liked broccoli, but his sister seemed to have more fun if she thought she was force feeding him veggies, so Cal winced and fidgeted and grimaced a bit as he let a few bright green florets tumble onto his plate, then passed the bowl to Dooley at the other end of the table.
He could almost hear Holly's voice asking him what kind of vegetable he'd want to be. God, he missed her. He didn't even have her phone number, but one call to Washington after dinner would soon remedy that.
Ruth's chicken, with its stuffing of sharp cheese and ham and fresh herbs, practically melted in his mouth. Having lived in Washington so long, and having circled the globe with the president, Cal was no stranger to fine cuisine, and Ruth's cooking ranked among the best he'd ever had. She really should have her own restaurant, he thought, but refrained from saying it out loud for fear of setting her off.
“How is Bev MacCauley?” he asked, not that he cared about their neighbor so much as he felt obliged to add a bit of good conversation to Ruthie's good meal.
“She's fine. Still talks up a storm,” Ruth said. “In fact, she told me something pretty interesting this morning. Seems like that Bingham fella—you know, the real estate guy—is snooping around her place, too. He's even been out wandering around Charlie Cutler's place, if you can believe that.”
“Well, he can't be too interested in ranching then,” Dooley said between bites of chicken. “Ol' Charlie hasn't cleared any brush in the past fifteen or twenty years. It's a damned paradise for javelinas and wild turkeys over there.”
Although Cal had been largely focused on Holly's pretty face the day they'd encountered the real estate agent, he suddenly recalled something Bingham's client had mentioned. “They're not looking for ranch land,” he said now. “I think they're trying to put together some acreage for a hunting preserve.”
“He told you that?” Ruth asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“Doesn't surprise me all that much,” Dooley said. “They've done that with a couple places over in Kleberg County and down in Kenedy County. Pretty successfully, too. They're importing all kinds of livestock from Africa. Springboks. Nilgai. Hell, even wildebeests, I hear.”
“Wildebeests.” Ruth
snorted.
“Well, honey, people are willing to pay a lot of money to hunt exotic critters, I guess.”
A little glimmer of an idea flickered to life in Cal's brain. It was probably stupid and pretty misguided, considering the source, but he decided to mention it anyway. What could it hurt?
“You know, you might want to think about consolidating with the MacCauleys and Charlie Cutler and some others. Why let all those easterners have all the fun and reap all the profits? You could put together your own ten or twelve thousand-acre hunting preserve and still keep enough fenced pasture for Dooley's bulls and the MacCauleys' long-horns.”
“You know how I feel about hunting,” Ruth said dismis-sively, putting an effective damper on the discussion.
But at the other end of the table, Cal noticed that Dooley looked a little more contemplative than usual. Maybe he wasn't a complete lame brain. Maybe his idea wasn't such a bad one after all.
It was after nine when Holly finally got home to her apartment. She and Mel had stayed late at the office to go over her ideas for her script and to finalize the shooting locations. In addition to returning to Honeycomb in July, Holly was going to have to visit the site of the assassination attempt in Baltimore, the Secret Service's headquarters in Washington and their training facility in Glynco, Georgia. They decided that would give them plenty of background footage.
When Mel dropped her off in front of her building on 59th, he had playfully punched her arm and said, “No rest for the wicked, kid.” Holly had searched his face intently then, wondering if her boss was implying something in “wicked” above and beyond the usual cliché. Did he mean she was just going to have to work hard, or could he tell somehow that she'd broken a cardinal rule of journalism by going to bed with the subject of her piece? Had the logo on her Longhorn shirt suddenly transformed itself to proclaim, “I slept with Cal Griffin and all I got was this lousy T-shirt”?
Cal and I are back together.
She couldn't get that sentence out of her head.
Once inside her apartment, the first thing she did was turn on the television, not simply to get a much-needed news fix but to supply herself with some background noise to drown out Diana Griffin's haunting words.
Cal and I are back together.
And Holly couldn't for the life of her recall how she'd responded when those words were spoken on the phone. She was fairly sure she responded vocally, other than just sitting at her desk feeling gut punched and out of breath and dizzy.
Cal and I are back together.
Surely she'd said something. A startled little “oh” no doubt, if not an audible gasp. She did remember saying brusquely to Diana, “I'll have to get back to you” before slapping the phone back in its cradle.
She turned the TV up another notch before she went to the refrigerator, where, if the gods had been sympathetic, she'd have found a Sara Lee coffee cake awaiting her. Instead, there were three yogurts, two of which had expired, and what was left of the split of champagne she'd bought last week to celebrate her promotion.
Jesus. Was it just a week? It felt more like a month. Shaking her head, Holly reached for the chilled little bottle, plucked out its plastic stopper, and drank the last flat ounce—gack—just before the phone rang.
It was probably Mel, who typically remembered something he'd meant to tell her when he was in the middle of the New Jersey Turnpike. Thank heavens for speed dial. Tonight he was probably calling to clarify exactly what he'd meant by wicked.
“What?” she asked when she picked up the receiver.
“Hey.”
Oh, God. It wasn't Mel.
“Hey,” she responded. The word sprang from her lips automatically even though Cal was the last person on earth she wanted to talk to right now. She wasn't prepared to be cool and unconcerned, to converse with him as if she'd never even kissed him much less gone to bed with him, to come across as if she weren't angry and hurt, sounding not like Sleepless in Seattle but Wretched in Manhattan, Devastated in New York.
“How did you get my number?” She asked the very first question that popped into her head. It seemed neutral enough. At least it was better than hanging up.
“Ve haf our vays, liebchen.”
Cal was laughing. Laughing! God. How could he laugh? How could he when all Holly wanted to do was cry? She was hardly able to breathe, much less talk.
“Just a minute,” she told him. “I've got something on the stove.”
As if there really were a pot about to boil over, Holly put the phone down on the bed and walked briskly into the small galley kitchen, where she stood for a moment, motionless, her head a blank and her heart as heavy as a stone. Don't just stand here. Do something, she told herself. So she reached down, opened the door of the oven, then let it slam closed. She opened the refrigerator, stood in its cool wash of light a second, then slammed that door closed, as well. She went to the sink, turned on the cold water, and bent forward to slurp from the tap.
None of the frenetic activity helped her know what to say to Cal, though. It wasn't like her to avoid a confrontation. It wasn't her habit to skirt an issue. To skulk. To pussyfoot. Hollis Mae Hicks was not a pussyfooter, by God. She was used to saying exactly what she felt, and she told herself she ought to pick up the phone and do just that.
Cal and I are back together. What do you have to say about that, bub? Care to comment, asshole?
Oh, but just now, just this minute, she couldn't bear to hear one of those knee-jerk male responses. A What are you talking about? or an It's not my fault, or a Give me a fucking break, will you?
Holly stalked back to the bedroom and picked up the phone from the bed, hoping against hope that her caller had grown bored while she was gone and had hung up. She didn't hear a dial tone, but at least he wasn't laughing anymore.
“Still there?” she asked in a tone neither sweet nor sour.
“Still here,” he said. “I miss you.”
The stone in Holly's heart increased to the size of a boulder, pressing against her lungs, hampering her ability to inhale or exhale properly. I miss you, too. Oh, God. I'll be missing you the rest of my life.
“That thing in the kitchen…” she said. “I…uh…I need to get back to it.”
He didn't say anything then. To Holly it seemed less an absence of sound than a dark, profound silence—almost palpable across two thousand miles.
“Cal?”
“Yeah, well, listen…” Now his voice was brusque and all business. “I don't want to keep you. I just called to ask you a quick question anyway. About that fifty-dollar bill you gave me at the airport. The one for Ellie.”
“What about it?” So you don't really miss me, then? You called to ask about some stupid money?
“Do you remember where you got it, or maybe remember who gave it to you?”
“No,” she answered, hardly bothering to hide her irritation.
“Did you get it at Ramon's?”
“I don't know,” she snapped.
“Think. This is important.”
Think? Here's what I think, buster! Why did you even bother to say you miss me when it's obvious you don't? And when did you get back with your wife? You should have told me. Damn you, Cal. That was important. Not some fucking fifty-dollar bill.
“Think, Holly,” he said again. “Please.”
“Oh, all right.”
Holly really didn't have to think. She clearly recalled the moment when she got the fifty yesterday in change from Hec Garcia at his print shop after she'd used his Xerox machine to copy Cal's yearbook. She'd handed Hec a crisp hundred and he'd given her the tattered fifty along with a few smaller bills and forty-two cents in change.
“Hec Garcia gave it to me yesterday,” she said.
“At his print shop?” Cal asked.
“Yes. I did some copying there. What's the big deal?”
“No big deal.”
There was that bottom-of-the-ocean, sunken Titanic silence again on the other end of the line, and Holly
wondered if he was preparing a confession or framing an apology or working up to an offhand remark about his reconciliation with his wife. If that was the case, she was fairly sure the top of her head was going to explode with anger and the phone was going to melt in her fist.
But all he said was “Well, I'll let you get back to whatever it is you need to get back to.”
And then he hung up.
Just like that.
Cal didn't know how long he sat on the pulled-out sofabed with the dead phone in his hand. Long enough for the sun to set and for darkness to creep into each corner of his room. He had no idea what time it was. What difference did it make? All he knew was that he felt like the biggest fool on the planet.
Yeah. Sure. He'd anticipated that Holly would get sucked back into the rat race once she was back in New York. He just hadn't expected it would happen quite so fast. One minute he was kissing her good-bye; the next minute she was kissing him off.
Just like that.
If he hadn't been such a coward, he'd have asked her whose voice he heard in the background and what the hell was so important in her kitchen that made her sound so damned distant and distracted on the phone.
He'd called to tell her how much he missed her, how much he wanted her, to tell her he didn't want to wait four interminable weeks for her return to Honeycomb, to say he was thinking about flying to New York, thinking about her, thinking about the two of them, together again, maybe always.
She hadn't given him a chance to say much of anything before she raced away from the phone, and by the time she came back Cal was already feeling like a fool. The funny fifty was the last thing he wanted to ask her about, but as a defense, he put on his Secret Service hat and pretended the money was the only reason for his call.
Hec Garcia. He'd think about that tomorrow and decide how to proceed. In the meantime, he was tempted to drive into town, and reclaim his seat at Ramon's while renewing his old acquaintance with Dr. Heineken and Mr. Johnnie Walker.
“Cal?” Ruth knocked softly on his door. “I was just going to make some popcorn for Dooley and myself. Do you…?”