“I'm sure it's okay. So Texas isn't so bad after all, huh?”
“Well…”
“How's your story going?”
“Great. I met Griffin's sister this morning. He's living with her.”
“Wait a minute. I thought he was married.”
“He is.”
“So, where's his wife?”
After Holly hung up a few minutes later, she stared at one of the dinner plate-sized white roses on the wall. Good question, she thought. Just where
was
Cal Griffin's wife?
L
ater that afternoon, Holly stood on the sidewalk in a measly square of shade provided by the awning over the drug store, riffling her fingers through her damp corkscrewed curls. The thermometer on the bank's sign said 103, which probably put the humidity at two thousand. Holly hated Texas all over again.
Mel couldn't have been more wrong about her knowing the territory and speaking the language. She was as out of place here as she had been in Manhattan three years ago when she'd stepped off the bus from Albany. Actually she was more out of place now. Back then in New York, if she kept her mouth shut and didn't gawk too much at the tall buildings, people couldn't tell she didn't belong. Here in Honeycomb she might as well have had
PERFECT STRANGER
tattooed on her forehead.
Nobody in town was talking. Not about Calvin Griffin anyway. At least, not to a perfect stranger. She'd approached three of the people on Ellie's list this afternoon. Bobby Brueckner, the balding bank manager, claimed he was too busy with Friday afternoon receipts and reconciliations, although Holly hadn't noticed anybody putting money in or taking it out of Honeycomb Savings and Loan while she was there. Nita Mendes, on the other hand, was legitimately busy in her beauty shop on this Friday afternoon and suggested Holly come back Tuesday when things were slow. Tuesday. That was four long, hot days away.
The final non-talker had been Hec Garcia in Ye Olde Print Shoppe, who smiled rather cryptically and said his mother had taught him if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all. End of interview.
Holly squinted up at the cloudless sky as if she were seeking celestial guidance. As an interviewer, she didn't seem to be aggressive enough. At least she didn't seem to have the correct approach. People loved to be interviewed, didn't they? People jumped at the chance to see themselves on TV, whether it was wearing silly stuff on their heads and two-tone paint on their faces at football games or providing solemn but useless commentary after a crime or a catastrophe.
Maybe she should say she was from
60 Minutes
or
20/20.
Maybe nobody in Honeycomb had ever seen the VIP Channel. No. Wait. Ellie Young had. But even gabby Ellie didn't want to go on record.
Holly pulled the list of prospective interviewees from her handbag, perused it once more, then looked at the clock on the bank. It was four-thirty. Five-thirty in New York, where the workweek had already wound down and the weekend officially begun. If she were home, she'd probably be elbowing her way out of the train at the Lexington Avenue station right now, hotfooting it down 59th, grabbing something to eat, hoping to be in her robe in front of her two TVs in order to catch most of the local news on at least two major networks. It was how she spent most Friday evenings, barring the occasional date that turned out badly, making her wish she'd stayed home with her TVs.
For a moment, she considered going back to Ellie's and flipping on the big-console TV she'd seen in one of the rooms downstairs, but decided that getting a news fix wasn't going to help her get any closer to her story here in Honeycomb.
Muttering a curse, Holly crammed the list back into her handbag. The hell with it. If nobody wanted to talk to her this afternoon, she'd opt for local color. She was going to find someplace to sit and have a bite to eat and something cold to drink. She eyeballed the street, instantly dismissing the Longhorn Café with its banner telling her that Friday promised all the fried catfish she could eat for $6.99.
As far as she could tell, that only left the asphalt-shingled dive in the middle of the block. Ramon's. Worst case, she'd have a beer and pretzels, then climb her fire escape and call it a day.
When she stepped through the door, the darkness nearly blinded her for a second. The chilled, recycled air was rank with booze and peanuts, and Patsy Cline was wailing somewhere in back by the pool table. God Almighty. Holly took a deep breath and headed toward a vacant stool at the end of the bar where a kid who looked almost young enough to be her son was drying glasses.
“Hey,” he said after she'd managed to hoist herself onto the tall stool. “What can I get for you?”
“Is there any chance I could get some kind of sandwich?”
“Sure. No problem.” He stepped a few feet to his left and bent to open a small refrigerator. Its light washed over his face. “I can give you ham or…ham.”
“I'll take ham,” Holly said, smiling, already feeling better.
“One ham sandwich, coming up,” he said. “What can I get you to drink?”
Holly gazed at the assorted neon signs that decorated the place. A cold beer sounded so good, but it would make her way too sleepy to get any work done after dinner. “I'll have a diet cola,” she said.
A moment later the young bartender set a tall, ice-filled glass in front of her and deftly poured the soft drink so that not a drop of foam spilled over. “You're not from around here, are you?” he asked her as he poured.
It was the nicest thing Holly had heard all day. “No,” she said. “I'm from New York.”
“Cool.” Without inquiring what a nice, obviously sophisticated, big-city girl was doing in a dump like this, he began fixing her sandwich, a process which amounted to slapping square pieces of processed meat onto square slices of soft white bread.
Holly sipped her drink. The only other person sitting at the bar was a blonde who looked like a permanent fixture down at the other end. There were people in the back of the room, but it was so dark she could only distinguish their shapes. Every minute or so, there was the thunk of a billiard ball falling into a pocket, followed by a delighted whoop or a disgruntled curse.
It reminded her of the place in Sandy Springs where her parents used to go every Saturday night. What was it called? Joker's? No. Wait. Jester's. That was it. She could remember the boot heel of her daddy's good foot hooked over a rung of a bar stool, and how her tiny mama's feet never touched the floor once she was perched at the bar. In some ways it seemed a million years ago, but in others it seemed like just last week. Even the same song—
Crazy
—was playing on the jukebox back then.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
That was about all she could remember from the French course she'd taken her sophomore year in college, hoping it would help eradicate her twang. It didn't. All it did was lower her grade point average. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Man, wasn't that the truth. Holly fished in her glass for a diamond-clear chunk of ice, then popped it into her mouth. Fourteen years spent heading to New York, and here she was back in a crummy little bar in Texas, drinking diet cola, sucking ice, feeling as if she'd never left. She half expected the ghost of Bobby Ray Hicks to limp in and tell her she was expected home right quick to do her chores.
Just then, in the bottle-lined mirror that backed the bar, she saw the front door open and bright daylight cut briefly into the perpetual midnight of the tavern. A man ambled in. Holly couldn't distinguish his features, but his Stetson and outsized belt buckle and slim-legged jeans all branded him pure cowboy.
“Here's your sandwich, ma'am.” The young bartender plopped a paper plate in front of her. He had stuck frilly green cellophane toothpicks into each sandwich half, and put a fat hot pepper on the side.
“Thanks,” Holly said. “It looks good.”
“You need anything to put on it? Mayo? Mustard?”
“Mustard, please. Dijon, if you have it.”
“Dee—what?”
“Never mind. Plain ol' mustard'll do me just fine.” She couldn't believe those words had come out of her own mouth. And not just the words themselves, but the twang that had accompanied them. After less than twenty-four hours. Dear God. What was she going to sound like in a week or two?
“Hey, now. Don't that look good?” The newly arrived cowboy slung his dusty denim butt onto the stool beside hers. “Rick, fix me up one of those, will you? Hell, make it two. But gimme a beer first.”
He tilted his hat back, gave Holly's elbow a nudge, and grinned. God's gift to all the women south of the Nueces River. “Can I buy you a beer, honey?”
“No, thank you.”
Holly picked up her sandwich and turned away from him. She had barely swallowed the first bite when he moved closer, his arm fully in contact with hers.
“You're not from around here, are you?” he asked.
She took a sip of her cola to wash the sandwich down. “No.”
“Yeah, I didn't think so. I'd've noticed you, for sure. The name's Tucker Bascom.” He stuck out a dirt-creased, cal-lused hand. “People just call me Tuck.”
Oh, God. Why was it so easy to say “buzz off in New York and almost impossible to do it here? Holly ignored his hand in favor of another bite of her sandwich.
“I bet I can guess your name,” he said, oblivious to the subtlety of her brushoff.
From the opposite end of the bar came a female drawl. “She don't want nothin' to do with you, Tuck.”
“Shut up, Patsy,” he growled. “Nobody's talkin' to you.”
“Thank God,” the woman said.
The cowboy lifted his bottle of beer, knocked back half of it, then turned toward Holly again. “You're almost done with that cola, honey. Rick, bring this little lady a light beer. On me.”
The young bartender raised an eyebrow at Holly. “Ma'am?”
She shook her head.
“Aw, come on now, Jennifer or Jessica or…wait. I bet it's Tiffany. Am I right?”
Holly leaned forward across the bar. “Could I have a plastic bag or something to put the rest of my sandwich in?” she asked Rick. “And a can of diet cola to go?”
“Tiffany! Darlin'! You can't leave me like this. Why, hell, we've just met and…”
A pair of shoulders wedged between Holly and the cowboy. “Take a hike, Tucker. The lady's with me.”
There might have been a time when Holly would have taken great umbrage with this game of
Got Testosterone?,
when she might have snapped to her would-be rescuer, “Thanks, but I can handle this myself.” But this wasn't one of those times. She'd never been happier to see anybody than she was to see Cal Griffin right now.
He had wedged between them so he was facing Holly, and while he told the cowboy to get lost, his beautiful blue eyes were trained on Holly's face. Blue? Surely she could do better than that. She searched for a more descriptive word. Azure, perhaps. Heavenly. Celestial. That was close. Silly, but for one heart-stopping second she was wishing she really were “with” him.
Tucker grumbled, “Well, now how the hell was I supposed to know that,” as he slid his beer and then himself several stools away. He glared at Holly in the mirror, but didn't utter another word.
“Thank you,” she said softly.
“You're welcome. I've got a table in the back.” Cal picked up her paper plate. “Come on. You can finish your sandwich back there.”
This was one time Cal didn't mind having the reputation of one mean son of a bitch. Tucker Bascom, if he'd half tried, could probably have wiped the floor with him this afternoon.
“Thanks again,” Holly said, settling in her chair across from him. “What a jerk.”
“It wasn't that I didn't think you could handle him yourself. I just got tired of his mouth.” He pointed to her glass of melted ice. “Do you want another one of those?”
“Actually…” Her green eyes twinkled even in this dim light and she angled her head toward his beer. “I wouldn't mind having one of those.”
“Rick,” he called out.
“Yessir?”
He held up two fingers.
“Coming right up, Mr. Griffin.”
Cal settled back in his chair, content just to sit there and to gaze at Holly's face. Still, he'd taken her away from Tucker, hadn't he? A little follow up was necessary. He used to be pretty good at this kind of thing. Hell. He used to be good at everything.
“So, how'd you and Ellie get along?” he asked. “Did she talk your ear off?”
She smiled as she lifted her hands to hook a myriad of curls back on both sides. “Nope. I've still got two of them. See?”
What he was seeing were two perfectly formed, delicate shells, two pale and complicated whorls, and he couldn't remember when a woman's ear had struck him as so erotic, so absolutely sexual. He shifted in his chair, glancing over his shoulder to see if the kid was on his way yet with the liquid reinforcements.
“I enjoyed talking to Ellie,” Holly said. “My room is incredible. The bed and breakfast was a good choice, Cal. Thanks.”
She picked up her sandwich and bit off a dainty corner, which wasn't all that sensual, but then her pink tongue peeked out in search of a dab of yellow mustard in the corner of her mouth, and Cal's throat almost closed at the sight. He turned his chair sideways, parallel to the table, thinking it might help if he wasn't looking at her head on.
“Have you come up with any interesting answers for my questions yet?” she asked.
“Depends on the questions.” He drained what was left in his bottle, then handed the empty to Rick, who had just arrived with the new one.
“Sorry about what happened up there, ma'am,” the kid said to Holly.
“That's okay,” she told him. “It's not your fault. You make a great ham sandwich, by the way.”
“Yeah?” The kid's face nearly glowed in the dark. “Thanks. I appreciate that.”
Cal sampled the fresh, cold brew. The first swallow out of a full bottle was always the best. Probably comparable to the first pull on a lit cigarette. Good thing he'd never smoked.
Young Rick headed back for the bar, and Holly asked, in her half Eastern seaboard, half chili pepper voice, “So, are you ready for my first question?”