Saturday, March 17, 1962
Ice. In Virginia. An inch thick on everything it hit, had made Jo Grant’s pickup slither and slide the twelve miles of hills and hollows west from Middleburg to her brother Tom’s farmhouse on the highest hill she’d faced yet.
Trees and power lines had come down all around her, turning the roads into obstacle courses that took two hours to cross. And by the time she’d turned into the lane that led to Tom’s house, if she’d thought she could’ve walked up the hill, she would’ve left the truck where it was, stuck off to one side.
When she’d finally flogged it to the top of the drive, inching and crawling and sliding back down – when she’d turned the engine off in front of Tom’s door – Jo’s whole body was rigid, and her jaws felt soldered together. Ice had melted on her chin and her throat, and her face was raw from sticking it out the window, straining to see what she couldn’t.
She sat there for half a minute, shivering in her seat, listening to sleet peck at ice-covered metal, telling herself to breathe again, and stop thinking about Tom.
It wasn’t the ice, or the digging herself out, or hauling branches out of the road that had left Jo Grant sitting stunned in the dark. She’d grown up on the edge of Lexington, Kentucky where ice storms roll through like blizzards in Vermont. It was death again, taking its toll, where and when it shouldn’t.
When she looked back on that Saturday later, when she saw how what came next changed her life – the lives of too many others too, innocent or not – her loss nearly became a footnote to what walked in from Tom’s war, and what she saw in families touched and torn by murder.
But that night, frozen in her truck, two tears slid slowly toward Jo’s chin, and she shoved them away in disgust. She hadn’t cried when Tom’s landlord had called and told her Tom had died. She hadn’t whimpered at his memorial service in a Middleburg church that morning. She’d sat dry-eyed at his lawyer’s in Middleburg that afternoon. And she didn’t intend to start crying now. Not till she’d packed Tom’s things in her pickup, and driven his horses home.
It was a good thing she’d gotten them in the barn at noon before she’d left to meet the lawyer. The sky in the west had been iffy then, and if she’d left them out in an ice storm they could’ve broken a leg or two, or done something else as deadly.
They still weren’t settled for the night. They should’ve been fed and watered by six, and it was pushing eight already. So she grabbed the papers from the lawyer, and the cardboard box from the safety deposit box Tom had taken in both their names, and picked her way across ice-glazed bricks to Tommy’s front door – the black door in the old brick farmhouse he’d rented till he’d been killed.
She still couldn’t take it in. Tommy. The invincible. Killed on a motorcycle, after teaching motorcycle safety since he was a kid. The pole-vaulter who’d moved like a panther. Hit by a truck that turned left right into him, breaking every bone in his body against a fieldstone wall.
Jo shook her head as she unlocked the door, because of the obvious irony. That Tommy could fight through World War II and make it home unscathed, only to die because a ninety-year-old farmer couldn’t see his Triumph.
But Tommy put himself in the crosshairs. Choosing dangerous addictions. Motorcycles. Horses. Skydiving on his birthdays. Even in the work he’d done, Tommy’d chased disaster, taking engineering jobs in all the world’s worst trouble spots.
Jo told herself she wasn’t being fair. That once he’d bought Sam, his six-year-old gelding, and rented the farmhouse here, Tom had worked consistently in the U.S. for a company near Fairfax. Building only-God-knew-what for some arm of the military. Probably. Though no matter how she’d asked him, Tommy never had said.
But why did he take more and more risks, once he got home from the war? Jo Grant asked herself that for the umpteenth time that week, as she set Tom’s things on the chair in his cold front hall.
The lights went on, which surprised her, with the farm as far off the road as it was. It made her change fast into jeans and boots, because if the power did go off, the well pumps wouldn’t work, and she had to water the horses while she still could.
Bundles of contradictions, horses. Strong but fragile. Big but spooky. Needing constant care.
Jo, on the other hand, needed to get away from them. And once she got Tom’s two to Lexington, where her uncle would take them while she looked for a buyer, she’d do exactly that. Get away from nursing anything – equine or human.
She filled the kitchen sink with water in case she needed it later, and rolled up the sleeves of Tom’s winter barn coat, cramming candles in its pockets too, before she started toward the barn in the back, holding on to the clothes line that stretched halfway across.
She fell once, next to the barn door. And then heard, as she felt for the light switch, what she’d dreaded all her life – a horse thrashing around in a stall, breathing hard and fast.
She gritted her teeth before the lights went on, then saw what she expected – a sweat-covered horse, eyes white-edged and panicked, rolling on his back in his stall.
Sam, the gelding Tom had really cared about, the half-Thoroughbred, half-quarter-horse cross – Sam was drenched and steaming, his chestnut coat dark and slick and flecked with white foamy sweat. He rolled onto his stomach when he saw Jo, his back legs tucked toward the side, his forelegs stretched straight in front to push him up on his feet.
His ears hung low and limp. His head drooped toward his knees. His soft brown eyes were wide and frightened as he started circling his stall again, pain driving him hard.
Jo said, “Hey, Sam,” as she reached out a hand and let him sniff her fingers. “You’re a good boy. And I’m sorry you hurt.”
Sam glanced around at her, having stood still for a second, quivering and exhausted, his rear-end toward the door now, his head in a back corner.
“You’ll be alright. I’m going to help, okay?” Jo knew he didn’t understand that, but he needed to hear a calm quiet voice. He needed her to move slowly too, and as though she knew what she was doing.
She unlatched the half-door to his stall while she talked, and fastened it behind her, then walked around to stand on his left and slide a hand down his neck.
Sam turned his head and sniffed Tom’s barn coat, then smelled Jo’s hand again, while Maggie, the pregnant mare across the aisle-way, shuffled her feet and nickered, with her head over her door.
“I’ll feed you in a minute, Maggie. I’ve gotta look after Sam.”
Jo wasn’t an absolute stranger. She’d taken care of them the last six days, which helped her see the difference when she looked at the bedding in the stall. Sam had been rolling and circling his stall long enough that what manure there was had been pulverized and scattered. And there hadn’t been much to begin with – which was not a good sign.
Jo slid her right hand down Sam’s withers, and draped that arm across his back, then pressed her right ear against his side so she could hear his gut.
What she heard was what she’d been afraid of.
Absolutely nothing. Sam was colicking. His intestines had shut down, and nothing was moving through.
The worse case would be a torsion, a twisted intestine that ties itself off. A few vets had brand new clinics that could do colic surgery, but even if there was one near Middleburg, which she doubted, she couldn’t put Sam in a trailer. Not on roads like those.
Impacted food usually causes colic. Dry hay and stemmy winter grass could’ve gotten packed solid and stopped the gut from working, especially since Sam hadn’t drunk much water to keep everything moving. For the two buckets Jo had filled at one were still almost full.
Rolling could’ve made him worse too, twisting intestines that hadn’t been before. And if he did have a twisted gut, the best thing Jo could do was put him down right away. The problem was that deciding the cause wouldn’t be easy for a vet.
Walking can make colic feel better, and Sam was circling again, while Jo talked quietly and patted his flank when it swung past, as she opened his stall door.
Sam needed a vet. And Jo scanned the list of numbers tacked to the tack room wall. The vet’s was there near the top, but when Jo grabbed the wall phone Tom had rigged above the feed bin, the phone line was dead.
She poured a scoop of grain in Maggie’s feed tub, and threw her two flakes of hay, then started off toward the house.
She tried the phone by the woodstove in the kitchen. But there wasn’t a dial tone there either.
So Jo would have to treat Sam herself, hoping for a simple impaction. And that meant Jo would have to oil Sam, the thought of which was unnerving. You called your vet for something that hard you knew was dangerous too.
And yet Tom must have oiled his own horses. He had the equipment in the tack room. And unless Jo oiled Sam soon he’d die a miserable death.
Jo fastened Sam’s halter, and attached the lead rope, then led him out of his stall onto the aisle-way’s concrete floor. The big copper-colored horse didn’t even look at her as she rubbed the white star on his forehead, and clipped the crossties to both sides of his halter.
Every bit of him that could looked scared, and he groaned quietly as he picked up his left rear leg and kicked at his own stomach.
“I’m sorry, Sam, I’m sorry it hurts.” She could see the pain, and the patience, in his eyes, and she patted the side of his neck. “You’ve got to help me and swallow the tube, ’cause I’ve never done this before.”
The very first step was the most dangerous. She had to get the tube into the lowest of the three chambers at the back of Sam’s nose. Plenty of vets have missed it and shoved the tube straight into the lungs, causing really horrifying bleeding, and many times even death.
Jo was trying to picture what a vet would do in precisely what order, while she washed her hands in the tack room, and braided her long brown pony tail to keep it out of her way. The longer she thought about it, the shakier she got – which made her feel even worse.
She was just about to slide the tube into Sam’s nose – when she remembered the first thing old Doc Taylor had done every time she’d watched him worming mares in their broodmare barn when she was a little girl.
It made perfect sense, when she thought about it. So she positioned the one inch diameter rubber tube along Sam’s side, measuring the length of his head and neck down all the way to his stomach. She made a mark on the tube with a pen she’d found in Tom’s pocket, so she’d see when she’d slid enough tube to reach Sam’s gut.
Jo stood for a second, quietly talking to him, trying to whip up enough courage to actually stick the tube in his nostril and try to push it down his throat.
She still postponed the irreversible. She pushed the stainless steel bucket full of mineral oil, with the hand pump sitting in it, six feet away. Tom only had a gallon, and she couldn’t afford to kick it over, or damage his only pump.
It was guiding the tube that had her panicked. She’d be sliding the tube with her right hand. Maybe she could stick the index finger of her left into Sam’s nostril too, and push the tube down inside his nose toward the bottom hole.
It made as much sense as anything else, and she took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, while Sam tossed his head up and kicked at his stomach.
“Ho! Sam. Settle down. You’ve got to hold really still.”
Jo pushed the tube in his left nostril and held it down with her left index finger, but it bumped up against something hard, and Sam jerked his head up.
She talked to him, and tried again, and thought, Lord, don’t let me kill him, not Tom’s favorite horse.
And finally, on the fourth try, with Sam on the edge of panic, it slid a little way down an opening she hoped to God was his throat.
Sam didn’t seem to be swallowing it, and Jo asked him to five or six times, and kissed his nose, and wiggled the tube further. And then, miraculously, it seemed to slide on – and she began to think she saw a faint outline of something moving down along his neck, from where she stood on his left.
That’s when the lights went off. And Sam disappeared.
“Stand, Sam! Everything’s okay. You just stand still.”
Candles aren’t what you want in a barn, with everything that’s flammable. But she stuck two on a metal tack trunk, and one more on the concrete floor on her side of Sam.
Then she could see enough to slide more tube – and finally begin to pump the oil down Sam’s throat, talking to him, kissing his nose, kissing him on the cheek.
He held still and put up with it. And didn’t look any worse than he’d been when she first came into the barn. She wanted to get some water in him too, and she pulled out one of his water buckets and pumped all of it down.
Jo walked him back and forth in the aisle-way for two hours straight, talking to him much of the time, talking to Maggie on her way past – till Jo couldn’t make herself walk any further that night. She led Sam into his stall and leaned against a wall for a minute, trying to ease her back.
She slept there in the aisle-way, on a pile of horse blankets under a comforter, waking up every few minutes, checking on how he was doing, using the Coleman lantern she’d found in the back of Tom’s pantry.
She heard the sound she’d been waiting for at three-thirty that morning. And found another small oil-covered pile when the sound of Sam sucking water at five got her up for good.
He wanted breakfast, but she didn’t give him any. When she saw a couple of more piles she would, but not this early.
The ice hadn’t melted much, so she couldn’t put him out with Maggie, which was what Sam needed – the two of them outside together keeping each other moving.
By seven Jo had heated water on the cook stove, and gotten herself washed, and dressed, and eaten an egg sandwich.
She was sitting by a fire in the study by seven-thirty, in an old leather chair that had come with the house, the cardboard box Tom had left her waiting on her lap.
She cut the tape he’d used to seal it as permanently as an engineer would – and pulled off the lid.
His life insurance policy was on top. Under that was a small manila envelope where he’d put three medals from WWII she’d never known he had. There was a long handwritten letter on personal stationary from someone named William Donovan too, who recalled recruiting Tom, and his early days of training, and thanked Tommy for everything he’d done, above and beyond the call of duty, while he served in something called the O.S.S., which Donovan had directed.
Jo had never heard of the O.S.S. And she put the letter on the table to read again later.
In a small leather drawstring bag she found her father’s grandfather’s pocket watch, which her dad had given Tommy when he’d turned seventeen his freshman year in college.
At the very bottom of the shoe box was a seven inch reel-to-reel recording tape, as well as a black leather-bound book, the pages printed like graph paper, the covers held tightly closed by a black elastic band.
When Jo opened it, she found a letter to her from Tommy inside the front cover in an envelope sealed with wax.
Jo broke the seal and pulled out several sheets of black lined graph paper covered in his engineer’s printing, very precise, very readable, that architects often use too.
12 January 1962
Dear Josie,
I know, you want to be called Jo, but I’ve got too many memories of you when you were Josie to give it up now. Like seeing you on Rabbit at age six galloping through the woods, holding a banana in one hand as you chased Dad on Red.
There’re names and addresses in the enclosed lab book for people I knew in the Army. Give it to a friend of mine named Alan Munro (address on fly leaf). There may be folks there he knew and wants to get in touch with.
The tape I’ve left is a record of my memories of the war when I was trained by, and worked for, the Office Of Strategic Services in Europe. O.S.S. was the beginning of our military intelligence services that you never heard about from me, no matter how you asked.
We swore an oath of secrecy I’m breaking now, in this letter, and on the tape. It won’t be read until after my death, and I console myself by thinking that’s an honorable breach that will take place many years from now.
It was when I first heard Mom was sick, that I felt duty bound to start this. It didn’t make a lot of sense, but I knew it was what I should do.
I hope someday the secrecy ban will be rescinded. Those who were in the O.S.S. need to be free to talk about it with those they love most, so the loved ones understand too.
You’re the last one left I do love, by the way. Though I entertain hopes, cautiously, at the moment, that there still might be a woman for me. I would like to have a wife and kids, even in my forties. I wish that for you too, little one, needless to say, after the unworthy and roguish Nate. Thirty-two is not too old for you to start a new life.
You and I haven’t had much luck, have we? Me, getting the proverbial Dear John from Missy while I was overseas. You, getting two-timed by Nate. I, as the protective older brother, toyed with the idea of squashing him like a bug, but decided to rise above.
I’m sorry we haven’t had much time together since I got back in ’45. You were so young then, and I wasn’t anymore. And I came back different. More complicated. More unpredictable. Angrier too, to tell you the truth. I didn’t want to inflict that on you. And I had to get away from Lexington. I had to go where no one knew me. Where no expectations could tangle me up.
It wasn’t what you and Mom wanted, but I had to travel, Jo, all over. I couldn’t stay still for awhile. I can’t really explain it. Though I think after Mom disappeared behind the brain tumor, our real Mom the way she was before, I’ve seen almost the same look in your eyes when you don’t know I’m watching that I used to see in the mirror.
It wasn’t easy for you, was it? Losing Dad early, having me gone for years. Yet, having seen what people went through in Europe, you and I will never have a right to complain about anything that happens.
I’m rambling, little one. Sorry. I can’t thank you enough for what you did for Mom at the end. Giving up your job with the architect in Michigan, moving home and taking care of her, when we both know how hard that was. Just seeing her being nothing like herself made it hurt to set foot in her room. Thank God Toss was there to help run the farm.
Anyway, Josie, thank you. I love you a lot. You’d be a favorite person of mine even if you weren’t my sister.
I hope you find the right man to love, who understands and appreciates you and loves you right back.
Keep saying what you really think. It’s one of your best, if irritating, traits. Not too many of us want to hear what somebody really thinks, and we tend to resist before we can listen.
Marry a man who listens.
Like I have to tell you that. Like you’d do anything else.
If Sam is still alive, take care of him. Keep him, if you’re ready for another horse. If not, if you’re not over having to put good old Jed down (or the irritations of Mimi the miscreant), find him a really good home. He’s a great guy. If you hang around him you’ll understand. Great head. Great heart. Very decent gaits, especially the canter.
Maggie’s a valuable Thoroughbred mare, in foal to a good stallion. I bought her because she needed a home, but she’s also a good investment. Her papers are in my vet file.
If you meant what you said at Christmas, take some of the money you get from me and go see the houses owned by Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and the rest. Get yourself to Europe like you want to, and look at what’s appealing about the smallest cottages in England and Scotland, and the great houses too.
Architecture that’s absolutely timeless, you’ll see it all over Europe. Go look for yourself, then build what you were born to build.
Don’t feel sorry for me. Whenever I went, I was ready. I should’ve died in ’43, or ’44, or 1945 and didn’t, when too many of the best did. Everything else has been a gift.
I love you, kidlette. I know, you hate that. But I love you anyway. I’m glad you were a surprise.
Tommy
Jo said, “Tommy,” twice, and stared at the letter, lying limp in her lap, and realized her throat had clenched up, and she’d already started to cry.
Then she heard a car engine. Which didn’t make any sense. Virgil, the landlord, had taken his family to Richmond after Tom’s memorial service and wouldn’t be back till Tuesday. She couldn’t imagine who else would drive out before the ice melted.
But it definitely was a car engine. That got switched off while she listened. Before a car door slammed.
“Jo? I’m Alan Munro.” The voice came first, quiet and deep, just before the knock.
“Yes?” Jo opened the heavy black door, and saw a face she couldn’t place.
“I was a friend of Tom’s. I came to see if you’re okay. I tried to call, but your phone was out of order.”
“Aren’t the roads horrible?”
“Yeah, but better than last night.”
“Ah.” They were still standing in the doorway – Jo Grant, tired and rumpled, tall and thin and wary, and a much taller man with dark hair and green eyes and an old scar on the left side of his jaw, just in front of his ear.
“I’m sorry. Come in. Please.” She was wearing one of Tom’s warmest sweaters, which was way too big for her, and realized right then how ratty she must look.
“You okay?” He limped enough for her to notice, as he watched her considering him. “I was at the service yesterday.”
“I thought you looked familiar. I’m sorry I seem so vague. I’ve just had kind of a shock.” Jo’s large, dark, intense blue eyes stared past him out the front door.
And when she closed it half a minute later, he said, “You look kind of tired. I’m sorry, if I—”
“No, it’s fine. I was up last night with a horse.”
“Sam?”
“Yep. He was colicking. You know about horses?”
“No, but Tom used to talk about Sam all the time, and we’d go out to see him if I met Tom here. Tom and I rode bikes together, on the few occasions we were both in Virginia at the same time.”
“Is that how you knew him? Motorcycles?”
“No. We served together in the war.”
“So. You know about the O.S.S.?” She’d been watching him closely when she asked that, before she turned toward the kitchen and shoved her hands in her pants pockets. “How ’bout a cup of coffee?”
“Thanks.” He started adding logs to the fire, arranging them with a poker, making sparks fly up the flue.
“There’s a letter from Tom on the table. He left me something to give you. Go ahead and read it.”
He’d picked it up before she’d finished talking, and was holding it up to the light from one of the tall front windows when she walked off to the kitchen.
He was sitting in front of the fire when she came back with the coffee, and he said, “That smells good, thanks. Have you listened to Tom’s tape?” Alan Munro sipped his coffee and set his mug on the arm of the sofa, his long legs stretched toward the fire, his eyes still on the letter.
“The power’s still off, and Tom’s tape recorder’s packed, and I probably won’t get a chance till I get home to Lexington. I was planning to leave tomorrow.”
“It’s supposed to melt overnight.”
“Good.”
“Who’s ‘Mimi the miscreant?’”
“She was a four-year-old mare I bought after I had to put my old horse down, and we didn’t get along. She tested me constantly, and was generally unpredictable, and I didn’t have the patience for that then. Not with everything else that was going on. So what will you do with his book of names?”
“Keep it. We knew some people in common and I might want to get in touch.”
“Are you a mechanical engineer too?”
“No, I’m a chemical engineer. Is Sam okay?”
“I think he’ll be fine. I’ll start feeding him a little at a time, and watch him really closely. I checked on him while I made the coffee.”
“Tom used to say Sam was one in a million, but I never understood why.”
“Right now he’s one more piece of Tommy’s life that I’ve got to take care of.”
“I see.” He folded the letter and handed it back.
“Our Mom died in October, and I’m still sorting out her stuff.”
“And that’s on top of missing her.”
Jo put her feet on the coffee table and crossed her arms across her middle. “She died of a brain tumor, and she wasn’t herself for two years. She told me she hated me most days, till she got so she couldn’t talk. Then she’d glare, or turn away. That was while she could see and move.”
“Ah.” Alan Munro looked away from Jo, and sat staring at the fire for a minute, rubbing the scar on his jaw. “So you’re disgusted with Tom for doing it to you too? Making you clean up his mess?”
“No! I loved Tommy, but—”
“It’s a lot of death too soon.”
“Yeah. You always put words in people’s mouths?”
“No.” He laughed. “Sometimes, though.”
“You think Tommy killed himself?” Jo stared straight at the fire, her hands clenched in her lap.
“Absolutely not. Why would you ask that?”
“The letter. It was a strange thing to do. It could’ve been a suicide note. Like he’d planned his own death.”
“Nope. Not Tom. That was what he wanted to say to you. You. Josie. And he made sure he got it done in case he broke his neck over a jump, or got driven off the road. Right? Tom made plans.”
“That’s what’s got me worried.”
“He talked about you a lot, you know.”
“Did he.” Jo didn’t ask it like a question. It came out cold and flat, and her face seemed to close down.
“He’d recently met a woman too, I think he was really interested in.”
“Tommy? Where? He never said a word.”
“One of his jobs. He’d been helping design storage facilities for an oil company based in Fairfax. She’s one of their chemists.”
“So that’s what he meant in the letter. That he still had hopes there might be a woman for him.”
“Sounds like it to me. I think he wondered if he was too set in his ways to marry anybody, though. After living alone for so long.”
“Why didn’t he tell me anything about her?”
“Wouldn’t he have, if he’d seen you? He only mentioned her to me once, when we’d spent two days on a road trip.”
“Maybe. You couldn’t get much out of him on the phone. Unless he called you.”
“True.” Alan Munro laughed, and threw another log on the fire. “He hadn’t even gone out with her when he saw you at Christmas.” Alan studied Jo for a second, as she played with the bottom of Tom’s sweater, before he added, “A pickup truck hit Tom out of the blue. There wasn’t anything he could do.”
“Why did he do things he knew were that dangerous? He rode Sam alone cross country all the time, trailering him all over, jumping walls and fences when he didn’t have a clue what was on the other side. And skydiving, for heaven’s sake! It seemed like after he got back from the—”
“War?”
“Yes.”
“That’s how it took some of us. Others, it was safety first, once we got back. Keep your head down, and don’t make—”
“It was hard, if you loved him. We worried about him, and prayed for him constantly, all those years he was fighting in Europe. Mom, and Uncle Toss and I. And then he comes back and leaves again. He travels all over, and does everything he can think of to test himself, or endanger his own life and limb, almost as though he wanted to—”
“He explained it some in the letter.”
“Still.”
“What if you tamed lions for a living, and then you were forced to sort mail in a post office?”
“It’s not quite the same, is it? I can imagine myself liking the lions, but—”
“War brings out the best, and the worst, and triggers a lot of unexpected reactions. Though that was an unintended pun.”
“I don’t want him to be gone.”
“No. I don’t either. Tom was a great friend.”
They were both quiet for a minute. Watching the fire. Feeling the heat and the hurt in the air. Wondering where else to go with both.
“How old were you in ’45, when he got back from the war?”
“Almost fifteen.”
“Ah.” Alan set his mug on the table and pushed himself up off the sofa. “I guess I ought to head back.”
“Aren’t you going to tell me about the O.S.S.?”
“I don’t know that there’s that much to tell. You listen to the tape, and then maybe we could talk again. If you want to.” He pulled a business card out of his shirt pocket and laid it on the table.
“What do you do for a living?”
“I work for a pharmaceutical firm, but I’m actually moving to Lexington. I’ve taken a job with an equine pharmaceutical company and I start in a couple of weeks.” He laughed at the look on her face, and picked up his coat.
Jo was holding the card, reading the address in Fairfax. “Why Lexington? Why equine drugs all of a sudden?”
“I’m tired of working for a big company, and my boss, whom I like a lot, is a long time friend of the guy who started Equine Pharmaceuticals in Lexington, and he put me in touch.”
“Bob Harrison. Sure. I don’t know him well, but I know him.”
“Tom told me he respected him as a scientist. And I’m ready to live in a smaller town. I’m sick and tired of D.C., and I’m interested in horses. Tom did that for me. Tom and Sam. I don’t know, I can’t explain it all, but I’m ready for a big change.”
“Lexington’ll be that.”
“Maybe I’ll call you in a couple of weeks. When you’ve had a chance to listen to the tape. If you wouldn’t mind. Once I get to town.”
“So you won’t talk about the O.S.S. either? Just like Tom?”
“We’ll see. If you give me your number and address.” Alan pulled a small spiral notebook from his coat pocket and handed it to Jo. “Is there anything you need help with? Loading Tom’s books in the truck? Or—”
“Thanks. I’m just taking his personal stuff now. His landlord is shipping the books when he gets back this week. He’ll sell Tom’s truck and horse trailer for me too.”
“Let me know if I can help before you go. Tom would never forgive me if I didn’t help Josie when she needed it.”
“Jo.”
“Sorry.”
“No, you’re not.” She smiled for the first time, then stood up and picked up the mugs. “You’re teasing me just like Tom. Thanks, anyway. Thanks for coming all the way out here.”
“The least I could do.” Alan Munro grinned at her then, and opened the door.
“Which kind are you?”
“What?”
“Do you take more and more risks, or keep your head down and not make waves?”
“That’s a good question.” Alan turned away from her, and stuck his arms out to the side, then slid fast down the ice-covered walk, stopping himself with his hands, finally, on the hood of his navy blue Dodge.