Six P.M. was an unfashionably early dining hour in Las Vegas. The mostly empty Strip House restaurant produced the promised red leather banquette and dim lighting, but the crimson walls were lined with black-and-white pinup photos of Hollywood starlets.
Temple had never eaten here before—who could cover every restaurant in Las Vegas?—and had taken the “Strip” in the name as a tribute to its easy access from Las Vegas Boulevard and for, uh, strip steak.
Once more Midwestern naïveté had reared its innocent head. Instead, the restaurant walls showcased plenty of naked female flanks, loins, and ribs.
“Oops,” Temple said. “I’ve never been here before. The Web site didn’t show all the wall cheesecake, just the dessert on the menu.”
“That’s okay,” Max said, “I’m sitting with my back to the wall, so I’ll have to leer long-distance, anyway. Your fiancé would frown on the decor?”
“How do you know so much—?”
“Garry was trying to give me a trip down memory lane via his laptop computer in between following the trail of Kathleen O’Connor back to her beginnings.”
“Kathleen O’Connor? Beginnings?” Before Temple could catch her breath and ask for more, the waiter came to take their drink orders.
“Double single-malt whisky. No ice,” Max said.
Temple had planned to skip another drink but changed her mind. She wasn’t going to let Max out of this place until he’d revealed every shock in the Book of Life.
“I’ll have a”—What was a long-sipping drink?—“house Margarita, no ice, no salt.”
By then the busboy was bringing goblets and bottled water, so the barriers to instantly shaking the news about Kathleen O’Connor out of Max remained.
“‘Kitty the Cutter,’” he said when they were alone again. “You’d be interested to know that nickname may have been appropriate even in her early teens.”
“Why on earth? Where on earth?”
He immediately understood what she was asking. “Apparently, I’d instructed Gandolph to, ah, track down her background, if he could, if he survived me. He considered my almost fatal brush with mortality enough reason to do just that. Where is that drink?”
She’d never heard Max impatient before. She’d never seen him visibly hurting both physically and psychically before.
The waiter skated back with a tray and set down the drinks. Max’s was low and deep amber colored, Temple’s was high, wide, and the color of diluted snot, if you thought about it.
“That cocktail is bigger than you are,” he noted.
She shrugged and stirred it with her straw. “Do you mean that Kathleen may have been a cutter as a teen? Self-abuse? Or assault even then? She had a police record?”
“She had a history that might have started her off mutilating herself rather than other people. Look, Temple, it’s not a pretty story.”
“What have you got to tell me that is?”
“Good point.” He took what detective novels call a “slug” of the expensive whisky.
Her credit card company might be calling to check up on a sudden increase in her spending. No problem.
“Tell me a little about me,” he said, “before I go into my dark-and-stormy-night-of-the-soul routine.”
“I’m sorry, Max.”
“I know. That’s why you let me come back. I don’t quite remember all of that call.”
She did.
Yes, I’ve been drinking; that’s what we Irish do at wakes, even private ones.
“Gandolph must have told you,” she said after a halfhearted sip of her Margarita, “about your long and unhappy relationship with Ireland and the IRA, about your counterterrorism work with him.”
“Yes.”
“How much,” she asked, “did he know about what Kitty the Cutter did here?”
“More than he should have, come to think of it. He was always a master spy as well as a spymaster. I don’t suppose too many people know that she slashed … your current fiancé,” Max said.
“No! I would have said three, four people, tops, including you. That’s impossible.”
“Nothing was impossible with Garry.” Max said with a sigh. “Except a surprise resurrection, like in the book.”
“The book? Oh, you mean the books. The Lord of the Rings trilogy. That’s right, Gandalf the wizard plunged to his apparent death in the Moria abyss, fighting the Balrog, but then came back.”
“Garry isn’t coming back.” Max sipped his drink and paused to master his grief before speaking again. “Maybe taking the stage name of Gandolph the Great wasn’t just chutzpah. He could be a wizard. He spent all that time under cover here in Vegas—from his purported death at the Halloween séance to two months ago when he spirited me from the Neon Nightmare to a Swiss clinic in the Alps—looking into the Synth and, in the past two months, Kathleen O’Connor abroad.”
“She was a broad, all right,” Temple said, surprised to hear a bitter note in her voice. “After you, trying to track you down, maybe for the same obsessive reason you wanted to uncover her past, even after your own ‘death.’”
“I’m not leaving this planet without knowing why she manipulated a couple Irish-American teenaged boys to betray each other over her.”
“And did you find out?”
“Gandolph … Garry … did. Maybe. But we’re back to the insoluble, inhuman tragedy. What about the immediate present? What was I like when I lived here? Was I happy?”
“Were we happy? Yes.”
“Why’d I blow it?”
“Someone was always on your trail. Kinda hard to keep up a normal life.” Temple sipped just as the waiter returned with padded leather menus big enough to give her carpal tunnel syndrome.
Max reached across the table to take and shut hers. “Let me order for you. Keep talking.”
It was good he kept his eyes on the menu while she recited the highs and lows of their interrupted two-year relationship.
“You swept me off my feet, literally, at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, and distressed my over-fond family of pushy brothers and protective parents by whisking me away to your year-long gig at the Goliath Hotel here in Vegas. Then you disappeared on the closing night of your magic show, the very night a dead man was found in the spy area above the gaming tables. A local homicide detective was on your trail for that, but I knew nothing and said nothing. A year later you came back, but you didn’t dare occupy the condo we’d bought together at the Circle Ritz building, so you lived in a house that I now realize had been Gandolph’s. You and I were trying to trace a weird magical cult called the Synth for masterminding several unsolved Vegas murders. Then you must have gone undercover at the Neon Nightmare, which has now been revealed to me as the Synth headquarters. You fell or were sabotaged and disappeared once more. And, voila! Here you are again.”
So was the waiter. Max ordered quickly to regain their privacy.
“All right?” he asked of his double order as the waiter vanished.
“It has to be. It’s a Max Kinsella Production.”
“So,” he said, nodding at the ring on her finger, “where did the fiancé come in?”
“His name is Matt. You can say it.”
“I know.… I was shown that online.”
“Just that radio station Web site?”
He nodded.
“It’s all hype.”
“Of course.”
“His name is Matt Devine, as you know. You may not know he and you actually kinda got along. When Lieutenant Molina would go into her usual rants about you, Matt defended you. Even to me.”
“Lieutenant Molina?”
“Homicide. She was sure you’d offed the guy in the Goliath ceiling.”
“So this hard-case lieutenant gave you a rough time about me and my whereabouts?”
“Of course.”
“And you didn’t crack?”
“Of course not.”
“Did we always talk like a Humphrey Bogart movie?”
“No. Just when we were trying to pretend everything was okay, like now.”
Their salads arrived, forcing them to lean back and away from their opposite sides of the table. Max ordered another double. Temple had barely lowered her drink below the unsalted rim level. She was driving. He wasn’t.
“Thank you,” Max said in the pause after the food had arrived and the waiter had left.
She understood why. “You’re welcome.”
Pinning parts of their salads with the fork tines was a good way to not look at each other and carry on an abbreviated conversation.
“Matt sounds like a solid guy,” he said.
“He is.”
“He must have a hell of a backstory.”
“So did you, it turns out,” she said.
“He knows … what … about me?”
“Pretty much everything.”
Silence. “It’s a bit numbing that my replacement knows more about me than I do.”
“Nobody could replace you, Max,” Temple said wryly.
“Now eat your salad and listen,” she continued. “You were gone the first time for almost an entire year with no word. Matt is the most … genuine guy in the world. Way too nice for his own good, but I’ve brought him around to reality some.” She couldn’t help smiling. “You’re a hard act to follow, but he can do it. I love him. We’re working on getting married in a way that will satisfy two geographically and culturally different families. I loved you, but even you finally made me see we couldn’t live with all the kickback from your secret life. I’m not going to let you flail around alone, not knowing anyone now, here or anywhere, who knows anything about you but enemies.”
His fork had been poised over the salad for a long time, and now he put it down for a hit of the second double whisky. She’d quoted his phone-call words almost exactly, but she could see he couldn’t quite place them.
I don’t know anyone now, here or anywhere, who knows anything about me but enemies. They tell me my name is Michael Aloysius Xavier Kinsella.…
“So, Michael Aloysius Xavier Kinsella,” she went on, “since you’ve still got enemies and I’ve still got unanswered questions that effect me and mine, including Matt, and there are still unsolved Synth-related deaths out there and signs that some IRA rogues are aiming their sights on Las Vegas, and since Lieutenant C. R. Molina is still suspicious of you and me and the Circle Ritz palm tree, it’s to my advantage to shake the cobwebs out of your head and get you on the road to your real future life, without me.”
He just stared at her for a few moments. “That sounds like it would be a damn shame.”
“And no flirting, no Irish charm, no inveigling, seducing, or magic tricks.”
He shrugged. “I don’t feel in the mood for any of those things. It’s funny. I felt better, more in control, when I was on my own, almost, running for my life, in Europe, anyway. Ireland got … out of control. Yet here in Vegas, where I loved, lived, and almost died, I seem to feel lost, out of steam.”
And Temple could, and would, use that.
I’ve got a case of amnesia where all I’m remembering is a bit about the IRA, a dead woman named Rebecca or a possibly live one named Kathleen.…
“What’s this about a ‘possibly live … Kathleen’?” she asked.
“Did I say that? On the phone?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe something like that.”
“That. Exactly. You think I’m going to forget any words from a ‘possibly dead’ man?”
“You’d given up on me. What a bummer to have me show up again.”
“I was never really sure you were dead, Max. Maybe years from now, I’d believe it. You don’t die easy.” Temple grinned. “Oh, how I wish I could tell Molina.”
“Not good to tell anyone, but I suppose you can’t keep things like me from the fiancé.”
“No.”
“Where is he?”
“Out of town for a couple more days.”
“I always have this good timing?”
“Yup. Your timing is annoyingly impeccable. Years of being a magician, I guess.”
The appearance of the attentive waiter struck Temple with a fresh little jolt each time tonight. Overhearing must be avoided. She eyed the surrounding diners and met Max’s eyes returning from the same mission.
Their massive steak platters were still sizzling before them, accompanied by huge-handled steak knives.
“Nice of the staff to arm us,” Max said. “I could have used these last week. If the sight of blood disturbs you, I warn you this will be really rare.”
She thought the sight of blood would disturb him, but Max had obviously put the raw details of the shoot-out in Ulster behind him. Maybe he felt in limbo because he was busy burying the recent past and trying to grasp the present. As for any future, forget it.
Steak required a lot of attention to eat, and that’s what they did. Temple’s side of black truffle–creamed spinach made the vegetable almost like dessert, and Max had both the Potatoes Romanoff and baked. He’d always been steel-spring lean, but now he ate like a starving vampire drank.
“So,” he asked, after the waiter had removed their empty platters, plates, and drink glasses. “Where are you planning to park me, or should I just get a room at the … Goliath, was it? See if anybody there remembers me?”
“Negative,” Temple answered with emphasis. “Remember, you have a house here. Seeing it might jog your memory. No reason you can’t move right in. I planned to take you on a tour of the place after dinner.”
No reason not to move in, she thought—except it might be haunted … by an unidentified stalker who’d shredded Max’s wardrobe and also speared an illegally present Molina, or maybe by Garry Randolph’s real ghost this time. There was nowhere else to park Max for tonight, though.
“Are we having dessert, or what?” she asked, hoping for more pleasant topics.
“How about Baileys Irish Cream and coffee while I tell you about Kitty the Cutter?”
“My favorite after-dinner combo,” Temple said, with a lemon twist in her voice. “Depressants, stimulants, and psychopaths.”
Max laughed for the first time and signaled the waiter. When they were ensconced behind small crystal liqueur glasses and full cups of coffee, he began.
“The long and short of the matter is that Kathleen was always a rabid IRA agent, even after the peace. She raised gun money from wealthy men who sympathized for the cause from Europe to North and South America.”
“Whoring for the homeland? We’d figured that out before you left.”
“Not why. She’d had a … rough upbringing. Ireland was always poverty-stricken with few natural resources and no competitive living wage until the very recent technological revolution. The wrongs against the Irish are long and many and bitter.”
“Then you and your naive cousin were just practice, early in her career?”
“Something like that.” Max downed the dainty liqueur glass of Baileys in one gulp then concentrated on the coffee.
“What’s this ‘dead woman named Rebecca’ have to do with Kathleen?” Temple said.
“I said that in the phone call? Or, more improbably, you remembered that?”
“I tend to remember every damn word from a ghost. It’s my job to know about everything and remix it into something else. Rebecca?”
“A literary reference.”
“Oh. That Rebecca, the literal femme fatale from the Daphne du Maurier novel of the same name. I devoured that book in eighth grade. I wanted to rekill that lying, manipulative, unfaithful Rebecca and marry Maxim de Winter.”
He stared at her. Maybe it was her rerun of childish but uncharacteristic venom or … oh, right. Wrong! Max de Winter. Temple had just confessed that her preadolescent self wanted to marry a tall, dark, mysterious but tormented man named Max.
“That was just an old, outdated book,” Temple explained in unseemly haste, although she considered Rebecca a timeless classic. “A lot of forties mystery novels featured murderous, manipulative women from hell. Probably a ploy to get women back out of the workforce after World War Two.”
He laughed again and shook his head, hiding his weary eyes behind a forked hand. “Your mind jumps around like a knight on a chess board. So one minute you’re a murderous romantic, and the next you’re a feminist?”
“Makes perfect sense to me. What does the name Rebecca have to do with Kitty the Cutter?”
“It was the name given her at the Irish orphanage where she was … reared. She obviously identified with Du Maurier’s book, too, but in a very different way. She may have been using the name Rebecca as an alias these last several years of détente on the Irish question, which means that the Kitty the Cutter who visited Las Vegas may still be alive and well and elsewhere.”
“You saw her dead,” Temple said. “Then again, I saw Gandolph the Great ‘dead’ at that Halloween séance, and it was just a magician’s trick.”
“It was a master magician’s trick,” Max said, his expression hardening with grief. Then he doffed the mood with a shake of his head. “I’ve … glimpsed that motorcycle accident in recent dreams. I saw myself checking her carotid artery for a pulse. That woman was dead—really dead.”
“You believe in dreams and visions now?”
“That’s where the jigsaw pieces of my memory are reassembling. I’ve got to believe in something.”
Temple didn’t know what to answer; it was so sad to imagine living on shards of yourself.
I have a decision to make as to where I’ll live and die or if there’s any point to the years in between those states.
She thought some more while Max finished his coffee. Sipping the sweet liqueur with the bitterness of all that tragic past lingering in her mouth was like drinking a shot of scouring aquavit.
“Then,” she suggested finally, “maybe the woman who was pursuing your car by motorcycle wasn’t Kitty, aka Rebecca. Maybe the real Kitty has been in hiding here all these months.” Temple finished her Baileys almost as fast as Max had his. “Think about it. Meanwhile, time to visit Gandolph’s former house and your crash pad.”
Temple paused to deal with the waiting credit card and receipt, gathering up her tote bag. “Are you telling me everything, Max? I get a feeling of … missing chapters.”
“I’m telling you everything I can handle at the moment,” he said. “You say I can claim a roof and a bed under it in Las Vegas? Let’s go.”
Some bed, Temple thought, remembering the elaborate opium bed in that house, even if Max didn’t.
Yet.
* * *
“Timed it right,” Temple said, a half hour later as the Miata pulled up, top raised, to 1200 Mojave Way.
The sun had set behind the western mountains, leaving residential streets dark, dramatically lit, and quiet. Like all Sunbelt homes, this one had few visible windows and a well-shaded front entry, the better to fend off the grueling sunlight.
Max sighed deeply after the car’s engine stopped, then he untangled his legs from the passenger seat to stand and gaze at the question mark of a one-story house.
“Think I can get in?” he asked.
“Lieutenant ‘Nosy’ Molina did. You believe a homicide dick can beat you at breaking and entering into your own place?”
“You’re kidding. A cop did a B and E? That would be—”
“—Against the law and police conduct rules. Yeah, she did. She confessed to me just a couple weeks ago. I told you she was obsessed.”
“What is it about me?” he asked wryly. “Kitty the Cutter, this Molina woman?”
“They just can’t let you get away,” Temple said. “Not my problem, apparently.”
“Smart. I’m obviously trouble.”
The continuing silence indicated he was thinking about Gandolph. Garry Randolph. Clever merging of a pop-culture name with his real one to create a memorable stage name, Temple thought. She knew about Gandolph, although she’d never knowingly met the man himself in his own offstage guise, Garry Randolph. He’d been Max’s father figure from a vulnerable age and time until he’d died several time zones away, either two or three days ago. How do you compute the distance from such a bitter loss?
“Let’s see,” Max said, shambling up the walk, “if the Magic Fingers can still do their thing.”
“Magic Fingers?”
“That’s how I survived on the escape run from the Swiss clinic, which might have been a haven for assassins. I lifted tourist credit cards.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t worry about those ripped-off tourists losing faith in their fellow man. If they were regular Joes, I used their cards only once before destroying them. If they were rich bastards, I enjoyed myself. No ruined trips of a lifetime for the ordinary blokes.”
“Robin Hood.” Temple gave the name a sarcastic twist.
By then Max was using a Swiss Army knife to jimmy the front door lock. How had he gotten that through security? Scary.
“This place has a Rottweiler of a security system,” he said. “God.” Temple could see him glance to the house’s side. “Six foot fence. Don’t tell me I’ll have to heave myself over it in this condition.”
“The security system is still working?”
“Why not?”
“Molina said it had been breached.”
“You’d think she’d know.”
“Then again,” Temple said, “the house was playing tricks on people, like me, the moment you disappeared.”
“How?”
“Sleight of hand and household goods. I came out here to check after I hadn’t heard from you in a few days, and every stick of your furniture and magic paraphernalia was gone. An aging chorus girl out of Guys and Dolls answered the door.”
Max laughed so hard he fell back against the entry area’s tiled side wall.
“Not funny to me,” Temple said, irritated. “That’s the first moment I knew for sure you were gone.”
“Sorry,” Max huffed as he caught his breath. “That’s the kind of wholesale ‘disappearing’ act only Gandolph—Garry—could pull off.”
“I deserved far more than a wholesale trick.”
“So he told me.” He straightened and grasped her arms. “Temple, you have to understand. I crashed feet first at God knows how many miles per hour when that tampered bungee cord at the Neon Nightmare broke. I was out cold and taken for dead. Gandolph—no, Gandolph is truly dead now—Garry was an old man, but he had to get me out of there and this house and Las Vegas. He had to make me disappear so whoever had attempted to take my life would think they’d succeeded. And the illusion had to be total.”
She wrested away from his grip.
“Temple,” Max said, pleading. “At the Swiss clinic I was accused of being drunk when injured, because only drunks are so limber and relaxed they can survive fatal collisions, when their sober victims can’t. I’d learned that doing ‘death-defying’ acrobatics as a magician: go limp if you fall. That’s what saved me at the Neon Nightmare, if not my legs.”
“I could have been told, Max. I could have been trusted. I’d never said a word about where you might be for almost a year when you were gone the first time, when Molina was harassing me. And that woman knows how to harass. Even hoods couldn’t beat it out of me in a parking garage.”
“Hoods? Beating? Did I know this?”
“No.” Temple simmered down. “Matt did.”
“Ah.”
“It’s not what you think. He caught me sneaking back to the Circle Ritz and insisted I go to an ER, where who happened to be there but Molina, implying I was a domestic abuse victim. Of Matt’s.”
“Sorry.” Max swept Temple into an embrace despite herself. “I should have been there for you. That was humiliating, I know. And you never told the copper what really happened because the creeps were after me. Garry was right. You had to be deceived. You don’t give up.”
“Let me go.”
Max released her to lean against the wall again.
“I’m doing this for—what’s the cliché?—old time’s sake,” Temple said. “So you better figure out a way into the house, because I’m going home unless you need a tour of the premises.”
He didn’t answer, just returned to the security panel and torturing the door lock again, while Temple tormented her do-gooder instincts. That impulsive embrace had shaken her. Max hadn’t been that effusive. This house, the night. Max. Being here was playing with fire. Old flames, to be exact.
“Remember,” he admonished himself after a couple minutes of gashing the metal with the Swiss Army knife. His fingers played tune after tune on the keypad, and … “There!”
He pushed the broad door open.
Chill air wafted against their faces like the house’s exhalation. They stared at each other, although the dark was fast becoming total.
Max cocked his head at the hum of air-conditioning units all over the block.
“This one’s running, too,” he said, pushing inside, the Swiss Army knife still clutched in his hand, now as a weapon.
The hall light rained down incandescence when the wall control was depressed.
“This stuff belong here?” Max asked, waving at a console table and mirror.
“From your time of residence, yes. Molina told me everything had been restored only a few days after I saw it gone. Garry should have waited longer to undo his vanishing act.”
“Who knew a rogue homicide lieutenant would break in?”
“She wasn’t the only one.”
Max had felt his way deeper into the house and was too distracted to hear her. “Wish I had a flashlight.”
“I think everyone who wanted to break in here has come and gone by now,” Temple said.
Max doubled back to shut the front door.
“Let there be light,” he announced, moving forward again to turn on any light fixture he encountered.
How strange, Temple thought—that the security system was on, the air-conditioning was on, the lights working, and the door had been locked. She hadn’t thought to check on the house all these weeks, having been so dramatically turned away from the door and the thought of any future with Max.
That was just what Garry Randolph had wanted. Needed. He was protecting his foster son, she supposed. By cutting off all contact with the woman he loved?
Poor Max. Who would love him now?
An exclamation from down the bedroom wing drew her deeper inside. Had he found the opium bed … or the clothes closet?
* * *
She walked into the dazzle of the master bedroom, with its cove ceiling lighting and mirrored wall of sliding ceiling-high closet doors. Max stood by an open area, holding up shreds of black material.
“Silk. Cashmere. Featherweight wool. These are leavings fit for a moth’s feast. Looks like a pack of feral cats have been at the contents.”
“Try a butcher knife from the kitchen. Molina was concealed in the house when this slasher party went on. Someone hated you.”
“Nothing new, I gather. I suspected my instinct on the run to avoid black clothing was worth heeding. Was I the depressive sort?”
“Not usually. You always said naked was the best disguise.”
“And black’s the best camouflage … unless it’s your signature.” He let the tatters drop from his hands to the floor. “I was letting myself be predictable. Maybe that’s why Garry died.”
“I don’t think so, Max. You’re a guardian. You don’t slack up. Sometimes fate is bigger than even a magician’s ego.”
“Okay. I won’t self-flagellate in front of you.” Max stared at the huge, glitzy master bedroom. “Where did I sleep? It sure as hell wasn’t in here.”
“This house once belonged to Orson Welles,” Temple explained.
“Ah. So…?”
Feeling mischievous, perhaps because she was now firmly in control here—Max’s “spirit” guide to his own house and past—Temple went down the hall and opened the door on the bedroom holding the opium bed and pretty much that was all.
An opium bed is like an internal gazebo, an exquisite, small room meant to be the central jewel within a larger room, an intricate fretwork frame of ebony and mother-of-pearl. Its silk cushions are miniature embroidered artworks.
Max stepped inside the room, feasted on the art object, and sighed. “‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever,’” he quoted Keats, “but I never slept on this magnificent artifact, nor smoked dope on it.”
“No, you didn’t,” Temple said. “And you would never blunt your perceptions with recreational drugs.”
“But I did ‘sleep’ with you on it?”
“Nor would I blunt your perceptions with bawdy speculations.” Temple smiled. “I can show you two more bedrooms in this house. Game?”
“Play on.”
She retraced their steps to another closed door, which opened, and again lights blossomed in a room.
This one was stacked with elaborately painted boxes reflected into invisible mirrors.
“Illusions,” Max said, stepping into their midst like a late arrival at a cocktail party crammed with old friends.
His long supple fingers caressed the smooth wood and cool glass as if they were beloved childhood pets. Temple knew these boxes and mechanisms were the conjoined artistry of Gandolph and the Mystifying Max, years of experimentation and creativity boiled down into the mechanisms of magic.
“Has anything been—?” Temple asked.
“No,” Max said, his eyes and hands still devouring the landscape of escape. “Some things are sacred even to psychopaths.”
Temple remained quiet. She guessed his touch remembered more than his mind at the moment—years of hearing Garry Randolph’s voice on the stage, in this room, or on the run.
Max turned, done with reruns. “I didn’t sleep in here either.”
Without a word, Temple turned and led him to the fourth bedroom, opening the door with a theatrical flourish.
He stepped over the threshold as she depressed the light switch.
Bare walls. Bare wooden floor. A futon on the floor between two metal-shuttered security windows. A celadon vase holding a pussywillow branch and a silk bird of paradise blossom. A low ebony table holding a Japanese blue-ware teacup. And thou.
“It must have seemed boring to a barbarian,” Max mused, stepping inside and breaking the surface of peace that lay like a seal on the room.
“That’s why it was safe. This was where you slept.”
“Not you.”
“I’m a social being, Max. You were always somewhat Zen. That’s how you kept your sanity.”
“I’m a monk?”
“You could be.”
“Was that a problem?”
“Hell, no.”
“You often talk like that?”
“Hell, no.”
He turned with a smile. “I can sleep here safely tonight.”
“Good. I can go.”
“Can I let you?”
“You will.”
They tell me my name is Michael Aloysius Xavier Kinsella, and I know I need to get the hell somewhere else fast. I guess there’s only one question to ask or answer before I decide where.
He nodded. “Thanks for the tour. I’ll see what my dreams dredge up tonight.”
“Mine, too,” Temple said, mocking herself. “Welcome home.”
Is it possible…? Do you … love me?