And there were memories, drifting in and out as she lay in her hospital bed in the intensive care unit: moments of fear, times of great pleasure. Memories of Lee. Mostly, during the following days, she was back in August.
A letter.
It had begun with a letter, and now Kate lay in her hospital bed and remembered—
—a day in early August. San Francisco had sweltered for ten days, longer, everyone complained, the weatherman explained, with his highs and lows - until finally that afternoon at three o'clock the people on the sidewalks at Fishermen's Wharf had felt the first damp fingers of fog on their sunburned faces, and by five o'clock the city was cool and cocooned.
The house on Russian Hill retained the day's heat, but the food on the stove smelled good, appetizing after a week of cold salads and refrigerated soups. "That smells great, Jon," she said, greeting him from the hallway. She poked her head into the kitchen. "Hi."
"Hello, Kate, isn't it lovely to be cool again? I've been waiting for weeks to try this Ethiopian meat thing."
"Smells incredible." She turned to the closet and peeled off her windbreaker and shoulder holster, kicked off her shoes, stowed her briefcase on the floor, then put her head around the door to the living room, saw it was empty, and went back to the kitchen. "I know what you mean. I haven't felt like eating in days."
He looked up from the cutting board, his thinning hair in damp disarray. "Then the mice are getting pretty pushy, taking plates of food from the fridge."
"Squeak," she admitted. "Want a glass?" At his nod, she poured him some, and then filled a third glass. Pushing one toward him and picking up the other two, she asked, "Is Lee upstairs?"
"She is. The new physiotherapist was by this morning, seemed impressed," he reported. "And she had a couple of letters. One of them seemed to upset her."
"Upset her? How?"
"Maybe upset isn't the right word." He paused, one hand on his hip, the other flung back with a sauce-coated spoon in it. He'd dropped most of his limp-wrist caricatures in the last year, thank God, but tended to strike poses when distracted and mince his words when uncomfortable. "Excited, maybe? Like a child with a secret, or a present. She said it was from her aunt." He shrugged and went back to his fragrant alchemy. Kate did not tell him that, as far as she knew, Lee had only one aunt, and she had died years ago.
"Everything else okay?"
"Fine. Dinner in twenty minutes," he said, dismissing her. She paused in the hallway to leaf through the mail on the table, seeing only bills and circulars, then carried the wine upstairs, where she found Lee in her study, reading something at the desk.
"Howdy, stranger," Kate said. Lee started violently, dropping the letter, and swung her chair around sharply. "Sorry, hon," Kate apologized, "I thought you heard me coming." She placed a glass on Lee's desk, kissed her, and dropped into the armchair with her own glass.
Lee looked flushed, but not with exertion, and it was cool up here. Excitement? Embarrassment? Kate's eyes flicked to the letter and away. She would not ask - Lee had little enough privacy, though Kate tried hard to give her as much as she could.
"Glad you could stop by," Lee said, regaining her calm. "Are you here or just passing through?"
"Here. And tomorrow off."
"You caught your baddie?"
"We did that, and a right little shit he is, too." Most murderers were someone close to the victim, family or friend, who lost control for a brief, fatal minute - not villainous, not particularly bright, and soon apprehended. Bread and butter for a homicide detective, but there was no denying the hard satisfaction of putting cuffs on someone to whom murder was more than an accident of chance.
They talked for a few minutes of this and that and nothing in particular; then Kate said, "Jon said you had some letters."
Was Lee's evasive glance so obvious, or was the professional habit of interrogation so strong that she read guilt where there was none? 'A postcard from Vaun Adams," Lee said. "From Spain. Where did I put it? Here." A photograph of Antoni Gaudi's Sagrada Familia church, and in Vaun's neat handwriting:
Architecture like this makes a person feel that human beings ought to be a different shape - Ray Bradbury hiring Frank Lloyd Wright to build a house on Mars. Head nearly full, be home soon. Gerry and his wife send greetings.
Love, V.
"The last one was from Kenya, wasn't it?"
"Egypt, and before that, Kenya. She's getting around."
"Nothing else exciting?"
"Couple of things, nothing thrilling."
"Fine," Kate said easily. "Do you feel like going down to dinner, or shall we eat up here? Jon's cooking up a storm."
"I've been smelling it all afternoon, drooling on the rug. I'll go down."
"Need a hand?"
"Carry the wine, please."
Lee rolled her chair over to the stair lift, maneuvered herself from one seat onto the other while Kate stood by making trivial talk and being unobtrusively ready to catch her. At the bottom, she checked that the walker was where Lee could reach it, then walked away, leaving her to it. She washed the grime of the day from her face and hands, then got to the table in time to hold the chair for Lee to lower herself into. Food, talk, paperwork, bed: just a day like any other.
Later that night, cuddling close for the first time since the heat wave had begun, Kate spoke into Lee's ear.
"You don't have to tell me whom you got a letter from."
"Don't I?"
"Of course not. It's your perfect right to have secrets, nasty, horrid secrets, secret lovers probably - I don't mind." Here she began to nibble down the back of Lee's neck while her fingertips sought out the sensitive areas along Lee's ribs. "I'll just tickle you until you tell, but I don't mind if you don't tell me. I can lie here all night tickling you, until you fall out of bed and have to sleep on the floor and —" Lee began to giggle and writhe away from Kate's hands and teeth, and the two of them wrestled until Lee, whose upper-body strength after months in the wheelchair was greater than Kate's, succeeded in pinning down Kate, who was not really trying very hard. Panting, Lee looked down into Kate's dark and astonished eyes.
"You sure you feel like just lying there all night?" she demanded in a husky voice, and put her mouth to Kate's.
It was the closest they had come to a normal night in a long, long time.
Much later, Kate muttered into Lee's shoulder, "Don't you think that will get you out of telling me about the letter."
"Tomorrow, my sweet Kate. Tomorrow."
"It was from my aunt," Lee said, when tomorrow had come and they were still in bed, drinking coffee.
"But your aunt died." Lee's mother's sister had been a real terror, the sort of ramrod-spined old lady who regarded fitted bedsheets as a sure sign of the country's moral decay, who had left a clause in her will making it quite clear that Lee was to get not one cent to support her abominable lifestyle. "Don't tell me her will included posthumous letters."