Heat by Michael Cadnum Read Free Book Online

a client must have an emergency situation that needed his attention. Dad was always having to file a response to a request for summary judgment or prep an expert witness.
    Still, I was disappointed, and I felt underprepared, someone called upon to give a speech to a strange audience. I followed Cindy into the kitchen when she asked me, would I like anything. She must have expected me to sit in the living room, admiring the coffee-table books I had never seen before, Chinese Jade for the Collector, Cloissonné Masterpieces . I followed her right in and accepted a glass of pineapple juice with three big cubes of ice.
    â€œI really like this house,” she said. A car approached in the street, and we both paused to listen. The distant engine murmur traveled on up the neighborhood.
    Maybe she was telling me that she hadn’t really overnighted here very often. Maybe she was complimenting me, assuming that I had helped my dad pick out the English fox-hunter prints and the books on the glories of the quarter horse. For someone just back from Hawaii, she didn’t have much of a tan.
    She had been Dad’s secretary for about a year and a half, but when I called my dad I almost always spoke to one of the receptionists, a series of temps. I had only visited my Dad’s new office a couple of times, and admired its view of Lake Merritt and the other neighboring office buildings. Ever since my dad and his law partner, Adam David, had split up a couple of years ago, my dad’s schedule had been too frenzied for anyone but him to keep track of. So far, he was only ten minutes late.
    â€œI’m not going to do anything to the landscaping,” Cindy was saying, perhaps on the theory that if my mom liked root systems and broad-leafs, then it was only natural that I did, too. I felt a little sorry for her suddenly. She was a woman just a little older than my sister Georgia, stuck with a stepdaughter who kept giving her a thousand-yard stare.
    â€œI always thought Dad overdid it with bamboo,” I said.
    She kept peeling the Saran wrap off the rosemary chicken, nudging it with a fork to make sure it was still there.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    Sometimes Cindy would glance up, a morsel of chicken breast poised on her fork, mistaking yet another passing car for Dad’s BMW. But unless the car sounded a lot like Dad’s I was rarely deceived. As the evening went on and Dad called again, we settled into stories of Cindy’s childhood. She had grown up in Nevada, Iowa—pronounced with a long a: Ne- vay -da. “They make everything out of soy, ink and food, so my dad raised that, but what he loved was livestock.”
    When I told Cindy her books about collectibles were an improvement over Dad’s usual reading matter, the Kentucky Derby and bare-fisted boxing, Cindy said that she was going to invest in transportable assets. This was the one phrase she used that made me stop and look sideways at her as I sipped my pineapple juice, wondering if this was the sort of thing you said if you were raised around abandoned silos. Her fingernails were the same color as mine, but longer.
    Dad called yet again, and Cindy said things were great, do what you have to do. I could feel the conversation filling with things she didn’t want to mention, even when she took the portable phone into the den, where Dad kept the largely unread, leather-bound volumes he had inherited from his grandfather, Emerson and Dickens and geographies of a world that doesn’t exist anymore.
    Finally, at the end of the third call, Cindy waved me into the den and I stood staring at the spine of Byron’s collected poems while Dad said he was sorry he had made such a mess of the evening, he would make it up to me. He was helping Mrs. Jovanovich.
    Cindy drove me home after we had picked at our pine-nut tarts, fresh baked that day at Angelino’s in Montclair. As she dropped me off at my mom’s house, Cindy thanked me for coming over, as