'Good,' she said. She paused uncertainly. 'Andrew I'd really like it if the neighbors didn't find out. About where you've been, I mean.
Not that I'm ashamed or anything, it's just that it'd be easier . . .'
'I'm still your son,' he began.
'Don't let's be difficult. You see, you've been having all that mail sent here, all those things for Phil Wharton, whoever he is. I've been saving them, keeping them here for you just like you said. Who is he anyway, a friend of yours or what?'
'It's a pen name, Mama. I couldn't very well send things out with my own name on them, now could I.'
'Thank goodness,' she said.
:'What do you mean?'
'Well, that's sort of what I've been pretending. That you were him, or at least that Phil Wharton was my son.'
'You've been telling your friends that I'm Phil?'
Myrna Louise cringed at the hard edge of anger in his voice. 'I didn't mean any harm, Andrew. One of the ladies was here when the mail came one day. She saw it on the table and asked about it. I told her that you're a journalist who's been out of the country working on assignment and that you'd be home soon.'
'So you've lied to them?'
'Please, Andrew, I. . .'
Andrew had her dead to rights, but the idea of his mother making up that kind of whopper was really pretty funny.
He decided to let her off the hook. After all, it was his first night home.
'It's okay, Mama. The name's Phil, remember?'
Breathing a sigh of relief, Myrna Louise smiled grate fully. He was going to go along with it and not embarrass her in front of her friends.
She wouldn't be expelled from the morning coffee break after all.
At once she switched into full motherly mode. 'Have you had any dinner?
Are you hungry?'
Sure he was hungry. Why wouldn't he, be hungry? It had been a busy day, a tiring day. Besides, hiking up and down mountains always gives a man one hell of an appetite.
Diana waited until the sun went down before she tried going up on the roof to work on the cooler. No wonder people called them swamp coolers.
The thick, musty odor was unmistakable, gagging. Diana climbed up the ladder armed with a bottle of PineSol. She raised one side of the cooler and poured several glugs of powerful disinfectant into the water.
The oily, piny scent wasn't a big improvement, but it helped.
After returning the side of the cooler to its proper position, Diana stood for a few moments on the flat, graveled roof to survey her domain.
The wild and forbidding front yard remained much as it had been when she first bought the place. An overgrown thicket of head-high prickly pear cast bizarre, donkey-eared shadows in the frail moonlight.
She had spent far more effort in back, where both yard and patio were surrounded by a massive six-foot-high rock wall.
The end result was almost a fortress. Inside that barrier, she felt safe and protected.
The house and outbuildings, sturdily constructed in the early twentieth century and lovingly remodeled during the twenties, had originally belonged to one of Pima County's pioneer families. When family fortunes fell on hard times and when surviving family members dwindled to only one dotty eighty-year-old lady, most of the land, with the exception of the house, cook shack, and barn, had been deeded over to the county as payment for back taxes. That had been during the late forties. The old lady, who wasn't expected to live much longer anyway, had been allowed lifetime tenancy in the house, with her estate authorized to sell off the remainder after her death.
The old lady confounded all predictions and lived to a 101, refusing to leave the walled confines of the compound until the very end, but letting the place fall to wrack and ruin around her. She died, and the wreckage went up for sale at almost the same time Gary Ladd's life-insurance proceeds came into Diana's hands.
After spending her entire childhood in housing tied to her father's job, Diana Ladd wanted desperately to escape the mobile home in the Topawa Teachers' Compound housing, to bring her baby home to a house that belonged to her rather than to her employer. She jumped at the chance to buy the derelict old house. dissuade her, patiently The realtor had done his best to pointing out all the things that were wrong with the place.
it was full of garbage--of dead bread wrappers and empty tin cans and layers of old newspapers six feet deep. The plaster was falling off the lath in places, windows were cracked and broken, the roof leaked, and the toilet in the only bathroom had quit working. Throughout the house, falling wiring was a nightmare of jury-rigged repairs, but Diana Ladd was not to be deterred. She bought the place, warts and all, and she and Rita Antone set about fixing it up as best they could.
Six years later, the remodel was stalled for lack of Money. To solve that problem, Diana had temporarily set aside home-improvement projects in favor of finishing her book.
Writing it was pure speculation, of course. She had made some preliminary and reasonably favorable inquiries, but the book wasn't sold yet. She hoped that when she did sign a contract, she'd be able to hire a contractor to complete some of the heavier work.
Standing on the roof, she watched the approach of an oncoming pair of headlights on the road overhead Approaching her driveway, the vehicle slowed to a craw and the turn signals came on. As the unfamiliar car turned
