Sometime around midnight the Saturday before Thanksgiving, winter found Allegro, Oklahoma. Grateful for even the increasing cold that dragged her from the dreams that continued to haunt her, Anne still had to force herself out from under the electric blanket. She knew that some folks swore electric blankets were as bad for a person as sausage and eggs, but she happened to think terminal frostbite was worse.
She also knew that she couldn't just crawl back under that blanket and ignore the drop in temperature. Shivering in the chilled room, she struggled into fuzzy slippers and a cotton terry-cloth robe. Then, still shivering, she worked through the house lighting small gas heaters.
The idea of central heating was appealing more and more as she made her way through the drafty hallways and back to the warmth of her bed. Flick a thermostat before retiring and never have to get up to protect plumbing or plants? Heaven, maybe, but she still hadn't made up her mind about the economy or practicality of one huge gas burner in a house this size.
Surprisingly though, it wasn't thoughts of giant gas bills or miles of snake-like ductwork that kept her awake after she settled back into the cocoon of her bed and upped the thermostat on the blanket. Nor was it the all too frequent fear of falling back into her troubled dreams. It was that out-of-the-way bedroom upstairs. The one with the lavatory. And the off-center light fixture. And the blank wall that should have been filled with windows looking out over the garden.
And a cop. A cop who had come crashing into her life and was spawning thoughts, emotions, and memories she couldn't afford, didn't want, and wouldn't tolerate.
By noon it appeared that winter had come for more than a brief visit. The bright, crisp blue sky of Saturday had settled into something between pewter and wet fireplace ash in color, and periodically spat little needles of cold rain against the equally cold expanses of windows in the kitchen.
Anne had begged and bartered for a delivery from the lumberyard yesterday, and now rolls of pink insulation and four-by-eight sheets of drywall spilled out from the overflowing tool room, but she hadn't been able to beg or barter anyone to install it, or even to help her do so.
She'd lit all the burners on the charming but antiquated gas range, and cranked the new, highly touted gas heater up to full roar, so the old kitchen wasn't too bad, except when the wind rattled the windows. Then she shivered and cursed the naïveté that had lulled her into thinking she was going to be forever warm in the winter just because she had moved back to the south. While she shivered, she huddled over a cup of coffee and continued toting up the cost of something that should have been so simple: making this monster of a house into a home.
Maybe Willie Johnson was right, she thought in disgust. Maybe she ought to have let Joe have the house. That would be one more way of simplifying her life. Maybe she ought to call him now and see if he was still interested. But she knew she wouldn't. This grand old relic deserved a better fate than demolition to make room for a pile of look-alike boxes like the ones Joe Hansom owned on the other side of town.
Between bouts of feeling sorry for herself, she spent a few minutes in silent sympathy for her unwilling houseguest of the day before. She had signed on for the long haul in this part of the country; he had come looking for rest and recreation. What a vacation he was having.
What the hell was he doing?
David shook his head, letting his attention wander from the rain-slick road and the lumbering shock-sprung Blazer he was driving long enough for the rattling relic to try to take a dive off the twisting road. Hell and damnation. He needed another wreck even less than he needed what he was inviting by what he intended to do.
He'd convinced himself last night that he could spend the next month in Allegro without seeing Anne Locke.
Yeah.
But that had been in a fit of self-righteous self-examination.
And before Blake Foresman had come by for him this morning and driven him to the Sheriff's Department to take his statement about the collision, before Blake, a basically decent man, had helped find him transportation, and before he'd just happened to mention Dr. Locke.
"She's a fine woman," Foresman had said. "And from all accounts a fine doctor. She doesn't need the grief that cousin of hers is trying to give her. Hell, everybody knew he thought that place would be his. It's not her fault that his grandmother didn't inherit it. Or that he didn't have enough sense to suspect someone besides himself might want it."
David didn't need this. He had enough on his plate as it was. He wouldn't get involved. Nope. Not him. Under orders from his captain, this was vacation time. This was reflection time. This was her problem.
"What kind of grief?" he heard himself ask.
"Oh, hell," Foresman said. He rubbed his hand across the back of his neck and shrugged. "It's gossip. Just gossip. I shouldn't have said anything. They'll work it out."
"What kind of grief?" David repeated, looking steadily into Foresman's eyes until the sheriff shifted, turned, sighed. "It's ancient history," he said finally. "Katherine—that's Anne's mama—moved away from here years ago, as soon as her mama died. To get away from family. To get away from gossip. Unfortunately, some folks have long memories. They remember the mistake Katherine made as a girl, never mind how much she turned her life around and raised that little girl into a fine woman. Never mind that Joe's side of the family never gave her a lick of help."
Foresman met his steady questioning inspection. What he hadn't said was where Anne's father had been during all this time. But then he didn't need to, did he? So old family gossip was again circulating. And Anne had lost four crews in six months. Nice cousin. Welcome home, Annie.
She deserved better.
It wasn't any of his business, he'd told himself when he'd headed the Blazer out of Fairview. He didn't need to go riding to the rescue like some damned cowboy. It wasn't any of his business, he'd told himself when he reached the turnoff to the Tompkins place, and passed it. It wasn't any of his business, he told himself again, when he reached the bottom of Anne Locke's driveway and turned in, when he stopped beside that fading purple wall and felt the back of his neck prickle, when he crossed the yard and stepped up onto the back porch and felt a chill that had no relationship to any cold-weather chill he'd ever felt before shudder down his spine.
He didn't owe her anything. Except maybe payment for a medical bill and a genuine word of thanks.
None of his business.
Right.
He raised his fist and knocked at the door.
Anne almost kicked over the chair she had her feet propped on when she heard the knock on the kitchen door. On Sunday? In this weather?
She carried the cup of coffee to the door with her and cautiously moved the curtain to one side to peer out at the shadowed porch. David Huerra stood there, bareheaded, hunched into his blue windbreaker.
She fumbled the deadbolts open with one hand and stepped back in a wordless invitation that he didn't hesitate to accept. He entered, stamping his feet and blowing on his hands. She didn't bother to ask, she just parked her cup on the table, went to the counter, and poured him a cup of coffee. When she turned around, he'd already gravitated to the open heater and stood backed up to it. She handed him the cup, and he took it in both hands.
"Thanks."
She cocked her head, looking up at him but resisting her initial impulse to order him into a chair and begin an examination. Instead she went to the basket of folded, clean laundry beside the dryer and returned to his side with a towel.
"You look—"
"Like your buddy Hank's worst nightmare?" he finished for her. He smiled, but smiling did little to dispel the image of desperado his assorted bruises and cuts had hung on his already dark looks.
"I was going to say cold," she told him. She held the towel out for him. "And wet."
He traded her his cup for the towel and wiped still glistening drops of rain from his hair, then followed her to the table where she set his cup and retrieved her own. He grinned at the arrangement of chairs, probably realizing she'd had her feet propped up again, and looked around the room as he sat down. His grin faded when he saw the stacks of new supplies.
"What brings you to town?" she asked. "Figuratively and literally?"
He laughed softly. "Sheriff Foresman came to the cabin this morning. It seems he didn't want to wait to see how much trouble his brother was in, or if he could somehow mitigate it. He took me into his office in Fairview to make my statement, then tracked down Hank's insurance agent and the owner of the Chevy dealership." He shook his head. "I'd forgotten how different small towns could be."
She chuckled. She'd had that same slightly dazed feeling herself for the first several weeks, before she'd remembered there was a flip side to the good things a small town offered—such as long memories and a surprising lack of choices in the matter of craftsmen and carpenters. "So when is Blake coming back for you?" she asked. A sudden thought sobered her. "Are you in pain? Discomfort? Did I miss something—"
He waved his coffee cup in dismissal of her fears. "I feel like hell," he admitted, "and I probably will for a few days, but no, you didn't miss anything. And Foresman's not coming back, because he didn't bring me here. Thanks to his influence with the Chevy dealer, I have the use of what is probably the oldest Chevy Blazer still on the road until my car is either repaired or replaced."
"Then what—"
"Annie, Annie," he said on a long sigh. "I came to say thanks and to take you out for Sunday dinner to repay you for yesterday's meal, provided of course you don't mind being seen with someone who looks as bad as I do right now."
Oh.
Oh, my.
Decision time.
She grinned at him. "I suppose if I refuse, you'll blame it on your appearance."
He grinned back. "Anything that works, Doc."
Allegro offered only two places to eat the midday meal on Sunday: a really good restaurant in the downtown business district that catered to the after-church crowd, and a rustic looking but also excellent restaurant at the lake where casual clothes were the norm, not the exception. They opted for the lake.
The hostess was not a patient of Anne's, although Anne did recognize her. She glanced from Anne to David, cocked her head, and pursed her lips, but she didn't say anything until she had seated them beside a wall of windows overlooking the wooded hillside and a cove of the lake below. They were well away from, but not out of sight of, the table where Anne's cousin Joe sat with a group of men, engaged in an avid discussion.
She'd heard rumors that Joe was going after a state senate seat in the next election, his reason having more to do with proposed oil and gas legislation that threatened his mineral holdings than with a need to serve. It looked as though the rumors might be right. The group with him consisted of the powers that be, the movers and shakers of the south end of Pitchlyn County.
Joe broke off his part of the conversation long enough to shoot Anne a long, unwelcoming stare not seen, she hoped, by anyone but her. Then the hostess called out to a passing waitress, "Hey, Susie. Come take care of Doc Anne and the Dallas cop. And be nice," she added as she plopped their menus down on the table. "We want him to have a better impression of us than the one Hank must have left him with."
Anne saw David's lips twitch, but he controlled them and gave the hostess no more than a polite smile before he hid his face behind the menu.
"I didn't think Allegro had a Sunday paper," he said.
That was just what she needed to take her mind away from why Joe Hansom couldn't even pretend to be friendly. "It doesn't," she told him, feeling a smile of her own threatening to get out of control. "It doesn't need one."
She glanced at her menu. "The catfish is always good," she said. "It's local, and fresh. So is the prime rib. Good, that is. Although I'm pretty sure it has seen the inside of a least one freezer." She read further, sharing her knowledge of the offerings because she knew how wary one could get of strange restaurants. "The German fries are to die for, and—oh, great. They do have it today. Sometimes they don't—save room for the deep-dish apple pie. They serve it heated with a scoop of double-rich French vanilla ice cream."
She hear what could have been a cough, could have been the sound of someone choking, and looked up to see David Huerra watching her cautiously. "Doc?" he said when he saw he had her attention. He raked an appraising glance down all of her he could see, from forehead to tabletop, then back up to her face, and she felt the warmth of a flush threatening her embarrassingly fair complexion and the freckles that no makeup, even if she had been wearing any, could hide.
His appraisal wasn't blatant, but neither was it dismissive. And it didn't offend her. Well, well. Imagine that. Maybe she was coming back to life after all.
"I thought anybody coming out of med school these days had to swear allegiance to the carrot stick and celery brigade. Did you miss a few nutrition classes? Or maybe learn something that the American Medical Association isn't letting the rest of us in on?"
She grinned at him. She'd heard that question before. "Or maybe the rest of us just haven't listened to?" she asked him. "Such as 'moderation'?"
He raised an eyebrow, silently requesting her to explain.
She moved her hand in a sweeping gesture to catalogue her less-than-imposing features. "I weigh a hundred and ten pounds. I don't have an exercise regime, but I park at the back of the lot when I do go to a mall, rarely take an elevator when the stairs are accessible, and walk to work five days a week. Those same five days I eat baked, broiled, or low fat. On the weekends I usually wear myself out toting, sawing, and hammering in my house, so if I want to treat myself, I don't think I'm hurting my chances for a long and healthy life.
"Besides," she added, "I was just telling you what's good on the menu. I'm having the baked chicken."
He gave her a rueful grin and a two-finger salute, and she realized that once again, with little or no provocation, she'd climbed on a soapbox. She dropped the menu onto the table. "Sorry," she told him, giving him a rueful grin of her own. "If you push the right button, I can argue the flip side of that, but probably not with as much fervor."
They were laughing when Susie came to take their order. They both had the baked chicken. And the German fries. And the deep-dish apple pie. They talked with an ease and companionship that Anne had found with very few people. It was almost as though they had known each other forever instead of barely twenty-four hours, yet with an underlying awareness of each other as strangers: distant, somewhat mysterious, possibly dangerous to each other's peace of mind. That awareness was visible, in an occasional sharp glance, a marginally nervous handling of the flatware or dishes, a shifting in the mismatched but comfortable chairs. But it was unspoken, as were other things.
She learned that David Huerra, surprise of surprises, had actually seen Placido Domingo in La Traviata, that he frequented museums in Dallas and elsewhere, that he had seen the Tutankhamen exhibit, had been to Teotihuacan, and had even been dragged to the Thorne room display in Chicago by a niece who had then demanded that her father, his brother Patrick, build her dollhouse furniture that looked like the museum-quality miniatures she had seen on display. He glossed over his childhood, but he said enough for her to understand what he wasn't saying: for a man who had been raised on what he called a west Texas dirt farm, he and some members of his family had ranged far and wide from their beginnings.
She didn't learn why he had chosen to take a vacation in November, nor did she learn why his expression became withdrawn, almost painfully so, when he mentioned his job. That was all right. She really didn't want to learn too much about the pressures of the Dallas P.D., any more than she wanted to reflect on why she had really left the clinic in Chicago. She did share the story of how she had come to own a sprawling purple monstrosity on a hillside in downtown Allegro.
"My mother put the bid in for me," she said.
"She what?"
Anne nodded. "I didn't even know about the family's lawsuit to partition the property, only that I wanted to come home. At least for a while. I had no idea that I would enjoy renovating an old house. I did ask Mom why, if she thought the house was such a great buy, she didn't buy it herself. She just said that she knew herself as well as she knew me; she'd found her haven and now it was my turn." Anne smiled with the memory of her mother's impassioned speech. "She said that even though Allegro hadn't been particularly good for her, it was probably just what I needed. At least for now."
"So you bought it?"
"Once I saw it, I knew she was right. Purple paint and all." Anne laughed in self-conscious acknowledgment of Joe and all the unpleasantness. "But along with it, I have acquired what appears to be a family feud. It seems they were a package deal, and if my mother knew about it, she kept that knowledge to herself."
"Is this a long-standing feud?"
"I don't know. No one seems willing to admit it exists, much less talk about it."
For a moment she glimpsed the cop in him. "Is it a dangerous one?"
Loud laughter erupted from across the room. In one of those odd coincidences no one would believe, the laughter came from the men with Joe, the main perpetrator of the very feud they were discussing. Their party was breaking up, and Joe, after ignoring her, this time for more than a month, stood up, snagged his leather jacket from the back of his chair, and walked to where she sat.
He stood there with his jacket caught by one finger over his shoulder, pearl snaps gleaming on his white-on-white western shirt, knife-edge crease accenting black denim jeans, tooled leather and triple-stitching marking his boots as custom-made.
"Anne," he said, with all the warmth of an IRS auditor.
"Joe," she answered, marginally warmer.
"I hear you've had more trouble up at the house."
Now where would he have heard a thing like that?
"No," she said. "Not that I know of."
"You haven't lost another crew?"
As if he didn't know. He probably had a pipeline to the lumberyard, if not to the carpenters themselves. "Why, Joe, I'm getting so used to that, I don't consider it trouble any more, just a fact of life. Let me guess—you're starting a new project, and my two carpenters were the very ones you needed for a special phase of that job."
"Winter's coming, Anne," he said, ignoring her gibe. "I worry about you up there all alone. That house has to be almost uninhabitable. When are you going to give up in this effort to inconvenience me?"
"Joe, Joe," she chided. "If you hadn't been so sure of yourself that you only bid ten cents on the dollar, you'd own the house right now."
His smile slipped slightly. "Yeah, but that was all it was worth, sitting there going to ruin. I bid fair market value for the land. I suppose you're going to want a profit on what you've done—"
When she shook her head, he grimaced. "You won't last the winter," he said. "You might as well get someplace comfortable before it gets really cold."
David picked up his coffee cup and set it back in the saucer, a nonthreatening action that somehow managed to convey all sorts of unspoken menace. Joe wasn't unaware of him; he'd just been ignoring him. Now he glanced down, taking in David's desperado appearance in one sweeping, disdainful glimpse. He had to know who David was—everyone in the restaurant did—but he chose to pretend that he didn't. That didn't surprise her; his words did.
"You're staring a little early, aren't you? Even for someone with your track record."
No. Winter wasn't coming early; it was already here. Anne felt the chill clear through her bones. What had she ever done to Joe Hansom that would cause him to make such a malicious, mean-spirited attack? Other than buying a house that was up for grabs anyway? Nothing. At least nothing that she was aware of.
She saw David lean forward in his chair and wondered if they were going to have a major scene in the Lake Café. No. She wouldn't give Joe that satisfaction. She smiled at him. "I got a letter from my mother last week. From Australia. You do remember that's where she lives now, don't you, Joe? She asked me to give her regards to your grandmother. Since you won't tell me where she is, please pass the message on to her for me, will you? Or maybe I should just ask around until I find her."
Joe's smug grin became a little strained. He nodded abruptly and left without saying another word.
David Huerra studied her silently for a moment. He glanced in the direction of the door to make sure Joe had left, then rose and held his hand out for her. "I think it's time for us to leave, too."
Yes, it was.
The rain had eased, but the wind was just as cold as they drove back toward town.
"I take it that was an example of the feud," David said.
She nodded. "It's a lovely family, isn't it?"
"Obviously you were adopted."
"Thanks." She sank back against the cracked seat and looked out the window, silent for perhaps another mile, debating with herself, knowing she had to tell him. "Joe has a vicious mouth."
"You don't owe me any explanation," he said, and she knew by the way he said it he'd thought Joe had been making some sort of sexual innuendo. And maybe he'd already heard the stories circulating about her birth. About her mother. "By this time tomorrow everyone else in Pitchlyn County is going to know what he said and what he was talking about. I'd rather at least one person heard it from me," she said, hoping she didn't sound as weary of Joe's unending rumors and innuendos as she felt.
They were still a couple of miles outside of town. Huerra found a wide shoulder and pulled off the road, set the emergency brake and flashers, and turned in the seat to face her. "Okay," he said. "Shock my socks off me."
"I wish." Was there any good way to say this? Damn Joe anyway. She sucked in a deep breath. "He was making allusions to your visible injuries, not to the fact that we were sharing a meal. It seems I—Well, the men in my life . . . They die."
She'd shocked him all right. Maybe he still had on his socks, but for several seconds it seemed he'd lost his voice. "Oh, hell, Annie. Damn that son of a bitch!"
She tried to rake her hand through her hair, got it caught in the pins and gave up. "The first one was in high school. We'd gone steady for three years, two eggheads who didn't fit in with anyone else. Someone decided it would be fun to spike his drink to see how a nerd acted drunk. Then they put him in his car and let him go off alone. He drove off the side of a mountain."
"Annie—"
"It's all right," she said. "I can tell you. Maybe I need to tell you. The other one was a man I had been engaged to. We'd decided we didn't really have what it took to make a marriage work, but Anthony and I did have a fine friendship and a good working relationship. He was murdered—killed in a clinic robbery."
"Hell."
"Yeah."
She thought for a minute that David was going to reach for her. She thought for a minute she needed him to do just that. She hadn't talked about Anthony in months—not to anyone—and just mentioning him brought back too-vivid memories that had stubbornly refused to fade. Instead, David turned in the seat and started the Blazer back toward Allegro with what she suspected to be an uncharacteristic clashing of gears.
David stayed silent—so did she—until they were back in her kitchen. There, he looked at the supplies spilling from the tool room. "Joe is responsible for your crews being hired away from you, isn't he?"
"No one will admit it, but, yes, I think he is. Men who haven't worked for weeks, some of them for months, are suddenly offered long-term projects just as I get them lined up out here."
"What does he want with this place?"
"I think he really does just want the land. Willie Johnson at the sawmill told me Joe wanted to put up another set of apartments like the ones south of town."
"You mean the ones that look like prefab mini-storage buildings?"
She caught her hand to her mouth as an unexpected laugh broke from her. "Yes," she said. "That's exactly what they look like."
He pulled off his windbreaker and draped it over a kitchen chair. "Why don't you show me what needs to be done?"
"Why—"
"I don't like your cousin Joe," he said. "Your cousin Joe is not a nice man, and he's had everything his way for much too long."
"But you're on vacation."
"Yeah," he said, and grinned. It was not a nice grin, not at all like the easy, companionable ones he had shared with her and that had coaxed return smiles from her. No. This one gave her a glimpse of a side of David Huerra she wasn't sure she was ready to know. "Against my will and for a month. And it just so happens that this west Texas farmboy worked his way through night school on a construction crew."
"You're injured. And you came here to fish."
"Wrong," he said. "I came here to think, and I can do that just as well helping you as I can killing bait. Besides, you were the one who told me my brain was still working. Do you remember what the weather is like outside? With the wind-chill it's about ten degrees, and that's on dry land. God only knows what it is out on the lake in a boat. Come on, Annie, isn't there some part of you, buried way down deep, that wants to rub good old Joe's face in it? Let's do it, Annie. Let's fix up this house. And let's see who offers me what to leave you stranded."
He was offering her retribution of all the slights and slurs Joe had been responsible for giving her since she'd inadvertently thwarted his latest plans. Already he knew her well enough to know what her answer had to be.
Knew it before she did.
And he was right.
In spite of his stated intent, David Huerra didn't start work on Anne's house that Sunday. After a tour and a discussion of what had to be done, after a slice of Sara Lee pound cake topped with the last of her precious stash of Häagen-Dazs, after a yawn and a stretch and a groan she knew he didn't intend for her to hear, he left, banished by her to his rented cabin on the lake for much needed rest.
What she wanted but wasn't able to do that afternoon was to finish lowering the kitchen ceiling so that she'd have one room where the heat didn't hover twelve feet above the floor. What she was able but didn't want to do that afternoon was some minor finish work in the butler's pantry, which, until she'd knocked the doorway through to the hall, had been the only access to the kitchen from the rest of the house.
What she did was something she hadn't done in years. Her things were packed away in a jumble of unlabeled boxes in an abandoned parlor off the living room, and it took some time to located them, and then to drag the kitchen table closer to the gas heater, and to find a floor lamp to use until her magnifier surfaced.
Her tools and supplies were in three modified tackle boxes. She scooted her pile of invoices and bills to one side and arranged all three cases on the kitchen table within easy reach.
Anne opened the first tackle box and glanced at the battered and well-used metal snips, shears, and soldering irons. She hadn't been able to spend a lot of money on her hobby, and for the last few years she hadn't even been able to spend a lot of time on it. For Anne's high school graduation, her mother had presented her with an unorthodox gift. Anne lifted the fitted case from the bottom of the tackle box's deep tray and opened it, too, tracing her fingers over the matching precision scaled awls and punches and rasps, the calipers and pliers and hand drill with its assorted bits.
Her mother did know her well. Any doubts Anne might have harbored about that disappeared when she touched the set of tools that she had coveted for years but had never mentioned to her mother, had no idea her mother knew anything about, until she had opened her gift expecting to see something imminently practical for college and found these.
Somewhere Anne had a padded work surface, but she hadn't uncovered that or her anvil or grinder in her search through the packing crates. She took a folded jeweler's cloth from the second of the boxes, spread it on the table in front of her and began opening the trays and drawers of this case. She'd never used many stones in her work, preferring the beauty of the metal she'd worked with, but she did have a small hoard of them. She lifted them to the cloth, along with the few finished pieces she hadn't yet given away, a couple of partially completed pins and a scattering of loose findings.
Then she opened the third box.
And knew what had compelled her to drag out these icons of her youth.
But not why.
Not yet why.
She felt a strange tightness in her throat and chest—apprehension or anticipation?—and a betraying tremor in her hands as she lifted the carefully wrapped bundle from the third box and placed it on the cloth in front of her. She'd foregone lunches and movies in high school, and later even necessities, to keep herself supplied with what she'd long ago determined was as essential to her well-being as the air she breathed.
And she hadn't even looked at it in years.
Did she want to now?
This wasn't the material she had cut so that she could shape the smaller pieces. This was intact, although some of it—very little—was worked. She remembered that, too well, and how she had agonized over the designs and the execution. But the other was clean, pristine, just waiting for—for what? For a skill greater than hers had been or probably ever would be, she suspected.
Another gust of rain battered the windows, and in it she heard what she very much feared was ice. What little daylight there had been was fading fast, and the kitchen was illuminated now only by the circle of light from the floor lamp and from the open gas flames of the heater and range. She shivered, cold again, even in her heavy sweater. The chill extended to her fingers. She flexed them once, twice, before reaching again for the bundle and folding back the cloth.
The metal should have been cold. Everything she knew or had been taught told her that. Each exquisite and finely prepared leaf should have absorbed the chill from the unheated room where it had been stored, from the draft now scooting across the kitchen, from the years of having been abandoned to the darkness. But it wasn't. She dropped her hands to the top sheet, unmindful for the moment of fingerprints and damaging oils, and felt the warmth and the soft, beckoning glow of the copper fill her with the same inexplicable longing it always had.