Cold Fire

The neighborhood was new, just off Crown Valley Parkway, and in the neat, well-landscaped, precision-planned tradition of south Orange County. The streets were wide, gracefully curved, lined with young palms and melaleucas, and the houses were all of compatible Mediterranean styles with roofs in different shades of red and sand and peach tiles. But even in such a desirable south-county city as Laguna Niguel, where the per-square-foot cost of a tract home could rival that of a Manhattan penthouse, Ironheart could easily have afforded better than he had purchased: It looked like a little more than two thousand square feet, the smallest model in the neighborhood; creamy-white stucco; large-pane French windows but no other apparent custom features; a lush green lawn, but small with azaleas and impatiens and a pair of willowy queen palms that cast lacy shadows on the walls in the temperate morning sun.

She drove by slowly, giving the house a thorough looking over. No car stood in the driveway. The drapes were drawn at the windows. She had no way of knowing if Ironheart was home-short of going up to his front door and ringing the bell. Eventually, she would do just that.

But not yet.

At the end of the block, she turned around and drove past the house again. The place was attractive, pleasant, but so ordinary. It was hard to believe that an exceptional man, with astonishing secrets, lived behind those walls.

Viola Moreno's townhouse in Irvine was in one of those park-like communities the Irvine Company had built in the sixties and seventies, where the plum-thorn hedges had entered woody maturity and the red-gum eucalyptuses and Indian laurels towered high enough to spread a wealth of shade on even the brightest and most cloudless of summer days. It was furnished with an eye to comfort rather than style: an overstuffed sofa commodious armchairs, and plump footstools, everything in earth tones, with traditional landscape paintings meant to soothe rather than challenge the eye and mind. Stacks of magazines and shelves of books were everywhere at hand. Holly felt at home the moment she crossed the threshold.

Viola was as welcoming and easy to like as her home. She was about fifty, Mexican-American, with flawless skin the shade of lightly tarnished copper and eyes that were merry in spite of being as liquid-black as squid ink. Though she was on the short side and had broadened a little with age, it was easy to see that her looks would once have turned men's heads hard enough to crack vertebrae; she was still a lovely woman. She took Holly's hand at the door, then linked arms with her to lead her through the small house and out to the patio, as if they were old friends and had not just spoken for the first time on the phone the previous day.

On the patio, which overlooked a common greensward, a pitcher of icy lemonade and two glasses stood on a glass-topped table. The rattan chairs were padded with thick yellow cushions.

"I spend a lot of my summer out here," Viola said as they settled into chairs. The day was not too hot, the air dry and clean. "It's a beautiful little corner of the world, isn't it?" The broad but shallow green vale separated this row of townhouses from the next, shaded by tall trees and decorated with a couple of circular of red and purple impatiens. Two squirrels scampered down a gentle slop and across a meandering walkway.

"Quite beautiful," Holly agreed as Viola poured lemonade into their glasses.

"My husband and I bought it when the trees were just sticks and the Hydroseeded greenbelt was still patchy. But we could visualize what it would be like one day, and we were patient people, even when we were young." She sighed. "Sometimes I have bad moments, I get bitter about his dying so young and never having a chance to see what this all grew up into. But mostly I just enjoy it, knowing Joe is somewhere better than this world and that somehow he takes pleasure in my enjoyment.”

"I'm sorry," Holly said, "I didn't know you'd been widowed.”

"Of course you didn't, dear. How could you know? Anyway, it was a long time ago, back in 1969, when I was just thirty and he was thirty-two My husband was a career Marine, proud of it, and so was I.

So am I, still, though he died in Vietnam.”

Holly was startled to realize that many of the early victims of that conflict would now have been past middle-age. The wives they left behind had now lived far more years without them than with them. How long until Vietnam seemed as ancient as the crusades of Richard the Lionheart or the Peloponnesian Wars? "Such a waste," Viola said with an edge to her voice. But the edge was gone an instant later when she said, "So long ago. ”

The life Holly had imagined for this woman-a calm and peaceful journey of small pleasures, warm and cozy, with perhaps more than its share of laughter-was clearly less than half the story.