After he'd snagged a smaller one, he put his rod and reel away.

"Do we have to go?" I almost whined.

He put the fish on ice in a blue cooler and opened the lid on a red one. "No, I put up the equipment because we have enough for supper and some left for the freezer. I'm going to read for a while. You catch anything, we'll do a catch and release. Hungry?"

"Sushi?" I snarled my nose.

"No, sandwiches and Cokes."

"Did you think of everything?"

"Hopefully. Want something to read?"

"Got a John Grisham?" I asked.

"Oh, you like mystery, do you? How about J. A. Jance?"

I removed the plastic wrap from the sandwich he handed me and took a bite. "I do like mystery, and J. A. Jance is a favorite."

He opened a tote bag and handed me a book. "Okay, then you can have this one, and I'll read the new James Lee Burke"

"Who is James Lee Burke?"

"Another good author. He can describe Louisiana so well, I can hear the nutria screaming and smell the swamp water. You'll have to read one of his books. You'll be hooked if you like mystery and good writing."

We finished our sandwiches and spent three hours reading in comfortable silence. The sun had reached its high point and started falling toward the western sky when Billy Lee fired up the motor and steered us back toward the pier beside his cabin.

He cleaned the fish, and I made baked beans and cabbage slaw. While he fried the fish, I added chopped onions, baking powder, egg, milk, and a little salt to the leftover cornmeal and made hush puppies.

"Been a while since I've had fresh catfish. Smells good, doesn't it?" he said.

"I can't remember the last time I ate fish fixed at home. Daddy liked to fish, and we had it often, but he's been gone ten years"

"Did he put cayenne pepper in the cornmeal?"

"Momma did. Said it needed a little fire."

"I agree," he said.

We ate out on the deck. The zapping noise of the bug killer competed with Mother Nature's night sounds, but there were no mosquitoes to ruin supper.

When we finished, he carried the paper plates inside to the trash can and pulled a couple of cold Cokes from the refrigerator. "Think I'll read a little more before bedtime, unless you want to do something else."

"Actually, I left Sheriff Joanna in a bind," I said.

To anyone else it would have been a boring evening. To me it was the stuff cotton candy and dreams are made from. No tension. No boredom. Not even a trip to the refrigerator to find something to eat just to have something to occupy the long hours. My tummy was full. I had a good book to keep me entertained. And Billy Lee was right there. Life was truly good.

Billy Lee took a shower at about ten o'clock and came out of the bedroom wearing knit pajama bottoms and a gauze undershirt. He wasn't as scrawny as he looked in his overalls. His arms and abs were rock hard. I had to exercise a good measure of self-control to keep from reaching out and touching the fine brown hair on his chest to see if it was as soft as it looked.

My voice was a little hoarse when I said, "Good night, Billy Lee. You sure you don't want me to take the couch?"

"Now you're being nice," he said.

"Yes, I was, and I apologize. I really do want that bed, and I'm looking forward to a long shower."

He tossed a couple of cushions onto the floor and pulled a bed out of the sofa. He opened a closet door beside the fireplace and found two pillows. "See? It's a real bed, and I'll be just fine."

"Then sleep tight. Any time we need to be up and around?"

"When you wake up. Sleep as long as you like. When we start in on that dining room and living room, we'll be working from sunup till sundown. Gert kept more junk in those two rooms than any of the others"

I lingered. "She did, didn't she? But then, that was what folks saw when they came inside the house. She wanted them to notice all her collectibles."

"Collectibles? That's not a collection. It's rejects from forty years of yard sales"

I almost ducked and ran for cover. Surely lightning would come crashing out of the sky. Billy Lee had just said something derogatory about Gert, and that was even more surprising than the motorcycle momma's prophecy.

"Amen!" I hustled on into the bedroom.

I wasn't really sure how accurate lightning bolts were. Keeping a wall between me and Billy Lee might just save my life.

I fought back tears when we left the lake. We'd slept late. We'd eaten when we wanted. We'd fished. We'd trolled around the whole lake one day and fed the fish and turtles part of our sandwiches.

"I don't want to leave," I whispered as we got onto the Harley.

"I never do. But it wouldn't be nearly as much fun if we had it every day," he said.

"Bet me"

"We can come back anytime you want to, Trudy."

"Is that a promise?"

"It is. But if you had all the candy bars you wanted every day, you'd get tired of them."

"You don't know me very well." I managed a smile even though my chin was almost quivering. "Next time we need to leave for the floor man, will you bring me back here?"

He nodded, and I believed him. Billy Lee had never lied to me.

Riding on the back of a cycle for more than two hours gave me lots of time for thinking. If we hadn't put so many long hours and elbow grease into redoing the top floor, I might have gathered up some twenty-year-old newspapers from a corner, soaked them in ten-year-old gasoline from the garage, and set fire to the whole house. The only thing that saved the place was the furniture Billy Lee had built. That and the brandspanking-new big deep Jacuzzi the plumbers had installed in the bathroom. I couldn't very well torch something that expensive. But the thought of having to do the whole downstairs was enough to make me tell Billy Lee to turn the bike around and take me back to the lake house, where I intended to live permanently.

It was dusk when we got home, and Billy Lee didn't even come inside. He said he'd see me the next morning bright and early and went on home. I was tickled with the new, shiny floors, but all that junk in the living room and dining room hadn't mysteriously disappeared while we were gone.

I wandered through the downstairs, which was almost a perfect square. The foyer and living room extended across the entire front, taking up half the downstairs. Whoever had designed the place hadn't been thinking of rowdy children who could slide down the banister into the living room and run circles from the living room, through the dining room, into the kitchen, and back to the living room. Visions of the lake house danced in my head, and it became the light at the end of the tunnel.

The next morning we had breakfast together, and Billy Lee went straight up to my new office, where he would be assembling the desk and cabinets. I would rather have been helping him than boxing up all the junk.

"Hey, when you get all that done, you can come up here and keep me company," he yelled down the stairs.

"You're going to die a lonely old man!" I yelled back. "I'll have gray hair before this is done. I'm not totally sure that doing this job won't cause Alzheimer's. Going through Grandmother Matthews' old stuff is probably what snatched my mother's memory. You've got time to construct a new home complete with three stories and a basement and attic in the time it'll take me to empty the dining room."