It was horrible. And original and impish andfiendish. Precisely the sort of thing he’d expect from the girl who’d once turned the top of Devil’s Leap into a tap dancing stage, who had once put acorns into an Easy-Bake Oven recipe and had then needed to go to the hospital for a stomach ache, who had suggested they all pretend to be mummies and walk off the edge with their arms outstretched. What if she did this every day?
Now the game really was on.
Later, when he stalked down to get his mail, Avalon was standing at the mailboxes, shuffling through hers like a Vegas gambler who knows she has the winning hand. He had a hunch she’d been waiting there for him to show up.
“Oh, hey, Mac.”
“Kicking out the jams today, are we, Avalon?”
She looked up, her velvety eyes innocent and questioning. “Don’t you like my taste in music?”
“IT’S NOT MUSIC AND IT’S NOT TASTE.”
Her eyes widened very slightly.
He took a subtle breath.
“Gosh, I didn’t mean toupsetyou, Mac,” she said very, very mildly. A little furrow crumpled the smooth tawny skin between her brows.
“I’m not upset,” he modulated, perhaps a little too much. Because now he sounded like an announcer on NPR. He’d tried to work with earplugs in. It hadn’t quite done the trick.
“Well, it’s just that you raised your voice just now,” she pointed out, reasonably, and still so, so sympathetically.
“Well, it’s just that I thought I needed to because I thought you might be losing your hearing in your old age. Given the volume of your chosen ‘music.’” He bent his fingers in air quotes around that last word.
“Ohhhhh,that. I just wanted to be able to hear it wherever I went in the house. And it’s a big house. As you know. Cavernous. So roomy and so comfortable and so very, very... mine.”
A bird oblivious to the gravity of their showdown trilled like it was Beverly Sills and this wasLa Traviata.
“Don’t you think the birds and the squirrels and deer mind the noise?” Mac suggested.
“Don’t they mind themusic, you mean?” she corrected, her nose wrinkled fetchingly in faux confusion.
“I meant the noise,” he repeated evenly.
She shrugged indolently with one shoulder. “Animals often love music, Mac. I’m sure they’ll get used to it. It’s just that I sometimes get in the mood for an inspirational, motivational ballad. And I never know when the mood might strike. Sometimes it strikes very, very late at night. Sometimes it doesn’t ease up until morning.”
“Is that so, Avalon? Get lonely and bored late at night, do you, these days? Need to burn off a little angst?”
He detected a blip in her aplomb. A hesitation.
That was interesting. What was up with the boyfriend?
“Whydoyou hate that song so much?” she asked suddenly.
“I hate the belabored circus metaphor, what with the clowns and tightropes and whatnot. I hate that she’s advising people to keep all the feelings inside, which, my God, strikes me asterribleadvice. And that she’s actually yelling aboutnotcrying out loud, which, I mean—how does that make anysense? I don’t like advice yelled at me from a song.”
“I think Miss Manchester would characterize it as singing,” she said finally. Sounding subdued. But she looked dazzled. Her eyes were lit with hilarity.
“Miss Manchester would be deluded.”
“She has some good songs. ‘Midnight Blue.’ Pretty good song.” Now she was messing with him.
He waved this opinion away with an impatient chop of his hand.
“I like songs like... like that Baby Owls song. About being lost in the forest and going around and around and around. Perfectly adequate lyrics. Keep it simple. Lost in the forest, going round and around and around. Happens to someone every day, right? Not this sentimental histrionic dreck.”
“Yeah, but that Baby Owls song is kind of existential, when you think about it. The round and around is meant to symbolize the circle of—”