Predicting Rain?

“There’s a middle-aged hippie next door to the loft, George Armstrong. He’s a good man, but he’s beyond eccentric and if you let him, he’ll give you hours of lectures about corporate greed. He paints, I think, and comes and goes on whims, apparently. He never got past the ‘do your own thing’ or ‘if it feels good, do it,’ era,” she said.

“You said you live next door?”

“I moved in a few weeks ago. George is my—”

“I know all about George,” he said before she could go into their relationship. He understood all too well from what Zane had told him. But it bothered him that she was involved with the man.

She frowned, then cocked her head to one side and her hair moved in a soft veil. “Oh, sure, of course, you know.”

“What does that mean?”

“Just more labeling. Since George doesn’t conform to what you think he should, you’re sure that he’s some irresponsible hippie living like some flower child.” She bit her lip. “Gad, you’re a snob.”

A snob? “Now I’m a stuffed suit and a snob?”

She shook her head, then went past him into the main living area that was deep in shadows except for the light slicing in from the hallway. He followed her, watching her silhouetted against the light coming in the door. She was at the entrance before she stopped and turned back to him. In that fleeting moment, the light behind her softly exposed her slender figure. “Sorry for the intrusion. I’ll let that Zane person know the cat’s back.”

“Don’t bother. I’ll take care of it,” he said.

“Oh, sure, the responsible one,” she muttered.

She was going back to that middle-aged hippie and he felt vaguely sick. “I’ll take care of it,” he repeated.

“Of course, and, oh, by the way, my name’s Rainbow Swan, for the record. Good night, Jackson Ford.”

With that, she left, quietly closing the door behind her. Before he could do more than absorb the fact that she’d obviously had the last word, the door opened again and this time he could see through the thin cotton of her T-shirt. “I’ve got the key,” she said. “Tell Zane that he can come get it any time he wants to. But until then we’ll guard it with our lives so that you’ll be safe from any and all undesirables who might be in the area.” And she closed the door after her.

Jack crossed to the door, opened it and heard another door shut firmly. Rain was gone. And she’d had a double last word. He hated that. He closed his door, threw the bolt lock on it, then saw the cat. The animal was walking silently along the shelf on the top of the partial wall. He got to the bedroom area, looked at Jack, then leaped in the opposite direction and disappeared. A cat. A hippie. He looked at the clock. The whole thing had lasted fifteen minutes, tops. It had seemed to last forever.

The middle-aged hippie and Rain. It sounded like the title of a bad novel, or some crazy song. But it knotted his stomach with distaste. Instead of going to the bedroom, he crossed to the work station, turned on two lights and sat down in front of the computer. As the monitor warmed up, he heard the cat somewhere close by mewing softly in the darkness. Then a heavy thump came from somewhere beyond the wall across the room that was shared with the next loft.

He looked at the computer screen, logged onto the Internet and went to the mail program. There were several notes from Mrs. Ferris, and a single note from Eve. He opened Eve’s note quickly. All thoughts of Rain pushed to the back of his mind…for now.

RAIN WENT INTO the loft and called out to George. “I’m back.” She crossed to the kitchen to make herself a cup of green tea.

“What was going on over there?” he asked coming up behind her.

“Labeling,” she muttered, a bit shocked that Jack Ford had gotten under her skin so completely. Labels didn’t matter. She’d known that all her life, but for some reason his attitude stung.

“What?” George asked as Rain put the teakettle on the stove, then turned to her father.

Yes, he was a hippie. From the long gray hair, thin on top, pulled back in a ponytail with a friendship rope that Bree, her mother, had made for him, to the rope sandals, the six earrings in his left ear and the cutoffs worn with a shirt that sported a skull and roses on it, he was a hippie. Although Rain liked the term a free, caring spirit better than hippie. He was middle-aged, sincere about helping to make the world a better place, and vastly talented as a painter.

She glanced at the loft, a cavernous space free of any real adornments, with pillows instead of chairs, bed pads on the floor in the side alcoves, and his paintings all around, in various stages of completion. “Want some green tea?” she asked, not about to get into this with her father, too.

He waved that aside with, “No, thanks,” and headed over to his latest canvas, a huge, four-by-six-foot work in progress that he’d labeled Experimental. Red he called it, and it was that. Very red. Lines, sweeping swirls, dots, splashes, all in various shades of red. Even though she loved her father and thought he was beyond talented, it still amused her at George’s chagrin that “normies,” as her dad called the rest of the world, actually liked his work and bought it. “The cat showed up, huh?”

“Sure did,” she said and turned as the kettle started to whistle. As she made a mug of tea, George put on one of his tapes of lute music. She turned with the steaming mug in her hands and inhaled the combination of paint and incense in the air. “You said LynTech used that loft sometimes when their people came to town?”

“Yeah,” George said, studying his painting, hands on his hips and his head cocked to one side. “They’ve got it set up so they can work without ever seeing the light of day,” he said. “I hear they’ll need it with all that stuff going on at LynTech.”

“What stuff?” she asked.

“Something big, and I don’t mean that charity ball next month.” He looked away from his canvas and back at her. “Business intrigue that no one’s talking about.”

She crossed to the rope hammock by the fire escape window on the back wall and settled into it, cradling her tea. This was the way it had been whenever she was here with George, her sipping tea in the hammock, him with his painting. It felt good, even if she was twenty-eight years old. “What’s the big secret?”

“I don’t know, but they called in a big gun from London, Jackson Ford. He’s dead in the middle of it.”

“He’s also dead in the middle of the loft next door,” she muttered and took another sip of the tea.

George looked surprised. “You sure?”

“I just ran into him when I was feeding that cat.” Now she understood a slight hint of a certain properness in his voice. England. Yes, it could be a hint of an English accent he might have absorbed living there. Then again, maybe it just came from him being so incredibly uptight. “They must use that place a lot. It’s set up like a control center for NASA, every business machine you could want. Well, not you.”

“Mmm,” George said as he looked back at the painting. “Next door, huh? Well, from what little I’ve been able to find out, Ford and some others are working on a big deal, and it looks as if that very big deal could fall through.”

Rain wondered if Mr. Jackson Ford was on the edge of being booted from LynTech for some mess up on his part? Maybe that was partly why he was so uptight. “Too bad,” she said.

“It’s all a part of the corporate mindset, that need to work your butt off and make big bucks and destroy this country in the process,” George said. “That can’t be easy on anyone.”

She didn’t want him to get started on this. She’d heard the speech far too often, and her nerves couldn’t stand it now. “No it can’t,” she said, ready to deflect the topic, but he did it for her.

“Do you think this is too much?” he asked, pointing at a huge blot of crimson dead in the middle of the canvas. “Too…intense, too flamboyant?”

Everything about George was flamboyant, another character trait that she’d adjusted to a long time ago. “You’re asking me that, the person who you once said, if I remember correctly, had the artistic bent of a log?” she teased.

He turned with a grin. “I forgot for a moment. Thought I was talking to Serenity.”

She called her mother Bree, but George never called her by anything except the nickname he’d given her the summer they met years ago at a commune on the coast of California near Big Sur. “So, she called, didn’t she?”

“Sure did.” The grin seemed permanent now. He always seemed to glow a bit when he talked about her. Over the years, through all the changes in both of them, she’d never doubted that her parents loved each other very much. They just didn’t commit to a relationship the way the world thought they should. “Did I tell you I’m taking off soon?” George asked.

“No, you didn’t, but then again, when did you ever check in when you wanted to take off?” She’d just gotten here, and with the mess at the hospital, she was hoping he’d be around for a while. But George moved when he wanted to and she was used to him just up and leaving when the spirit moved him.

“True, and that being the case, I’m assuming that I didn’t tell you where I’m going?”

“I didn’t expect you would,” she said. “Is there a gathering or something?”

“No, not at this time of the year.” Then he came over to the hammock and stood in front of Rain with his arms out at his sides. “So, how do I look?”

She shrugged. “Like you usually look.”

For some reason that seemed to please him. “Good, good,” he murmured and moved across the studio area to the makeshift dining table all but covered with stretched canvases and paint supplies.

“So, where are you going?” she asked.

“The Golden City,” he said, the smile deepening.