Fire and Rain by Diane Chamberlain

again, straightening her arm out in front of her. “What…God, it’s paint!”
    Mia looked down at the reddish stains on the inside of her forearm. “No,” she said. “It’s clay.”
    “
Clay
. I thought it was blood. Thought I had a suicide attempt on my hands.” He shook his head, and she could see the relief in his face. “You know how it is, Mia. You try to keep a low profile, and you end up living on the property of a television journalist and a famous ex-ballplayer, and you innocently knock on your neighbor’s door, thinking, what could be safer, and you end up spending the rest of the day in an emergency room with everyone asking you questions about yourself.”
    He was a madman. She drew her arm to her chest again. “You have an overactive imagination,” she said.
    “Maybe.” He glanced toward the adobe, then back at her once more. “Could you do me a favor? Chris already left. He wanted me to stop by the office this morning, but I won’t be able to. Sometime in the middle of the night I realized I’m off base with a few of my equations, and I need to get to the warehouse to work on them. Would you let him know that, please?”
    “Sure.” She had gotten his nose entirely wrong in her sketches. It was longer. There was the barest hint of a flare to his nostrils.
    “Clay?” He peered behind her into the living room. “You’re working with clay at seven in the morning?”
    “Actually, I’ve been up since five.”
    He raised his eyebrows. “May I see?”
    She stepped back to let him in. He walked across the plastic-covered carpet and sank to his knees in front of the orange crate. Henry grinned up at him. “Holy shit,” he said softly, sitting back on his heels. “This is definitely not amateur hour.”
    “His name’s Henry,” she said.
    He looked up at her. “You work down here on the floor?”
    “Yes.”
    “You’re going to destroy your back.” He touched Henry’s chin with tanned fingers. The hair on his arm was dark blond. “Terra cotta, right?”
    She nodded, surprised.
    “What did you use for an armature?”
    She pointed to the wire armature on the coffee table.
    Jeff ran his fingertips lightly over Henry’s hair, and she knew he was hunting for a seam. “How did you get it out?”
    She knelt on the floor next to him. “I cut him in two, right where you’re touching. Then I covered up my tracks.”
    He studied the top of Henry’s head. “Excellent job,” he said. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen something this realistic. It’s not the kind of work most sculptors do these days, is it?”
    “No. Figurative sculpting is not exactly ‘in,’ but I can’t imagine doing anything else. Right now, though, I’m only into heads.”
    He touched Henry’s rounded cheek. “You must have studied anatomy to be able to produce work like this.”
    “Yes.” She’d had more figure study classes than she liked to remember. “How do you know so much about sculpting?”
    He stood up again. “I know a little bit about a lot of things.”
    She pointed to the bulletin board covered with Henry’s pictures. “He was a homeless man in San Diego. I paid him to let me shoot the pictures.”
    “Are you aware of how good you are?”
    “Yes.” She smiled.
    “So why are you squirreled away out here in the middle of nowhere?”
    “It’s where I want to be.”
    His eyes narrowed as if he didn’t believe her. “What will you work on next?”
    Mia laughed as she got to her feet. “I was thinking about sculpting you.”
    A look of surprise crossed his features before he, too, laughed. “I wondered why you’re always watching me. You look at me as though you’re trying to count the pores in my skin.”
    “Sorry.” Her cheeks flushed, but she wasn’t about to let this opportunity pass her by. “Would you consider it? Letting me sculpt you?”
    “No, I don’t think so.”
    “You wouldn’t need to pose,” she said quickly. “I could work from photographs, like I did