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for anything.”
    “How’s the hand?” he asked when he saw her rubbing her knuckles.
    “Oh. A little sore still. It’ll probably give me some trouble working tomorrow. But I should be able to turn the experience into a good strip.”
    “I can’t see Emily laying a mugger out on his ass.”
    Cybil’s face glowed on a grin. “You
do
read it.”
    “Now and again.” She was entirely too pretty, he thought suddenly. Entirely too bright. And it was abruptly too tempting to find out if she tasted the same way.
    That’s what happened, Preston supposed, when you hung around eating homemade cookies in the middle of the night with a woman who made her living looking at the light side of life.
    “You don’t have your father’s edge or your mother’s artistic genius, but you have a nice little talent for the absurd.”
    She let out a half laugh. “Well, thank you so much for that unsolicited critique.”
    “No problem.” He picked up the plate. “Thanks for the cookies.”
    She narrowed her eyes as he headed for the door. Well, he was going to see just how much of a talent she had for the absurd in some upcoming strips, she decided.
    “Hey.”
    He paused, glanced back. “Hey, what?”
    “You got a name, apartment 3B?”
    “Yeah, I’ve got a name, 3A. It’s McQuinn.” He balanced his beer and his plate, and shut the door between them.

Chapter 3
    When scenes and people filled her head, Cybil could work until her fingers cramped and refused to hold pencil or brush.
    She spent the next day fueled on cookies and the diet soft drinks she liked to pretend balanced out the cookie calories. On paper, section by section, Emily and her friend Cari—who over the last couple of years had taken on several Jody-like attributes—plotted and planned on how to discover the secrets of the Mr. Mysterious.
    She was going to call him “Quinn,” but not for several installments.
    For three days she rarely left her drawing board. Jody had a key, so it wasn’t necessary to run down and let her in every time she dropped over for a visit. And Jody was always happy enough to dash down to open the door for Mrs. Wolinsky or one of the other neighbors who stopped by.
    At one point on the third evening, enough people were in the apartment to have put together a small, informal party while Cybil remained coloring in her big Sunday strip.
    Someone had turned on the stereo. Music blared, but it didn’t distract her. Laughter and conversation rose up the stairs, and there was a shout of greeting as someone else dropped in.
    She smelled popcorn, and wondered idly if anyone would bring her some.
    Leaning back, she studied her work. No, she didn’t have her father’s edge, she acknowledged, or her mother’s genius. But all in all, she did indeed have a “nice little talent.”
    She had a quick and clever hand at drawing. She could paint—quite well, really, she mused—if the mood was right. The strip gave her an arena for her own brand of social commentary.
    Perhaps she didn’t dig into sore spots or turn a sarcastic pencil toward politics, but her work made people laugh. It gave them company in the morning over their hurried cup of coffee or along with a lazy Sunday breakfast.
    More than anything, she thought as she signed her name, it made her happy.
    If McQuinn in 3B thought his careless comment insulted her, he was wrong. She was more than content with her nice little talent.
    Flushed with the success of three days’ intense work, she picked up the phone as it rang and all but sang into it. “Hello?”
    “Well, well, there’s a cheery lass.”
    “Grandpa!” Cybil leaned back in her chair and stretched cramped muscles. “Yes, I’m a cheery lass, and there’s no one I’d rather talk to than you.”
    Technically, Daniel MacGregor wasn’t her grandfather, but that had never stopped either of them from thinking of him as such. Love ignored technicalities.
    “Is that so? Then why haven’t you called me or your grandmother?