The Stone Flower Garden

by Deborah Smith

  “Someone needs to be the lady of the manor, and you’ll be perfect. And Leon was meant to own the quarry.”

  “I’m not a Hardigree,” he put in.

  “Marry Karen, and you will be.”

  The thought settled on him, and on my cousin. I watched the decision sink in, and I felt Eli’s gaze on me. I met his troubled but proud eyes. “We’ll come back to visit,” I said. “We’ll be involved in Stand Tall.”

  “What if it was built on these grounds?” he asked. “Something good, set on this property. Put the buildings on the land I cleared. Make the Stone Cottage the center of it. What do you think?”

  I stepped away from Clara’s empty grave, then touched my fingertips to the towering stone vase with its hopeful marble flowers, always imitating life, waiting for the magic Eli and I had always tried to make there. “I think that would be perfect,” I said.

  Matilda and Swan lay in state in the main living room at Marble Hall. I had sat with their bodies all morning, alone, talking to them. Now I kept myself in the library, smoothing my pale gray suit, fingering the Hardigree pendant that still bound my neck. In an hour, I would open the house to all the people who would come to pay their respects. Flowers and cards filled the mansion. Karen had escaped to Leon’s farm, crying. I ached with fatigue, with grief, with the hard tug of unfinished debts. Eli and I had barely been alone together, and had not talked much in the two days since the deaths. There was too much to say. We didn’t know how to start over, or when the words would suddenly be free in us, again. I knew why we were held back, even if he didn’t.

  Gloria, who had transferred her affections to Karen but not to me, glumly opened the library door. Eli walked in with Annie Gwen and Bell. Bell’s husband had rushed to North Carolina and reunited tearfully with her. He was caring for their baby at the Broadside house.

  I looked at Eli with quiet reserve, him as foreign to me in a handsome suit as a suit of armor. Everything about his grim face said my request to talk to his mother and sister in private worried him. He didn’t know what I intended, and he was right to worry. I was frightened, myself.

  “Poor child,” Annie Gwen said, and hugged me. So did Bell.

  I hugged them back. “It’s a miracle you don’t hate me for what I represent,” I said wearily.

  “How could we blame you for what your grandma did?” Bell cried.

  You’ll see, I thought. I went behind Swan’s desk, to the bookcases, reached up between the two heavy textbooks where I’d hidden my confession, and pulled it out. Eli realized then what I meant to do. He stepped close to me and clamped a hand on the large brown envelope. I shook my head and spoke around a knot in my throat. “I have to do what’s right. The secret will always be between us, if I don’t. No more secrets.”

  “Goddammit,” he said very softly, in pain. “Some things don’t have to be told, if they only hurt people.”

  “I love you too much—and your family too much—to let this stay hidden.” I turned to Annie Gwen and Bell, held out the envelope, and said in a low, strained voice, “I knew about Clara’s murder when I was a child. I wrote down all the details here. I knew what my grandmother did. I’ve always known, but I was too afraid to tell anyone.” My hand shaking, I laid the envelope on Swan’s desk. “I have to share the blame for what she did.”

  Slowly, Annie Gwen and Bell’s faces compressed in sorrow. I watched a dozen emotions wash across their eyes, until finally, to my amazement, only sorrow remained. “I figured you knew,” Annie Gwen whispered. “I could see the guilt in your face at the funeral home.” She looked at Eli. “I could see it in yours, too.”

  I put a hand to my throat and shut my eyes. Beside me, Eli said gruffly, “I won’t have Darl blamed for any of this. I didn’t want you and Bell to know something that ought not make a difference. Something that only hurts.”

  Bell surged forward, her eyes fervent and gleaming with tears. “Are you saying your grandma told you about the murder when you were a girl? Why did she do that to you?”

  “She didn’t have to tell me. I saw it happen. I saw her shove Clara over the terrace wall. I watched Clara die. And that night I watched Swan bury her.” Breaking down, I leaned on the desk for support. Eli grasped me around the waist, but I was frozen in place. “I don’t expect your forgiveness.”

  Annie Gwen’s mouth flattened. She came around the massive desk like a small, determined hen in a blue suit, followed by Bell, and in the next moment she took my face between her hands. “Poor child,” she whispered again. “Justice has been done, here, already. Me and my family, we . . . we killed your grandma. We killed her by comin’ back.”

  “Annie Gwen, that’s not so—”

  “Oh, yes, it is. In her heart she knew she had a debt to pay, and her heart paid it. But we killed poor innocent Matilda, too, god help us.” Annie Gwen pressed her hands tighter around my face, as if impressing her faith on me. “What’s done is done, child. On both sides.”

  “Let it go,” Eli said softly, and curved a hand down my hair. And I did. I had been forgiven, and could start forgiving myself. The next thing I knew, I was encased in Annie Gwen’s arms, and Bell’s, and Eli’s.

  “I want to see Swan,” Annie Gwen said, her voice firm.

  I ushered her into the tall-windowed living room, then stood back. Even the sight of the twin coffins set among towering flower arrangements across the large room broke my heart. I had looked at my grandmother’s face for the last time, and Matilda’s, and would not look again.

  Annie Gwen made her way to Swan’s coffin and stood quietly beside it, gazing down at her. Annie Gwen spoke softly but firmly. “I’ll take your granddaughter into my heart,” she told Swan, “and make her part of my family. I’ll be a good grandmother to her children with my son—and they’ll honor me. You’ll just be a bad memory—somebody we don’t talk about much, for Darl’s sake. You took my husband. But I’ll take your whole family. I’ll take the future. And that’s my revenge, Swan Samples. That’s the hell you made for yourself.”

  Annie Gwen Wade turned her back to my grandmother’s memory, and faced me.

  “You love my son, and I love you,” she said.

  “I’ll never make you regret that,” I answered.

  She, Bell, Eli and I carried the envelope with my confession in it outside to the pale pink marble patio, and Eli held his lighter beneath one corner, and we burned all those words.

  The first Burnt Stand fire gave my family a name and a clean past. The second one, there on the marble patio that day, gave my family a soul and a clean future.

  They were buried in the Hardigree mausoleum in the Methodist cemetery—Swan, Matilda, and Clara—all with their separate names carved on the faces of their crypts. And where there had been a blank space on the secret crypt beside my mother’s, we carved the name of Karen’s mother. Katherine Wade.

  It was all set in stone, now.

  “Come with me,” Eli said after the funerals. It wasn’t so much an order as a plea.

  We drove to the Stone Cottage, sitting forlornly in a scalped hollow that would soon revive with the buildings and lawns of Stand Tall. Eli and I walked inside the cottage’s cool, haunted beauty, silently acknowledging the love that had been nurtured there by Anthony and Matilda, the close family that had blossomed there when Jasper and Annie Gwen moved in, and now, the redemption and devotion Eli and I brought to the rooms his own grandfather had built.

  I followed Eli to a back bedroom, where we faced each other beside a simple bedstead and mattress we’d covered with white sheets, broad pillows, and deep comforters. There was just that bed in that marble cottage, and us. He held out his hands and I went to him. He took a small set of pliers from his suit pocket, slid his fingers beneath the collar of my blouse, lifted the chain of my pendant, and cut it.

  I laid the necklace on a marble sill, and never
touched it again.

  We undressed each other, becoming pure and naked, and got into bed. We stayed there for the afternoon and the night, taking each other as full and trusting lovers, never letting go, making the sorrow all right, turning back time.

  The next morning we threw our belongings together, said good-bye to Karen and Leon, to Annie Gwen and Bell, then went to the airstrip outside town. I wore jeans and a t-shirt, a leather jacket of Eli’s, and old shoes. He was just as comfortable. We flew out over the town, circling for a moment, looking down at the pale blush majesty of Burnt Stand among the golden mountains. “Time to go,” Eli said, and I nodded. We moved away on high currents of autumn air. In a few hours we were free of the land and the past, soaring over the southern ocean toward some exotic and warm adventure, skimming over the unpolished face of the world, weightless.

  Loving each other, and forgetting the coldness of stone.

  (Continue reading for an excerpt of A Gentle Rain)

  Also From Deborah Smith:

  A Gentle Rain

  Available from BelleBooks

  Excerpt

  Kara

  My birth, 1974

  In my mother’s innocent world of Saturday morning cartoons, babies wearing name sashes fluttered about a cartoon garden after being delivered by a heavenly stork. Lily Akens had no reason to doubt the obstetrics of a TV show.

  My teenaged father, Mac Tolbert, knew better, since he often helped birth calves and foals at River Bluff, his family’s elegant, northern Florida farm, but he didn’t know how to warn my mother about the process. Besides, he wasn’t certain human babies were born the same way as livestock.

  He could only assume a baby came out from the same spot where the boy put it in.

  “Lily, L-lily, don’t c-cry,” Mac stuttered, kneeling over her helplessly in the sweaty, sub-tropical darkness, swatting at mosquitoes that flitted in the beam of his shaking flashlight. Tall pines shifted above them in a swampy breeze. Bullfrogs chortled in the creek bottoms. Somewhere in a sumpy ditch, an alligator grunted. The dark forests of inland Florida breathe and talk at night, drawing mysterious memories from the porous limestone bedrock. Though far from either ocean, the air carries a faint hint of saltwater.

  “But it hurts!” Lily sobbed, pounding her palms on her distended stomach. Her cheap, flowery mumu was soaked with fluid and clotted around her thighs.

  “I t-think it’s s-supposed to hurt,” Mac told her. “Maybe you should stand u-up. Like a m-mare.”

  “I don’t think I can! Oh, Mac! It hurts so bad! Mac! Something’s trying to come out of me down there!”

  Trembling, Mac pointed the flashlight between her legs. Horses and cattle were born front feet first, as if diving into the world. Mac looked closely but saw no baby hands, just the bloody pate of a tiny head. It terrified him, but he hid the emotion. He had to be strong for Lily. They were different from other teenagers; they had taken care of each other since childhood. “It’s just the b-baby.” He sounded more confident than he felt. He knew how to turn a breeched calf or foal but could not imagine sticking his big hand inside Lily.

  “Mac! It’s moving!”

  He grabbed her hands as she sat up. She rocked and he held her. The heels of her tennis shoes plowed furrows in the soft, damp loam. Lily began to yell. After what seemed like forever she went quiet and collapsed against him. “The baby fell out,” she moaned. “Why doesn’t it flap its wings? Something must be wrong with it. Oh, Mac.”

  My father turned the flashlight between her thighs, again. He and my mother stared in horror. Neither had seen a newborn child, before. I was not a cute little doll or a smiling cherub. I was nearly purple. My head was misshapen. Bloody mucous plastered a feathery dab of red hair to my skull. I opened my shriveled mouth and took a big yawn of air. To them, the effort looked like a dying gasp.

  They bent their heads over me and cried.

  Searchlights pierced the woods. Mac’s older brother, Glen, found them first. “What the hell have you done?” he said.

  Mac and Lily sobbed. Before they could hold me even once, before they could realize I was alive and normal, I was taken from them.

  I would be grown before I knew Mac and Lily existed. Grown before I knew they had birthed me in the wilds of Florida. Grown, before I knew they had wanted me.

  Grown and orphaned before I was born into my parents’ lives, again.

  About Deborah Smith

  Deborah Smith is the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of A PLACE TO CALL HOME, A GENTLE RAIN, and many others. She has written over forty novels including series romance, women’s fiction, mainstream fiction and fantasy. As editorial director and partner in BelleBooks, a small publishing company she co-owns with three other veteran authors, Deborah edits and writes for a variety of books including the Mossy Creek Hometown Series and the Sweet Tea story collections. She also manages BelleBooks Audio. You can now purchase audio downloads of Deb’s newest novels, read by the author. Visit Deb at www.deborah-smith.com or www.bellebooks.com. Send comments to her at BelleBooks@bellebooks.com.