Lavender Morning

by Jude Deveraux

  “Did she eat an entire half of one?”

  “More like a quarter.”

  “Would you two stop it!” Ramsey said. “Jocelyn, my cousin and I came here to explain some things that I think may have been misunderstood by you.”

  “Oh? And what would that be?”

  “About our intentions.”

  “Intentions?” Jocelyn asked. “I have no idea what you mean.”

  “I told you she’d be mad,” Luke said as he leaned back against the sofa.

  “Because my cousin misrepresented himself,” Ramsey said, and it was the voice of a lawyer, “doesn’t mean that I have. I have never been anything but honest and clear about my intentions toward you.”

  “And they would be?”

  “Would be…?” Ramsey asked, not understanding her question.

  “She wants to know what you intend to do with her,” Luke said. “Marry her or set her up in a shop, as Sara’s new boyfriend wants to do with her.”

  Ramsey turned to glare at Luke. “This whole thing is your fault. Why didn’t you tell her you were married?”

  “Never came up,” Luke said, then looked at Joce. “You have any beer?”

  “Not for you, I don’t,” Jocelyn said sweetly. “Why don’t you ask your wife? Or does she just send you checks so you can live well but take on menial jobs?”

  Luke’s face turned red with anger, but Ramsey grinned. “She’s got your number. Why don’t you wait for us outside? Better yet, why don’t you go home and leave us alone?”

  Luke didn’t say a word as he started to get up.

  “Tell me, Ramsey,” Jocelyn said, “was it me or my house you wanted so much?”

  Luke blinked at her a few times, then sat back down.

  “How can you say a thing like that? I’ve liked you since before we even met.”

  “And what a perfect match we’d be. McDowell money with the Harcourt land. I don’t have the name, but I do have the house. I saw all those people you were courting today. Think of how you could entertain them in such style here. You aren’t thinking of running for office, are you?”

  Luke gave a sound in his throat like a chuckle. “She’s got you there.”

  Jocelyn turned blazing eyes on him. “And you took up my time so I wouldn’t meet another man while Ramsey was working. It was all so clever. So very well done.”

  “Joce, it wasn’t like that,” Ramsey began.

  “No? At the second picnic you told me about the letters you’d read with your grandfather. What a touching story. You made it sound as though you’ve been in love with me since I was a child. But of course after that revelation, I didn’t see you again for days.”

  “I think I’ll leave you two alone,” Luke said.

  “Oh, no, you don’t!” Joce said, and he sat back down.

  “Look!” Luke said. “I never misrepresented myself. I’m your gardener, that’s all. My personal life has never been an issue between us.”

  “I’m not even going to dignify that with a reply. Gardeners don’t…don’t take such an interest in their employers as you have in me. You’re just like my father, with his slick talking, his Harleys, and his penchant for girls who don’t know which side of a book to open.”

  “Your…?” Luke said, aghast. “You think I’m like your father?”

  “A photocopy if I ever saw one. And, by the way, your cousin pays your salary.”

  “I know,” Luke said, his face still showing his shock over Jocelyn’s words. “Every week I pad my bill by half.”

  “Why you—” Ramsey began.

  “Out!” Jocelyn said. “I want both of you out of my house this instant, and I don’t want to see either of you…maybe never.”

  “Jocelyn,” Luke said as he tried to recover himself. “I apologize for whatever you think that I’ve done to you, but the garden needs—”

  “Stay out of my garden,” she said. “Don’t come near it or me.”

  “But it needs care. It needs—”

  “I’m sure I can find a high school boy who will mow the lawn.”

  “Jocelyn,” Ramsey said, pleading, “you aren’t being fair to me. I know that your stepsister was a real snake today, and I’m sure you’re upset about it all, but I haven’t done anything to deserve being told to get out of your life. Whatever Luke did to make you think that he was…” Ramsey looked at his cousin. “What the hell have you been doing to make her so angry to find out that you’re married? So help me, if you’ve touched her in any way, I’ll—”

  “I am not property!” Jocelyn shouted as she stood up and glared at both of them. “I am not a piece of land that you two can fight over and eventually win. Or in this case, that one can hold for the other. I am—”

  “Joce, please,” Ramsey said. “If Luke has been too familiar, it’s not my fault, don’t take it out on me.”

  “Why don’t you go to Tess and tell her your problems?”

  When Luke chuckled, Jocelyn glared at him. “And you can go to your wife. Now go! Both of you!”

  15

  JOCELYN LOOKED UP from her desk and stared vacantly out the window. The lawn needed cutting—again—and it looked like some bug was eating those…whatever those bushes were that ran around the side of the house. One morning she could have sworn she heard termites eating the wall, but it turned out to be only Sara and her boyfriend at it—again.

  She looked back down at the slant-top drafting table she’d bought and at her papers. The desk wasn’t what she someday hoped to be able to put in the house, but for now it was what she could afford.

  She’d done a lot in the six weeks since she’d told Ramsey and Luke to get out of her life. First, she’d gone to a bank in Williamsburg and borrowed fifty grand on the house. She figured she needed that much to live on while she did her best to write a biography that she could sell to a publisher. She was tempted to write something about Thomas Jefferson, as all those books seemed to sell, but her heart wasn’t in it. She wanted to write about Miss Edi.

  Jocelyn knew from experience that no publishing house would give an advance to a writer who’d never written a book before, so she’d had to find other ways to support herself while she wrote. To repay the mortgage, she spent her days in Williamsburg researching the eighteenth century for a very successful novelist for a trilogy set during the American Revolutionary War.

  During the evenings and into the night, Joce worked on the book about Miss Edi. Tess had told Joce she didn’t know Luke was married. In fact, Tess said she and Ramsey had had a big fight about it. He told her that what went on in his family was his business.

  Tess swore that if she’d known she would have told Joce. “I hate the way this town hides its dirty little secrets. Someone should have told me—you—us that he was married.”

  Tess’s tone was so angry that Joce felt herself pulling back from her. But Tess got her the key to the attic and Joce had spent days going through every box and trunk. As far as she could tell, everything of value had been removed, and all that was left were thousands of account books. Perhaps someday she could do something with them, but she’d been hoping for a diary where someone admitted killing someone else, and after her bio she could write about it and make millions.

  “So make up your own story,” Tess said. “Kill someone, then figure out who did it and why.”

  It sounded so simple, but in the past whenever Joce had tried to do it, she couldn’t. She liked to read about real events and real people, so that’s what she wanted to write about.

  “Miss Edi!” Tess said, putting her hands over her ears. “I’ve heard so much about that woman that if I saw her ghostly form standing in the doorway, I’d just tell her to go away.”

  “If you see her, please ask her to tell me what to do,” Joce said gloomily.

  It was yet another night that Tess was in Joce’s kitchen making cupcakes. After the party at Viv’s house—The Disaster, as Joce thought of it—Tess had agreed to do the next two catering jobs. Luke’s father, Jim,
said she was the best negotiator he’d ever seen. She didn’t let anyone even suggest what was to be served at their own party. Tess told them what she’d show up with, and her manner was so authoritarian that they just agreed to whatever she said.

  Since then, Tess, with Jim’s help, had catered over a dozen kids’ parties and ladies’ teas. And all the cooking had been done in Joce’s kitchen. While she worked on her book, she saw boxes of wonderously decorated cupcakes and cookies going out her front door.

  As for Sara, a hundred percent of her time was taken up with her new boyfriend and the plans for the dress shop. All Sara talked about was what Greg said, did, thought. “Greg says we should—” seemed to start her every sentence.

  During the day—morning, afternoon, or night—Joce and Tess would hear the sounds of their energetic lovemaking through the walls. At first it had been embarrassing, then laughable. After a couple of weeks it had become so commonplace that all they did was look at each other and say where it was happening. But that ended abruptly one night.

  “Kitchen,” Joce said.

  “No, that’s the pantry,” Tess said.

  Joce listened. “You’re right. Oops. There they go into the living room.”

  “Sara really should let those carpet burns on her knees heal before she goes at it again in there. She—” Tess broke off because she’d looked up to see Jim standing in the doorway, a box of supplies in his hands. He didn’t say anything, just put the box down and left the house.

  Wide-eyed, the two women grabbed drinking glasses and held them to the wall. They knew Jim was going to Sara’s apartment and they wanted to hear what he’d say. But, unfortunately, Jim kept his voice so low they couldn’t make out a word. When he returned to the kitchen, Joce and Tess were busy at the table, their faces looking innocent. Whatever Jim said, they never again heard the sounds of lovemaking coming through the walls.

  Later, Tess said, “I don’t know whether I’m happy at the silence or miserable.”

  “Me either,” Joce agreed.

  For the first two weeks after The Disaster, while Tess baked, Joce wrote letters and e-mails, and made calls. Dr. Brenner’s widow was so happy that Joce was going to write a biography of her husband—Joce gave up trying to tell her the truth—that she sent so many boxes of papers that they filled half a UPS truck. But as Joce went through them, she had to work to stay awake. Dr. Brenner may have been a great physician, but he was a horrible journalist. She would find entries of several deaths on one day, but there was no explanation of how or why. She began sending out more inquiries. She wrote the American embassies of countries where Dr. Brenner had worked. Twice she was told that the official word was that no American doctor had ever worked in their country.

  While she waited, Joce wrote down all she could remember of Miss Edi’s stories of her time with Dr. Brenner. Joce carried a notebook with her and wrote at every possible moment.

  Through all the searching and recording, she thought of Luke. No! she told herself, she thought of the story Luke had read her while she was cooking. Joce had loved hearing about Miss Edi and her David, the jeep driver who she despised but came to love very much. But how did it happen? What put them together in a way that allowed them to fall in love? Joce hoped it wasn’t just proximity and the passions of war. She hoped that they got to know each other, to really and truly love each other.

  She very much wanted to contact Luke’s grandfather and ask for the rest of the story, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She couldn’t believe he’d give her, a stranger, the stories, especially not after the way she’d thrown out his grandson.

  Thinking of the story made Jocelyn Google General Austin. She saw that he’d been decorated many times, and there was mention of a son who’d received the last award for his father posthumously. Joce didn’t think there was much hope that his family would remember a secretary from World War II, but she wrote them a polite inquiry to ask if they’d possibly heard of Miss Edilean Harcourt.

  Four days later, Joce received an enthusiastic e-mail from William “Bill” Austin, the grandson of General Austin, saying that he was writing a biography on his grandfather, and, yes, he knew of Miss Harcourt, but not much. “I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours,” he wrote.

  The problem was that what she’d heard of General Austin was from a story written by Miss Edi and the portrait of the general was so unflattering that she wasn’t sure the man’s grandson would want to hear it. She told him that since what she had was from Miss Edi’s life after the war, it would be of little help to Bill with his biography. However, she asked if she could please see whatever he had on Miss Edi.

  Bill wrote back that there were some letters that mentioned Miss Harcourt, but they hadn’t been transcribed yet so they were still in boxes—and he wasn’t going to let the originals out of his hands. “My transcriber was my ex-girlfriend and I’m either going to have to get a new transcriber—which I can’t afford—or a new girlfriend who can type, or ask my ex to marry me. If I had a three-headed coin I’d flip it.”

  Joce bought some super glue and fastened three quarters—each from a different state—together to form a pyramid and mailed it to him without so much as a note. Two days later she got an e-mail from Bill saying that he and his ex-girlfriend could have bought a house for what her family was shelling out for a wedding. “It’s going to take weeks of my time. And then there’s the honeymoon. My work on the biography has been postponed indefinitely. I don’t know whether to thank you or hate you.”

  “Me neither,” Joce mumbled. She went back to what she could find out about Dr. Brenner. Twice, she hit pay dirt with people who remembered him and Miss Edi. When she found a nurse who’d worked for him, Joce drove to Ohio and spent three days recording what the woman could remember. But she’d only worked for Dr. Brenner for six months and she remembered Miss Edi as being “scary.” “Coldest woman on earth. No heart at all,” she said. Joce had to work hard not to tell the old woman off.

  Now, as Joce looked up from her desk in the office she’d set up in the second parlor, she didn’t know whether to give up or to keep butting her head against a wall.

  “You miss him, don’t you?”

  Quickly, Joce looked down at her papers. “Miss Edi?” she said to Tess, who stood in the open doorway. “Yes, I miss her very much. I just wish people could have seen her as I did.”

  “Not her. Him.”

  “Oh, you mean Ramsey. He’s in Boston. I heard it was because he lost a big case here. I think the name was Berner, something like that, so he needed to drum up some business. But no, I can’t say that I do miss him. We really didn’t spend that much time together. Maybe when he gets back…” Jocelyn shrugged.

  “If you want to lie to yourself, go ahead, but you can’t lie to me. And stop leaving the door open in the hope he’ll show up,” she said as she shut it.

  Joce put her head in her hands. Yes, she missed Luke. She missed him every single minute of every day. She did her best to pretend that she was working too hard to miss anyone, but she wasn’t.

  She missed his laugh, the way he listened, the way he understood whatever she was trying to tell him. The first thing she did in the morning and the last at night was to look out the window. She wanted to see his truck, his tools. She wanted to see him.

  “He is not the man for you,” she whispered. She was not going to be like her mother and run off with some man she’d end up waiting on hand and foot. She wanted a man like Ramsey who’d take care of her.

  But reason didn’t make her miss Luke any less. Even all that Sara told her about Luke and his…his…She could hardly think the word, much less say it. WIFE. Luke was with his wife. Ingrid had been in Edilean for nearly six weeks now, and Jocelyn assumed they were a happy couple. They were probably having a second honeymoon.

  But no matter her good intentions, every time Joce got into her car, her thoughts went to Luke and Ingrid. She tried to direct herself to think about her book, but her mind went d
own its own path.

  Obviously, Luke and his wife had been separated because of her job. Through some discreet questioning, Joce found out that, as far as anyone knew, Luke hadn’t seen his wife in over a year until she showed up with Bell at that hideous party.

  Whatever or however long it had been, it was none of Joce’s business. Luke Connor was just a man she’d known for a few days and had had a few conversations with. That’s all. He was back with his wife now and was probably sublimely happy. She doubted if he even remembered her.

  A noise to her right made her look to the door. Someone had slipped a cream-colored envelope under it. Getting up, she picked up the envelope and saw her name on it. When she opened it, she saw it was an invitation to lunch from Dr. David Aldredge.

  “David Aldredge,” she said out loud. Miss Edi’s first love.

  He was probably the man she most wanted to meet in the world. He’d been pointed out to her at Viv’s party, but she hadn’t had a chance to speak to him. Since the party, she hadn’t had the courage to contact him. The truth was that she’d made an effort to stay away from the people of Edilean. They asked too many questions. They wanted to know what had happened between her and Ramsey, and they even asked about Joce and Luke. “All of you seemed like such good friends,” they’d say, then wait for Jocelyn to tell them every detail of her private life. She’d just smile and walk away.

  But now David Aldredge wanted to meet with her. His e-mail address was on the note, and five minutes later she’d told him yes.

  In Williamsburg the next day, when she got to Dr. Aldredge’s house, she was at first surprised to see that his home was rather small and very close to the one next to it. Maybe because she’d spent so much time in Edilean and Colonial Williamsburg, she’d expected something older, more historical.

  She rang the doorbell, then tried to calm herself while she waited for him to answer. Would he be angry at her for throwing his grandson out of her house? Or was he more interested in the distant past? Would she have to hear some dreadful story about what Miss Edi did to him that made him jump into bed with another woman? He must be near ninety now, so would he be in a wheelchair with an oxygen tube in his nose?