Lavender Morning

by Jude Deveraux

  “I’d say his wife.”

  “Someone who is alive.”

  “I guess that would be me.”

  “Did Uncle Alex leave any diaries?”

  “Diaries are made of paper, and paper costs money,” Dr. Dave said. “Why don’t you come over now and we can play a few rounds together and talk?”

  “As much as I’d like to do that, Joce is bringing her computer outside and she’s going to type the story while I work.”

  “Good. I like that.”

  “Me too,” Luke said. “Listen, I have to go. She’s coming.”

  “So whatever you want to talk to me about tonight is to be kept secret from her?”

  “Add it to the secrets you told her about me and you should have a full load.”

  Dr. Dave was laughing as Luke hung up the phone.

  “You’re frowning,” Joce said, “so whoever you were talking to wasn’t a friend?”

  “Just my grandfather. He and I argue all the time.”

  “Your grandfather who no one got along with was your best buddy, but Dr. Dave, who is beloved by everyone, drives you crazy.”

  “You got it.”

  “So,” she said, “do you think that’s you or them?”

  “Them.”

  “Now why did I know that answer before I asked?” she said as she sat down on the ground and opened her laptop.

  “So how fast do you type?”

  “Very fast, then I spend two hours with the speller as I correct every word because they all have typos. What about you? Can you type?”

  He gave her one of his looks that said he found her amusing, then looked back at the dirt.

  “So what did you talk to your grandfather about?”

  “Nothing important. He wants me to go to their house for dinner tonight.”

  “That sounds nice,” Joce said, then stared at him hard, but he bent his head over the shovel and didn’t look at her. “I haven’t met your grandmother.”

  “Haven’t you?” He went to the truck and got out a digging fork.

  “Is she nice?”

  “Very nice.”

  “I guess she’s a lot different from Miss Edi, isn’t she?”

  “From what I saw, she is, but then I only met Miss Edi once.”

  “Really?” Jocelyn said. “I would have thought that you’d have met her more often than that. Since your grandfather chose another woman over her, I would have thought you would have been very curious about Miss Edi. If it had been me I would have wanted to see—”

  Luke stopped digging. “I can’t ask you to go with me,” he said in exasperation. “I have some…business to talk to my grandfather about and I can’t take you.”

  “I understand,” Jocelyn said, “and I certainly wasn’t hinting that you should take me. I would never in my life think of inviting myself to someone else’s house. I was merely asking about your grandparents. It’s just that I know your father so well and have spent time with your mother, and she’s been so very nice to me, and your grandfather has been wonderful. Did I tell you that he went to The Trellis and got a chocolate cake for our lunch? He—”

  “Seven!” Luke half yelled. “I’ll pick you up at seven. Now will you type and quit nagging me?”

  “Gladly,” Jocelyn said as she put her head down so he wouldn’t see her smile. She had really and truly missed him!

  “What do you think the men are up to?” Mary Alice asked Jocelyn when, after dessert, Luke and his grandfather disappeared into Dr. Dave’s study and were still in there.

  Since she and Luke had arrived, she’d been fascinated with this woman who had married the man Miss Edi had once been engaged to. To Jocelyn’s mind, no one was as great as Miss Edi, but Joce could see the attraction between Dr. Dave and Mary Alice. She was sweet and loving, and it seemed that all she wanted to do in the world was please her husband and grandson. All during dinner, she’d jumped up and down, going to the kitchen often to make sure that everyone had the best she had to offer.

  Physically, she was as different as she could be from Miss Edi. Mary Alice was short, plump, and homey. Miss Edi had been tall, thin, and elegant. Miss Edi looked at home in pearls; Mary Alice would look comfortable in a reindeer sweater.

  “I have no idea,” Jocelyn said. “Luke was strange from—” She broke off from saying that Luke had been acting oddly since she’d read him part two of Miss Edi’s story. It was Joce’s experience that nothing in Edilean faded with age. The people’s faces and bodies might age, but the stories, the secrets, seemed as fresh today as they did fifty years ago. With this in mind, she thought it was better not to mention Miss Edi.

  Instead, she started talking about Luke’s gardening, but when Mary Alice kept darting her eyes away, Jocelyn gave up on that subject as well. Was there some Edilean secret about his gardening? she wondered.

  Later, when they were in Luke’s truck and driving home, Joce asked him what he and his grandfather had talked about for so long.

  “Sorry about leaving you alone, but we had things we needed to talk about.”

  “That’s what I just said. I want to know what you were talking about.”

  “Plants,” Luke said quickly. “He wants to put in a garden and he wants me to do it.”

  “Sure,” she said slowly. “That’s why it was all done in secrecy, because I know nothing about plants so you have to hide it all from me.”

  “We didn’t want to bore you. How’d you get on with my grandmother?”

  “We had absolutely nothing to say to one another and your eyebrow is twitching.”

  Luke put his hand up to his eyebrow, then down again. “All right,” he said with a sigh, “I wanted to talk to Gramps about my doubts about this whole thing. For reasons that you can imagine, I don’t talk to him about Miss Edi in front of Nana. And before you tell me that I could talk to him during the day, might I remind you that I’ve been working and I don’t want to have to spend my days hauling a golf bag around?”

  Jocelyn noticed that the tip of his eyebrow was still twitching. If he was telling the truth, he certainly wasn’t telling all of it.

  Luke and Jocelyn were on a trail into the nature preserve that surrounded Edilean. He was leading; she was following. They both wore day packs that Luke had carefully filled with supplies they would need in case of an emergency, which included a rainstorm.

  It had been two days since they’d been to his grandparents’ house, and they had spent most of each day together. The first day had been for Joce, as she went over everything she’d done with the biography and told Luke how disappointed she was over the boring letters of Dr. Brenner. “I can’t get much out of them. Even on the days when I know that they were shot at, he wrote nothing but a record of how far they traveled that day. He didn’t mention any danger.”

  “Then how do you know they were being shot at?”

  “History and what Miss Edi told me,” Joce said. “And checking dates with the name of the country at that time.”

  “You need to dig deeper,” Luke said. “Someone somewhere knows about this. Have you checked the names of the other people mentioned in the letters?”

  Joce had pulled a piece of paper from the pile on her desk and showed him the names mentioned in Dr. Brenner’s journals.

  “Did they have a guide?”

  “I don’t know,” Joce said, her eyes opening wider. “You know, I think Miss Edi once mentioned a guide. Charles something.”

  “There you go,” Luke said. “Find him. Or find his relatives. There are people who know about them.”

  The next day, she’d spent with him on the herb garden. They had at last gone to the nursery to get the plants, and Luke said he was sending the bill to Ramsey. “Don’t worry, he’s going to deduct every penny off his taxes because it’s an historical garden.”

  “How is he?” Jocelyn asked.

  “You mean the IRS or his accountant?”

  “My husband-to-be, since you’re taken.”

  “Not for long
,” Luke said, smiling at her.

  She wanted to ask him about Ingrid and the annulment and about a lot of personal things, but she didn’t. Instead, she just smiled back and said, “This is pretty. Let’s get some of these.”

  “Modern hybrids. What we want is over there.”

  The plants that Luke liked looked as much like weeds as they did flowers. “Smell this,” he said, holding some gray-green, fuzzy-looking plant in front of her nose.

  “Heavenly.”

  “Your modern hybrids don’t keep the smell. They’re for looks alone, and you can eat few of them.”

  “Not roses. You can smell them and eat them.” She was proud of herself for knowing that.

  “That reminds me. We need to get some species roses.”

  She didn’t know what that meant, but she was learning that if it was a plant that Luke liked, it was sure to have more leaves than flowers. “Species roses.”

  “Yeah. They have great hips in the fall, and you can make jelly from them.”

  “Oh, goody,” Joce muttered as she followed him. “I get to make jelly. I can hardly wait.”

  Today, they were in the preserve, walking along trails that Luke seemed to know well. She’d wanted to get a map of the hiking trails, but he’d told her that he’d been on the trails so often that he could draw a map for her. He was taking her to a place he loved, and there they were going to picnic and read part three of Miss Edi’s story.

  All during the last days, Luke had been on his cell phone often, and he rarely told her who he was talking to. After their evening at his grandparents’ house, Luke seemed to have made some resolve that he wasn’t going to tell Joce anything more, no matter what she did to get information out of him.

  But she could see that something was bothering him and she wanted to know what it was.

  “I don’t know what I want to know, exactly, except that all of this has my radar up,” he said. “Something about it doesn’t ring true, that’s all.”

  “I don’t get what you mean. Miss Edi fell in love with a man who was killed in World War II. What’s so strange about that?”

  “That’s not the strange part,” Luke said. “It’s what happened so many years later. Alex McDowell said he owed Miss Edi for something and wanted to pay her back.”

  “Owed her for what?” Joce asked.

  “It’s no use trying to get that secret out of me because I don’t know it, and no one will tell it to me. Last night I again tried to get Gramps to tell me but he wouldn’t. He said that all I needed to know was that Alex felt that he owed Miss Edi.”

  “So when she retired and had nothing but a small pension to live on, he gave her a house in a warm climate and a job that she was good at. It sounds like he was an honorable man. He repaid the debt.”

  “But why Boca?” Luke asked. “Why not Miami? Or Sarasota? Or somewhere in Arizona?”

  “Why not Weeki Wachee and she could go see the mermaids every day? Why not Boca Raton? It’s a wonderful place. And Alex had friends there.”

  “Yes, your grandparents. I called Ramsey and he said he’d never heard his grandfather mention anyone named Scovill, but then he never heard him mention Miss Edi, so he was no help.”

  “Did he ask about me?”

  Luke gave a little half grin. “I believe he did. And he mentioned my grandfather too, then he said he was coming after both of us with weapons if we—Well, I can’t repeat what he said in front of a lady.”

  “Yet again, I am considered property. From the way people act you’d think that I was to marry Ramsey to fulfill some kind of prophecy.”

  “Maybe just righting what some people see as wrongs. Everyone has always thought that the richest family should marry the one with the oldest name.”

  “But I’m not related to Miss Edi,” Joce said. “I got the house because she had no one else to leave it to.”

  When Luke said nothing, Joce looked at him. “You have something on your mind, don’t you?”

  “I want to see those letters from General Austin to his wife.”

  “Bill Austin’s on his honeymoon, or maybe he’s not even married yet, I don’t know. I do know that he won’t let the letters off the premises.”

  Luke turned around and started walking backward on the trail. “But then the grandson doesn’t own them, does he?”

  “Sure he does. He—” Joce looked up at him. “No, he doesn’t. General Austin’s wife is still alive so she owns them. Do you think you could talk her into sending them?”

  “No, not me, but my grandfather could. He could turn on that bedside manner of his and charm her into anything he wants.”

  “It would certainly be interesting to see what’s in them,” Joce said. “Maybe it’s nothing, but maybe he mentions when Miss Edi came back from her time with David Clare. Hey! Is that water I hear?”

  “Yes. A waterfall and a lake. Icy cold and beautiful.” Luke turned around and kept walking.

  “You know this place well, don’t you.”

  “I spent a lot of time walking here when I was growing up. I think it’s what first made me interested in plants. I used to wander along the trails with a guide to wildflowers in my hand and try to learn the names of all the plants.”

  “What’s this one?” she asked, bending down to a weedy-looking plant with red flowers.

  “Penstemon—and that’s the last I’m doing of that. I’m not a tour guide.”

  “No, you’re a gardener who I’m told doesn’t have to worry about money. You didn’t really take earnings from your model wife, did you?”

  “What do you think?”

  “That you’d live on the street before you did that.”

  “You do know something about me, don’t you?”

  “I’m learning,” she said.

  “And what have you learned so far?” he asked.

  He said it lightly, as though it didn’t matter, but Joce could see the way his shoulders tightened. “That if anyone wants anything from you they have to draw it out. You don’t just sit down and spill your guts to people.”

  “Is that good or bad?” he asked.

  “Good for me,” she said, “because I’m learning how to get ’round you to find out your secrets.”

  He stopped walking and turned to look at her. “You think so, do you?”

  “Oh, yeah. I already know everything there is to know about you. Except for a few small things, that is, like why you’ve never let me see the inside of your house, why you and Ramsey are so competitive, why you didn’t tell me you were married, and what you and your grandfather are really cooking up. Other than those things, I know everything.”

  “And I know that you can nag a man to death to find out what you want to know,” he said, but she could hear the smile in his voice. When he turned off the trail, she followed him. They came to a small waterfall that fed into a stream that went into a lake. It was beautiful and peaceful and it felt as though no one else in the world had ever been there before, but Luke knew just where to put their packs in a little alcove behind some rocks.

  “Been here often, have you?”

  “A million times,” Luke said. “When I was a kid I came here to get away from my father’s expectations and my mother’s constant watchfulness.”

  “You and Ingrid came here?”

  “Never,” he said.

  “Couldn’t find designer boots?”

  “She couldn’t find anyone who wanted to be alone with her on a wilderness trail,” he said softly, looking at Jocelyn.

  It was natural to slip into his arms and to share a kiss. His mouth came down on hers slowly and tentatively at first, then deeper. As his arms tightened on her and his body came closer, she knew that he wanted her. If it had been up to Jocelyn she would have made love there in that beautiful spot, but he pushed her away.

  “I can’t,” he said.

  “That’s not what your body says,” she said, her voice husky.

  “No, I mean, I don’t feel that I have a right. Thi
s thing about the…the marriage. I have to straighten that out first. And us. I want us to know about each other. I want—”

  “Not to make a mistake again,” she said.

  He didn’t say anything, but she knew that’s what he meant. Minutes later, they were stretched out on the ground, the water before them, and he pulled the next part of Miss Edi’s story out of his pack. His grandfather had given it to him last night.

  “Shall I read or you?” he asked.

  She liked his voice and liked that he’d said shall. “You read.” She put her hands behind her head and prepared to listen.

  19

  ENGLAND

  1944

  WITH THE RAIN coming down so hard, it was difficult to even see the bridge. When they did, they both drew in their breaths. The river was high and already running over a bridge that didn’t look like it could hold a bicycle, much less a heavy car.

  “That thing is pre-Columbian art,” David said as he slowed down, wiped the windshield, and stared ahead.

  “Late medieval,” Edi said. “Look at the stone pillars on the side. They—”

  “So help me, if you start giving me a history lecture, I’ll throw you out.”

  She thought he was lying for effect, but she wasn’t absolutely sure, so she said nothing more.

  David put his hand over the back of the seat and reversed the old car. “I’m going to hit that bridge at a run. We’ll either get across it or we’ll skid and go over the side, probably upside down. Are you ready?”

  Edi braced herself and nodded.

  “On second thought, why don’t you get out and wait for me?”

  “If another man impugns my courage I’ll take one of the rifles out of the back and shoot him.”

  David blinked at her. “Rifles in the back,” he said under his breath. “I’m driving an antique tank. I bet this thing was used in Sarajevo.”

  In spite of the situation, Edi gave a bit of a smile. In 1914, World War I was started when Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria and his wife were assassinated in Sarajevo. It looked like that, in contrast to his seeming crassness, Sergeant Clare knew a bit about history.

  She held her breath as he got to the top of a little hill and gunned the motor, then he moved the shift down to low, let up on the clutch while his foot was on the brake, and in the next minute they went toward the old bridge in a dense flurry of mud and water. Edi could see nothing. The windshield was covered in seconds and the wiper blades refused to even try to cut into the mud.