Lavender Lies

by Susan Wittig Albert

  Wanda stared at me, taking this in. Her face showed her inner struggle: She was hopeful, then afraid to hope, by turns. Finally, hope won out. “It might work. It’s got to work!” She leaned forward eagerly. “Oh, thank you, China. You can’t know how much this means to—”

  I held up my hand. “Hang on,” I said. “Before I put my friend to work, I want to know where you were on Sunday night.”

  She gave me a blank look. “Sunday night? Why, I was home. With my husband.”

  “From when to when?”

  “All day, actually. Our son and his wife were supposed to come for dinner, but I was feeling pretty down about this whole thing, so I called them and canceled.” She frowned, realized why I was asking, and sucked in her breath. “You want to know if I killed him, huh? Well, let me tell you, if I’d had a gun, I certainly would have considered it.”

  “Where were you this morning?”

  Her mouth tightened. “This morning?” she asked suspiciously. “Why do you want to know?”

  I gave her a big smile. “I’d like to feel I’m getting a little something in return for my phone call to my friend in San Antonio.”

  “No, I mean, what’s it to you? Why are you so interested in the Colemans?”

  I remembered an old line that Perry Mason used when he moonlighted as a detective. “Let’s just say that I’m acting as a friend of the court.”

  She thought about that and decided that it sounded right. “Well, anyway,” she said sullenly, “I don’t have anything to hide. I was in the office this morning. I had a lot of stuff to deal with.”

  “Can anybody verify that?”

  Her jaw was working back and forth as if she were gritting her teeth. Her nose was twitching. “Quent was with me most of the time. We were going over the books.”

  By now, it was pretty plain that Wanda hadn’t had anything to do with Letty’s death. But it wouldn’t hurt to push her a little. “Where is Quent?” I asked. “Just in case he’s needed to confirm your statement.”

  Wanda put her hand to her nose. “He’s not here. He won’t be back.” She swallowed hard. “He got another job, in Houston.”

  “In Houston!” I said, shocked. “But why?”

  “Because I don’t have the money to pay his salary.” Wanda began to cry. “I had to let him go.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  There are many folk traditions for the protection of small children. For instance, a cross made from lavender, or a bundle of lavender, rosemary, and dill, might be hung in the cradle to keep the infant from being carried off by witches. Peony root was carved into beads and hung around the neck to protect against evil, or a child might be given a bracelet of cloves strung on a red thread to repulse the devil. An amulet containing mistletoe, holly, and hazelnuts protected against lightning and sudden storms.

  “The Meaning of Lavender,” by China Bayles

  The Pecan Springs Enterprise

  Home and Garden Section

  From time to time, I have enjoyed poking fun at Wanda Rathbottom, whose efforts to comer the nursery trade in Pecan Springs have often seemed intemperate. But now that I’ve heard her story, it won’t be so easy to be sarcastic. As I drove back along Redbud Road, I kept thinking of how tough it was going to be for her without Quent, who had single-handedly transformed Wonderful Acres into a fine nursery. Chalk one more disaster up to Edgar Coleman. I used my cell phone to put in a call to the Whiz and left a message on her answering machine. If anybody could force Shepherd to honor his contract with Wanda, it was Justine Wyzinski. The money wouldn’t bring Quent back, but it might keep Wonderful Acres afloat a little longer.

  Back at Thyme and Seasons, everything seemed pretty normal. Business had picked up while I was gone, and we’d had a respectable afternoon. Laurel reported that a quartet of wandering tourists had come in, browsed for a half-hour, and gone away with a stack of books, some gift items, and a selection of essential oils, leaving a nice bit of cash behind. I was momentarily sorry that the tearoom wasn’t open yet—they might have left even more cash. Not to be greedy, of course, but I am in business to make a profit.

  “Remember the woman who was here this morning?” Laurel asked, when she had finished telling me the news. “The one who left you the note I couldn’t find?” She took the clip out of her hair and shook her head, brown hair rippling down her back.

  I picked up the mail. “Uh-huh,” I said, leafing through it. There wasn’t much—severat mail orders, a couple of invoices, a newsletter from the International Herb Association, and an envelope with an Indiana return address. “Did you find the note she left?” I asked absently, studying the envelope.

  “No,” Laurel replied, pulling her hair back and clipping it into another ponytail. “I didn’t have time to look. But she’s out in the garden. She wants to talk to you.”

  “What about?” I opened the envelope. There was a typed letter inside. It was from Harold Tucker, our absentee landlord.

  “She says it’s personal.” Laurel paused, frowning a little. “Actually, today isn’t the first time I’ve seen her. She’s been here a time or two, although I think mostly she just walked around the garden.”

  Still holding the letter, I looked up at the clock. The visit with Wanda had taken longer than I’d thought, and it was nearly four-fifteen. “I won’t have long to talk to her,” I said. “Sheila will be here in a few minutes. We’re going to see Iris Powell.”

  “That reminds me,” Laurel said. “Sheila phoned to confirm. Your mother called too. She got the recipe for the cake, and she was on her way to the grocery to pick up supplies. She sounded excited.”

  “I’m excited too,” I said. I folded the letter without reading it, stuffed it back in the envelope, and stuck it at the back of the stack. Harold Tucker could go fly a kite. He was not getting his house back before the first of January. And that, by damn, was that.

  “Ruby is very excited,” Laurel said significantly. “She got her outfit for the wedding this afternoon.”

  I handed the mail to Laurel. “A couple of these look like orders. If you get time, you could process them.” I paused. “I didn’t know Ruby went shopping today.”

  “She didn’t. The outfit came in the mail. From one of those weird catalogs she buys from. Sexy Secrets, I think it was called.”

  “Oh, God,” I said. Ruby buys her clothes from two places, the vintage shop in the Emporium next door and catalogs, some of which offer very odd items. Some of Ruby’s most exotic clothing comes from catalogs.

  “Right.” Laurel’s expression was grim. “I wouldn’t be the one to tell her so, but the outfit looks like a nightgown. All she’d need is a retinue of slave girls and some palm fans and she could go as the Queen of Sheba. One good thing, though,” she added with a little laugh, “you won’t have to worry about people finding fault with your wedding dress. They’ll be too busy criticizing Ruby.” She stopped. “And then there’s Josephine.”

  Josephine? I frowned. “Who’s Josephine?” Then I remembered. “Oh, yes. The tropical storm.”

  “Not any longer,” Laurel said. “They’ve promoted her to a hurricane. She’s still way out in the Gulf and doesn’t show any sign of going anywhere special. But there’s a high pressure ridge to the north, and the steering winds are likely to send her in our direction. She’s getting stronger, too. They say she might be Force Three when she hits the coast.”

  “It figures,” I said. “This is shaping up to be the wildest wedding Pecan Springs has ever seen. The groom may or may not show up, the bride’s mother is baking the cake, and the matron of honor plans to come as the Queen of Sheba. What the hell. Get out the umbrellas. We’ll have a hurricane party instead.”

  The woman was waiting for me on the stone bench beside the fountain, in the shade of a chaste tree. A breeze swayed the fragrant blue blossoms, but the afternoon was still much too hot for the navy blue suit she had on, and she was perspiring. She wore her sandy-red hair in a tidy page-boy cut. When she turned her head s
harply at my footsteps, her hair swung away and I saw that the right side of her face had been extensively reconstructed, with only partial success. I had automatically taken the hand she held out before I realized, with a start, that it was a prosthetic. But she stood and smiled with the poised assurance of a professional woman who is used to meeting and dealing with people on her own terms, and handed me a business card that said she was Rachel Lang, a psychologist who specialized in counseling women and girls, from Orlando, Florida.

  I pocketed the card, on which she had written a local phone number. “What can I do for you, Ms. Lang?”

  By any stretch of the imagination, the woman was definitely not pretty. The reconstruction had left her face scarred and misshapen, her nose was oddly chunky, and her right shoulder drooped. But her clear gray eyes met mine steadily and her voice was low-pitched and deliberate.

  “You can help me reconnect with my daughter, Elena,” she said.

  Of all the things the woman might have asked me, this was the least expected. “Your ... daughter?”

  “Yes,” she said. “She was abducted eleven years ago. I’d like to tell you my story, if you have the time.”

  I looked at my watch. “I have a few minutes.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “I’ll be brief. At the time Elena was taken, I was serving a prison term for tax fraud. The court had granted temporary custody of Elena to my mother. The child’s father, Jim Carlson, took her out one afternoon and never brought her back. My mother called the police, but they couldn’t or wouldn’t do anything. The shock of it nearly killed her then, and she died of a heart attack six months later.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I was also surprised, because while there was a resonant tone of deep feeling in Rachel Lang’s voice, she spoke straightforwardly and factually, with a firm control. This was a woman who knew herself.

  She nodded, accepting my sympathy without comment. “When I was released from prison and began to look for my daughter, the trail was cold. It was as if she had vanished in thin air. Unfortunately, a couple of months after my release, I was involved in a nearly fatal automobile accident. My car was hit head-on by a drunk driver, and I spent most of the next year recovering.” She touched her face with the fingers of her left hand. “As you can see, it involved quite a bit of reconstructive surgery, as well as physical rehabilitation. I wasn’t able to resume the search for another year. Finally, I contacted the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. We did manage to turn up a lead, but by the time I arrived on the scene, Elena and her abductor were gone.”

  Her story was tragic—tragedy heaped on tragedy. But I couldn’t see where I fit into it. “I don’t mean to be insensitive,” I said, “but what in the world makes you think I can help you find your daughter?”

  She smiled crookedly. “You know Elena very well, better than I do, in fact. Last weekend, she worked for you here in your garden. She spends a great deal of time with your son, Brian.”

  “Melissa?” I gasped. “You’re talking about Melissa?”

  “That’s the name her abductor gave her. Her real name is Elena Lorraine Lang.” Beneath the businesslike words, the woman’s voice had grown sad, as if she were still grieving for something precious, something lost. “She was born twelve years ago yesterday, in the Women’s Unit of the Florida State Prison.” She smiled a little. “I’ve been absent from my daughter’s life, but I recall every moment of her birth. It was an incredible, glorious event. I loved her instantly, with every cell of my body.”

  Twelve years ago yesterday. And last night we had celebrated Melissa’s twelfth birthday. I shook my head helplessly. “I ... I don’t know what to say.”

  “I know it’s a surprise,” the woman said, “and I understand that it may be hard to believe. I can provide confirmation of my claims. And of course you are free to contact the Center and check my assertions with the case worker who has been monitoring this search. I can give you her name and the Center’s telephone number. The hot line answers calls twenty-four hours a day.” She opened her purse, holding it with her prosthetic and reaching into it with her left hand. “I can show you Elena’s birth certificate and the custody papers, as well as an age-processed photo that the Center produced. It’s not exactly like her, but pretty close.”

  “An age-progressed photograph?”

  She pulled a large manila envelope out of her purse. “They used a photograph of Elena at eighteen months, just before she was abducted, and a photo of me. They put them together with a software program that creates an image of what she might look like today.” She opened the envelope and took out a photo and some papers. “And here is a ‘To Whom it May Concern’ letter from the Center and my Florida driver’s license.”

  I scanned the papers and the license quickly and lingered over the photograph. It wasn’t perfect, a little off in the chin and eyes, but it was Melissa, with her chunky nose—unmistakably, eerily, her mother’s nose. Looking at the photo, I felt an immediate and sweeping sympathy for the young girl I would love to call my daughter, who had long ago accepted the idea that her own mother was dead. Over the years, she had created a fantasy around that mother, transforming her into a beautiful illusion, a gorgeous princess. How would she cope with the reality of a real mother who was a convicted felon, facially disfigured and partially disabled, who had given birth to her in prison? Melissa might have been better off if this woman had never found her.

  I handed everything back to Lang except the card with the Center’s phone number and the case worker’s name. “Granted that what you’ve told me is true,” I said distantly, “I still don’t know what you want from me. Have you contacted the local police and asked for their help?” I didn’t think she had—surely McQuaid would have called me immediately.

  “Not yet.” Lang put the papers back in her purse. “My first concern is Elena. She is deeply attached to her abductor, and perhaps also to his wife. Emotionally, this could be catastrophic for her, just as she’s entering adolescence. She will need a great deal of support when she learns the truth.” She paused. “I’m not in a great hurry to confront Dr. Jackson—that’s what he’s calling himself. I think the risk of flight is considerably less now than it was when he left Seattle.”

  “Seattle?”

  “Yes. I said that we turned up a lead some time ago. Someone recognized Elena’s picture and phoned the Center. I flew immediately to Seattle, but by the time I got there, they had gone. They didn’t leave any traces.”

  “Melissa said that she lived in Seattle,” I said slowly, remembering last night’s conversation. “She said that was where her dad remarried.” I found myself wondering, somewhat irrelevantly, what was going to happen to Dr. Jackson. He was a very good dentist. It was a damned shame to lose him. And Rachel Lang was right: Melissa loved her father very much. When she found out the truth, she would be devastated. If Jackson was convicted of kidnapping, how would she cope? I doubted if the discovery of her real mother would compensate for the loss of the father she loved.

  I was jolted out of these thoughts. “—not her father,” Rachel Lang was saying.

  “What?”

  “Dr. Jackson is not Elena’s father,” the woman said. She shook her head, smiling a little. “I’m sorry. This is all very complicated. You see—”

  She stopped. We could hear the sound of footsteps on gravel, and we both turned. It was Smart Cookie, cool and self-confident in a lemon-yellow blazer, black blouse, and trim black slacks.

  “Laurel told me you were out here,” she said. She nodded a greeting to Rachel Lang. “I’m sorry to interrupt your conversation, but I think we’d better be going, China. I told Iris Powell we’d be there at a quarter to five, and it’s a fifteen-minute drive.”

  “I’m afraid I have to go, Ms. Lang.” I glanced at the card. “Is this the phone number where you’re staying?”

  “Right. It’s the Pack Saddle Inn.” Her voice became urgent. “I know you’re terribly busy with your wedding plans, but can w
e possibly get together tonight? I would like to tell you the whole story, from beginning to end, so you can better understand what I hope to achieve.” She pressed her lips together and a shadow of sadness crossed her face. “Elena admires you so, Ms. Bayles. I think you may be the only one who can help her. This is going to be so hard for her to understand and accept.”

  “I’ll give you a call later in the evening,” I said. “I can’t promise to see you, though. Things are a little hectic just now.” That was the understatement of the month. Of the year, probably.

  “That’s what your counter-person told me,” the woman said. She held out her hand again, and I took it. “I’ll be at the inn after seven o’clock. Please call. I’ll be glad to drive to your house to see you, if that would be better.”

  Sheila and I said good-bye and left her standing there beside the fountain as we walked down the path. “What was that all about?” Sheila asked, as we neared her car.

  “Her daughter was kidnapped,” I said. “It’s a heartbreaker.”

  “Oh, God,” Sheila said compassionately. “That’s the very worst thing I can think of.” She took out her keys. “Why did she come to you?”

  “Because I know the girl,” I said. “She wants me to help break the news.”

  I waited as Sheila got into her Explorer and reached over to unlock the passenger door. Which was the greater tragedy for Melissa: losing her mother for the first twelve years of her life, or losing the man she loved as her father? Would mother and daughter ever be able to make up for the lost years, or re-create the bond that might have joined them? And what about Dr. Jackson? If he wasn’t Melissa’s father, who was he? Whatever his motivation for taking the child, whatever the joys of raising her, kidnapping is a federal crime and the penalties are severe. What would happen to him?

  I got in beside Sheila and slammed the door. A mother might have found her daughter, the daughter might be restored to the mother. But there were no winners in this sad affair. Only losers, and terrible, terrible losses.