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Lavender Morning
Lavender Morning
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Prologue
HELEN?” ASKED THE person on the other end of the line. “Helen Aldredge?”
If anyone had asked her, Helen would have said that it had been so long since she’d heard Edilean Harcourt’s voice that she wouldn’t have recognized it. But she did. She’d heard those elegant, patrician tones only a few times, but each time had been significant. Because of who the caller was, Helen didn’t point out that her married name was Connor. “Miss Edi? Is that you?”
“What a good memory you have.”
Helen visualized the woman as she remembered her: tall, thin, perfect posture, her dark hair never out of place. Her clothes were always of the finest quality and of a timeless style. She had to be close to ninety now—Helen’s father David’s age. “I had good ancestors,” Helen said, then wanted to bite her tongue. Her father and Miss Edi had once been engaged to marry, but when Edilean returned from World War II, her beloved David was married to Helen’s mother, Mary Alice Welsch. The trauma had been so great that Miss Edi turned the big, old house her family had owned for generations over to her wastrel of a brother, left the town named for her ancestress, and never married. Even today, some of the older people in Edilean spoke of the Great Tragedy—and they still looked at Helen’s mother with cool eyes. What David and Mary Alice had done caused the end of the direct line of the Harcourt family—the founding family. Since Edilean, Virginia, was so near Colonial Williamsburg, losing direct descendants of people who had hobnobbed with George Washington and Thomas Jefferson was a major blow to them.
“Yes, you do have good ancestry,” Miss Edi said without hesitation. “In fact, I’m so sure of your capabilities that I decided to ask you to help me.”
“Help you?” Helen asked cautiously. All her life she’d been told of the feuds and anger that had come about because of what happened in her father’s lifetime. She wasn’t supposed to have heard about it, because everything was talked about in whispers, but Helen had always been a curious person. She’d sat to one side of the porch, played with her dolls, and listened.
“Yes, dear, help,” Miss Edi said in a patronizing way that made Helen blush. “I’m not going to ask you to bake a hundred cookies for the church sale, so you can get that out of your mind.”
“I wasn’t—” Helen started to defend herself, then stopped. She was at the kitchen sink and she could see her husband, James, outside struggling with the new bird feeder. Someone should outlaw retirement for men, she thought for the thousandth time. Without a doubt, James would come in angry about the feeder and she’d have to listen to his tirade. He used to manage hundreds of employees across several states, but now all he had was his wife and grown son to boss around. More than once Helen had gone running to wherever Luke was and asked if she could spend the afternoon with him. Luke would give her that amused look of his and set her to weeding.
“All right,” Helen said, “what can I help you with?” Never mind that she hadn’t spoken to this woman in what? Twenty years?
“I’ve been told that I have less than a year to live and—” She cut off at a sound from Helen. “Please, no sympathy. No one has ever wanted to leave this earth more than I do. I’ve been here much too long. But being told I have a full year left has made me think about what I still need to do in my life.”
At that, Helen smiled. Miss Edi might no longer live in the town named after her great-something grandmother, but she’d made an impact on it. That the town still existed was due to Miss Edi. “You’ve done a lot for Edilean. You’ve—”
“Yes, dear, I know I’ve paid for things and written letters and raised a ruckus when people wanted to take away our homes. I’ve done all that, but that was easy. It just took money and noise. What I haven’t done is right some wrongs that happened when I was a young woman.”
Helen nearly groaned aloud. Here it comes, she thought. The Story. The one about how her mother, Mary Alice, stole Miss Edi’s boyfriend at the end of World War II. Poor Miss Edi. Rotten ol’ Mary Alice. She’d heard it all before. “Yes, I know—”
“No, no,” Miss Edi said, yet again cutting Helen off. “I’m not talking about what your parents did back when the dinosaurs roamed the earth. That’s done with. I’m talking about now, today. What happened then has changed today.”
Frowning, Helen turned away from the sight of her husband kicking the bird feeder, which he couldn’t get to stand upright. “You mean that if my father had married you, quite a few lives would be different,” she said slowly.
“Perhaps,” Miss Edi said, but she sounded amused. “What do you know about the fourteenth of November, 1941?”
“That it was just before the attack on Pearl Harbor?” Helen asked cautiously.
“Then I take it that your eavesdropping when you were a little girl didn’t let you hear everything, did it?”
In spite of herself, Helen laughed. “No, it didn’t. Miss Edi, would you please tell me what this is about? My husband is about to come in for lunch, so I don’t have much time.”
“I want you to come here to Florida to visit me. Think you can bear to be away from your husband for that long?”
“The man is retired. I may move in with you.”
Miss Edi gave a dry little laugh. “All right, but you can’t tell anyone where you’re going or who you’re seeing. I have some things to talk to you about, and we have to figure out how you’re going to do what has to be done. I will, of course, pay for everything. Unless you’re not interested, that is.”
“A free trip? Secrets revealed? I’m very interested. How do we arrange this?”
“I’ll send all the travel information to my house and you can pick it up there. How’s that handsome son of yours?”
Helen hesitated. Should she give the stock answer she gave to everyone else? Hardly anyone knew the full extent of what Luke had been through in the last few years, but Helen thought that, somehow, Miss Edi knew. “He’s recovering slowly. Mostly he hides out in the gardens around town and digs holes. He doesn’t want to talk to anyone about his problems, not even me.”
“How about if I change his life?”
“For good or bad?” Helen asked, but she stood up straighter. Her only child, her son, was in pain, and she didn’t know how to help him.
“For good,” Miss Edi said. “All right, you better go give your husband lunch. Remember that you’re not to tell anyone about me. The tickets should be there tomorrow by ten, so pick them up at the house, then call me. When you get here, I’ll have someone meet you at the airport.”
“All right,” Helen said as the back door opened.
r />
“Damned thing!” she heard James muttering. “I should write the attorney general’s office about that worthless piece of garbage.”
Helen rolled her eyes. “Will do,” she whispered. “I have to go.”
Miss Edi hung up, sat by the telephone, looked at it for a moment, then she used the two canes to get out of the chair. Her legs were causing her so much pain today that she wanted to lie down and never get up. She hobbled to the big box that sat on top of the piano bench and thought of the photos inside and of the full stories of what had happened to all of them so very long ago.
She picked up the thin green book that was their high school senior yearbook. Class of 1937. She didn’t need to open it because she could see all of them in her mind, and she was glad she hadn’t been to Edilean, Virginia, in the last few years. She missed the place, missed the trees and the changing seasons, but what she didn’t like was seeing the aging faces of her friends. Or seeing their names on gravestones. Who would have believed that the last remaining people alive would be her and David and Mary Alice? And Pru—but she didn’t count. Nearly all the others had died, some of them recently, some a ways back. Poor Sara died back in…Edi couldn’t remember the date, but she knew it was a long time ago.
She put the book down and looked at the little box that contained photos of all of them, but she didn’t open it. She was feeling worse than usual today, and she was sure the doctor was wrong. She didn’t have a year left, but she was glad of that. The pain in her old, scarred legs was getting worse. On the days when she did get out of bed, she had to force herself. And when she couldn’t make herself get up, she had that annoyingly cheerful little nurse get her laptop computer, and she spent her whole day on it. What a glorious thing the Internet was! And how very much she could find out through it.
She’d even looked up David’s family and seen that his eldest brother had made it through the war. He’d lived to make a success of a business. Several times she’d come close to calling the family, but the pain she knew she’d feel stopped her. Besides, she doubted if they’d ever heard of her. David was killed just weeks after they met.
As Edi walked toward the kitchen, she thought of Jocelyn. As always, just the thought of the young woman made her pain ease and her mind relax.
It had been Alexander McDowell, the man whose life was at the center of all the secrets and heartache, who’d put Edi together with the young girl.
“Her grandparents, the Scovills, were dear, dear friends of mine,” Alex said, his voice raspy from a lifetime of cigarettes. “Their beautiful daughter Claire was sent to the best schools. At her coming-out party, she had eleven marriage proposals. But she didn’t marry until she was thirty-three, and then she chose the country club’s handyman.”
Miss Edi had been through too much in her life to be a snob. “What was he like as a person?”
“Good to her. Lazy, barely literate, but good to her. They had a daughter named Jocelyn, and just a few years later, beautiful Claire died.”
Maybe it was the name “Claire” or maybe it was that at that time Edi had been at a crossroads in her life. She’d spent her working life traveling with Dr. Brenner. His family’s fortune gave him the freedom to work unpaid, so he’d traveled around the world, helping wherever he was needed. It was said that if a bomb was dropped, Dr. Brenner booked his flight before it exploded. The truth was that Edi did the booking, and she was always with the doctor.
But when he retired, that meant Edi did also. Should she go back to Edilean to live in that big house with her brother, who bored her to death? Or should she live quietly on her pension and savings and maybe write her memoirs—yet another boring prospect?
When Alex McDowell, a man she’d known since they were babies together, offered her a job managing charity funds and looking after the young granddaughter of his friends, Edi accepted.
“I don’t know what the child is like,” Alex said those many years ago. “For all I know, she could have the brains of her father. What I do know is that after her mother died, she lived with her grandparents. After they died, Jocelyn—that’s the girl’s name—was left in the full custody of her father.”
“He doesn’t harm her, does he?” Miss Edi asked quickly.
“No, I’ve had PIs looking in on her, and I’ve had no reports of anything like that, but her father has reverted.”
“Reverted? To what?” Miss Edi asked sharply.
Alex chuckled. “Worse than what you’re imagining. He remarried to a woman with identical twin daughters, and they ride motorcycles together.”
For a second, Miss Edi closed her eyes. The name “Clare” and the image of motorcycles filled her mind.
“…Boca Raton,” Alex was saying.
“Sorry, but I didn’t hear all that.”
“I have a house in the same gated community where young Jocelyn lives with her father and the Steps, as she calls them. One of my detectives talked to her.”
“She talked to a stranger?” Miss Edi snapped.
Again, Alex chuckled. “You haven’t changed, have you? I can assure you that the meeting was well chaperoned. They were at a NASCAR race.”
“A what?”
“Just trust me on this: You’d hate the thing. Edi, what I’m asking is if you’d mind living in Boca Raton. You’d be three houses from Claire’s daughter and watching out for her while you work for me.”
If it had been anyone else, Edi would have checked her enthusiasm, but Alex was an old, trusted friend. “I would love to,” she said. “Truly love to.”
“I thought the warmth of Florida would be good for your legs.”
“Not moving back to Edilean and being looked at with pity for being an old maid will be the best thing for my legs.”
“You, an old maid,” Alex said. “I will always see you as twenty-three and the most beautiful woman in—”
“Stop that or I’ll tell Lissie on you.”
“She loves you as much as I do,” Alex said quickly. “So give me your address and I’ll send you all the particulars.”
“Thank you,” Edi said. “Thank you very much.”
“No,” Alex said, “the thanks are always to you. If it weren’t for you…”
“I know. Give kisses to everyone for me,” she said, then hung up. It was a full moment before her smile nearly cracked her face. She was a great believer in doors opening and closing. The door with Dr. Brenner had closed and a new one had opened.
Now, so many years later, Jocelyn Minton was the love of Miss Edi’s life. The child she didn’t have. The heart of the home she’d missed out on.
Whenever Jocelyn could escape her duties at that little college that worked her half to death but paid her little, she jumped in her car and drove home. After the obligatory visit to her father and stepmother, she’d head straight to Edi’s house. The two of them would embrace, thoroughly glad to see each other. Jocelyn was the only person who wasn’t intimidated by Edi’s stern appearance. She’d hug Edi just as she’d done when she was a child. “My lifesaver,” she called Edi. “Without you I don’t know how I would have survived my childhood.”
Edi knew it was an exaggeration; after all, people didn’t die from a lack of books. They didn’t actually die from being stuck in a house with a father, stepmother, and two stepsisters who thought truck rallies were high society. But there were different ways to die.
The truth was that their meeting had been the best thing that ever happened to both of them. Edi had only lived in the lovely house Alex had bought for four months when she first saw the child with her family. The house they lived in had belonged to Jocelyn’s grandparents, and after her mother’s death it had been willed to the granddaughter. It hadn’t taken much work to find out that what money had been left had been quickly spent.
Miss Edi saw the parents in their leather clothes, their two overly tall twin daughters wearing as little as was legally allowable, then Jocelyn straggling behind them. She usually had a book in her hand and her dishwat
er blonde hair covering her face, but the first time Edi got a good look at her, she saw intelligence in the girl’s deep blue eyes. She wasn’t the beauty that her mother had been—Miss Edi had seen photos—but there was something about her that drew Edi to the child. Maybe it was her square chin with just the tiniest hint of a cleft in it. It reminded her of another square chin that she’d once loved with all her heart. Or maybe it was the way the child seemed to know that she was different from the people she lived with.
At the beginning Miss Edi had twice arranged it so she could speak to the girl. One time was at the library, and they spent thirty minutes discussing the Narnia books, and just as they parted, they introduced themselves. The second time, Miss Edi decided to take a walk that went past the child’s house. She was outside on her bicycle, riding around and around on it. “When I was a child we played hopscotch,” Miss Edi said.
“What’s that?”
“If you have some chalk I’ll show you.”
Miss Edi waited while Jocelyn went inside and got the chalk. Back then, Miss Edi had only needed to use one cane for walking. But all those years of standing up while she took care of Dr. Brenner and his team had further damaged the muscles in her legs, and she knew that it wouldn’t be long before she was forced to use two canes, then a walker, then…She didn’t like to think about those things.
She felt someone watching her and turned to see Jocelyn’s father. He was wearing what she’d known as a “skivvy shirt,” something men in her generation kept covered. He seemed to have tattoos all over his body and he hadn’t shaved for days. He was working on a blue motorcycle and constantly turning the handle to make it sound louder. The neighbors had quit complaining, but not because he was a homeowner in the restricted community. If that was all he was, they would have thrown him out. But Gary Minton was still the handyman, the one who came in the middle of the night when the toilet overflowed and flooded the bathroom. He’d also pulled a child off the bottom of a swimming pool, and climbed a tree to get a terrified little boy down. All in all, the noise of a few motorcycles was easy to put up with.