Edi had a moment of feeling guilty. Perhaps the reason General Austin had sent Sergeant Clare with her was because the young man had been injured.
“You were wounded?” she asked from behind her menu.
“Yeah, by your damned general!” David muttered. “Think the potatoes are any good here?”
Since the menu was mostly dishes made with potatoes, Edi didn’t bother answering him. She looked for the woman to take their orders but she was nowhere to be seen. “I think I’ll…” Edi broke off, not wanting to say that she was going to the restroom.
“Go on, I’ll order for you,” he said in a way that was nearly a growl. “Unless you want something other than potatoes.”
Edi had been around General Austin enough to know when a man was looking for a rousing good argument, and if Sergeant Clare didn’t stop speaking to her in that tone, she was going to give it to him. It was enough that she was in charge of seeing that they got to their destination and that the magazine was delivered; she didn’t need to put up with a surly man. From her observation, if Sergeant Clare wasn’t dangerously cocky, he was angry. When she got back to General Austin, she planned to tell him in detail what she thought of this man he’d sent with her.
Edi got up from her chair, picked up her handbag, and started to reach for her satchel, but thought that carrying it to the restroom would draw too much attention to it. She didn’t think that Sergeant Clare had been told anything and she wanted it to stay that way.
She took a while in the restroom. It was a home bathroom, with rose-printed curtains and pretty little soaps in a glass jar. This room, so very lovely, was why she got away from London and the soldiers and everything that reminded her of war as often as she could. She took her time washing her face, applying fresh lipstick, then taking her hair down, recombing it, and pulling it back again.
When she got back to the table, the food was there, and it was delicious. There were huge, fluffy potatoes slathered in homemade butter, some beef that had been cooked for hours so it was tender, and some green beans that had probably been taken from the garden that morning.
Neither she nor the sergeant spoke much, just a couple of comments on the rain, which seemed to be about to stop.
After lunch, as Sergeant Clare limped back to the car and again held open the front passenger door for her, he said, “It would be nice if you sat in front so you could give me directions.” Again she ignored him as she opened the back door and got in. “One thing I can say about you is that you don’t give in easily, do you?” he said as he got into the car, again struggling with his left leg, which seemed to be stiff.
“Would you please get back on the road? We need to make a turn in about three miles.”
“Are you ready to tell me where we’re going and what we’re doing?”
“General Austin wants me to offer my condolences to the widow of a friend of his.”
“Yeah, I heard all that,” he said. Just then, the sky seemed to open up and the rain started coming down hard. David turned on the windshield wipers, but they didn’t work very well. The rain was so loud that he had to shout to be heard. “Do you know this road where we’re supposed to turn?”
She started to say that she didn’t, but she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. “I have a map and it—”
“So you know nothing,” he said loudly as he used his shirtsleeve to wipe the fog off the inside of the window. “Maybe we should pull over and wait this out. This car isn’t the best for these roads.”
“No,” Edi said from the backseat. “We need to get to—” She almost said “Dr. Jellicoe’s” but caught herself. The car lurched as it hit a pothole, then slipped a few feet.
“I really think we should pull over,” David said. “I can’t see where I’m going.”
“Then we’ll walk if we have to,” Edi snapped. What was wrong with the man if he let a little rain bother him? She picked up her leather satchel off the seat and opened it to reassure herself about the magazine. If anything happened, she didn’t want it to get wet. Whatever was inside it had to be preserved at all costs.
But when she opened the case, there was nothing in it but her notebook, two pencils, a pen, and the folded map. In disbelief, she pulled everything out onto her lap. There was no magazine. She put the contents back, then started searching the seat. Did the magazine fall out? She got down on her hands and knees and looked under the front seat, on the floor, in the rack in the back.
“What the hell are you doing?” Sergeant Clare yelled over the sound of the rain.
She leaned forward, her mouth close to his ear. “Where is the magazine?”
“What magazine?”
“The Time magazine!” she shouted at him. “Where is it?”
“What’s wrong with you?” he yelled back, his hand over his ear. “I don’t know what happened to your magazine. You took so long in the bathroom I got bored, so I started reading it. Maybe I left it on the chair, I don’t know. I’ll buy you a new one.”
In all her life, Edi had never panicked, but now she did. “We have to go back!” she screamed. “Now! This minute. Turn this car around and go back. We have to get that magazine!”
“Calm down—” David began, but then he saw her face and muttered an obscenity under his breath. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me it was important?”
“It’s not your job to know anything!” she screamed at him. If he weren’t driving the car, she would have put her hands around his neck and squeezed. “I knew you were incompetent. I begged the general to give me someone else, but, no, he had to send me with you. So help me, when we get out of this—if we do—I’m going to recommend that you be court-martialed.”
“You want to sit back and hold on?” David said in a voice that let her know he was as angry as she was. In the next minute he slammed the car around in a circle that sent them skidding on the muddy, slick road. The old car almost conked out, but it gave a couple of coughs, then kept moving. David gunned it and it slid from one side of the road to the next, but he kept it under control and finally straightened it out.
In the back, Edi was slammed against one side of the car, then the other. She tried to grab on to the armrests, but when she’d get near one, the car would turn the other way and she’d miss it. Her head hit the door twice, and half the bobby pins in her hair came out then flew about the car, one of them just missing her eye.
In a tidal wave of gravel, David stopped the car in front of the little cottage where they’d eaten lunch. “Wait here and I’ll—”
“Go to hell!” she said as she got out of the car into the driving rain.
There was a CLOSED sign on the window and the door was locked, but Edi started pounding and yelling over the rain. David started to say something to her, but then hobbled toward the back of the house to find another door. He was back minutes later.
“Anything?” she shouted, the rain running down her face; her clothes were drenched, her hair straggling about her face.
“Nothing. The place is locked up.”
“There has to be something we can do,” Edi said. “Break the window.”
“What?”
“Break it down. Get inside. Look for the bloody magazine!”
“If this is supposed to be a secret,” he shouted, “that will expose it.”
“Do you have a better idea?” she yelled back.
“Yeah, we could—”
David didn’t say anything more because the front door opened, and Mrs. Pettigrew peeped out.
“Come in,” she said. “You’re soaking.”
Edi practically pushed David aside as she went into the restaurant. “Did you see a magazine?” she blurted out.
“Oh, yes, the Time. We don’t see them much around here. It was nice to see about the Cavendishes and the—”
“Where is it?” Edi asked, her question a demand.
David stepped in front of her. “What she means is that she promised the magazine to her uncle and it was my fault it was left
behind. Do you have it?”
“Sorry, but I don’t,” Mrs. Pettigrew said, smiling. “But I have some very nice issues of Country Life. Maybe your uncle would like a couple of those.”
“No,” David said before Edi could speak. “That magazine has an article in it about her cousin and she needs that issue.”
“Oh, well, then, I think that Mr. Farquar has some old Time magazines. Maybe he has that issue.”
“We want that magazine,” Edi said, her teeth clenched. “What happened to it?”
“Aggie took it.”
“Aggie took it,” Edi said in barely a whisper.
“Aggie Trumbull. She works for me two days a week. I can’t afford to pay her much, but I let her keep bits and pieces that the guests leave behind.” She looked at Edi in reproach. “Like old magazines. Usually, people don’t mind.”
David put his arm out, as though to keep Edi from attacking the woman. “So where can we find this Aggie?”
“She goes home where she lives with her grandfather. If you come back in three days, she’ll be here and we can ask her about the magazine. I’m sure she took it for her old grandfather. He loves to read.”
“Three days,” Edi said. “Three days?”
“Maybe we could go to her grandfather and get the magazine ourselves,” David said. “Could you tell us where he lives?”
“Three villages over,” Mrs. Pettigrew said, “but in this rain you’ll never make it in a car. The bridge goes out at half this much rain, and at this time of year the river will be flooded. No, you’d better stay here for a couple of nights and wait. I could put you up. Do you want one room or two?”
Again, David stepped between Edi and the woman. “No, we won’t be needing any rooms, but maybe you could draw us a map of the way to Aggie’s grandfather’s house. And if it wouldn’t be too much trouble maybe you could pack some lunches for us.”
“It’s past time for lunch,” she said, looking as though she wasn’t going to move.
“Tea, supper, and something for breakfast,” Edi said coldly. “We’ll buy all the food you have. Now will you draw us a map?”
“I’d be happy to,” Mrs. Pettigrew said. “And it’ll just take me a minute or two to fix you a few boxed meals.” She left the room.
Edi gave David a look like she wanted to murder him.
“Don’t look at me like that. This is your fault for not telling me what was going on,” he said under his breath so he wouldn’t be heard. “If you’d told me that that blasted magazine held some kind of secret, I would have—”
“What, Sergeant Clare? Not gone snooping in my bag and stolen it, then left my private property on a chair so someone else could steal it? If the safety of our countries depended on you we’d have lost this war years ago.”
“If you weren’t such an uptight snob who thought she knew everything and no one else in the world had a brain, we wouldn’t be here now.”
“Snob? You call taking care of Top Secret information snobbery? Is that what you’re labeling it?”
“Top Secret? Since when does a secretary have Top Secret security clearance?”
“When it is necessary.”
“To console some widow? There are thousands of widows right now and they—” Halting, he looked at her. “There is no widow, is there? This is something altogether different, and neither you nor that loudmouthed general you kiss up to told me anything. Damn you!” he said. “You’re talking something dangerous, aren’t you?”
“It’s none of your business what’s going on. You’re just the driver.”
“And you’re just the secretary!” he said, his face nearly touching hers.
“Oh, dear,” came the woman’s voice from the doorway. “I’m afraid I’ve caused a bit of a tiff between you two. That’ll be ten pounds six,” she said.
“Ten pounds?” Edi said, aghast. It was an enormous amount of money. “I don’t think—”
“I think that’s fine,” David said, getting out his wallet. “Could I have the map now?”
“Of course, dear,” she said, not looking at Edi. She handed him a folded piece of paper, and he took it without looking at it.
“I’d help you out with the boxes but it’s a bit damp out there, so…” She trailed off, then left the room.
On one of the tables were six large white boxes, each tied with string for handles. “I think she did this on purpose,” Edi said, “and I think she had these ready and waiting for dumb Americans to come back and pay a king’s ransom for them. Give me the map.”
“Not in this lifetime,” David said as he picked up four of the boxes. He reached for the other two, but Edi took them.
“I want the map now.”
“No,” he said as he opened the front door and ran out. He tossed the boxes in the backseat of the car, then held open the front passenger door for Edi. It was raining so hard she could barely see the car and she didn’t want to take the time to fight with him. Besides, she wanted that map.
She got into the passenger seat, put the boxes in the back, then waited for him to get in the car. He put his stiff left leg in, then had to twist his whole body to get his other leg in.
She pulled a handkerchief from her handbag and wiped her face. “What happened to your leg? Did you shoot yourself?”
“You know, if you weren’t a girl, I’d—”
“You’d what?” she asked, her eyes narrowed at him.
“Don’t use that tone with me and don’t tempt me.” He slammed the door, then spent the next ten minutes trying to get the old car to start.
“I thought you could fix any mechanical engine.”
“I was given this piece of junk this morning. I didn’t even get to see the motor.” When it started, he gave a sigh of relief and turned out of the parking lot.
“So let me see the map,” Edi said, and David reached inside his shirt and pulled it out. It was damp, but the ink hadn’t run.
“Ten pounds for this,” she said in disgust. “It says you go to the church, turn right, then keep going until you reach Hamish Trumbulls’s farm. That seems easy enough that even you can do it.”
David gave her a look that told her she was treading on thin ice with him and she’d better watch out.
18
WELL,” JOCELYN SAID when she’d finished reading. Between them, she and Luke had eaten nearly everything in the basket, plus Luke had eaten a large serving of pot roast. “Not a great way for love to start, is it?”
“Sounds all right to me,” Luke said. He was stretched out on the cloth, his hands behind his head. “What else do you want?”
“I don’t know, a meeting of the minds. I guess I thought that Miss Edi and her David looked across a room, their eyes met, and they were in love. Instant and without any doubt to it. I thought that they’d go out to dinner and talk, and find out that they were exactly alike in everything. But this man…”
“This man, what?”
“He doesn’t sound like her…I don’t know how to say it without sounding like a snob. He doesn’t seem like her type. She’s educated, from a long lineage of, well, society, but this man is…”
“What? Like the gardener and the lady of the manor?”
“Are you going to start on me again?”
“I’d like to,” he said softly as he gave her a look up and down.
She couldn’t help herself as she moved toward him, but he rolled away and got to his feet.
“There’s something bothering me about this story,” Luke said as he picked up his shovel again.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, but something about all of it is puzzling me. Uncle Alex and Miss Edi, you meeting Miss Edi, everything. Something about it keeps going ’round and ’round in my head, and it always seems like we’re missing something.”
“I don’t see any mystery,” Joce said. “My grandparents and Alexander McDowell were friends, that’s why he bought that house in Boca and that’s why Miss Edi moved there.
“I guess,” Luke said, “but there’s something odd about it all. Alex McDowell didn’t make friends. He was grumpy and he liked to work. And you know what Edilean is like. Everybody knows everything. The last time I had to play golf with my grandfather I asked him when and where Uncle Alex had made friends with your grandparents, and Gramps said that to his knowledge Alex rarely left town.”
“What about World War II?” Joce asked. “My grandfather manufactured helmets and he traveled to Europe several times. Maybe they met then.”
“Uncle Alex didn’t go to the war. He had some disability that kept him out of it, so he stayed in the U.S. and moved money around.”
“He was a banker?” Joce said, but Luke didn’t answer her. He was concentrating on his digging. She began to clean up the picnic, and she put the precious story on top of the basket. “I’m going to type this.”
“Computer got a battery?” Luke asked.
“Sure, it—” She smiled. “Okay, I’ll bring it out here.” As she stood up, she noticed that there were some plants in a cardboard box in the back of Luke’s truck. “What are those?”
“Some things I dug up here and there. There used to be a lot of cultivated gardens around here, and some of the plants have survived.”
To her, all of them looked like weeds. “So if you’re just walking around and you see a plant, you know what it is and how to dig it up so you don’t kill it?”
“Yeah,” he said, seeming to be amused by her question.
“I’ll be back in a few minutes,” she said, smiling, but he seemed to be so preoccupied that he didn’t notice.
The minute Jocelyn got to the house and closed the door behind her, Luke opened his cell phone and called his grandfather.
“Hey! Luke!” Dr. Dave said, “I just made a hole in one.”
“Congratulations,” Luke said quickly. “Mind if I come over tonight? I want to talk to you about something.”
“About my lie to Jocelyn about part two having the car wreck in it?”
“No,” Luke said slowly, “she didn’t mention that particular lie to me. This is about something else. Who knows the most about what Uncle Alex was up to?”