Lavender Morning (36 page)

“Is she nice?”

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“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

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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.”

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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.

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“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.