Wild Orchids Read online

  Russell smiled at me in a way that made me want to lie down on my back and open my arms to him.

  “You’re good for my ego, Miss Maxwell.”

  “Jackie,” I said, trying to stay upright. I made myself look back at the camera. “Okay, I’ll keep your secrets but I need to know all of them.” I was trying to be lighthearted, sophisticated even. I fiddled with the zoom lens, making it go in and out, then flipped the switch to screen view and looked at the few photos he’d taken. All landscapes, all perfect.

  After a while he looked back at the roses and I relaxed.

  “I wrote a bad review of one of Dessie’s shows,” he said. “I earn a little money on the side from writing reviews, and I wrote an honest opinion, but no one in Cole Creek has ever forgiven me.”

  I didn’t do a little dance of joy, but I wanted to. It was, of course, downright mean-spirited of me to want Dessie to get a bad review, but still…

  “That’s it? The town dislikes you because you gave a bad review to one of its citizens?” I asked, looking up at him.

  He gave me a little one-sided smile that nearly made my socks curl off my feet. If I were in a Disney film, bluebirds would have flown down and plucked at my silk gown.

  “That and the fact that I’m an outsider who knows they crushed a woman to death,” he said.

  I nearly dropped the camera. If I’d fallen off a cliff I probably would have held whatever camera I had protectively to me, but what Russell said nearly made me drop that beautiful instrument.

  “Shocked?” he asked, looking at me hard, but all I could do was nod. “Shocked at what I said or shocked that I know?”

  “Know,” I said, and my voice was so hoarse I had to clear it.

  He seemed to study me for a moment before he finally looked away. “Let me guess. Newcombe got wind of the story somehow, but when he asked questions, no one in Cole Creek knew anything about it.”

  I was ready to run away with this man, certainly to have a mad affair with him, but I wasn’t ready to reveal what I’d found out since I’d arrived in this town. If I did that, I might slip and start telling him about my visions and that I remembered too many things. I decided to say as little as possible about what I knew.

  “Exactly,” I said. “Miss Essie Lee.”

  Russell smiled. “Ah, yes. The inimitable Miss Essie Lee. She was there, you know. She heaped stones on that poor woman.”

  I tried to stay calm. I’d read newspaper accounts of horrible things happening, hadn’t I? But my stomach lurched at the thought of having been near someone who had done such a vile thing. “Was anyone prosecuted?” I managed to ask.

  “No. Everything was hushed up.”

  I asked the question that Ford loved so much:“Why? Why would they do such a thing?”

  Russell shrugged. “Jealousy would be my guess. Amarisa was loved by many people—and hated by a few.”

  “Amarisa?” I asked.

  “The woman who was crushed. I met her when I was just a kid and I thought she was very nice. She…Are you sure you want to hear this?”

  “Yes,” I said. I set down the camera, drew my knees to my chest, and prepared to listen.

  “Amarisa’s brother, Reece Landreth, came to Cole Creek to run a small factory that made pottery. There’s a lot of good clay around here and tourists were coming into the area so I guess the owners thought it would be a good business to get into. Reece opened the factory and hired some locals to work in it. The trouble came about because the prettiest girl in town was a Cole—”

  “One of the founding families.”

  “Yes,” Russell said. “Harriet Cole. She was young and beautiful, and Edward Belcher wanted to marry her. I remember him, too. He was a pompous bore. But Ms. Cole wanted to get out of Cole Creek, so she latched onto a man who was free to move around.”

  “The young and handsome potter.”

  He was silent for a moment. “Did I mention ‘young and handsome’?”

  “Must have heard it somewhere,” I mumbled, cursing myself for giving too much away.

  “Anyway,” he said, “the problem was that after Harriet and Reece were married, he found out she was the town bitch, and she made his life hell. The irony was that she’d married him to get away from Cole Creek, but afterward she refused to leave her parents. By the time poor Reece found out his wife wouldn’t leave the town, they had a daughter he was mad about, so he was trapped.”

  I didn’t say anything. There was no reason whatever for me to believe that I was that daughter. Because my memories fit the story exactly wasn’t enough evidence. “How did Reece’s sister, Amarisa, fit into all this?” I asked.

  “Her husband had died and left her well off, but she was alone, so when her brother asked her to move to Cole Creek, she gladly accepted. I remember hearing my mother—who despised Harriet Cole—say that Amarisa knew her brother was in trouble so his rich sister came to Cole Creek to bail him out. And it was true that by the time Amarisa got here, the pottery works had gone out of business and Reece was working for his father-in-law. My mother used to say that Reece worked fourteen hours a day, but old Abraham Cole stole all the profits.”

  “So Amarisa saved her brother,” I said.

  “Yes. Amarisa supported her brother and his little family.” Pausing for a moment, Russell looked at me. “But the problem wasn’t money. The problem was that everyone in town liked Amarisa. She was a lovely woman. She listened to people and, as a result, they told her their secrets.”

  When he didn’t say any more, I looked at him. “Do you think she knew too many secrets?”

  Russell began to clear away the food. “I don’t know exactly what happened, but I do remember hearing my mother say that people in Cole Creek were jealous of Amarisa and it was causing problems.”

  “So they killed her out of jealousy,” I said. Even if I didn’t know the details, I could imagine the strong emotions.

  “That’s what my mother said,” Russell said. “One night she was crying hysterically, ‘They killed her! They killed her!’ I was in bed pretending to be asleep but I heard it all. The next day my father put my mother and me in the car and we left our home, never to return.”

  I felt a tightening of my skin. I had a kinship with this man. I, too, had been bundled up and taken away from my home. Only I had also been taken away from my mother. Had she been Harriet Cole, the “town bitch”?

  “But you came back to Cole Creek for visits.”

  “After my mother died when I was eleven,” Russell said softly, “my dad and I returned here for visits. Not often and we never stayed in the old house. I don’t know why. Maybe it had too many memories for him. I do know that my mother was never the same after that night when she came home crying.” He was silent for a moment, and when he looked at me, his eyes were dark with pain. “I think that on that night they killed my mother as well as Amarisa. It just took my mother longer to die.”

  We sat in an intimate silence for a while, and I’m not sure what would have happened if it hadn’t started raining. Never in my life had I met anyone who’d been through what I had. I’d been younger than Russell when I’d “lost” my mother, but we shared the trauma of having been whisked away from everything we knew.

  But perhaps what really bound us together was that maybe we had been through the same tragedy. Maybe Amarisa’s death—murder—had disrupted both our lives.

  We sat on the tablecloth, watching the fading light on the roses, saying nothing, thinking our own thoughts, but when the first raindrops fell, we went into action. Protect the equipment! was an unspoken command. I grabbed my yellow poncho out of my bag as Russell grabbed a blue one out of his. We tossed the big ponchos over our heads and clutched our precious equipment to our bosoms.

  When we looked out the head holes and saw each other, we began to laugh. The canvas bag containing what was left of the food (not much) was in the rain, and Russell had a jacket slung across the bench—but our camera equipment was safe and dry.