Lavender Morning Read online

  Ingrid had run back to her husband in the hope that the New York man could pacify his rich, angry wife.

  “Poor Luke,” Jocelyn said as she pulled her hair back into a ponytail, but she couldn’t keep the grin off her face. She could say the words, but she didn’t feel that there was anything “poor” about him at all. Maybe he’d visit today. Maybe he could—

  She paused because she thought she heard something outside. Maybe it was a truck, but when she looked out the window, it was only Greg, Sara’s boyfriend. No doubt they were going to work on the dress shop today. True to what Sara had told them about him, he seemed to have a bottomless bank account, and he’d bought the used-furniture store on the corner McDowell Street and Lairdton, diagonally from the Great Oak, as Joce had found out that it was called.

  As she looked down at Sara and Greg from her bedroom window, Joce had to work not to envy them—and to wonder if she’d been an idiot. When she’d arrived in town, two men had come into her life, but she’d thrown them both out—and they’d made no effort to get back into her good graces.

  “So much for an ‘ardent courtship,’” she said aloud.

  Downstairs, the kitchen was empty, as it was Monday morning and Tess wasn’t catering a party. Joce didn’t know how she did it. She was working full-time plus catering as many as four parties on the weekends. Of course Jim was there helping her, but it was still a lot to do.

  Joce had some milk and a bran muffin, then went to her desk to start work, although it was becoming more frustrating with each day. She was tempted to e-mail Bill Austin and ask if she could visit him and make photocopies of the letters his grandfather had sent about Miss Edi. She’d take one of those tiny photocopy machines with her so the letters would never leave the premises. She’d promise him that she…As often happened lately, her mind wandered off into thinking what she could do, wanted to do, but it always came back to the fact that she’d pretty much hit a brick wall in her biography of Miss Edi.

  She remembered the story that Dr. Dave had dangled before her eyes. An upside-down car. A rescue. What happened?

  Jocelyn went back upstairs and got the little double-framed picture that had been Miss Edi’s prize possession. On the day she passed away, Jocelyn had surreptitiously slipped it off the bedside table and hidden it inside her shirt. At the time, she’d assumed that everything would go to charity, but she wanted that one thing to remember her friend by.

  Jocelyn well remembered the first time she asked Miss Edi about the hair in the braid. She’d been about ten years old and curious about everything in the world.

  “It’s hard to imagine it now,” Miss Edi said, “what with men today having hair down to their waists, but back then the sides of men’s heads were shaved with a buzz cutter. But David hadn’t had a haircut in a few weeks, so I was able to get a few strands of it and I wove the braid of his hair and mine.”

  “What color were his eyes?” Joce asked, looking at the black-and-white photo.

  “As blue as yours,” Miss Edi said, smiling. “And he had a chin with a dimple in it like you do.”

  “Like my mother’s,” Jocelyn said.

  “Chins like yours are a hereditary trait.”

  “My grandfather said his chin was just like ours, but that his four other chins covered it.”

  Miss Edi smiled. “I wish I’d been here then and could have known your mother and her parents.”

  “I’m glad you came to rescue me,” Jocelyn said. “I’m like one of your burn patients except that my scars are on the inside.”

  Miss Edi shook her head in wonder at Jocelyn. “Sometimes you say things of extraordinary wisdom.” As they often did, they smiled at each other in perfect understanding.

  Jocelyn glanced up from the photo and her memories to the window, then did a double take. She put the frame down, then leaned closer to the window. She could just see what she thought was the end of the bed of a truck. Luke’s truck, and it was parked where he was working on the herb garden.

  Slowly, Jocelyn stood up and looked down at herself. Miss Edi would be appalled, but she had on a new pair of jeans—Sara had sold them to her from the wholesale clothes she was buying by the truckload—and a dark pink shirt. Was her shirt too formal? Should she change? Into what? A halter top? Something with spangles and tassels?

  Laughing at herself, she ran down the stairs and into the kitchen to go out the back door, but she paused, then ran to the freezer, grabbed a pack of pot roast, and tossed it into the microwave. “Might as well be prepared,” she said as she went out the door.

  “Hi,” she said as Luke rammed the shovel into the ground and pulled up a huge hunk of dirt.

  “This place is a mess,” he said. “Look at the weeds growing here. They’ve probably established themselves until I’ll have to burn them out.”

  “With your bad temper?” she asked without a hint of a smile.

  “Flamethrower breath,” he said, still frowning, then he jammed the shovel in the ground and glared at her. “Look! I’m married. I’m sorry I didn’t ask if that was all right with you. For some stupid reason I thought I was your gardener, not your boyfriend. The whole town thought you were coming here to marry Ramsey. You were going to at last connect the families of McDowell and Harcourt.

  “I don’t know what was wrong with my not knowing that I couldn’t talk to you because I was married. And if I may remind you, that’s all I did. I apologize. I live alone. Sometimes it seems like every person who lives in this town is related to me, so what’s to talk about? Our childhoods? How we used to skinny-dip in your pond?

  “So put me up against a wall and shoot me, but I talked to a woman who was not my wife. Who, by the way, I haven’t seen in so long that I hardly recognized her.

  “So now everyone in town is angry at me. My father’s half in love with you; my mother is so mad that she won’t invite me over for dinner even once a week, so right now I’m at the mercy of Ingrid and a microwave. And the church sent the pastor over to have a talk with me about infidelity and about corrupting minors. Maybe he means Ingrid, but thanks to enough Botox to give her the plague, she only looks fourteen.

  “So I came over here to dig. Nobody else in town will let me near their gardens, but I need to work with the earth. You have any problem with that?”

  “You like pot roast?”

  “Pot roast?” he asked dumbly.

  “With carrots and Worcestershire sauce. I have your mom’s recipe.” She put her hand up. “If you start crying, you can’t have any.”

  Luke pulled the shovel out of the dirt and tossed it onto the back of his truck. “Why do I feel like I’m the object of some plot?”

  “Join the club,” Joce said. “Your grandfather is using me to get you away from the…I want to quote him exactly…‘that grasping little gold digger he married.’ Yeah, that was it.”

  “Shouldn’t you be keeping this a secret between you and my grandfather?”

  “Are secrets allowed in this town?” she asked as they neared the house. “I thought there was a law against them. Keep a secret and get put in jail. On the other hand, your cousins kept the secret of your being married so well that not even Tess knew about it. I hear she yelled at Ramsey so long and loud that they had to repaint his office.”

  He blinked at her. “I think you’ve lived in Edilean too long.”

  “But you came back to it from wherever you were, doing whatever you were doing…” She looked around to see if there was anyone near, then lowered her voice. “Up north.”

  “What in the world are you talking about?”

  “Did you know that your right eyebrow twitches on the tip when you lie?”

  “No, that’s hunger.”

  “Whatever it is, you and everyone else have again jumped over some big secret about you. I mean, other than the fact that you’re married, that is.”

  “About to be unmarried,” he said as he opened the door and let her go in first.

  “Don’t tell me you at last had t