Lavender Morning p.26 Read online

  “I’d say his wife.”

  “Someone who is alive.”

  “I guess that would be me.”

  “Did Uncle Alex leave any diaries?”

  “Diaries are made of paper, and paper costs money,” Dr. Dave said. “Why don’t you come over now and we can play a few rounds together and talk?”

  “As much as I’d like to do that, Joce is bringing her computer outside and she’s going to type the story while I work.”

  “Good. I like that.”

  “Me too,” Luke said. “Listen, I have to go. She’s coming.”

  “So whatever you want to talk to me about tonight is to be kept secret from her?”

  “Add it to the secrets you told her about me and you should have a full load.”

  Dr. Dave was laughing as Luke hung up the phone.

  “You’re frowning,” Joce said, “so whoever you were talking to wasn’t a friend?”

  “Just my grandfather. He and I argue all the time.”

  “Your grandfather who no one got along with was your best buddy, but Dr. Dave, who is beloved by everyone, drives you crazy.”

  “You got it.”

  “So,” she said, “do you think that’s you or them?”

  “Them.”

  “Now why did I know that answer before I asked?” she said as she sat down on the ground and opened her laptop.

  “So how fast do you type?”

  “Very fast, then I spend two hours with the speller as I correct every word because they all have typos. What about you? Can you type?”

  He gave her one of his looks that said he found her amusing, then looked back at the dirt.

  “So what did you talk to your grandfather about?”

  “Nothing important. He wants me to go to their house for dinner tonight.”

  “That sounds nice,” Joce said, then stared at him hard, but he bent his head over the shovel and didn’t look at her. “I haven’t met your grandmother.”

  “Haven’t you?” He went to the truck and got out a digging fork.

  “Is she nice?”

  “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 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