Moonlight in the Morning Read online

  “If you can get me a model as beautiful as the son of Venus, sure,” she said, joking.

  Kim didn’t hesitate. “I’ll get Tris. He won’t like doing it, but I’ll nag him into it. Are you ready to go?”

  “I think I’ll make a quick trip to the restroom,” Jecca said, thinking about Kim instantly casting Tris as Cupid.

  “I’ll make some notes,” Kim said.

  A few minutes later, Jecca returned to the table to see Kim laughing. “What did I miss?”

  “Tristan.”

  “What about him?”

  “He was just here. He said he was sorry he couldn’t stay to meet you, but he had to help his dad with something. He said he’d stop by Mrs. Wingate’s this evening.”

  “I would like to see him,” Jecca said, “especially since he’s all I hear about from you, Mrs. Wingate, and Lucy.”

  “So you did talk to this Lucy!” Kim said.

  Jecca picked up her bag. “Is there someplace I can get some shampoo? I’m about out.”

  “Sure. It’s homemade around here and we put lye in it, but it won’t hurt your hair too much.”

  “Funny,” Jecca said. “I just need—”

  “Ma’am?”

  They turned to see their waitress holding out a large, colorful book to Jecca. “You left this behind.”

  Taking the book, Jecca stared at it. Cupid and Psyche was the title, and it was profusely illustrated with gorgeous watercolors.

  “Jecca!” Kim said. “You’ve really been thinking a lot about my ad campaign. You are such a good friend! Could I borrow this?” She reached for the book.

  “No!” Jecca said and clasped it to her chest. “I mean, I need to look at it more before I come up with some ideas.”

  “Okay,” Kim said, smiling, “but I get it next.”

  They stayed in Edilean for only an hour more. Kim had meetings and Jecca was dying to get to work. She wanted to set up her table and put out all her supplies in exactly the order she wanted them in. And she wanted to start photographing the orchids in the light of the setting sun.

  But m Kh=" start ostly, she wanted to go through the book Tristan had left for her. She couldn’t help smiling as she thought about how he’d gone to the trouble of finding and purchasing the book, then hiding it . . . Where? In his sling? Somehow, he’d distracted Kim long enough to get it out and put it beside Jecca’s bag. She hadn’t noticed it but was very glad the waitress had.

  Once she was back at the Wingate house, Jecca ran upstairs, flopped across the bed, and read the story of Cupid and Psyche. It wasn’t until the last page that there was a note from Tristan stuck inside.

  I was wrong. They didn’t wed until after they fell in love. Tristan

  She laughed. It was funny that he was pretending that she was the woman he wanted. “A woman he’s never even seen,” she said aloud.

  She slipped the book under her pillows and went about setting up her makeshift studio. She got out her precious paper and laid out her brushes. Since school she’d invested in the best quality sable brushes, and treated them with all the care and respect they deserved.

  She put individual enameled dishes that she used for her paints in stacked office trays. Jecca liked to layer her paints. If she wanted green, she’d put down a very thin glaze of blue, let it dry, then put another glaze of yellow on top. The resulting green was, to her eye, more luminous than if she’d just mixed blue and yellow on a palette and spread it on the paper.

  Her practice of letting colors dry between applications, plus her frequent use of masking fluid, made her paintings take weeks. But to her, the result was what mattered.

  She got out her travel box, the one she used when she went outside to sketch. Her father had made it of fine-grained mahogany.

  “That should hold what you use,” he said when he presented it to her the second Christmas she was home from art school. Unknown to her, he’d gone through her big, worn-out canvas bag and measured everything inside it. It held what she needed when she did her quick sketches, where she didn’t take the time to layer but used a kit that held a dozen different colors. A few weeks before, Jecca had been in tears because her wet colors had bled onto what she’d painted.

  “You turn them up sideways and they run,” her brother had said, as though she were a moron.

  Her dad put his arm around her and patted her shoulder. At Christmas he’d given her the box that had space for her paper, paints, brushes, and a separate place inside for her completed work.

  Jecca had loved the kit so much that she’d danced around the room with it, making her father and brother laugh. Later, she’d painted a picture of her dad and Joey bent over a new hand plane. Their faces showed an identical look of love for the tool—and for each other.

  Jecca ran her fingers over the grooves for her pencils and her brushes and thought of her dad. The last few years hadn’t been happy for him. He was always butting heads with Joey’s wife, Sheila. She had turned out to be extremely ambitious, and she didn’t see any reason why her father-in-law shouldn’t retire and give the hardware store to Joey.

  “Tell her that when the queen r Kn tm">̶etires I will!” Joe had shouted at his son.

  “What queen?” Sheila asked. “Is he talking about that club down on the corner? I don’t go into places like that.”

  During one of the fights—which Jecca worked to stay out of—she’d said that Sheila’s ambition was inversely proportional to her intelligence. Her dad laughed, Joey glowered, and Sheila had asked what that meant.

  The “Sheila War,” as Jecca called it, was one of the major reasons she’d so readily accepted Kim’s invitation to spend a peaceful summer in Edilean.

  Jecca was so absorbed in her thoughts that she didn’t notice Lucy standing at the open door to her bedroom.

  “I don’t mean to interrupt you,” Lucy said. She was wearing a flowery bathrobe and looked like she was headed for the shower. “It’s just that it’s nearly three o’clock and you said you might like to join us.”

  “Sure,” Jecca said. She could stand some mild exercise. She just hoped it would be active enough to get her blood flowing. Afterward, she’d like to set up her camera and take some photos.

  But an hour of leg lifts or whatever would be a welcome break. And besides, she liked the idea of being with these two older women. She didn’t really remember her mother, and since she’d spent her life with men, she’d always wondered what it would be like to be around such women.

  Five

  “Tristan?” Jecca said into the dark for the third time, but there was still no answer. “Stood up by a man I’ve never even seen,” she mumbled, then groaned at the pain in her shoulder.

  There was a crack of lightning, followed immediately by a clash of thunder. Great, she thought. Now I’m going to get soaked. When the first drops hit her, she turned back toward the house.

  “Psyche,” she heard Tristan’s voice. The rain started coming down harder.

  She couldn’t see anything, but she felt his arm go around her shoulders in a way that drew her head down onto his chest. When he started running, she went with him.

  They went through the dark woods at a fast pace. A couple of times she felt a tree graze her arm. If Tristan hadn’t known exactly where he was going they would have slammed into one another, but he never hesitated in his run.

  “Duck!” he said as his hand came up to her head and pulled it down. He stepped back as she went across what seemed to be a threshold and under a low doorway. When she stood up again, she was inside a building, and if possible, it was darker than outside. “Where are we?” she asked.

  “You are in . . .” he said.

  She could hear him moving about but could see nothing. There was a sound of cloth, then he handed her what felt like a small quilt. She wrapped it around her upper body.

  Tris Nn tm"he htan put his free hand on her shoulder and began to pat her. “Sorry about the rain,” he said. “You’re in the Aldredge playhouse. My niece is th