“Sorry, I, uh…” Jocelyn wasn’t sure what to say, but she was certainly embarrassed by her outburst. “It’s just that we could have used your help, that’s all.”
“From what I hear, the three of you are doing great. So, Dad, which ones did you decorate?”
“Humph!” Jim said. “I’m management. So where have you been? With my father-in-law in his fancy house in his fancy subdivision playing on his fancy golf course?”
Luke looked at Jocelyn. “Don’t you just love families?”
“Yours, yes, mine, no,” she said quickly, which made Jim chuckle.
“Could you get that dirty box away from the cupcakes?” Tess asked.
“It’s not dirty,” Luke said. “In fact…” He picked up a pretty nasturtium blossom and ate it. “These flowers are not only clean, they’re edible.”
When Jocelyn looked at him, her eyes widened. “Flowers,” she whispered. “Like fried zucchini blossoms.”
“Exactly,” Luke said, smiling at her.
“Is that some Yankee thing? Fried flowers?” Jim asked. “And we Southerners are accused of frying too much.”
“No frying,” Luke said. “We’re just going to stick them on top of adult cupcakes and cookies.” He was looking hard at Jocelyn, as though silently transmitting something to her.
“You didn’t!”
“I did. In the truck.”
“Are we to guess what you two did in the truck?” Tess asked, but Jocelyn was already running out the door, Luke close behind her.
The four of them gathered around the back of Luke’s truck as he untied a tarp. Under it were two bushel baskets, and in them were clear plastic bags full of some dried purple twigs.
For a moment Jocelyn was speechless, then she said, “I’ll need a—”
Luke threw the tarp back farther and exposed a white marble mortar that was about fourteen inches across, with a big pestle inside.
Joce let out a squeal and spontaneously threw her arms around Luke’s neck. “You did it! You’re wonderful! Thank you, thank you, thank you!”
Tess and Jim stood back, watching the two of them. “Better start making out your guest list for the wedding,” Tess whispered, but Jim made no reply. In fact, he was frowning deeply.
“All right,” Jim said, “you two wanta tell me what this is? It looks like something Merlin would use. You gonna turn that stuff into gold?”
Suddenly, Joce felt embarrassed and abruptly let go of Luke, and stepped away. “He found lavender, and that’s a mortar and pestle for grinding it. I can make my lavender cookies. They’re perfect for ladies’ tea parties.”
“Sounds great!” Tess said with enthusiasm. “When do we—” She broke off at a look from Jim. “It does sound great, but I think I better go see what trouble Rams is having. If he can’t find that tape he’ll lose his case. I should see what I can do to help him.”
“And I’m worn out,” Jim said. “I’m too old for all this. I’ll be here early tomorrow to help get everything to Viv’s house, so don’t sleep late.” He gave a warning look to his son.
Jim pulled his car keys out of his pocket, went to his car, and drove away, and Tess went to her own apartment.
When they were alone, Luke asked, “Was it something we said? Maybe I should have showered.”
“I gave up trying to understand this town after the first hour I was here. Come inside and tell me everything. And, by the way, you’re putting in the herb garden for free. Or maybe your father is paying for it.”
“That skinflint! Never. So what did he tell you to make my gardening free?”
“I behaved myself. Your father absolutely loves the word yes.”
“You didn’t say that to him, did you?” Luke asked, his voice a groan. “When I was six months old, Mom and I made a pact that we’d never, never say that word to him, and we’ve kept our pledge. Please tell me you haven’t ruined it.”
“Six months old,” she said, smiling as she went into the kitchen. Every surface was covered with the most beautiful cupcakes imaginable. There were flowers and insects and animals. About a dozen of them had drawings of high heels and dresses on them.
“Let me guess,” Luke said. “Sara did these.”
“Right on. She wanted me to make some cakes shaped like high heels, but it would take too much time.”
“What about these? Did you do them?” He held up a cupcake with a puppy’s face in brown and white.
“Tess did.”
“Tess?” Luke asked. “Tess who works for Ramsey? Tess who disdains anything cute or sentimental?”
“The very one. I think your dad wants to open a business with her.”
Luke sat down on a chair and stared at Jocelyn. “My father and Tess? But the two of them are bosses. They like to tell everyone what to do and how to do it. My father never gets along with anyone he isn’t in charge of. And Tess isn’t much better. She runs Rams’s office like she’s the captain of the ship.”
Joce shrugged. “I have no idea how they work together, but they do. You should see them together. They’re like a machine. If Tess runs out of blue icing, she doesn’t say a word, but the next time she reaches for the blue, your dad has filled a tube for her.”
“My dad? He made icing?”
“And filled the big pastry tubes. After the first day, he and Tess spent about two hours on the Internet and ordered a huge amount of tubes and bags and…well, everything.”
“I wish I’d been here to see it.”
“So where were you?” Joce asked as she poured batter into paper liners.
“Better let me do that,” Luke said. “I don’t want my dad to show me up.” As he washed his hands he looked at the cakes on the counters. They really were beautiful and quite professional-looking.
“I’m waiting,” Joce said.
“Sorry. I keep looking at everything.”
“No, I mean I’m waiting for you to tell me where you’ve been.”
“Well, Mom…,” he said, trying to make it sound as though Joce was his mother. But she didn’t smile. “Show me how to do this.”
Joce showed him how to use the bowl and a spatula to fill the liners, then how to put the pan into the oven and set the timer. “We have to get all these into the boxes your father ordered and you can talk while we work.”
“Why do you think Miss Edi never told you about Edilean?”
“I don’t know,” Joce said, and she could hear the hurt in her own voice. “She told me so much about the rest of her life. I could write a book about her years with Dr. Brenner, but she left out everything about the town where she grew up.”
“She said nothing about her childhood?”
“She told me she grew up in a little town in the South but that was all. She said her life didn’t begin until she met David. And until I came here, I thought David was killed in World War II, but Sara said he jilted her. Miss Edi returned from the war with her legs a mass of scars and the man she loved had married some floozy he’d impregnated.”
“That’s one way of looking at it,” Luke said as he filled a bakery box with a dozen cupcakes.
“What does that mean? You sound as though I’ve said something horrible. I’m just repeating what I was told.”
“Good ol’ Edilean gossip. Where do I put this?” He held up a box filled with cupcakes.
“I thought we’d stack them in the hallway. I need a place to put the big mortar so I can start grinding.”
“You know that there are machines that can do that,” Luke said.
“Sure, but who wants one? Not me.”
She could see that Luke liked that answer as he took the box into the hallway and returned with the big mortar and pestle, then got the baskets of lavender.
“I think you have something to tell me, but you’re hesitating,” Joce said, “so out with it.”
“If you could have any job in the world, what would it be?”
“Writing biographies,” she said instantly.
Luke looked
at her in surprise.
“When I was a junior in college, Miss Edi said that a friend of hers wanted to write a biography on her great-aunt who’d been a suffragette, but she didn’t have any idea how to do the research. She didn’t know a primary source from an encyclopedia.”
“Primary source,” Luke said as he packed more cakes in boxes. “Letters, unpublished documents, that sort of thing?”
“Exactly. I spent spring break with the woman, and we had a wonderful week going through old trunks and rummaging through the attics of some of her relatives.”
“Did she write her book?”
“Yes and no,” Joce said as the timer went off and she took the cupcakes out of the oven. “She wrote it, but she couldn’t find a publisher, so it just made the rounds of her relatives, but that was beside the point. It was great to search and dig and find out about the life of a person. In her case she found out that her great-aunt had done nothing more than invite the suffragettes to tea at her house, but when her husband heard what she’d done, that was the end of that. But still, I loved doing it.
“Afterward, Miss Edi encouraged me to write letters to some editors, and I got a few jobs helping research some other books. It didn’t pay much but I enjoyed it greatly.”
“So who would you like to write about?”
“I…” Jocelyn hesitated, as though she was trying to get her courage up to tell him. “I thought about writing about Miss Edi’s work with Dr. Brenner. He died a few years ago, but his wife has all the letters he wrote to her, and she said she’d be glad to lend them to me. But she thinks I want to write about her husband, not his assistant. That could cause problems.”
“What if I told you that I have the beginning of a story that Miss Edi wrote about her war experiences and that I got it from the David you think jilted her?”
“You what?” Jocelyn looked up from the mortar at him. “Did the jerk write her a Dear John letter while she was in the hospital with her legs burned to a crisp?”
Luke had to swallow and wait a moment before he spoke. “Okay, we have to get something straight here. You have to stop quoting the lies that this town believes. The David who you think jilted Edilean Harcourt is my grandfather, and the ‘floozy’ he impregnated is my grandmother, and the resulting child is my mother.”
“Oh,” Jocelyn said as she sat down heavily on a chair. “Your grandfather courted her ‘ardently’ then he—”
“Before you say any more, I think you should know that there was another David and he was killed in World War II.”
“Another David?” Jocelyn whispered. “Miss Edi was in love with two men named David?”
“I’ve spent the last couple of days with my grandfather and—”
“He’s alive? Miss Edi’s David is alive?”
“Very much so. And he’s still married to Mary Alice, and they’re still mad about each other, and he gave me the first part of the story Miss Edi sent to a friend. I haven’t read it, but Gramps says it tells what happened to her.”
Jocelyn could only stare at him.
“If you don’t get busy mashing that lavender up, we’re going to be here all night and never get these cookies done.”
“I want to see the story now,” Joce whispered.
“No,” Luke said firmly. “If I can delay reading it, so can you. We’re going to finish all this, make some money off these things, then you’re going to read it to me while I put in the herb garden.”
Slowly, Jocelyn stood up and began on the lavender again. “I want to know every word that you know. You can’t leave out even one detail.”
“It’s not much and I had to play golf with Granpa Dave to learn even what I was told. I hate golf.”
“But you love fishing.”
“Don’t you start on me too!” Luke almost shouted, then said, “Sorry. I’ve had it for days. Grandparent jealousy.”
“So what did you learn?”
Luke didn’t say anything for a few moments. “Why is all this so important to you?”
“I don’t know,” she said slowly. “Sometimes I think my whole life has been a lie. But even if it was the truth I don’t understand it. Until I met Miss Edi, I had my grandparents, and Granpa used to spend hours telling me about my mother—but he didn’t believe in whitewashing the stories. Granma used to chide him for talking to me as though I were an adult.
“Anyway, my mother spent her life in private schools. She could play the piano well enough to perform at concerts. She was beautiful, intelligent, and popular. She had dozens of suitors, but she turned down every marriage proposal, until my grandmother said she thought her daughter was never going to marry. But you know what she did?”
“I have no idea.”
“She fell madly in love with the handyman who worked for the country club where my grandparents were members. He quit school in the tenth grade, and never opened a book. He lived in a one-bedroom shanty and spent every penny he had on motorcycles. My grandparents did everything they could think of to get her away from the man, but my mother said she’d run away from home if they didn’t give her their blessing—and a place to live.”
Jocelyn paused as she scooped out the crushed lavender and began measuring ingredients for her cookies.
“By that time my mother was already thirty-three years old and her parents knew she had her own ideas. They gave in and pretended they were thrilled that their beautiful daughter was marrying the handyman. They even acted like they didn’t mind when the newlyweds moved in with them. My granddad got my father a job at his insurance company, and my dad went to work every day, but he wasn’t any good at it. But he certainly did love my mother.”
“And that’s what counted,” Luke said.
“Yes, but still…My grandparents never said anything bad about my father, but I knew how they felt about him. Anyway, four years after my parents were married, I was born and five years later my mother died of an aneurism. When I was nine, my grandparents died in a car wreck and…”
“And that left you alone with your dad.”
“Yeah,” she said as she looked back at the cookies. “And he went back to what he had been. No more neckties for him. No more attempts at a nine-to-five job. My grandparents left the house to me, and what little money there was, was administered by the family lawyer. It was gone by the time I was twelve.”
Jocelyn smiled. “But by then I’d met Miss Edi, and some of the loneliness of my life was relieved.”
“All right,” Luke said after a moment. “Can you cook and listen?”
“Are you asking me if I can make cookies and listen to Miss Edi’s story? You have it with you?”
“I have chapter one.”
“Is it in book form?”
“I think so.” Luke gave a sigh. “I wasn’t kidding when I said that about grandfather jealousy. Granpa Dave was the town doctor, so he knew everybody and he was always surrounded by people. If we went to a Christmas party, half the town would be lined up to show him a boil or a wart, hoping to get free medical advice.”
“And you were a loner, so you stayed out of the middle of the crowd,” Jocelyn said.
“Exactly. So now that Granpa Joe is dead and Granpa Dave is retired, he wants—”
“You to spend more time with him.”
“Right,” Luke said, “so that’s why I haven’t been around for a few days. Nana Mary Alice had some things to say to me as well, so…”
“So they blackmailed you into staying at their house, and how much weight did you gain?”
“None. I spent the days walking the damned golf course and carrying Granpa Dave’s bag. The thing must weigh a hundred and fifty pounds.”
“So what did you get for it?”
Luke got up, went to his jacket that he’d tossed onto a chair, and pulled out a thick pile of paper, folded in the middle, from his pocket. The papers were old and yellow and worn around the edges.
Jocelyn sat down across from him, a big bowl of lavender-colored batter in her arms. ?
??Is that the story?”
“The first chapter. It seems that when Miss Edi was in the hospital recovering from her burned legs, she wrote it all down and sent it to her friend Alexander McDowell.”
“The man whose money Miss Edi managed. The man who owed her something but no one will tell us what. Have many people read the document?”
“I don’t think so. Uncle Alex gave the papers to my grandfather a long time ago. Gramps read them and they’ve been in a safe-deposit box in Richmond ever since then.”
She looked at the papers Luke was holding as she gave the lavender batter a stir. “Where’s the rest of it?”
“My dear grandfather is going to give it to me chapter by chapter. I think I have to play more golf with him.”
“Or take him fishing with you,” she said. “Or on a ride on one of your bikes.”
“How did—? Oh, you and Dad borrowed my truck. Anytime you want a ride, let me know.”
“Sure,” she said, but he didn’t seem to notice her hesitation.
“You read and I’ll make cookies.” As he opened his mouth, she said, “Wait a minute! I had this really horrible idea and I wanted to ask you about it.”
“I like it already.”
“One time I made something called Margarita Cupcakes for one of Miss Edi’s charity events. They have a bit of tequila in the batter, and the icing has lime juice and tequila. Do you think I dare do something like that for Viv’s party?”
“You have the ingredients?”
She opened a lower cabinet and pushed aside a stack of paper bags to reveal two bottles of tequila and a big sack of limes. “I didn’t know how your father would take it, so I had Tess sneak them in for me.”
“We won’t tell them. We’ll call them limeade cupcakes and leave it at that. You couldn’t spare a bit for sipping, could you?”
Smiling, she poured two small glasses of tequila and handed him one.
“Ready?” he asked.
“I think so.”
Luke opened the papers and began to read.
12
LONDON, ENGLAND
1944
CLARE!” CAPTAIN OWENS yelled at his sergeant, who was leaning against the jeep and staring into space. When he got no response, he waved his hand in front of his face but there was no reaction. “What the hell’s wrong with him?” He looked to a corporal standing on the other side of the jeep.