Lavender Morning (Edilean 1)

“A free trip? Secrets revealed? I’m very interested. How do we arrange this?”

“I’ll send all the travel information to my house and you can pick it up there. How’s that handsome son of yours?”

Helen hesitated. Should she give the stock answer she gave to everyone else? Hardly anyone knew the full extent of what Luke had been through in the last few years, but Helen thought that, somehow, Miss Edi knew. “He’s recovering slowly. Mostly he hides out in the gardens around town and digs holes. He doesn’t want to talk to anyone about his problems, not even me.”

“How about if I change his life?”

“For good or bad?” Helen asked, but she stood up straighter. Her only child, her son, was in pain, and she didn’t know how to help him.

“For good,” Miss Edi said. “All right, you better go give your husband lunch. Remember that you’re not to tell anyone about me. The tickets should be there tomorrow by ten, so pick them up at the house, then call me. When you get here, I’ll have someone meet you at the airport.”

“All right,” Helen said as the back door opened.

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“Damned thing!” she heard James muttering. “I should write the attorney general’s office about that worthless piece of garbage.”

Helen rolled her eyes. “Will do,” she whispered. “I have to go.”

Miss Edi hung up, sat by the telephone, looked at it for a moment, then she used the two canes to get out of the chair. Her legs were causing her so much pain today that she wanted to lie down and never get up. She hobbled to the big box that sat on top of the piano bench and thought of the photos inside and of the full stories of what had happened to all of them so very long ago.

She picked up the thin green book that was their high school senior yearbook. Class of 1937. She didn’t need to open it because she could see all of them in her mind, and she was glad she hadn’t been to Edilean, Virginia, in the last few years. She missed the place, missed the trees and the changing seasons, but what she didn’t like was seeing the aging faces of her friends. Or seeing their names on gravestones. Who would have believed that the last remaining people alive would be her and David and Mary Alice? And Pru—but she didn’t count. Nearly all the others had died, some of them recently, some a ways back. Poor Sara died back in…Edi couldn’t remember the date, but she knew it was a long time ago.

She put the book down and looked at the little box that contained photos of all of them, but she didn’t open it. She was feeling worse than usual today, and she was sure the doctor was wrong. She didn’t have a year left, but she was glad of that. The pain in her old, scarred legs was getting worse. On the days when she did get out of bed, she had to force herself. And when she couldn’t make herself get up, she had that annoyingly cheerful little nurse get her laptop computer, and she spent her whole day on it. What a glorious thing the Internet was! And how very much she could find out through it.

She’d even looked up David’s family and seen that his eldest brother had made it through the war. He’d lived to make a success of a business. Several times she’d come close to calling the family, but the pain she knew she’d feel stopped her. Besides, she doubted if they’d ever heard of her. David was killed just weeks after they met.

As Edi walked toward the kitchen, she thought of Jocelyn. As always, just the thought of the young woman made her pain ease and her mind relax.

It had been Alexander McDowell, the man whose life was at the center of all the secrets and heartache, who’d put Edi together with the young girl.

“Her grandparents, the Scovills, were dear, dear friends of mine,” Alex said, his voice raspy from a lifetime of cigarettes. “Their beautiful daughter Claire was sent to the best schools. At her coming-out party, she had eleven marriage proposals. But she didn’t marry until she was thirty-three, and then she chose the country club’s handyman.”

Miss Edi had been through too much in her life to be a snob. “What was he like as a person?”

“Good to her. Lazy, barely literate, but good to her. They had a daughter named Jocelyn, and just a few years later, beautiful Claire died.”

Maybe it was the name “Claire” or maybe it was that at that time Edi had been at a crossroads in her life. She’d spent her working life traveling with Dr. Brenner. His family’s fortune gave him the freedom to work unpaid, so he’d traveled around the world, helping wherever he was needed. It was said that if a bomb was dropped, Dr. Brenner booked his flight before it exploded. The truth was that Edi did the booking, and she was always with the doctor.

But when he retired, that meant Edi did also. Should she go back to Edilean to live in that big house with her brother, who bored her to death? Or should she live quietly on her pension and savings and maybe write her memoirs—yet another boring prospect?

When Alex McDowell, a man she’d known since they were babies together, offered her a job managing charity funds and looking after the young granddaughter of his friends, Edi accepted.

“I don’t know what the child is like,” Alex said those many years ago. “For all I know, she could have the brains of her father. What I do know is that after her mother died, she lived with her grandparents. After they died, Jocelyn—that’s the girl’s name—was left in the full custody of her father.”

“He doesn’t harm her, does he?” Miss Edi asked quickly.

“No, I’ve had PIs looking in on her, and I’ve had no reports of anything like that, but her father has reverted.”

“Reverted? To what?” Miss Edi asked sharply.

Alex chuckled. “Worse than what you’re imagining. He remarried to a woman with identical twin daughters, and they ride motorcycles together.”

For a second, Miss Edi closed her eyes. The name “Clare” and the image of motorcycles filled her mind.

“…Boca Raton,” Alex was saying.

“Sorry, but I didn’t hear all that.”