“And please forgive me,” Edi whispered. That was her most fervent hope, that Jocelyn would forgive her for so many secrets kept for so very long. “I made a promise, a vow,” she whispered, “and I honored it.”
In her mind, she began composing the letter she was going to leave with her will.
1
JOCELYN GLANCED AT herself in the hotel mirror for the last time. This is it, she thought. This is the moment. Her instinct was to put her nightgown back on and climb back into bed. Wonder what was on HBO during the day? Did this hotel have HBO? Maybe she should look for a hotel that did.
She took a deep breath, looked back at the mirror, and straightened her shoulders. What would Miss Edi say if she saw her slumping like this? At the thought of Miss Edi, tears again came to her eyes, but she blinked them away. It had been four months since the funeral, but she still missed her friend so much she sometimes didn’t know how to function. Every day she wanted to call Miss Edi and tell her something that had happened, but each day she discovered afresh that she was gone.
“I can do this,” Joce said as she looked in the mirror. “I really and truly can do this.” She was dressed conservatively, in a skirt and an ironed, white cotton blouse, just the way Miss Edi had taught her. Her shoulder-length, dark blonde hair was pulled back with a headband, and she had on very little makeup. All she knew about the town of Edilean, Virginia, was that Miss Edi had grown up there, so Jocelyn didn’t want to arrive in jeans and a tube top and shock the locals.
She picked up her car keys, grabbed the handle of her big black suitcase, and rolled it to the door. Tonight she’d be sleeping in her own house. It was a house she’d never seen, never even heard about until a lawyer told Joce she’d inherited it, but it was still hers.
Just days ago, she’d sat in the lawyer’s office in Boca Raton, Florida, dressed all in black and wearing the pearls Miss Edi had given her. It was months after Miss Edi’s funeral, but her will stated that it was to be read on the first day of May after she died. If she’d died on June the first, that would have meant waiting eleven months. But she’d died in her sleep just into the new year, so Jocelyn had had time to grieve before facing the ordeal of hearing what was in the will.
Beside her sat her father, his wife beside him, and next to her were the Steps, Belinda and Ashley. But now they were better known as Bell and Ash. Due to their mother’s indefatigable efforts, they’d become models—and the media had loved the idea of there being two of them. In the last ten years they’d been on the covers of all the top magazines. They’d traveled all over the world and modeled the clothes of every designer. When they walked through a mall, teenage girls followed them, their mouths open in awe. And males of every age looked at them with lust.
But for all their fame, to Jocelyn’s mind, the Steps hadn’t changed since they were all kids together. As children, the twins loved to make up things they said Joce had done to them, then tell their mother. Louisa used to glare at her stepdaughter and say, “Wait ’til your father gets home.” But when Gary Minton returned, he’d just shake his head and do whatever he could to stay out of the turmoil. His objective in life was to have a good time, not to referee his three children. He’d retreat to his garage workshop, his wife and his tall stepdaughters trailing behind him. Jocelyn would leave and go to Miss Edi.
“So what did the old witch leave you?” Bell asked as she stretched her long neck to see Jocelyn at the far end of the row of chairs.
For Joce, it had never been difficult to tell the twins apart. Bell was the smarter of the two, the leader, while Ash was quieter and did whatever her sister wanted her to. Since that usually meant saying something nasty to gain a laugh, Ash was often the one to stay away from.
“Her love,” Jocelyn said, refusing to look at her stepsister. Bell was on her third husband now, and her mother was hinting that that marriage was about to fail. “Poor thing,” her mother said. “Those men just don’t understand my darling baby.”
“They don’t understand her belief that she can have affairs even if she’s married,” Joce muttered under her breath.
“What was that?” Louisa asked sharply, sounding as though she were about to say “Wait ’til your father gets home.” The woman couldn’t seem to understand that her “babies” would turn thirty this year and that their fifteen minutes of fame was already on the downward spiral. Just last week Joce had read that two eighteen-year-old girls were “the new Bell and Ash.”
Jocelyn didn’t begrudge the Steps their fame—or the fortune that they seemed to have spent. To her, they were just the same: always bad tempered, jealous of everyone, and disdainful of anyone who wasn’t in the gossip rags every week. When they were kids, they’d been extremely envious of Jocelyn because she spent so much time at “that rich old bat’s house.” They refused to believe that Miss Edi didn’t give Joce bags full of money every week. “If she doesn’t give you things, then why do you go over there?”
“Because I like her!” Joce said again and again. “No. I love her.”
“Ahhhh,” they would say in that tone that was meant to say they knew everything.
Joce would just shut the door to her bedroom in their faces, or, better yet, she’d go to Miss Edi’s house.
But now Miss Edi was gone forever, and Jocelyn was requested to be at the reading of the will. The lawyer, a man who looked to be older than Miss Edi, came in a side door and seemed startled at the sight of the five of them. “I was told it would just be Miss Jocelyn,” he said, glancing at her, then looking at her father as though demanding an explanation.
“I, uh…,” Gary Minton started. The years had been kind to him, and he was still a handsome man. With his dark hair with just a touch of gray at the temples, and his dark brows, he looked much younger than he was.
“We take care of our own,” said his wife from beside him. It was as though the years Gary’s face didn’t carry were etched on his wife’s. Sun, cigarettes, and wind had weathered her skin so she looked like a dried-up mummy.
“You don’t mind if we’re here, do you?” Bell said in a purring voice to the lawyer. Both twins were wearing micro-miniskirts, their famous long legs stretched out until they nearly touched his desk. The little tops they wore were open almost to the waist.
Mr. Johnson glanced at them over his half glasses and gave a bit of a frown. He seemed to want to tell them to put their clothes on. He looked back at Jocelyn, noted her plain black suit with the crisp white blouse under it, the pearls around her neck, and gave a little smile. “If Miss Jocelyn approves, you may remain.”
“Oh, la tee da,” Ash said. “Miss Jocelyn. Miss college-educated Jocelyn. Will you read a book to us?”
“I’m sure someone will have to,” Jocelyn said without taking
her eyes off the lawyer. “They can stay. They’ll find out everything anyway.”
“All right then.” He looked down at the papers. “Basically, Edilean Harcourt left you, Jocelyn Minton, everything.”
“And how much is that?” Bell asked quickly.
Mr. Johnson turned to her. “It’s not my business to tell anything more. Whatever Miss Jocelyn tells you is her concern, but I will say nothing. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.” He picked up a brown paper, string-tied folder and handed it across the desk to Jocelyn. “All the information is in there, and you may look through the documents in your own time.”