“Did she?” Eden said, smiling. “I think I missed her every day I was away from her.”
“I don’t know how! She was a demanding old woman. I can’t tell you how many times she made me mow her lawn! I wasted two Saturdays a month here behind that hideous old push mower of hers. I used to…” He stopped and smiled at Eden. “If I hadn’t had Alice Augusta Farrington while my wife was ill, I think I might have gone insane. My wife took nearly three years to die.” He looked down at his plate, then back up at Eden. “In this light, at this table, I can almost see her, Mrs. Farrington, I mean. There are things about you that remind me of her.”
When he pushed his food around on his plate, Eden felt that he had something to say but was afraid to say it. Silently, she waited for him to go on.
“You’ll hear stories about me,” he said softly.
“Will they be worse than the ones about me?”
“No,” he said, then grinned and took a big bite of his fish. “After what you did to McBride, this town will have gossip for the next ten years. You’re going to beat our resident clairvoyant for causing talk.”
“A clairvoyant? Great! I can have my fortune told. Does this mean that Arundel is becoming New Age?”
“Far from it. She’s a Pembroke.”
“Ah,” Eden said. That explained everything. While no one in Arundel would put up with eccentricity from an outsider, they tolerated pretty much anything from one of their own. “So tell me about your wife,” she said.
“We weren’t exactly a match made in heaven. You’re going to hear that. We’d already started divorce proceedings when she told me she had cancer.”
“But you stayed with her.”
“Yes, I did. I wasn’t faithful, though. You’ll hear that too. There was a woman…But it didn’t last. After my wife died, I realized that I didn’t want anything to do with her, not long-term, anyway. Mrs. Farrington made me see that.”
“Really? But Mrs. Farrington was such a proponent of extramarital sex.”
“Yeah, my grandfather and my great-uncle.” Brad grinned. “But in between the Willow Stories, as I came to think of them, Mrs. Farrington told me about you.”
Eden was flattered and curious. “What could she have told you about me?”
“What you liked to eat, what you wore, what you were good at, what you couldn’t do. What interested you, what didn’t. You name it and she told me about it. She said you liked the garden more than the house, so that’s why she went t
o all the trouble of renovating this old house, but left the gardens a mess for you to have the pleasure of cleaning up.”
Eden smiled. “I can hardly wait to get my hands on them. Know any muscular teenage boys who need summer jobs?”
“At least twenty of them. Mind if I help?”
“Don’t tell me you’re a gardener?”
“More or less. Well, actually, less. But I can dig holes with the best of them.”
His look was so intense that Eden looked away for a moment. He seemed to want her to comment on what he’d told her about himself. “Brad, you don’t have to confess your past sins to me,” she said. “Really, at my age, I’ve committed a few of my own.”
“You?” he said, one eyebrow raised. “What possible sins have you committed? According to Mrs. Farrington you were an angel come to earth.”
“Didn’t she tell you that I was lazy and daydreamy and all the other things that she complained about me?”
“She never said a bad word about you.” His eyes were twinkling, and Eden was enjoying his teasing. “I got the impression that you worked nonstop and that you never said an unkind word about anyone in your life.”
“She didn’t tell you about all the horrible things I said about the youngest Camden boy? He decided he was going to marry me.”
Brad groaned. “I know him well. Doing you a favor, was he?”
“Oh, yes. I think he had an idea that Mrs. Farrington would leave me the house, and he wanted it. There weren’t enough old Camden houses for him to have one. I think he thought he’d die if he had to live in a new brick house. Whatever happened to that boy?”
“He moved up north where he got a Yankee wife, but when his brother had financial reverses, he moved back home. He lives in the Camden-Minton house now. He’s good with money. He must have figured out that Mrs. Farrington couldn’t leave the house to her son.”
“Did everyone in town know about her son? About what he did?”