“When do you want to do this?” Clara asked.
“Mandy has told me that she and Joe Bob are spending this weekend in Houston,” Elizabeth said. “They are leaving on Friday. She wants to introduce him to her friends there. I want her safely out of the county when this conversation occurs. Clara, can you arrange to have Kate and Jenny come here on Saturday?”
“Yes,” Clara said. “I’ll talk to Jenny. Stop her from asking any more questions until then. At least we can control how this all comes out.”
“When you speak to her, tell her that she will have her answers,” Elizabeth said. “And the rest of you? You will all be here?”
The women nodded.
“Well then,” Elizabeth said, “it’s settled. We have a plan.”
“God help us,” Mae Ella muttered under her breath.
Elizabeth looked over at her and smiled, “He always has, my old friend. He always has. It’s time for us all to have faith in that fact.”
“You do know this could all go horribly wrong?” Mae Ella persisted. “We’ve kept this stuff buried all these years for good reasons.”
“Mae Ella,” Elizabeth asked, “do you remember your Sophocles?”
“Lord, Elizabeth,” the other woman said with a sharp bark of a laugh, “you know as well as I do that I barely made it out of senior English. What in the world are you talking about?”
“‘To he who is in fear, everything rustles,’” Elizabeth said. “We are all brave women. I think it’s time we remembered that. I truly believe these girls will understand when they know the whole story.”
“I just don’t want you to be hurt any more,” Mae Ella said in a softer tone. “You’ve been hurt more than any of us.”
“And therefore, I stand to be the most healed,” Elizabeth said. “It’s truly all right, Mae Ella. It’s time.”
61
Clara Wyler’s phone call caught Jenny just as she was covering a pan of fresh cornbread. She was already late getting to the main house. Jenny glanced at the clock and almost didn’t answer, but in the end her manners won out. “Hi, Clara,” she said brightly. “How are you?”
“Still old, still can’t breathe worth a flip, still alive,” Clara said, adding, without preamble. “You ask a lot of questions, young lady.”
Uncertain where this was headed, Jenny said, “Uh, sorry? Something I can do for you?”
“Stop asking questions.”
“I’m assuming this has something to do with my visit to Wilma Schneider today,” Jenny said, putting the pan on the counter and sitting down on one of the bar stools.
“And George Fisk and that greasy little weasel Harold Insall,” Clara said.
“How do you know all that?”
“Girl, you’re gonna be surprised as hell by everything I know,” Clara said sternly. “But for right now I need you to quit asking questions. Mandy and Joe Bob Mason are going to Houston this weekend, right?”
Good Lord, did the old woman have CIA contacts? “Yes, they are,” Jenny said. “Why?”
“Saturday morning at 10 o’clock I want you and Katie to meet me at Elizabeth Jones’ house behind the cemetery. There’s a buzzer at the front gate. Just press it and Hortencia will come let you in.”
Although it sounded more like an order than an invitation, the location for this command appearance didn’t surprise Jenny. She had done a great deal of thinking on the drive back from town. “What am I supposed to tell Katie?” she asked.
“Don’t tell her anything but that you’re humoring a bunch of old women, which you are,” Clara said. “I promise you all of your questions will be answered on Saturday, just don’t stir anything else up in the meantime. Think about your little sister.”
“She’s all I have been thinking about,” Jenny said curtly.
“Me, too,” Clara said. “Since the day your Mama told me she was carrying that child. Nobody is gonna do anything to hurt Mandy. That’s the last thing any of us want.”
“Who is ‘us?’” Jenny asked.
“You’re just gonna have to wait for Saturday, Jenny,” Clara said firmly, and then added as an afterthought. “Please. On your Mama’s grave, I promise you that we’ll tell you everything.”
At least once a week, Kate, Jenny and Josh, Mandy and Joe, and now Jake had dinner at the main ranch house, usually followed by a movie or maybe a game of cards. On this occasion, Mandy showed up with pages of potential bridesmaids dresses, oblivious to the effect the styles were having on her sisters, especially Kate.
“And if I decide to do an outdoor wedding,” Mandy gushed happily, “you all could wear sun hats.”
“No, we all couldn’t,” Kate said, followed by a yelp as Jenny kicked her under the table. The men stifled snickers and kept their attention firmly on their plates.
“She’s just being grumpy, honey,” Jenny said with forced good cheer. “But an outdoor wedding that late in the summer might be awful hot.”
“Well, I’m not sure on the date yet,” Mandy said, frowning, “but you are right. We don’t want sweat to be an issue with the fabric.”
“Oh, absolutely not,” Jenny agreed, shooting Kate a glare that plainly said, not a word.
At the end of the night, as everyone was getting ready to leave, Jenny offered to stay and help Kate with the kitchen. No one thought the idea was unusual, since the older Lockwood girls made time in each day for a private conversation.
Stifling a huge yawn, Josh told Jenny, “Wake me up when you come in, sugar.”
Jenny kissed him lightly and said, “I don’t like to have to set dynamite off after dark. Scares the wildlife.”
Good nights were said amid the ensuing laughter and Jenny and Kate were left alone in the hall. As soon as she closed the door, Kate said, “Okay. As much as I appreciate the help, I’m guessing you’re really hanging around because you have more to tell me about your day in town?”
“Indeed I do,” Jenny said, as they walked into the dining room. “And it all just got stranger about three hours ago.”
“How’s that?” Kate asked, stacking the dinner plates and then lifting and balancing the load with her right hand.
“You’re getting better at that,” Jenny observed, gathering up the silverware.
“Thanks,” Kate said. “I’ve only broken two sets of china learning. So keep talking. Why is everything even stranger now?”
“Clara Wyler called me and told me to quit asking questions. I never told her that I saw the Fisks or Harold Insall, but she knew anyway. She also knew that Mandy and Joe Bob are going to Houston. You and I have been ordered to make a command performance Saturday morning at Elizabeth Jones’ house, where, supposedly, all will be revealed.”
“All of what? And how in the hell did Elizabeth Jones get involved in all this?” Kate asked with a frown.
Jenny put down the dishes in her hands and took the stack of plates from Kate. “I think Elizabeth Jones is Alice Browning.”
Kate stared at her slack-jawed. “I’m damned glad you took those plates out of my hand before you said that. How many glasses of wine did you have tonight?”
“Two,” Jenny said. “I’m not drunk, but I am serious. I don’t think Alice Browning died that night at the bridge.”
“The dishes can wait,” Kate said, pulling out one of the chairs from the table. “Sit down and tell me what you found out today.”
Jenny went over all the information she learned from the Fisks and described in greater detail Harold Insall’s nervous behavior and his cryptic comment about the waste of a “lovely casket.”
“Jesus,” Kate said, “only an undertaker would call a casket ‘lovely.’”
“I know,” Jenny said. “For God’s sake, don’t ever let Harold Insall be the last man to touch me.”
“My hand on the Bible,” Kate said, with a little shudder. “Now what about Wilma Schneider?”
“She told me a pretty, pat little story about how Alice was cut up in the wreck and Mrs. Browning didn’t want any
one to see her that way. Supposedly Harold took the body out the back door of the doctor’s office at her orders. She also wanted the closed-casket service. Don’t you think it’s just a little convenient that this town has an elderly recluse living behind the cemetery and that she has a disfigured face?”
“I think it sounds like something out of one of those cheap romance novels,” Kate said.
“Daddy only drew Alice from the left side,” Jenny said. “I think that’s the way he saw her last, or maybe he couldn’t bear to remember what the other side of her face looked like. I don’t know for sure, but from what George Fisk told me, the wreck never would have happened if Daddy hadn’t lost his temper.”
“There are a hell of a lot of things that wouldn’t have happened if Daddy hadn’t lost his temper,” Kate said ruefully. “So you think the Brownings hid Alice away all these years because of her injuries? Isn’t this a little bit like the crazy wife in the attic in Jane Eyre?”
“I hated that book,” Jenny said absently. “I could take everything up to the point he got his sight back, and that was it for me.”
“My point exactly,” Kate said. “This is the kind of thing that only happens in gothic soap operas.”
“Or in close-minded little towns where nobody can be themselves and gossip can be raised to the level of a backstabbing art form,” Jenny countered.
Kate shook her head. “If this is true, Daddy spent his whole life grieving over a woman who was living right here under his nose.”
“How is it possible he was never suspicious?” Jenny asked.
“From everything we’ve been told, and what we’ve read in his journals, Daddy must have been blind with grief,” Kate said. “If Harold and Mr. Simmons were in on it, they could easily have put on a damned convincing funeral. Throw a couple of sacks of feed in an empty casket for weight, close the lid. That alone would have kept people speculating about how bad her face was cut up. You know how morbid folks can be about things like that.”
“True,” Jenny said, “but what about when this strange woman showed up living on the edge of town? Wouldn’t tongues have started wagging about that?”
“Maybe,” Kate said, “but Daddy wouldn’t have heard any of it. Once he inherited this place, he almost never went to town, and when he did, he never talked to anyone. If old lady Browning was smart enough and controlling enough to engineer a fake funeral, surely she could have managed a cover story for Alice living in that old house as Elizabeth Jones.”
“She must have been some piece of work,” Jenny said. “What kind of woman would do such a thing to her own daughter?”
“Well, if Elizabeth Jones is Alice Browning, there’s obviously a whole lot we don’t know, so I guess we find out on Saturday. And Clara’s right, in the meantime, we just let everything be normal. Since she brought up Mandy, I’m also guessing this all has something to do with her real father.”
“I didn’t even ask you if Saturday was okay with you,” Jenny said.
“Well, as it happens, Josh and I were going to take a load of goats to Mason,” Kate said. “This works out fine. I’ll help him get them in the trailer early and send him off by himself. Nobody needs to know where we’re going.”
“He’ll ask why you’re sending him by himself,” Jenny warned.
“I’ll tell him we’re going to town to meet with Jolene and plan a surprise wedding shower for Mandy,” Kate said. “Men run like a bunch of scared rabbits when women start planning social events. Didn’t you see how the boys hid their heads in their plates at dinner when she was showing us those damned dresses?”
“Perfect cover story,” Jenny agreed. “Josh is already about to have a stroke that he’s going to have to put on a tuxedo to be one of the groomsmen.”
“I should be so lucky,” Kate grumbled, getting up to start the dishes. “I’m going to have nightmares tonight about those bridesmaids dresses.”
“No, you won’t,” Jenny assured her grinning. “It’ll be the sun hats. Did you notice they had satin streamers?”
At a little before 10 o’clock on Saturday morning Jenny and Kate stood in front of the gate at Elizabeth Jones’ house.
“What were you saying about bad gothic novels?” Jenny asked, her eyes roaming over the lines of the old house.
“Really,” Kate added. “I’m pretty sure this place has the requisite attic.”
“Clara said to press that thing,” Jenny said, pointing at the buzzer.
Kate did as she was told and they waited. After a minute or two, Hortencia’s round face appeared at the door of the gatehouse.
“Buenos dias, Señorita Catalina,” she said, smiling at Kate.
“Buenos dias, Hortencia,” Kate smiled back. “Como esta su madre?”
Hortencia smiled broadly as she opened the door for them, “Muy bien, gracias.”
As they followed the housekeeper to the door, Jenny said under her breath, “You didn’t tell me you knew Hortencia.”
“Her uncle shears for us,” Kate answered. “And her Mama makes the best tortillas in the county.”
Hortenica held the door open for them to enter the house. Once inside she said, pointing toward the parlor, “The señoras are there.”
Kate and Jenny stepped in the room and stopped in their tracks. Mae Ella Gormley and Lenore Ferguson occupied the antique sofa, with Wilma Schneider in a straight-back chair on their left. On the right, Clara Wyler was settled in a red velvet wingback, her oxygen line firmly in place. Beside her, in a matching chair, Elizabeth Jones gazed at them calmly, not attempting to hide the ruined side of her features. Although her hair was snow white and a cane leaned against the chair, her expression carried an air of lively engagement and depth of character that Jenny instantly recognized from Langston Lockwood’s drawings.
“Welcome to my home, ladies,” Elizabeth said, indicating the two empty chairs that completed the circle obviously arranged with a discussion in mind. “Won’t you sit down?”
“Thank you,” Jenny said, taking in the antique air of the room and the quality of gentile isolation it suggested. The woman in the chair had clearly spent many years here, but this space didn’t convey the hermit-like desperation she had sensed in Langston’s cave. Turning her attention back to the seated figure, Jenny said, “Should we call you Elizabeth or Alice?”
“No one has called me Alice in more than 50 years,” the old woman said.
“But you are Alice Browning,” Jenny said.
“I was Alice Browning,” Elizabeth answered, “and I loved your father . . . and your mother . . . very much.”
“Our mother?” Kate said, surprise coloring her voice. “You knew our mother?”
“Irene was my dear friend,” Elizabeth said. “We only knew one another for a short time before her death, but we were very close. She wanted so much for you girls, and although you don’t know it, she made sure before she died that you would be taken care of in the end. Langston liked to believe that his word was law on the Rocking L, but it was Irene who crafted your future. You own the ranch today because of her. Please, sit. Let us tell you the story.”
The sisters each took a chair and looked around the room. “I don’t understand why you’re all here,” Kate said. “What’s going on?”
“We all played a part in what happened, Katie,” Clara said, dialing up her oxygen. “The story has to come from us all.”
“But it must begin with me,” Elizabeth said, drawing in a long breath as if she were preparing herself for an arduous task. “It must begin with the night I died.”
62
Elizabeth fell silent as she gathered her thoughts. No one else in the room spoke. Outside the window a scampering squirrel caught Jenny’s attention and she was overcome by a sudden, nauseating wave of fear. Did she really want to hear what Elizabeth had to say or were the silent secrets of the past better left to molder into the forgetfulness of time?
Here they were. Seven women brought together by the fallout of one man’s decisions and
choices. Across the road in the graveyard, her own mother made eight. Mandy was nine. Was there no end to the fallout of Langston Lockwood’s arrogance? Wasn’t that very thing better left in the grave with him?
And yet, Elizabeth had said Irene protected them, ensured their future. The idea that her mother, in the end, trumped the suffocating bonds of her abusive and unhappy marriage thrilled Jenny. It felt uncomfortably like an unnamed desire for vengeance against her father, and that’s what scared her.
All their recent discoveries showed Jenny how much she was like Langston; her temper, her passion, her talent, but she did not want his vengeful spirit. That would be a revelation she didn’t think she could handle. That revelation might kill her.
Jenny’s thoughts snapped back to the present when Kate quietly took her hand. Jenny turned to look at her sister, who whispered silently, “You okay?”
Jenny nodded, but she didn’t turn loose of Kate’s hand. Kate’s thumb softly stroked Jenny’s knuckles, comforting her anxiety. Their eyes met and Kate used the same words she’d spoken that night in the draw, “I’m here.”
Somehow, Katie always knew. Just like Mama, Jenny thought. Just like the woman you don’t think you ever understood. She smiled at Kate and nodded again, squeezing her hand.
The sound of Elizabeth clearing her throat made them both turn toward the old woman, who smiled and began to speak.
“In so many ways I was a thoughtless, careless young woman,” she said. “Langston, George and I grew up together. I knew they were both in love with me . . .”
December 1957
Alice Browning stood in front of the full-length mirror in her bedroom and smoothed the folds of her Christmas taffeta party dress. George would be there any minute to pick her up and then they had to drive out and get Langston because his car wasn’t working. The three of them had all been looking forward to this night for weeks.
Alice had been scared to death that her mother’s seamstress, Mrs. Buster, wouldn’t have the dress ready in time. Just that afternoon Alice and her mother picked the gown up at the cleaners, perfectly pressed for the occasion. Now, Alice couldn’t quit looking at her own reflection, twirling to make her petticoats swirl the yards of festive fabric in a rainbow of color around her.
The Lockwood Legacy - Books 1-6: Plus Bonus Short Stories Page 37