David took his time answering. “The Edi I knew had a reason for everything she did, and I think she meant for your Jocelyn to find out what that reason was.”
“Don’t start on me again. She’s not ‘my’ Jocelyn.”
David ignored his grandson’s angry tone. “Did you read Edi’s letters to Alex?”
“Letters?” Luke asked, sounding as though he’d never heard of such a thing.
“Yes, letters. Alex and Edi corresponded all during the war and afterward. Ramsey must have them.”
Luke thought about that for a moment. If there were letters between Edi and Alex, then Luke had no doubt that Ramsey had read them—and kept them a secret. No wonder Rams was pursuing Jocelyn with so much gusto. Picnic baskets, chocolate-covered strawberries, hassling Tess for advice…Suddenly, some things were making sense. Luke’s mother used to visit Alex McDowell often. Had she read the letters? Had she colluded with him in some plan to hook up Rams and Jocelyn?
Luke looked at his grandfather. “What about you?”
David looked up at the waitress to signal for the check. “What about me what?”
“Letters,” Luke said. “Did you and Miss Edi write each other?”
“For a while,” David said, his voice barely audible.
Luke stared at his grandfather as he signed the check, and when he stood up to go, Luke stayed seated and kept staring.
Reluctantly, David sat back down. “Okay, yes, we exchanged a few letters, but…”
Luke studied his grandfather’s face. “Nana Mary Alice doesn’t know about them, does she?”
“Oh, she knew all right, but she made me swear to burn them, and I did.”
Luke’s face fell. “You didn’t by chance burn some other letters, did you?”
“No. Your grandmother was forgiving of some things, but she got sick of being compared to Edi. She stood right beside me as I threw every one of those letters into the flames.”
Luke looked at his plate, and for a moment David was silent.
“However…,” David said.
“However, what?”
“The truth is that those letters from Edi weren’t very interesting. She just recounted where she was and what she was doing during the war. They were more perfunctory than enlightening. But the stories she sent to Alex…Well, they were a whole different kettle of fish.”
“You mean the letters Ramsey has?”
“No, not those. I’m talking about the stories she wrote while she was recovering from her burns. She told Alex the truth about what she did during the war and she wrote down the story about the man named David who she fell in love with.”
“Do you have those stories?” Luke asked, his eyes alight.
“Yes and no.” David paused. “You know what Alex was like at the end. It was only by accident that I saw the stories, and I think some of them may have been destroyed. I kept all that I could find.”
“Where are they?”
“In a safe-deposit box that my wife doesn’t know I have.”
“When can we get them?”
David looked at his grandson. “Meet me here tomorrow at ten A.M. and we’ll drive to Richmond.”
“You have to keep the safe-deposit box all the way in Richmond?”
“Be grateful I didn’t open it in Nevada. Meet me here, and we’ll drive there together.”
“I look forward to it,” Luke said.
“We won’t go fishing, but maybe we can ride in a vehicle together,” David said, and Luke knew he was making an allusion to Granpa Joe. It had never occurred to Luke that Granpa Dave could be jealous.
“So maybe you can give me some advice on how to get a feisty girl to think of me as something besides her best buddy,” Luke said.
Just then two pretty girls walked by and when they saw Luke they started to giggle and batt their lashes at him.
“Now why do I think you’ll have no problem with that on your own? Come on, I’ll walk you to your truck.”
“I brought the car.”
“If I’d known you wanted information from me that much I would have made you pay the check. So, tell me, what’s your father up to these days?”
Luke gave a low laugh. “He’s solving a cupcake crisis.”
When Luke started to say more, David put up his hand. “Save it for tomorrow and tell me on the drive. I may not sleep tonight from eager anticipation.”
“And you can tell me about your broken engagement from Miss Edi.”
They were in the parking lot now, and suddenly Luke looked at his grandfather with love. He knew from experience how quickly people could leave this life.
“Don’t look at me like that. Go!” David ordered. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Thanks,” Luke said as he got into his car, but he put his hand on his grandfather’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze.
11
IF I NEVER see another cupcake in my life, it will be too soon,” Sara muttered as she turned the little cake around in her hand and tried to make an icing rose on top of it.
“I would have thought you’d like this job,” Tess said. She was making a big daisy on her cupcake.
“You just like it because it’s better than working with lawyers,” Sara said. “I don’t like the mess. I don’t like the smell, and I don’t even like the sugar.”
“You don’t have to stay,” Jocelyn said. She was at the huge, beautiful range that Jim, Luke’s father, had put in for her four days ago. Already, it had been put through enough that it was a veteran.
“Go!” Jim said to Sara as he came in from the hallway, his arms full of grocery bags. “Go sew your fancy clothes for ladies who eat too much.”
Sara handed her cupcake to Tess and practically ran out of the room.
Jim surveyed the many cupcakes on the table and countertops as though he were a government inspector.
“Do we pass?” Joce asked.
“They look good to me, but I think Luke should yea or nay them. He knows more about flowers than I do.”
Tess put down her big pastry tube and shook her arms. Few people knew how much muscle it took to squeeze the thick, heavy icing out of the big bags through tiny tubes to make the designs. “I’m going to write a murder mystery and the killer is a woman who is a professional cake decorator. No one suspects her because the murder took great strength to commit. Who would think that a lady who decorates cakes has the strength of ten men in her forearms?”
Jim picked up a cupcake that looked like a ladybug. The body of it was red with black spots, with a black face. Tess had added white eyes, a red nose, and a bright white smile. She’d also made a green turtle with Tootsie Roll legs and head. But her pièce de résistance was a bright yellow, smiling chick with closed eyes and happy little wings that made him look as though he was about to take off flying.
“You ought to go into business,” Jim said as he picked up a cupcake covered in pink and yellow flowers with tiny white centers.
“No,” Tess said slowly, “I’m just good at bossing lazy men around.” She picked up an uniced cupcake and looked at it. “What do you think? Shall I try a bumblebee?”
“I think that whatever you attempt, it’ll come out good,” Jim said as he glanced at Jocelyn, who was straining a batch of spinach purée. They’d been working on the cupcakes for days now, and the biggest surprise to them all was how good Tess was at decorating them.
The first day, Jim had taken over. When he and Joce couldn’t find Luke in the garden, Jim drove them to Luke’s house to borrow his pickup. Jocelyn was curious to see where Luke lived, but all she saw was the outside. It wasn’t a large house, but it had a deep porch across the front, and it was beautiful. She didn’t know what she’d expected, but it didn’t take an expert to see that the house had cost a lot. The windows were double paned and deeply trimmed with hardwood. The roof looked to be slate. When she peeked around the side, she could see what looked to be a fabulous garden in the back.
When she glanced at Jim, he was wa
tching her. “I take it you haven’t been here before,” he said as he pushed some numbers on a keypad and the garage door opened.
“No. Is the town saying I have been?”
“This town says everything.” When the garage door opened, he said, “He took the car.”
“Luke has a truck and a car?”
Jim gave her a sharp look but didn’t answer. “He must have gone into Williamsburg to see his grandfather.”
“I thought his grandfather passed away.”
“Told you that, did he?”
“Yes,” Joce said cautiously as she got into the passenger side of the truck. Was there some secret about Luke’s grandfather?
“My guess is he went to see the other one, my wife’s father.”
“Oh,” Joce said but said no more. Just as she’d suspected, in front of the truck were three motorbikes: a muddy Honda dirt bike, an old Indian, and a sleek red Kawasaki made for the road. As she got into the truck, she wanted to ask more about Luke, but Jim didn’t seem to want to say much about him. Actually, the man didn’t seem to want to say much about anything, so they rode in silence for a while. “You wouldn’t like to fill me in on what’s going on with all these cakes, would you?”
“Beats me,” Jim said. “Luke said he wanted me to organize a big party for Saturday where you sell cupcakes for twenty-five dollars each—or thereabouts. Sounds good to me. What kind of equipment do you need?”
“The kind that comes for free,” she said without thinking.
“How about if I get you time payments that don’t start for eighteen months?”
“To get terms like that you must have sold your soul to the devil.”
Jim gave a little chuckle. “Worse than the devil, I owe my soul to the company store.”
“Whadaya expect when you load sixteen tons?” Joce said without so much as a smile.
As Jim backed the truck out of the garage, he gave her a smile that almost cracked his face. “Anybody who can quote Tennessee Ernie Ford is my kinda gal. How does a forty-eight-inch six-burner with a grill and two ovens sound to you?”
“What are the BTUs?”
“At least sixteen thousand.”
“I’d say that no wonder you were so good at your job. You talk porno to women.”
He took her to a warehouse outside Richmond and introduced her to what seemed to be a hundred men, all of whom he’d trained, and all of whom were still in awe of him. Jim had been regional manager for the entire southeastern United States and had always topped his yearly sales quota by at least 4 percent.
What he was able to get for Jocelyn were damaged appliances. The huge range had a dent in the back of it that wouldn’t be seen, but no customer paying top dollar would want it. He also got her a giant freezer that was in a discontinued color of pale yellow. “It looks like butter,” she said.
“That’s the problem,” Jim said. “Today people don’t even want to think about butter. They want to think about lettuce.” The way he said it made her laugh.
By the time they got back to Edilean Manor, there were three cars in the driveway. “It looks like my wife is working hard to get rid of me,” Jim said. “Maybe you and I should go into business together.”
“Doing what?” Joce asked.
“I haven’t figured that out yet, but if I come up with something, I’ll let you know.”
“What about Luke? Maybe you two could—”
“We’d kill each other in the first week. He likes to work alone.”
“But he can’t make much money at gardening. I’m no Realtor, but that house of his looked as though it cost a dollar or two.”
“He just needs time to lick his wounds,” Jim said as he got out of the truck. “He’ll be fine. He likes you a lot, I know that. I haven’t seen him less miserable in a long time.”
Jocelyn sat in the truck and watched Jim as he went into her house. Miserable? What was Luke unhappy about? He’d never seemed “miserable” to her.
In the next minute the red-haired woman who’d been at her door the day before came out, opened the trunk of her car, and pulled out a huge mixer. Joce jumped out of Luke’s pickup. “Let me help you with that.” She slipped her arm under the top of it, then took the other box the woman handed her.
“I met you at church, but I’m sure you don’t remember me. I’m Mavis—”
“Ken’s mother.”
“That’s right,” she said, pleased. “Where have you and Jim been?”
“Buying things. They should be here tomorrow.”
“Ha! If I know Jim Connor, they’ll be here any minute. There’s a man in there disconnecting the gas lines already. Are you really going to open a cupcake store in Edilean and sell all over the U.S. by mail order?”
Jocelyn took a moment to digest that. “No. I can’t think of anything I’d less like to do than bake cupcakes for the rest of my life. Actually, I’m thinking of writing a history of Edilean. I’ve heard so many delicious secrets that I thought I’d share them with the world.”
Mavis gave Jocelyn a weak smile, then hurriedly started for the house. “If I were you, I wouldn’t tell anyone that or you might find arsenic in your own cupcake,” she said over her shoulder.
Joce followed her into the house. Interesting, she thought. She’d certainly hit a nerve with that remark.
Mavis was right, and the appliances showed up about two hours later. Jim was frowning and asking what the hell took them so long to do one simple job.
“Did they celebrate when he retired?” Joce whispered to Tess.
“Actually, they cried. He got the best out of them.”
“Like you do with your lawyers.”
Tess shrugged as she twirled a lazy Susan around. “You mind if I help on this? Sometimes I get sick of paperwork. It might be interesting to do something different.”
“I don’t know how big this thing is getting to be, but it’s my guess that I’m going to need all the help I can get.”
Later, she thought that truer words had never been spoken. At first, some of the women from church stopped by to see what was going on, and now and then one of them tried to decorate a cupcake, but between Tess and Jim giving orders, they soon left. “See what I have to put up with,” Jocelyn heard Luke’s mother say to one woman as they both left.
In the end, it was just Tess, Jim, and Jocelyn in the kitchen. Jocelyn baked and put the cakes in the freezer, then Tess decorated them. Jim made sure the women had everything they needed and he kept the bowls and bags clean. Tess soon learned that she didn’t like parchment paper bags, so Jim got on the Internet and found huge canvas bags for her. They also ordered so many tubes, holders, paste colors, and rose nails that they arrived in a three-foot-square box. In the bottom was a DVD showing how to use the equipment. Tess used her portable player and caught on as though she’d done it all her life, and soon there were icing roses everywhere.
Late on the second day, Ramsey showed up with a briefcase full of papers and a list of questions for Tess. Most of them started with “Where is…?”
Tess was piping butterfly wings on parchment paper. When they were dry, she’d peel them off, stick them together, and put them on top of the cupcakes. “I don’t know,” she said to Ramsey. “Ask one of the girls to look for whatever you can’t find. Or have they finished their learn-to-read courses yet?”
“Tess, this is not funny. I’m due in court at nine tomorrow morning and I don’t know what happened to the deposition.”
“Did anyone type it?” Tess asked without looking up.
“Of course it was typed. When it was transcribed it was…” He trailed off. “Please tell me it’s not still on tape.”
“I didn’t tell the girls to do it, so unless you did, my guess is that it is still on tape. And it’s probably still in the recorder. I hope you checked the batteries. Did you make sure that the little wheels inside were going ’round and ’round?”
“I have to go,” Ramsey said in a voice that sounded like he was going
to be sick. As he ran past Jocelyn he paused, as though he thought he should stop and say something.
“Go!” she said. “Check the recorder. Do what you have to do.”
As he hurried through the hall, he yelled, “Tomorrow, Tess. I want you in the office tomorrow morning. I want you in court with me.” They heard the door close behind him.
Joce was stirring a pan and turned to look at Tess. “I’ll hate to lose you, but if you’re needed at work…”
“I have no intention of going back to that office until Ramsey McDowell and his partners offer me more money.”
“And a car,” Jim said from the doorway.
“And a new kitchen,” Jocelyn said, then looked at Tess. “Okay, so no new kitchen. How about a company credit card and four weeks paid vacation?”
“I like it,” Tess said, smiling as she held up a cute little bumblebee cupcake. “Or maybe I’ll quit and do this.”
She was joking, but Jim and Jocelyn looked at each other with raised eyebrows.
It was at four o’clock on the day before the party, when Jocelyn was so tired she was swaying on her feet, that Jim said, “So what are the adults going to eat?”
“I thought there was going to be food for them.”
“Yeah,” Jim said, “there is. Viv’s having it catered, but what about the cupcakes for them? Or cookies? They’ll want something that doesn’t have a five-inch-thick layer of icing on it.”
“How about edible flowers?”
The three of them turned to see Luke standing in the doorway holding a big wooden box full of flowers.
“Where have you been?” Joce blurted out. “I haven’t seen you in days. What have you been doing?”
Everyone looked from Luke to Jocelyn because she’d sounded almost angry.
“Glad to know I was missed,” he said calmly as he put the wooden flat down on the edge of the table.
Lavender Morning Page 17