Lavender Morning

by Jude Deveraux

  When the door was opened by a handsome, gray-haired man, Jocelyn almost said she was there to see his father. “You’re Miss Edi’s David?” she blurted out, wonder in her voice.

  He gave her a dazzling smile and said, “You have made my entire week. No, my whole year. I can hardly wait to tell Jim about you.”

  Jocelyn laughed. “I’ve heard all about the grandfather jealousy, Dr. Aldredge, but I didn’t know it extended to the generation in between.”

  “Oh, yes. It goes all the way down—and back. I can’t imagine what would happen if Luke had a child.” At that he gave her a glance up and down.

  “Shall I take that look as a fertility check?” she shot at him.

  David blinked a moment, then smiled. “Jim said you had a saucy sense of humor, but it’s better than he said. Won’t you come in? My wife has made herself scarce for the afternoon, so we have the privacy to talk. And, by the way, call me Dave, or as the town does, Dr. Dave.”

  As soon as Joce stepped inside, she saw why he’d bought the house. The entire front of it was glass and it looked onto a small, storybook beautiful harbor. Sailboats and small motorboats and little docks led into the lovely James River.

  “Wow!” was all she could say.

  “We like it,” Dr. Dave said, obviously pleased that she thought it was pretty.

  The downstairs of the house was mostly one open room, with living, breakfast, and kitchen all in one area. To the side was a dining room that had been turned into a TV-library. Across the front of the house was a glassed-in porch with wicker furniture, and it looked like the place that got the most use.

  She knew her guess was correct when she saw there was a little table set for two on the long porch. The dishes matched the napkins and the place mats, so she knew someone had gone to a lot of trouble.

  “I guess I should have asked what you like to eat but—”

  “Luke told you everything about me,” she said.

  “No.” Dr. Dave looked surprised. “My grandson would probably hit me over the head with one of my own golf clubs if he knew I’d invited you here. He has a true belief that he can solve all his own problems all by himself.”

  “And you don’t think he can?”

  “I don’t believe anyone can solve their problems all by themselves. What about you?”

  “I don’t know,” she said cautiously. “I don’t think I ever thought about it before, but I guess not. I know that I grew up being very attached to Miss Edi, and she helped me with whatever problems I had.”

  “Ah, yes, now we get down to it,” Dr. Dave said as he removed the cover off the big soup tureen in the center of the table. “Do you like cold vichyssoise?”

  “Love it. But only if it’s from organic potatoes.”

  Dr. Dave chuckled. “You’ve spent some time around Ellie.”

  “No, just her daughter and all the other relatives.” At the thought of Sara, Jocelyn couldn’t keep her face from turning red.

  “So Sara has a new boyfriend, does she? Bit noisy, are they?”

  Jocelyn took a sip of the soup. Delicious. “Jim stopped that.”

  “So I was told, and my wife made me leave the room when I started to laugh. Jim always was a bit of a prude. I can’t imagine why my daughter married him.”

  Joce knew he was teasing, but she didn’t like it. Jim Connor had been very good to her. “Maybe because he’s the kind of man who looks after people and cares about them and helps whenever he’s needed.”

  “I see,” Dr. Dave said, sitting down and taking a sip of his soup. “Like father, like son.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Just that Luke and his father are very much alike. That’s why Luke got along with the other grandfather so well. I’d offer Luke a trip to Disney World and Joe would offer him two days on a smelly boat. I always lost out.”

  “Were you disappointed that Luke didn’t become a doctor?” she asked.

  “Why, no,” Dr. Dave said, as though he’d never thought of the idea before. He got up to get some rolls out of the oven. “Mary Alice would skin me if I forgot these. Only Henry, Sara’s father, wanted to be a doctor. The rest of them did what they wanted to.”

  Jocelyn broke a roll, buttered it, and took a bite. She’d had enough of chitchat. “So what happened between you and Miss Edi?”

  “People don’t know this, but we broke up before we left for war.”

  Jocelyn could only blink at him. “But I thought…”

  “Everyone, including us, thought we were going to get married. I asked her, she said yes, and I slipped the ring on her finger. But a few weeks after that, Pearl Harbor was bombed and everything changed.”

  “Or did things change because of what happened earlier in that year?”

  It was Dr. Dave’s turn to look surprised. “You do your research, don’t you.”

  “I know that Alexander McDowell supported Miss Edi after her retirement, and I assume it was probably his money that sent me to college. Now why would he do something like that?”

  “Would you like some more soup?”

  “Love some.”

  “And I have sandwiches. Cucumber, tuna, chicken salad, and egg salad. Help yourself,” he said as he put the big plate on the table.

  “Okay,” Jocelyn said as she took a tuna salad sandwich and bit into it. “Something happened in Edilean about the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor on the seventh of December 1941, and because of it, a whole lot of things changed.”

  “Please tell me you aren’t going to dig and snoop until you find out what happened.”

  “I’m afraid I am.”

  Dr. Dave gave a sigh. “Young people always want to know family secrets.”

  “From people who already know them,” Jocelyn said.

  Dr. Dave chuckled. “I knew I was right in asking Mary Alice to get us a chocolate cake from The Trellis.”

  “You mean one of those nine-layer Death by Chocolate things? They aren’t an urban legend?”

  “They’re real, and I have one. Now what is it you most want to know?”

  “Right now, I’m interested in 1944.”

  “Edi’s story,” Dr. Dave said as he took the empty bowls off the table. He waved to Jocelyn to stay where she was. “So you read the story I gave Luke.”

  “Sort of. Actually, he read it to me.”

  Dr. Dave put the dishes down on the kitchen island, then turned to her slowly. “What do you mean? He read it to you?”

  Joce stood up and wandered around a bit, looking at the pictures on the walls. Unless she missed her guess, they were original works gathered from around the United States. “Just that. I was baking cupcakes for that…that party and he read to me.” She said the word with so much anger that she had to take a couple of breaths. Where had Bell flown in from? Milan? London? Paris? All just to ruin Jocelyn’s first venture into society where she now lived. Between working that day and Bell’s hateful little stunt, Joce hadn’t talked to even one person about Miss Edi—which had been her main objective of the day. That and earning money.

  “Who else was in the house?” Dr. Dave asked.

  “Just us,” Joce said, then gave him a sharp look. “Have people been saying that Luke and I—”

  “No, I’ve heard nothing, and thanks to e-mail, texting, and the telephone, my wife and I hear pretty much everything that goes on in that town. So you and my grandson were alone in your house, you were baking cupcakes, and he was reading to you?”

  “Yes,” she said, giving him a puzzled look. “Am I missing something here? Did I commit some Southern taboo? Sara keeps telling me I’m a Yankee, and Tess…Well, who knows what Tess thinks?”

  “No,” Dr. Dave said softly, “you did nothing wrong. It’s just not a way I’ve seen my grandson before. He’s pretty much of a loner.”

  “Loner?” Joce said. “He’s married. Did you forget that?”

  Dr. Dave took his time as he removed the cover off a big cake holder, and under it was the wonderful chocola
te cake. “You wouldn’t like to hear the truth about Luke’s marriage, would you?”

  “It’s not any of my business,” Joce said tightly. “I know that I overreacted when I found out, and by the state of my garden now I should have kept my mouth shut, but in the last few months of my life I’ve had more betrayal than I can handle. Even if they aren’t interested in you as other than a friend, married men don’t usually sit in your kitchen night after night and—” She took a breath. “Whatever. You don’t by chance need a job mowing lawns, do you? We pay in cupcakes.”

  “No,” Dr. Dave said, smiling. “Night after night, huh?” He handed her a plate with a three-inch-thick piece of cake on it. “Maybe this will last you while I tell you about my grandson’s marriage.”

  “Does he know you tell people this?”

  “Luke doesn’t even know some of what I’m about to tell you.”

  “Ah, well, then,” she said as she took her first bite of the divine cake. “I’m all ears.”

  “Luke was living and working in…” Dr. Dave waved his hand. “Up north. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that he met a tall, skinny, pretty waitress and one thing led to another. Six weeks later, she told him she was pregnant. Old story, huh?”

  “The oldest,” Jocelyn said.

  “The difference is that my grandson was involved. Luke the Good. Luke the Honorable. He married her. He told me that he liked her and he figured that love would come. More importantly, he said he wasn’t going to desert the child she carried.”

  Dr. Dave looked down at his cake. “I was the only one who had the nerve to suggest that he wait and get a paternity test.” He looked back at Jocelyn. “Luke almost kicked me out of his life after that. I make jokes about it, but it hurt.”

  He took a breath. “Anyway, after the wedding, they honeymooned in New York. It’s where Ingrid wanted to go, and Luke would have done anything for the woman carrying his child. They were there only a day when a photographer handed her his card and asked her to come by to have some pictures made. Ingrid thought it was a joke, but Luke had heard of the man, so he encouraged her to go. Of course Luke went with her to the photo session.”

  Dr. Dave paused to take a bite of his cake. “The pictures were so good that the photographer asked to show them to some people, so Luke and Ingrid ended up staying in New York for two weeks. To make a long story short, Ingrid was pretty much an overnight success. You know how it is. They want the girls as young as they can get them.”

  “I know more about the modeling world than I want to,” Jocelyn said.

  “Luke needed to get back to his job, but Ingrid begged him to stay with her. I think that to Luke’s mind it had all been a lark. I think he thought that someday she’d show her model photos to their children.”

  “Did she refuse to go back with him?” Jocelyn asked.

  Dr. Dave jammed his fork into the cake. “No. I wish she had, but she didn’t. She may be a stupid girl, but when it comes to herself, she is exceedingly clever. She packed her bags and said she was going with him, that she loved him enough to give up everything for him. She just wanted one last assignment, so of course Luke said yes. How could he refuse? So she went to her last photo shoot while Luke stayed at the hotel and changed all the flights back home.

  “The next time Luke saw Ingrid, she was in a hospital. She’d miscarried and she was saying that she was so unhappy that she wanted to kill herself. Of course Luke couldn’t leave her there alone, and she was in so much pain that he couldn’t drag her onto a plane.”

  “What happened?” Joce asked.

  “In the end, Luke stayed in New York with her. He lived and worked in the city.”

  “Gardening in New York?”

  “My grandson can do a lot of things, but whatever he does, he hates doing it in a city, but they lived there together for about eighteen months. Then, one day, quite by accident, Luke found out that Ingrid hadn’t miscarried. Her ‘last assignment’ in New York had been to get an abortion.”

  “Luke must have been…” Joce was unable to think of words.

  “He was devastated about the child, the loss of…the loss of everything in his life. He returned to Edilean and started taking on gardening jobs. His paternal grandfather had left him an old house, and Luke fixed it up, then he turned his hand to Edilean Manor.”

  He looked at Jocelyn. “As far as I know, my grandson hadn’t seen or heard from Ingrid in nearly two years.”

  “Why didn’t he get a divorce?”

  “If she filed papers, I’m sure Luke would have happily signed them, but he’s not the kind of man to present a woman with divorce papers.”

  “But now they’re back together.”

  “Can I trust you?” Dr. Dave asked.

  “Do you mean will I tell the entire town whatever you say to me?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean. Sometimes it’s good to be surrounded by people who’ve known you all your life, but sometimes it’s horrible. From the beginning Luke has refused to talk to anyone about his disastrous marriage. I think he feels he was just plain dumb to have fallen for someone with so little…” He shrugged.

  “Soul? Lack of self-interest? I know what she’s like. I lived with two of them.”

  “What you don’t know is what I am like.”

  “You mean about you and Mary Alice Welsch?”

  At that Dr. Dave smiled, and she could see Luke in forty-plus years. “No, I don’t mean that. I mean that I hired a private investigator to find out about Ingrid’s very convenient ‘miscarriage.’ It took months, but he found the clinic she went to to have the abortion, then I made sure my grandson ‘accidently’ found the papers.”

  “If Luke found out you did that…,” Joce whispered.

  “I guess you can see how much I’m trusting you.”

  She leaned back in her chair. “You’re telling me this because you’ve found out something else, haven’t you?”

  “Yes.” Getting up, he opened a drawer in a table, pulled out a thick folder, then removed a big envelope. “Yesterday I received this from the same PI who found out about the abortion. It tells why Ingrid has come back.”

  She took the envelope, but she didn’t open it. “I really hope you’re not asking me to tell Luke about whatever is in here.”

  “No, I’m not. It’ll all come out in the newspapers soon enough. What I want to say is that when Luke was spending time with you—” He put up his hand when she started to speak. “Yes, I know it was just a few days, but he was the happiest I’ve seen him in years. He even played golf with me.”

  “You do know, don’t you, that he hates golf.”

  “Yeah,” Dr. Dave said with a chuckle. “And he’s really, really bad at it.”

  “Then why—?”

  “It’s just a family joke. He used to spend so much time with his other grandfather…Oh, well. It’ll all work out.” He pulled an old, yellowed stack of papers from inside the folder, and Joce’s eyes lit up. “You know what this is?”

  Like a cobra hypnotized by a flute, she leaned toward the papers, both of her hands out to take them.

  Dr. Dave pulled them away and put them back into the folder. “You make my grandson smile again and I’ll give you part two.”

  “Have you read them?” Her voice was little more than a whisper.

  “Oh, yeah. I especially liked the part where they slid into a river in an overturned car. Edi has to—Oh well, maybe you’re not interested.”

  “I am, but—”

  “But what?”

  “Ramsey. I told both him and Luke to get away from me.”

  “Funny you should mention Ramsey, but some new cases have come up in Massachusetts, and it looks like they’re going to take weeks.”

  “Heaven help me!” she said, aghast. “You sent him there, didn’t you? I really am being used as a piece of property. You want me for your grandson, don’t you?”

  “I’m too old to think that far ahead. Right now I want to use whatever I can to get
my grandson away from that grasping little gold digger he married. And I want you to add these stories to the book you’re writing on Edi.”

  “How do you know—? Never mind.”

  “Post office,” he said. “Return addresses, an Internet search, and it was easy to figure out what you were doing.”

  “For the life of me I can’t understand why Miss Edi wanted to get away from that town,” she said in sarcasm.

  “From what I hear, you’re fitting right in. You like people knowing who you are and you like living in the Big House.”

  “What kind of doctor are you? A shrink?”

  “GP,” he said as he searched inside the folder.

  “Please tell me you don’t have something else for me to read? A new Dead Sea Scroll maybe?”

  “Better. Ah, here it is. It’s my daughter’s pot roast recipe.”

  “Pot roast?”

  “That’s right. Make some, freeze it, and have it ready so when I make Luke so miserable that he goes back to digging holes at your house, you’ll be able to feed him.”

  “It’s called double digging and…Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “You miss him, don’t you?”

  “Actually, I’ve been so busy that I haven’t had time to even—” She cut off when he was smiling at her. “You know something? You’re as annoying as he is.”

  “I take that as a great compliment. Remember. Freeze the pot roast and have it ready.”

  16

  JOCELYN AWOKE LATE the next morning. Between Dr. Dave’s stories and the chocolate cake, she’d been in a stupor for the rest of the day, and had fallen asleep early.

  Part of her wanted to deny some of the things the man had said, but another part knew that he was right. She’d missed Luke—and she was oh, so very, very glad to hear that he was miserable.

  She showered and dressed, then looked at the big envelope that Dr. Dave had given her yesterday. She’d read it last night while she was in bed, and not a word of it had surprised her. Ingrid had been having an affair with a rich, prominent, married New York man and some reporter had found out about it. If the man’s wife discovered the affair and filed for divorce, it would cost him everything because the money was hers and the prenup he’d signed was not a pretty thing.