Lavender Morning Read online

  But he was watching Miss Edi as though trying to assess her, to see if it was all right for his daughter to be with her. Miss Edi turned away. Better to ask if the child should be with him.

  It was only minutes before Jocelyn returned with the chalk, and Miss Edi showed her how to draw the hopscotch chart on the concrete driveway, throw the rock, then follow it on one foot. She’d been delighted by the game.

  A few days later, when Edi opened her front door and saw the scrawny, poorly clad little girl, her blonde hair covering her face, sitting on her front steps and crying, she wasn’t surprised.

  “I’m sorry,” the girl said as she jumped up. “I didn’t mean to…” She didn’t seem to know what to say.

  Edi saw the corner of a plastic suitcase behind a hibiscus bush and figured the child was running away from home.

  That first day, Edi purposefully kept the child at her house for nearly three hours. They talked of books and a science project she was making at school. What Edi wanted to do was teach that father of hers a lesson; she wanted to make him worry. He should pay more attention to where his child was.

  While Edi walked Jocelyn back to her house, she was thinking that when the relieved parents came to the door, she would give them a piece of her mind. But to Edi’s shock, her father and stepmother hadn’t been aware that the girl had run away. Worse, when they were told, they weren’t worried or surprised. Their attitude was that Jocelyn did what she wanted to and they had no idea what that was.

  That night, Edi called Alex and told him the child’s situation was worse than he’d thought. “She’s extremely intelligent and loves learning and culture. You should have seen her face when I played Vivaldi! It’s as if Shakespeare were living with the town morons. Did I tell you about those two repulsive stepsisters of hers?”

  “Yes,” Alex said, “but tell me again.”

  The next weekend, as Edi hoped she would, the girl showed up on the sidewalk, trying to look as though she were just passing by. Edi asked the child in, then called her father and asked if she might be allowed to help Edi with a project she was working on. That he didn’t ask what the project was or inquire about the length of the stay solidified her bad impression of him. “Yeah,” her father said on the phone, “I heard about you and I know where you live. Sure, Joce can stay there. If you gotta lotta books Joce’ll be happy. She’s just like her momma.”

  “Then she may stay here for the afternoon?” Edi asked, sounding even more stiff than she usually did. She was trying to conceal a growing dislike for the man.

  “Sure. Let her stay. We’re gonna go to a rally so we’ll be home late. Hey! You wanta keep her overnight, you can do that. I bet Joce’d like that.”

  “Perhaps I shall,” Edi said, then hung up.

  Jocelyn had spent the night. In fact, they enjoyed each other’s company so much that the child didn’t leave until Sunday evening. As she started to go, she turned back, ran to Edi, and threw her arms around her waist. “You are the nicest, smartest, most wonderful person I’ve ever met.”

  Edi tried to remain aloof, but she couldn’t help hugging the girl back.

  After that, Jocelyn spent weekends at Edi’s house and most of the holidays. They were two lonely people who needed each other and were thrilled to have found one another. They made a life together, with outings on Saturdays, church on Sundays, and time to be quiet and sit in the garden.

  As for her father, for all that Edi had at first judged him to be uncaring, she found out that he loved his daughter as much as he’d loved her mother, and all he wanted was for Jocelyn to be happy. “I can’t give her what she woulda had if her mother had lived,” he told Edi, “but maybe you can. Joce can go to your house all she wants to, and if you need anything from me, you just let me know.” He glanced at his wife and twin stepdaughters waiting for him in the car. “They’re like me and we fit together, but Joce is…different.”

  Edi knew what it felt like to be different, and Jocelyn was as out of place in her home as Edi had been at times in her life.

  The years with Jocelyn had been the happiest of Edi’s life. It had been wonderful to teach a young mind, and to show her the world. When her family went to Disney World, Edi took Jocelyn to New York to the Metropolitan Opera. When her stepsisters were wearing short shorts to show off their long legs, Jocelyn was wearing Edi’s pearls with a twin set.

  The summer Joce turned sixteen, she and Miss Edi went to London, Paris, and Rome together. The traveling had been difficult on Miss Edi. Between her legs and her age, she didn’t have much energy. But Jocelyn had spent the days wandering about the cities and photographing them. In the evenings she shared her new stories with Miss Edi’s old ones.

  In London Edi had shown Joce where she’d met David—no last name given—the man she’d loved and lost. “There was only one man for me, and he was it,” she said as she looked at the big white marble building where they’d met.

  By that time, Jocelyn had heard the story a dozen times but she never tired of it. “One love.” “A love for all time.” “A forever love.” These were terms she’d heard many times. “Hold out for it,” Miss Edi said. “Wait for that kind of love,” she advised, and Jocelyn had always agreed. One true love.

  Besides the pleasure of the time they spent together, as she grew older, Jocelyn often aided Miss Edi with the charities she administered. Joce did research and sometimes even traveled to see them. Three times she discovered frauds and as a result, she developed friendships with a couple of men in the local police department.

  But what Miss Edi never told was that the money she gave away wasn’t hers. She carefully concealed the fact that the money came from Alexander McDowell of Edilean, Virginia. In all their years of friendship, neither his name nor the town’s was ever mentioned.

  When Jocelyn started going to a small college not too far away, Edi had been lost without her. At first, Jocelyn had been so busy with her weekend job and all she’d had to do to put herself through school, she couldn’t even call. They e-mailed and texted often—Miss Edi loved any new technology that came out—but it wasn’t the same.

  After six months of college, Miss Edi started paying Jocelyn’s tuition so she wouldn’t have to spend all her time at the school. This was done without the knowledge of her father or the “Steps,” as they called the two skinny, blonde twins. Edi didn’t think her father would object, but she didn’t want to risk it. And she especially didn’t want to risk that the stepdaughters would hit her up for money. Although people often spoke of how beautiful the girls were, Edi didn’t find them so. Several times they’d shown up at Edi’s house when Jocelyn wasn’t there, and they’d looked around her house as though they were trying to guess the value of everything. Edi disliked them as much as she loved Jocelyn.

  Jocelyn graduated from college with a degree in English literature and got part-time work at the same school as a teaching assistant. And through a friend of Miss Edi’s, she got freelance employment helping authors research the biographies they were trying to write. Joce was excellent at both jobs, and she especially loved spending her days in libraries, buried in old files.

  When Edi realized that the little pains in her chest were more than just aging, she started thinking about Jocelyn’s future. If Edi died and left everything to Jocelyn, as she planned to do, she had no doubt that the Steps would do what they could to take it from her.

  Edi wanted to leave Jocelyn with a great deal more than just her possessions. She wanted to leave her with a future. No. What she really wanted was to leave her a family. Jocelyn had spent most of her life living with old people, first her grandparents, then Miss Edi. Edi had taken everything she knew about Jocelyn into consideration, then she’d spent a long time and done a lot of work to figure out how to give Jocelyn what she needed.

  Now, she closed the lid on the book of memorabilia and slowly made her way to the kitchen. What dreadful thing had the little nurse left her for dinner? Probably something with the word taco in the title.
When she heard the overnight delivery truck pull into the drive to pick up the package for Helen, she smiled.

  As Edi opened the refrigerator, she thought that the best thing about all this was that she wasn’t going to be around when Jocelyn found out that Edi had…Well, not really lied, but she’d omitted an awful lot about herself. Since Jocelyn loved to ask Edi about her long life, it hadn’t been easy to skip years and brush over the whole truth, but Edi had managed it.

  She pulled out the big salad that had been left for her and put it on the table. Jocelyn wasn’t going to be happy when she was told certain things, but Edi had faith that Jocelyn would search to find the answers to everything.

  Smiling, Edi thought how her life plan for Jocelyn excluded those too-tall, too-skinny stepsisters who paraded around with next to no clothes on. That those girls had become “famous”—a term Miss Edi detested—said much too much about the modern world.

  Jocelyn didn’t think Edi knew it, but the young woman had given up a great deal to look after an old woman, and Edi wanted to make it up to her. What Edi wanted to give Jocelyn was the truth. But she wasn’t just going to tell her everything, she was going to make Jocelyn search it out, work for it, something she was so very good at doing.

  “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.”

  When he remained standing, Joce also stood. “Thank you,” she said as she took the portfolio. “I’ll read it later.”

  “I would suggest that you read it when you’re alone. In privacy. Edilean wrote some things that I think she meant only for you to see.”

  “Everything to her?” Ash asked, at last understanding what had been said. “But what about us? We used to visit the old woman all the time.”

  Mr. Johnson’s old face moved into a bit of a smile. “How could I have forgotten?” He took a key out of his pocket, and unlocked a drawer in his desk. “She left these for you.”

  He held out two small, blue satin bags, and the contents looked to be bumpy, as though they contained jewels.

  “Oooooh,” Bell and Ash said in unison. “For us? Why that darling. She shouldn’t have. We really didn’t expect anything.”