Lavender Morning (2 page)

lived to make a success of a business. Several times she’d come close to calling the family, but the pain she knew

she’d feel stopped her. Besides, she doubted if they’d ever heard of her. David was killed just weeks after they

met.

As Edi walked toward the kitchen, she thought of Jocelyn. As always, just the thought of the young woman

made her pain ease and her mind relax.

It had been Alexander McDowell, the man whose life was at the center of all the secrets and heartache,

who’d put Edi together with the young girl.

“Her grandparents, the Scovills, were dear, dear friends of mine,” Alex said, his voice raspy from a lifetime

of cigarettes. “Their beautiful daughter Claire was sent to the best schools. At her coming-out party, she had

eleven marriage proposals. But she didn’t marry until she was thirty-three, and then she chose the country club’s

handyman.”

Miss Edi had been through too much in her life to be a snob. “What was he like as a person?”

“Good to her. Lazy, barely literate, but good to her. They had a daughter named Jocelyn, and just a few

years later, beautiful Claire died.”

Maybe it was the name “Claire” or maybe it was that at that time Edi had been at a crossroads in her life.

She’d spent her working life traveling with Dr. Brenner. His family’s fortune gave him the freedom to work

unpaid, so he’d traveled around the world, helping wherever he was needed. It was said that if a bomb was

dropped, Dr. Brenner booked his flight before it exploded. The truth was that Edi did the booking, and she was

always with the doctor.

But when he retired, that meant Edi did also. Should she go back to Edilean to live in that big house with

her brother, who bored her to death? Or should she live quietly on her pension and savings and maybe write her

memoirs—yet another boring prospect?

When Alex McDowell, a man she’d known since they were babies together, offered her a job managing

charity funds and looking after the young granddaughter of his friends, Edi accepted.

“I don’t know what the child is like,” Alex said those many years ago. “For all I know, she could have the

brains of her father. What I do know is that after her mother died, she lived with her grandparents. After they

died, Jocelyn—that’s the girl’s name—was left in the full custody of her father.”

“He doesn’t harm her, does he?” Miss Edi asked quickly.

“No, I’ve had PIs looking in on her, and I’ve had no reports of anything like that, but her father has

reverted.”

“Reverted? To what?” Miss Edi asked sharply.

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3/16/2010 everted? To what?” Miss Edi asked sharply.

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Alex chuckled. “Worse than what you’re imagining. He remarried to a woman with identical twin daughters,

and they ride motorcycles together.”

For a second, Miss Edi closed her eyes. The name “Clare” and the image of motorcycles filled her mind.

“…Boca Raton,” Alex was saying.

“Sorry, but I didn’t hear all that.”

“I have a house in the same gated community where young Jocelyn lives with her father and the Steps, as

she calls them. One of my detectives talked to her.”

“She talked to a stranger?” Miss Edi snapped.

Again, Alex chuckled. “You haven’t changed, have you? I can assure you that the meeting was well

chaperoned. They were at a NASCAR race.”

“A what?”

“Just trust me on this: You’d hate the thing. Edi, what I’m asking is if you’d mind living in Boca Raton.

You’d be three houses from Claire’s daughter and watching out for her while you work for me.”

If it had been anyone else, Edi would have checked her enthusiasm, but Alex was an old, trusted friend. “I

would love to,” she said. “Truly love to.”

“I thought the warmth of Florida would be good for your legs.”

“Not moving back to Edilean and being looked at with pity for being an old maid will be the best thing for

my legs.”

“You, an old maid,” Alex said. “I will always see you as twenty-three and the most beautiful woman in—”

“Stop that or I’ll tell Lissie on you.”

“She loves you as much as I do,” Alex said quickly. “So give me your address and I’ll send you all the

particulars.”

“Thank you,” Edi said. “Thank you very much.”

“No,” Alex said, “the thanks are always to you. If it weren’t for you…”

“I know. Give kisses to everyone for me,” she said, then hung up. It was a full moment before her smile

nearly cracked her face. She was a great believer in doors opening and closing. The door with Dr. Brenner had

closed and a new one had opened.

Now, so many years later, Jocelyn Minton was the love of Miss Edi’s life. The child she didn’t have. The

heart of the home she’d missed out on.

Whenever Jocelyn could escape her duties at that little college that worked her half to death but paid her

little, she jumped in her car and drove home. After the obligatory visit to her father and stepmother, she’d head

straight to Edi’s house. The two of them would embrace, thoroughly glad to see each other. Jocelyn was the only

person who wasn’t intimidated by Edi’s stern appearance. She’d hug Edi just as she’d done when she was a

child. “My lifesaver,” she called Edi. “Without you I don’t know how I would have survived my childhood.”

Edi knew it was an exaggeration; after all, people didn’t die from a lack of books. They didn’t actually die

from being stuck in a house with a father, stepmother, and two stepsisters who thought truck rallies were high

society. But there were different ways to die.

The truth was that their meeting had been the best thing that ever happened to both of them. Edi had only

lived in the lovely house Alex had bought for four months when she first saw the child with her family. The house

they lived in had belonged to Jocelyn’s grandparents, and after her mother’s death it had been willed to the

granddaughter. It hadn’t taken much work to find out that what money had been left had been quickly spent.

Miss Edi saw the parents in their leather clothes, their two overly tall twin daughters wearing as little as was

legally allowable, then Jocelyn straggling behind them. She usually had a book in her hand and her dishwater

blonde hair covering her face, but the first time Edi got a good look at her, she saw intelligence in the girl’s deep

blue eyes. She wasn’t the beauty that her mother had been—Miss Edi had seen photos—but there was

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something about her that drew Edi to the child. Maybe it was her square chin with just the tiniest hint of a cleft in

it. It reminded her of another square chin that she’d once loved with all her heart. Or maybe it was the way the

child seemed to know that she was different from the people she lived with.

At the beginning Miss Edi had twice arranged it so she could speak to the girl. One time was at the library,

and they spent thirty minutes discussing the Narnia books, and just as they parted, they introduced themselves.

The second time, Miss Edi decided to take a walk that went past the child’s house. She was outside on her

bicycle, riding around and around on it. “When I was a child we played hopscotch,” Miss Edi said.

“What’s that?”

“If you have some chalk I’ll show you.”

Miss Edi waited while Jocelyn went inside and got the chalk. Back then, Miss Edi had only needed to use

one cane for walking. But all those years of standing up while she took care of Dr. Brenner and his team had

further damaged the muscles in her legs, and she knew that it wouldn’t be long before she was forced to use two

canes, then a walker, then…She didn’t like to think about those things.

She felt someone watching her and turned to see Jocelyn’s father. He was wearing what she’d known as a

“skivvy shirt,” something men in her generation kept covered. He seemed to have tattoos all over his body and

he hadn’t shaved for days. He was working on a blue motorcycle and constantly turning the handle to make it

sound louder. The neighbors had quit complaining, but not because he was a homeowner in the restricted

community. If that was all he was, they would have thrown him out. But Gary Minton was still the handyman, the

one who came in the middle of the night when the toilet overflowed and flooded the bathroom. He’d also pulled

a child off the bottom of a swimming pool, and climbed a tree to get a terrified little boy down. All in all, the noise

of a few motorcycles was easy to put up with.

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

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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