Roses (60 page)

K
ERMIT
, T
EXAS, TWO MONTHS LATER

R
achel stood by the front door of her childhood home—car keys in hand, a packed bag at her feet—and took a last look around.
She was leaving no visible trace of the lives lived here since before she was born. The scrapes and marks and stains left
behind by her family members were under coats of eggshell white paint she’d applied herself, unwilling to trust strangers
with the obliteration of their memories. It had taken her six weeks to clear and clean the place for the new occupants, whoever
they would be. She had made an agreement with the Realtor that the house was not to be shown or the for sale sign to go up
until she was ready to leave.

Her next-door neighbor, a woman she had known all her life and her mother’s best friend, had asked, “Why do you have to sell
the house so soon, Rachel? Why can’t you give yourself time to come home awhile?”

She’d shaken her head mutely, her voice still lost in the well of her grief. She didn’t deserve to live in this place she’d
loved and betrayed. It would be a sacrilege.

“Rachel, will you stay in Lubbock?” Danielle had asked when she went to pack her things from her office. Someone was already
occupying her desk, a young Japanese man who had neatly boxed her personal belongings and stacked them in a corner. Ron Kimball,
whose father was one of the survivors of the death march to Bataan, had already quit and found a job at another cotton farm
a county over. No way would he work for a Jap, he told Danielle. She, too, had given notice.

“And do what?” Rachel had asked with a mirthless smile. “Watch Toliver cotton grow under somebody else’s management?”

She’d put the town house up for sale as well and boxed her belongings, realizing as she arranged for their storage that with
the house on Houston Avenue gone and the one in Kermit soon to be on the market, she had nowhere to send them. She was virtually
homeless… for a while.

Rachel took a final glance around the living room, picked up her bag, and let herself out. She’d already visited her old garden
plot, now a neatly clipped part of the Bermuda-grass yard that showed only faint evidence of the bounty once grown there.

“I suspect this is where it all began for you,” Amos had remarked after the funeral when she’d found him gazing at the grass-covered
depressions beside the house, where he’d gone to escape from those paying their respects inside.

“Yes, this is where it all began,” she’d said, remembering the late afternoons she’d tended her garden, the conversations
overheard beneath the kitchen window.

“He wanted to come, you know.”

She had made no comment.

“Percy and I convinced Matt that… now would not be a good time. He’s terribly worried about you, Rachel. He can’t understand
why you refuse to see him, or at least to take his calls. Frankly, my dear… neither can I,” he said, his face seamed with
concern. “None of this is Matt’s fault, you know. Percy says that if you’ll just come back to Howbutker to hear Mary’s story,
you’ll understand why she left things as she did and all for the love of you.”

“Really?” Rachel felt her lip curl. “I might have been convinced of that once, but not now.”

“Now? What’s happened now?”

“You’ll know soon enough. Excuse me. I have to get back to the others.”

Poor Amos, caught in the middle, she thought as she turned the ignition of her BMW. And Matt, too….

For the past two months, she’d tried not to think of him and how they’d parted. Everything was hazy after she’d answered the
door and backed up before the troop of men filling the foyer. Matt had tried to take her into his arms, but she’d turned instead
to Amos. Somehow she’d managed to call Carrie Sutherland, her best friend and roommate at Texas A&M, who must have flown over
the highway from Dallas to arrive two hours later. She remembered the hurt in Matt’s eyes as he watched her and Amos go up
the stairs to her room to await Carrie’s arrival, leaving him below. And later… through the fog of her pain, she remembered
running downstairs when she heard Carrie in the hall and going into her arms rather than the ones Matt looked longing to hold
out to her.

“It’s best that you leave now, Matt,” she’d said finally.

He’d got hold of her at last, taking her by the shoulders and angling his head down to look into her empty eyes. “Rachel,
Granddad told me about the will… about Somerset going to him. On top of everything else, I can’t begin to imagine how hurt…
how shocked you must be. I’m hurt and shocked for you, but I’m not the enemy here. You need me. We can get through this together.”

Her voice had come dull as a sleepwalker’s. “There are things you don’t know. You will become the enemy. You won’t have a
choice.”

He’d looked as if she’d slapped him. “What?”

“Good-bye, Matt.”

Over the following weeks, the rest of that unimaginable time came back in cloudy bits and pieces, illuminated now and then
by a streak of clarity. The dialogue between her and Carrie on the drive back from identifying the bodies the next day was
one of those. In the sick silence, Carrie had asked, “Are you up to telling me why you slammed the door in the face of that
gorgeous hunk of man on the verandah last night?”

“I didn’t slam it. And no, I’m not up to it. If you’re interested, be my guest.”

She’d let out a whoop. “Well, that’s really sweet of you, lamb chop, but he doesn’t impress me as a man who’s any woman’s
to offer. He’s crazy about you, Rachel. Why are you shutting him out?”

“I have to. If I don’t, it will only make things much worse later.”

“Later?”

“When I take back what’s mine.”

Tears stung her eyes as she took her last glimpse of the house and street where she’d grown up. She would leave the house
keys with the Realtor on her way out of town. She was headed to Dallas to bunk with Carrie for a while, but her main reason
for going there was to meet with Carrie’s father. Taylor Sutherland was an eminent commercial trial lawyer specializing in
real estate fraud. She had an appointment with him to evaluate the contents of the green leather box.

M
ATT PULLED INTO THE DRIVEWAY
of Rachel’s house, finding its address easily from Amos’s directions. He parked the rental van and got out, assaulted at
once by the dry heat and gritty wind that blew constantly in West Texas. His heart beat like a bongo drummer gone berserk.
Finally, he’d have Rachel in his sights again. If she didn’t admit him, he’d force his way in. They had to talk. She had to
tell him face-to-face why she wanted nothing more to do with him. There had to be more to it than his grandfather inheriting
Somerset. Her last words to him the night of the accident kept running through his head:
There are things you don’t know. You will become the enemy. You won’t have a choice
.

“What did she mean by that, Granddad?” he’d asked when he reported those words to him. “What is it that I don’t know?”

“I have no idea.”

Especially disturbing was Rachel’s cryptic remark to Amos when he attended the funeral. At one time, she’d told him, she may
have been willing to believe Mary had acted out of love for her, but not now, and when Amos asked her what had happened to
cause her to say that, she’d said, “You’ll know soon enough.”

“Why
now,
Granddad? That implies she’s discovered further reason to condemn Mary—maybe even us.”

A shrug. “I don’t know, son.”

He had not been totally convinced of his grandfather’s ignorance. In the past two months, he’d been aware of rattling skeletons
again—those family secrets he wasn’t telling.

The yard had been recently mowed. Its baked, dusty smell drifted up to him, reminding him of Amos’s observation:
What a godforsaken place! How does anything but rattlesnakes survive out there?
Matt shared his view. On the drive from the airport, surrounded by a desert of scrub brush that had all the beauty of a moon
crater, he had wondered how this hardscrabble land had inspired Rachel’s passion for farming. It had to be blood, not locale.

He approached the steps to the front porch uncertainly, disturbed by the unoccupied air of the place. The green shutters looked
newly painted, as did the closed garage door. There were no curtains on the windows, and the glass sparkled from recent cleaning.
No, don’t tell me….
He groaned and made a scope of his hands to peer through the small squares of glass in the door. The front room was empty,
deserted as a bird’s nest in winter, not a stick of furniture in it. In chagrin and disbelief, he tromped around the sides
of the house, gazing in windows, finding each room bare of everything but starkly painted walls.

“May I help you?”

He whirled from a window in the backyard to find an obese woman in a tropical-patterned muu-muu staring at him, hands on hips.

“Well, I—yes, you can,” Matt stammered. “The woman who lives here. Rachel Toliver. She appears to have moved. Can you tell
me where she’s gone?”

“Who’s asking?”

“I’m Matt Warwick.” Matt brushed the window dust off his hands and held one out. “A friend of the family from Howbutker, Texas.”
He guessed her to be a neighbor and perhaps familiar with the names.

Slowly, the woman removed a hand from her hip and allowed it to be shaken. “I’ve heard of the Warwicks from Howbutker. My
name’s Bertie Walton, a friend and neighbor. I live next door.” She nodded in the direction of her house. “What do you want
with Rachel?”

Matt hesitated, then came right out with it. “I’ve come to check on her and maybe take her home. She needs to be with those
who care about her.”

The woman seemed to relax. “I couldn’t agree more.” She looked him up and down and, as if deciding something, said, “Well,
I’m sorry to tell you, but you’ve missed her by little over an hour. I think she may be gone for good. She must have left
when I was at the grocery store, and I didn’t get a chance to say good-bye.” Her tone indicated deep hurt.

“Did she say where she was going?”

“’Fraid not. Told me yesterday she’d be in touch, but… the state she was in, I’m not holding my breath.”

Matt’s hope for a reunion plummeted. “You know anybody who’d know where she’s going?”

“Not a soul. Rachel wasn’t close to nobody in Kermit anymore, ’cept me. I was her mother’s best friend. The house is going
up for sale. I’d try the Realtors in town, if I was you. There are only two. She’s bound to have left a contact number with
one of ’em.”

Matt patted his coat pocket for a pen and notepad. “Could you give me their names and directions?”

“I can do better than that. Come on over and I’ll draw you a little map. You won’t find them otherwise.”

She waddled in the direction of her house, and Matt followed. Minutes later, he was seated at her kitchen table, watching
her pour sun-brewed tea into glasses she’d taken from a special cupboard. “Mrs. Walton, why would Rachel move? I’d think that…
under the circumstances… she’d want to stay here, where she’s known.”

“It’s Bertie,” she said, setting down the glasses of iced tea, a yellow legal pad and a ballpoint pen clamped under her fleshy
arm. She wedged into one of the captain’s chairs and slapped the pad onto the table. “I can’t say I’m surprised that she left.
Rachel’s been gone from Kermit a long time. There’s nothing here for her anymore, if there ever was. I would’ve thought she’d
stay simply because she had nowhere else to go, but she couldn’t get outta here fast enough.”

“You said… the state she was in when she left. How did she look?”

Bertie had begun sketching streets and landmarks on the yellow pad. “When’d you last see her?”

“Two months ago, when she came for her great-aunt’s funeral.”

“Deduct about twenty pounds from that pretty figure of hers and add a thin, drawn face and berry brown skin, and you got it.
She don’t look like the same girl who was here over Christmas.”

“She’s not the same girl,” Matt said softly. “How’d she get the berry brown skin?”

“From all that fixing up of the outside of the house—the roof, the shutters, the yard. Wouldn’t let nobody else touch ’em.
But that’s not to say she wasn’t…
together
.
Something
was keeping her from falling apart. You could tell by the way she hammered those nails.”

Matt frowned. “She never hinted at what it was? Anything you can tell me would be a big help.”

Bertie reflected a moment. “It looked like some kind of
inner force
driving her, but… not exactly
grit
, if you know what I mean. Not the kind of gumption that makes you keep going whether you want to or not. It wasn’t that.
No, it was more like she had a
purpose,
an
objective
in mind for when she finished up here.” She clicked off the ballpoint pen and ripped the sheet from the pad. “I can’t tell
it no better than that.”

“You’ve told it very well, Bertie. Thanks for your help.” He finished the iced tea and stood up. “Write down your telephone
number and if I find out anything, I’ll let you know.”