Roses (53 page)

When he pulled up before the Toliver mansion, Henry, wearing a black armband, came out to greet them and carry in Rachel’s
bags. “I can take it from here, Amos,” she said, the folder under her arm. “Go home and get some rest. Forgive my saying so,
but you look as if you could use it.”

“Yes… yes, I will do that. One word of caution before I leave you, Rachel. I suggest you refuse to speak to reporters until
after the funeral… as a matter of propriety. I’m sure it’s what Mary would have wished.”

“Good advice.” She leaned over and kissed his cheek. “Go grab a nap and then come back for dinner. We’ll invite Percy and
Matt, too. I’m sure they’ll want to be with us.”

Through his rearview mirror as he put the car in gear, Amos observed her climb the verandah steps, back straight and head
held high—as though already feeling the weight of the crown. Sighing deeply, his sorrow twisting like a knife inside him,
he prayed again, Dear God, help us all.

A
S ALWAYS WHEN IT HAD
been a while since Rachel had been home, Sassie threw open the front door when she reached the verandah and embraced her
in a bear hug, her smooth dark face, endearingly at odds with her cap of wiry gray curls, puckering into tears. “Oh, Miss
Rachel, thank the Lord you’re here,” she cried, her rich, clean smell as much a part of Houston Avenue as the scent of honeysuckle
growing over the backyard fence.

“It happened right over there,” she said when they’d parted, and pointed to an area where two wide-armed chairs had been thrown
back from a table. “She collapsed right over there. I should have never left her, what with her actin’ so strange and all.
I knew she wasn’t herself.”

Rachel stepped to the spot. “How was she acting strangely, Sassie?”

“Why, she was
drinkin’,
Miss Rachel, and you know your aunt never drunk nothin’ stronger than lemonade, not even at Christmastime when a little eggnog
never hurt nobody. But she done come in from town ’bout lunchtime, and she sit right down in the heat where you’re standin’
and had me bring her out a bottle of champagne.”

Rachel frowned. That
was
strange, Aunt Mary drinking liquor, let alone at noon on the verandah during the hottest month of the summer. “Maybe she
was celebrating something.”

“Well, if she was, I don’t know what. Besides, that ain’t the way Miss Mary would celebrate nohow. But that’s not the only
thing. Before that, she had Henry go up to the attic to find Mister Ollie’s old army trunk and unlock the lid. That’s what
she was ravin’ about when I found her. ‘I got to get to the attic… I got to get to the attic.’ I figured it was the liquor
talkin’, though she seemed sober enough when she cried out your name, Miss Rachel.”

“So Amos told me,” Rachel said, her eyes smarting. “Did Aunt Mary say what she wanted out of the trunk?”

Sassie fanned herself with the skirt of her apron. “You know Miss Mary was tighter’n a tick on a dog when it come to impartin’
her business. No, she didn’t tell neither of us nothin’. I asked her if Henry could get it for her, and she ’bout had a fit.
Said she was the only one who knew what she was looking for.”

Rachel thought a moment. “I believe Aunt Mary was very sick and knew she was dying, Sassie. That’s why she disappeared to
Dallas without letting any of us know. I think she was seeing a doctor. She had Henry open the trunk in order to get something
out of it—a personal item, I suspect—that she didn’t want found after her death.”

Sassie looked somewhat relieved. “Well, now, in light of everything else that’s happened round here, that makes sense.”

Rachel took her arm. “Let’s go inside and you can tell me the rest over iced tea.”

When they were seated at the kitchen table, two frosted glasses of sweetened tea between them, Sassie said, “I shoulda known
somethin’ was wrong when Miss Mary up and left town for so long without tellin’ Mister Percy. Mister Amos, he was hurt, too.”

“How long was she gone?”

“Nearly four weeks.”

Rachel sipped her tea. “What else has happened around here to support my suspicion?”

Sassie snorted. “Her lettin’ Miss Addie go with such short notice. That shoulda told me somethin’, and then there was them
pearls of hers, the ones she always wore when she dressed up.”

“What about them?”

“She left here wearin’ ’em, but Henry say she wasn’t when she come out of Mister Amos’s office.”

“She must have left them with him,” Rachel suggested. “Did you know that she was flying out to see me today?”

“Yes’m, that I did know, but only barely. She told me just before she left for Mister Amos’s office. I found her overnight
bag packed when I took her purse up to her room after the ambulance come. I didn’t know nothin’ ’bout it ’forehand, though.”

“No, neither did I.”

The doorbell rang. “Oh, Lawsey, here comes the first of the food. Well, we can use it with all the mouths we goin’ be feedin’.”

The cook ambled out, and Rachel mused over the series of indicators that pointed to the near certainty that Aunt Mary had
been aware of her coming death. The champagne itself was a conclusive clue. Aunt Mary had once told her, “Alcohol for me is
a passport to places I’ve no desire to revisit. Someday when I’m old and whiter-haired than I am now… when there’s no time
left… I may go back.”

And the missing pearls was another sign. The pearls were coming to her. It would have been like Aunt Mary to leave them with
Amos rather than in the safe—perhaps to give her after the reading of the will as another token of her last regards. But if
so, why hadn’t he realized that something was amiss?

She got up from the table wearily, too mentally tired to sort it all out.
I’m sure all will come to light soon enough,
Amos had said. Sassie returned, and she informed her of his arrangements and her family’s plan to arrive the next day. “I’ll
go up and select a viewing dress before I unpack. Then I’ll start with the calls on Amos’s list. He provided the names of
a couple to assist you and Henry, Sassie. I’ll contact them first.”

“Don’t worry ’bout me, honey chile. I’d rather be movin’ and doin’ than restin’ and thinkin’.”

Upstairs, Rachel found her great-aunt’s suite of rooms dark, the shutters sealed and the draperies drawn. No consoling residue
of her spirit reached out to her as she pushed open the closed door that reminded her of the locked secrets her great-aunt
had taken to the grave. The room impressed a coldness upon her in spite of the personal touches that were so warmly Aunt Mary.
A pink satin robe she was in the habit of slipping into for a nap after lunch lay across a chair, and a matching pair of open-toed
slippers peeped from beneath the bed like the eyes of a banished puppy. A host of family portraits, among them many of Rachel,
reigned from the fireplace mantel, and an ornate and well-worn silver vanity set—a wedding present from Uncle Ollie—gleamed
from the dresser. Beside it stood the overnight case Aunt Mary had packed for her last trip to Lubbock.

Rachel had rarely been in this room and then to step no more than a few feet inside. She and Aunt Mary had passed their time
together in the library or her office or on the screened back porch. But once, long ago, the door had been left open and a
picture among the framed photographs had caught her eye. She’d stolen in and inspected it. The subject was a dark-haired teenage
boy—her father, she’d thought at first. But closer study revealed that it wasn’t. His Toliver features were too distinct,
and there was a certain strength of character in the young jawline that her father did not possess. She’d turned over the
portrait. “Matthew at sixteen,” Aunt Mary had written in her distinctive script. “July 1937. The love of his father’s and
my life.” A few months later, the boy was dead. Instinctively, she’d known then that Aunt Mary had never been the same afterward.
What else would account for that faint nimbus of sadness that seemed always around her?

She looked for the portrait now, but it was missing. Another mystery. Green, she thought, moving toward the mirrored closet
doors.
Uncle Ollie would have chosen green
. She selected a dress of the simple lines and luxurious fabric Aunt Mary would have preferred, pausing to push the slippers
with their peeping eyes under the bed out of sight before she left the room.

A
fter unpacking, Rachel settled glumly behind her great-aunt’s desk in her office to start her round of calls using a private
line. Outside its closed door, the house telephone rang constantly, Sassie and Henry alternating taking messages. She’d left
word that she was not to be disturbed to take inquiries from the press.

She’d gotten through most of the list when Henry poked his head in from the hallway. “Miss Rachel, you’ll want to answer this.
Line two.”

“Who is it, Henry?”

“Matt Warwick.”

Rachel picked up the receiver immediately. “Matt Warwick!” she exclaimed, feeling a rush of pleasure. “It’s been a while.”

“Too long,” Matt said. “I wish we didn’t have to keep meeting like this. You still have my handkerchief?”

Rachel smiled. So he remembered the last time they’d met. She glanced at the handkerchief she’d brought down to remind herself
to return it to him. “I’m looking at it right now,” she said. “I’d hoped to give it back to you in person long before now.”

“Amazing that we haven’t had the opportunity. You’d think there was some divine conspiracy to keep us apart. Why don’t we
take care of that right now? Granddad’s finally fallen asleep after being up most of the night, and I’m at your service. Maybe
I could drive you somewhere? Or head off a few casseroles while you rest?”

It was as if an arm had come around her shoulders, strong and comforting, the same arm that had been there for her when Uncle
Ollie had died. She had never forgotten. She glanced at the notes she’d made from speaking with the funeral director. “How
would you feel about taking me to the mortuary to… see Aunt Mary? Her body has been released from the coroner’s and they’re
waiting for the viewing dress.”

“It would be my privilege,” he said, his voice softening. “How about some lunch first?”

“I’d like that. Thirty minutes?”

She flipped the intercom button to tell Sassie she’d be leaving the house for a while and not to worry about lunch for her.
Then she took out her compact to repair the ravages of a sleepless night and her periodic crying jags, aware of a familiar
quiver of anticipation. It had been twelve years since she’d felt this particular flutter. The gloomy drive to Howbutker with
her father in June 1973 to attend Uncle Ollie’s funeral had held one bright spot for her: She’d see Matt Warwick again. On
that occasion, the object of her distant crush had fully met her expectations. He was drop-dead handsome, mature, and confident,
as easygoing as she remembered, but disappointingly cool toward her. The reason had not come to light until the reception,
when he’d found her crying her heart out in the gazebo while everybody else was eating and drinking inside the house.

“Here,” he’d said none too kindly, and thrust out a handkerchief. “Looks like you could use another one of these.”

“Thank you,” she’d said gratefully, and covered her face, embarrassed that he’d caught her in such a state.

“Sounds to me like a lot more’s going on there than your sorrow for your uncle Ollie,” he’d remarked.

Her face had shot up from the handkerchief, and she’d stared at him out of sandpapery eyes. How did he know? It was at that
time she’d discovered that a big part of grief was guilt, and she was feeling plenty of it that day in the gazebo—guilt for
her treatment of Uncle Ollie, guilt for going back on her promise to her mother. That morning, she had broken the news to
her that she would be staying in Howbutker.

I don’t know that I can forgive you for this, Rachel.

Mama, please try to understand. Aunt Mary is all alone now. She needs me here.

And we both know why, don’t we?

It will be all right, Mama.

No, it won’t. It’s never going to be all right again.

Matt had sat beside her on the swing, his expression unfeeling. “Would all that angst have to do with dropping the DuMonts
from your prom card for three years? They lived for your visits in the summer, you know, and you left them high and dry. You
broke their hearts, especially Mister Ollie’s. He adored you.”

She had gasped in shock, the tears streaming again. “Oh, Matt, I had no choice!” And to her complete surprise—because she
couldn’t bear to have him mad at her, too—she’d sobbed out the whole story. She’d revealed the family secrets that had led
to her promise to her mother and described her pain in being separated from Aunt Mary and Uncle Ollie and having to give up
her garden and her dream of becoming a farmer. And now, to make it all worse, Uncle Ollie had died without ever knowing how
much she had loved him.

And somehow in the blubbering, she’d wound up with her head on his shoulder and his arm around her, the handkerchief soaked
along with the lapel of his navy blue blazer.

When finally the tears had subsided to hiccups, he’d said, “Your uncle Ollie was a very wise, understanding man. I’ll bet
right now he’s sitting on the edge of the sweet by-and-by saying to himself, ‘
Mon Dieu!
I knew it had to be something like that to keep our Rachel from us.’ ”

She’d gazed at him, raw-eyed. “You think so?”

“I’d bet on it.”

“Do you win your bets?”

“Nearly always,” he’d said.

“How do you do it?”

“I bet only on what I believe to be a sure thing.”

Rachel smiled to herself, remembering, and snapped her compact shut. The next day, he had returned to Oregon, where the company
had an office, but he’d left her with a lighter heart and the handkerchief now in her purse. From then on, they had passed
each other, as Uncle Ollie had remarked, on in- and outbound trains. Now that he’d mentioned it, it did seem as if by design
their paths had not crossed sometime in all these twelve years.