Roses (58 page)

“That’s what I intend to find out, Daddy.”

She kept the Dodge in sight until it had turned the corner, then sought out Sassie in one of the guest rooms, pulling sheets
off the bed. “Leave that, Sassie,” she said. “You’re worn out. Wouldn’t you like to take the night off, have Henry drive you
to visit your sister? There’s nothing that needs your attention around here tonight.”

“Are you sure about that, Miss Rachel? Seems to me that
you
could use a little attention.” Sassie had obviously deduced from her refusal to take Matt’s calls and her family’s stamp
down the stairs, bags packed, so soon after returning to Houston Avenue that something must have gone haywire in Mister Amos’s
office. She and Henry were due to meet with him tomorrow to hear of the annuity they’d be receiving for life. They, too, would
soon be forced to leave the home they had known all their lives.

Rachel patted her plump shoulder and forced a smile. “I’m okay, just strung out from the past few days. I suppose I need some
time to be alone.”

Sassie untied her apron. “In that case, I wouldn’t mind gettin’ outta the house awhile. Neither would Henry. Might do us both
good to go see his mama.”

“Then by all means go. Tell Henry to take the limo and stay as long as you like.”

When she heard the limousine drive away, Rachel locked all the doors to keep Matt from storming in on her when she did not
answer the phone. She was of no mind—or heart—to see him right now, and she had a mission to complete before Sassie and Henry
got back. Sassie had blamed the champagne for Aunt Mary’s frantic ravings to get to the attic in the final moments of her
life. Rachel was now convinced that she had actually been fully lucid and aware that she was dying before completing one last
and crucial task. She’d had Henry unlock Uncle Ollie’s trunk for a reason. It may have been to recover a diary or batch of
love letters—probably from Percy—or some other ancient indiscretion she wished to keep out of the hands of the Conservation
Society, but Rachel didn’t think so. Whatever she’d meant to retrieve had been so important that it had been the last thing
on her mind as she was dying—that and the guilt that had caused her to cry Rachel’s name.

And she intended to find it.

The telephone shrilled again as she headed down the upstairs hall to a narrow door that opened to the attic stairs. Its insistent
ring cut off abruptly, even angrily, by the time she’d climbed the steep flight. Ignoring a twinge of pity for Matt’s frantic
concern, she creaked open the door and entered cautiously.

It was a cavernous place, hot and airless and filled with the domestic cast-offs of over one hundred years of Toliver occupancy.
Good luck to the Conservation Society pawing through this mass, she thought, a little short of breath from the climb. The
stairs, not to mention the lack of air, would have been quite a struggle for an eighty-five-year-old woman in poor health.
To make it easier to breathe, she propped open the attic door and levered a rusty andiron under the stuck frame of one of
the windows, then looked around to assess where to begin. Her glance passed over an organized arrangement of household items,
old books, vintage clothes, musical instruments, and sports equipment, landing on an assortment of trunks, packing cases,
hatboxes, and wardrobes. She’d start her search there.

Her guess was rewarded almost immediately. She found the army-issue footlocker behind a tall wardrobe, stacked on top of two
other metal trunks. Its lid gaped open, and a pair of keys hung from the lock. Her breath caught.
This is it
.

She peered inside, instantly assaulted by the stale odor of packets of letters long closed away, many of them tied with faded
ribbons. A momentary aversion to what she was about to do made her draw back. Rummaging about in the trunk would be like pawing
around in somebody’s underwear drawer, but every instinct shouted that something was here that it was imperative she find.
Intuition conquered her squeamishness, and she glanced back into the trunk. A packet of letters whose handwriting looked familiar
grabbed her eye. The top envelopes were a dime-store variety and bore the return address of Kermit, Texas. Her throat closed.
Aunt Mary had kept every one of her letters, it appeared—from her grammar school years through college. They had obviously
been read many times. She put them back, surprised at her great-aunt’s sentimentality. Or was it Uncle Ollie who’d preserved
and tied them with the maroon-and-white colors of her alma mater? She picked up another group, skimpy in number, addressed
in a childish hand. The thinness of the envelopes suggested they each contained no more than one sheet of paper. The return
address listed a boys’ camp in Fort Worth and above it the name of the sender: Matthew DuMont. She held the fragile envelopes
tenderly. Had these letters from her son been what Aunt Mary had been after? Maybe so. She laid them back carefully and drew
out another bundle—two, actually, tied separately and then together. The initials
PW
were written above the lengthy U.S. Army return address of the first group.
Percy Warwick
. There were ten envelopes, postmarked 1918 and 1919, bound with a green ribbon. Or could it have been these she’d wished
removed?

The second group, double in volume and postmarked the same years, was secured by a faded blue ribbon. Rachel recognized Uncle
Ollie’s finely penned characters and wondered if the fact that Percy’s had been placed on top had been inadvertent or a deliberate
ranking of Aunt Mary’s affections. Well, what did it matter now? What did she hope to find here that would change by one iota
what Aunt Mary had done? And written in whose hand? Matthew DuMont’s? Uncle Ollie’s? Percy’s? Her grandfather’s?

Rachel paused. Her grandfather’s…

She knew hardly anything about him. Her father barely remembered him, and Aunt Mary had spoken of him only once, when she’d
asked why her grandfather had chosen to live in France. “Was it because your daddy did not remember him in his will?” she’d
asked.

Aunt Mary had grown stone still. “What makes you think he wasn’t remembered?”

“Because my daddy said he wasn’t.”

“Is… that the reason your mother resents your interest in your Toliver heritage—because he left Somerset and the house to
me?”

She’d been embarrassed that Aunt Mary had perceived the truth. “Yes, ma’am,” she’d said.

Aunt Mary had looked stricken with some thought she’d appeared on the verge of sharing but had thought better of confiding.
“Your grandfather had short roots for the land,” she’d wound up saying. “His passion was for ideologies and people, mainly
the less fortunate, and he found them in France.”

Rachel gazed thoughtfully at the piles of letters. Had Miles corresponded with his sister during those years in France… written
of his son’s birth… his wife’s death? Had he enclosed pictures of himself and his family, especially of his wife, her grandmother?
She knew virtually nothing of Marietta Toliver. Would his letters have reflected his feelings of being left out of his father’s
will? Could his voice reach out to her even now, generations after his death, and help her deal with a similar pain?

Carefully, she delved into the assortment of brittle keepsakes. If her great-aunt had saved these other letters, she’d have
kept her brother’s.
What was this?
She removed a large, bulky bundle packaged in thick paper. Upon unwrapping it, she discovered a tight ball of knitted cream
strips compacted around a wad of pink satin ribbons. It looked like an aborted attempt at an afghan or shawl, not Aunt Mary’s,
she didn’t think. Aunt Mary had been averse to needles and thread.

She rewrapped and tied the package and—her curiosity now fully off the leash—removed the lid of a long, slender box.
Wow!
Folded in tissue paper was a pair of lovely fawn leather gloves, exquisitely made but evidently never worn. The edge of a
note peeked from inside one of the cuffs. She withdrew it and read, “For the hands I hope to hold for the rest of my life.
Love, Percy.” She slipped the note back and reset the lid, moved in spite of herself. She took out another box from a florist’s
shop and found inside the desiccated remains of a long-stemmed rose; the petals were brown as tobacco stains, but most certainly
had once been white. Beneath the fragments, another note: “To healings. My heart always, Percy.”

She had her answer now. These old letters and treasured mementos of an unrequited love must have been what Aunt Mary had wished
to remove. Tomorrow, she’d perform one last family duty to her and sack up the whole lot to destroy when she returned to Lubbock.
The light was fading. She was hot and tired and at the bottom of her emotional barrel. She wanted out of the attic. Quickly,
she returned the items to the trunk, making room for the bundle at its base. Her hand struck something… the metal casings
of a box, she thought. She paused. A box….

Her heart beginning to race, she felt farther down and lifted out a dark green leather case. It was locked. She set it on
the stack of hatboxes and grabbed the key ring from the lid of the army trunk, inserting the smaller of the two keys into
the lock of the case. Despite its age, the top released instantly. She raised it and gazed inside. In the dim light, bold
letters jumped out at her:
The Last Will and Testament of Vernon Thomas Toliver
.

D
usk in summer was the feature William most remembered about the Piney Woods of East Texas. It seemed to him that when the
sun went down, a cast came over the landscape the color and luster of gray pearls and was never ending. Nowhere else did he
think the light lasted as long before dying.

As a boy just come from France, he’d been grateful for this aspect of the region, for when his mother died, he became afraid
of the dark. His father understood and left a light burning while he slept, but he could remember very clearly, at five or
so, being ashamed of his fear. When he came to Howbutker, he sensed at once that he must say nothing of this to the tall,
commanding woman to whom his father had sent him. The portly, gentle man he called Uncle Ollie would have understood, but
not his aunt. He’d known instinctively that she was not one to tolerate weakness.

Or so he’d believed.

The first night, he’d fallen asleep long before darkness fell and was carried to his room in his uncle’s arms. But after that,
all through the summer when going to bed, he’d raise the shade his aunt had pulled down and go to sleep by the light of the
dusk. When fall came and shorter days, he worried that his aunt would turn off the light by his bed when she came in to say
good night. But instead, she surprised him by asking with her small smile, “Shall we leave the light on a little longer?”

“
Oui, Tante, s’il vous plaît
.”

“Well, good night, then. See you in the morning.”

Thereafter, it became their routine bedtime exchange, and he’d awake in the mornings to find the lamp still burning. He’d
thought she hadn’t bothered to return to switch it off, but he was wrong. One winter night several years later, he awoke to
see her in the lamplight at the side of his bed. She was wearing a robe and looked like a goddess pictured in his mythology
books. Her hand on the light switch, she asked kindly, “Shall we turn it off now?”

And it was then he realized that she’d been aware of his fear of the dark all along. “Yes, Aunt,” he’d said, recognizing that
his fear was gone and had been for a long time. It had simply disappeared, wandered away with the other dragons of his childhood.

William glanced at his wife, snoring with her mouth open, the towel still up at her window. She’d begun to doze almost immediately
after she saw how disinclined he was to talk of their new wealth. “Rachel will get over it, William, believe me,” she’d said,
reading his worried mind as easily as her romance novels. “And it’s not like she’s been kicked entirely out of Howbutker.
She can marry Matt Warwick and get Somerset back through him when Percy dies. What’s the big deal?”

“The big deal, Alice, is that Somerset won’t go to Matt Warwick. Percy will have it removed from his estate. That’s why Aunt
Mary left it to him. She knew he’d make sure Rachel never got her hands on it again.”

“Why, for God’s sake?”

“That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. I really think Percy’s got the right idea. I believe Aunt Mary was trying
to save Rachel from that curse she spoke of back in ’56.”

“And you don’t know what it is?”

“No, but Percy does.”

He was thankful that once Alice was asleep, Armageddon couldn’t wake her. She would not have approved this detour onto a country
road through the pine forests he remembered from his boyhood, and Jimmy was plugged into his Walkman with his eyes closed,
too lost in the oblivion of his frenzied music to notice he’d turned off the interstate. This little jaunt would make the
trip longer, but he might never pass this way again, and he had a hankering to linger in the twilight of the Piney Woods for
as long as he could, revisit memories he wouldn’t be adding to after today. Close by over there, he recalled, was a creek
where he and a buddy used to seine for catfish. God, the water moccasins and cottonmouths they’d draw up with their catch!

And somewhere around here ran a railroad track, the one that had taken him out of Howbutker when he made his escape forty
years ago. His plan had been to hide in the bushes by the side of the track until the train started to roll, then jump on
and buy his ticket on board. But the conductor had said the train was full and he’d have to wait for the next one. Amos, then
a recently discharged army paratrooper on his way to Houston, had gotten off to stretch his legs before reboarding. William
still remembered his surprise when he had shoved his ticket into his hand and told him to hop on. Once out in the oilfields
of West Texas, he’d thought of the tall, gangly soldier from time to time, wondering what had possessed a stranger passing
through town to part with his ticket to a kid he could tell was on the lam. He learned later from Aunt Mary that at fifteen
Amos had tried to run away from home but was hauled back by ham-fisted deputies to a father who had punished him by strapping
him to a post and whipping him publicly. Amos, unsure to what he’d be condemning him if he was caught, had made the decision
to help him. That turned out to be a good thing for the old boy. He had stumbled into a town that had taken him in as one
of their own—no mean achievement in Howbutker. Funny how things happen.