Roses (32 page)

“Amos?”

“I’ll be right there, Percy. Are you at Warwick Hall?”

“Yes. The EMS has just taken the body to the coroner’s. There won’t be an autopsy. Cause of death was obvious. You’ll have
to let Rachel know.”

Amos’s despair sank deeper. “I’ll call her from your house.”

S
WINGING HER DARK GREEN
BMW into her reserved space in the parking lot of Toliver Farms West, Rachel was surprised to find her foreman and indispensable
right-hand man of eight years sitting in the shade of the awning, apparently waiting for her. He had been scheduled to take
delivery of a new compressor out at the south sector while she was at her noon business meeting. Another odd feeling of unease
rippled through her. The New York representative of the textile mills with whom Toliver Farms had dealt for years had arrived
at their meeting with no contract. Out of courtesy to their long association, he had shown up merely to offer apologies but
no explanation.

“What’s wrong, Ron?” she called as she got out of the car and knew immediately that something was amiss from the reluctant
way he got out of the chair, pushed back his straw hat, and stuck his fingertips into his jeans pockets.

“It may be nothing,” he said in his West Texas drawl, “but when I came for the invoice, I took a call from Amos Hines. He
sounded agitated. You’re to call him soon as you can. I thought I better hang around… well, in case it’s bad news. I’ve contacted
Buster to take care of the delivery.”

She gave his arm a squeeze as she rushed past him. “Is Amos at his office?”

“No, at the house of somebody named Percy Warwick. The number’s on your desk.”

Rachel threw down her handbag and grabbed the phone, steeling herself for the likelihood that something had happened to Percy.
If so, she’d fly immediately to be with her great-aunt. Aunt Mary would have a terrible time adjusting to life without Percy.

Amos answered the phone before the ring was completed. “Rachel?”

“I’m here, Amos. What’s happened?” She locked eyes with Ron’s and held her breath to await the impact of Amos’s answer.

“Rachel, I’m… afraid I’ve got bad news. It’s about Mary. She died a couple of hours ago from a sudden heart attack.”

It was as if she’d taken a gunshot to the chest. She felt the numbing shock, then the spread of pain like the slow seepage
of blood from a wound. Ron caught her arm to help her back into her desk chair. “Oh, Amos….”

“Dear girl, I can’t begin to tell you how deeply sorry I am.”

She heard the break in his voice and the struggle with his own pain and tried to get a grip on hers. “Where was she? Where
did it happen?”

“On her verandah around one o’clock. She’d come in from town and had been sitting in one of the porch chairs. Sassie found
her in her… death throes. She lived maybe a minute longer.”

Rachel closed her eyes and pictured the scene. Just in from town, probably dressed to the teeth, her lovely old great-aunt
had died on her verandah with her last view on earth the street where she’d lived all her life. She’d have preferred no other
place to breathe her last. “Did… she say anything?”

“According to Sassie, she… said something about needing to get to the attic. Earlier she’d had Henry go up there and unlock
a trunk. It must have contained something she wanted. She… also cried your name, Rachel… there at the end.”

Tears began to course from beneath her tightly squeezed lids. Quietly, Ron retrieved a box of tissues from the coffee table
and laid it within reach.

“My dear child,” Amos said. “Is there anyone who can be with you?”

She pressed a tissue to her streaming eyes, knowing that he asked because he knew of the strained relations between her and
her family and that they were not likely to be a source of comfort. “Yes, my foreman is here and my secretary, Danielle. I’ll
be all right. I’m so glad you and Matt are there for Percy. How is he?”

“Taking it pretty hard, as you can imagine. Matt has sent him upstairs to have a rest. He sends his love, though, and Matt
asked me to tell you he’s at your disposal when you get to Howbutker.”

Matt… His name sent a shock of remembrance through her—a comforting one. She hadn’t seen him since she was a teenager, when
she’d cried on his shoulder. “Tell him I’ll gratefully take him up on that,” she said. “And you, Amos? How are you?”

There was a moment’s silence while he seemed to be groping for the right word. “I am… devastated, child… especially for you.”

Kind, loving Amos, she thought, swallowing down a fresh surge of tears. “I’ll be all right,” she said. “It will just take
time. Aunt Mary used to say that the only thing time was good for was to get past bad times.”

“Yes, well, let us hope it will not fail its one attribute,” he said, and cleared his voice loudly, as if a huge obstruction
were in his throat. “Now, do you have any idea of the time of your arrival? I ask because I can make preliminary arrangements
for you—set up appointments with the funeral director and florist, that sort of thing. The plane is gassed and ready to go.
Mary had planned to fly out to see you tomorrow, you know.”

Her surprise momentarily stanched her tears. “No, I didn’t know.”

“Then I’m afraid she died before she could inform you, but I know she planned to see you. She told me so in my office this
morning when she came for… a visit.”

“You saw her today? How wonderful for you to have seen her one last time, Amos. I wish she could have made it here. Did she
say why she was coming? It’s not… it wasn’t like her to surprise me.”

“It had to do with some… recent changes, I believe. All she told me for sure was that she loved you.”

Rachel closed her eyes again. That, too, was unlike her great-aunt. Had she known she was seriously ill? “Did she tell you
she had heart trouble?” she asked.

“No, she never told me she had heart trouble. That came as a surprise to all of us. Now back to the question of your arrival….”

“I’ll try to be there by ten in the morning,” she said, “and I would appreciate your making those appointments. I don’t know
if I’ll have any luck persuading my mother and brother to come with me and Daddy, but would you also alert Sassie to the possibility
that she may have to make up an extra guest room?”

There was another pause, as if Amos were carefully considering his next statement. “I would suggest that you convince at least
Jimmy to come with your father. I’m sure Mary would have wanted them both at the reading of the will to hear her… last regards
to them.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” she said, hoping that Amos’s phrasing might convince her mother to come, too. Aunt Mary’s will had
been the source of all the trouble between them. Rachel could hear her mother now:
I’ll never forgive you, Rachel Toliver, if your great-aunt leaves the whole ball of wax to you and nothing to your father
and brother!

“Well, then, I’ll see you tomorrow, Rachel,” Amos said. “Let me know for certain the time, and I’ll be at the airport to pick
you up.”

Rachel slowly replaced the receiver, niggled by a sense that some other disturbance besides Aunt Mary’s death was troubling
Amos… like a distinct hum beneath a louder sound. It was the second time that day she’d had the feeling that something else
was wrong other than the trouble at hand.

“I take it your great-aunt is gone from us?” Ron asked quietly, slipping a handkerchief from his back pocket to pat his eyes.
He’d removed his hat and taken a seat on the other side of the room.

“Yes, she’s gone, Ron. A heart attack around one o’clock. You’ll have to take charge around here.”

“Be happy to, though I’m sorry it has to be this way. We’ll miss her, as we sure as hell’re gonna miss you.”

Her eyes flooded again. “Tell Danielle, will you? I’ll be out in a few minutes. I need to notify my parents.”

When the door had clicked closed, Rachel sat without moving for a few minutes, listening to the peculiar quiet that had fallen.
Silence makes a buzzing sound when someone you love has died, she thought, like a fly in an empty room. She got up and moved
to the window, desiring to see the sun before she picked up the phone. At one time, the number she was about to call had represented
the truest place on earth to her, an umbilical chord to acceptance, understanding, and love. But that was before Aunt Mary.
That was before Somerset.

G
randdad?” Matt rapped a knuckle softly on his grandfather’s sitting room door and spoke quietly to avoid disturbing him if
he’d managed to fall asleep in his chair.

“Come on in, son. I’m up.”

Matt entered to find his grandfather ramped forward in his recliner, looking none the better for his nap. His face appeared
composed, but his red-rimmed eyes and the puffy pockets beneath them spoke to a loss far greater than that of an old friend
and neighbor. Matt’s heart grabbed as it always did when he realized that his grandfather was nearing the end of his days.
He drew up a chair. “Rachel’s just returned Amos’s call. I told Savannah to give him lunch. He hadn’t eaten.”

“Johnnie Walker Red, from the smell of him,” Percy said. “That’s not like Amos.”

“Well, maybe he took a belt or two after you called. Like me, he’d visited with Mary only a few hours before she died. You
can tell he’s grieving.”

“She’ll be a severe loss to him. They were great friends. Amos was even a little in love with her when he first came to Howbutker.
He was a young man then. If Mary ever noticed, she didn’t let on. Goodness, what man wasn’t a little in love with Mary?”

Matt couldn’t resist asking, “Including you?”

Percy raised his eyebrows at him, dark expressive ledges over gray eyes that on good days were still remarkably clear and
alert. “What makes you ask that?”

Matt tugged at his ear, a giveaway to his grandfather that he wished he hadn’t spoken, but if it comforted him, what difference
did it make now if he told him of the old horse Mary had let out of the barn? “Like I told you, I ran into Mary standing by
that old elm near the statue of St. Francis. What I didn’t tell you was that I caught her looking confused and talking to
herself.”

“Is that so?” A light flickered on behind the bloodshot eyes. “What was she saying?”

“Well…” He squirmed a bit under his grandfather’s tightened gaze. “She thought I was you. She seemed to have gone back in
time and was reliving some memory. When I called her name, she turned around and said…”

Matt could sense his grandfather’s sudden tension. “Go on, son. She said…?”

“She said, ‘Percy, my love, did you have to drink
all
my soda? I wanted it that day, you know, as much as I wanted you.’ That’s it verbatim, Granddad. I hope I’m not dragging
up old memories better left buried.”

“You’re not. Anything else?”

“Well, yes.” Matt found himself wriggling again. “She said, ‘I was too young and silly and too much of a Toliver. If only
I hadn’t been such a fool.’ And that’s when I shook her a little and identified myself.” He paused to gauge Percy’s reaction.
“That’s why I asked if you weren’t once in love with her yourself.”

Percy let out a raspy chuckle. “In love with her
once
?” He swung his gaze to the mantel lined with a series of family pictures. They were mostly of Matt in sports gear and one
of him as an infant in his mother’s arms, but occupying front and center was the official photograph of his father in his
U.S. Marines uniform, the left side of his jacket covered in medals and campaign ribbons. Matt couldn’t tell whether Percy’s
eye fell on the portraits or the murky watercolor—a present from his father—that filled the space above it. In a voice scratchy
with memory, he mused, “It was July 1914, at the dedication ceremony of the courthouse. That’s where Mary had gone in memory
when you found her. She was fourteen, and I was nineteen. She wore a white dress tied with a green ribbon. I was already in
love with her and planned to marry her, but she didn’t know it.”

“Well, I’ll be damned.” Matt felt a thrill of wonder. “Did she
ever
know it?”

Percy said, “Yes, she knew it.”

“Well, then, what happened? Why didn’t you marry?” His assertion was plain: His grandfather would have been a hell of a lot
happier married to Mary Toliver than he ever was to Lucy Gentry.

“Somerset happened,” Percy said, kneading the knuckles of his right hand, a habit when he was deep into himself, Matt had
noticed.

“You want to talk about it?” he asked. “That Johnnie Walker Red doesn’t seem like a bad idea.”

Percy shook his head. “Won’t help, I’m afraid. And, no, I don’t want to talk about it. It’s over and done with… all that might
have been.”

“Granddad…” Commiseration for his grandfather stabbed through him, bound all these years to a woman he did not love. “You’re
breaking my heart. Did Gabby ever know about you and Mary?”

“Oh, yes, she knew, but Mary and I happened before I married your grandmother, and there was never any ‘about you and Mary’
after that.”

“Did… you still love her after you married Gabby?”

Percy worked his hands. “I loved her all of her life, from the moment she was born.”

Dear God, Matt thought. Eighty-five years
….
A bereaved silence fell, Percy still massaging his hands. “Did Ollie know?” he asked.

“Always.”

Amazed, Matt blew out his breath, sad to the soles of his feet. “Was Mary the reason Gabby left you?”

“She was a factor, but your grandmother had other grievances.” Percy adjusted his hips as if he were uncomfortable. “All so
much water under the bridge now,” he said.

And not waters he cared to go fishing in, Matt gathered, but he wasn’t going to let him off the hook now that the line was
in. “Well, I’d like to hear about it someday, Granddad. I’d like you to fill in the empty spaces of our family… while there’s
still time.”

Percy cast him a surprised glance. “Is that how you think of… certain periods in our family’s history—as empty spaces? Well,
I suppose I can understand how you might be curious about them, but they’re in the past and don’t pertain to you at all.”