Roses (66 page)

Apparently, she had not. Not even a lamp shade had been changed in twenty-five years. Only the painting over the mantel had
not been her selection. It was his father’s, brought by a marine buddy from overseas after his death.

“Isn’t it time this room was redone, Granddad?” he asked. “It’s beginning to look a little threadbare.”

“So is the time I have left,” Percy said, declining a drink with a motion of his finger. “I’ll leave it to you to do something
about.”

“Start with that,” Amos said wryly, nodding toward the painting.

Percy gave him a twisted smile. “Can you not make out the subject, Amos?”

“Frankly, no. If you’ll forgive my saying so, its quality has not inspired a close look.”

“Well, give it a close look, and tell me what you see.”

Amos unwound himself from the wingback and drew close to examine the artist’s attempt at an impressionistic setting. Matt,
too, craned his neck around. What was his grandfather getting at? The painting had hung there so many years, it had become
invisible to him. Other than the sentiment attached, it held no artistic value to him whatsoever.

“Why, I see a small boy running toward a garden gate…,” Amos mused.

“What’s in his arms?”

“It looks as if they’re… flowers.”

“What kind?”

Amos turned to Percy, his face brightening in surprised recognition. “Why… they’re white roses.”

“My son Wyatt had that painting delivered to me posthumously. Not a very good one, I grant you, but its message means the
world to me.”

Matt knew something was coming. He caught the emotion in his grandfather’s voice, the soft shine of tears in his eyes. A pit
opened in his stomach. “What message, Granddad?”

“A message of forgiveness. Did you ever know about the legend of the roses, son?”

“If I did, I’ve forgotten.”

“Tell him, Amos.”

Amos explained, his Adam’s apple bobbing, its tendency when he was feeling deep emotion, Matt was aware. The history lesson
completed, he said, “So my dad was saying he forgave you. For what?”

“For not loving him.”

Matt slowly straightened in his chair. “What are you talking about? You were crazy about my father.”

“Yes, yes, I was,” Percy said, “but that was many years after he came into the world—and past the time when it mattered. You
see, I had two sons. One I loved from the beginning. The other—your father—I did not.”

Both men gaped at him, their glasses held motionless. “
Two
sons?” Amos croaked. “What happened to the first?”

“He died at age sixteen of influenza. Wyatt lies beside him now. There’s a picture of him on my bedside table. Mary mailed
it to me the day she died.”

“But—but—that’s Matthew DuMont,” Matt sputtered.

“Yes, son. Your namesake. Matthew was Mary’s and my child.”

Shocked silence met this calm revelation, broken by Grady’s tentative knock and Percy’s, “Come in.” He tiptoed in as if entering
a sickroom and set down a tray wafting a savory smell. On it was a plate of appetizers and a tape recorder. When he had departed,
Percy turned to his still thunderstruck audience, Matt looking as if hell had opened up, Amos as if the heavens had parted.
“Better eat up, fellows, before Savannah’s cheese puffs get cold,” he said. “It’s going to be a long night.”

“Granddad,” Matt said finally, “I think it’s time we heard your story.”

“And I think it’s time I told it,” Percy said, and punched on the tape recorder.

U
p the street from Warwick Hall, next to the Toliver mansion, Hannah Barweise sat rocking on her verandah, in the grip of a
quandary. Percy Warwick was failing, and now the question was whether she should inform Lucy to be prepared for the worst.
Her friend would never admit it, but it was plain as the freckles on Doris Day’s face that she was still in love with her
husband.

Should she tell Lucy of the latest developments that may have sent Percy over the edge? The first began around noon when she’d
spotted the Toliver girl go into Mary’s house. She’d stayed long enough for Henry to carry some boxes out to her car, then
left. She hadn’t been gone any time before Matt had come careening up the street like a madman, screeching into Mary’s drive.
Not long afterward, he’d come tearing out as if he had a plane to catch.

As a past president of the Conservation Society, she’d considered it her duty to question Henry in regard to Rachel Toliver’s
visit. The society had received no instruction from her concerning what to do with Mary’s possessions. Without Sassie around
to curb his tongue, he’d told her plenty. First, Rachel had taken only a few antiquated ledgers and the items from a trunk
in the attic. She’d wanted nothing else of Mary’s. That told Hannah what the girl now thought of her great-aunt, and who could
blame her, considering the bomb she’d tossed in her lap?

Next, she’d gotten out of him that Matt had taken off after Rachel on a hunch that she was holed up in a motel outside Howbutker.
How she’d have liked to be a mouse under the bed for
that
reunion. It was no secret around town that before everything blew up in Rachel’s face, she and Matt had been a hot item.
She was guessing he’d found her and she was the special guest expected for dinner, based on a conversation she’d listened
in on between her housekeeper and Savannah, the Warwicks’ cook, a little while ago.

Savannah had called to wail that after all her hard work, the girl wasn’t coming and that Percy was terribly disappointed.
Hannah would bet two to one that he’d hoped to redeem himself with Rachel and salvage a chance for her and his grandson to
get back together. Matt and Amos were down there now, Amos looking longer in the face than usual and Matt not much better.
According to Savannah, they were all three closeted in Percy’s study drinking Scotch while the chicken Florentine dried out
in the oven.

It was Savannah’s contention that Percy couldn’t take much more and that it was only a matter of time before he succumbed
to the inevitable. It would break Lucy’s heart to hear it, but Hannah had promised to inform her of news that affected her
family. If worse came to worst, she would want to be there for Matt. On that note, Hannah left her rocker and went inside
to make the call.

L
UCY HUNG UP THE PHONE
and rang for Betty.

“Yes, ma’am?”

“Forget the dessert and coffee tonight, Betty. Bring the brandy.”

“Somethin’ wrong?”

“There most certainly is. My husband is dying.”

“Oh, Miss Lucy!”

“How
could
he?” Lucy thumped the floor with her cane. “How
could
he?” Thump. Thump. Thump.

“But, Miss Lucy!” Betty stared at her mistress in astonishment. “Maybe he don’t have no say about it.”

“Yes, he does! He doesn’t have to give up the will to live because of that woman.”

“What woman?”

Lucy caught herself. She pulled up her shoulders, neutralized the cane. “The brandy, Betty. Immediately.”

“Comin’ right up.”

Lucy dragged in a deep breath. Her heart was thrashing like a caged wild bird, but Lord, when had it not when it came to Percy?
She was beginning to dread these calls from Hannah, but at the same time she was grateful for the information. Hannah hadn’t
a clue how to put the pieces together, thank God, but Lucy did. Hannah relayed, and she assembled. From the tidbits she’d
sent on through the years, assisted by the unwitting Savannah and the information she could pump from Matt, Lucy had had a
clear picture of the happenings at Warwick Hall.

And what was happening now was that Percy was allowing Mary to rob him from the grave of the life he had left. That damn plantation
would be the ruin of the Warwicks yet! How
dared
that woman leave Somerset to Percy and transfer its curse along with it? Because that’s what it was—an evil that destroyed
anyone who possessed it. What
was
Mary thinking to put Percy in such a spot? Hadn’t she realized the split it would cause? That was the grief cratering Percy.
He’d hoped to see Matt and Rachel married, picking up where he and Mary had left off, making good on what they had let slip
through their fingers. The only way that could happen now was for him to restore Somerset to Rachel, which had as much chance
of transpiring as worms sprouting legs.

And, of course, Mary had counted on him to abide by her trust, God send her soul to hell.

But Lucy was puzzled. Mary may have been bullheaded, but she was never irrational. Why not sell the plantation along with
her other farms? Why burden Percy with it? Why sell her holdings at all and leave the house to the Conservation Society? Why
would she
disenfranchise
the heir she’d primed to carry on the legacy she’d sacrificed so much to preserve?

Betty placed a snifter of brandy beside her. “Miss Lucy, you starin’ like you seein’ the second comin’,” she said.

“Almost, Betty… almost,” Lucy whispered, awestruck. An amazing notion had shot into her head, as if straight from the mouth
of God, and before she’d had a sip of brandy, too.
Why, Mary Toliver, you sly old bitch, you. Now I know why you did it. You saved Rachel from becoming you. You saw where she
was headed and deprived her of the means to get there. For once in your life, you loved someone more than that bloodsucking
plantation. Well, I’ll be a horse’s patootie
.

But, as usual, Mary had shown up too late with too little, typical of her eleventh-hour timing throughout her life. Matt had
said she’d died within hours of delivering the codicil to Amos’s office, apparently before she had an opportunity to clear
her skirts with Rachel. Now her good intentions had blown up in everybody’s face like a misdirected bomb. Rachel now loathed
her, she and Matt had split, and Percy was slowly expiring from the rock and a hard place where Mary had left him. Once again,
she’d stuck it to him, and now her clone—unless somebody shook some sense into her—was sticking it to Matt, too.

Lucy picked up the snifter, her fury smoldering. Damn if she hadn’t seen this coming, ever since Hannah reported the first
summer visit of Mary’s great-niece to Howbutker. Hannah, who had known Mary all her life, described the child as having the
same “witch black hair, shade of foreign-looking eyes, gypsy complexion, and hole in the middle of her chin” as her nemesis.

“In other words, she’s beautiful, isn’t she?” Lucy had asked.

“I’m afraid so,” Hannah had admitted, “and looking so much like Mary at her age that I had to pinch myself to make sure we
weren’t back in elementary school.”

It was then that Lucy had considered the irony of Matt and Rachel one day enacting the Mary Toliver–Percy Warwick saga all
over again. She’d held her breath and crossed her fingers. For how could she be happy for Matt in love with an heir to the
throne who suffered the same dysfunctional attachment to it as its present owner? How could she embrace a granddaughter-in-law
cast in the same mold as the woman she detested?

She’d breathed easier when their first reported meeting—at Ollie’s funeral—didn’t take, but when years passed and neither
married, she’d had a terrible feeling that it was only a matter of time before the inevitable happened. And it did. Within
days of Rachel returning to attend Mary’s funeral, Matt had called to say that he’d met the girl he hoped to marry.

“You’re sure of that?”

“I’m sure of it, Gabby. I’ve never been as sure of anything in my whole life as I am of her and me. I’ve never been this happy.
Hell, I don’t think I’ve ever
been
happy, not if it feels like this. I know you and Mary had your differences, but you’re going to like
this
Toliver.”

So she’d sucked in her breath and said, “Well, then, get the ring on her finger, Matt, before your grandfather and I become
too old to chase babies.”

A week later, it was over. As her great-aunt had Percy, Rachel had dumped Matt over that miserable plantation. She’d spared
him the sops grandmothers usually give to grandchildren who are casualties of love. She hadn’t told him he’d get over Rachel,
that time would heal, and that there were other girls in the chorus line. Like his grandfather, he’d found—and lost—his one
and only love.

But God save the boy from the rebound mistake Percy had made in his marriage.

The brandy was warming her bloodstream, softening her rage to sadness. Never before had she felt so completely separated from
her former home and those she loved. If only she could meet with the girl, she’d set her down and give her an earful of the
truth about her great-aunt and that plantation… truth that would set her free to love and marry Matt. But what could
she
do from her golden cage here in her self-imposed exile?

Y
ou came into our lives when our stories were done… and we were living with their consequences
, Mary had said, and Amos now understood her meaning. Percy’s story was over. A heavy silence hung at its conclusion, breached
by the mellow tone of the clock on the mantel announcing the time as nine o’clock. Two hours had passed. The ice bucket stood
sweating on the bar with the bottle of single-malt Scotch beside it still full except for the two drinks poured earlier, the
tray of appetizers, long grown cold, barely touched.

Percy had related his and Mary’s pasts in the calm, flat voice of a prisoner in the dock, apparently leaving out no event,
consequence, or effect resulting from the day that had started it all—the day that Mary, at sixteen, had inherited Somerset.
Amos saw Matt’s face reflect the gamut of his own profound feelings during the narration, the greatest drop of his heart coming
with the unthinkable implication of Ollie’s war injury. Matt’s appeared to have occurred when he heard of the beating in the
woods. If nothing else came of the story, now they knew that Matthew was more than a name on a time-bleached headstone, Lucy
more than a harridan who had left her husband in a fit of menopause, Wyatt more than the rebellious son who had turned his
back on his father’s hopes and expectations. Now they knew why Mary had bequeathed Somerset to Percy.