Tea and Primroses (6 page)

He let her go, stepping away. “This is why it’s better for me to live across the world from you. I need a drink.” He turned on his heel and left the room. The door shut hard behind him.

Sutton sank onto the bench, their bench, and stared at the floor, rubbing the hot places on her arms where he’d touched her.

After a few moments, there was a soft knock on the office door. Wiping her eyes, she got up and went to the window. “Come in.” The weather was stunning and it hurt, this blue sky and bluer water, these waves crashing in their perfect rhythm, because her mother would have loved it, and knowing that she would never again see this stretch of beach made Sutton want to scream.

The door opened. Patrick Waters, carrying a plate of food, closed the door with his foot. “I thought you might be hungry.” His voice was gentle, unobtrusive but masculine.

“Thank you. I’m not really hungry.”

“Ah, well, of course. I’ll just put it on Oregon’s desk.”

“What did you just say?”

He smiled, tugging on his ear. “That’s what I called Constance.”

“Oh. Did she call you Vermont?”

“No. Just Patrick. Which is what you should call me.”

“Why did my mother never mention you to me? Or her time in Vermont?”

He shuffled his feet and tugged on his left earlobe again. “Well, I’m not sure.”

But the way he said it made her think he did know. He went to the desk and picked up the clock her mother always kept there. It was old-fashioned, with a feminine face and a smooth, polished cherry wood case. Her mother had wound it every day.

“Is this one of yours?” asked Sutton, suddenly knowing.

“First one I ever made.”

Just then, Louise came in, carrying a plate of food. She was pretty and, like Constance, didn’t look like she could be in her middle fifties. Her blond hair, long when they were children, was cut in an attractive bob. She had lively eyes and a gentle way of moving and talking. Her eyes were red and swollen from days of crying. “Sutton, I brought you some food.” She stopped when she saw Patrick standing by the desk. “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you had company. Declan told me to bring you something to eat.” She said all this with her eyes on Patrick.

“Louise, this is Patrick Waters. Patrick, this is Louise. My mother’s oldest and dearest friend.” But the rest of the sentence was lost. At the sound of the name Patrick Waters, Louise dropped the plate of food. It crashed on the hardwood, breaking the plate and scattering bits of sandwich, some kind of green casserole, and chocolate cake near Louise’s feet. Seeming not to notice, Louise simply stared at Patrick, as if frozen.
Like she’d seen a ghost
, thought Sutton.

“Louise, are you all right? Do you need me to get Ben?” Ben was Louise’s new husband; they were married just six months ago in this very house.

But Louise seemed not to hear. Patrick moved closer to her, holding out his hand. “Nice to meet you, Louise. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

Louise continued to stare at him for a moment and then, like someone awakening from a hypnotized trance, seemed to suddenly notice the food at her feet. “Oh my goodness, I’m so sorry, Sutton.” Louise dropped to the floor and started picking up pieces of plate and food.

“Don’t clean it, Louise. I’ll grab one of the servers. They’ll have a rag or something.” Sutton left and searched the front room for a server. Catching a young woman’s eye, she asked if she would get a cleanup cloth and meet her in the office.

When she came back to the office, Patrick and Louise were sitting on the couch. He held her hand, looking remorseful. Louise was weeping.

Sutton stood by the door, unsure whether to interrupt or not.

“But how? How did I not know?” asked Louise.

“She planned on telling you this week.”

“We thought it would be me first, you know. I can’t get my head around that.” Patrick’s voice broke.

“You have no idea how she suffered over the years.”

He wiped under his eyes. “It hurts me to hear that.”

Louise continued to cry. “It’s just that it doesn’t seem fair.”

The server approached behind her; Sutton moved aside so she could enter the room. Patrick and Louise both looked up and saw Sutton. Louise started and rose abruptly to her feet, a look of guilt passing over her face. “Well, I should get back to the guests. I’d love to talk more later, Patrick. I have so many questions.”

“Of course. I’m staying at a hotel up in Cannon Beach.”

“You’ll stay a while then?” asked Louise.

He nodded, looking as if he wanted to say more. “For a while longer, yes.”

After Louise left and the server was cleaning up the mess, Sutton perched on the side of the desk, scrutinizing Patrick, a dozen questions coming to her mind but she didn’t have a chance to ask anything because Roger came back. “Sutton, what’re you still doing in here? I told you the guests were asking for you. And I know no one.”

Sutton rose to her feet. “Patrick, this is Roger. Roger, Patrick.”

Roger held out his hand without any sense of curiosity about who Patrick was, Sutton thought with a hint of irritation. Roger was the least curious man she’d ever met. This came with being sure one knew everything. The men shook hello before Roger turned to Sutton. “Hey, I have to jump on a conference call for work. I’m going to take the call upstairs. It could take a while.”

“Fine,” said Sutton to his back as he exited the room. She sighed, suddenly exhausted. She wanted nothing more than to sink into the couch and cry until she fell asleep.

Patrick was looking at her with one eyebrow raised. “So that’s Roger?”

“Yeah. Did my mother tell you about him?”

“She did.”

Sutton flushed. It was obvious from the way he answered that her mother hadn’t kept her opinion of Roger to herself. “I’ve been in Europe for two months. He asked me to marry him before I left. I said yes. And now, well, now I’m not sure. My mother would have been able to help me but she isn’t here and I’m lost.”

“Just tell him the truth. Maybe ask for some time. But, listen, it’s better to break it off now than marry him knowing you’re uncertain. Most important decision you ever make in your life is who you marry.” He cocked his head to the side. “And there’s Declan.”

“You know about that too?”

He nodded, pursing his lips as if slightly embarrassed. “Your mother had a strong opinion. About everything.”

“About everything.” Sutton smiled. “I wanted to talk to her about Roger. But I never had the chance.”

He took a card out of his breast coat pocket and set it on the desk. “Here’s my card. Has my cell and email on there if you need to get ahold of me. Now, come along. I need another drink.”

“Me too.” She stopped him, though, before they reached the doorway. “Patrick, who were you to my mother?”

He looked down at her, his face soft, his eyes misting. “I loved her for most of my life.”

The shock of that statement settled in her chest but she didn’t have time to ask anything further, because they were swallowed up into the swarm of people offering condolences and she lost Patrick in the crowd. Sutton spoke with several guests before Gigi was beside her. She put another glass of white wine in Sutton’s hand and wrapped an arm around her waist. “Peter Ball and Declan are on the patio. They want to talk to you.”

“Is Jack here too?”

Gigi nodded. “Yes. I haven’t had the courage to say hello to him yet. I feel so awful after what happened and I don’t know what to say to him. We were all so tight back in the day but I’ve let too much time pass without calling or anything.” She hesitated. “Well, I wrote to him, of course, you know, one of those awful cards saying how sorry I was.”

Jack was now living in Legley Bay and working as a high school math teacher after his wife was murdered when he was finishing his doctorate back east. Shortly after her murder, he’d spent some time at a mental health facility after an attempted suicide. The suicide attempt had shocked them all; it was hard to imagine guileless and innocent Jack capable of such darkness. They’d all been close growing up, a gang of kids spending hours at her mother’s house for barbeques and beach parties. Jack had been like their mascot back then, four years younger than Declan and Peter, and always tagging along no matter where they all went. Jack and Gigi had both been academic class stars in high school, nerdy and intellectual, valedictorians of their years. It was hard to believe over ten years had passed since then. And so much had happened for all of them, mostly bad, it seemed.

They were on the patio now. The sun was lower in the sky than the hour before, bothering Sutton’s red and raw eyes.

“I’m going inside to check with the caterer about a few things,” said Gigi. “Will you be all right with the boys for a bit?”

“Of course.” Declan and Peter sat at the table, under an umbrella, talking quietly and intensely. They were both so much older than the last time they’d sat in the same spot on her mother’s deck. How did time tick away so quickly? How was it possible that Declan had been away for six years? And Roma? It seemed, so often even after all these years, that she might be in the house, that Sutton had only to open a door and she might be there, cooking something at the stove, or dusting Constance’s books, or watering a plant. When Sutton visited in the late afternoon, she expected the smell of one of Roma’s batch of cookies to greet her. But instead it was quiet and without smells, merely the sound of her mother’s keyboard coming from the office. But that would no longer be there, either. Her legs weakened and the awful hollow ache came again. How could she ever enter this house again knowing her mother was no longer waiting?

On shaky legs, she greeted Peter. He was dressed in a black suit and was as handsome as ever, with wavy blond hair and light green eyes and those full lips all the girls used to dream of kissing when they were in high school. It was no surprise he was a detective, and not because his father was a cop, although that would be the obvious assumption, but because he was always the type who listened more than he talked and seemed to always be searching for the root of everything, the cause and effect. Declan had told her once how Peter was the best in their high school Honors English class at figuring out what would happen next in any given novel. Maybe it was the same skill one needed to be a detective.

Peter hugged her tightly. “Your mother smelled of tea and primroses and I loved her.”

“Thank you, Peter.”

“And you still smell of cinnamon and green apples.”

“You’re such a nut with this two-scent thing,” she teased, putting her hands on both sides of his face.

“It’s a gift.”

“I’ve missed you and the old times.” She kissed him on the cheek. “Thanks for coming.”

“As much as I hate the reason, it’s good to see you,” said Peter, holding out a chair for her to sit. “What’s it been now? Since my mom’s wedding?”

“I think so,” said Sutton, scooting the chair a few inches closer to Declan. “And before that your wedding. Weddings and funerals, I guess is what it takes to get together.” She fought the lump in her throat. “How’s your beautiful bride?”

He sat. “Cleo’s well. I suppose my mother told you she has a starring role in a movie filming down in southern Oregon?”

“She did. I think Louise told everyone in town,” said Sutton. All three laughed, and for a moment, for four ticks of the second hand round a clock, Sutton forgot her mother was dead, forgot that Declan had been away, or that Jack’s young wife had been murdered. And they were all still young and her mother and Roma and Louise were in the kitchen having wine in coffee cups so the children weren’t badly influenced, gossiping and laughing as the sun slowly descended into the blue sea. It was just the center of that laughter that mattered; nothing could touch them, not grief or shock or disappointment. But then, as quickly as it came, it went, bursting like a child’s bubble blown from a plastic wand, which for the briefest moment had floated perfectly in the sunshine, a rainbow of colors on its shiny surface, hovering so that she wanted to reach out and touch it but knowing that to do so would ruin it and so she simply watched. And when it was gone, she wondered if it had existed at all.

The men sobered; they exchanged glances between them, as if Sutton couldn’t see. She knew the look. It was the expression of men who didn’t want to say something. “Guys, what is it?”

Declan shifted in his chair, gazing at the surface of the table.

Peter leaned forward, folding his hands together. “I’ve just come from seeing my dad at the station. He believes without a doubt your mother was murdered.”

She couldn’t speak. She held her breath for what was to come next.

“A witness came forward today, an older man that sits every morning looking out the window from his upstairs bedroom. He sees your mother ride into town every morning at the same time. He says he saw a parked car pull away from the curb and plow into your mother from behind, then speed away.”

The shock tingled through her body. She imagined it in tiny electrical currents starting in her stomach and spreading up and out to every nerve ending. In the house, the crowd was loud. She could hear them now, like the roar of a stadium. There were birds circling over the lawn, just off the deck, and she remembered, suddenly, how during one week of an unusually warm September the birds outside their high school became drunk on sun-drenched, fermented berries and flew into the glass windows of the lunchroom and fell to their deaths. She and Gigi watched helplessly from inside, waving their arms, but the birds saw only the sky reflected in the glass and perhaps their own image.
They’re flying to a friend
, said Gigi.
There’s no stopping them.
Sutton imagined the birds here now—might they drink some fermented nectar and fly free and clumsy and headstrong into her mother’s windows, their bloody corpses falling upon the deck at their feet?