Disguise for Death Page 4

  “You’ll be my guest next Monday. Tell my audience what the book is about, how you came to write it, how you get ideas and so on.”

  “Thank you for the invitation. What time should I be at the studio?”

  “My assistant will call you with the details.”

  “Should I bring my galley copy?” But Royce was talking to a dead line. Suze Mackie had hung up.

  So the impression Royce had gotten the couple of times she’d watched the show must be correct. Suze Mackie was brusque and impersonal with her guests. Was that the current journalistic style? If it was, Royce didn’t think much of it. But Ross would be upset if she turned it down. She’d just do it and get it over with.

  She set thoughts of Suze Mackie aside and returned to the earlier shocking call. About the money. Who was it? Who the hell could possibly know about Eddy’s letter and the money?

  For the third time, the phone rang. “Maybe I’d better get call waiting,” she muttered. “Hello?”

  “Royce. I can hardly believe even you would spread such lies about your own husband.” The voice hissed over the line, the last person she ever expected to call.

  “Eleanor? What are you talking about? What lies?”

  “You’re telling people Eddy left an inheritance to an illegitimate son.”

  Royce almost dropped the receiver. She could speak no words of denial or defense.

  Eleanor shouted, “You’re despicable.” The line went dead.

  ****

  Though it was the last thing she wanted to do, Royce kept her dinner date with Hal that evening. A proposal of marriage from her agent, Ross Morris—a most unlikely scenario given that he was gay—would not have surprised her as much as Hal Woodstone’s words the very evening she’d planned to tell him she wouldn’t be accepting any more dinner invitations. And his outrage at her response left her almost reeling, coming as it had on top of the anonymous calls and then Eleanor’s long-distance blast. She’d blurted out the first words that came to her. “No! Hal, you’re not serious?”

  “No? No? A dozen women younger than you would jump at the chance to marry me!”

  “Hal, aren’t you still married to Lil…”

  “You think I’m a bigamist?” He jumped to his feet. “I divorced her long ago for desertion.”

  “Oh. But Hal, I never expected—”

  “Don’t want a man with dirt under his nails? Going after bigger fish than Eddy now he’s gone.” Dishes and silverware rattled as his fist slammed onto the table and put a violent period to his irate words.

  Royce flinched. She stared at her transformed host. His twisted mouth and blazing dark eyes brought an earthquake of childhood fears churning up from the depths of her memory. Hal wasn’t drunk, like her father had been. But her heart convulsed and then beat so hard in her chest she thought it might actually be hitting her chest wall.

  She detested her fear. Get a grip, Royce. You will not allow Hal Woodstone to treat you like your father did your mother. Leave this instant.

  “Calm down, Hal. We’ll forget this—”

  “Oh, you’re good at forgetting.” His eyes bored into hers. “What else have you forgotten to do?”

  There was no use talking to him. So she extricated herself the only way she could, by bolting from his house, an undignified retreat into the starlit night. She rushed across the lawn between their homes and thrust her key into the lock. Fearing sleep would be elusive, she filled the tub with steaming hot water instead of taking her usual shower and tried to soak away the unexpected stress of the evening. When the hot bath failed in its goal, she resorted to one of the sleeping pills the doctor had prescribed after Eddy’s death.

  ****

  The woman’s eyes fluttered open. Dim light with flashes of neon red and yellow sent shards of exquisite pain slicing through her head.

  Where was she? San Francisco, the loft? Terri blowing smoke rings? The door crashing open, knocking her to the hard, oak boards. Terri’s voice echoing in her head. Damn you, Heather, you’ve led them straight to me.

  The torment in her head erased Terri’s venomous words. Not Terri. That was twenty-five years ago. Where now? In the fraction of time her eyes were open, she’d glimpsed a bed. A lamp lay on the scratchy carpet she felt beneath her, not a wooden floor.

  Now another voice in her head, an accusing voice, punctuated with sobs and weeping. An anguished voice. Whore! Home-wrecker! Royce had said those words.

  Then the same words raged from Hal’s contorted face as it drifted across her dimming consciousness. “Slut. Whore.” And his boot ground her ankle, with its tattooed ring of daisies, against the carpeted concrete.

  Consciousness almost gone. Not San Francisco. Hal was after San Francisco. And Eddy. Another memory fragment. Palm. She’d called him, and he came. He didn’t hate her. He didn’t think so, he said. He said he’d be back again. Oh, God. Then Hal came. Must get up. Protect Palm from Hal. She tried to brace an arm against the floor, and agony plunged her back into total and complete darkness.

  ****

  Royce woke early Sunday morning. The corkscrews of sheets and light blanket wound around her and trailing from the bed testified to her restless tossing from side to side.

  Morning brought no more understanding of Hal’s attitude than she’d had last night.

  Could Hal know or suspect he was not Palm’s father? He’d never given any hint of it. Unless the way he always treated Palm was a sign.

  Who else could possibly know? The person who called her? Did that person know Hal and had told him? If so, had Hal told Palm, out of spite or revenge? If he or Palm asked her anything, she’d just deny it. Eddy had no right to ask her to tell Palm the truth of his parentage.

  She needed to talk to Palm, try to find out if Hal had told him anything. Today would be the ideal time. On weekends, Hal always went to the big farmers market in Asheville to buy plants for the nursery. He usually left around noon on Sunday, staying overnight and returning on Monday.

  She would call Palm and ask him to stop in to see her this afternoon as he often did. She always welcomed him and refrained from dwelling on what her reason might be for enjoying his company, forcing back the memory of seeing him, so like Eddy, from her window. The antique grandfather clock in the front hall started striking as she picked up the phone. Seven. Too early. Hal would not have left yet. She put the phone back on its hook and switched on the coffee maker.

  Fortified with two cups of black coffee and half a bagel with cream cheese, she took the portable radio from her desk and stepped out the back door onto the redwood deck. Might as well get the flats of scented geraniums and chives, mint, and rosemary in the ground while she waited to call Palm.

  The sun painted the sky in streaks of gold and rose and a pair of black-winged butterflies fluttered around the purple irises. A mockingbird plied its theme from a limb filled with white blossoms in the old apple tree. Among them still clung a ragged bit of rope, remnant of the swing Eddie had made for Palm the summer he was six years old.

  This morning, digging into the soil, placing the aromatic plants into the dark earth, and listening to the melodious sounds of her winged serenader didn’t have their usual calming effect on Royce.

  “Marry me, Royce. It’s the right thing for all of us.” Unbidden, Hal’s words from last night, his voice at first matter-of-fact, pushed the birdsong from her ears. Hal’s response to her answer had dazed her at first, then triggered anger. What did he mean, “the right thing for all of us”?

  A sardonic laugh escaped her. At the sound of her mirth, Devon, lying on the grass nearby, jerked his head up. Awakened, no doubt, from dreaming of an endless series of sticks thrown into lakes for a black Lab to jump in and retrieve.

  “Sorry, Devon. Why didn’t he play that card? He knows Palm calls me his ‘next-door mom.’ I would have thought he’d count on that being an inducement for me to marry him. If he really wanted me to.”

  Did he? What was Hal’s reason for proposing to me?
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br />   Giving up on her gardening as a distraction from her unwelcome thoughts, she sat down at the picnic table and fiddled with the radio. The woeful strains of a jazz station fitted her mood. She sat tapping a sneaker-clad foot against the table’s wooden frame.

  The shocking call yesterday from a woman who knew about Eddy’s will followed by Eleanor’s long-distance attack, the unexpected and out-of-character marriage proposal, and Hal’s reaction when she rejected him kept going round and round in her head.

  Was it really true? That Palm was not Hal’s son, but Eddy’s? If so, what did that have to do with Hal’s demand for her to marry him? Or did it have anything to do with it?

  She’d closed and padlocked the door to that past, determined over twenty years ago never to acknowledge it. Eddy’s will had threatened to open that sealed door, but she had not allowed it. Now she was being forced to deal with it again.

  “Where are you, Lily? Still ‘infecting’ other women’s weak husbands?” The sound of her own voice, filled with loathing, startled her. Loathing for Lily? Or Eddy?

  She swatted an early mosquito heading for the long bruise on her forearm. She’d expected to see the bruise this morning. Yesterday she’d moved a bag of mulch off the deck. The bag slipped, and she nearly fell. Her arm shot out for support and hit the railing hard.

  Another time she did fall. Shortly before Hal brought Lily into their lives, while helping Hal in his greenhouse, Royce had fallen from a ladder and suffered her first miscarriage. Eddy blew up and blamed Hal in no uncertain terms. Royce finally persuaded Eddy to apologize and their neighborly relationship resumed, more or less.

  Chapter Five

  Against a background of slow jazz from the radio, she looked back at that perfect spring season when Lily had arrived in Fall Creek. But in her heart, she now regarded it as a frigid winter. Hal’s hard work had begun to pay off, and his healthy plants and shrubs sold at a steady pace. Someone had told him that the Farm in Summerville raised and sold nursery stock at a good price. He drove downstate to check on it and give them a try as a supplier for his flourishing nursery/greenhouse.

  Seventeen, just arrived at the Farm to visit a cousin, Lily was a waif-like, late-blooming flower child from California. Her luminous gray eyes and flowing blonde hair projected a touching vulnerability. She apparently captivated Hal and on his second trip to the Farm, he brought her home with him, like a prize plant. He apparently felt he owned her, expected to hold and dominate her totally. Quicksilver would have been easier to hold than Lily. And as unstable.

  Hal had only allowed Lily to associate with Royce and Eddy. The occasional bruises they saw on the young woman’s arms troubled Eddy. He’d gone on too many domestic violence police calls, sometimes arriving too late to save an abused wife. “I ought to talk to Hal,” he said several times. “Maybe if he knows we’ve noticed, he’ll let up on her.”

  But Lily asked for no assistance, and Royce feared that if Eddy talked to Hal, another feud would begin with their neighbor.

  Hal must have realized that Lily’s bruises were causing them concern. He shook his head when they were all outside once, indicating Lily and Royce. “Got another clumsy city girl in the greenhouse, bumping into things.”

  Royce accepted Hal’s explanation, and later as she and Eddy ate dinner, she reminded him, “Remember how I used to come home with broken nails and bruises on my arms and shins while he was teaching me about gardening?”

  When it became obvious that Royce and Lily were both pregnant, Royce hoped it was a good thing. She even thought perhaps they might become closer. But instead Lily became more distant from Royce. And then Royce miscarried—again.

  Had her grief after each loss of a hoped-for child caused Eddy to feel rejected, not enough? As she’d felt after her mother committed suicide.

  Now Royce wondered if she was predisposed to let deep loss consume her life. From the age of ten until she married Eddy, she remembered only bitter loneliness. Just weeks after her father’s death, her mother either fell or jumped from their third-story apartment window.

  Her retreat into mourning the children they would never have may have played a part in what Eddy did. The admission, resurrected from its hiding place deep in her soul, brought all the other buried memories with it.

  She never knew for sure what drove Lily, only two years after her arrival in Fall Creek, to abandon husband and baby son. After Hal’s ranting visit to their house the morning after Lily left, Royce and Eddy never discussed the subject again. She also never knew whether her stormy visit next door to vent impotent rage at Lily’s treachery helped drive Lily away.

  What neatness demon had caused her to bend down and look under the bed for Eddy’s other slipper? And find instead Lily’s Birkenstocks. Why didn’t she just lie down as the doctor had ordered when he released her from the hospital? Only after leaving the Woodstone house and the confrontation with Lily did she follow instructions and rest. And the next day Lily was gone.

  The sound of rustling leaves brought her back to her sunlit garden. She pushed bitter memories back into hiding and looked toward the boxwood hedge which separated the Sage property from hers. Chrys Wynter pushed through a narrow gap. Her striking beauty made Royce uncomfortably aware of her own grungy look. Wisps of light brown hair, threaded with silver just since Eddy’s death, tickled the back of her neck where they had escaped from bright orange banana clips. She tried to slap some of the dirt from the heavy cotton gardening gloves which encased her hands.

  She patted ineffectually at her hair, adding bits of soil to the mix, and appraised the young woman in the pale blue, thigh-high leather skirt and matching jacket. Golden-blonde curls piled on her head added to her height, but somehow Chrys reminded Royce of Lily. A reminder she especially disliked this morning, though she hoped her greeting didn’t reveal it.

  “Good morning, Chrys. Have a seat.”

  Stripping off her gloves, she waved at a pair of cast-iron garden chairs. The design curling over their plastic-covered cushions was a vine with grape clusters in a color not found in nature. Interpreting Chrys’s dubious look, she added, “They’re clean, I promise. I’ve coffee inside if you’d like a cup?”

  Chrys looked hard at a cushion, then sank into the chair. “No, thanks. Brunch date with Brenda. And how was dinner with Hal Woodstone last night?”

  “Um. Unusual. Marc and Amanda flown away again?”

  Chrys arched one perfect golden brow but asked no more questions about the dinner, to Royce’s relief. “With a client who called yesterday. Claimed an emergency and insisted that Marc fly to Bermuda. Amanda’s trying to shake the flu, and court’s not in session so she went, too.”

  “Sounds like fun.”

  “Especially if a client foots the bills. They decided to come back on a Princess Line cruise ship to Miami.”

  “A change of scene.” Royce looked around the garden, slapping her gloves together. “I could use that.”

  “Really? Go on a cruise?”

  “Maybe not a cruise. Traveling alone on a cruise ship mightn’t be so much fun.” Royce could see the girl didn’t know whether she was serious or not.

  “Did you and Eddy ever go—?” Chrys broke off, as though not sure she should complete the question.

  “No, we stayed close to home most of the time. Visited his sister a few times.”

  “Atlanta?”

  Royce nodded. “We talked about flying to France some day.”

  “Paris? The Riviera?”

  “I could go for both of us,” she mused more to herself than aloud.

  “Do you have a passport?”

  “Huh? Passport—no, I guess I’d have to get one, wouldn’t I?”

  “Wouldn’t going to Paris alone be just as bad as cruising alone?”

  Royce shielded her eyes from the sun. “Eddy’s grandfather was killed in action during the Battle of Brittany. He’s buried there. We were going to find his grave, bring flowers.”

  “What about Eddy’s sist
er? Wouldn’t she like to go, too?”

  Royce picked up her trowel and dug gently into a flat of petunias, set it down again. “The last thing Eleanor would like is to take a trip with me.”

  “If you’re serious about a trip overseas, you’d better see about that passport soon. It takes several weeks for one to be issued.”

  “I’ll do it this week, I think.” She smiled. “I may never need it. But what the heck. I’ll have it, just in case.”

  “What would you do with Devon?”

  “Board him at the kennel, I suppose.”

  “He’d miss this big yard, I bet. He could stay with Palm.”

  “Maybe.” She broke off. “No, probably not. The kennel would be best.” She gazed into the distance and considered an idea.

  She was beginning to understand, a little, Eddy’s failure to confess to his affair with Lily and the child it produced. Eddy couldn’t know how Palm would respond to his biological father’s failure to acknowledge his own son for all those years. If she did tell Palm the truth, how would he react now? She couldn’t bear his scorn, hatred even. For her and Eddy. No, she couldn’t tell him.

  “While you’re gone, I could watch the house for you.” Chrys offered in a tentative voice. “Umm—international flights are kind of expensive though.” Her slender, pink-tipped fingers pressed against the faint blush that glowed on her porcelain cheeks. “Royce. I didn’t mean to imply…”

  “Travel costs money. Oh, yes. And I’m hardly among the independently wealthy, as you know. But the advance for my book should cover it.”

  The money Eddy left was for emergencies. She’d made up her mind about that.

  “You’ve received it then?”

  “What?”

  “The advance,” Chrys said.

  “No, but any day now.”

  Chrys mimed writing in the air. “I can’t wait to get a copy so you can autograph it.”

  “It should help give me closure, as they say, to see all the places Eddy and I talked of visiting but never got to. I’ll dig out my old French primer from high school and brush up.”

  “Marc and Amanda went to Europe last summer. There are probably some brochures around the house. Want me to bring them over later if I can scrounge them up?”