“And considerably more than one whisky back at the house.” Edward shook the quarter full bottle. “Don’t forget, I was doing the pouring.”
“I think I’m entitled to a drink, today of all days.”
“Absolutely.” He unscrewed the bottle top and handed the whisky to me. “And you’ll notice I’m doing nothing at all to stop you.”
I held on to the bottle but did not drink. “But…?”
“But I noticed that everyone else in the room was reminiscing – they were sad, but they were thinking about the good times. And you looked like you were thinking about Armageddon.” Which wasn’t strictly true. I hadn’t actually been doing any thinking at all, that I could remember. “And I thought that maybe you needed to get outside, or at least out of that room, somewhere where people weren’t watching you or worrying about you. I thought that maybe you were obsessing about keeping things together, and it might be good for you to fall apart for a little while.”
“So you brought me to sit in the dark on my own, so that I don’t bother anyone else if I decide to have a nervous breakdown?”
Edward took my hand. “Not on your own.” His voice was warm and comforting, and I could feel the tears already building behind my eyes.
I looked down at our joined hands. “Yeah. Okay.”
Tucking my head onto his shoulder, I let the tears come – quietly at first, as I remembered all things that I’d never experience again, then louder as I thought about the next few days, weeks, months, years without Nathaniel. Edward simply wrapped his arms around me and let me sob – after moving the whisky bottle out of its precarious position between my knees.
It was some time before I felt calm enough to talk again. “How did you know?” I asked, wiping my eyes then nose with a handkerchief Edward had produced from one of his pockets.
We were still sitting so close that I could feel him shrug. “I was watching you. And I remembered what I needed when my dad died.”
“I’m sorry.” I contemplated the soggy handkerchief in my hands. I was really going to have to wash it before I gave it back. “I didn’t know.”
He shrugged again. “No reason you should. It was a few years ago now.”
“Thank you,” I said, after a while of sitting in silence. “This was what I needed, and I had no idea.”
“Ready to go back in?” Edward asked, shifting his arm from around my shoulders.
I glanced down at my watch; it was almost midnight. “Yeah. I should get to bed. Lots of work to do tomorrow after all.”
Edward creaked to his feet, rubbing some of the chill out of his knees and legs before turning to me and offering me his hand. “Oh I don’t know, there’s only another twenty or so boxes to go through.” And one of them had to contain the information I was looking for. “Come on.”
He was facing the wrong way, so he couldn’t have seen it. But as I took Edward’s hand and stood up, my own bones aching suddenly in the night air, I saw a figure just beyond him, on the other side of the Rose Garden. A woman in white, indistinct and ethereal. Caroline’s ghost, again. Would Nathaniel return to haunt us here at Rosewood, I wondered hazily, through the whisky fog. I wasn’t sure if I wanted him to or not.
“Come on,” Edward said again. “Let’s go in.”
I nodded and smiled at him, and when I looked back, the figure was gone.
Chapter Ten
Sally came home last night. She brought with her a man I don’t imagine I’d have spent more than a moment considering under normal circumstances. He shouldn’t fit in here; he’s not loud enough, or brash enough, or full of stories. You couldn’t write a book about him. But to my daughter, he is everything. And to me…he is more than another character in our story. He’s the hero.
From the journal of Nathaniel Drury, 1987
It should have been awkward the next morning. It should have been difficult to sit down at breakfast with Edward and everyone else and know that he’d seen me break down more completely than even my family ever had. But somehow it wasn’t.
“I suppose you’ll be starting work on the memoirs today, then,” Isabelle said, glaring at us over her cup of coffee. “After all, he’s dead and buried now. No point in waiting.”
Edward gave me the ‘This one’s yours’ look. I gave him the ‘Thank you very much’ sarcasm glance in return.
“I’m not making any firm decisions yet, Isabelle,” I said, calmly pouring myself another cup of tea. As strange as it seemed, I did feel much better after my crying jag in the Rose Garden the night before. Even dressed in my own jeans and top and not a film star’s outfit, I at least felt I could cope with the world. “But I can’t make that decision without taking a look at the materials Nathaniel left behind, and we’re still only about halfway through. So, yes, Edward and I will be working in the study today.”
The rest of the family remained sensibly silent at that.
“Did you really mean that?” Edward asked, as we escaped up the stairs towards the study.
“Mean what?”
“That you still haven’t made your mind up about the memoirs?”
Ah. That. I’d thought I was doing quite a good job of keeping everybody happy by hedging my bets every which way, but eventually I really was going to have to make a decision.
“Yes, I did.”
“I see.”
I waited. I was pretty sure that wasn’t everything he had to say on the matter.
To his credit, Edward managed to keep quiet until we were in the study. Whether out of habit, or to stop me escaping without answering his
questions, he locked the door behind us again. I settled into my usual chair and tried to look engrossed in the next box in the pile, but Edward was having none of it.
Perching on the edge of the desk closest to me, he said, “What’s holding up your decision?”
I sighed, and put aside the box for the time being. “A number of things. First of all, I still don’t know what it is everyone doesn’t want broadcast to the public at large, so how can I say it’s the right thing to publish them? I need to know exactly what we’re talking about if I say yes to this.” Most especially, I needed to know what secrets Isabelle had been talking about, the night of the Golden Wedding. Did it really all tie into the story Nathaniel had told me that morning? Did someone really die at a Rosewood party – and if so, how? I thought about the clipping again, and the way the guy in the middle had been looking at Therese. Who was he to her? And what did Nathaniel think about that? I couldn’t help but think that if whatever happened was as innocent as I hoped, I’d have heard about it before now.
“Not to mention your own secrets.” Edward gave me an assessing look. “Are you sure you’re not holding back because you don’t want to expose those to the whole world? I mean, that’s understandable, I guess.”
But I could tell from his expression that understandable wasn’t the same as acceptable to him. Edward Hollis was all about the unvarnished truth. He’d never accept me keeping something back just because it made me uncomfortable. Even if it turned out that my family had something to do with a man’s death.
“This isn’t about me and Greg.” Because that was what he was talking about, I knew. And it was almost the whole truth, too. “Not everything is, you know.”
“Fine.” He didn’t believe me, I could tell, but he moved on anyway. “So what are your other reasons?”
I considered. What else was holding me back from committing to the job? Other than a possible investigation into a long ago death, my own despicable behaviour, and the possibility of being banished from Rosewood for good? Wasn’t that enough? “Well, there’s the logistics of it all, I suppose.”