Prologue
HELEN?” ASKED THE person on the other end of the line. “Helen Aldredge?”
If anyone had asked her, Helen would have said that it had been so long since she’d heard Edilean Harcourt’s voice that she wouldn’t have recognized it. But she did. She’d heard those elegant, patrician tones only a few times, but each time had been significant. Because of who the caller was, Helen didn’t point out that her married name was Connor. “Miss Edi? Is that you?”
“What a good memory you have.”
Helen visualized the woman as she remembered her: tall, thin, perfect posture, her dark hair never out of place. Her clothes were always of the finest quality and of a timeless style. She had to be close to ninety now—Helen’s father David’s age. “I had good ancestors,” Helen said, then wanted to bite her tongue. Her father and Miss Edi had once been engaged to marry, but when Edilean returned from World War II, her beloved David was married to Helen’s mother, Mary Alice Welsch. The trauma had been so great that Miss Edi turned the big, old house her family had owned for generations over to her wastrel of a brother, left the town named for her ancestress, and never married. Even today, some of the older people in Edilean spoke of the Great Tragedy—and they still looked at Helen’s mother with cool eyes. What David and Mary Alice had done caused the end of the direct line of the Harcourt family—the founding family. Since Edilean, Virginia, was so near Colonial Williamsburg, losing direct descendants of people who had hobnobbed with George Washington and Thomas Jefferson was a major blow to them.
“Yes, you do have good ancestry,” Miss Edi said without hesitation. “In fact, I’m so sure of your capabilities that I decided to ask you to help me.”
“Help you?” Helen asked cautiously. All her life she’d been told of the feuds and anger that had come about because of what happened in her father’s lifetime. She wasn’t supposed to have heard about it, because everything was talked about in whispers, but Helen had always been a curious person. She’d sat to one side of the porch, played with her dolls, and listened.
“Yes, dear, help,” Miss Edi said in a patronizing way that made Helen blush. “I’m not going to ask you to bake a hundred cookies for the church sale, so you can get that out of your mind.”
“I wasn’t—” Helen started to defend herself, then stopped. She was at the kitchen sink and she could see her husband, James, outside struggling with the new bird feeder. Someone should outlaw retirement for men, she thought for the thousandth time. Without a doubt, James would come in angry about the feeder and she’d have to listen to his tirade. He used to manage hundreds of employees across several states, but now all he had was his wife and grown son to boss around. More than once Helen had gone running to wherever Luke was and asked if she could spend the afternoon with him. Luke would give her that amused look of his and set her to weeding.
“All right,” Helen said, “what can I help you with?” Never mind that she hadn’t spoken to this woman in what? Twenty years?
“I’ve been told that I have less than a year to live and—” She cut off at a sound from Helen. “Please, no sympathy. No one has ever wanted to leave this earth more than I do. I’ve been here much too long. But being told I have a full year left has made me think about what I still need to do in my life.”
At that, Helen smiled. Miss Edi might no longer live in the town named after her great-something grandmother, but she’d made an impact on it. That the town still existed was due to Miss Edi. “You’ve done a lot for Edilean. You’ve—”
“Yes, dear, I know I’ve paid for things and written letters and raised a ruckus when people wanted to take away our homes. I’ve done all that, but that was easy. It just took money and noise. What I haven’t done is right some wrongs that happened when I was a young woman.”
Helen nearly groaned aloud. Here it comes, she thought. The Story. The one about how her mother, Mary Alice, stole Miss Edi’s boyfriend at the end of World War II. Poor Miss Edi. Rotten ol’ Mary Alice. She’d heard it all before. “Yes, I know—”
“No, no,” Miss Edi said, yet again cutting Helen off. “I’m not talking about what your parents did back when the dinosaurs roamed the earth. That’s done with. I’m talking about now, today. What happened then has changed today.”
Frowning, Helen turned away from the sight of her husband kicking the bird feeder, which he couldn’t get to stand upright. “You mean that if my father had married you, quite a few lives would be different,” she said slowly.
“Perhaps,” Miss Edi said, but she sounded amused. “What do you know about the fourteenth of November, 1941?”
“That it was just before the attack on Pearl Harbor?” Helen asked cautiously.
“Then I take it that your eavesdropping when you were a little girl didn’t let you hear everything, did it?”
In spite of herself, Helen laughed. “No, it didn’t. Miss Edi, would you please tell me what this is about? My husband is about to come in for lunch, so I don’t have much time.”
“I want you to come here to Florida to visit me. Think you can bear to be away from your husband for that long?”
“The man is retired. I may move in with you.”
Miss Edi gave a dry little laugh. “All right, but you can’t tell anyone where you’re going or who you’re seeing. I have some things to talk to you about, and we have to figure out how you’re going to do what has to be done. I will, of course, pay for everything. Unless you’re not interested, that is.”