“I have a house in the same gated community where young Jocelyn lives with her father and the Steps, as she calls them. One of my detectives talked to her.”
“She talked to a stranger?” Miss Edi snapped.
Again, Alex chuckled. “You haven’t changed, have you? I can assure you that the meeting was well chaperoned. They were at a NASCAR race.”
“A what?”
“Just trust me on this: You’d hate the thing. Edi, what I’m asking is if you’d mind living in Boca Raton. You’d be three houses from Claire’s daughter and watching out for her while you work for me.”
If it had been anyone else, Edi would have checked her enthusiasm, but Alex was an old, trusted friend. “I would love to,” she said. “Truly love to.”
“I thought the warmth of Florida would be good for your legs.”
“Not moving back to Edilean and being looked at with pity for being an old maid will be the best thing for my legs.”
“You, an old maid,” Alex said. “I will always see you as twenty-three and the most beautiful woman in—”
“Stop that or I’ll tell Lissie on you.”
“She loves you as much as I do,” Alex said quickly. “So give me your address and I’ll send you all the particulars.”
“Thank you,” Edi said. “Thank you very much.”
“No,” Alex said, “the thanks are always to you. If it weren’t for you…”
“I know. Give kisses to everyone for me,” she said, then hung up. It was a full moment before her smile nearly cracked her face. She was a great believer in doors opening and closing. The door with Dr. Brenner had closed and a new one had opened.
Now, so many years later, Jocelyn Minton was the love of Miss Edi’s life. The child she didn’t have. The heart of the home she’d missed out on.
Whenever Jocelyn could escape her duties at that little college that worked her half to death but paid her little, she jumped in her car and drove home. After the obligatory visit to her father and stepmother, she’d head straight to Edi’s house. The two of them would embrace, thoroughly glad to see each other. Jocelyn was the only person who wasn’t intimidated by Edi’s stern appearance. She’d hug Edi just as she’d done when she was a child. “My lifesaver,” she called Edi. “Without you I don’t know how I would have survived my childhood.”
Edi knew it was an exaggeration; after all, people didn’t die from a lack of books. They didn’t actually die from being stuck in a house with a father, stepmother, and two stepsisters who thought truck rallies were high society. But there were different ways to die.
The truth was that their meeting had been the best thing that ever happened to both of them. Edi had only lived in the lovely house Alex had bought for four months when she first saw the child with her family. The house they lived in had belonged to Jocelyn’s grandparents, and after her mother’s death it had been willed to the granddaughter. It hadn’t taken much work to find out that what money had been left had been quickly spent.
Miss Edi saw the parents in their leather clothes, their two overly tall twin daughters wearing as little as was legally allowable, then Jocelyn straggling behind them. She usually had a book in her hand and her dishwat
er blonde hair covering her face, but the first time Edi got a good look at her, she saw intelligence in the girl’s deep blue eyes. She wasn’t the beauty that her mother had been—Miss Edi had seen photos—but there was something about her that drew Edi to the child. Maybe it was her square chin with just the tiniest hint of a cleft in it. It reminded her of another square chin that she’d once loved with all her heart. Or maybe it was the way the child seemed to know that she was different from the people she lived with.
At the beginning Miss Edi had twice arranged it so she could speak to the girl. One time was at the library, and they spent thirty minutes discussing the Narnia books, and just as they parted, they introduced themselves. The second time, Miss Edi decided to take a walk that went past the child’s house. She was outside on her bicycle, riding around and around on it. “When I was a child we played hopscotch,” Miss Edi said.
“What’s that?”
“If you have some chalk I’ll show you.”
Miss Edi waited while Jocelyn went inside and got the chalk. Back then, Miss Edi had only needed to use one cane for walking. But all those years of standing up while she took care of Dr. Brenner and his team had further damaged the muscles in her legs, and she knew that it wouldn’t be long before she was forced to use two canes, then a walker, then…She didn’t like to think about those things.
She felt someone watching her and turned to see Jocelyn’s father. He was wearing what she’d known as a “skivvy shirt,” something men in her generation kept covered. He seemed to have tattoos all over his body and he hadn’t shaved for days. He was working on a blue motorcycle and constantly turning the handle to make it sound louder. The neighbors had quit complaining, but not because he was a homeowner in the restricted community. If that was all he was, they would have thrown him out. But Gary Minton was still the handyman, the one who came in the middle of the night when the toilet overflowed and flooded the bathroom. He’d also pulled a child off the bottom of a swimming pool, and climbed a tree to get a terrified little boy down. All in all, the noise of a few motorcycles was easy to put up with.
But he was watching Miss Edi as though trying to assess her, to see if it was all right for his daughter to be with her. Miss Edi turned away. Better to ask if the child should be with him.
It was only minutes before Jocelyn returned with the chalk, and Miss Edi showed her how to draw the hopscotch chart on the concrete driveway, throw the rock, then follow it on one foot. She’d been delighted by the game.
A few days later, when Edi opened her front door and saw the scrawny, poorly clad little girl, her blonde hair covering her face, sitting on her front steps and crying, she wasn’t surprised.
“I’m sorry,” the girl said as she jumped up. “I didn’t mean to…” She didn’t seem to know what to say.
Edi saw the corner of a plastic suitcase behind a hibiscus bush and figured the child was running away from home.