Dr. Dave paused to take a bite of his cake. “The pictures were so good that the photographer asked to show them to some people, so Luke and Ingrid ended up staying in New York for two weeks. To make a long story short, Ingrid was pretty much an overnight success. You know how it is. They want the girls as young as they can get them.”
“I know more about the modeling world than I want to,” Jocelyn said.
“Luke needed to get back to his job, but Ingrid begged him to stay with her. I think that to Luke’s mind it had all been a lark. I think he thought that someday she’d show her model photos to their children.”
“Did she refuse to go back with him?” Jocelyn asked.
Dr. Dave jammed his fork into the cake. “No. I wish she had, but she didn’t. She may be a stupid girl, but when it comes to herself, she is exceedingly clever. She packed her bags and said she was going with him, that she loved him enough to give up everything for him. She just wanted one last assignment, so of course Luke said yes. How could he refuse? So she went to her last photo shoot while Luke stayed at the hotel and changed all the flights back home.
“The next time Luke saw Ingrid, she was in a hospital. She’d miscarried and she was saying that she was so unhappy that she wanted to kill herself. Of course Luke couldn’t leave her there alone, and she was in so much pain that he couldn’t drag her onto a plane.”
“What happened?” Joce asked.
“In the end, Luke stayed in New York with her. He lived and worked in the city.”
“Gardening in New York?”
“My grandson can do a lot of things, but whatever he does, he hates doing it in a city, but they lived there together for about eighteen months. Then, one day, quite by accident, Luke found out that Ingrid hadn’t miscarried. Her ‘last assignment’ in New York had been to get an abortion.”
“Luke must have been…” Joce was unable to think of words.
“He was devastated about the child, the loss of…the loss of everything in his life. He returned to Edilean and started taking on gardening jobs. His paternal grandfather had left him an old house, and Luke fixed it up, then he turned his hand to Edilean Manor.”
He looked at Jocelyn. “As far as I know, my grandson hadn’t seen or heard from Ingrid in nearly two years.”
“Why didn’t he get a divorce?”
“If she filed papers, I’m sure Luke would have happily signed them, but he’s not the kind of man to present a woman with divorce papers.”
“But now they’re back together.”
“Can I trust you?” Dr. Dave asked.
“Do you mean will I tell the entire town whatever you say to me?”
“That’s exactly what I mean. Sometimes it’s good to be surrounded by people who’ve known you all your life, but sometimes it’s horrible. From the beginning Luke has refused to talk to anyone about his disastrous marriage. I think he feels he was just plain dumb to have fallen for someone with so little…” He shrugged.
“Soul? Lack of self-interest? I know what she’s like. I lived with two of them.”
“What you don’t know is what I am like.”
“You mean about you and Mary Alice Welsch?”
At that Dr. Dave smiled, and she could see Luke in forty-plus years. “No, I don’t mean that. I mean that I hired a private investigator to find out about Ingrid’s very convenient ‘miscarriage.’ It took months, but he found the clinic she went to to have the abortion, then I made sure my grandson ‘accidently’ found the papers.”
“If Luke found out you did that…,” Joce whispered.
“I guess you can see how much I’m trusting you.”
She leaned back in her chair. “You’re telling me this because you’ve found out something else, haven’t you?”
“Yes.” Getting up, he opened a drawer in a table, pulled out a thick folder, then removed a big envelope. “Yesterday I received this from the same PI who found out about the abortion. It tells why Ingrid has come back.”
She took the envelope, but she didn’t open it. “I really hope you’re not asking me to tell Luke about whatever is in here.”
“No, I’m not. It’ll all come out in the newspapers soon enough. What I want to say is that when Luke was spending time with you—” He put up his hand when she started to speak. “Yes, I know it was just a few days, but he was the happiest I’ve seen him in years. He even played golf with me.”
“You do know, don’t you, that he hates golf.”