“I have no idea,” Jocelyn said. “Luke was strange from—” She broke off from saying that Luke had been acting oddly since she’d read him part two of Miss Edi’s story. It was Joce’s experience that nothing in Edilean faded with age. The people’s faces and bodies might age, but the stories, the secrets, seemed as fresh today as they did fifty years ago. With this in mind, she thought it was better not to mention Miss Edi.
Instead, she started talking about Luke’s gardening, but when Mary Alice kept darting her eyes away, Jocelyn gave up on that subject as well. Was there some Edilean secret about his gardening? she wondered.
Later, when they were in Luke’s truck and driving home, Joce asked him what he and his grandfather had talked about for so long.
“Sorry about leaving you alone, but we had things we needed to talk about.”
“That’s what I just said. I want to know what you were talking about.”
“Plants,” Luke said quickly. “He wants to put in a garden and he wants me to do it.”
“Sure,” she said slowly. “That’s why it was all done in secrecy, because I know nothing about plants so you have to hide it all from me.”
“We didn’t want to bore you. How’d you get on with my grandmother?”
“We had absolutely nothing to say to one another and your eyebrow is twitching.”
Luke put his hand up to his eyebrow, then down again. “All right,” he said with a sigh, “I wanted to talk to Gramps about my doubts about this whole thing. For reasons that you can imagine, I don’t talk to him about Miss Edi in front of Nana. And before you tell me that I could talk to him during the day, might I remind you that I’ve been working and I don’t want to have to spend my days hauling a golf bag around?”
Jocelyn noticed that the tip of his eyebrow was still twitching. If he was telling the truth, he certainly wasn’t telling all of it.
Luke and Jocelyn were on a trail into the nature preserve that surrounded Edilean. He was leading; she was following. They both wore day packs that Luke had carefully filled with supplies they would need in case of an emergency, which included a rainstorm.
It had been two days since they’d been to his grandparents’ house, and they had spent most of each day together. The first day had been for Joce, as she went over everything she’d done with the biography and told Luke how disappointed she was over the boring letters of Dr. Brenner. “I can’t get much out of them. Even on the days when I know that they were shot at, he wrote nothing but a record of how far they traveled that day. He didn’t mention any danger.”
“Then how do you know they were being shot at?”
“History and what Miss Edi told me,” Joce said. “And checking dates with the name of the country at that time.”
“You need to dig deeper,” Luke said. “Someone somewhere knows about this. Have you checked the names of the other people mentioned in the letters?”
Joce had pulled a piece of paper from the pile on her desk and showed him the names mentioned in Dr. Brenner’s journals.
“Did they have a guide?”
“I don’t know,” Joce said, her eyes opening wider. “You know, I think Miss Edi once mentioned a guide. Charles something.”
“There you go,” Luke said. “Find him. Or find his relatives. There are people who know about them.”
The next day, she’d spent with him on the herb garden. They had at last gone to the nursery to get the plants, and Luke said he was sending the bill to Ramsey. “Don’t worry, he’s going to deduct every penny off his taxes because it’s an historical garden.”
“How is he?” Jocelyn asked.
“You mean the IRS or his accountant?”
“My husband-to-be, since you’re taken.”
“Not for long
,” Luke said, smiling at her.
She wanted to ask him about Ingrid and the annulment and about a lot of personal things, but she didn’t. Instead, she just smiled back and said, “This is pretty. Let’s get some of these.”
“Modern hybrids. What we want is over there.”
The plants that Luke liked looked as much like weeds as they did flowers. “Smell this,” he said, holding some gray-green, fuzzy-looking plant in front of her nose.
“Heavenly.”