cursed with an orderly mind, which meant that anniversaries came annually, not any old time it was convenient.
So now it was the second anniversary, and she was in perfect health. This time, she was determined to see it through. The champagne alone had cost nearly a week’s rent, but it was Mark’s favorite kind. While she was at it she had splurged on a pair of beautiful, brand-new crystal champagne glasses, too, because Mark had also appreciated fine crystal.
The leis had been even harder to find than the champagne, but as they had honeymooned in Hawaii, leis had seemed a fitting floral tribute.
So now she was on her way. She refused to think about those nasty whispers she had overheard a few weeks after Mark’s death, about his wandering eye. He’d been too busy building an empire for any extracurricular hanky-panky.
Goodness, he’d hardly had time for his own wife, and they’d still been in the honeymoon stage.
To clear her mind of unworthy thoughts, Deke went over her checklist. She had been taught early and well that orderliness was right up there alongside cleanliness, which was right next door to godliness. “Camera case, notebook, overnight bag—check! Champagne, glasses, leis—check!”
And then she moved on to her next list. Lights off, stove off, windows locked, door locked. Done, done, done and done.
Orphaned at the age of thirteen, Deke Kingsly Kiley could barely remember her father, who had died when she was five, but she’d never felt a lack of love. She’d been brought up by a mother who found life rather overwhelming, and by three elderly women whose notion of propriety had been formed during the Coolidge administration. She had loved them all dearly, and they had loved her right back. Although she had to admit that none of them had left her particularly well prepared for life as a single woman in the nineties. The nineteen nineties, that is.
Still, she’d made it. She was doing just fine, thank you. She had two published books to her credit, another one under contract, a part-time job at a day-care center and another one at Biddy’s Birdery, feeding baby birds and cleaning cages.
Not to mention one brief marriage.
Three and a half years ago she had married a handsome, highly successful businessman from nearby Norfolk. Mark Kiley had owned the shopping mall where she’d been signing her first book. He’d seen her there and stopped by to ask how it was going, and one thing had led to another. A week later, on their third date, he told her that her serenity and her quaint, old-fashioned beauty had knocked him clean off his pins.
Two weeks later they’d been married.
Her great-aunts had been horrified. A year’s engagement was de rigeur, Aunt Ellen had insisted. Anything less was hardly even decent, according to Aunt Eliza.
If Granna Anne hadn’t passed away the previous spring, Deke might never have been allowed to marry, because Anne Kingsly had been nobody’s pushover. Of all the Kingsly women—Deke’s mother, Deborah, her grandmother, Anne, and her two great-aunts, Eliza and Ellen, Granna Anne had been the only one with any backbone at all. Deke liked to think she had inherited it, but there were times when she wondered, she truly did.
Hers had been a storybook romance. Unfortunately, it hadn’t had a storybook ending. No happily ever after. She’d been so sure that once her family got to know Mark they would love him as much as she did, only there hadn’t been time. First Great-aunt Ellen had died, and then, in less than a year, Great-aunt Eliza had died. Mark had been too busy overseeing a huge development off the coast of South Carolina to help Deke deal with her grief. Not to mention dealing with all the legal red tape of a joint will that had been written before Deke had even been born.
She had begged Mark to help her. He’d promised to look into it just as soon as he could spare a minute. He was always incredibly busy, but then, one of the things that had attracted her in the first place had been his ambition. His aggressiveness. It had been enormously appealing to a woman who’d been trained from the cradle to be pretty, polite and passive.
It had been shortly after that that she’d seen the advertisement for a mail-order course in self-empowerment and assertiveness. If she hadn’t been so worried about her marriage—the gloss seemed to have gone off rather quickly—and overwhelmed by all the legal hocus-pocus she was hearing from her great-aunt’s executor—not to mention her concerns about her second book, which wasn’t coming along as it should…
If it hadn’t been for all that, she never would have sent off for the blasted thing.
Not that it had helped much. When it worked at all it was in fits and spurts, usually when she least expected it. She still blamed Lesson Two for what happened when she’d asked Mark if they could please start a family. Empowerment is the birthright of every woman, the first paragraph had stated. It is important to express your needs in unequivocal language.
So she had. An only child, Deke had desperately wanted babies of her own. She’d said so.
Mark had laughed. He’d told her she was child enough for him, and that it was about time she grew up because she was beginning to bore him with her childish demands.
That had hurt her feelings. With all the dignity and empowerment she could summon, she had asked why he had married her if he hadn’t wanted a family.
“Why? God knows. Maybe because you were a virgin and that’s a pretty rare commodity in this day and age.”
“You couldn’t possibly have known that—not then, at least.”
“Ah, come on, honey, you were practically advertising the fact. The way you dressed—the way you talked—even the way you sat there, with your knees together and your feet flat on the floor, like you were scared to death a fly would buzz up your petticoat.”
It wasn’t true. None of it. Oh, it was true enough that she’d been a virgin, but she’d been wearing a sophisticated new outfit, a new hairstyle and a new shade of lipstick in honor of her very first autographing when they’d met.
Besides, things like that didn’t show…did they? “I don’t believe you,” she’d said flatly.
Mark had sneered. There was no other way to describe it. “You were a novelty, darling, but let’s face it—novelties wear off, so be a good little girl and get off my back, will you?”
That was when the mail-order course had kicked in. She’d thrown a vase of roses at him. A Steuben vase. It had been a wedding gift, and Mark had known to the penny how much it had cost, which she’d thought rather crass at the time, but of course, by then, her training had quit cold on her, so she hadn’t told him so.
Never go to bed angry. That, along with that business about turning the other cheek, was one of her great-aunts’ favorite sayings.
So Mark had slammed out, and Deke had waited up, unable to sleep until she had apologized and smoothed things over between them.
He hadn’t come home at all. The next day his partner had called to tell her that Mark had gone out of town on another business trip and wouldn’t be home until the following Tuesday.
Still furious, hurt and determined to get over both, she had applied herself to packing away her great-aunts’ clothing to give to the church’s Helping Hand Society.
And then word came that Mark had been killed in a plane crash.
Deke
