style="font-size:15px;"> Her mouth still tasted of peppermint.
CHAPTER 3
M eyer waited on the church steps. It was warmer in the sun, but the wind was too cutting for him to stand out in the open for long. He stepped back into the alcove and glanced toward the sound of a backhoe digging a new grave in the cemetery across the road, all too aware that he could easily have ended up over there—and a lot sooner than later.
There had to be at least five generations of valley people buried in that patch of ground, friends and enemies, relatives claimed and unclaimed, but he had no idea who they were digging this grave for. There had been a time when everyone in the valley would have known, and friends and neighbors would have dug the grave themselves with a pick and shovel. He could remember when it had still been done, and when people had brought the best food they’d had to offer and sat up all night with the homemade wooden coffin placed on sawhorses in the living room. There was a lot to be said for the kinship of it, for neighbors coming together in times of trouble and sadness. It was the main reason he’d returned to the valley—that and the fact that he belonged here and whatever he needed to be—friendly or standoffish or something in between—he could be, and no one would hold it against him. Unfortunately, he had returned just in time to see that sense of community die away. He didn’t know half the people who lived around here anymore.
It occurred to him that the two new guests at Lilac Hill might be friends or relatives of whoever had died—which would explain the younger woman crying after her phone call. It hadn’t looked like grief to him, though. It had looked more like “significant other” or husband trouble.
Significant other, he decided, because she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.
It surprised him a little that he found her…interesting. He hadn’t been interested in much for a long time. And it wasn’t just that she was self-assured and attractive and drove an expensive vehicle. Caught crying, she’d still had the presence of mind to conclude that he was an idiot for bothering her and react accordingly—but she wasn’t rigid about it. She’d revised her initial opinion of him once she’d understood that he only meant to help. He liked women like that—feisty, but still reasonable. He also liked the fact that she didn’t seem to be all that aware that everything she had was working for her. Or maybe she just didn’t waste such an obvious advantage on the help unless she wanted something.
In any event, she was obviously rich and she was definitely good-looking. She was also about as unhappy as he’d first thought, even before he’d seen her crying on the gazebo steps. He didn’t like having to witness a woman’s sadness. It reminded him too much of the things he was trying so hard to forget. He had seen enough sadness when he’d been in the army. All over the world. That relentless kind of sorrow that beat a woman down until she couldn’t hide it no matter how hard she tried. Hundreds of them. It lived inside them and looked out of their eyes.
The image of an altogether different woman’s face suddenly rose in his mind, and he had to work hard to push it away and force his thoughts back to the present. Whatever was going on with the Lilac Hill guests had nothing to do with him, and he had too many things on the concerns list already. Things like not sleeping night after night and not being able to find enough work to make ends meet. He had told the younger woman that everything was going to be all right. He shouldn’t have done that. He certainly didn’t believe it. Whatever optimism he’d once had had desiccated in a foreign desert. Nobody knew any better than he did that good deeds never go unpunished.
Which should have kept him from hanging around the church steps now.
He walked to the double doors of the church, expecting them to be locked. They were, but he thought not for long. If there was a funeral on the church schedule, then Estelle Garth would be arriving soon for one of her white-glove inspections. If it was possible for any one human being to own a house of worship, then Estelle Garth owned this one. She lived halfway up the hill just beyond the church, where she could see everything. Nothing happened on the premises night or day that she didn’t know about, and he expected that sooner or later she’d see him down here.
Estelle didn’t like him. As a boy, he’d spent an extraordinary amount of time trying to stay out of her crosshairs. At first, he’d thought it was because he’d lived in Chicago with his parents before they’d died, and those years had somehow canceled out the fact that he was a Conley and he’d been born here. Somehow, his brief absence had turned him into an outsider, and everybody knew how Estelle felt about them.
By the time he was ten or eleven it had gotten so bad that he’d had no alternative but to ask his great-aunt Nelda about it—and she hadn’t been nearly as helpful as he’d hoped.
“I reckon everybody’s got their cross to bear, Meyer, and she’s yourn,” she’d said.
He owed Nelda a lot, and he wanted to accept her simple philosophy of life, but he couldn’t do it, regardless of the fact that he was the pitiful homeless orphan none of his other relatives wanted. He must have lived in a dozen foster homes before Nelda stepped up to claim him and bring him home to the mountains again. By the time he came to live with her, he’d already had plenty of crosses to bear and the last thing he needed was Estelle Garth throwing another one on the pile. So he kept after Nelda. He needed a real reason, so he could deal with it.
“Maybe she thinks you done something,” Nelda said finally.
“If she thought that, she’d come to you about it—or she’d make the preacher do it. I’ve not done anything, Nelda. I swear it!”
“It…might not be you, Meyer.”
“Well, who then? She’s after me all the time—accusing me of things when there’s not a word of it true. I ought to know what it’s about, Nelda. How else am I going to stand it?”
“It might could be it’s got something to do with me, honey, something Estelle thinks I done, and the Lord knows I’d be sorry if you was having to suffer for it. Estelle, she thinks what she thinks, and whatever it is, can’t nobody on this earth change her mind about it. She’s been that way ever since I knowed her—when we was little girls even. If I was to go to her about you, it would just make it worse.”
The possibility that Nelda was the real target led to a certain moral indignation on his part. He didn’t like being chastised for his sins when he was guilty. He really didn’t like it when he was innocent, especially when it was done to persecute his beloved Nelda.
Estelle Garth.
There was something about being innocent that made him bold, made him just have to annoy the woman, if the opportunity presented itself. He was always respectful when he did it—he had Nelda’s standing in the community to consider—but he didn’t just toe the ground and let Estelle blame him for everything but the Great Flood after that. He spoke up for himself, no matter how many people were around to hear it, stating his innocence and politely reminding her of all the other times she’d thought he was guilty of something when he wasn’t. He especially enjoyed pointing out the time she’d accused him of throwing rocks at the church windows when he’d gone on a school trip and wasn’t even in the county.
Estelle had understood immediately that there had been a big change in their relationship, and that, for all intents and purposes, they were at war. And still were, as far as he knew. Nelda had been right about one thing. Estelle Garth didn’t change. Not too long ago, he’d overheard some of the women in Poppy’s store talking about how she still marked on her kitchen calendar exactly when every wedding took place. Evidently, she didn’t do it to avoid scheduling conflicts. She did it so she’d know in
