Chapter Four

Royce opened her mouth to respond but couldn’t find words. She managed to drag the desk chair out and dropped into it.

“Royce, what is it? Who is it?” Chrys asked and started around the table.

As Royce’s trembling hand held the phone to her ear, the voice on the telephone uttered more shocking words.

“If you don’t give it to him, you’re stealing from your husband’s son. Think about it.” The line went dead.

“A crank call,” she managed. “A stupid crank call.” To Royce’s relief, Chrys left after a few minutes. Just as Royce closed the back door the phone rang again.

She snatched up the phone. “Who are you?”

“Is this Royce Thorne?” Yet another unfamiliar voice came over the line.

“And who are you?”

“Suze Mackie at WJFC TV. I’ve just received a publicity packet from a literary agent named Ross Morris. It’s all about you and the book you have coming out.”

“From Ross? I’m sorry I was—”

“Morris is your agent?”

“Yes. He told me he’d be sending the publicity releases out.”

“Your book, Two on the Run, is due out in late summer, according to the release info.”

“It is.”

“As you know, my show here at WJFC, Suze First, spotlights a local author or artist on Monday of each week.”

“I’ve seen your show. It’s a nice thing for you to―”

“You’ll be my guest next Monday. Tell my audience what the book is about, how you came to write it, how you get ideas and so on.”

“Thank you for the invitation. What time should I be at the studio?”

“My assistant will call you with the details.”

“Should I bring my galley copy?” But Royce was talking to a dead line. Suze Mackie had hung up.

So the impression Royce had gotten the couple of times she’d watched the show must be correct. Suze Mackie was brusque and impersonal with her guests. Was that the current journalistic style? If it was, Royce didn’t think much of it. But Ross would be upset if she turned it down. She’d just do it and get it over with.

She set thoughts of Suze Mackie aside and returned to the earlier shocking call. About the money. Who was it? Who the hell could possibly know about Eddy’s letter and the money?

For the third time, the phone rang. “Maybe I’d better get call waiting,” she muttered. “Hello?”

“Royce. I can hardly believe even you would spread such lies about your own husband.” The voice hissed over the line, the last person she ever expected to call.

“Eleanor? What are you talking about? What lies?”

“You’re telling people Eddy left an inheritance to an illegitimate son.”

Royce almost dropped the receiver. She could speak no words of denial or defense.

Eleanor shouted, “You’re despicable.” The line went dead.

****

Though it was the last thing she wanted to do, Royce kept her dinner date with Hal that evening. A proposal of marriage from her agent, Ross Morris—a most unlikely scenario given that he was gay—would not have surprised her as much as Hal Woodstone’s words the very evening she’d planned to tell him she wouldn’t be accepting any more dinner invitations. And his outrage at her response left her almost reeling, coming as it had on top of the anonymous calls and then Eleanor’s long-distance blast. She’d blurted out the first words that came to her. “No! Hal, you’re not serious?”

“No? No? A dozen women younger than you would jump at the chance to marry me!”

“Hal, aren’t you still married to Lil…”

“You think I’m a bigamist?” He jumped to his feet. “I divorced her long ago for desertion.”

“Oh. But Hal, I never expected—”

“Don’t want a man with dirt under his nails? Going after bigger fish than Eddy now he’s gone.” Dishes and silverware rattled as his fist slammed onto the table and put a violent period to his irate words.

Royce flinched. She stared at her transformed host. His twisted mouth and blazing dark eyes brought an earthquake of childhood fears churning up from the depths of her memory. Hal wasn’t drunk, like her father had been. But her heart convulsed and then beat so hard in her chest she thought it might actually be hitting her chest wall.

She detested her fear. Get a grip, Royce. You will not allow Hal Woodstone to treat you like your father did your mother. Leave this instant.

“Calm down, Hal. We’ll forget this—”

“Oh, you’re good at forgetting.” His eyes bored into hers. “What else have you forgotten to do?”

There was no use talking to him. So she extricated herself the only way she could, by bolting from his house, an undignified retreat into the starlit night. She rushed across the lawn between their homes and thrust her key into the lock. Fearing sleep would be elusive, she filled the tub with steaming hot water instead of taking her usual shower and tried to soak away the unexpected stress of the evening. When the hot bath failed in its goal, she resorted to one of the sleeping pills the doctor had prescribed after Eddy’s death.

****

The woman’s eyes fluttered open. Dim light with flashes of neon red and yellow sent shards of exquisite pain slicing through her head.

Where was she? San Francisco, the loft? Terri blowing smoke rings? The door crashing open, knocking her to the hard, oak boards. Terri’s voice echoing in her head. Damn you, Heather, you’ve led them straight to me.

The torment in her head erased Terri’s venomous words. Not Terri. That was twenty-five years ago. Where now? In the fraction of time her eyes were open, she’d glimpsed a bed. A lamp lay on the scratchy carpet she felt beneath her, not a wooden floor.

Now another voice in her head, an accusing voice, punctuated with sobs and weeping. An anguished voice. Whore! Home-wrecker! Royce had said those words.

Then the same words raged from Hal’s contorted face as it drifted across her dimming consciousness. “Slut. Whore.” And his boot ground her ankle, with its tattooed ring of daisies, against the carpeted concrete.

Consciousness almost gone. Not San Francisco. Hal was after San Francisco. And Eddy. Another memory fragment. Palm. She’d called him, and he came. He didn’t hate her. He didn’t think so, he said. He said he’d be back again. Oh, God. Then Hal came. Must get up. Protect Palm from Hal. She tried to brace an arm against the floor, and agony plunged her back into total and complete darkness.

****

Royce woke early Sunday morning. The corkscrews of sheets and light blanket wound around her and trailing from the bed testified to her restless tossing from side to side.

Morning brought no more understanding of Hal’s attitude than she’d had last night.

Could Hal know or suspect he was not Palm’s father? He’d never given any hint of it. Unless the way he always treated Palm was a sign.

Who else could possibly know? The person who called her? Did that person know Hal and had told him? If so, had Hal told Palm, out of spite or revenge? If he or Palm asked her anything, she’d just deny it. Eddy had no right to ask her to tell Palm the truth of his parentage.

She needed to talk to Palm, try to find out if Hal had told him anything. Today would be the ideal time. On weekends, Hal always went to the big farmers market in Asheville to buy plants for the nursery. He usually left around noon on Sunday, staying overnight and returning on Monday.

She would call Palm and ask him to stop in to see her this afternoon as he often did. She always welcomed him and refrained from dwelling on what her reason might be for enjoying his company, forcing back the memory of seeing him, so like Eddy, from her window. The antique grandfather clock in the front hall started striking as she picked up the phone. Seven. Too early. Hal would not have left yet. She put the phone back on its hook and switched on the coffee maker.

Fortified with two cups of black coffee and half a bagel with cream cheese, she took the portable radio from her desk and stepped out the back door onto the redwood deck. Might as well get the flats of scented geraniums and chives, mint, and rosemary in the ground while she waited to call Palm.

The sun painted the sky in streaks of gold and rose and a pair of black-winged butterflies fluttered around the purple irises. A mockingbird plied its theme from a limb filled with white blossoms in the old apple tree. Among them still clung a ragged bit of rope, remnant of the swing Eddie had made for Palm the summer he was six years old.

This morning, digging into the soil, placing the aromatic plants into the dark earth, and listening to the melodious sounds of her winged serenader didn’t have their usual calming effect on Royce.

“Marry me, Royce. It’s the right thing for all of us.” Unbidden, Hal’s words from last night, his voice at first matter-of-fact, pushed the birdsong from her ears. Hal’s response to her answer had dazed her at first, then triggered anger. What did he mean, “the right thing for all of us”?

A sardonic laugh escaped her. At the sound of her mirth, Devon, lying on the grass nearby, jerked his head up. Awakened, no doubt, from dreaming of an endless series of sticks thrown into lakes for a black Lab to jump in and retrieve.

“Sorry, Devon. Why didn’t he play that card? He knows Palm calls me his ‘next-door mom.’ I would have thought he’d count on that being an inducement for me to marry him. If he really wanted me to.”

Did he? What was Hal’s reason for proposing to me?

Giving up on her gardening as a distraction from her unwelcome thoughts, she sat down at the picnic table and fiddled with the radio. The woeful strains of a jazz station fitted her mood. She sat tapping a sneaker-clad foot against the table’s wooden frame.

The shocking call yesterday from a woman who knew about Eddy’s will followed by Eleanor’s long-distance attack, the unexpected and out-of-character marriage proposal, and Hal’s reaction when she rejected him kept going round and round in her head.

Was it really true? That Palm was not Hal’s son, but Eddy’s? If so, what did that have to do with Hal’s demand for her to marry him? Or did it have anything to do with it?

She’d closed and padlocked the door to that past, determined over twenty years ago never to acknowledge it. Eddy’s will had threatened to open that sealed door, but she had not allowed it. Now she was being forced to deal with it again.

“Where are you, Lily? Still ‘infecting’ other women’s weak husbands?” The sound of her own voice, filled with loathing, startled her. Loathing for Lily? Or Eddy?

She swatted an early mosquito heading for the long bruise on her forearm. She’d expected to see the bruise this morning. Yesterday she’d moved a bag of mulch off the deck. The bag slipped, and she nearly fell. Her arm shot out for support and hit the railing hard.

Another time she did fall. Shortly before Hal brought Lily into their lives, while helping Hal in his greenhouse, Royce had fallen from a ladder and suffered her first miscarriage. Eddy blew up and blamed Hal in no uncertain terms. Royce finally persuaded Eddy to apologize and their neighborly relationship resumed, more or less.