Chapter 1

Spring, 1992

UPI New York

IBN News anchor Pete Cooper further enhanced the reputation of the newest network's news department by capturing a Peabody Award Monday night for the series he wrote and co-produced on the plight of mentally ill homeless in the big cities entitled Nowhere to Go. A well-respected veteran of ABC and NBC with awards for coverage of everything from war to the decay of family life, Cooper has been the lead anchor on the IBN national news for the four years it has existed. He is widely considered to be one of the driving forces behind the new network's growing credibility in the broadcast news field. When asked to comment, Cooper said that he has benefited greatly from the latitude network chief Evan Parischell has given him, and looks forward to seeing IBN take its place alongside the other major networks.

Entertainment World, May

News Tidbits: To-die-for newsman Pete Cooper has once again made the top-ten list of most eligible bachelors. Divorced and presently unattached at thirty-four, the oh-so-cool Cooper, who stole our hearts with his unforgettable war reports (who can forget his elán during those missile attacks, decked out in leather jacket and scar), has an apartment in Atlanta where he now works, but also has a little flat in New York's Soho so he can keep up with the bright lights he left behind for IBN. He gracefully declined a questionnaire on likes and dislikes, but has been often spotted at symphony, ballet, opera and any tony fundraiser that's lucky enough to get him. From the sounds of the nightly newscast—that's become a must for women everywhere—it seems that all that slow, Southern living hasn't dimmed the edge on Pete's abilities—in any arena.

Western Union May 15

PETER COOPER, 1676 MAGNOLIA CRESCENT, ATLANTA, GEORGIA. COOPER. STOP. WHAT'S IT WORTH TO YOU TO KEEP THE SORDID TRUTH FROM GETTING OUT AND RUINING THAT SMOOTH REPUTATION? STOP. YOU'D BETTER BE THERE AT ONE, OR THE PICTURES HIT THE STREET. STOP. STUMP.

The Miller Family Funeral Home was open for business. A white colonial two-story building nestled between Chicken Delight and Bob's Carparts in the heart of downtown Rupert Springs, Arkansas, the home boasted two limousines, state-of-the-art refrigeration and stained-glass windows in the Chapel of Reverence. Two of its rooms could be opened to contain a larger-than-average crowd, and its morticians, Ray and Billy Lee Miller, stood poised at the head of the stairs in their dark suits, dark glasses and folded hands, nodding greetings to the mourners who were assembling to remember Miss Mamie Stevenson Fillihue.

Inside, Mrs. Marjorie Barlow was already playing a selection of reverential favorites on the organ, and the flowers that had arrived bracketed the pulpit. A fair crowd of townsfolk mingled in the heavily scented room to commiserate with Miss Mamie's two surviving sisters in their hour of need. Everything was ready.

Brooke Ferguson stood alongside the largest of bouquets with the minister, the Reverend Mr. Purcell, who was commenting on the lovely turnout. Pulling a little at the bright blue cotton shirtdress she wore for the humid afternoon service, all Brooke could think of was how very much she hated gladioli. There was never a funeral bouquet without gladioli, and the damn things stuck out of every arrangement in the room. Except, of course, the one with the pansies and lily of the valley in the corner. The one given by Brooke and a certain missing nephew who would go nameless—and headless if he didn't show up soon.

"Oh, Brooke, dear, isn't this all too lovely?" Mamie's older sister Letitia gushed, raising a perfume-drenched hankie to her well-powdered nose. Brooke bit back the truth and smiled to the fluttery little woman.

"Mamie was a lovely woman."

Everyone was beginning to find his or her place among the folded chairs. Giving her skirt one more yank against the humid heat that had managed to sap even the Miller's legendary air-conditioning, Brooke overcame the urge to yank out every gladiolus she saw, and settled onto an end seat in the second row.

She'd given up looking over her shoulder. It was already after one, and there was no sign of him. She was going to have to get through this one alone, it seemed. It didn't leave her any happier at all.

Mr. and Mrs. Wilbur Renfield nodded their hellos as they took up their places on the other side of the chair that held Brooke's purse and umbrella. She just smiled back and left her belongings where they were. She wasn't in the mood for this—not the weather, not the service, not the disappointment. She was exhausted after the past two weeks, and furious that she hadn't won even a single argument in the past three days. Brooke would have much rather been in her jean cutoffs, up to her elbows in dirt planting her annuals. Instead she was decked out in her brightest, most attention-getting dress and hat like a peacock who'd wandered into a field of well-mannered crows.

Oh well, she thought in resignation, at least it's for a good cause. God knows, nobody else in this room would think to celebrate the right way.

The Reverend Mr. Purcell marched slowly to his pulpit and turned to face the crowd of mourners. "Open your books to hymn number four hundred and fifty-three, if you please."

Clothing rustled and chairs clattered a little as the crowd climbed to its feet for the opening hymn. Brooke followed along, heaving a sigh of capitulation as the congregation swung into "Onward Christian Soldiers."

"Oh, for heaven's sakes," she muttered beneath her breath. Alongside her, Mr. and Mrs. Renfield made a show of offering to share their book as they joined in the town's second-favorite hymn. Brooke smiled and shook her head. They didn't seem pleased. Brooke went back to thinking about futility and a conspicuously absent nephew she was going to get on the next plane to personally strangle.

She was so busy muttering to herself that she didn't hear the surprised rustle in the room around her, the slight faltering of voices. Trying her best to ignore the music Miss Letitia had picked for the service, Brooke clenched her hands together to keep them still and wondered if she could get up to give her own eulogy to the little lady they were remembering today.

Not one thing. They hadn't allowed one of Mamie's requests to be honored at her own damn funeral. It seemed that the dead in Rupert Springs didn't have the same rights their fluttery, iron-willed surviving sisters did. Miss Letitia and Miss Emily, both often married and yet still clinging to that fond affectation of Southern womanhood, stood together in the front row, tiny sparrows in their old straw hats and organdy dresses, white gloves and prayer books. Dabbing overwrought and suspiciously dry eyes, they oversaw the funeral they'd personally planned for the sister they'd never quite agreed with. At least, Brooke could almost hear them thinking out loud, Mamie's done something correctly. It had almost been over Brooke's dead body.

"Excuse me, can you take that damn hat off?" a new voice suddenly whispered in her ear. "Person can't see over somebody your size, much less one with a Frisbee on her head."

All of Brooke's anxiety escaped her in a whoosh as she whipped around on her attacker. "Well, if it isn't the star of stage, screen and Saudi Arabia," she hissed right back, fighting hard to keep the delighted grin from her face as the congregation swung around in an attempt to read the second verse and watch the newcomer at the same time. "Where the hell have you been?"

Coop shot Brooke a brash, completely unrepentant grin. "It's one. I'm here. And I have the bribe."

Not even seeming to notice the people around him, he handed up a gold-wrapped box that Brooke knew was going to contain Godiva chocolates.

"One my cute little tush," she retorted, snatching the box from his hand. "When have you ever been on time for anything?"

"You forget," he answered. "I'm a respected newsman now. Six-thirty, every night. No matter what. In your living room."

Brooke snorted, upsetting the delicate tonal balance of the Renfields. "Not in my living room. I have better things to watch." She gave brief attention to the weight of the box and nodded. "You just made it, bucko. That shot of you and Bessie almost hit every wire service in the country."

Coop scowled at her. "I do not consider cow-tipping a sordid truth. And besides, it's not like I did it with a stranger. She was Mamie's cow."

"Your cow, now. Stand up here, you jerk, and pay your proper respects."

He looked so good. So much the same, and yet so different. Brooke had lied. She did watch him every night on the news, cheering for his successes and worrying through his crises. She hadn't eaten the entire forty-eight hours he'd been caught in Baghdad by a surprise war, had barely had the concentration to work while he'd dodged scud attacks in Saudi Arabia. And when he'd been hurt, she'd come very close to getting on a plane herself.

"Did I miss 'Streets of Laredo'?" he whispered in her ear.

Brooke was one of the few women Pete didn't have to bend to. At six-two, he was built like a runner, long, sleek lines and unconscious grace. Brooke, of course, remembered the years when that frame had been lanky, the legs too long, the arms too short, the famous Cooper profile still honing. She remembered the vast sea of insecurities that had finally launched his career in broadcasting.

No one would ever think it now. No one in Rupert Springs remembered anymore that Pete Cooper hadn't always been self-possessed and striking, that women didn't always fall dead away at his feet over that just-handsome scar on his chin and the devilish intelligence in those moss green eyes.

"Please be seated," the reverend intoned just as Pete gained the chair Brooke had saved for him.

"Yeah," Brooke informed her older brother's best friend. "You missed 'Streets of Laredo,' all right. You missed everything."

"Mamie Marie Ellen Stevenson Fillihue," the reverend intoned in his best preaching voice, "was a good woman."

Brooke couldn't hold back the groan. "I knew it," she said mournfully with a shake of her head. "I just knew it. He'd give this same damn eulogy if it were about Lizzie Borden."

"Where's Elmer?" Pete asked in her ear.

"Fixing fenders," Brooke informed him. "Just like he is every other Saturday. Miss Emily called Lamont instead."

Pete turned his attention fully on her now. "But Mamie wanted Elmer to do her service."

"I know that," Brooke retorted. "And you know that. But I'm afraid that Letitia and Emily didn't believe that."

Pete's eyebrow slid north. "But Elmer's a licensed minister. What was their problem?"

"He wasn't their licensed minister. And he happened to only be licensed in the Church of the Cosmic Consciousness." She shrugged. "I just think they were afraid he'd allow some of the... irregularities Mamie wanted."

"None of them?" he demanded incredulously. "Elmer, 'Laredo,' nothing?"

"I often met Mamie on the streets," Reverend Purcell offered, his hands flat on the pulpit, his head bowed reverentially, "and passed the good word with her."

"Not unless that good word was 'Elvis lives,'" Brooke muttered under her breath.

"But she could never stand that man," Pete objected a little louder.

Brooke didn't bother to hush him up. The Renfields were doing a nice enough job of that. One gleaming smile from Pete neatly shut down the impending protest.

"Well, she wasn't around to argue the choice," Brooke retorted angrily. "And a certain close relative who's bigger than her two sisters put together, and who just might have prevailed, was busy somewhere in the Baltics."

"I did the best I could," he protested.

Brooke knew he had. She could see it in the bruised, drawn strain of his eyes. Pete survived jet lag better than most people, but it was a bet he was on the short end of it right now.

He'd been up for close to a week covering a hot-breaking story, and then flown home in time to get to the service.

"Besides," he offered in her ear. "You're bigger than they are, too. Why didn't you stick up for Mamie?"

Brooke whirled on him. "Why didn't I what?"

Three rows of mourners and the reverend turned her way.

"'A... good, good woman," the reverend stumbled on, by now solidly entrenched in his favorite—his only—eulogy line.

Brooke was all set to pull Pete right out of the parlor by his ear. One look at the crooked, knowing grin he flashed her killed the impulse. They went back too far and knew each other too well. Pete knew just what would get her goat, what would snap the frustration that had been building for the three days since she'd called him collect on his network's money.

"I guess this means that the Elvis impersonator is totally out of the question," he added.

"'A... good... woman..."

Laughter was building right beneath Brooke's sternum. Insidious, insistent, absolutely irreverent.

"Even when I asked if he could sing 'In the Chapel,'" she answered, her voice breathless with control. She was grinning back, a silly, wicked grin Mamie would have loved. An expression at the edge of crumbling, too close to exposure for the very well mannered group who'd gathered.

"The Hell's Angels couldn't make it, either?"

Brooke could do no more than shake her head.

"I'm going to read for you now a verse Mamie was particularly fond of..."

Pete's eyebrow cocked. "Not..."

Another shake of the head. "I think it was the man from Nantucket that spoiled it."

He just nodded and turned back to the front, the silliness escaping onto his features, as well. "Elmer would have read one."

The reading, in truth, was lovely. Or would have been if the Reverend Purcell hadn't been reading it. He tended to do everything as if he were imparting civilization to the natives. Mamie probably wouldn't have minded hearing Elmer read it.

But Elmer wasn't reading it. Elmer wasn't here. Or the Hell's Angels, or the New Orleans jazz band Mamie had wanted to lead the funeral procession. There were only very nice people who had considered Mamie a town eccentric instead of the only unique being within a fifty-mile radius. They all sat silently, fanning themselves with available booklets and listening to the Reverend Purcell intone yet another familiar passage, only allowing their attention to stray surreptitiously to where Pete Cooper sat amid them for the first time in nigh on to five years.

And Brooke, sitting just as silently, fought the frustration of not being able to better represent her friend, of not successfully bucking the system like Mamie would have been able to do, of not having somebody else close by during those last few weeks to help defray the strain.

Brooke had loved Mamie so much. Never in that bright, sly little woman's life had she ever made Brooke feel "different," even in the years when Brooke had battled every convention in town, when a twelve-year-old girl hadn't known how to accommodate a five-foot-nine-inch frame and bright red hair. Brooke still felt like Clarabelle the Clown. She was still too tall, her hair too red, her face never as dainty and porcelain sweet as her sister's. But because of what Mamie and Pete had given her in those years, she'd at least finally learned to stand up straight and be proud of her differences. No matter what she looked like, then or now.

It was why she was dressed in bright blue, instead of gray. Celebrate yourself, little Mamie had always said. Always face the world like you got the better of it, and the world will believe you.

"And now," Reverend Purcell finally said after Miss Letitia's grandson serenaded his aunt with an accordion rendition of You'll Never Walk Alone, "we'd like to invite Brooke Ferguson up to the organ to sing Miss Mamie's favorite hymn."

At least, she thought, they hadn't been able to keep her from doing that. She smoothed down the peacock blue material of her skirt and rose all the way to her feet, chin high, eyes bright, never letting the town know that she still felt like that gawky, unhappy teenage girl who had yearned so much to be accepted. And alongside her, Pete, her dearest friend and most stalwart supporter, gave her one of his patented smiles, sure to make her feel pretty, no matter how she really looked.

* * *

She looked beautiful. Pete hadn't expected it, not really. It had been so long since they'd really been in the same town together, carrying on their friendship over the phone lines of the world since he'd signed on as a correspondent.

Whenever he thought of Brooke, he thought of that thirteen-year-old girl who had always tagged along with David and him, an explosion of auburn curls and freckles and braces, so painfully shy that she turned the world on its head in rebellion. He thought of her dressing up for her senior prom, trembling on the edge of maturity, her great blue eyes wide and appealing. He'd known all along, he supposed, that she'd grow into her looks. He'd just never realized how well.

The people in the little chapel were mesmerized by her regal walk, her stately posture, her cool beauty that didn't have to rely on accepted fashion to compel. They smiled in delight to hear the sweet alto of her voice as she sank into the first notes of "Amazing Grace."

Mamie had known. She'd known all along. Pete remembered talking to her about it that first time, slamming into the house after walking home from the Fergusons'.

"You should see her," he'd said, munching on the apple he'd plucked from the Wilson's tree on the way home and plopping into the beanbag chair that crouched alongside Mamie's red brocade fainting couch. "She looks like a stork somebody stuffed into a burlap bag." He shook his head. "Poor Stump. Her first dance and she has a date who can stare straight up her nostrils."

Mamie had never looked over from where she was helping a TV detective solve crime over dinner. "Don't you dare talk about that girl that way, Peter," she demanded. Pete still saw Mamie as he always did, in her orange stretch pants and her red-and-green-and-blue painter's smock, feet bare, toenails a lurid pink, her wispy gray hair held back by rhinestone barrettes. "If you tell her she's ungainly, how is she ever going to understand how beautiful she is?"

"Beautiful?" he'd demanded, almost choking on his apple. "Mamie, you see her. She looks like Ichabod Crane!"

Mamie had turned very unamused eyes on him. "I'd have to say that's mighty thoughtless talk comin' from a boy who just spent my bulb money on pimple cream this afternoon. She'll be beautiful if she believes it," she informed him gently, those cagey old blue eyes pinning him in his place. "It's our job as her friends to help her do that. And mark my words, Peter Jackson Cooper. If we work hard enough, that little girl will be like an amaryllis in a clover patch. She'll outshine this town someday—" She'd waved her fork at him in punctuation and then turned back to the television where gunfire sputtered and cars screeched. "Mark my words."

You were right, Mamie, he couldn't help thinking as he watched Brooke sing for her friend, eyes closed, body swaying gently with the music, her audience rapt. More than a flower, a jewel. A rare life and light in this little town of conformists. He couldn't have been prouder of her if he'd found her and polished her himself. It was no matter, really, that Mamie hadn't had the send-off she wanted. She had the tribute she deserved in the woman Brooke Ferguson had become.

* * *

Brooke stood by the food table at Miss Letitia's and watched Pete with wry amusement. She hadn't seen that much humility since Gary Cooper stepped up to the microphone in The Pride of the Yankees. Local boy does good seemed to have been playing big this season. All the old women doted and all the young women simpered. The men nodded wisely and confided that they'd known Pete Cooper had it all along.

Brooke just chuckled. They hadn't said that when Pete had bought his first motorcycle. But then, they'd labeled Pete Cooper a long time before that, and it had nothing to do with his soon-to-be legendary charisma. Funny how they forgot.

"Isn't it lovely that Pete could get here?" Wilhelmina Waverly gushed over her punch as the knot of people moved with Pete toward the food table like moons following a revolving planet.

Brooke threw Coop a coy smile and nodded. "I think it's so nice he could see his way clear to visit. This makes it twice in ten years."

She knew he'd get over to her eventually. She held his drink in her hand, old whiskey on the rocks. Pete reached for it with an answering smile that said a lot more than anybody in the crowd saw.

"Hey," he protested, hand to tie and tailor-shirted chest in a show of sincerity. "I can't help it if world events interrupt my life sometimes."

Brooke laughed. "Don't be silly. World events are your life. You missed my graduation."

He nodded. "Tiananmen Square."

She handed over the bourbon. "The baptism of your godchild..."

"Berlin Wall."

"Mamie's eightieth birthday party."

"I explained."

"Saying, 'Sorry, Aunt Mamie, I can't make the party' as you're donning a gas mask on international television isn't exactly hearts and flowers," she teased.

He took a sip of bourbon and nodded. "How was I supposed to know that the press secretary really meant get out of Baghdad?"

"I think the pleading note in his voice would have tripped a few instincts."

"She understood."

Brooke laughed. "Are you kidding? She ate out for six months on that story."

"She did dote on you so," one of the other ladies assured him.

For just a moment, Coop's eyes clouded over. "It was mutual," he assured the woman, and then took a good slug of whiskey.

"What are you going to do now?" Millie Bell asked, her eyes fluttering. "With the house and all, I mean."

"Oh, I haven't decided," he allowed. "I haven't even had a chance to sit much less think about that kind of thing."

No less than four women patted his arm and murmured, "Of course, dear," just as if he were their nephew.

Brooke took a sip of her own drink to keep her silence. Across a sea of upturned female faces, Coop shot her a glance that begged rescue. He was looking a little more frayed at the edges. Too much flattery on an empty stomach would probably do it to her, too.

"If you'll excuse us for just a moment," Brooke immediately spoke up, setting her drink down. "I need to discuss something with Pete. About Mamie's animals."

She got him away from the crowd, but it was like pulling a foot out of wet sand. She could almost hear a sucking noise as they let go of him. Pete gave her his arm, which seemed quaintly appropriate in this, Miss Letitia's shrine to Southern hospitality where she'd never asked her younger sister to attend. The two of them headed right for the front door.

They didn't make it. Harlan Willoughby intercepted them halfway across the front parlor.

"There you are," he wheezed, a large asthmatic man with a penchant for white linen suits and silk handkerchiefs. "Couldn't get to you through all them titterin' females. Good to see you home, boy."

Pete clasped the man's ham-size hand. "Harlan."

"Since you're here, and the little ladies are here, thought we'd dispense with the will right now. Mind?"

Harlan, Rupert Springs's most senior lawyer, cherished his reputation as a good old boy. He also liked to play the role of crafty Southern politician, a wily mind behind a slow Southern accent. The problem was, most days the only part he got right was the accent.

"Couldn't it wait?" Pete asked. "I just got in from a long flight, Harlan. I'm beat."

"It's all pretty cut-and-dry, boy. I just figured I'd get things movin' so Miss Letitia and Emily could start arguin' about the furniture." He gave Brooke his best crocodile smile. "Pretty crafty little girl here," he allowed, even though he had to look up to the "little girl."

"Movin' right into Miss Mamie's house and changin' the locks so the old girls couldn't sneak in and cart off the best stuff."

"I just didn't want to worry about burglars who read death notices," Brooke demurred. Or about sisters who spoke often and emphatically about what a waste it was to have Great-Grandmother's chifforobe in that horrible little house. And Great-Great-Aunt Esther's tea service. Things like that belonged in a civilized home, not one given over to strays.

"Fifteen minutes," Harlan announced with that same knowing smile and a pat to Pete's arm.

"Might as well get it over with," Brooke told Pete. "I'll wait for you." She smiled. "That way I don't have to worry about your virtue with that crowd out there."

Pete scowled. Harlan came to a kind of attention.

"Oh, no," he argued. "You, too. Didn't I say that?"

Brooke turned on the man. "Me? What for?"

Harlan looked at her as if she were a couple of sandwiches shy of a picnic. "Because Mamie made it a special point to mention you, of course. Be there."

Harlan lumbered off and Brooke stood there, mouth open a little, stunned. "Oh, no," she protested.

Pete was laughing. "I wonder what it'll be?"

Brooke just shook her head. "God only knows."

Besides being acknowledged as the town eccentric, Mamie was also the state's most prolific collector. And not of normal things like butterflies and ceramic animals. Brooke wondered if she had been left Mamie's collection of doorknobs or the clown paintings. With her luck, it would be the license plates. All six thousand of them.

"You still want to go in and face that?" Pete asked, downing the rest of the drink he'd had the foresight to hang on to.

Brooke shook her head. "Might as well. I'd never be able to work up the courage to come back."

* * *

They held the meeting in the library, just as in all the old movies, with Harlan settled behind the great mahogany desk and the family members scattered over straight-back chairs. Pete and Brooke shared the couch at the back of the room so they could be both participants and observers. Letitia and Emily fanned themselves in identical fashion, with Letitia's daughter Ella Sue pacing the carpet.

No one actually read in the library, just as they didn't really play music in the conservatory. The books that lined the shelves had never suffered the injustice of a stretched spine, nor had the pages been smudged with fingerprints. They stood, row upon row in the floor-to-ceiling shelves, in silent splendor to accent the hunter green-and-leather decor of the room where Miss Letitia's latest late husband, the Colonel, conducted his used-car business.

"First off," Harlan announced, picking up one of the sheets of paper in front of him, "Brooke, I think you wanted this. It's the list of things Miss Mamie wanted at her funeral." His smile was companionable. "Didn't have much luck, did you?"

Brooke got to her feet and walked over to take the handwritten sheet back. After all the fighting, she didn't really need it. She knew the list by heart. She'd asked for it anyway rather than lose even the memory of Mamie's requests.

"I'll save it for my funeral," she assured the older man with a smile.

When she got back to the couch, she handed the list to Pete, who was nursing his refilled glass.

"Now then, all," Harlan began, settling his glasses on the edge of his rather bulbous nose and resettling papers. "You've all heard the lingo before. It's too hot for that today, so I'm just going to hit the high points."

"Duck fast," Brooke advised Coop under her breath, knowing where Mamie's largess would rest, and therefore, her sisters' resentment.

Coop just settled a little more deeply into the leather and gave his tie a yank. "I can handle Letitia," he assured her out of the side of his mouth. "I'm counting on you to take out Emily for me."

Brooke gave her head a definite shake. "No way, bud. I've already done my time."

"Gone with the Wind?" he demanded suddenly, looking down on the paper. "You didn't tell me that one."

Brooke just shrugged. "We couldn't have found enough costumes to dress everyone in town anyway," she allowed.

"Now then," Harlan announced, looking over his glasses, much as he'd seen Burl Ives do in the movie of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. "Here it is." He looked back down at his work. '"To my loving sister Letitia, who has always been so concerned with my appearance, I bequeath all my jewelry. You can finally throw it all away, just like you've wanted to do since you were eighteen.'"

Brooke stifled a chuckle with her fist as Harlan handed over a shopping bag of jewelry she'd helped him collect, each piece more gaudy and outrageous than the last. Letitia was not amused.

"I still think we should have fought for the Elvis impersonator," Pete murmured, his attention obviously not on the business at hand.

"We did," Brooke retorted. "We lost."

"'To Emily, guardian of the family name and history,'" Harlan continued, "'I leave a sigh of relief. You don't have to worry anymore about including me in the family tree. But remember, a family's no fun at all without a black sheep or two. So I also leave you Pete, who I hope follows in my footsteps.'"

At that last sentence, Pete looked up from his aunt's list and smiled. Brooke could tell he didn't even notice the startled little gasps of outrage from his other aunts.

"'And to Ella Sue, I leave my collection of salt-and-pepper shakers. Maybe it'll help your cooking a little, child.'"

This time Brooke couldn't contain her laughter. Nor could Ella Sue contain her fury.

"How dare she!" the very prim woman demanded.

Harlan just shrugged. "Her property," he said with just a hint of delight. "'To my lovely Brooke Ferguson, I leave all the memories of our rides together. Those long, soft spring evenings when we drove up through the Ozarks and dug up dogwoods and redbuds for my yard."'

A silly thing to make a person cry, but it was doing it to Brooke. The deep, shady yard behind Mamie's house looked like an Ozark forest for all the trees they'd transplanted.

"'... and I leave the car."'

"The what?" Ella Sue demanded, whirling toward Brooke.

"The what?" Brooke echoed in a choked little whisper.

Harlan's smile was broad and delighted. "The Thunderbird, girl. Mamie said that aqua would go so well with your hair, she knew you had to have it."

"But that's a classic!" Brooke protested.

Harlan nodded. "You know where the keys are."

"The rest all goes to Pete. 'All I ask,' she says, 'is that you love it like I did.' And that's all."

"It can't be!" Letitia protested, leaping to her feet.

"She can't have that car!" Ella Sue shrilled. "That car was to be saved for little Lyman's sixteenth birthday."

"She shouldn't have left it to me," Brooke murmured to Pete, truly overcome. That car had been Mamie's pride and joy, an original 1956 two-seater that shone like a new penny.

"Of course she should," Pete retorted. "Now all you have to do is enjoy it."

"But how can I take that?" Brooke protested. "I let her down. She thought I was going to arrange her funeral for her, and I couldn't get anything."

He shook his head, oblivious to the firestorm that was raging around Harlan not ten feet away. "Nobody here would have really appreciated it anyway. Can you really see this town high-stepping through the streets behind a jazz band, or reading their favorite limericks at sunrise?"

"But dammit, she deserved to have the funeral she wanted."

"Tell you what," he offered. "If you let me ride in your car, I'll let you sit on my couch, and we can read limericks by ourselves. We can even go on up to the mountains and pick up another dogwood or two."

Brooke wasn't sure where the idea came from. Maybe the result of all that fruitless arguing over the past few days, maybe the fact that now that Mamie was gone there wouldn't be any more spontaneity in this town. Maybe the fact that the sisters who should have mourned her were already picking over her things after denying her the send-off she wanted. Whatever it was, the minute the impulse struck, Brooke knew it was pure gold.

"No," she retorted, snatching the paper from Pete's hands. "That's not good enough."

His expression was dubious. "I guess you'll tell me what is."

She grinned now, suddenly happier than she'd been since the day Mamie had calmly announced that she was dying. "You bet your cute butt I will, boy. We're going to give Mamie the send-off she deserves."

Pete looked a bit bemused. "Brooke," he reminded her, "Mamie's already been sent off."

But Brooke shook her head. "Not really. Not officially. I say we hop in that little car of hers and take off in search of her funeral."

Pete still stared at her. The din of the room was rising. Harlan had both hands up trying to fend off female outrage, but neither Brooke nor Pete paid any attention.

"Come on, Coop," Brooke urged. "Do you really think she had the send-off she deserved?"

"Of course not. There weren't even any party hats."

Brooke nodded, her own hat tipping precariously toward Pete with her enthusiasm. "Then let's do it. You and me. Let's go find everything Mamie wanted. It'll be kind of like a cosmic scavenger hunt."

Pete stopped staring long enough to finish off his drink. "You're nuts."

"I know. But isn't that just what Mamie would have wanted?"

It took him a moment. First he looked at Brooke, then over where his aunts and cousin were circling Harlan like an Indian scalping party. Finally he turned back to Brooke, and that old challenge lit his eyes. "Yeah," he admitted, "it is. Let's go."