Chapter 63
Jon’s dark eyes lit up as he looked at Beatrice over a breakfast of eggs, biscuits, and gravy.
“I didn’t invite you,” she said.
“Beatrice,” he said, “we are both too old to worry about invitations, yes?” He smiled. “And we are both too old to worry about what other people think of us. Surely.”
“I never did,” she said and laughed. “But there will be questions.”
“Life is full of questions. We’ll answer them on our own, eh?”
“Yes,” she said after a moment, feeling her heart give way. “I suppose you’re right.”
But here she was, soon to be eighty-two, feeling like a teenager or a newlywed. One moment she felt like a ridiculous old fool. The next, she allowed the feelings to wash over her and reveled in them. She had never imagined another man would come into her life. She and Ed were so well suited, and she had loved him completely.
She’d known many women who had lost their husbands, and all of them had remarried. Most of them lost their second husbands, too. Tootie buried three of them before she whispered to Beatrice as she hugged her at the funeral, “Never again. I can’t take any more.” And she herself died four months later.
It was a risk always to get close to anybody at any time in your life—a careful line to walk between being open enough to allow the good in and to recognize the bad. But at her age, the risk felt sharper. She had found her place in the world as a widow and had occupied it for years. The other side of that sharpness was the sweetness of finding love again.
Here he was. Sitting in her house. At her kitchen table. Eating biscuits and gravy. Drinking from her coffee cups.
Cups that Cookie adored. They were purple, her favorite color.
Funny, Beatrice should think of her now. Beatrice was caught between hating and loving her. Maybe feeling sorry for her. Was she an escaped mental patient? She would have thought so at one time during their brief time of knowing one another. She’d always thought there was something not quite right, sort of out of time about her. Or was Cookie Crandall exactly who she claimed to be? A magician–time traveler sort of person from the future who had come back to set something right? Or maybe that was not what she had said to Beatrice at all. She’d said it was like time travel or some such thing. But Beatrice liked to think of her that way. Of course, it almost vindicated her life’s work. But perhaps she was as delusional as Detective Bryant thought she was.
She laughed at that. Nah. She was not delusional. She looked across the table and saw Jon plainly, clearly, just as she saw Cookie that day, leaning across the table in the jail, spilling her secrets.
Life was getting even more interesting in her town. There were murders and weird religious cults. According to the FBI, they had been watching that group for a while—and still were. They claimed it was for tax evasion. The group had been trying to set up a nonprofit religious organization that was full of ex-convicts. Turned out Rose was right about shenanigans on the mountain.
Blissfully unaware until Rose had filled her in. Beatrice realized that even then, it was just a blip on her radar screen. Land sakes, she couldn’t keep track of everybody. There were people moving into Cumberland Creek all the time. There was a new person sitting across the table from her.
And as she thought about Cookie and Jon, their appearance in her life, it just confirmed her belief, which sharpened as she had gotten older: Science could accurately predict some events, but the most meaningful things in a life often held no prediction, no explanation. The universe could be completely, delightfully random.
She started to get up from the table, reaching for the spent breakfast plates.
“Let me get that, ma chérie,” Jon said, beating her to it.
“Well, now,” she said, sitting back in her chair, “I could get used to this.”