Present Day. Peach Orchard Inn
Had anyone mourned the dead man all those years ago? Had his family waited and prayed, ultimately passing from this life without ever knowing what happened to their loved one?
Life was uncertain and death was a mystery. Nobody understood that better than a man who had faced his own mortality.
Wearing these somber thoughts like a shroud, Grayson left the gristmill and returned to Peach Orchard Inn.
Devlin would return in the morning. The contractors, except for two, had been rescheduled to begin work at eight. Finally, the Blake brothers could get back on track with this project without losing more time or money.
Had Mr. Bones known he was running out of time that last fateful day? The day someone stabbed him in the back and buried him beneath the gristmill?
Murder.
Grayson couldn’t quite seem to shake the eerie thoughts. God, Grandma always said, had a plan for everyone. Was death by murder Mr. Bones’s destiny just as life through the fire of Hodgkin’s disease had been his? Did cancer still wait around some dark corner to grab him by the throat again, this time to take him all the way to the grave?
He shuddered at the miserable thoughts. It was not death that frightened him. A dying person, even a teenager, took the time to reconcile his life with God and eternity. Death was inevitable, even if he’d prefer to put it off as long as he could. But it was the agony of living through the treatments again and witnessing the fear in his mother and father and brother that scared him.
From the dining room came the voices of other guests as he entered the foyer. The smell of freshly baked cookies filled the house, but none of the family seemed to be downstairs.
He wondered how Julia had taken the news. With strength, he was sure, but with a heart full of loss that remained unresolved.
In passing through to the staircase, he glanced up at the couple over the parlor fireplace. They seemed to offer their approval, of what he didn’t know, and the whimsy of his thoughts caught him off guard. He was neither whimsical nor superstitious, but as soon as the thought came, he heard music.
The soft, tinkling sound seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, an indication that the piano and its player must be in his head.
Like Patience’s sheet music. It niggled at the back of his brain, teasing, challenging him to discover...something.
He bounded up the staircase, escaping his melancholy thoughts as eagerness to apply yet another solution overcame him. Computer software. Algorithms. He’d become convinced the music held a secret code of some sort, and when his intellectual curiosity was aroused, he didn’t stop until he was satisfied.
He loved a good puzzle. Crossword, cryptogram, sudoku, any puzzle. The music presented a unique challenge, and if figuring out the code brought him in contact with the innkeeper’s sister, he wasn’t complaining.
Perhaps Valery was correct, and Patience had a forbidden lover.
While his laptop loaded, he took out the sheet music and held it up to the light. Nothing unusual there, but from outside the window directly across from the desk, a flash of color caught his eye.
Sheet music momentarily forgotten, he went to the window. Valery in a shiny blue blouse walked away from the house, her head low, her body language melancholy.
Something swung from her right hand. He squinted. A pink bag?
Contemplating, he breathed in through his nose, hands on his hips.
The conversation with Julia must not have gone well. Valery was distressed. Alone and upset.
Without thinking, he tossed the paper aside and trotted down the blood-red stairs and out the back door. By then, Valery had disappeared through the tree line.
Curious and, if he was honest, concerned, he followed. If Julia was troubled, Valery was troubled. He’d learned that about her. She carried her sister’s losses as well as her own.
He instinctively knew she needed someone as much as Julia did. Today, he wanted that someone to be him. Never mind their differences or his fear that a woman like Valery could break his heart. She needed him.
As he crossed the large back lawn and passed through the tree line, the space suddenly cleared into a little cemetery he hadn’t known was there. Hidden by the trees and set back among the viney brush, the burial ground was not visible from the house. From the gray and weathered condition of the stones, the graves were old.
On the far side of the cemetery, Valery stood with her back to him, the pink bag on the grass and a bourbon bottle in her hand. One palm rested on a headstone.
Grayson’s heart sank to his boot heels. “Valery.”
She spun around, holding the bottle behind her back. “Grayson! What are you doing here?”
“I saw you leave the house. Is everything all right?”
“If you mean Julia, she’s okay, coping. Eli is with her.”
“I was asking about you,” he said gently.
“Oh.” Her posture eased. “That’s nice.”
He moved closer, stepping carefully around the stones. “What is this place?”
“The Portland family cemetery.” She gestured with her free hand. “No one’s been buried here in years.”
Yet she came out to a place of the dead. Alone. With a bottle of bourbon. The aloneness worried him. Valery was a woman who needed and enjoyed being with people. She was a gregarious extrovert, the life of the party, the fun girl. Alone was not her personality.
“Someone plants flowers. You?” Neat, well-kept greenery and spring color sprouted all around the small plot.
She inclined her head. “Someone has to.”
“Why?”
Her slender shoulder lifted. “I like it here. It’s peaceful, and I feel this—don’t laugh—this connection.”
“Maybe I feel it, too.” Like the affection and pity I feel for you, strong enough to draw me out here. Strong enough to mess with my head and my heart.
“Do you?” Her words were tremulous.
“Every grave has a story.” The solemn comment won an approving blink of whiskey-colored eyes, veiled eyes that hid the truth but couldn’t hide the pain.
He didn’t add that Mr. Bones had a story, too. No use stirring up that ghost again today.
With the bottle carefully concealed behind her back, an action that sent a pang through Grayson, Valery trailed her fingertips over the top of a headstone.
“She lost her babies. So many babies.”
He stepped closer. “Who?”
“Charlotte Portland, the woman in the photo above the parlor fireplace. Eli found that picture, oval frame and all, during the carriage house renovation.”
“I’ve noticed it. Who were they?”
“Charlotte and the Yankee captain she married after the war. William Gadsden. We don’t have a photo of her first husband, Edgar, but his family built this house and the gristmill.”
“How did Charlotte end up with the captain?” Could she have been the subject of Patience Portland’s clandestine musical notes? “Did she leave her husband for a Yankee?”
“Not Charlotte. She was deeply religious, and her captain must have been, too. Her letters show that she loved him but was not willing to break her marriage vows. We also know she was locked away in her room by her husband for writing letters to the captain.”
“That wouldn’t go well today.”
“Edgar was thrown from a horse and died, and sometime after the war ended, Charlotte and her captain found true love right here at Peach Orchard.”
“A romantic story.”
“But tragic, too. Marrying a Yankee in the post-war South was not popular.” She bent toward the headstone, blocking his view, and he was amazed how she smoothly transferred the bourbon bottle to the back of the stone, effectively hiding it from him. “Four babies are buried here, too. Little Anna was the last, the child of Captain Gadsden. How desperately they must have prayed that she would survive. She lived five days.”
The sadness in her voice made Grayson’s throat ache. She went to her knees before the faded stone and traced a finger over the faint lettering. “I think about her, who she would have grown up to be. Does she dance or sing or plant flowers or have a boyfriend? Babies. Little helpless babies tossed by the wind of fate and choice.”
Tugging at his pants legs, Grayson eased to his haunches beside her. “Choice?”
She startled, an odd reaction he thought, as if she’d forgotten his presence. “God chooses when and where we’re born. That’s what I meant by choices. Today, with modern medicine, all four babies might have lived.”
He caught the faintest scent of bourbon. “No way of knowing for sure.”
“So much loss.” She looked at him with a wounded expression. “Their little angels touch my heart.”
“You like kids.”
“Don’t you?”
“Yes.” They were in his life plan. Someday. And when he was with Valery, someday seemed to move closer. His computer brain didn’t like the algorithm, but his heart paid no attention.
“Have you ever thought about kids of your own? You’d make a great mom.”
Her eyelashes fluttered in surprise. “Me?”
“Sure. Look at you. Sympathizing with Charlotte. Mourning her lost children.” And Julia’s. But he didn’t say that. “And you’re great with Alex.”
She dropped her gaze to the grass. “No, no. Some people aren’t meant to have kids. I’m too—”
“Too what?”
“Selfish.”
“I don’t believe that.”
She shook her head and didn’t look at him. Grayson floundered to know where to go from here.
Every time he thought they’d made a connection, something changed, and she withdrew.
He stood and walked a short distance away, flummoxed and troubled. The graveyard exuded peace and quiet, much like the inn itself, as if Heaven reached down in mercy and compassion.
He was being whimsical again, but he couldn’t deny the gentle, benevolent mood swirling over the cemetery. Over all of Peach Orchard Inn.
Angels lived at Peach Orchard Inn, but no ghosts. The only ghosts were inside Valery Carter.
She came here seeking peace, but what price was peace found in a bourbon bottle?
He slid a hand under her elbow and raised them both to a stand. Turning her to face him, he loosely held her forearms and tugged her to within inches of his chest. Grayson wanted to hold her close and soothe all her hurts and chase away her ghosts, but he listened to his logical brain instead. He was not only walking on hallowed ground, he was playing with fire. Valery could burn him badly.
Gently, he said, “I have to ask you something. I need to know.”
She cocked her head to one side.
“What makes you come out here all alone with a bottle of booze?”
* * *
Valery pulled back, shame flushing through her body hot and cold and relentless. “I don’t know what you mean.”
Grayson held firm, his expression calm and rational, as if he was reasoning with a child. She should be angry at him for prying, for sticking his nose where it didn’t belong. But she couldn’t muster up the energy. Not with Grayson.
He knew. He’d seen. And his opinion mattered more than she’d ever intended. Now he’d never want to see her again.
“It’s not so much the alcohol that bothers me, Valery. It’s that you feel the need to hide it.” He gestured toward the stone where she’d hidden the bottle.
Neither Mama nor Julia would have said a word. They would have seen, but cold silence and troubled glances would have been their response.
Confrontation was impossible in the Carter family. Someday, though, she’d gain her courage. Someday, she’d break the silence.
“What I do is none of your business.”
Instead of haughty insult, the words tumbled out in a whimper.
Grayson, as steady as a mountain, held her with a look. “What if I want it to be?”
“Why would you?” After what she’d done, why would any decent man care about her?
“Ah, Valery.” He sighed deeply and pulled her into a light hug, a caring embrace that nearly brought her to tears.
She didn’t resist. Right now, she had no desire to be anywhere other than in Grayson’s arms. Resting her head against his chest, she listened to his steady, solid heartbeat. He was so secure. So safe and confident and solid.
Would he want to touch her if he knew the truth?
The silent graves listened, patient and kind, while overhead in the sweet gum tree a blue jay scolded.
“Lem says you have ghosts,” he murmured. “I concur.”
Lem, the old vagrant, what could he possibly know?
Her mouth curved against Grayson’s cotton-scented shirt. “Do you? If two such great minds concur, it must be true.”
He didn’t respond in jest. He simply waited, holding her, the question out there. What haunted her? What horrible thing was she trying to numb with bourbon? Though she couldn’t tell him, Valery understood the psychology of her brokenness.
Julia’s child had been stolen. Valery had thrown hers away. She’d sold her soul for a pair of dancing shoes.
The cruel cosmic joke was on her. She had gotten exactly nothing.
What she didn’t know was what to do about it.
“When I was sick—” Grayson’s voice rumbled in his chest and tickled her ear “—my parents went through pure hell.”
Valery remained silent, listening, intrigued and relieved by his change of subject. The last thing she wanted to address were her reasons for over-imbibing. Silence made her sins invisible.
“We were all scared, but my parents more than me. I made my peace with death. But Mom and Dad were shattered. They felt responsible to make me well and suffered guilt because they couldn’t.”
“Making you well wasn’t in their power,” she murmured.
He tilted back, and she felt him look down, felt him touch the top of her hair. Featherlight. Gentle. Tender.
“No. But fact and feelings don’t always agree, and their emotional response didn’t change. Mom stopped working to take care of me. Finances took a hit. Medical bills piled up. Dad got an ulcer, and Mom couldn’t deal at all. She stopped sleeping to sit by my bed, afraid I’d die in my sleep. She lost weight and cried a lot but tried to keep the rest of us, particularly me, from knowing.”
“But you knew.”
“Oh, yeah. I was there. Her eyes were always red. The house was heavy with worry, and when I was in the hospital, fear was palpable. After a while, the strain took a toll. Mom started drinking.”
Valery’s stomach dropped. So, that’s where he was going with this.
She lifted her face to look at him, solemn and steady. “What happened? Is she okay?”
“Dad saw what was happening, though Mom hid the vodka and denied she was drinking. She became a master at mouthwash, minty gum, and pretending all was well even when her eyes were glassy and her voice slurred.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Dad and my grandparents intervened and got her treatment, but I felt guilty for a long time. If I hadn’t gotten sick, she wouldn’t have either.”
“You know that’s not rational.”
“Feelings rarely are.” He pushed her back a slight distance to stare into her face. “Your feelings matter, Valery. To me. Mom was afraid of losing a son, afraid she’d failed her family, and because of the fear, she did fail us. For a while. Her strength came in learning to deal with fear and stress without the vodka. We both got well.”
“Thank God.” Valery heard what he was saying and some place deep inside knew he was right.
“I do. Every day.”
He stroked a hand down her back, and she thought of the innocent fun and sweet kisses they’d shared that day of the picnic. Now they were here in a quiet cemetery talking of alcoholism and cancer. Grayson Blake was a deep well, a man who would despise her if he knew the real reasons she sometimes drank too much.
“I’m concerned about you, Val.”
“Don’t be. I’m—” She started to say “fine,” but couldn’t lie. Not to Grayson. “Life doesn’t always turn out the way we plan. I’ve made some stupid mistakes.”
“We all have.” His voice was gentle and thick with an understanding that spoke deeply to her spirit.
“Not like mine.” The need to share her greatest sin with someone—anyone—pushed up inside her like hot lava from an active volcano. She swallowed down the burning impulse, afraid if she allowed the vent to blow, neither of them would survive.
So she cheated.
“When Mikey disappeared...” She let the words dwindle, hoping he’d take the bait and swim away from her sins. The drinking had started then, but Mikey wasn’t the only reason.
God forgive her for using her abducted nephew as an excuse.
“Booze won’t bring him back.”
“I know.” She stepped out of his arms, afraid to continue the conversation lest she say too much and have the humiliating experience of watching his concern turn to disgust.
Sooner or later, it would happen. He’d see her for who she was, and he’d drive away in that big Jeep of his.
“I should get back to the house. Dinner soon,” she said abruptly, eager to get away, though mostly from herself.
After touching her fingers to Anna’s headstone in a silent goodbye, she started out of the cemetery, the ground beneath her feet soft and moist.
“Valery.”
She turned back. Grayson held up the pink tote, her secret stash bag, and the pint of Jack.
“Forgetting something?” There was no accusation in the question, nor in his quiet, steady expression.
She stared at him a long moment before saying, “You keep it.”
Then she hurried out of the graveyard, chased by the truth she needed to be free.