“He’s almost as beautiful as Alejandro. Not quite, but close.”
“He’s Letty’s son.” She paused. “And he recently married one of Ace’s daughters.”
“That’s good,” Kathy said. “Really great. Does the name Tate come from Tattwell?”
“Tate is short for Tatton and both names came from Tattington. His sister’s name is Nina.” Olivia paused for a moment. “Tate bought the plantation in memory of his mother.”
“In memory?” Elise said. “Oh no! I think I hate knowing the future. Poor Ace and his mother, and poor Letty dying young. And you and Kit.” There were tears in her eyes.
“Tell us some more good things,” Kathy said. “Tell us about you and Kit being friends and the wonderful things you did for the children.”
“My mother...” For a moment, Olivia had to blink away tears. All this talk was bringing up some painful memories. “My mother knew me so well. I talked to her every day on the phone. At first all I did was complain, but gradually, I began asking her how to do things. About twice a week she showed up with cooking equipment that I needed or something that would help me. Back then, I was too young and dumb—sorry, Elise—to understand how much she did.”
“No offense taken,” Elise said, “but we all tend to mess up our lives, no matter what our age.”
“Ouch!” Olivia said, making them laugh. “Mom foresaw that two old Southern men and two little kids were going to get sick of elegant French cuisine. Before they did, she handed me a shoe box. Inside were big index cards with recipes for meat loaf, beef stew, chicken and dumplings, fish with hush puppies, et cetera. All homey things. The first time I again served them Campbell’s tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch, I thought the four of them were going to start crying.”
“What about the bikes?” Kathy asked.
“The Saturday after he met my dad, Kit and I drove into Richmond to get them.” She smiled in memory. “It was a nice trip. He told me so much about himself that I didn’t realize he was leaving out the biggest parts. He talked about his first year in college, about majoring in poly sci, his friends, his family. All of it. At least I thought he did. He just left out that he was planning to go undercover to infiltrate Muammar Gaddafi’s new regime.”
Both Kathy and Elise drew in their breaths in horror.
“Right. Back then we had no idea what the man was like. There was no hint of what was coming.”
Elise put her hands over her face. “I don’t want to hear the bad things. Poor Ace and Letty and now Kit.”
“Was Kit hurt?” Kathy spoke quickly, before Elise could add Olivia’s first marriage to the list of bad.
“Yes. It’s a wonder he can still walk, but the good part was that he was declared unfit to be a soldier. That’s what made him go into diplomacy. But I always knew that was his calling. I saw it that first summer.”
“You have to tell us,” Elise said.
“But first,” Kathy said, “tell us about the children and the bikes. Did they like them?”
Olivia took a sip of her wine. “Yes and no. Kit and I agreed that if we gave them two shiny new bikes as gifts they’d be so suspicious that they might not use them. So we decorated them.” She smiled. “With pond slime. Letty’s bike was silver and Ace’s black, but Kit and I covered them with mud and all the icky things we could dig out of the pond.”
For a moment Olivia looked off in the distance in memory. “One rainy afternoon I was teaching the kids—and by that I mean all four of them—how to put papier-maché strips over balloons. When the sun came out, Kit burst through the door in a rage. Furious! We were all shocked. He said he could no longer work in the wood shop because there was so much useless junk in there that he had to throw some out. He said the first thing to go were those old bicycles he’d found in the back. He said they must be a hundred years old. That was all the kids needed. They took off running.”
Olivia sipped her wine. “Kit and I tried to get them to wash off the mud and slime but they never did. They truly loved those bikes!”
The women were silent for a moment, thinking how good it was to have given so much pleasure to children whose futures were less than perfect.
Olivia leaned back in her chair. “I knew Kit was a born diplomat the day the children killed Uncle Freddy.”
As she meant, Elise and Kathy looked at her with eyes wide with horror. “Everyone was in hysterics. You see, Kit had been giving the children swimming lessons, but they were forbidden to get in the pond without adult supervision.”
“And Uncle Freddy was an adult.” Kathy was frowning, not sure she wanted to hear this story if it had a tragic ending.
Olivia nodded. “That’s exactly what I said then.”
Chapter Eighteen
Summer Hill, Virginia 1970
Olivia was hanging sheets on the line and Kit was helping her keep them from touching the ground. The washerwoman they’d hired had a sick grandchild so the task had fallen to Olivia. She had a feeling the child wouldn’t be sick if it weren’t change-the-bedding day.
But in the weeks since she and Kit had called a truce, they’d become good at helping each other with chores. They’d worked together to clean up the big kitchen garden. Nina had come over and mumbled about feeling guilty for not helping, but then, as always, she’d run off after Bill.
“‘I’ll bet thee a thousand pounds to a crown we have a boy tomorrow nine month,’” Kit said.
Olivia cracked up because she knew he was quoting from the movie Tom Jones.
It was a very hot day and she and Kit were dressed so differently they may as well have lived in separate countries. Olivia wore long sleeves, her collar up, and a wide-brimmed hat. Her long legs were encased in cotton trousers that reached to her ankles. Kit had on nearly nothing.
“What about your feet?” Kit asked. “They’re open to the sunshine. Doesn’t that scare you?”
“You laugh, but you don’t know what sun does to your skin. When you’re forty you’ll look sixty.”
“And you’ll always look twenty,” he said in such an admiring way that she blushed.
The old men had delighted in teasing her about the way she and Kit were now working together.
“You two have certainly become friends,” Uncle Freddy said.
“I never would have thought that could happen after the way you two started out,” Mr. Gates said.
“I truly believed that our Livie hated young Kit,” Uncle Freddy said.
Letty was confused. “But she cooked a second lunch just for him. I thought she liked him.”
“Did she?” Uncle Freddy asked. “I don’t remember that.”
Mr. Gates agreed. He didn’t remember that either.
“It was the best fried chicken I ever had,” Ace said. “How could you forget that?”
“They didn’t,” Olivia said. “They’re just pulling your leg.”
That phrase made the children’s eyes widen.
She didn’t want to be caught in one of their twenty-minute-long “why” sessions, so she changed the subject. “Who wants strawberry Popsicles?” She narrowed her eyes at the men, but her warning just made them laugh.
It was the next day, as she and Kit were hanging up the laundry, that he heard the screaming. When he dropped one end of the sheet, it scraped the ground.
“Hey!” Olivia said. “I just washed that. You’re going to have to—”
“Quiet!” His voice was a command and in the next second he took off running.
Olivia tossed the sheet into the basket and ran after him. It wasn’t until they’d rounded the trees that she heard the children crying. And there was a low moan of such anguish that it made chills run down her spine. She would have stopped, afraid of what she was about to see, but Kit didn’t slow down.
When she saw the pond, she halted. To her left were the children, clinging to each other and crying loudly. To her right, Mr. Gates was sitting at the edge of the slimy old pond, his legs in the water. Pulled onto him, facedown, like some sea creature dragged up from the depths, was Uncle Freddy. All of him was wet, with nasty pond weeds clinging to him.