Page 43 of The Queen of Roses

Mr. Whitley laughed and slapped his free hand on his right thigh before whisking her up in his arms to twirl her around. Hands braced awkwardly against his chest, she gave a little yelp. “Mr. Whitley, you are creating a scene!”

“Let them stare. The most beautiful woman in Pasadena just said she’d be my wife.”

So great was his enthusiasm that she couldn’t help it when she began to laugh. “Mr. Whitley!”

He shook his head. “Call me Guy, Adele, remember? We are, after all, engaged.”

Her Christian name sounded strange in his flat accent, but she hardly had time to think because, before she knew it, he had bent down and his lips were on hers.

She gasped a little in surprise, but of course it wasn’t improper at all.

Adele Pearce was finally an engaged woman.

chapter sixteen THERESA

May 1960

Then you were the first Mrs. Whitley?” asked Theresa.

“I was,” said Miss Pearce. “People married for many different reasons in those days—they still do, if they are being honest with themselves. Some are lucky and marry for love. Others marry because they want something.

“When Guy proposed, he secured himself a bride of status, and I effectively saved my family from the twin humiliations of my father’s folly and genteel poverty.”

“When did you and Guy divorce?” Theresa asked, hurrying to add, “It’s just that when I spoke to the staff at the nursing home where Mr. Whitley spent his last days, they said he had no surviving family. They told me that his son had died in the war and Mrs. Whitley had died more than a decade before. If she was the second Mrs. Whitley—”

Miss Pearce put a hand to her right temple and closed her eyes. “I apologize, Miss Johnson. I find myself suddenly very tired. I suspect it is the heat.”

“Do you need me to find Matt?” Theresa asked, setting her pen and notebook aside.

“No, no. I would hate to interrupt him, and you have a job you must not be late for.” Miss Pearce leaned back in her chair, her face tilted up but still shielded from the sun by the hat she wore. “I will rest here a moment.”

“If you’re certain…”

“You may see yourself out, Miss Johnson.”

The imperious tone Theresa had first heard on the telephone was back and, for a moment, she sat still, the buzzing of bees and the breeze through the olive trees around the patio the only sounds. Was she imagining it, or was Miss Pearce paler than she had been when Theresa had first arrived that morning?

When Miss Pearce did not move, Theresa rose to her feet and carried in the coffee tray before depositing the china cups and saucers in the kitchen’s deep copper sink.

On the way out, Theresa picked up her envelope as she had the week before, glancing at it when she was safely in her car. She stuffed the check into her handbag before turning over the ignition on the Bug.

In the two years of working at the Pasadena Herald Times, she’d never had a month where she hadn’t lived paycheck to paycheck. She’d managed to scrape together a little bit of savings, but those had been wiped out when something on the Bug started clanging as she drove and she’d been forced to finally take it to a mechanic who’d asked her if she wanted him to speak to her husband to explain what was wrong with the car. She’d walked away frustrated and nearly broke, resigning herself to living on peanut butter sandwiches and coffee from the newsroom’s breakroom until her next paycheck because she refused to pick up the phone and call Uncle Wally or, worse, her mother, to bail her out. It would feel too much like an admission of defeat.

A hundred a week to sit and speak with an old woman for a few hours on a Saturday? Well, that was already making a huge difference, and she hadn’t even begun writing yet.

Still, it wasn’t just the money that brought her up to the house in the foothills. It was Miss Pearce herself. Theresa had found herself fascinated by the woman’s stories of debutante balls and the grand old days of Pasadena society. Adele Pearce was clearly a relic of the past, and yet this was the same Adele Pearce who had not asked how Theresa’s nonexistent husband would feel about her taking on extra work of writing a biography or whether she should make out Theresa’s check to Mrs. Whomever Johnson. She’d simply paid Theresa, on time and in full.

Theresa made a three-point turn in front of Rosewood House to get herself pointing back toward the valley for the drive through Altadena to the Herald Times office. As she neared the sign for Rosewood Nursery, she spotted Matt in a pair of jeans and an open blue-checked shirt over a white tee, his Dodgers cap firmly in place. He had his boot on the running board of a Ford pickup truck loaded up with plants and was talking to the driver.

She slowed and gave him a wave. He patted the side of the truck twice and pushed off, letting the driver pull out before ambling over to her driver’s-side window. He waited as she cranked the window down.

“Hi,” he said with a glance back up the hill. “Is she keeping you busy?”

“She is. She’s got quite the life story, and we’re not even out of 1903 yet.”

He laughed. “Is that right? I’d like to read it one day.”

“Do you know much about how she came to own Rosewood House and the nursery?” she asked.