Shades of Twilight

She leaned over to kiss the wrinkled cheek Lucinda presented to her.

"Drive carefully," Lucinda said, as she always did.

"I will." There was an element of escape in her departure, and from the way Webb was looking at her, she was sure he’d noticed it as well.

After lunch, Webb and Lucinda returned to the study. He had endured Gloria and Harlan’s effusive, embarrassingly false welcomes, ignored Corliss’s sulky bad manners, and been fussed over by Tansy and Bessie. It was plain as hell that only Roanna and Lucinda had wanted him back; the rest of his family obviously wished he’d stayed in Arizona. The reason for that was pretty plain, too: they’d been mooching off Lucinda for years and were afraid he’d boot them out on their asses. It was a thought. Oh, not Gloria and Harlan. As much as he knew he’d dislike having them around, they were in their seventies, and the reasons he’d given Roanna ten years ago for their moving in were even more valid now. But as for the others … He didn’t plan to do anything right away. He didn’t know the details of their individual situations, and it was a lot easier to get his facts straight before he acted than it would be to repair the damage done by a wrong decision.

"I suppose you want to have your say," Lucinda said

crisply, taking her seat on the sofa.

"God knows you deserve it. This is your chance to get it off your chest, so go to it. I’ll sit here, listen, and keep my mouth shut."

She was as indomitable as ever in spirit, he thought, but dangerously frail. When she’d hugged him, he’d felt the fragility of her brittle bones, seen the creepy thinness of her skin. Her color wasn’t good, and her energy level was low. He’d known, from his letters from Yvonne, that Lucinda’s health wasn’t good these days, but he hadn’t realized the imminence of her death. It was a matter of months; he doubted she would even see spring.

She’d been a cornerstone of his life. She had let him down when he’d needed her, but now she was willing to face his ire. It was a measure of her strength that he had tested his budding manhood against her, measured his growth by how well he held his own with her. Damn her, he wasn’t ready to let her go.

He hitched one hip onto the edge of the desk. "I’ll get to that," he said evenly, then continued with soft violence: "But first I want to know what in hell y’all have done to Roanna."

Lucinda sat in silence for a long time, Webb’s accusation hovering in the air between them. She stared out the window, looking out over the sweep of sun drenched land, dotted here and there with the shadows of the fat, fluffy clouds drifting overhead. Davenport land, as far as she could see. She had always taken comfort in this vista, and she still loved to see it, but now that her life was nearing an end she was finding other things of far more importance.

"I didn’t notice at first," she finally said, her gaze still far away.

"Jessie’s death was-well, we’ll talk about that later. I was so preoccupied with my own grief that I didn’t notice Roanna until she’d almost drifted away. "Drifted away, how?" His tone was hard, sharp.

"She nearly died," Lucinda said baldly. Her chin trembled, and she sternly controlled it.

"I’d always thought Jessie was the one who so desperately needed to be loved, to make up for her circumstances … I didn’t see that Roanna needed love even more, but she didn’t demand it the way Jessie did. Strange, isn’t it? I loved Jessie from the cradle, but she would never have helped me the way Roanna. has, or become as important to me. Roanna’s more than my right hand; these past few years, I couldn’t have managed without her."

Webb waved all of that away, focusing on the one statement that had his attention.

"How did she nearly die?" The thought of Roanna dying shocked him to the bone, and he felt a cold sense of dread when he remembered her guilty, miserable expression the day of Jessie’s funeral. She hadn’t tried to kill herself, had she?

"She stopped eating. She never ate much anyway, so I didn’t notice for a long time, almost too long. Everything was so disrupted, there were seldom any routine meals, and I suppose I thought she was snacking at odd hours the way we all were. She stayed in her room a lot, too. She didn’t do it deliberately," Lucinda explained softly.

"She just … lost interest. When you left, she totally withdrew. She blames herself for everything, you know."

"Why?" Webb asked. Roanna had told him she hadn’t deliberately caused trouble, but maybe she really had, and confessed to Lucinda.

"It was a long time before she could talk about it, but several years ago she told me what happened in the kitchen, that she caught you by surprise when she impulsively kissed you. She didn’t know Jessie was coming down, and of course, it was just like Jessie to make a huge scene, but to Roanna’s way of thinking she caused all the trouble with that kiss. If she hadn’t kissed you, you and Jessie wouldn’t have argued, you wouldn’t have been blamed for Jessie’s death, and you wouldn’t have left town. With you gone .. ." Lucinda shook her head.

"She’s always loved you so much. We laughed about it when she was little, thought it was hero worship and puppy love, but it wasn’t, was it?"

"I don’t know." But he did, he thought. Roanna. had never had any self-protection where he was concerned. Hell,

she’d never been good at any kind of subterfuge. Her feelings had been right out in the open, her pride as totally vulnerable as her heart. Her adoration had always been there, like a piece of sunshine in his life, and he’d depended on its being there though he seldom paid much attention to it. Like the sunshine, it was something he’d taken for granted. That was why he’d been so damn mad when he thought she had betrayed him just to get back at Jessie.