Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
D onna Rossiter was Wyatt’s biggest Achilles’s heel. He’s always been a mama’s boy, and when she cried, it got to him.
“I can’t do it,” Donna sobbed over the phone. “I know everyone wants me to, but if I let go of the chest it will cut the last link with my precious girl.”
She was speaking of the heirloom hope chest in Lauren’s bedroom. Donna started filling the old cedar chest with things to set up her daughter’s first marital home shortly after Lauren was born. The first item to go in was the family’s antique baptismal gown. Over the years Donna created a binder of recipe cards and knitted baby blankets. Lauren helped because she loved girly things and crocheted lace table linens and napkins for the chest.
After Lauren’s death, the hope chest became an obsession for Donna. Instead of joy, opening up the hope chest to air it out became a time for tears followed by days of suffocating depression. Wyatt’s father finally convinced Donna to pass the hope chest on to another member of the family where it could be used for its intended purpose.
Wyatt hadn’t realized this was the day his uncle intended to pick up the hope chest, and Donna was in a complete meltdown. It had been a normal Saturday morning at his condo when he got his mother’s desperate call.
“Is Dad there?” Wyatt asked, his heart thudding with dread.
“He had to open the store,” Donna said. “There isn’t anyone else here today and I don’t think I can do this. I can’t, Wyatt. I just can’t go on anymore.”
He needed to get to their house immediately. “Okay, hold on, Mom. I’m coming over. I’m going to be on the phone with you the entire drive, okay?”
Donna gave a watery gulp. “You won’t hang up?”
“I won’t hang up.” He raced for his keys and shrugged into a coat. It was so cold he could see his own breath as he hurried down the metal staircase outside the condo, his feet clanging the entire way until he reached the parking lot.
“Keep talking, Mom,” he said once he started the car. He had her on speaker phone to monitor her mood as he navigated through the sleepy town. With luck he should be at his parents’ house in five minutes.
His memories of the hope chest were different than Donna’s. As a kid, he’d teased Lauren over her extravagant daydreams of marriage and the bridal magazines she put inside the hope chest. When she wasn’t looking, he would replace them with issues of Car & Driver. It would usually take a while for Lauren to notice, but her shrieks could shake the rafters as she’d chase him down to demand the return of her magazines.
If only he could take those childhood taunts back. Lauren would never have her wedding day. The hope chest was the closest she would ever get to marriage, and helping Donna pass it on was going to be hard for everyone.
He parked on the tree-shaded street before his childhood home, a plain brick house that looked so ordinary from the outside but had been an extraordinary place to grow up. Rather than material riches, it was the bounty of love, faith, and acceptance that once made this home the envy of the neighborhood.
His Uncle Brian had just arrived in a pickup truck, ready to retrieve the chest. Brian brought both his kids with him. All three of them climbed out of the truck, stretching their legs after the ninety-minute drive from Tampa. Becky, the twelve-year-old girl destined to inherit the treasured family heirloom, was all elbows and knees, her chestnut hair in braids just like Lauren wore at that age.
Wyatt sent them a silent wave as he continued talking into his cell phone. “Brian and the kids just pulled up. Are you ready for them, or do you need a few more minutes?” It was freezing, but he’d keep them outside if Donna needed more time.
“I’m all right,” she said in a thin voice. “They can come in.”
Maybe this would be okay. He tapped the phone off and strode toward Brian. “It’s been a rough day,” he said as he returned Brian’s handshake. “Letting go of that chest will be a big step if we can convince her to do it.”
Uncle Brian understood the magnitude of the step, but his daughter was bursting with excitement. “Can I go inside and see it?” Becky asked, her eyes sparkling.
“You might want to pipe down a bit,” Brian warned his daughter, then turned back to Wyatt. “Is Ed here?”
“Dad is at the store. Let me go up alone and be sure she’s ready.”
Once he was inside, the hardwood floor in the front hall made the same creaky squeaks he’d heard for the past thirty-four years. The familiar scent of lemon polish and the steady tick from the grandfather clock summoned a wave of childhood memories as he mounted the steps.
Lauren’s bedroom door was open and Donna sat atop the hope chest, staring vacantly at the floor. A few crumpled tissues were scattered about, but Donna’s expression was blank.
“I hate him,” she whispered. “I hate that he took the coward’s way out.”
There was no need to ask who she was speaking about. Donna clung to her anger toward Jack Summerlin as tightly as she clung to Lauren’s hope chest. It would be best if she could let both of them go, but one step at a time.
Wyatt sat on the other end of the chest. “Hey, Mom,” he said softly. “Lauren is in a better place. Heck, Lauren was just about perfect, and if anyone’s soul could fly straight to heaven, it was Lauren. Right?”
Donna’s reluctant, half-hearted nod barely registered. It was something, at least.
“We had such a good life here,” she said, her voice nearly reverent. “I once heard a pastor say that we live in an imperfect world, and can never really be happy because our hearts remember the echo of Eden. But I was truly happy. Maybe that was why it was all snatched away.”
What could he say to that? Their family had been blessed beyond all reason, and none of them anticipated the tsunami that would smash their idyllic world to pieces. People always struggled with the age-old question of why a loving God caused innocent people to suffer. Wyatt had prayed long and hard about it, but still had no answer. The best he could do was lean on the passages from Revelation, promising that at the end of this age would come a time when there would be no death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things will pass away.
Donna was in no mood for biblical wisdom. She preferred clinging to Lauren’s memory rather than lifting her eyes to the good that remained in life.
“Brian is downstairs,” he said as gently as possible. “He brought Becky and Ethan with him.”
A fresh wave of grief rippled across her face. Wyatt kept his expression carefully composed despite the prickling at the back of his eyes. If Donna sensed he was struggling too, she’d start bawling. Was there anything worse than watching a parent weep? He’d become reconciled to Lauren’s death, but Donna hadn’t and probably never would. It was time to rip off the Band-Aid.
“Come on, let’s go downstairs,” he coaxed. “You don’t have to watch.”
The cell phone in his pocket vibrated with an incoming text. It was his state phone, not his personal phone. He often fielded work texts on the weekend, but he ignored it while walking his mother down the staircase.
Brian and his son headed upstairs while Wyatt started brewing a pot of coffee. The radio was on, a welcome distraction as the announcer talked about a new head coach for the Florida Gators.
“Maybe we’ll finally have a winning season,” he said, searching for something to distract his mother. Donna used to love the football season, hosting parties for half the neighborhood while she and Lauren cooked up a feast.
The football parties stopped after Lauren died, but his father wanted to start them up again in the fall. Would Donna be ready? Next July would mark two years since Lauren’s death. Two years since he scrapped his plans to move out of state in search of a bigger challenge. He was only marking time in Amity, stuck in a dead-end town and growing older as his dreams grew fainter with each passing season.
Donna stared out the kitchen window at a tree swallow seeking shelter in a little wooden birdhouse Lauren made in Girl Scouts. Upstairs, the scrape and thump of the hope chest banged against the floor. Donna winced as though she’d been struck but kept her eyes fastened on the birdhouse.
His cell phone vibrated again with a second incoming text, and he yanked it out. It was an auto-generated alert telling him that a new message had been registered at the Suggestions Box on the Ag Law Enforcement website. Normally he wouldn’t bother with something like this on a weekend, but it would give him something to focus on rather than his mother’s grief.
He opened the message and blanched at the subject line: Problems at Summerlin Groves .
The rest of the message got worse. Citrus canker had been found on Summerlin Groves, and Jenny was trying to cover it up. The message linked to a series of photographs documenting the outbreak. One picture showed the burned patch in her west field, and others were closeups of citrus leaves with the distinctive brown splotches and yellow halo. It was the unmistakable sign of canker.
He braced his hands on the linoleum countertop, the blood rushing in his ears. This explained the burned acre on Jenny’s grove. He’d been so distracted by seeing her again that he forgot about that burned patch as soon as he left the grove. Now the hint of fear he’d seen in her eyes made sense. She’d been burning trees in an attempt to contain the outbreak.
A spot fire wouldn’t do the trick. Citrus canker was so contagious it could devastate the orange industry, and state regulations dictated all citrus trees in the vicinity be burned down, both healthy and diseased. Depending on where the canker was detected, Jenny could lose her whole grove.
Another thump from upstairs distracted him as Donna darted toward the base of the stairs.
“Be careful,” Donna called up. “That chest is a hundred years old!”
“I got it,” Brian grunted as he and Ethan took another step down the staircase. Donna breathed a sigh of relief when the chest arrived safely on the ground floor, and she followed them outside to load it into the truck.
Wyatt remained inside, the weight on his chest getting heavier as the implications of the text message sank in.
The laws for citrus canker eradication were unpopular and inflexible. Wyatt still remembered the heart-wrenching day he had to cut down an orange tree in an old lady’s front yard because it was close to an outbreak on a nearby grove. The lady said her husband planted that tree on their first wedding anniversary. It was almost fifty years old and her husband had died of cancer the previous month when Wyatt showed up with a court order to destroy it. Her tree was healthy. There was nothing wrong with it other than its proximity to an outbreak in a nearby orange grove. The old lady cried when the state burned her tree.
A headache began to pound. Jenny didn’t deserve this. No wonder she’d been on edge when he showed up at her grove.
He read the anonymous complaint once again. Who sent it? Anonymous complaints rubbed him the wrong way, and yet he was required to act on it. He’d bring in specialists to confirm the outbreak . . . and then it would be his duty to enforce the eradication order.