Dear Cordelia by Pamela Ford

Author:Pamela Ford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2005-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

JACK WAS HOME for almost an hour before he couldn’t stand being there anymore. The answering machine had no messages about C.J. and the ladies next door reported no sign of her. The only thing left for him to do was wait.

And he didn’t do well with waiting. Especially not now, after dredging up all those old memories of his childhood, and the humane society, and his grandmother. He’d lost his grandmother’s dog…and it weighed heavy on him.

He felt a need to atone for what he’d done, to be near his grandmother now, to visit her grave. He glanced at his watch; there was plenty of time before his flight left.

Slipping on his jacket, he headed out to the garage, grabbed a dusty red plastic geranium out of a clay pot up on a shelf and drove to the cemetery. The moment he passed through the big iron gates, a sense of peace washed over him. The grounds stretched out in every direction like a sea of white, broken only occasionally by a cross or angel at the top of the taller headstones.

Jack pulled his car to a stop beside a tall pine tree and shut off the engine. He sat there a moment before finally opening the door and stepping out.

Under the gray sky, a chill wind rolled across the open grounds. He flipped up the collar of his jacket and let the hush of the cemetery envelope him. Looking around, he tried to get his bearings so he could find his grandmother’s grave. Everything was so different covered with snow—still the same, and yet, the path he would have taken was obscured, the usual landmarks buried.

After a short walk, he stopped to brush off the front of a headstone sticking up through the snow. Cook. One of Grandma’s cemetery neighbors—he’d known he was close. He went a few feet farther and used his gloved hands to clear away the snow on his grandmother’s headstone.

“‘Catherine Graham,’” he read aloud. His words almost sounded reverent in the all-encompassing quiet. “‘Love never fails.’”

It had been part of one of her favorite quotes. He didn’t know the whole thing, just the beginning—Love is patient, love is kind… When his grandmother died it had only seemed right to have that quote define her for the rest of time.

“I lost C.J., Grandma.” His words were sucked away by the wind. “I’m sorry.”

No reply came—not that he was expecting one.

“She was out in the yard and then she was just gone.” Now, if that didn’t sound like a guilty kid’s excuse, he didn’t know what did. “You wouldn’t be able to get the big guy to help us find her, would you?”

The wind whistled past.

He sighed. He hadn’t thought so. A lost dog had to be pretty low on the priority list.

He dug the plastic geranium out of his pocket and stuck it in the snow by the headstone. It looked silly and he grinned. This was just the way his grandmother would have wanted it.

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