She wrote that down. “Where are you from?” she asked suddenly, without looking up.

“Georgia.”

Her pen stopped for a second.

“Where do you want these sent?”

Uh-oh. I’d walked right into this. If I’d had the brains God gave a goat, I’d have sent the flowers to Amina, but since I’d said they were for my mother, I felt stupidly obliged to send them to my mother. I had sustained a deception all day, and perhaps I was just tired of deceiving.

“Twelve-fourteen Plantation Drive, Lawrenceton, Georgia.”

She kept writing steadily, and I shed an inaudible sigh of relief.

“It’s an hour later in Georgia, so I don’t know if I can get anything there today,” Cindy Bartell pointed out. “I’ll call first thing in the morning, and I’ll do my best to find someone who can deliver them tomorrow. Will that do?”

She looked up, her eyes questioning.

“That’ll be fine,” I said weakly.

“You have a local number?”

“The Holiday Inn.” She was past being pretty; she was striking. She was a good six inches taller than I.

“How’d you want to pay?”

“What?”

“Cash? Credit card? Check?”

“Cash,” I said firmly, because that way I wouldn’t have to give her my name. I thought I was being crafty.

I’d been watching the blond woman work on the funeral cross; I always like to watch other people do something well. When I looked back at Cindy Bartell, I caught her staring at me. She glanced down at my left hand, but of course my engagement ring was still zipped in my purse. “Do you have relatives here, Miss?”

“No,” I said with a bland smile. And I handed over my money.

I am not totally without resources.

As I picked up supper from a fast food restaurant and took it to the Holiday Inn, I wondered why I’d done such a stupid thing. I couldn’t come up with a very satisfactory answer. I hadn’t given Martin’s past life much thought, and I’d been overwhelmed with sudden curiosity. Surely prospective wife number two always wonders about wife number one?