Sweet Violet and a Time for Love

Book 4: Sienna St. James

by Leslie J. Sherrod

Genres: African American Christian

Synopsis

"Flowers can't tell lies. If you keep the sun off of them, dry up their waterbeds, and throw in weeds to choke 'em out, ain't no way or reason for them to bloom. If a rose is in full bloom when you know it's only been kept in darkness, and the ground it's planted in is cracked and cold, don't stop to smell that rose. There's a trap somewhere in those tempting, dark red petals. There's deceit. Maybe even death. Run from that flowerbed. You don't want to get buried in that soil." It's a few weeks before her fortieth birthday, and Sienna finally has the life she's dreamed of: a husband who loves her, a private practice that's flourishing, and an extended family that has finally put its skeletons to rest. However, when a homeless woman named Sweet Violet comes under Sienna's care with nothing on her but broken memories and a pocket watch stopped at 5:11, Sienna knows the peaceful life she's been enjoying will come to a screeching halt. Despite her best attempts not to get too involved, Sienna quickly discovers the dangerous past of Sweet Violet, and decades-old secrets and shadows come creeping into the present with violent results. Further complicating matters is a shocking midlife surprise for Sienna, and an unwelcomed guest her son Roman brings home. Life and death, love and loss, remain on the line as Sienna seeks answers, ducks bullets, and tries to be a good wife.

Release date: March 1, 2015

Publisher: Urban Books

Print pages: 288

Sample

“I solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.” Yes, please help me, God: the only coherent thought running through my brain at the moment. What am I doing here?

The bumpy leather of the Bible cover beneath my palm felt cold to the touch. As the bailiff took the sacred book away, I felt all eyes boring through me from the courtroom benches, from the other side of TV screens across the nation, from behind computer and phone devices around the world.

Okay, maybe this case wasn’t airing around the entire world, but at the moment it had consumed my complete attention, and that of all of Baltimore. This case had been eating away at my appetite and sleep, and, in the immediate moment, had left a pool of sweat on the back of my thighs. There were some TV cameras, I reminded myself as I thought about that pool of sticky sweat on my legs that was certainly seeping through my stockings and staining my clothes. Should have gone with the darker suit. Leon was right; this was not the time to make a cheery fashion statement with my bright yellow blazer and knee-length skirt. I probably looked like a balloon at a little kid’s birthday party and not the leading witness for a triple murder trial. I should have listened to him; he had a background in law enforcement. I was a therapist, at the moment specializing only in children’s play therapy, having grown weary of the creeps, killers, and terrorists who seemed to be attracted to my practice.

But this case in which I was testifying had nothing to do with the children I served.

The defendant’s attorney, a slender black woman who went by the name of Shanay Deen, stood and flipped through some index cards. She frowned at a note passed to her by her assistant and then grinned at me as if she were a tiger and I was a limping gazelle. She even licked her chops, her tongue flicking over her too-red lips as she looked at her notes and then at me again.

I thought about the homemade play dough I kept in a drawer back in my office for my young clients. The cool squishiness of the multicolored flour and water mixture would have been perfect to pound out the nerves quivering inside of me.

She approached the bench, each of her steps carefully watched by the waiting jury. We all seemed to be holding our breath.

“My client, Delmon Frank, has been charged with murder in the first degree, three times over,” the defense attorney began. “This charge carries with it the possibility of an entire life spent behind bars, a punishment that would be appropriate for a cold-blooded killer such as the one who viciously took the life of the victims. However, such a punishment would be a catastrophic mistake for an innocent young man barely out of his teens who is just starting to live his own life, who just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, and who had nothing to do with the tragedies that transpired.” She gave a solemn look at the twenty-one-year-old male sitting at the defendant’s table. In his suit and tie, I barely recognized him.

But those unreadable eyes and curled lips could not be dressed up or disguised.

“You have a son about his age, Ms. St. James.” She leaned in close to me. Her voice was a slight whisper, as if we were patrons in an upscale restaurant chatting aimlessly about the menu and not defense attorney and star witness about to enter the opening act of a courtroom drama. “I don’t have to remind you of the seriousness of the matter at hand as I ask you to think of how you would feel if your son . . . Roman, right? If Roman was falsely accused of murder. Think of him, Ms. St. James, as I ask you these questions.”

Thinking of Roman would not help her cause. She didn’t know that. Very few people knew the current state of the relationship I had with my only son. I pushed down the heartache.

“My name is Mrs. Sanderson, no longer Ms. St. James.” I glanced at Leon who sat in the back of the courtroom. He winked at me, but I still saw the irritation on his face.

We were supposed to be packing for our first wedding anniversary trip, but here we were, in a courtroom with cameras flashing. I’m sorry, I wanted to say to him, but the attorney took my words.

“Yes. I’m sorry about misstating your name, Mrs. Sienna Sanderson St. James.” The woman shuffled through her cards as she butchered my name once more. She stopped at one card and her smile returned. “I have just a few questions for you. Are you ready to begin?”

I shut my eyes for a moment, inhaled, searched for a calm space in my head. Listened.

“Hush ’em. Hush ’em.”

The memory jolted through me with such vividness, I could almost taste the butter crème icing that dripped off my lips that day, smell the fresh cut flowers that had sat in squat vases at each table.

“Hush ’em. Hush ’em.” The old lady held a crooked finger up to her lips and whispered out of a mouth so crusty and smelly it took all I had to not gag in her face. “What do you hear?” She used her other finger to rap on the glass storefront of Leon’s downtown bakery where we were holding our reception. I stood at the doorway, poised to go in, my right palm pressed against the door. They were waiting for me inside.

“What do you hear?” she asked again, her eyes wide with awe. Her wrinkled brown face full of dark freckles was bright with excitement. She wore a stained blue housecoat and blue slippers, and a large black handbag hung off her frail shoulders. I wanted to be polite, but it was my wedding day, my reception, and I wanted to get inside. “What do you hear?” she asked again.

“I hear you tapping on the window.” I gave a smile and pressed against the doorway once more.

“Hush ’em, hush ’em.” She leaned in closer to me. Her breath stopped me in my tracks, made my eyes water. “I asked ‘what do you hear?’ Not ‘what do you see?’” Her nostrils flared outward. Anger.

“I don’t . . . I don’t know.” I turned away, but her rapping got louder. Leon looked at us from the other side of the window. His boutonniere was a single blue flower. “I hear you tapping on the window,” I said again, rushing through my words this time, ready to leave this woman and her stank breath alone.

“No, that’s not tapping you hear.” The woman’s wide smile revealed several missing teeth and many rotting ones. “That’s the sound of glass trying not to break. My finger here is force, wind, weight.” She stared at her dirty nail as if it were gold. “The glass is shouting against it. Screaming against it.” She stopped tapping and narrowed her eyes at me. “You that glass, young lady. You that glass trying so hard not to break under pressure. I can see right through you. Why are you trying so hard?”

“Mrs. St. James Sienna Sanderson?” The attorney brought me back with her continued butchering of my name. “I’m ready to begin. Are you?”

I opened my eyes, looked at the three posters standing by the prosecution’s table. Three enlarged pictures of the victims rested on easels, though the TV cameras were only focused on the last victim, his name and local fame enough to build ratings, I guessed.

What was I supposed to say to the coming questions? I looked around the courtroom, peered into the cameras. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God. I settled back into my seat. Exhaled.

“Yes. I’m ready.”

Leon shifted in his seat. I saw him shake his head. Don’t bring that old woman up, I knew he was saying.

As if I didn’t already have enough to do.

I stared at the pager vibrating on my bathroom sink. 911 STAT, the small digital screen read. It shook and buzzed and clattered on the marble countertop like it was having convulsions. I silenced it with one touch of my index finger.

“Why did I agree to do this?” I asked my reflection in the mirror.

Eleven fifty-three on a Saturday night, and here I was, locked in my bathroom, looking and feeling a hot mess. My stomach was weak, my eyes were red, and my two-day-old press and curl had reverted to nap and kink. My hair had been natural, free of chemical straighteners for nearly two years now, but nights like this made me want to grab a wig or a weave or the biggest jar of hair-taming raw lye I could find. I hope I hadn’t looked this bad during the interview taping earlier that evening.

The pager went off a second time.

“All right already.” I shut if off again and collapsed down on the edge of my tub. Two 911 pages in less than two minutes: a record. “I don’t have time for this,” I groaned.

And I didn’t.

I had a full-time job. No, a full-time business. A successful full-time business. Not to mention the interviews, the speaking engagements, and the comfortable advance for my not-yet-written memoir Fearless: How a Therapist Tracked Down a Terrorist, in which I was supposed to detail how I’d followed my gut instincts to expose the mastermind behind a horrific explosion at BWI Airport in April. This on-call pager gig was only supposed to be a temporary arrangement, an easy way of “giving back to the community.” The key word was “temporary.”

So much for that.

Another wave of nausea rolled through my stomach and the pager went off a third time.

Okay, so it was definitely a real emergency going on at the other end of the page, but how on earth was I supposed to respond to a crisis when I was dealing with my own situation?

Too much for a Saturday night.

On the bathroom countertop, next to the trembling pager, sat a skinny white stick. My entire life peered down at this stick, waiting to see whether or not two pink lines would appear.

I rocked on the edge of the tub and willed the vomit to stay down as my eyes stayed glued to the third white stick of the evening. The pager, for its part, clattered down into the bowl of the sink.

I was too old to be pregnant.

I mean, twenty-five-year-olds get pregnant. Thirty-one-year-olds carry babies in their bellies. Shoot, sixteen-year-olds who may have jumped the gun way too early are walking around with swollen stomachs.

Not me. Wasn’t supposed to be me.

I was turning forty in a few months.

My son was a sophomore in college and my husband had only been my husband for five months.

What kind of foolishness was this?

I scratched my head and looked at the pink lines again. Yup. There were two of them and that was what the manufacturer’s box claimed would happen if the test detected babyness in your pee.

There had to be a mistake, a typo, or something extra in that glass of water I had before I went to bed last night for my pee to be telling three different pregnancy tests I was . . . couldn’t even get the word out.

Pregnant.

Pregnant?

My cell phone started ringing. I could hear it vibrating from my purse on the tile floor. When I came home an hour ago, I’d marched straight to the bathroom with the bag from Walgreens hidden in my purse, even though nobody was home to witness my mission.

The bag had been filled with five pregnancy tests.

Yes, I was going to use all five of them because there had to be a mistake. One of these tests was bound to get it right. I could not possibly be pregnant.

My cell phone began a second deluge of rings. I rolled my eyes and answered it.

“Hello, KeeKee,” I sang into the phone as I greeted the Saturday night emergency department charge nurse at Metropolitan Community Hospital. “Is it a suicidal, homicidal, or drunk customer tonight?”

“It’s D: none of the above.” KeeKee’s raspy voice was lined with irritation. “Sienna, why didn’t you answer my page?”

“Aside from the fact that you didn’t give me a chance to, I didn’t answer because I knew that you would call. Now what exactly does ‘none of the above’ mean? Is this really a mental health or substance abuse emergency?”

“Just come in, Sienna, we need you now. Stat. This one is major.” KeeKee hung up.

Two pink lines and a new husband who had no idea that I had a collection of positive pregnancy tests stored in my side of the bathroom armoire.

And now some kind of urgent matter in the ED at Metro Community that required three pages and two phone calls in less than five minutes.

I was supposed to have the first draft of the first three chapters of my memoir to my agent by Monday morning. I needed to do something with my hair. And, most important to me, I wanted to be home when Leon walked in the door, which I knew would be within the half hour.

But all of these things were on hold.

All because I had agreed to carry that on-call pager. For free.

It was warm for November. Well, at least the Baltimore version of November warm. Though now after midnight, temperatures still flirted with the mid-fifties. As I got into my car and turned west on Boston Street toward the downtown area, I caught notice of the nighttime sky. Cloudless with a million stars that seemed to shimmer like high-quality sequins on a black velvet gown, there was no hint of an earlier rainstorm that had scented the air with wet dead leaves and pavement. Despite the warm air and clear sky, however, an early snow was in the forecast for tomorrow, with temperatures expected to dip all the way down into the twenties.

So had been my life over the past few months: changes I’d never seen coming; twists and turns I hadn’t expected; opportunities that came and went like the restless weather. Fortunately, sunshine had largely filled this new season of my life.

Sunshine.

Leon.

Change for the better.

I’d entered Leon’s bakery on a Sunday afternoon this past April, on a day when all had finally and for the first time in my life felt right. After helping to unveil a terrorist who’d bombed BWI airport; after turning down a proposal to a man who could never love me the way I deserved; after closing once and for all the chapter of my estranged husband who turned out to be a sham, and forgiving him so that I could move forward: I unwittingly discovered Leon’s bakery on Pratt Street and was reunited with his sweet skills and welcoming smile.

It was the smile he gave me when he saw me sitting at one of his tables that let me know he’d returned permanently to my life.

And I was ready for him. A whole woman. No more pieces.

Better than the cookies that were still warm from his brand new ovens was the envelope he showed me sitting on his office desk that fateful day.

Addressed to me, he said he’d written it three months earlier but had just put the stamp on it that morning. While I had been breaking up with Lazarus Tyson and healing over RiChard St. James, God had been working out the details of a love I needed, a love I could receive.

Perfect timing. Predestined reunion. Purposed plan.

I never opened the envelope. Never saw the note he’d written inside of it. I didn’t have to. We were together and that was a good enough end to the story for me.

Only I knew it wasn’t the end.

A green light and a blaring honk brought me back to the present. “Sorry,” I mouthed and waved to the silver Hummer behind me. The driver swerved to pass me and quickly disappeared into the flow of steady traffic on Boston Street. Midnight in Canton. Leon and I moved into the high-end waterfront neighborhood on the far outskirts of Baltimore’s Harbor shortly after our hastily planned nuptials.

No more wasting time and a new beginning for both of us. Together.

It had felt right at the time, leaving behind our old lives and dwellings to settle into a home financed by my practice, his business, and the wave of interviews and endorsements that had greeted my instant fame following the terror investigation. We’d purchased a two-bedroom condo that overlooked the waters of the outer harbor. It had a massive master bedroom suite and a spare space for when Roman came home during college breaks.

A two-bedroom condo and now a possible newborn.

“Jesus, is this some kind of joke?” I prayed aloud as I now made my way west on Orleans Street. The neighborhoods, just like Baltimore’s fickle weather, had changed and transformed around me, from glitz and glamour to neglect and desperation, a testament to the turbulence of life and the testiness of times. The sudden rumble of nausea in my abdomen informed me there was no joke, no waiting punch line.

My life was about to face major changes once again.

“It’s about time you got here.” KeeKee Witherspoon glared at me from behind the nurses’ station. Five years my junior, she always looked like she was about to hit the runway instead of the emergency department, or ED, as staff called it. She was the only nurse in the ED who could get away with not wearing scrubs, and few questioned it. Tonight, she wore black skinny jeans, a pale pink top, and a rhinestone-studded headband that held back her long braids and matched a single bangle on her wrist. Despite her fashion-forward wardrobe, she wore little makeup, only lip gloss and eyeliner, and had no qualms about taking off her many rings to get her hands dirty. I’d watched her help clean up a child’s diarrheal accident once, and, on another occasion, I witnessed her help carry without hesitation several greasy bags that contained all the worldly goods of a homeless man seeking the warmth and safety of the ED.

“I’ll be with you in a moment, slowpoke,” she said either to me or a tech who stood nearby. Several charts were in KeeKee’s hand, and pagers, phones, and even the intercom system sounded around her in chaotic dissonance.

Twelve-thirty a.m. in Metro Community’s emergency department might as well have been twelve-thirty in the afternoon for how busy it was.

The reality of a hospital by the hood.

“Bed two,” she barked to an EMT team pushing a new arrival from the ambulance bay. Bright blood trickled from the arm of the young man on the stretcher. Despite having a small stab wound near one of his biceps, a playful smile filled his face as he winked at the young attendant who pushed his IV pole.

“Put your number in my phone, sweetheart.” He nodded his head at her, as if they were meeting in the food court of a mall and not on the floors of the ED. She, for her part, ignored him, but I saw the flash of interest in her eyes.

Fiending for love could be more dangerous than craving dope.

“Sienna, I’ll be right with you,” KeeKee shouted as she darted away and disappeared behind curtain number seven.

What kind of emergency did she page me for? I shook my head and glanced at the time on a nearby phone. 12:36. Leon should be home by now, his bakery closed, pots and pans cleaned, floor swept and glass display counters sparkling. My lips curled into a smile as I thought about the sweetness of his embrace, the faint taste of chocolate frosting on his lips, the warmth of his body that I knew was waiting in the bed we now shared as husband and wife.

12:43. My smile stopped. What emergency did KeeKee have me missing my husband for?

“Right with you!” KeeKee dashed by me again, this time heading for the radiology wing of the bustling ED. I groaned and marched away from the nurses’ station deciding to be proactive. Rooms ten and eleven, the stripped-down, sparse units where psych patients were kept while awaiting emergency evaluations, were on the other side of the station. I stopped in my tracks the moment they both came in view.

Empty.

I could see the plastic beds, white walls, and plastic-enclosed televisions in each from where I stood.

Really? They’re both empty?

I had agreed to carry the on-call pager for psych evals while a replacement for the vacancy left by the weekend ED social worker’s sudden departure was sought. I volunteered after being told it would be three Saturday nights at most with onsite visits only for dire emergencies. The director of social work at the hospital, Mabel Plattsmith, was a good friend of my mentor, Ava Diggs. Ava said she would do it and I said no way. Ava needed to rest and enjoy her retirement. And her cough nagged me.

This was Saturday number six.

After making sure one of the three security officers who covered the ED was within running distance, I stepped into both rooms ten and eleven to make sure that I had not missed someone crouching or weeping in the corners.

They were indeed both empty. Nausea rolled anew through my intestines.

Why would KeeKee call me down here in the middle of the night if there were no patients for me to see? I headed to the waiting room. Maybe I’d missed a drunk sleeping in the dark blue vinyl chairs who needed a referral to a detox unit. But couldn’t that have waited until the morning? I groaned again as I waved my temporary badge over the box that would open the exit doors that opened to the waiting room.

Mother with sick baby.

Man sounding like he was coughing up a lung, and not covering his mouth.

Teen girl in the corner staring at the space in front of her.

Woman playing a game on her cell phone while a male who loved the “f” word and wore a homemade sling over his arm chatted indiscriminately on his.

Middle-aged man sitting next to a gray-haired woman who smacked her lips over and over as she studied me.

Nobody stood out to me in the waiting room.

I looked back over at the teenage girl. The look on her face. Her crossed arms. Alone. I thought of the pregnancy tests I’d hid in my bathroom drawer and wondered if she was facing a similar dilemma.

No.

Absolutely not. I caught my flawed thinking and corrected it. We were not facing any kind of similar dilemma because I was not pregnant even if she was. Though I didn’t need the money, I was certain to get a large payout from that pregnancy test company who was putting out defective merchandise.

I looked again at the girl, her blank stare, mournful eyes.

Maybe she was suicidal. I waved my badge to get access to the triage nurse to see if she had the scoop on the pensive-looking young girl. Maybe she was the reason KeeKee had demanded my presence.

As the doors to triage slid open, a shadow near the main entrance of the waiting room caught my eye. A man in a black puffy jacket with a black baseball cap tucked low over his eyes stood near the rotating doors, just behind a tall, fake plant. I wondered if Mr. Phil, the overnight security guard who sat at a desk not far from the entrance, had even noticed the man standing there. Is that man trying to stay unnoticed?

“Who’s that, Kelly?” I asked the approaching triage nurse. “Did he check in?” I nodded my head toward the man.

She followed my gaze and shrugged. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Quinisha King? Please come back.” Kelly had moved on and apparently so had the man.

There was no sight of him anywhere, but the gust of wind that filled the waiting room meant that the side door had been opened and shut with great force. I looked over at Mr. Phil. A newspaper had his attention. Was I the only one who had noticed the man?

The teenage girl, apparently Quinisha, followed the nurse back to a triage station.

“The flu. I think I have the flu.” I overheard her complaints to Kelly.

I groaned, but then shook my head at my ill-directed disappointment that the girl wasn’t suicidal. I headed back to the nurses’ station. Back at her post, KeeKee gave me a look that had to be as fierce as the one I gave her.

“Where did you disappear to that fast?” Her eyes narrowed.

“KeeKee, please tell me why I am here and not home with my husband.”

“Sorry, missus, but that good lovin’ gonna have to wait a little while longer. I need you to handle the patient in room twenty-nine.”

“Twenty-nine? That’s not even one of the psych rooms. Isn’t that the last room in the hallway?”

“Yeah, well that’s the room the patient wanted to go to, and nobody was willing to force the issue. That’s why we needed you here. I need that room free and that patient discharged. Now.”

KeeKee must have seen my raised eyebrow because she put down the charts and papers she had in her hand and came from around the desk. “Come on, Sienna. I’ll walk down with you. I’m curious to see how you’re going to handle this.”

Bed twenty-nine was the last room in the emergency department, the last resort on busy nights. It had been used as a storage room, a private counseling area, and even, on at least one occasion that I’d heard of, as a rendezvous spot for two employees who’d wanted to “get to know each other better.” As we walked toward it, I noted that the last patient room in use before it was twenty-one.

“So what exactly is going on?” I tried again as we neared the room. KeeKee gave no response as she fooled around with several papers in her hand. The curtain to bed twenty-nine was closed and a shuffling noise echoed from its walls. I noted that a sitter, a hospital staff person assigned to sit with disruptive patients, stood outside the curtain, peeking into the room. She turned around at our approach.

“Thanks, Tiffany.” KeeKee nodded at the sitter. “Sienna can take it from here. Just let security know not to go too far in case we need them.”

“Security? A sitter? KeeKee, you’ve got to tell me something here.”

“If I knew what was going on, I would not have paged you.” KeeKee stopped short of the curtain, looked up from her paperwork, and gave me a smile I could not read.

I pulled back the curtain.

“Step one, step two, step three and four. Shake it fast, baby, and hit the floor. Ooooh, yeah! Dum. . .