Black Rose - NRoberts - G2 Black Rose

 “I should’ve said you work miracles.”

 “Oh, I just put in the request for them.”

 “Do you think she’ll move on it?” Logan wondered. “Move out, and bring you the diaries? The way you described her, she didn’t seem to have much spine.”

 “Some of us don’t. And some of us find out we’ve got one, but misplaced it. She’s young, and she doesn’t have what you’d call a lot of spirit. And though I made it clear there were no strings, I’m fairly sure she’ll feel obligated if she takes this job, and this apartment. Now whether she has the gumption to act on that obligation’s another matter.”

 “If she doesn’t?” Mitch asked.

 “Then I expect Cousin Rissy and I are due for a come-to-Jesus talk. I have a few cards up my sleeve, and I’ll play them if I have to.”

 David’s eyes brightened as he leaned closer. “Dirt? Such as?”

 “Family peccadilloes that she wouldn’t care to have come to light, and that I’ll assure her I will light up like Christmas unless she returns what belongs to Harper House.” She tapped David on the chin. “But for now, they’re my little secrets.”

 “Spoilsport.”

 She turned, as did everyone else, when Hayley shouted. Her face glowing, she rushed breathlessly to the table. “She walked. She walked right to Harper. Three steps!”

 Nothing would do but that Lily demonstrate her new skill again. But she just buckled at the knees each time Hayley tried to nudge her into a step. And preferred crawling on the patio or trying to climb up Roz’s chair.

 “I swear she walked. You can ask Harper.”

 “I believe you.” Roz hauled Lily up to nuzzle. “Teasing your mama, aren’t you?” She pushed back, rose with Lily in her arms, then picked up a cracker, held it out to Hayley. “You might as well start early using one of the primary parenting tools. Bribery. Scoot down there, hold that cracker out.”

 As Hayley obeyed, Roz crouched, steadied Lily on her feet. “Harper held out a flower.”

 “That boy knows how to charm the girls. Go on, baby. Go get it.”

 To enthusiastic applause, Lily performed. Then she plopped down on her butt and ate the cracker.

 When the others went inside, Roz sat with Mitch in the twilight.

 “Would you be insulted if I said you make a beautiful honorary grandmother.”

 “The termgrandmother is a bit of a jolt yet, but since I couldn’t love that baby more if she were my own blood, no. She took her first steps to my boy. To Harper. It’s hard for me not to focus on that, on the significance of it.”

 “She’s not seeing anyone? Hayley?”

 “Her life’s centered on Lily right now. But she’s young and full of passion. There’ll be someone sooner or later. As for Harper, I can’t keep up with the females who come and go. Still, he doesn’t bring them home to meet me. There’s significance in that, too.”

 “Well, speaking of sons, mine’s seeing a new young lady. A local girl. And it happens her parents are members of your club. He’ll be at the dinner dance tomorrow night. I’m looking forward to introducing you.”

 “I’d love to meet him. Who’s the girl?”

 “Her name’s Shelby—after the county, I’m guessing. Shelby Forrester.”

 “It’s a small and crowded world. Yes, I know Jan and Quill, Shelby’s parents. I know her, too—and she’s a lovely girl. Her parents and I are currently on . . . tenuous terms. Quill is doing business of some sort with Bryce, and it makes things a bit sticky between us. But that won’t touch on anyone else.”

 “No one does complex connections and tenuous terms like the South.”

 “I suppose not, and I only mention it so that if you sense any awkwardness, you’ll know why. But I’m prepared to be excruciatingly polite, so you needn’t worry.”

 “I’m not, whether you decide to be polite or otherwise. Why don’t we take a walk? That way I can hold your hand and find some shadowy and fragrant corner of the garden where I can kiss you.”

 “Sounds like a fine idea.”

 “You’re doing a fine thing for Jane Paulson.”

 “Maybe, but my motivations are murky.”

 He laughed and brought her hand to his lips. “If your motivations were always pure, I doubt I’d find you as fascinating as I do.”

 “I do love astute flattery. Let’s walk around to the stables. I’ll show you Spot’s marker.”

 “I’d like to see it. It might be a good place for me to broach another theory. One I’ve been chewing on for a while now.”

 As they walked down the path, she gauged the progress of her flowers and kept out an eagle eye for weeds.

 “I’d as soon you spit it out as chew on it.”

 “I’m not entirely sure how you’re going to feel about this one. I’m looking at dates, at events, at key moments and people, attempting to draw lines from those dates, events, moments, and people to Amelia.”

 “Mmm-hmm. I’ve always enjoyed having these stables here, leaving them be. As a kind of ruin.”

 Head cocked, hands fisted on hips now, she studied the crumbling stones, the weather-scarred wood. “I suppose I could have them restored. Maybe I will if I get those grandchildren and they develop an interest in horses. None of my boys did, particularly. It’s girls, I think, who go through that equine adoration period.”

 She studied the building in the half light, the sagging roof and faded trim—and the vines, the climbers, the ornamental grasses she’d planted around it to give it a wild look.

 “It looks like something you’d see in a movie, or more likely, in a storybook.”

 “That’s what I like about it. My daddy’s the one who let it go, or never did anything to preserve the building. I remember him talking about having it razed, but my grandmother asked him not to. She said it was part of the place, and she liked the look of it. The grave’s around the back,” she said. “I’m sorry, Mitch, I interrupted. Mind’s wandering. Tell me your theory.”

 “I don’t know how you’re going to feel about it.”

 “Poison sumac,” she said, nudging him away before he brushed up against a vine. “I’ll have to get out here and get rid of that. Here we are.” She crouched down, and with her ungloved hands plucked at weeds, brushed at dirt until she revealed the marker with the hand-chipped name in the stone.

 “Sweet, isn’t it, that he’d have buried his old dog here, carved that stone for him. I think he must’ve been a sweet man. My grandmother wouldn’t have loved him as much as she did if he hadn’t been.”

 “And she did,” Mitch agreed. “You can see the way she loved him in the pictures of them together.”

 “He looks sort of cool in most of the photographs we have of him. But he wasn’t cool. I asked my grandmother once, and she said he hated having his picture taken. He was shy. Odd thinking of that, of my grandfather as a shy man who loved his dog.”

 “She was more outgoing?” Mitch prompted.

 “Oh, much. She liked to socialize, nearly as much as she liked to garden. She loved hosting fancy lunches and teas, especially. She dressed up for them—hat, gloves, floaty dresses.”

 “I’ve seen pictures. She was elegant.”

 “Yet she could hitch on old trousers and dig in the dirt for hours.”

 “Like someone else we know.” He skimmed a hand over her hair. “Your grandfather was born several years after the youngest of his sisters.”

 “Hmm. There were other pregnancies, I think. My grandmother had two miscarriages herself, and I recall, vaguely, her mentioning that her mother-in-law had suffered the same thing. Maybe a stillbirth as well.”

 “And then a son, born at the same time we’ve theorized Amelia lived—and died. Amelia, who haunts the house, but who we can’t verify lived there—certainly not as a relation. Who sings to children, gives every appearance of being devoted to children—and distrusting, even despising men.”

 She cocked her head. Twilight was moving very quickly to dark, and with dark came a chill. “Yes, and?”

 “What if the child that was born in 1892 was her child. Her son, Roz. Amelia’s son, not Beatrice Harper’s.”

 “That’s a very extreme theory, Mitchell.”

 “Is it? Maybe. It’s only a theory, in any case, and partially based on somewhat wild speculation. But it wouldn’t be unprecedented.”

 “I would have heard. Surely there would have been some mention of it, some whisper passed along.”

 “How? Why? If the original players were careful to keep it quiet. The wealthy, the influential man craving a son—and paying for one. Hell, it still happens.”

 “But . . .” She pushed to her feet. “How could they hide that kind of deception? You’re not talking about some legal adoption.”

 “No, I’m not. Just run with me on this a minute. What if Reginald hired a young woman, likely one of some breeding, some intelligence, who’d found herself in trouble. He pays the bills, gives her a safe haven, takes the child off her hands if it’s a boy.”

 “And if it’s a girl, he’s wasted his time and money?”

 “A gamble. Another angle might be he impregnated her himself.”

 “And his wife just accepted his bastard as her own, as the heir?”

 “He held the purse strings, didn’t he?”

 She stood very still, rubbing her arms. “That’s a very cold theory.”

 “It is. Maybe he was in love with Amelia, planned to divorce his wife, marry her. She might have died in childbirth. Or it could’ve been a straight business deal—or something else. But if that child, if Reginald Harper Jr. was Amelia’s son, it explains some things.”

 “Such as?”

 “She’s never hurt you or anyone of your blood. Couldn’t that be because you’re her blood? Her descendant? Her great-grandchild?”

 She paced away from the little grave. “Then why is she in the house, on the property? Are you theorizing she birthed that baby here? In Harper House?”

 “Possibly. Or that she visited here, spent time here. Maybe as the child’s nurse, that’s not unprecedented, either. That she died here, one way or the other.”

 “One way or—”

 The grave was not small, and it had no marker. It gaped open dark and deep.

 She stood over it, stood over that wide mouth in the earth. She looked down at death. The body in the tattered and filthy gown, the flesh that was melting away from bone. The smell of decay swarmed over her like fat, humming bees, stinging her eyes, her throat, her belly.

 The ground was damp and slippery where she stood. Over it a thin, fetid fog crawled, smearing the black dirt, the wet grass with dirty tongues of gray.

 She plunged the shovel through that fog, into the earth and grass, filled the blade. Then threw the earth into the grave.

 The eyes of the dead opened, gleaming with madness and malice. Lifting a hand, bones piercing horribly through rotted flesh, it began to climb out of the earth.

 Roz jolted, and slapped at the hands holding her.

 “Easy, easy. Just breathe. Nice and slow.”

 “What happened?” She pushed at Mitch’s hand again when she realized she was on the ground, cradled in his lap.

 “You fainted.”

 “I certainly did not. I’ve never fainted in my life.”

 “Consider this your first. You went sheet white, your eyes rolled straight back in your head. I grabbed you when you started to go down. You were only out about a minute.” Trembling a bit himself, he lowered his brow to hers. “Longest minute of my life, so far.”

 He took a long breath, then another. “If you’re okay, would you mind if I just sat here a minute until I settle down?”

 “Well, that’s the damnedest thing.”

 “I didn’t mean to upset you. We’ll just table the theories. Let’s get you inside.”

 “You don’t think I passed out because you had me thinking my grandfather might’ve been born on the wrong side of the blanket? Christ. What do you take me for? I’m not some silly, spineless woman who questions her own identity because of the actions of her ancestors. I know who the hell I am.”

 Her color was back now, and those long-lidded eyes were ripe with irritation.

 “Then you want to tell me why . . .” Now he went pale as polished glass. “God, Roz, are you pregnant?”

 “Get a hold of yourself. A few minutes ago you’re calling me a grandmother, now you’re going into shock thinking I could be pregnant. I’m not going to present either one of us with a midlife baby, so relax. I had some sort of spell, I suppose.”

 “Care to elaborate?”

 “One second we were talking, and the next I was standing—I don’t know where, but I was standing over an open grave. She was in it. Amelia, and she was not looking her best.”

 She couldn’t stop the shudder, and let her head rest against him. That good, strong shoulder. “More than dead, decomposing. I could see it, smell it. I suppose that’s what took me down. It was, to put it mildly, very unpleasant. I was burying her, I think. Then she opened her eyes, started to climb out.”

 “If it’s any consolation, if that had happened to me, I’d have fainted, too.”

 “I don’t know if it was here, I mean this particular spot. It didn’t seem like it, but I can’t be sure. I’ve walked by here countless times. I planted that pachysandra, those sweet olives, and I never felt anything strange before.”

 “To risk another theory, you were never this close to finding out who she was before.”

 “I guess not. We’ll have to dig.” She pushed to her feet. “We’ll have to dig and see if she’s here.”

 THEY SET UPlights and dug beyond midnight. The men, and Roz, with Stella and Hayley taking turns between shovels and remaining inside to mind the sleeping children.

 They found nothing but the bones of a beloved dog.

 “COULD BE METAPHORICAL.”

 Roz looked up at Harper as they walked the woods toward home the next day. She knew very well why he was with her, his arm slung casually around her shoulder, because Mitch had told him she’d fainted.

 She’d barely had five minutes to herself since it happened. That was going to change, she thought, but she’d give him and the rest of her honorary family a day before she shooed them back.

 “What could be metaphorical?”

 “That, you know, vision thing you had. Standing over her grave, shoveling dirt on her.” He winced. “I don’t mean to wig you out.”

 “You’re not. Who used to have nightmares after watching that Saturday morning show? What was it,Land of the Lost ?”

 “Jeez. The Sleestak.” He shuddered, and only part of the movement was mocking. “I still get nightmares. But anyway, what I’m saying is you never stood over her grave, never buried her. She died a long time ago. But if we do the metaphor thing, we could say how you’re trying to open her grave—but by missing something, not finding something, whatever, you’re burying her.”

 “So, it’s all in my mind.”

 “Maybe she’s planting it there. I don’t know, Mama.”