herself that her child breathed.
Parker rolled lazily over, gave a little greeting growl, a single thump of his tail, then went back to sleep.
He senses me, smells me, knows me. Is it the same with her? Why doesn't he bark at her?
Or am I just losing my mind?
She readied for bed, then took a blanket and pillow into their room. She laid down between her sons
and passed the rest of the night between them, guarding them against the impossible.
TWELVE
In the greenhouse, Roz watered flats of annu-als she'd grown over the winter.. It was nearly time to
put them out for sale. Part of her was always a little sad to know she wouldn't be the one planting them. And she knew that not all of them would be tended properly.
Some would die of neglect, others would be given too much sun, or not enough. Now they were lush
and sweet and full of potential.
And hers.
She had to let them go, the way she'd let her sons go. She had to hope, as with her boys, that they
found their potential and bloomed,, lavishly.
She missed her little guys. More than she'd realized now that her house had boys in it again with all their chatter and scents and debris. Having Harper close helped, so much at times that it was hard for her not to lean too heavily on him, not to surround him with need.
But he'd passed the stage when he was just hers. Though he lived within shouting distance, and they often worked together side by side, he would never be just hers again.
She had to content herself with occasional visits, with phone calls and e-mails from her other sons. And with the knowledge that they were happy building their own lives.
She'd rooted them, and tended them, nurtured and trained. And let them go.
She wouldn't be one of those overbearing, smothering mothers. Sons, like plants, needed space and air. But oh, sometimes she wanted to go back ten years, twenty, and just hold on to those precious boys a little bit longer. •
And sentiment was only going to make her blue, she reminded herself. She switched off the water just
as Stella came into the greenhouse.
Roz drew a deep breath. "Nothing like the smell of damp soil, is there?"
"Not when you're us. Look at these marigolds. They're going to fly out the door. I missed you this morning."
"I wanted to get here early. I've got that Garden Club meeting this afternoon. I want to put together a couple dozen six-inch pots as centerpieces."
"Good advertising. I just wanted to thank you again for watching the boys for me last night."
"I enjoyed it. A lot. Did you have a good time?"
"I really did. Is it going to be a problem for you if Logan and I see each other socially?"
"Why would it be?"
"In a work situation ..."
"Adults should be able to live their own lives, just like in any situation. You're both unattached adults.
I expect you'll figure out for yourself if there's any problem with you socializing."
"And we're both using 'socializing' as a euphemism."
Roz began pinching back some petunias. "Stella, if you didn't want to have sex with a man who looks
like Logan, I'd worry about you."
"I guess you've got nothing to worry about, then. Still, I want to say ... I'm working for you, I'm living
in your house, so I want to say I'm not promiscuous."
"I'm sure you aren't." She glanced up briefly from her work. "You're too careful, too deliberate, and a
bit too bound up to be promiscuous."
"Another way of calling me a tight-ass," Stella muttered.
"Not precisely. But if you were promiscuous, it would still be your business and not mine. You don't
need my approval."
"I want it—because I'm working for you and living in your house. And because I respect you."
"All right, then." Roz moved on to impatiens. "You have it. One of the reasons I wanted you to live in
the house was because I wanted to get to know you, on a personal level. When I hired you, I was giving you a piece of something very important to me, personally important. So if I'd decided, after the first few weeks, that you weren't the sort of person I could like and respect, I'd have fired you." She glanced back. "No matter how competent you were. Competent just isn't that hard to find."
"Thanks. I think."
"I think I'll take in some of these geraniums that are already potted. Saves me time and trouble, and
we've got a good supply of them."
"Let me know how many, and I'll adjust the inventory. Roz, there was something else I wanted to talk
to you about."
'Talk away," Roz invited as she started to select her plants. ;
"It's about the ghost."
Roz lifted a salmon-pink geranium, studied it from all sides. "What about her?"
"I feel stupid even talking about this, but... have you ever felt threatened by her?"
"Threatened? No. I wouldn't use a word that strong." Roz set the geranium in a plastic tray, chose another. "Why?"
"Because, apparently, I've seen her."
"That's not unexpected. The Harper Bride tends to show herself to mothers, and young boys. Young girls, occasionally. I saw her myself a few times when I was a girl, then fairly regularly once the boys started coming along."
"Tell me what she looks like."
"About your height." As she spoke, Roz continued to select her geraniums for the Garden Club. "Thin. Very thin. Mid- to late twenties at my guess, though it's hard to tell. She doesn't look well. That is," she added with an absent smile, "even for a ghost. She strikes me as a woman who had a great deal of beauty, but was ill for some time. She's blond, and her eyes are somewhere between green and gray.
And very sad. She wears a gray dress—or it looks gray, and it hangs on her as if she'd lost weight."
Stella let out a breath. "That's who I saw. What I saw. It's too fantastic, but I saw."
"You should be flattered. She rarely shows herself to anyone outside the family—or so the legend goes. You shouldn't feel threatened, Stella."
"But I did. Last night, when I got home, and went in to check on the boys. I heard her first. She sings some sort of lullaby."
" 'Lavender's Blue.' It's what you could call her trademark." Taking out small clippers, Roz trimmed off
a weak side stem. "She's never spoken that I've heard, or heard of, but she sings to the children of the house at night."
" 'Lavender's Blue.' Yes, that's it. I heard her, and rushed in. There she was, standing between their beds. She looked at me. It was only for a second, but she looked at me. Her eyes weren't sad, Roz, they were angry. There was a blast of cold, like she'd thrown something at me in temper. Not like the other times, when I'd just felt a chill."
Interested now, Roz studied Stella's face. "I felt as if I'd annoyed her a few times, on and off. Just a change of tone. Very like you described, I suppose."
"It happened."
"I believe you, but primarily, from most of my experiences, she's always been a benign sort of presence.
I always took those temper snaps to be a kind of moodiness. I expect ghosts get moody."
"You expect ghosts get moody," Stella repeated slowly. "I just don't understand a statement like that."
"People do, don't they? Why should that change when they're dead?"
"Okay," Stella said after a moment. "I'm going to try to roll with all this, like it's not insanity. So, maybe she doesn't like me being here."
"Over the last hundred years or so, Harper House has had a lot of people live in it, a lot of houseguests. She ought to be used to it. If you'd feel better moving to the other wing—"
"No. I don't see how that would make a difference. And though I was unnerved enough last night to
sleep in the boys' room with them, she wasn't angry with them. It was just me. Who was she?"
"Nobody knows for sure. In polite company, she's referred to as the Harper Bride, but it's assumed she was a servant. A nurse or governess. My theory is one of the men in the house seduced her, maybe cast her off, especially if she got pregnant. There's the attachment to children, so it seemed most logical she had a connection to kids. It's a sure bet she died in or around the house."