“Mae Fitzpatrick.” Roz closed her eyes and tried to flip through the vast mental files of acquaintances. “I’m sorry, it doesn’t seem familiar.”
“She was married before. Wait a minute . . . Ives?”
“Mae Ives doesn’t ring bells either.”
“Well, she said she’d only met you a couple of times. Once was when you married Daddy. She was at your wedding.”
“Is that a fact? Well, that’s interesting, but not all that surprising. I think between my mama and John’s we had everybody in Shelby County and most of Tennessee at the wedding.”
“She knew Grandma Ashby.”
He sat on the garden path with her and told her of the conversation he’d had with Mae Fitzpatrick.
“Amazing, isn’t it,” she mused. “All those little angles and curls, and how they fit together.”
“I know. Mama, she had it figured. Too well-bred to say it right out, but she put it together, about Reginald Harper being the wealthy protector who’d cast his mistress off. She’s likely to talk about it.”
“And you think that bothers me? Honey, the fact that my great-grandfather had mistresses, that he kept women, tossed them aside, and lived a life generally rife with infidelity isn’t a reflection on me, or you. His behavior isn’t our responsibility, which is something I sincerely wish Amelia would realize.”
She dug out more weeds. “As to the rest of his behavior, which is beyond deplorable, it’s not our fault either. Mitch is writing about it. Unless you and your brothers feel strongly that all of this should be kept as closely within the family as possible, I want him to do this book.”
“Why?”
“It’s not our fault, it’s not our responsibility. That’s all true,” she said as she sat back to look at him. “But I feel that airing all of this is somehow giving her her due. It’s a way to acknowledge an ancestor who, no matter what she did, what she became, was treated shabbily at best, monstrously at worst.”
She lifted her hand, pressed her soil-streaked palm to his. “She’s our blood.”
“Does that make me heartless because I want her gone, I want her ended for what she nearly did to you, for what she’s doing now to Hayley?”
“No. It means Hayley and I are closer to your heart. That’s enough for today.” She swiped her hands on the thighs of her gardening pants. “We’re going to boil in this wet heat if we stay out much longer. Come on inside with me. Let’s sit in the cool and have a beer.”
“Tell me something.” He studied the house as they walked down the path. “How did you know that Daddy was the one?”
“Stars in my eyes.” She laughed, and despite the heat hooked an arm through his. “I swear, stars in my eyes. I was so young, and he put stars in my eyes. But that was infatuation. I think I knew that he was mine when we talked for hours one night. I snuck out of the house to meet him. God, my daddy would have skinned him alive. But all we did was talk, hour after hour, under a willow tree. He was just a boy, but I knew I’d love him all of my life. And I have. I knew because we sat there, almost till dawn, and he made me laugh, and made me think and dream and tremble. I never thought I’d love again. But I do. It takes nothing away from your father, Harper.”
“Mama. I know.” He closed a hand over hers. “How did you know with Mitch?”
“I guess I was too cynical for those stars, at least at first. It was slower, and scarier. He makes me laugh and think and dream and tremble. And there was a time during that longer, slower climb that I looked at him, and my heart warmed again. I’d forgotten what it was like to feel that warmth inside the heart.”
“He’s a good man. He loves you. He watches you when you come into a room, when you walk out of one. I’m glad you found him.”
“So am I.”
“With Daddy? What willow was it?”
“Oh, it was a big, beautiful old tree, way back, beyond the old stables.” She paused, looked toward the ruin, gestured. “John was going to come back sometime soon after, carve our initials in the trunk. But that next night lightning struck it, split it right in two, and—Oh my God.”
“Amelia,” he said softly.
“It had to be. It never occurred to me before this, but I remember there hadn’t been a storm. The servants were talking about the tree and the lightning hitting it when there hadn’t been a storm.”
“So even then,” he said, “she took her shots.”
“How mean, how petty of her. I cried over that tree. I fell in love under it, and cried when I watched the groundskeepers clear away the wood and pull the trunk out.”
“Don’t you wonder if there were other things? Small, violent acts we passed off as nature or some strange quirk, all while we thought of her as benevolent?”
He studied the house now, thought of what it was to him—and what had walked there long before he was born. “She’s never been benevolent, not really.”
“All that hate and anger stored up. Trapped.”
“Leaking now and again, like water through a crack in a dam. It’s coming faster and harder now. And we can’t put it back in, Mama. What we have to do is empty it out, draw out every drop.”
“How?”
“I think we’re going to have to break the dam, while we’re the ones holding the hammer.”
IT WAS TWILIGHT when Hayley wandered through the gardens. The baby was asleep, and Roz and Mitch were taking monitor duty. Harper’s car was there, so he was somewhere. Not in the carriage house, because she’d knocked, then poked her head in and called.
It wasn’t as if they were joined at the hip, she reminded herself. But he hadn’t stayed for dinner. He’d said he’d had something to do, that he’d be back before dark.
Well, it was nearly dark, and she was just wondering.
Besides, she liked walking in the gardens, in the gloaming. Even under the circumstances. It was soothing, and she could use a little soothing after running the story he’d told her about the bracelet over and over in her head.
They were getting closer to the answers, she was sure of it. But she was no longer sure it would all end quietly once they had them.
Amelia might not be content to give up her last links with this world and pass on—she supposed that was the term—to the next.
She liked inhabiting a body. If you could call it inhabiting. Sharing one? Sliding through one? Whatever it was, Amelia liked it, of that Hayley was sure. Just as she was sure it was something as new for Amelia as it was for herself.
If it happened again—when, she corrected, ordering herself to face facts. When it happened again, she was going to fight to stay more aware, to find more control.
And wasn’t that what she was doing out here alone, in the half light? No point in pretending to herself this wasn’t a deliberate move. A sort of dare. Come on, bitch. She wanted to see what she could handle, and how she would handle it when no one else was around to run interference. Or be hurt.
But nothing was happening. She felt completely normal, completely herself.
And was completely herself when sounds out of the shadows made her jump. She stopped, caught in the crosshairs of fight or flight, ears straining. The rhythmic, repetitive sound made her frown as she inched forward.
It sounded . . . but it couldn’t be. Still her heart beat like wings as she crept closer, envisioning a ghostly figure digging a grave.
Amelia’s grave. It could be. This could be the answer, at last. Reginald had murdered her, then buried her here on the property. She was going to be shown the grave—on unconsecrated ground. They could have it blessed or marked or—well, she’d look up what was done in cases like this.
Then the haunting of Harper House would be over.