In the Garden Trilogy

by Nora Roberts

  “We must’ve fallen asleep. I remember waking up, thinking somebody had stroked my head. I thought it was Roz, and I was a little embarrassed, so I squinted one eye open to see.”

  He sipped coffee, narrowing his eyes as he searched for the memory. “And I saw her. She walked over to Harper’s bed and bent over him, the way you do when you kiss a child on the top of the head. Then she walked across the room. There was a rocking chair over in the corner. She sat down and started to rock, and sing.”

  He set the coffee down. “I don’t know if I made some sound, or moved, or what, but she looked right at me. She smiled. I thought she was crying, but she smiled. And she put her finger to her lips as if to tell me to hush. Then she disappeared.”

  “What did you do?” Hayley whispered the question, reverently.

  “I pulled the covers over my head, and stayed under till morning.”

  “You were afraid of her?” Stella prompted.

  “Nine-year-old, ghost—and I have a sensitive nature, so sure. But I didn’t stay afraid. In the morning it seemed like a dream, but a nice one. She’d stroked my hair and sung to me. And she was pretty. No rattling chains or bloodless howls. She seemed a little like an angel, so I wasn’t afraid of her. I told Harper about it in the morning, and he said we must be brothers, because none of his other friends got to see her.”

  He smiled at the memory. “I felt pretty proud of that, and looked forward to seeing her again. I saw her a few more times when I was over. Then, when I was about thirteen the—we’ll say visitations—stopped.”

  “Did she ever speak to you?”

  “No, she’d just sing. That same song.”

  “Did you only see her in the bedroom, at night?”

  “No. There was this time we all camped out back. It was summer, hot and buggy, but we nagged Roz until she let all of us sleep out there in a tent. We didn’t make it through the night ’cause Mason cut his foot on a rock. Remember that, Roz?”

  “I do. Two o’clock in the morning, and I’m packing four kids in the car so I can take one of them to the ER for stitches.”

  “We were out there before sunset, out near the west edge of the property. By ten we were all of us half sick on hot dogs and marshmallows, and had spooked ourselves stupid with ghost stories. Lightning bugs were out,” he murmured, closing his eyes. “Past midsummer then, and steamy. We’d all stripped down to our underwear. The younger ones fell asleep, but Harper and I stayed up for a while. A long while. I must’ve conked out, because the next thing I knew, Harper was shaking my shoulder. ‘There she is,’ he said, and I saw her, walking in the garden.”

  “Oh, my God,” Hayley managed, and edged closer to David as Stella continued to type. “What happened then?”

  “Well, Harper’s hissing in my ear about how we should go follow her, and I’m trying to talk him out of it without sacrificing my manhood. The other two woke up, and Harper said he was going, and we could stay behind if we were yellow coward dogs.”

  “I bet that got you moving,” Stella commented.

  “Being a yellow coward dog isn’t an option for a boy in the company of other boys. We all got moving. Mason couldn’t’ve been but six, but he was trotting along at the rear, trying to keep up. There was moonlight, so we could see her, but Harper said we had to hang back some, so she didn’t see us.

  “I swear there wasn’t a breath of air that night, not a whisper of it to stir a leaf. She didn’t make a sound as she walked along the paths, through the shrubs. There was something different about her that night. I didn’t realize what it was until long after.”

  “What?” Breathless, Hayley leaned forward, gripped his arm. “What was different about her that night?”

  “Her hair was down. Always before, she’d had it up. Sort of sweet and old-fashioned ringlets spiraling down from the top of her head. But that night it was down, and kind of wild, spilling down her back, over her shoulders. And she was wearing something white and floaty. She looked more like a ghost that night than she ever did otherwise. And I was afraid of her, more than I was the first time, or ever was again. She moved off the path, walked over the flowers without touching them. I could hear my own breath pant in and out, and I must’ve slowed down because Harper was well ahead. She was going toward the old stables, or maybe the carriage house.”

  “The carriage house?” Hayley almost squealed it. “Where Harper lives?”

  “Yeah. He wasn’t living there then,” he added with a laugh. “He wasn’t more than ten. It seemed like she was heading for the stables, but she’d have to go right by the carriage house. So, she stopped, and she turned around, looking back. I know I stopped dead then, and the blood just drained out of me.”

  “I guess!” Hayley said, with feeling.

  “She looked crazy, and that was worse than dead somehow. Before I could decide whether to run after Harper, or hightail it like a yellow coward dog, Mason screamed. I thought somehow she’d gotten him, and damn near screamed myself. But Harper came flying back. Turned out Mason had gashed his foot open on a rock. When I looked back toward the old stables, she was gone.”

  He stopped, shuddered, then let out a weak laugh. “Scared myself.”

  “Me, too,” Hayley managed.

  “He needed six stitches.” Roz scooted the notebook toward Stella. “That’s how she looks to me.”

  “That’s her.” Stella studied the sketch of the thin, sad-eyed woman. “Is this how she looked to you, David?”

  “Except that one night, yeah.”

  “Hayley?”

  “Best I can tell.”

  “Same for me. This shows her in fairly simple dress, nipped-in waist, high neck, front buttons. Okay, the sleeves are a little poufed down to the elbow, then snug to the wrist. Skirt’s smooth over the hips, then widens out some. Her hair’s curly, lots of curls that are scooped up in a kind of topknot. I’m going to do an Internet search on fashion, but it’s obviously after the 1860s, right? Scarlett O’Hara hoop skirts were the thing around then. And it’d be before, say, the 1920s and the shorter skirts.”

  “I think it’s near the turn of the century,” Hayley put in, then shrugged when gazes shifted to her. “I know a lot of useless stuff. That looks like what they called hourglass style. I mean, even though she’s way thin, it looks like that’s the style. Gay Nineties stuff.”

  “That’s good. Okay, let’s look it up and see.” Stella tapped keys, hit Execute.

  “I gotta pee. Don’t find anything important until I get back.” Hayley dashed out, as fast as her condition would allow.

  Stella scanned the sites offered, and selected one on women’s fashion in the 1890s.

  “Late Victorian,” she stated as she read and skimmed pictures. “Hourglass. These are all what I’d think of as more stylish, but it seems like the same idea.”

  She moved to the end of the decade, and over into the early twentieth century. “No, see, these sleeves are a lot bigger at the shoulder. They’re calling them leg-o’-mutton, and the bodices on the daywear seem a little sleeker.”

  She backtracked in the other direction. “No, we’re getting into bustles here. I think Hayley may have it. Somewhere in the 1890s.”

  “Eighteen-nineties?” Hayley hurried back in. “Score one for me.”

  “Not so fast. If she was a servant,” Roz reminded them, “she might not have been dressed fashionably.”

  “Damn.” Hayley mimed erasing a scoreboard.

  “But even so, we could say between 1890 and, what, 1910?” Stella suggested. “And if we go with that, and an approximate age of twenty-five, we could estimate that she was born between 1865 and 1885.”

  She huffed out a breath. “That’s too much scope, and too much margin for error.”

  “Hair,” David said. “She may have been a servant, may have had secondhand clothes, but there’d be nothing to stop her from wearing her hair in the latest style.”

  “Excellent.” She typed again, picked through sites. “Okay, the Gibson Gi
rl deal—the smooth pompadour—was popularized after 1895. If we take a leap of faith, and figure our heroine dressed her hair stylishly, we’d narrow this down to between 1890 and 1895, or up to, say ’98 if she was a little behind the times. Then we’d figure she died in that decade, anyway, between the ages of ... oh, let’s say between twenty-two and twenty-six.”

  “Family Bible first,” Roz decided. “That should tell us if any of the Harper women, by blood or marriage, and of that age group, died in that decade.”

  She dragged it in front of her. The binding was black leather, ornately carved. Someone—Stella imagined it was Roz herself—kept it dusted and oiled.

  Roz paged through to the family genealogy. “This goes back to 1793 and the marriage of John Andrew Harper to Fiona MacRoy. It lists the births of their eight children.”

  “Eight?” Hayley widened her eyes and laid a hand on her belly. “Holy God.”

  “You said it. Six of them lived to adulthood,” Roz continued. “Married and begat, begat, begat.” She turned the thin pages carefully. “Here we’ve got several girl children born through Harper marriages between 1865 and 1870. And here, we’ve got an Alice Harper Doyle, died in childbirth October of 1893, at the age of twenty-two.”

  “That’s awful,” Hayley said. “She was younger than me.”

  “And already gave birth twice,” Roz stated. “Tough on women back then, before Margaret Sanger.”

  “Would she have lived here, in this house?” Stella asked. “Died here?”

  “Might have. She married Daniel Francis Doyle, of Natchez, in 1890. We can check the death records on her. I’ve got three more who died during the period we’re using, but the ages are wrong. Let’s see here, Alice was Reginald Harper’s youngest sister. He had two more, no brothers. He’d have inherited the house, and the estate. A lot of space between Reggie and each of his sisters. Probably miscarriages.”

  At Hayley’s small sound, Roz looked up sharply. “I don’t want this to upset you.”

  “I’m okay. I’m okay,” she said again and took a long breath. “So Reginald was the only son on that branch of the family tree?”

  “He was. Lots of cousins, and the estate would’ve passed to one of them after his death, but he had a son—several daughters first, then the boy, in 1892.”

  “What about his wife?” Stella put in. “Maybe she’s the one.”

  “No, she lived until 1925. Ripe age.”

  “Then we look at Alice first,” Stella decided.

  “And see what we can find on servants during that period. Wouldn’t be a stretch for Reginald to have diddled around with a nurse or a maid while his wife was breeding. Seeing as he was a man.”

  “Hey!” David objected.

  “Sorry, honey. Let me say he was a Harper man, and lived during a period where men of a certain station had mistresses and didn’t think anything of taking a servant to bed.”

  “That’s some better. But not a lot.”

  “Are we sure he and his family lived here during that period?”

  “A Harper always lived in Harper House,” Roz told Stella. “And if I remember my family history, Reginald’s the one who converted from gaslight to electricity. He’d have lived here until his death in ...” She checked the book. “Nineteen-nineteen, and the house passed to his son, Reginald Junior, who’d married Elizabeth Harper McKinnon—fourth cousin—in 1916.”

  “All right, so we find out if Alice died here, and we go through records to find out if there were any servants of the right age who died during that period.” Using her notebook now, Stella wrote down the points of the search. “Roz, do you know when the—let’s call them sightings for lack of better. Do you know when they began?”

  “I don’t, and I’m just realizing that’s odd. I should know, and I should know more about her than I do. Harper family history gets passed down, orally and written. But here we have a ghost who as far as I know’s been wandering around here for more than a century, and I know next to nothing about her. My daddy just called her the Harper Bride.”

  “What do you know about her?” Stella readied herself to take notes.

  “What she looks like, the song she sings. I saw her when I was a girl, when she came in my room to sing that lullaby, just as she’s reputed to have done for generations before. It was ... comforting. There was a gentleness about her. I tried to talk to her sometimes, but she never talked back. She’d just smile. Sometimes she’d cry. Thanks, sweetie,” she said when David poured her more coffee. “I didn’t see her through my teenage years, and being a teenage girl I didn’t think about her much. I had my mind on other things. But I remember the next time I saw her.”

  “Don’t keep us in suspense,” Hayley demanded.

  “It was early in the summer, end of June. John and I hadn’t been married very long, and we were staying here. It was already hot, one of those hot, still nights where the air’s like a wet blanket. But I couldn’t sleep, so I left the cool house for the hot garden. I was restless and nervy. I thought I might be pregnant. I wanted it—we wanted it so much, that I couldn’t think about anything else. I went out to the garden and sat on this old teak glider, and dreamed up at the moon, praying it was true and we’d started a baby.”

  She let out a little sigh. “I was barely eighteen. Anyway, while I sat there, she came. I didn’t see or hear her come, she was just there, standing on the path. Smiling. Something in the way she smiled at me, something about it, made me know—absolutely know—I had child in me. I sat there, in the midnight heat and cried for the joy of it. When I went to the doctor a couple weeks later, I already knew I was carrying Harper.”

  “That’s so nice.” Hayley blinked back tears. “So sweet.”

  “I saw her off and on for years after, and always saw her at the onset of a pregnancy, before I was sure. I’d see her, and I’d know there was a baby coming. When my youngest hit adolescence, I stopped seeing her regularly.”

  “It has to be about children,” Stella decided, underlining “pregnancy” twice in her notes. “That’s the common link. Children see her, women with children, or pregnant women. The died-in-childbirth theory is looking good.” Immediately she winced. “Sorry, Hayley, that didn’t sound right.”

  “I know what you mean. Maybe she’s Alice. Maybe what she needs to pass over is to be acknowledged by name.”

  “Well.” Stella looked at the cartons and books. “Let’s dig in.”

  SHE DREAMED AGAIN THAT NIGHT, WITH HER MIND full of ghosts and questions, of her perfect garden with the blue dahlia that grew stubbornly in its midst.

  A weed is a flower growing in the wrong place.

  She heard the voice inside her head, a voice that wasn’t her own.

  “It’s true. That’s true,” she murmured. “But it’s so beautiful. So strong and vivid.”

  It seems so now, but it’s deceptive. If it stays, it changes everything. It will take over, and spoil everything you’ve done. Everything you have. Would you risk that, risk all, for one dazzling flower? One that will only die away at the first frost?

  “I don’t know.” Studying the garden, she rubbed her arms as her skin pricked with unease. “Maybe I could change the plan. I might be able to use it as a focal point.”

  Thunder boomed and the sky went black, as she stood by the garden, just as she’d once stood through a stormy evening in her own kitchen.

  And the grief she’d felt then stabbed into her as if someone had plunged a knife into her heart.

  Feel it? Would you feel it again? Would you risk that kind of pain, for this?

  “I can’t breathe.” She sank to her knees as the pain radiated. “I can’t breathe. What’s happening to me?”

  Remember it. Think of it. Remember the innocence of your children and hack it down. Dig it out. Before it’s too late! Can’t you see how it tries to overshadow the rest? Can’t you see how it steals the light? Beauty can be poison.

  She woke, shivering with cold, with her heart beating against the pa
in that had ripped awake with her.

  And knew she hadn’t been alone, not even in dreams.

  thirteen

  ON HER DAY OFF, STELLA TOOK THE BOYS TO MEET her father and his wife at the zoo. Within an hour, the boys were carting around rubber snakes, balloons, and chowing down on ice cream cones.

  Stella had long since accepted that a grandparent’s primary job was to spoil, and since fate had given her sons only this one set, she let them have free rein.

  When the reptile house became the next objective, she opted out, freely handing the controls of the next stage to Granddad.

  “Your mom’s always been squeamish about snakes,” Will told the boys.

  “And I’m not ashamed to admit it. You all just go ahead. I’ll wait.”

  “I’ll keep you company.” Jolene adjusted her baby-blue ball cap. “I’d rather be with Stella than a boa constrictor any day.”

  “Girls.” Will exchanged a pitying look with each of his grandsons. “Come on, men, into the snake pit!”

  On a battle cry, the three of them charged the building.

  “He’s so good with them,” Stella said. “So natural and easy. I’m so glad we’re living close now, and they can see each other regularly.”

  “You couldn’t be happier about it than we are. I swear that man’s been like a kid himself the last couple of days, just waiting for today to get here. He couldn’t be more proud of the three of you.”

  “I guess we both missed out on a lot when I was growing up.”

  “It’s good you’re making up for it now.”

  Stella glanced at Jolene as they walked over to a bench. “You never say anything about her. You never criticize.”

  “Sugar pie, I bit my tongue to ribbons more times than I can count in the last twenty-seven years.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, honey, when you’re the second wife, and the stepmama on top of that, it’s the smartest thing you can do. Besides, you grew up to be a strong, smart, generous woman raising the two most handsome, brightest, most charming boys on God’s green earth. What’s the point of criticizing?”