Black Rose (10 page)

“I’m sorry, Mitch.”

“No need to be. Sara, my ex, did everything she could do. She loved me, and she wanted the life I’d promised her. She stuck with me longer than many would have. She begged me to quit, and I’d promise or reassure, or fluff her off. Bills were paid, weren’t they? We had a nice house, and we never missed a mortgage payment. I wasn’t some
stumbling-down, sprawled-in-the-gutter drunk, was I, for God’s sake? I just had a few drinks to take the edge off. Of course, I started taking the edge off at ten in the morning, but I was entitled.”

He paused, shook his head. “It’s easy to delude yourself that you’re entitled, that you’re just fine when you’re in a haze most of the time. Easy to ignore the fact that you’re letting your wife and child down in a dozen ways, every single day. Forgetting dinner parties or birthdays, slipping out of bed—where you are useless to her in any case—to have just one more drink, dozing off when you’re supposed to be watching your own baby. Just not being there, not completely there. Ever.”

“It’s a hard thing to go through, I imagine. For everyone involved.”

“Harder for the ones you shipwreck with you, believe me. I wouldn’t go to counseling with her, refused to attend meetings, to talk to anyone about what she saw as my problem. Even when she told me she was leaving me, when she packed her things, and Josh’s things, and walked out. I barely noticed they were gone.”

“That was tremendously brave of her.”

“Yes, it was.” His gaze sharpened on Roz’s face. “Yes, it was, and I suppose a woman like you would understand just how brave it was. It took me another full year to hit the bottom, to look around at my life and see nothing. To realize I’d lost what was most precious, and that it was too late to ever get it back. I went to meetings.”

“That takes courage, too.”

“My first meeting?” He took another bite of his sandwich. “Scared to death. I sat in the back of the room, in the basement of this tiny church, and shook like a child.”

“A lot of courage.”

“I was sober for three months, ten days, and five hours when I reached for a bottle again. Fought my way out of
that, and sobriety lasted eleven months, two days, and fifteen hours. She wouldn’t come back to me, you see. She’d met someone else and she couldn’t trust me. I used that as an excuse to drink, and I drank the next few months away, until I crawled back out of the hole.”

He lifted his coffee. “That was fourteen years ago next March. March fifth. Sara forgave me. In addition to being brave, she’s a generous woman, one who deserved better than what she got from me. Josh forgave me, and in the past fourteen years, I’ve been a good father. The best I know how to be.”

“I think it takes a brave man, and a strong one to face his demons, and beat them back, and keep facing them every single day. And a generous one, a smart one who shoulders the blame rather than passing it on, even partially, to others.”

“Not drinking doesn’t make me a hero, Roz. It just makes me sober. Now if I could just kick the coffee habit.”

“That makes two of us.”

“Now that I’ve talked your ear off, I’m going to ask you to return the favor, and give that first interview when we’ve finished eating.”

“All right. Am I going to be talking for the recorder?”

“Primarily, yeah, though I’ll take some notes.”

“Then maybe we could do that in the parlor, where it’s a little more comfortable.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

She checked on Lily first, and took the first phone call from Hayley. While Mitch gathered whatever he needed from the library, she pulled the tray of fresh fruit—David never missed a trick—and the brie and cheddar, the crackers, he’d stocked.

Even as she wheeled it toward the parlor, Mitch came up behind her. “Let me get that.”

“No, I’ve got it. But you could light the fire. A fire’d be
nice. It’s cold tonight, but thank God, clear. I’d hate to worry about my chicks navigating slick roads on their way home to roost later.”

“I thought the same thing about my own earlier. Never ends, does it?”

“No.” She set out the food, the coffee, then sat on the couch, instinctively propped her feet on the table. She stared at her own feet, surprised. It was a habit, she knew, but one she didn’t indulge in when she had guests. She glanced at Mitch’s back as he crouched to light kindling.

She supposed it meant she was comfortable with him, and that was fine. Better than labeling him a guest as she’d be trusting him with her family.

“You’re right, it’s nice to have a fire.”

He came back, set up his recorder, his notebook, then settled on the other end of the couch, shifting his body toward hers. “I’d like to start off with you telling me about the first time you remember seeing Amelia.”

Straight to business, she thought. “I don’t know that I remember a first time, not specifically. I’d have been young. Very. I remember her voice, the singing, and a kind of comforting presence. I thought—to the best of my memory, that is—that it was my mother. But my mother wasn’t one to look in at night, and I never remember her singing to me. It wasn’t her way. I remember her—Amelia—being there a few times when I was sick. A cold, a fever. It’s more that she was there, and expected to be in a way, than a jolting first time.”

“Who told you about her?”

“My father, my grandmother. My grandmother more, I suppose. The family would talk about her casually, in vague terms. She was both a point of pride—we have a ghost—and a slight embarrassment—we have a ghost. Depending on who was talking. My father believed she was one of the Harper Brides, while my grandmother maintained she was
a servant or guest, someone who’d been misused somehow. Someone who had died here, but wasn’t blood kin.”

“Did your father, your grandmother, your mother, ever tell you about their specific experiences with her?”

“My mother would get palpitations if the subject was brought up. My mother was very fond of her palpitations.”

Mitch grinned at the dry tone, watched her spread some brie. “I had a great-aunt like that. She had spells. Her day wasn’t complete without at least one spell.”

“Why some people delight in having conditions is more than I can understand. My mother did speak to me of her once or twice, in a sort of gloom-and-doom manner—something else she was fond of. Warning me that one day I’d inherit this burden, and hoping for my sake it didn’t shatter my health, as it had hers.”

“She was afraid of Amelia, then.”

“No, no.” Roz waved that away, nibbled on a cracker. “She enjoyed being long-suffering, and a kind of trembling martyr. Which sounds very unkind coming from her only child.”

“Let’s call it honest instead.”

“Comes to the same. In any case, other times, it was bearing and birthing me that had ruined her health. And others, she’d been delicate since a bout of pneumonia as a child. Hardly matters.”

“Actually, it’s helpful. Bits and pieces, personal observations and memories are helpful, a start toward the big picture. What about your father?”

“My father was generally amused by the idea of a ghost and had fond memories of her from his own childhood. But then he’d be annoyed or embarrassed if she made an appearance and frightened a guest. My father was fiercely hospitable, and mortified on a deep, personal level if a guest in his home was inconvenienced.”

“What sort of memories did he have?”

“The same you’ve heard before. It hardly varies. Her singing to him, visiting him in his room, a maternal presence until he was about twelve.”

“No disturbances?”

“Not that he told me, but my grandmother said he sometimes had nightmares as a boy. Just one or two a year, where he claimed to see a woman in white, with her eyes bulging, and he could hear her screaming in his head. Sometimes she was in his room, sometimes she was outside, and so was he—in the dream.”

“Dreams would be another common thread, then. Have you had any?”

“No, not . . .”

“What?”

“I always thought it was nerves. In the weeks before John and I were married, I had dreams. Of storms. Black skies and thunder, cold winds. A hole in the garden, like a grave, with dead flowers inside it.” She shivered once. “Horrible. But they stopped after I was married. I dismissed them.”

“And since?”

“No. Never. My grandmother saw her more than anyone, at least more than anyone would admit to. In the house, in the garden, in my father’s room when he was a boy. She never told me anything frightening. But maybe she wouldn’t have. Of all my family, that I recall, she was the most sympathetic toward Amelia. But to be honest, it wasn’t the primary topic of conversation in the house. It was simply accepted, or ignored.”

“Let’s talk about that blood kin, then.” He pulled his glasses out of his shirt pocket to read his notes. “The furthest back you know, personally, of sightings starts with your grandmother Elizabeth McKinnon Harper.”

“That’s not completely accurate. She told me my grandfather, her husband, had seen the Bride when he was a child.”

“That’s her telling you what she’d been told, not what she claimed to have seen and experienced herself. But speaking to that, can you recall being told of any experiences that happened in the generation previous to your grandparents?”

“Ah . . . she said her mother-in-law, that would be my great-grandmother Harper, refused to go into certain rooms.”

“Which rooms?”

“Ah . . . lord, let me think. The nursery, which was on the third floor in those days. The master bedroom. She moved herself out of it at some point, I’m assuming. The kitchen. And she wouldn’t set foot in the carriage house. From my grandmother’s description of her, she wasn’t a fanciful woman. It was always thought she’d seen the Bride. If there was another prior to that, I don’t know about it. But there shouldn’t be. We’ve dated her to the 1890s.”

“You’ve dated her based on a dress and a hairstyle,” he said as he scribbled. “That’s not quite enough.”

“It certainly seems sensible, logical.”

He looked up, smiling, his eyes distracted behind his glasses. “It may be. You may be right, but I like a little more data before I call something a fact. What about your great-aunts? Reginald Jr.’s older sisters?”

“I couldn’t say. I didn’t know any of them, or don’t remember them. And they weren’t close with my grandmother, or my father. There was some attempt, on my grandmother’s part, to cement some familial relations between their children and my father, as cousins. I’m still in contact with some of their children.”

“Will any of them talk to me?”

“Some will, some won’t. Some are dead. I’ll give you names and numbers.”

“All,” he said. “Except the dead ones. I can be persuasive.
Again,” he murmured as the singing came from the monitor across the room.

“Again. I want to go check on Lily.”

“Do you mind if I come with you?”

“No. Come ahead.” They started upstairs together. “Most likely it’ll stop before we get there. That’s the pattern.”

“There were two nursemaids, three governesses, a housekeeper, an under-housekeeper, a total of twelve housemaids, a personal maid, three female kitchen staff between 1890 and 1895. I’ve dug up some of the names, but as ages aren’t listed, I’m having to wade through a lot of records to try to pinpoint the right people. If and when, I’ll start on death records, and tracking down descendants.”

“You’ll be busy.”

“Gotta love the work. You’re right. It’s stopped.”

But they continued down the hall to the nursery. “Cold still,” Roz commented. “It doesn’t last long, though.” She moved to the crib, slid the blanket more neatly around the sleeping baby.

“Such a good baby,” she said quietly. “Sleeps right through the night most of the time. None of mine did at this age. She’s fine. We should leave her be.”

She stepped out, leaving the door open. They were at the top of the stairs when the clock began to bong.

“Midnight?” Roz looked at her watch to be certain. “I didn’t realize it was so late. Well, Happy New Year.”

“Happy New Year.” He took her hand before she could continue down the steps and, laying the other on her cheek, said, “Do you mind?”

“No, I don’t mind.”

His lips brushed hers, very lightly, a kind of civilized and polite gesture to commemorate the changing year. And somewhere in the east wing, Roz’s wing, a door slammed shut like a gunshot.

Though her heart jumped, she managed to speak evenly. “Obviously, she doesn’t approve.”

“More like she’s pissed off. And if she’s going to be pissed off, we might as well give her a good reason.”

He didn’t ask this time, just slid the hand that lay on her cheek around to cup the back of her neck. And this time his mouth wasn’t light, or polite, or civilized. There was a punch of heat, straight to her belly, as his mouth crushed down on hers, as his body pressed, hard against hers. She felt that sizzle zip through her blood, fast and reckless, and let herself ride on it for just one mad moment.

The door in the east wing slammed, again and again, and the clock continued to chime, madly now, well past the hour of twelve.

He’d known she’d taste like this, ripe and strong. More tang than sweetness. He’d wanted to feel those lips move against his as they were now, to discover just how that long, slender body fit to his. Now that he was, she settled inside him and made him want more.

But she eased back, her eyes open and direct. “Well. That ought to do it.”

“It’s a start.”

“I think it’d be best to keep everything . . . calm for tonight. I really should tidy up the parlor, and settle down up here, with Lily.”

“All right. I’ll get my notes and head home.”

In the parlor she loaded the cart while he gathered his things. “You’re a difficult woman to read, Rosalind.”

“I’m sure that’s true.”

“You know I want to stay, you know I want to take you to bed.”

“Yes, I know.” She looked over at him. “I don’t take lovers . . . I was going to say just that. That I don’t take lovers, but I’m going to say, instead, I don’t take them rashly,
or lightly. So if I decide to take you as a lover, or let you take me, it will be serious business, Mitchell. Very serious business. That’s something both of us need to consider.”