Red Lily (24 page)

“We’re taking you out,” Roz said.

“No, no. Just don’t let go. She’s dying—it’s horrible—and she’s so angry.” Hayley let her head fall onto Roz’s shoulder. “It’s dark. It’s dark where she is. Was. No light, no air, no hope. She lost. They took him again, and now she’s alone. She’ll always be alone. She can’t see, she can’t feel. Everything seems so far away. Very cold, very dark. There are voices, but she can’t hear them, only echoes. It’s so empty. She’s going down, down, so heavy. She can only see the dark. She doesn’t know where she is. She just floats away.”

She sighed, left her head on Roz’s shoulder. “I can’t help it, even in this room, I feel sorry for her. She was cold and selfish, calculating. A whore, certainly, in the lowest sense of the word. But she’s paid for it, hasn’t she? More than a hundred years of being lost, of watching over other people’s children and never having more than that one mad moment with her own. She’s paid.”

“Maybe she has. Are you all right?”

Hayley nodded. “It wasn’t like before, not the way I could feel her pulling at me. I was stronger. I need life more than she does. I think she’s tired. Almost as tired as we are.”

“That may be, too. But you don’t let your guard down.” Stella looked up where once had hung an armed gaslight chandelier. “Not for a minute.”

“Let’s go back.” Stella rose, helped Hayley to her feet. “You did what you could. We all have.”

“It doesn’t seem like enough. It was a brutal death. It wasn’t quick, and she saw the maid run out with the baby. She reached out her arms for him, even when she was strangling.”

“That’s not a mother’s love, whatever she thought,” Roz said.

“No, it’s not. It wasn’t. But it was all she had.” Hayley moistened her lips, wished desperately for water. “She cursed him—Reginald. Cursed them all—the Harpers. She . . . she willed herself to stay here. But she’s tired. Part of her, the part that sings lullabies, is so tired and lost.”

She let out a sigh, then smiled when she saw Harper pacing the landing. “We’ve all got so much more than she did. We’re fine.” She left the other women to go to him. “I guess we didn’t get what we were after, but we’re fine.”

“What happened?”

“I saw her die, and I felt her in the dark. Awful. Dark and cold and alone. Lost.” She leaned against him, let him lead her downstairs. “I don’t know what happened to her, what they did with her. She was going down in the dark, in the dark and cold.”

“Buried?”

“I don’t know. It was more . . . floating away in the dark, drifting down where she couldn’t see or hear, or find her way out.” Unconsciously, she rubbed a hand over her throat, remembering the sensation of the rope biting in. “Maybe it was a soul thing—you know the opposite of the tunnel of light.”

“Floating, drifting?” Harper’s eyes went sharp. “How about sinking?”

“Ah . . . yeah. I guess.”

“The pond,” he said and looked at her. “We never thought of the pond.”

“T
HIS IS CRAZY
.” In the hazy light of dawn, Hayley stood on the bank of the pond. “It could take hours, more. He should have help. We could get other people. Search-and-rescue people.”

Roz slid an arm over her shoulders. “He wants to do this. He needs to.” She watched while Harper pulled on flippers. “It’s time for us to step back, let them do.”

The pond looked so dark and deep with the skim of fog rising over its surface. The floating lilies, the spears of cattails and iris greens that had always seemed so charming to her were ominous now, fairy-tale foreign and frightening.

But she remembered how he’d paced the landing while she’d gone up the stairs into the nursery.

“He trusted me,” Hayley said quietly. “Now I have to trust him.”

Mitch crouched beside Harper, handed him an underwater lamp. “Got everything you need?”

“Yeah. Been a while since I scuba’d.” He took deep, steady breaths to expand his lungs. “But it’s like sex, you don’t forget the moves.”

“I can get some students, some friends of my son’s who know the moves, too.” Like Hayley, Mitch studied the wide, misty surface of the water. “It’s a big pond for one man to cover.”

“Whatever else she was, she was mine, so it’s for me to do. What Hayley said last night about maybe she’d been meant to help find her. I’m feeling the same about this.”

Mitch braced a hand on his shoulder. “You keep an eye
on your watch, surface every thirty minutes. Otherwise, your mama’s going to toss me in after you.”

“Got it.” He looked over at Hayley, shot her a grin.

“Hey.” She stepped to him, crouched down. With a hand on his cheek she touched her mouth to his. “For luck.”

“Take all I can get. Don’t worry. I’ve been swimming in this pond . . .” He glanced up at his mother, and vague memories of his own tiny hands slapping at the water while she held him flashed into his mind. “Well, longer than I can remember.”

“I’m not worried.”

He kissed her again, tested his mouthpiece. Then, adjusting his mask, slid into the pond.

He’d swum here countless times, he thought as he dived, following the beam of the light through the water. Cooling off on hot summer afternoons, or taking an impulsive dip before work in the morning.

Or bringing a girl back after a date and talking her into a moonlight skinny dip.

He’d splashed with his brothers in this pond, he remembered, playing his light over the muddy bottom before he checked his watch, his compass. His mother had taught them each how to swim here, and he remembered the laughter, the shrieks, and the cool, quiet moments.

Had all that happened over the grave of Amelia?

Mentally, he cut the pond into wedges, like a pie, and methodically began to search each slice.

At thirty minutes, then an hour, he surfaced.

He sat on the edge, feet dangling in while Logan helped him change his tank. “I’ve covered nearly half. Found some beer cans, soft drink bottles.” He tilted his face toward his mother. “And don’t look at me, I got more respect.”

She reached down, skimmed a hand over his dripping hair. “I should think.”

“Somebody’d get me a bag, I’d clean up as I go.”

“We’ll worry about it later.”

“It’s not deep, maybe eighteen feet at the deepest point, but the rain’s stirred up the mud some, so it’s a little murky.”

Hayley sat beside him, but he noted she was careful not to dip her toes in the water. “I wish I could go in with you.”

“Maybe next year I’ll teach you how to scuba.” He patted her belly. “Stay up here and take care of Hermione.”

He rolled back into the water.

It was tedious work, without any of the adventure or thrill he’d experienced when he’d strapped on tanks on vacations. The strain of peering through the water, training his gaze on the circle of light had a headache brewing.

The sound of nothing but his own breath, sucking in oxygen from the tank, was monotonous and increasingly annoying. He wished it was done, over, and he was sitting in the dry, warm kitchen drinking coffee instead of swimming around in the damn, dark water looking for the remains of a woman who, at this point, just pissed him off.

He was tired, sick and tired of having so much of his life focused on a suicidal crazy woman—one who would have, if left to her own devices, killed her own child.

Maybe Reginald wasn’t so much the villain of the piece after all. Maybe he’d taken the kid to protect him. Maybe . . .

There was a burn in his belly, not sickness so much as a hot ball of fury. The sort, Harper realized, that could make a man forget he was fifteen feet or so underwater.

So he rechecked his watch, deliberately, paid more attention to his breathing, and followed the path of his light.

What the hell was the matter with him? Reginald had been a son of a bitch, no question about it. Just as Amelia had been self-centered and whacked. But what had come from that selfish union had been good and strong. Loving. What had come from it mattered.

So this mattered. Finding Amelia mattered.

She was probably buried out in the woods, he decided. But hell, why dig a hole in the ground in winter when you’ve got a private pond handy? It seemed right, so right he wondered they hadn’t thought of it before.

Then again, maybe they hadn’t thought of it before because it was lame. People used the pond, even back then. To swim, to fish. Bodies that got dumped in water often resurfaced.

Why risk it?

He moved to another area, skimmed his light.

Nearly another hour passed in the murk, in the wet. He’d have to finish for the day, he decided. Get his tanks refilled and continue tomorrow. Customers would be coming in soon, and nothing put off retail like hearing that some guy was looking for human remains.

He trailed his light through the roots of his water lilies, thought fleetingly that he might try to hybridize a red one. Something that really snapped. He studied the roots, pleased with the health and progress of what he’d begun, and decided to surface.

His light caught something below, and slightly south. He checked his watch, noted he was approaching borrowed time, but he kicked, dived, scanned.

And he saw her, what was left of her. Bones, filthy with mud, tangled with growth. Weighed down, he saw, with a stirring of pity, by bricks and stones, tied to those bones, hands, legs, waist by the rope he imagined she’d hanged herself with.

The rope she’d meant to use on her son.

Still, shouldn’t she have surfaced at some point? Why hadn’t the rope rotted, those weights shifted? It was basic physics, wasn’t it?

But basic physics didn’t take ghosts and curses into account.

He paddled a hand in the water, moving closer to her.

The blow knocked him back, sent him somersaulting and ripped the light from his hand.

He was in the dark, with the dead, and running out of air.

He fought not to panic, to let his body go loose and limp so that he would drop to the bottom, and be able to spring off to the surface.

But another wave bowled him over.

He saw her, gliding through the water, her white gown billowing, her hair floating out in tangled ropes. Her eyes were wide with lunacy, her hand reaching out, curled like claws.

He felt them close around his neck, squeeze, though he could see her still, feet away, suspended in the water over her own bones.

He struck out, but there was nothing to fight. He clawed toward the surface, but she held him down as inevitably as the bricks and stones that had carried her to the bottom.

She was killing him, as she’d planned to kill her own child. Maybe that had been the plan all along, he thought dimly. To take a Harper with her.

He thought of Hayley, waiting for him on the surface, of the child she carried. Of the daughter she’d already given him.

He wouldn’t give them up.

He looked back down at the bones, tried to find a glimmer of that pity. And he looked at Amelia, eternally mad.

I remember you.
He thought it with all his will.
Singing to me. I knew you’d never hurt me. Remember me. The child that came from your child.

He groped for his diving knife, sliced his palm with the
blade. As she had once sliced hers in madness. His blood dripped and clouded in the murky water between them, and drifted down toward the filthy bones.

That’s your blood in me. Connor blood as much as Harper. Amelia to James, James to Robert, Robert to Rosalind, and Rosalind to me. That’s why I found you. Let me go. Let me take you home. You don’t have to be alone or lost anymore.

When the pressure on his throat released, he fought the urge to kick straight for the surface. He could still see her, and wondered how it was he could see tears flow down her cheeks.

I’ll come back for you. I swear it.

He pushed up, and he thought he heard her singing, the light, sweet voice of his childhood. When he looked back, he saw the beam of his light spear out from the bottom, arrow to her so she was illuminated in its shaft.

And watched her fade away like a dream.

Breaking the surface, he ripped his mouthpiece away, sucked in air that burned his scored throat. Sunlight sparkled in his eyes, dazzling them, and through the roaring in his ears there were voices calling his name.

Through the dazzle, he found Hayley standing on the verge, a hand pressed to her belly. On the wrist of that hand, ruby hearts glittered like hope.

He swam through the lilies toward her, swam away from death toward life. Logan and Mitch helped pull him out of the water where he lay on his back, drawing in air, looking into Hayley’s eyes.

“I found her.”

T
HE SUN FILTERED
through the leaves of sycamores and oaks and cast pretty patterns of light and shadows on the green of the grass. On the branches birds sang, filling the balmy air with music.

Gravestones stood, marble white, granite gray, carved to mark the dead. On some, flowers lay, petals fading, petals fluttering in the light breeze. Tributes to those who’d passed before.

Harper stood between his mother and Hayley, holding their hands as the casket was lowered.

“I don’t feel sad,” Hayley declared. “Not anymore. This feels right. More than right, it feels kind.”

“She earned the right to be here. Beside her son.” Roz looked at the graves, the names. Reginald and Beatrice, Reginald and Elizabeth.

And there, her parents. Their aunts and uncles, cousins,
all links in the long chain of Harpers. “In the spring,” she said, “we’ll put a marker for her. Amelia Ellen Connor.”

“You already have, in a way.” Mitch turned his head to kiss her hair. “Burying her son’s rattle with her, his picture. Hayley’s right. It’s kind.”

“Without her, I’m not. Without her, Harper, Austin, Mason are not. Nor are the children who come from them. She deserves her place.”

“Whatever she did, she deserved better than what was done to her.” Stella sighed. “I’m proud I was part of this, of giving her back her name, and I hope, giving her peace.” She smiled at Logan, then over at David and all the others. “We were all part of it.”

“Tossed in the pond. Discarded.” Logan rubbed a hand over the small of Stella’s back. “All to protect, what? Reputation.”

“She’s found now,” David added. “You did good, Roz, pushing through the system to have her buried here.”

“The Harper name still has the weight to shove the bureaucrats. Truth be told I wanted to give her this nearly as much as I wanted her out of my house, away from what and who I love.” She rose up to peck Harper’s cheek. “My boy. My brave boy. She owes you most of all.”

“I don’t think so,” he disagreed.

“You went back.” Hayley pressed her lips together. “Even after she tried to hurt you, you went back to help bring her out.”

“I told her I would. Ashbys keep their word as well as Harpers. I’m both.” He picked up a fist of earth, held it over the grave, let it sift through his fingers. “Now it’s done.”

“What can we say about Amelia?” Roz lifted a red rose. “She was mad—let’s be honest. She died badly, and didn’t live much better. But she sang to me, and to my children.
Her life gave me mine. So rest now, Great-grandmama.” She dropped the rose onto the casket.

In turn the others sent a rose into the grave, and stepped back. “Let’s give them a minute alone,” Roz said, nodding toward Harper and Hayley.

“She’s gone.” Hayley closed her eyes, settled her mind. “I can feel it. I knew she was gone before you came up. Knew you’d found her before you told us. It was like the rope tying me to her was cut.”

“Happiest day of my life. So far.”

“Whatever she needed, she has.” She stared down at the casket, at the flowers that lay on it. “I was so afraid, when you were in the pond, that you wouldn’t come back to me.”

“I wasn’t finished with you. Not nearly.” He took her shoulders, turned her away from the grave, toward him, toward the sunlight. “We’ve got a life to live. It’s our time now.”

He took the ring out of his pocket, slipped it onto her finger. “Fits now. It’s yours now.” He lowered his lips to hers. “Let’s go get married.”

“I think that’s a great idea.”

With their hands clasped, they walked away from death, into love, and life.

In Harper House, the wide halls and gracious rooms were quiet, full of sun, full of memories. Full of past, open to tomorrow.

No one sang there.

But its gardens bloomed.