Yanecia - Nora Roberts- Garden Trilogy - Red lily

“I know. My mind traveled that same road. That’s why you’re the one for me.

“I can’t walk away from here. Please don’t ask me to do that. I can’t walk away from this house, this family, the work I’ve come to love. The only way I can stay is to try to do this thing, to settle this. Right a wrong, or at least understand it. Maybe I was meant to. Maybe we found each other because we were meant to. I don’t know if I can do it if you’re not with me.” She scanned the room. “All of you.”

Then she looked at Harper. “Be with me, Harper. Trust me to do what’s right. Trust us to do it.”

He stepped to her, rested his brow on hers. “I am with you.” twenty

“THERE’S NO GUARANTEE anything will happen.” Mitch slipped a spare tape in his pocket.

“I think I can make it happen. What I mean . . .” Hayley moistened her lips. “I think I can draw her. She wants this—a part of her does, and has for a century.”

“And the other part?” Harper asked.

“Wants revenge. When it comes down to it, she’ll probably be more inclined to hurt you than me.”

“And she can hurt us,” Roz pointed out. “We’ve seen that.”

“So we go up there armed with cameras and tape recorders.” Logan shook his head.

“We happy few,” Mitch stated.

“Well, she’s raised the stakes.” Logan took Stella’s hand. “Since none of us are willing to fold, let’s ante up.”

“We stay together,” Roz said as they started up the stairs. “No matter what. We’ve never really confronted her as a group before. I think there’s strength in that.”

“She always had the upper hand, she always moved first.” Harper nodded. “Yeah, we stay together.”

When they reached the third floor, Roz turned toward the ballroom. Going with instinct, she stepped forward, pushed the double pocket doors open.

“There were lovely parties here. I remember creeping up at night to watch the dancing.”

She reached in to switch on the light. It showered down on the shrouded furniture, and the lovely pattern of the maple floor. “I nearly sold those chandeliers once.” She looked up at the dazzling trio of them dripping down from ornate plaster medallions. “Couldn’t bring myself to do it, even though it would’ve made day-to-day living easier. I gave my own parties here, once upon a time. I believe it’s time I did so again.”

“She came in this way, that night. I’m sure of it.” Though her hand was already in Harper’s, Hayley tightened her grip. “Don’t let go.”

“Not a chance.”

“She came in the terrace doors. They weren’t locked. She could’ve broken the glass if they had been. She came in, and oh . . . Gilt and crystal, the smell of beeswax and lemon oil. The rain dripping, dripping from the gutters. Turn on the lights.”

“I have,” Roz said quietly.

“No, she turns on the light. Harper.”

“Right here.”

“I can see it. I can see it.”

The fog rolled in the doors behind her, smoking damp over the glossy floors. Her feet were caked with mud, with blood where she’d trod on stones, and left streaks of that mud, of that blood, where she walked.

Alive still. Heart beating blood.

This, this is how they lived at Harper House. Grand rooms lit by sparkling chandeliers, gilt mirrors on the walls, long, polished tables and potted palms so lush they smelled of the tropics.

She had never been to the tropics. She and James would go one day, one day they’d go and stroll on sugar sand by warm blue water.

But no, but no, their lives were here, in Harper House. They had cast her out, but she would be here. Always here. To dance in this ballroom, lit by crystal drops.

She swayed, a partnerless waltz, her head tilted up flirtatiously. The blade in her hand shooting light from its keen edge.

She would dance here, night after night if she chose. Drink champagne, wear fine jewels. She would teach James to waltz with her. How handsome he would be, wrapped in his soft blue blanket. How sweet a picture they would make. Mother and son.

She must go to him now, go to James, so they could always be together.

She wandered out. Where would the nursery be? In the other wing, of course. Of course. Children and those who tended them didn’t belong near grand ballrooms, elegant withdrawing rooms. Smell the house! How rich its perfume. Her son’s home. And hers now.

The carpet was soft as fur on her feet. And even so late, even when the house was in bed, the gaslights glowed on low.

Spare no expense! she thought. Money to burn.

Oh, she should burn them all.

At the stairs she paused. They would be sleeping down there, the bastard and his whore. The sleep of the rich and the privileged. She could go down, kill them. Hack them to pieces, bathe in their blood.

Idly, she rubbed her thumb over the curved blade of the sickle, had blood welling red. Would their blood run blue? Harper blood. It would be so lovely to see it, spilling out of their white throats, pooling regally blue on their linen sheets.

But someone might hear. One of the servants could hear, and stop her before her duty was done.

So quiet. She tapped a finger to her cheek, stifled a laugh. Quiet as a mouse.

Quiet as a ghost.

She walked to the other wing, easing doors open if they were closed. Peeking inside.

She knew—it was her mother’s heart speaking, she thought—as her trembling hand reached for the latch on the next door. She knew her James slept inside.

A low light burned, and with it she could see the shelves of toys and books, the rocking chair, the small bureaus and the chests.

And there, the crib.

Tears spilled out of her eyes as she crossed to it. There he lay sleeping, her precious son, his dark hair clean and sweet, his plump cheeks rosy with health.

Never had there been a more beautiful baby than her James. So pretty and soft in his crib. He needed to be tended, and rocked, and sung to. Sweet songs for her sweet son.

She’d forgotten his blanket! How could she have forgotten his blanket? Now she would have to use what another had bought him when it came time to carry him off with her.

Gently, so gently, she brushed her fingers over his soft hair and sang his lullaby.

“We’ll be together always, James. Nothing will ever part us again.”

Sitting on the floor, she went to work.

She used the blade to hack through the rope. It was difficult to form the noose, but she thought she did well. Well enough. Discarding the sickle, she carried a chair, positioned it under the ceiling lamp. And sang softly as she tied the rope to the arms of the lamp.

It held on a strong, testing pull and made her smile.

She pulled out the gris-gris she had in a bag looped around her neck by a ribbon. She’d memorized the chant the voodoo queen had sold her, but she struggled with the words now as she sprinkled the gris-gris in a circle around the chair.

She used the blade to slice open her own palm. And let the blood from her hand drip over the gris-gris, to bind the work.

Her blood. Amelia Ellen Connor. The same blood that ran in her child. A mother’s blood, potent magic.

Her hands shook, but she continued to croon as she went to the crib. For the first time since he’d been born, she lifted her child into her arms.

Bloodied his blanket, and his rosy cheek.

Ah, so warm, so sweet! Weeping with joy she cuddled the child against her damp and filthy gown. When he stirred and whimpered, she hugged him only closer.

Hush, hush, my precious. Mama is here now. Mama will never leave you again. His head moved, his mouth sucking as if in search of a nipple. But when with a sob of joy, she tugged her gown below her breast, pressed him there, he arched and let out a cry.

Hush, hush, hush. Don’t cry, don’t fret. Sweet, sweet baby boy. Sawing her arms back and forth to rock him, she moved to the chair. Mama has you now. She’ll never, never let you go. Come with Mama, my darling James. Come with Mama now where you will never know pain or grief. Where we will waltz in the ballroom, have tea and cake in the garden.

She climbed, awkward with his weight, with his wiggles, onto the chair. Even as he wailed, she smiled down at him, and slipped the noose around her neck. Softly singing, she slipped the smaller noose around his.

Now, we’re together.

The connecting door opened, a spill of light that had her turning her head, baring her teeth like a tiger protecting her cub.

The sleepy-eyed nursemaid shrieked, her hands flying to her face at the sight of the woman in the filthy white gown, and the baby in her arms, screaming with fear and angry hunger, with a rope around his neck.

“He’s mine!”

As she kicked the chair away, the nursemaid sprang forward.

Screams gave way to the cold, and the dark.

Hayley sat on the floor of what had been the nursery, weeping in Harper’s arms.

SHE WAS STILL icy, even in the parlor with a blanket over her legs, and the unseasonable fire Mitch had set to blaze in the hearth.

“She was going to kill him,” she told them. “She was going to kill the baby. My God, my God, she meant to hang her own child.”

“To keep him.” Roz stood, staring at the fire. “That’s more than madness.”

“If the nurse hadn’t come in when she did. If she hadn’t heard him crying and come in quickly, she would’ve done it.”

“Selfish woman.”

“I know, I know.” Hayley lifted her hands, rubbed her shoulders. “But she didn’t do it to hurt him. She believed they’d be together, and happy, and, oh Jesus. She was broken, in every possible way. Then at the end, when she lost again . . .” Hayley shook her head. “She keeps waiting for him. I think she must see him in every child who comes to Harper House.”

“A kind of hell isn’t it?” Stella asked. “For madness.”

She’d never forget it, Hayley thought. Never. “The nurse, she saved the baby.”

“I haven’t been able to trace her,” Mitch put in. “They had more than one nursemaid during his babyhood, but the timing of this points to a girl named Alice Jameson—which also jibes with Mary Havers’s letter to Lucille. Alice left the Harper employ in February of 1893, and I haven’t found anything more on her.”

“They sent her away.” Stella closed her eyes. “That’s what they’d have done. Paid her maybe, or just as likely threatened her.”

“Both would be my guess,” Logan said.

“I’ll push on it, do what I can to find her,” Mitch promised, and Roz turned to smile at him.

“I’d appreciate it. I wouldn’t be here without her, nor would my sons.”

“It wasn’t what she wanted us to know,” Hayley said quietly. “Or not all of it. She doesn’t know where she is. Where she’s buried. What they did with her. She won’t be able to leave, to rest, to pass over, whatever it is, until we find her.”

“How?” Stella spread her hands.

“I have an idea on that.” Roz scanned faces. “One I think’s going to hit this group about fifty-fifty.”

“What’s the point?” Harper objected. “So Hayley can see her try to hang a baby again?”

“So she, or one of us, can see what happened next. Hopefully. And by we, I mean myself, Hayley, and Stella.”

For the first time since they’d started upstairs, Harper released Hayley’s hand. He shoved off the couch. “That’s a damn stupid idea.”

“Don’t take that tone with me, Harper.”

“It’s the only tone I’ve got when my mother goes crazy. Did you see what just happened up there? The way Hayley walked from the ballroom to the old nursery? The way she talked as if she was watching it happen, and like she was part of what was happening?”