"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 Girl 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 to 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, andbeing 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?