Black Rose - NRoberts - G2 Black Rose

“Oh. That’s done it.” The tears welled into her throat, spilled out of her eyes. “That’s done it for sure.”

“Go ahead and cry.” Mason leaned over to kiss her damp cheek. “Makes a nice circle.”

GETTING BACK TObusiness as usual helped fill the little hole in her heart from kissing two of her sons goodbye.

It would be a slow week—the holiday week was, routinely—so she took a page out of Stella’s book and shouldered in to organizing. She cleaned tools, scrubbed down worktables, helped with inventory, and finally settled on the style of potting-soil bag, and the design.

With some time to spare, she worked with Hayley to pour a fresh supply of concrete planters and troughs.

“I can’t believe Christmas is over.” Squatting, Hayley turned the mold as Roz poured. “All that anticipation and prep, and it’s over in a snap. Last year, my first after my daddy died? Well, it was just awful, and the holidays dragged and dragged.”

“Grief tends to spin time out, and joy contracts it. I don’t know why that is.”

“I remember just wanting it all to be over—so I wouldn’t keep hearing “Jingle Bells” every time I went to work, you know? Being pregnant, and feeling alone, the house up for sale. I spent most of Christmas packing things up, figuring out what I was going to sell so I could leave Little Rock.”

She sat back on her heels to sigh, happily. “And here, just one year later, and everything was so bright and happy. I know Lily didn’t know what was going on, but it was so much fun to watch her play with her toys, or mostly the boxes.”

“Nothing like a cardboard box to keep a baby entertained. It was special for me, for all of us, to have her, to be able to share that first Christmas with her.”

With the mold full, Hayley tidied the edges with a trowel. “I know you love her, but, Roz, I just don’t feel right about you staying home New Year’s Eve to sit with her while I go out to a party.”

“I prefer staying home New Year’s Eve. Lily gives me the perfect excuse. And I’m looking forward to having her to myself.”

“You must’ve been invited to half a dozen parties.”

“More.” Roz straightened, pressed the small of her back. “I’m not interested. You go on out with David and celebrate with other young people. Wear your new earrings and dance. Lily and I will be just fine seeing the new year in together.”

“David said he never could talk you into going to this party, even though it’s been a tradition for years now.” She picked up a bottle of water, drank casually. “He said Harper would probably drop by.”

“I imagine so. They have a number of mutual friends.” Amused, she patted Hayley’s shoulder. “Let’s get this next one done, then call it a day.”

She was tired when she got home, but in that satisfied way of knowing she’d crossed several chores off her list. When she noticed Mitch’s car in her drive, she was surprised to find herself considering going up to change before seeking him out in the library.

Which was, she reminded herself, both a waste of time and hardly her style. So she was wearing her work clothes when she walked into the library.

“Have everything you need?”

He looked up from the piles of books and papers on the library table. Stared at her through the lenses of his horn-rim reading glasses. “Huh?”

“I just got in. I thought I’d see if there was anything else you need.”

“A couple dozen years to organize all of this, a new pair of eyes . . .” He lifted the pot on the desk with him. “More coffee.”

“I can help with the last at least.” She crossed over, mounted the steps to the second level.

“No, that’s all right. My blood level’s probably ninety percent caffeine at this point. What time is it?”

She noted the watch on his wrist, then looked at her own. “Ten after five.”

“A.M. or P.M.?”

“Been at it that long?”

“Long enough to lose track, as usual.” He rubbed the back of one shoulder, circled his neck. “You have some fascinating relatives, Rosalind. I’ve gathered up enough newspaper clippings on the Harpers, going back to the mid-nineteenth century so far, to fill a banker’s box. Did you know, for instance, you have an ancestor who rode for the Pony Express in 1860, and in the 1880s traveled with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show?”

“My great-great-uncle Jeremiah, who’d run off as a boy, it seems, to ride for the Pony Express. Fought Indians, scouted for the Army, took both a Comanche wife and, apparently, another in Kansas City—at more or less the same time. He was a trick rider in the Wild West Show, and was considered a black sheep by the stuffier members of the clan in his day.”

“How about Lucybelle?”

“Ah . . .”

“Gotcha. Married Daniel C. Harper, 1858, left him two years later.” The chair creaked as he leaned back. “She pops up again in San Francisco, in 1862, where she opened her own saloon and bawdy house.”

“That one slipped by me.”

“Well, Daniel C. claimed that he sent her to a clinic in New York, for her health, and that she died there of a wasting disease. Wishful thinking on his part, I assume. But with a little work and magic, I found our Lucybelle entertaining the rough-and-ready crowd in California, where she lived in apparent good health for another twenty-three years.”

“You really love this stuff.”

“I really do. Imagine Jeremiah, age fifteen, galloping over the plains to deliver the mail. Young, gutsy, skinny. They advertised for skinny boys so they didn’t weigh down the horses.”

“Really.” She eased a hip on the corner of his desk.

“Bent over his mount, riding hell-for-leather, outrunning war parties, covered with dirt and sweat, or half frozen from the cold.”

“And from your tone, you’d say having the time of his life.”

“Had to be something, didn’t it? Then there’s Lucybelle, former Memphis society wife, in a red dress with a derringer in her garter—”

“Aren’t you the romantic one.”

“Had to have a derringer in her garter while she’s manning the bar or bilking miners at cards night after night.”

“I wonder if their paths ever crossed.”

“There you go,” he said, pleased. “That’s how you get caught up in all this. It’s possible, you know. Jeremiah might’ve swung through the doors of that saloon, had a whiskey at the bar.”

“And enjoyed the other servings on the menu, all while the more staid of the family fanned themselves on the veranda and complained about the war.”

“There’s a lot of staid, a lot of black sheep here. There was money and there was prestige.”

He pushed some papers around, came up with a copy of another clipping. “And considerable charm.”

She studied the photo of herself, on her engagement, a fresh and vibrant seventeen.

“I wasn’t yet out of high school. Green as grass and mule stubborn. Nobody could talk me out of marrying John Ashby the June after this picture was taken. God, don’t I look ready for anything?”

“I’ve got clippings of your parents in here. You don’t look like either of them.”

“No. I was always told I resembled my grandfather Harper. He died when I was a child, but from the pictures I’ve seen, I favor him.”

“Yeah, I’ve come across a few, and you do. Reginald Edward Harper, Jr, born . . . 1892, youngest child and only son of Reginald and Beatrice Harper.” He read his notes. “Married, ah . . .”

“Elizabeth McKinnon. I remember her very well. It was she who gave me her love of gardening, and taught me about plants. My father claimed I was her favorite because I looked like my grandfather. Why don’t I get you some tea, something herbal, to offset the coffee?”