Black Rose - NRoberts - G2 Black Rose

She studied the building in the half light, the sagging roof and faded trim—and the vines, the climbers, the ornamental grasses she’d planted around it to give it a wild look.

“It looks like something you’d see in a movie, or more likely, in a storybook.”

“That’s what I like about it. My daddy’s the one who let it go, or never did anything to preserve the building. I remember him talking about having it razed, but my grandmother asked him not to. She said it was part of the place, and she liked the look of it. The grave’s around the back,” she said. “I’m sorry, Mitch, I interrupted. Mind’s wandering. Tell me your theory.”

“I don’t know how you’re going to feel about it.”

“Poison sumac,” she said, nudging him away before he brushed up against a vine. “I’ll have to get out here and get rid of that. Here we are.” She crouched down, and with her ungloved hands plucked at weeds, brushed at dirt until she revealed the marker with the hand-chipped name in the stone.

“Sweet, isn’t it, that he’d have buried his old dog here, carved that stone for him. I think he must’ve been a sweet man. My grandmother wouldn’t have loved him as much as she did if he hadn’t been.”

“And she did,” Mitch agreed. “You can see the way she loved him in the pictures of them together.”

“He looks sort of cool in most of the photographs we have of him. But he wasn’t cool. I asked my grandmother once, and she said he hated having his picture taken. He was shy. Odd thinking of that, of my grandfather as a shy man who loved his dog.”

“She was more outgoing?” Mitch prompted.

“Oh, much. She liked to socialize, nearly as much as she liked to garden. She loved hosting fancy lunches and teas, especially. She dressed up for them—hat, gloves, floaty dresses.”

“I’ve seen pictures. She was elegant.”

“Yet she could hitch on old trousers and dig in the dirt for hours.”

“Like someone else we know.” He skimmed a hand over her hair. “Your grandfather was born several years after the youngest of his sisters.”

“Hmm. There were other pregnancies, I think. My grandmother had two miscarriages herself, and I recall, vaguely, her mentioning that her mother-in-law had suffered the same thing. Maybe a stillbirth as well.”

“And then a son, born at the same time we’ve theorized Amelia lived—and died. Amelia, who haunts the house, but who we can’t verify lived there—certainly not as a relation. Who sings to children, gives every appearance of being devoted to children—and distrusting, even despising men.”

She cocked her head. Twilight was moving very quickly to dark, and with dark came a chill. “Yes, and?”

“What if the child that was born in 1892 was her child. Her son, Roz. Amelia’s son, not Beatrice Harper’s.”

“That’s a very extreme theory, Mitchell.”

“Is it? Maybe. It’s only a theory, in any case, and partially based on somewhat wild speculation. But it wouldn’t be unprecedented.”

“I would have heard. Surely there would have been some mention of it, some whisper passed along.”

“How? Why? If the original players were careful to keep it quiet. The wealthy, the influential man craving a son—and paying for one. Hell, it still happens.”

“But . . .” She pushed to her feet. “How could they hide that kind of deception? You’re not talking about some legal adoption.”

“No, I’m not. Just run with me on this a minute. What if Reginald hired a young woman, likely one of some breeding, some intelligence, who’d found herself in trouble. He pays the bills, gives her a safe haven, takes the child off her hands if it’s a boy.”

“And if it’s a girl, he’s wasted his time and money?”

“A gamble. Another angle might be he impregnated her himself.”

“And his wife just accepted his bastard as her own, as the heir?”

“He held the purse strings, didn’t he?”

She stood very still, rubbing her arms. “That’s a very cold theory.”

“It is. Maybe he was in love with Amelia, planned to divorce his wife, marry her. She might have died in childbirth. Or it could’ve been a straight business deal—or something else. But if that child, if Reginald Harper Jr. was Amelia’s son, it explains some things.”

“Such as?”

“She’s never hurt you or anyone of your blood. Couldn’t that be because you’re her blood? Her descendant? Her great-grandchild?”

She paced away from the little grave. “Then why is she in the house, on the property? Are you theorizing she birthed that baby here? In Harper House?”

“Possibly. Or that she visited here, spent time here. Maybe as the child’s nurse, that’s not unprecedented, either. That she died here, one way or the other.”

“One way or—”

The grave was not small, and it had no marker. It gaped open dark and deep.

She stood over it, stood over that wide mouth in the earth. She looked down at death. The body in the tattered and filthy gown, the flesh that was melting away from bone. The smell of decay swarmed over her like fat, humming bees, stinging her eyes, her throat, her belly.

The ground was damp and slippery where she stood. Over it a thin, fetid fog crawled, smearing the black dirt, the wet grass with dirty tongues of gray.

She plunged the shovel through that fog, into the earth and grass, filled the blade. Then threw the earth into the grave.

The eyes of the dead opened, gleaming with madness and malice. Lifting a hand, bones piercing horribly through rotted flesh, it began to climb out of the earth.

Roz jolted, and slapped at the hands holding her.

“Easy, easy. Just breathe. Nice and slow.”

“What happened?” She pushed at Mitch’s hand again when she realized she was on the ground, cradled in his lap.

“You fainted.”

“I certainly did not. I’ve never fainted in my life.”

“Consider this your first. You went sheet white, your eyes rolled straight back in your head. I grabbed you when you started to go down. You were only out about a minute.” Trembling a bit himself, he lowered his brow to hers. “Longest minute of my life, so far.”

He took a long breath, then another. “If you’re okay, would you mind if I just sat here a minute until I settle down?”

“Well, that’s the damnedest thing.”

“I didn’t mean to upset you. We’ll just table the theories. Let’s get you inside.”

“You don’t think I passed out because you had me thinking my grandfather might’ve been born on the wrong side of the blanket? Christ. What do you take me for? I’m not some silly, spineless woman who questions her own identity because of the actions of her ancestors. I know who the hell I am.”

Her color was back now, and those long-lidded eyes were ripe with irritation.

“Then you want to tell me why . . .” Now he went pale as polished glass. “God, Roz, are you pregnant?”

“Get a hold of yourself. A few minutes ago you’re calling me a grandmother, now you’re going into shock thinking I could be pregnant. I’m not going to present either one of us with a midlife baby, so relax. I had some sort of spell, I suppose.”

“Care to elaborate?”

“One second we were talking, and the next I was standing—I don’t know where, but I was standing over an open grave. She was in it. Amelia, and she was not looking her best.”

She couldn’t stop the shudder, and let her head rest against him. That good, strong shoulder. “More than dead, decomposing. I could see it, smell it. I suppose that’s what took me down. It was, to put it mildly, very unpleasant. I was burying her, I think. Then she opened her eyes, started to climb out.”

“If it’s any consolation, if that had happened to me, I’d have fainted, too.”