Red Lily

  Talking on tape made her feel self-conscious, but she related everything.

  “I hear her singing sometimes, but usually when I go in to check, she’s gone. You know she’s been there. Sometimes I hear her in the boys’ room—Gavin’s and Luke’s old room. Sometimes she’s crying. And once I thought . . .”

  “Thought what?” Mitch prompted.

  “I thought I might’ve seen her walking outside. The night y’all left on your honeymoon, after we had the wedding party here? I woke up—had a little more wine than I should, I guess—and I had a little headache. So I took some aspirin, checked on Lily. I thought I saw someone, out the window. There was enough moonlight that I could make out the blond hair, the white dress. It appeared like she was going toward the carriage house. But when I opened the doors, to go out on the terrace and get a better look, she was gone.”

  “Didn’t we have an agreement, starting after Mama finally decided to clue us in about nearly being drowned in the bathtub, that we put everything on record?” Anger simmered in Harper’s voice. “We don’t wait a damn week to make an announcement.”

  “Harper,” Roz said dryly. “That horse is dead. Don’t start beating it again.”

  “We had an agreement.”

  “I didn’t know for sure.” Hayley’s back went up, and it reflected in her tone as she glared down at Harper. “I still don’t. Just because I thought I saw a woman walking toward your place didn’t mean she was a ghost. Could just as likely—more likely—have been flesh and blood. What was I supposed to do, Harper, call you over at the carriage house and ask if you were getting a bootie call?”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “Well, there you are.” Pleased, she nodded decisively. “It’s not like you never have female company over there.”

  “Fine, fine. Just FYI, I didn’t have female company—flesh and blood variety—that night. Next time, follow through.”

  “Class,” Mitch said mildly, and gave a professorial tap of pencil on notebook. “Can you tell us any more about what you saw, Hayley?”

  “Honestly, it was only a few seconds. I was just standing there, hoping the aspirin would kick in before morning, and I caught a movement. I saw a woman—a lot of blond or light hair, and she was wearing white. My first thought was Harper got lucky.”

  “Oh, man,” was Harper’s muttered comment.

  “Then I thought about Amelia, but when I went out to see better, she was gone. I only mention it because if it was her, and I guess it was, that’s twice I’ve seen her in about a week. And that’s a lot for me.”

  “You were the only woman in the house during that week,” Logan pointed out. “She’s been more likely to show herself to women.”

  “That makes sense.” And made her feel better.

  “Added to that, it was the night after Mitch and I were married,” Roz said. “She’d have been miffed.”

  “And it’s the second time we’ve got a firsthand report of her walking toward the carriage house. There’s something there,” Mitch said to Harper.

  “She’s not letting me know about it. So far.”

  “Meanwhile we keep looking. We believe she lived in this area, so our best bet is Reginald kept her in one of his properties.” Mitch lifted his hands. “I’m still pursuing that avenue.”

  “If we find out her name, her whole name,” Hayley asked him, “would you be able to research her the way you did the Harper family?”

  “It’d give me a start.”

  “Maybe she’ll tell us, if we just find the right way to ask. Maybe . . .” She trailed off when singing came through the monitor. “She’s with Lily, and she’s early tonight. I’m just going to go up and check.”

  “I’ll go with you.” Harper got to his feet.

  She didn’t argue. Even after more than a year, the sound of that sad voice sent a chill up her spine. As was her habit, she’d flicked lights on in her wing so she wouldn’t have to come back up in the dark. They reassured her now, as the sun was nearly set, as did the sounds of Luke and Gavin playing in the sitting room.

  “You know, if you’re uneasy being over here alone, you could move into the other wing, closer to Mama and Mitch.”

  “Just what the newly married couple need. Me and a baby as chaperones. Anyway, I’m mostly used to it. She’s not stopping.” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “She almost always stops before I get to the door.”

  Instinctively she reached for Harper’s hand as she eased open the door she always left off the latch.

  It was cold, but she’d expected that. Even after Amelia was gone, the chill would linger. Yet Lily was never disturbed by it. Her breath puffed out, a little startled cloud when she heard the distinctive creak of the rocker.

  That was a new one, Hayley thought. Oh boy.

  She sat in the rocker, wearing her gray dress. Her hands lay quiet in her lap as she sang. Her voice was pretty, unschooled but light and tuneful. Comforting, as a voice singing lullabies should be.

  But when she turned her head, when she looked toward the door, Hayley’s blood ran as cold as the air in the room.

  It wasn’t a smile on her face, but a grimace. Her eyes bulged, and were rimmed with violent red.

  This is what they do. This is what they give.

  As she spoke—thought—the form began to disintegrate. Flesh melted away to bone until what sat in the chair was a skeleton that rocked in rags.

  Then even that was gone.

  “Please tell me you saw that.” Hayley’s voice trembled. “Heard that.”

  “Yeah.” With his hand firm on hers, he drew Hayley across the room to the crib. “Warmer here. Feel it? It’s warm around the crib.”

  “She’s never done anything to scare Lily. Still, I don’t want to leave, go down again. I’d just feel better if I stayed close tonight. You can tell the others what happened?”

  “I can bunk up here tonight. Take one of the guest rooms.”

  “It’s all right.” She arranged Lily’s blanket more securely. “We’ll be all right.”

  He tugged her hand, gestured so that she went back out into the hall with him. “That was a first, right?”

  “A definite first for me. It’s going to give me nightmares.”

  “You sure you’re going to be okay?” He touched his hand to her cheek, and it flitted through her mind that was another first. They were standing close, her hand in his, his fingers on her cheek.

  All she had to do was say, no. Stay with me.

  And then what? She could start something, and ruin everything.

  “Yeah. It’s not like she’s mad at me or anything. No reason to be. We’re good, we’re fine. You’d better go down, fill the others in.”

  “You get spooked in the night, call. I’ll come.”

  “Good to know. Thanks.”

  She slid her hand out of his, eased back, and slipped into her own room.

  No, Amelia had no reason to be mad at her, Hayley considered. She had no boyfriend, no husband, no lover. The only man she wanted was off-limits.

  “So you can relax,” she murmured. “Looks like I’ll be going solo for the next little while.

  three

  HE HUNTED HER up the next day, mid-morning. But he had to be sly about it. He knew her well enough to be sure if she thought he was trying to help, to get her mind off things, to give her any sort of break, she’d brush him off.

  Hayley Phillips was the original I’m-fine-don’t-worry-about-me girl.

  Nothing wrong with that, Harper thought. In her place, a lot of women would have been happy to take advantage of his mother’s generosity, or at least to take that generosity for granted. Hayley did neither, and he respected that. He could admire her stand—to a point. But plenty of times, to his mind, that point tripped over into just mule-headed stubborn.

  So he kept it casual, even when he had to poke into two greenhouses, work his way to the main building before he found her setting up a new display of houseplants.

  She was wea
ring one of the nursery’s bib aprons over black camp shorts and a V-necked tank. There was damp soil on the apron, and on her forearm. Only repressed lust could be responsible for him finding it so absurdly sexy.

  “Hey, how’s it going?”

  “Not too bad. Had ourselves a little run on dish gardens. Customer just came in and bagged five as centerpieces for her sorority reunion lunch. And I talked her into taking the sago palm for her own sunroom.”

  “Nice going. Guess you’re busy then.”

  She glanced over her shoulder. “Not too. Stella wants to make up more dish gardens, but she’s tied up with Logan, which isn’t as sexy as it sounds. Big job came in, and she’s locked him in the office until she gets all the details for the contract. Last I walked by, he wasn’t all that happy about it.”

  “Ought to be at it for a while then. I was going to do some chip-budding. Could use some help, but—”

  “Really? Can I do it? I can take one of the two-ways in case Ruby or Stella need me.”

  “I could use another pair of hands.”

  “Mine’ll be right back. Hold on.”

  She dashed through the double glass doors, and was back in thirty seconds, shed of the apron and hitching a two-way to her waistband. And giving him a quick peek at smooth belly skin.

  “I read up some, but I can’t remember which is the chip-budding.”

  “It’s an old method,” he told her as they started out. “More widely used now than it used to be. What we’re going to do is work some of the field stock, some of the ornamentals. Mid-summer’s the time for it.”

  Heat hit like a wet wall. “This sure is mid-summer.”

  “We’ll start on magnolias.” He picked up a bucket of water he’d left outside the door. “They never stop being popular.”

  They walked over gravel, between greenhouses, and headed out to the fields. “Things stay quiet last night?”

  “Not a peep after that little show we were treated to. I’m hoping she doesn’t plan an encore of that trick. Gross, you know?”

  “She sure knows how to get your attention anyway. Okay, here’s what we do first.” He stopped in front of a tall, leafy magnolia. “I’m going to pick some ripe shoots, this season’s wood. You want one not much thicker than a pencil with well-developed buds. See this one?”

  With an ungloved hand, he reached up, gently drew a shoot down.

  “Okay, then what?”

  “I clip it off.” He drew pruners out of his tool bag. “See here, where the base is starting to go woody? That’s what we’re looking for. You don’t want green shoots, they’re too weak yet.”

  After he’d cut it, Harper put the shoot in the water bucket. “We keep it wet. If it dries out, it won’t unite. Now you pick one.”

  She started to move around the tree, but he caught her hand. “No, it’s better to work on the sunny side of the tree.”

  “Okay.” She rolled her bottom lip between her teeth as she searched, selected. “How about this one?”

  “Good. Here, make the cut.”

  She took the pruners, and since he was close he could smell the scent she wore—always light with a surprising kick—along with the garden green.

  “How many are you doing?”

  “About a dozen.” He stuck his hands in his pockets as he leaned in to watch her, smell her. And told himself he was suffering for a good cause. “Go ahead, pick another.”

  “I don’t get out in the field much.” She drew down another shoot, looked toward Harper and got his nod. “It’s different out here. Different than selling and displaying, talking to customers.”

  “You’re good at that.”

  “Yeah, I am, but being out here, it’s getting your hands into the thing. Stella knows all this stuff, and Roz, she knows everything. I like to learn. You sell better the more you know.”

  “I’d rather ram that shoot in my eye than have to sell every day.”

  She smiled as she worked. “But you’re a loner at heart, aren’t you? I’d go crazy holed up in the grafting house day after day like you. I like seeing people, and having them talk to me about what they’re looking for and why. I like selling, too. ‘Here, you take this pretty thing, and give me the money.’ ”

  She laughed as she put another shoot in the bucket. “That’s why you and Roz need somebody like me, so you can squirrel away in your caves and work with the plants for hours, and I can sell them.”

  “Seems to be working.”

  “That’s a dozen, even. What next?”

  “Over here, what we’ve got is rooted shoots I got from stool-grown stock plants.”

  “Stooling, I know what that is.” She stared down at the nursery bed and its line of straight, slim shoots. “Um, you hill the ground up to stimulate rooting, and cut them back hard in the winter, then you take the roots from the whatdoyoucallit, parent plant, and plant them out.”

  “You have been reading up.”

  “I like to learn.”

  “Shows.” And was just one more click for him. He’d never found a woman who’d interested him physically, emotionally, who shared his love of gardening. “Okay. We use a sharp, clean knife. We’re going to trim off all the leaves from the budstick—the shoots we just cut. But we’ll leave just a little stub, just about an eighth of an inch of the petiole—the leaf stalk.”

  “I know what a petiole is,” she muttered, and watched Harper demonstrate before she took her turn.

  Good hands, she thought. Quick, skilled, sure. Despite—or maybe because of the nicks and calluses—they were elegantly male.

  She thought they reflected who he was perfectly, that combination of privileged background and working-class.

  “Cut the soft tip from the top, see? Now watch.” He angled around so she could see, and their heads bent close together. “We want the first bud at the base, that’s where we’re going to cut into the stem, just a little below there. See how you have to angle the cut, going down, then another above, behind the bud toward that first cut. And . . .” Gently, holding the chip by the leaf stalk, he held it out.

  “I can do that.”

  “Go ahead.” He slipped the bud chip into a plastic bag, and watched her work.

  She was careful, which was a relief to him, and he heard her whispering his instructions to herself with every move.

  “I did it!”

  “Nice job. Let’s get the rest.”

  He did seven in the time it took her to do three, but she didn’t mind. He showed her how to stand astride the rootstock to remove the sideshoots and leaves from the bottom twelve inches.

  She knew it was a maneuver, and really, she’d probably feel guilty about it later, but she deliberately fumbled her first attempt.

  “No, you need to position it between your legs, more like this.”

  As she’d hoped, he came over to stand behind her, in a nice vertical spoon, his arms coming around, making her belly dance as his hands closed over her wrists.

  “Bend down a little, loosen at the knees. That’s it. Now . . .” He guided her hand for the cut. “Just a sliver of the bark,” he murmured, and his breath breezed along her ear. “See, there’s the cambium. You want to leave a lip at the base where the chip will layer.”

  He smelled like the trees, sort of hot and earthy. His body felt so firm pressed against hers. She wished she could turn around, just turn so they were pressed front to front. She’d only have to rise up on her toes for their mouths to line up.

  It was a maneuver, and shame on her, but she looked over her shoulder, looked dead into his eyes. And smiled. “Is that better?”

  “Yeah. Better. A lot.”

  As she’d hoped, his gaze skimmed down, lingered on her mouth. Classic move, she thought. Classic results.

  “I’ll . . . show you how to do the rest.”

  He looked blank for a moment, like a man who’d forgotten what he was doing in the middle of a task. She couldn’t have been more delighted.

  Then he stepped back, reached in
his tool bag for the grafting tape.

  That had been so nice, she mused. Line to line, heat to heat, for just a few seconds. Of course now she was all churned up, but it felt good, felt fine to have everything swimming around inside her.

  But as penance for her calculation, she behaved herself, played the eager student as she positioned the bud chip on the stock so the cambium layers met as snugly as her body had met Harper’s.

  She bound the chip to stock using the tape around and over the bud as instructed.

  “Good. Perfect.” He still felt a little breathless, and the palms of his hands were damp enough that he wiped them on the knees of his jeans. “In six weeks, maybe two months, the chip will have united, and we’ll take off the tape. Late next winter, we’ll cut the top of the stock, just above this bud, and during the spring the grafted bud will send out a shoot, and we’re off and running.”

  “It’s fun, isn’t it? How you can take a little something from one, a little something from another, put them together and make more.”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “Will you show me some of the other techniques sometime? Like what you do in the grafting house?” Her body was angled, her head bent over the next rootstock. “Roz and Stella showed me some of the propagation techniques. I’ve done some flats by myself. I’d like to try something in the grafting house.”

  Alone with her there, in all that moist heat. He’d probably drown in a pool of his own lust.

  “Sure, sure. No problem.”

  “Harper?” She knelt to join chip bud with rootstock. “Did you ever think, when your mama started this place, it’d be what it is?”

  He had to focus, on her words, on the work, and ignore—or at least suffer through—his body’s reaction to her.

  Lily’s mama, he reminded himself. A guest in his home. An employee. Could it be any more complicated?

  Jesus, God. Help.

  “Harper?”

  “Sorry.” He wrapped grafting tape. “I did.” When he looked up, looked around, beyond the fields and nursery beds, to the greenhouses, and sheds, he calmed. “I guess I could see it because it was what I wanted, too. And I know when Mama puts her mind to something, puts her back into it, she’s going to make it work.”

  “What if she hadn’t wanted it, or put her mind to it? What would you be doing?”

  “Just what I’m doing. If she hadn’t decided on this I’d’ve started it myself. And because I wanted it, she’d’ve got on board, so I guess we’d have pretty much what we have here.”

  “She’s the best, isn’t she? It’s good that you know that, that you understand how lucky you are. I see that between you. You don’t take each other for granted. I hope Lily and I have that one day.”

  “Seems like you already do.”

  She smiled at that, and rose to go to the next rootstock. “Do you think you and Roz are the way you are with each other, to each other—and your brothers, too—because you didn’t have a daddy most of your life? I mean, I think I was closer to my own daddy because it was just the two of us than I might’ve been otherwise. I’ve wondered about that.”

  “Maybe.” His hair, a thick tangle of black, fell forward as he worked. He shook it back, momentarily annoyed he’d forgotten a hat. “I remember her and my father, how they were together. It was special. She’s got something like that with Mitch—not the same. I guess it’s never the same, not supposed to be. But they’ve got something good and special. That’s what she deserves.”

  “Do you ever think about finding somebody? Somebody good and special?”

  “Me?” His head whipped up, and he narrowly missed slicing his own finger with