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"What did you do?" Hayley whispered the question, reverently

"I pulled the covers over "

"You were afraid of her?" Stella prohost - and I have a sensitive nature, so sure But I didn&039;t stay afraid In theit seemed like a drea tochains or bloodless howls She seeel, so I wasn&039;t afraid of her I told Harper about it in the , and he said we ot to see her"

He smiled at the memory "I felt pretty proud of that, and looked forward to seeing her again I saw her a few more times when I was over Then, when I was about thirteen the - we&039;ll say visitations - stopped"

"Did she ever speak to you?"

"No, she&039;d just sing That sa"

"Did you only see her in the bedrooht?"

"No There was this tiy, but we nagged Roz until she let all of us sleep out there in a tent We didn&039;t ht &039;cause Mason cut his foot on a rock Remember that, Roz?"

"I do Two o&039;clock in thefour kids in the car so I can take one of them to the ER for stitches"

"We were out there before sunset, out near the west edge of the property By ten ere all of us half sick on hot dogs and host stories Lightning bugs were out," hehis eyes "Past midsummer then, and steaer ones fell asleep, but Harper and I stayed up for a while A long while II knew, Harper was shaking my shoulder &039;There she is,&039; he said, and I saw her, walking in the garden"

"Oh, ed closer to David as Stella continued to type "What happened then?"

"Well, Harper&039;s hissing into talk hi oing, and we could stay behind if ere yelloard dogs"

"I bet that got youa yelloard dog isn&039;t an option for a boy in the co Mason couldn&039;t&039;ve been but six, but he was trotting along at the rear, trying to keep up There wasback some, so she didn&039;t see us

"I swear there wasn&039;t a breath of air that night, not a whisper of it to stir a leaf She didn&039;t h the shrubs There was soht I didn&039;t realize what it was until long after"

"What?" Breathless, Hayley leaned forward, gripped his arht?"

"Her hair was down Always before, she&039;d had it up Sort of sweet and old-fashioned ringlets spiraling down froht it was down, and kind of wild, spilling down her back, over her shoulders And she earing sohost that night than she ever did otherwise And I was afraid of her, ain Shethem I could hear my own breath pant in and out, and I must&039;ve slowed down because Harper ell ahead She was going toward the old stables, or e house?" Hayley almost squealed it "Where Harper lives?"

"Yeah He wasn&039;t living there then," he added with a laugh "He wasn&039;tfor the stables, but she&039;d have to go right by the carriage house So, she stopped, and she turned around, looking back I know I stopped dead then, and the blood just drained out of

"She looked crazy, and that orse than dead somehow Before" I could decide whether to run after Harper, or hightail it like a yelloard dog, Mason screaotten hi back Turned out Mason had gashed his foot open on a rock When I looked back toward the old stables, she was gone"

He stopped, shuddered, then let out a weak laugh "Scared ed

"He needed six stitches" Roz scooted the notebook toward Stella "That&039;s how she looks to me"

"That&039;s her" Stella studied the sketch of the thin, sad-eyed woman "Is this how she looked to you, David?"

"Except that one night, yeah"

"Hayley?"

"Best I can tell"

"Same for me This shows her in fairly sih neck, front buttons Okay, the sleeves are a little poufed down to the elbow, then snug to the wrist Skirt&039;s smooth over the hips, then widens out some Her hair&039;s curly, lots of curls that are scooped up in a kind of topknot I&039; to do an Internet search on fashion, but it&039;s obviously after the 1860s, right? Scarlett O&039;Hara hoop skirts were the thing around then And it&039;d be before, say, the 1920s and the shorter skirts"

"I think it&039;s near the turn of the century," Hayley put in, then shrugged when gazes shifted to her

"I know a lot of useless stuff That looks like what they called hourglass style I h she&039;s way thin, it looks like that&039;s the style Gay Nineties stuff"

"That&039;s good Okay, let&039;s look it up and see" Stella tapped keys, hit Execute

"I gotta pee Don&039;t find anything iet back" Hayley dashed out, as fast as her condition would allow

Stella scanned the sites offered, and selected one on women&039;s fashion in the 1890s

"Late Victorian," she stated as she read and skilass These are all what I&039;d think of as more stylish, but it seems like the same idea"

She moved to the end of the decade, and over into the early twentieth century "No, see, these sleeves are a lot bigger at the shoulder They&039;re calling the-o&039;-mutton, and the bodices on the daywear seem a little sleeker"

She backtracked in the other direction "No, we&039;re getting into bustles here I think Hayley hteen-nineties?" Hayley hurried back in "Score one for me"

"Not so fast If she was a servant," Roz reht not have been dressed fashionably"

"Da a Scoreboard

"But even so, we could say between 1890 and, what, 1910?" Stella suggested "And if we go with that, and an approxie of twenty-five, we could estimate that she was born between 1865 and 1885"

She huffed out a breath "That&039;s too in for error"

"Hair," David said "She may have been a servant,to stop her fro 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&039;d narrow this down to between 1890 and 1895, or up to, say &039;98 if she was a little behind the tiure she died in that decade, anyway, between the ages of oh, let&039;s say between twenty-two and twenty-six"

"Family Bible first," Roz decided "That should tell us if any of the Harper woroup, died in that decade"

She dragged it in front of her The binding was black leather, ornately carved Soined it was Roz herself - kept it dusted and oiled

Roz paged through to the fae 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 theat, begat" She turned the thin pages carefully "Here we&039;ve got several girl children born through Harper ot an Alice Harper Doyle, died in childbirth October of 1893, at the age of twenty-two"

"That&039;s awful," Hayley said "She was younger than ave birth twice," Roz stated "Tough on woer"

"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&039;ve got three es are wrong Let&039;s see here, Alice was Reginald Harper&039;s youngest sister He had two more, no brothers He&039;d have inherited the house, and the estate A lot of space between Reggie and each of his sisters Probably es"

At Hayley&039;s small sound, Roz looked up sharply "I don&039;t want this to upset you"

"I&039; breath "So Reginald was the only son on that branch of the family tree?"

"He was Lots of cousins, and the estate would&039;ve passed to one of thehters first, then the boy, in 1892"

"What about his wife?" Stella put in "Maybe she&039;s the one"

"No, she lived until 1925 Ripe age"

"Then we look at Alice first," Stella decided

"And see e can find on servants during that period Wouldn&039;t be a stretch for Reginald to have diddled around with a nurse or aas he was a man"

"Hey!" David objected

"Sorry, honey Leta period where men of a certain station hada servant to bed"

"That&039;s some better But not a lot"

"Are we sure he and his fa that period?"

"A Harper always lived in Harper House," Roz told Stella "And if I reinald&039;s the one who converted froht to electricity He&039;d have lived here until his death in" She checked the book "Nineteen-nineteen, and the house passed to his son, Reginald Junior, who&039;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 knohen the - let&039;s call thean?"

"I don&039;t, and I&039; that&039;s odd I should know, and I should know ets passed down, orally and written But here we have a ghost who as far as I know&039;s been wandering around here forabout 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 ca that lullaby, just as she&039;s reputed to have done for generations before It was coentleness about her I tried to talk to her sometimes, but she never talked back She&039;d just smile Sometimes she&039;d cry Thanks, sweetie," she said when David poured her e years, andbeing a teenage girl I didn&039;t think about her s But I remember the next time I saw her"

"Don&039;t keep us in suspense," Hayley demanded

"It was early in the summer, end of June John and I hadn&039;t beenhere It was already hot, one of those hot, still nights where the air&039;s like a wet blanket But I couldn&039;t sleep, so I left the cool house for the hot garden I was restless and nervy I thought I nant I wanted it - anted it soelse I went out to the garden and sat on this old teak glider, and drea it was true and we&039;d started a baby"

She let out a little sigh "I was barely eighteen Anyhile I sat there, she came I didn&039;t see or hear her co So about it, made me know - absolutely know - I had child in ht heat and cried for the joy of it When I went to the doctor a couple weeks later, I already kneas carrying Harper"

"That&039;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&039;d see her, and I&039;d know there was a baby co her regularly"

"It has to be about children," Stella decided, underlining "pregnancy" twice in her notes "That&039;s the conant woood" Immediately she winced "Sorry, Hayley, that didn&039;t sound right"

"I knohat you mean Maybe she&039;s Alice Maybe what she needs to pass over is to be acknowledged by name"

"Well" Stella looked at the cartons and books "Let&039;s dig in"

She dreahosts and questions, of her perfect garden with the blue dahlia that grew stubbornly in itsplace

She heard the voice inside her head, a voice that wasn&039;t her own

"It&039;s true That&039;s true," sheand vivid"

It seees everything It will take over, and spoil everything you&039;ve done Everything you have Would you risk that, risk all, for one dazzling flower? One that will only die away at the first frost?

"I don&039;t know" Studying the garden, she rubbed her are the plan I ht be able to use it as a focal point"

Thunder booarden, just as she&039;d once stood through a storrief she&039;d felt then stabbed into her as if soed a knife into her heart

Feel it? Would you feel it again? Would you risk that kind of pain, for this?

"I can&039;t breathe" She sank to her knees as the pain radiated "I can&039;t breathe What&039;s happening to me?"

Remember it Think of it Re it put Before it&039;s too late! Can&039;t you see how it tries to overshadow the rest? Can&039;t you see how it steals the light? Beauty can be poison

She woke, shivering with cold, with her heart beating against the pain that had ripped aith her

And knew she hadn&039;t been alone, not even in dreams