'You wouldn't ask if you'd been standing at the top of the stairs with me.'
'Poltergeists can cause stuff to fly around,' Hayley commented. 'But they usually manifest around adolescent kids. Something about puberty can set them off. Anyway, this isn't that. It might be that an ancestor of Logan's did something to her. So she's paying him back.'
'I've been in this house dozens of times. She's never bothered with me before.'
'The children.' Stella spoke softly as she looked over her own notes. 'It centers on them. She's drawn
to children, especially little boys. She's protective of them. And she almost, you could say, envies me
for having them, but not in an angry way. More sad. But she was angry the night I was going out to dinner with Logan.'
'Putting a man ahead of your kids.' Roz held up a hand. 'I'm not saying that's what I think. We have to think like she does. We talked about this before, Stella, and I've been thinking back on it. The only times I remember feeling anything angry from her was when I went out with men now and again, when my boys were coming up. But I didn't experience anything as direct or upsetting as this. But then, there was nothing to it. I never had any strong feelings for any of them.'
'I don't see how she could know what I feel or think.'
But the dreams, Stella thought. She's been in my dreams.
'Let's not get irrational now,' David interrupted. 'Let's follow this line through. Let's say she believes things are serious, or heading that way, between you and Logan. She doesn't like it, that's clear enough. The only people who've felt threatened, or been threatened are the two of you. Why? Does it make her angry? Or is she jealous?'
'A jealous ghost.' Hayley drummed her hands on the table. 'Oh, that's good. It's like she sympathizes, relates to you being a woman, a single woman, with kids. She'll help you look after them, even sort of look after you. But then you put a man in the picture, and she's all bitchy about it. She's like, you're
not supposed to have a nice, standard family—mom, dad, kids—because I didn't.'
'Logan and I hardly ... All he did was read them a story.'
'The sort of thing a father might do,' Roz pointed out.
'I... well, when he was reading to them, I was putting the bathroom back in shape. And she was there.
I felt her. Then, well, my things. The things I keep on the counter started to jump, jumped.'
'Holy shit,' Hayley responded.
'I went to the door, and in the boy's room, everything was calm, normal. I could feel the warmth on the front of me, and this, this raging cold against my back. She didn't want to frighten them. Only me.'
But buying a baby monitor went on her list. From now on, she wanted to hear everything that went on
in that room when her boys were up there without her.
'This is a good angle, Stella, and you're smart enough to know we should follow it.' Roz laid her hands on the library table. 'Nothing we've turned up indicates this spirit is one of the Harper women, as has been assumed all these years. Yet someone knew her, knew her when she was alive, knew that she died. So was it hushed up, ignored? Either way, it might explain her being here. If it was hushed up or ignored, it seems most logical she was a servant, a mistress, or a lover.'
'I bet she had a child.' Hayley laid a hand over her own. 'Maybe she died giving birth to it, or had to
give it up, and died from a broken heart. It would have been one of the Harper men who got her into trouble, don't you think? Why would she stay here if it wasn't because she lived here or—'
'Died here,' Stella finished. 'Reginald Harper was head of the house during the period when we think she died. Roz, how the hell do we go about finding out if he had a mistress, a lover, or an illegitimate child?'
SIXTEEN
Logan had been in love twice in his life. He'd been in lust a number of times. He'd experienced extreme interest or heavy like, but love had only knocked him down and out twice. The first had been in his late teens, when both he and the girl of his dreams had been too young to handle it.
They'd burned each other and their love out with passion, jealousies, and a kind of crazed energy. He could look back at that time now and think of Lisa Anne Lauer with a sweet nostalgia and affection.
Then there was Rae. He'd been a little older, a little smarter. They'd taken their time, two years of time before heading into marriage. They'd both wanted it, though some who knew him were surprised, not only by the engagement but by his agreement to move north with her.
It hadn't surprised Logan. He'd loved her, and north was where she'd wanted to be. Needed to be, he corrected, and he'd figufed, naively as it turned out, that he could plant himself anywhere.
He'd left the wedding plans up to her and her mother, with some input from his own. He wasn't crazy. But he'd enjoyed the big, splashy, crowded wedding with all its pomp.
He'd had a good job up north. At least in theory. But he'd been restless and dissatisfied in the beehive
of it, and out of place in the urban buzz.
The small-town boy, he thought as he and his crew finished setting the treated boards on the roof of a twelve- foot pergola. He was just too small-town, too small-time, to fit into the urban landscape.
He hadn't thrived there, and neither had his marriage. Little things at first, picky things—things he knew
in retrospect they should have dealt with, compromised on, overcome. Instead, they'd both let those little things fester and grow until they'd pushed the two of them, not just apart, he thought, but in opposite directions.
She'd been in her element, and he hadn't. At the core he'd been unhappy, and she'd been unhappy he wasn't acclimating. Like any disease, unhappiness spread straight down to the roots when it wasn't treated.
Not all her fault. Not all his. In the end they'd been smart enough, or unhappy enough, to cut their losses.
The failure of it had hurt, and the loss of that once-promising love had hurt. Stella was wrong about the lack of scars. There were just some scars you had to live with.
The client wanted wisteria for the pergola. He instructed his crew where to plant, then took himself off
to the small pool the client wanted outfitted with water plants.
He was feeling broody, and when he was feeling broody, he liked to work alone as much as possible. He had the cattails in containers and, dragging on boots, he waded in to sink them. Left to themselves, the cats would spread and choke out everything, but held in containers they'd be a nice pastoral addition to the water feature. He dealt with a trio of water lilies the same way, then dug in the yellow flags. They liked their feet wet, and would dance with color on the edge of the pool.
The work satisfied him, centered him as it always did. It let another part of his mind work out separate problems. Or at least chew on them for a while.
Maybe he'd put a small pool in the walled garden he planned to build at home. No cattails, though. He might try some dwarf lotus, and some water canna as a background plant. It seemed to him it was more the sort of thing Stella would like.
He'd been in love twice before, Logan thought again. And now he could sense those delicate taproots searching inside him for a place to grow. He could probably cut them off. Probably. He probably should.
What was he going to do with a woman like Stella and those two ridiculously appealing kids? They were bound to drive each other crazy in the long term with their different approaches to damn near everything. He doubted they'd bum each other out, though, God, when he'd had her in bed, he'd felt singed. But
they might wilt, as he and Rae had wilted. That was more painful, more miserable, he knew, than the quick flash.
And this time there were a couple of young boys to consider.
Wasn't that why the ghost had given him a good kick in the ass? It was hard to believe he was sweating
in the steamy air under overcast skies and thinking about an encounter with a ghost. He'd thought he
was open-minded about that sort of thing—until he'd come face-to-face, so to speak, with it.
The fact was, Logan realized now, as he hauled mulch over for the skirt of the pool, he hadn't believed
in the ghost business. It had all been window dressing or legendary stuff to him. Old houses were supposed to have ghosts because it made a good story, and the south loved a good story. He'd accepted
