“I can get some students, some friends of my son’s who know the moves, too.” Like Hayley, Mitch studied the wide, misty surface of the water. “It’s a big pond for one man to cover.”
“Whatever else she was, she was mine, so it’s for me to do. What Hayley said last night about maybe she’d been meant to help find her. I’m feeling the same about this.”
Mitch braced a hand on his shoulder. “You keep an eye on your watch, surface every thirty minutes. Otherwise, your mama’s going to toss me in after you.”
“Got it.” He looked over at Hayley, shot her a grin.
“Hey.” She stepped to him, crouched down. With a hand on his cheek she touched her mouth to his. “For luck.”
“Take all I can get. Don’t worry. I’ve been swimming in this pond . . .” He glanced up at his mother, and vague memories of his own tiny hands slapping at the water while she held him flashed into his mind. “Well, longer than I can remember.”
“I’m not worried.”
He kissed her again, tested his mouthpiece. Then, adjusting his mask, slid into the pond.
He’d swum here countless times, he thought as he dived, following the beam of the light through the water. Cooling off on hot summer afternoons, or taking an impulsive dip before work in the morning.
Or bringing a girl back after a date and talking her into a moonlight skinny dip.
He’d splashed with his brothers in this pond, he remembered, playing his light over the muddy bottom before he checked his watch, his compass. His mother had taught them each how to swim here, and he remembered the laughter, the shrieks, and the cool, quiet moments.
Had all that happened over the grave of Amelia?
Mentally, he cut the pond into wedges, like a pie, and methodically began to search each slice.
At thirty minutes, then an hour, he surfaced.
He sat on the edge, feet dangling in while Logan helped him change his tank. “I’ve covered nearly half. Found some beer cans, soft drink bottles.” He tilted his face toward his mother. “And don’t look at me, I got more respect.”
She reached down, skimmed a hand over his dripping hair. “I should think.”
“Somebody’d get me a bag, I’d clean up as I go.”
“We’ll worry about it later.”
“It’s not deep, maybe eighteen feet at the deepest point, but the rain’s stirred up the mud some, so it’s a little murky.”
Hayley sat beside him, but he noted she was careful not to dip her toes in the water. “I wish I could go in with you.”
“Maybe next year I’ll teach you how to scuba.” He patted her belly. “Stay up here and take care of Hermione.”
He rolled back into the water.
It was tedious work, without any of the adventure or thrill he’d experienced when he’d strapped on tanks on vacations. The strain of peering through the water, training his gaze on the circle of light had a headache brewing.
The sound of nothing but his own breath, sucking in oxygen from the tank, was monotonous and increasingly annoying. He wished it was done, over, and he was sitting in the dry, warm kitchen drinking coffee instead of swimming around in the damn, dark water looking for the remains of a woman who, at this point, just pissed him off.
He was tired, sick and tired of having so much of his life focused on a suicidal crazy woman—one who would have, if left to her own devices, killed her own child.
Maybe Reginald wasn’t so much the villain of the piece after all. Maybe he’d taken the kid to protect him. Maybe . . .
There was a burn in his belly, not sickness so much as a hot ball of fury. The sort, Harper realized, that could make a man forget he was fifteen feet or so underwater.
So he rechecked his watch, deliberately, paid more attention to his breathing, and followed the path of his light.
What the hell was the matter with him? Reginald had been a son of a bitch, no question about it. Just as Amelia had been self-centered and whacked. But what had come from that selfish union had been good and strong. Loving. What had come from it mattered.
So this mattered. Finding Amelia mattered.
She was probably buried out in the woods, he decided. But hell, why dig a hole in the ground in winter when you’ve got a private pond handy? It seemed right, so right he wondered they hadn’t thought of it before.
Then again, maybe they hadn’t thought of it before because it was lame. People used the pond, even back then. To swim, to fish. Bodies that got dumped in water often resurfaced.
Why risk it?
He moved to another area, skimmed his light.
Nearly another hour passed in the murk, in the wet. He’d have to finish for the day, he decided. Get his tanks refilled and continue tomorrow. Customers would be coming in soon, and nothing put off retail like hearing that some guy was looking for human remains.
He trailed his light through the roots of his water lilies, thought fleetingly that he might try to hybridize a red one. Something that really snapped. He studied the roots, pleased with the health and progress of what he’d begun, and decided to surface.
His light caught something below, and slightly south. He checked his watch, noted he was approaching borrowed time, but he kicked, dived, scanned.
And he saw her, what was left of her. Bones, filthy with mud, tangled with growth. Weighed down, he saw, with a stirring of pity, by bricks and stones, tied to those bones, hands, legs, waist by the rope he imagined she’d hanged herself with.
The rope she’d meant to use on her son.
Still, shouldn’t she have surfaced at some point? Why hadn’t the rope rotted, those weights shifted? It was basic physics, wasn’t it?
But basic physics didn’t take ghosts and curses into account.
He paddled a hand in the water, moving closer to her.
The blow knocked him back, sent him somersaulting and ripped the light from his hand.
He was in the dark, with the dead, and running out of air.
He fought not to panic, to let his body go loose and limp so that he would drop to the bottom, and be able to spring off to the surface.
But another wave bowled him over.
He saw her, gliding through the water, her white gown billowing, her hair floating out in tangled ropes. Her eyes were wide with lunacy, her hand reaching out, curled like claws.
He felt them close around his neck, squeeze, though he could see her still, feet away, suspended in the water over her own bones.
He struck out, but there was nothing to fight. He clawed toward the surface, but she held him down as inevitably as the bricks and stones that had carried her to the bottom.
She was killing him, as she’d planned to kill her own child. Maybe that had been the plan all along, he thought dimly. To take a Harper with her.
He thought of Hayley, waiting for him on the surface, of the child she carried. Of the daughter she’d already given him.
He wouldn’t give them up.
He looked back down at the bones, tried to find a glimmer of that pity. And he looked at Amelia, eternally mad.
