Blue Dahlia Page 0,77
Stella asked. "Died here?"
"Might have. She married Daniel Francis Doyle, of Natchez, in 1890. We can check the death records on her. I've got three more who died during the period we're using, but the ages are wrong. Let's see here, Alice was Reginald Harper's youngest sister. He had two more, no brothers. He'd have inherited the house, and the estate. A lot of space between Reggie and each of his sisters. Probably miscarriages."
At Hayley's small sound, Roz looked up sharply. "I don't want this to upset you."
"I'm okay. I'm okay," she said again and took a long breath. "So Reginald was the only son on that branch of the family tree?"
"He was. Lots of cousins, and the estate would've passed to one of them after his death, but he had a son - several daughters first, then the boy, in 1892."
"What about his wife?" Stella put in. "Maybe she's the one."
"No, she lived until 1925. Ripe age."
"Then we look at Alice first," Stella decided.
"And see what we can find on servants during that period. Wouldn't be a stretch for Reginald to have diddled around with a nurse or a maid while his wife was breeding. Seeing as he was a man."
"Hey!" David objected.
"Sorry, honey. Let me say he was a Harper man, and lived during a period where men of a certain station had mistresses and didn't think anything of taking a servant to bed."
"That's some better. But not a lot."
"Are we sure he and his family lived here during that period?"
"A Harper always lived in Harper House," Roz told Stella. "And if I remember my family history, Reginald's the one who converted from gaslight to electricity. He'd have lived here until his death in..." She checked the book. "Nineteen-nineteen, and the house passed to his son, Reginald Junior, who'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 know when the - let's call them sightings for lack of better. Do you know when they began?"
"I don't, and I'm just realizing that's odd. I should know, and I should know more about her than I do. Harper family history gets passed down, orally and written. But here we have a ghost who as far as I know's been wandering around here for more than a century, and I know next to nothing about 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 came to my room to sing that lullaby, just as she's reputed to have done for generations before. It was... comforting. There was a gentleness about her. I tried to talk to her sometimes, but she never talked back. She'd just smile. Sometimes she'd cry. Thanks, sweetie," she said when David poured her more coffee. "I didn't see her through my teenage years, andbeing a teenage girl I didn't think about her much. I had my mind on other things. But I remember the next time I saw her."
"Don't keep us in suspense," Hayley demanded.
"It was early in the summer, end of June. John and I hadn't been married very long, and we were staying here. It was already hot, one of those hot, still nights where the air's like a wet blanket. But I couldn't sleep, so I left the cool house for the hot garden. I was restless and nervy. I thought I might be pregnant. I wanted it - we wanted it so much, that I couldn't think about anything else. I went out to the garden and sat on this old teak glider, and dreamed up at the moon, praying it was true and we'd started a baby."
She let out a little sigh. "I was barely eighteen. Anyway, while I sat there, she came. I didn't see or hear her come, she was just there, standing on the path. Smiling. Something in the way she smiled at me, something about it, made me know - absolutely know - I had child in me. I sat there, in the midnight heat and cried for the joy of it. When I went to the doctor a couple weeks