much more than he already knew, but he'd answered the questions, filled in little gaps in the stories both his mother and David had already related.
"I've got David's rundown of the night you saw her outside, in the gardens, when you were boys."
"The night we were camping out, David, my brothers, and me." Harper nodded in acknowledgment. "Some night."
"According to David, you saw her first, woke him."
"Saw, heard, felt." Harper shrugged. "Hard to pin it down, but yeah, I woke him up. Couldn't say what time it was. Late. We'd stayed up eating ourselves half sick, and spooking ourselves out with scary stories. Then I heard her, I guess. Don't know how, exactly, I knew it was her. It wasn't like the other times."
"What was different?"
"She wasn't singing. She was more . . . moaning, I guess, or making these unintelligible sounds. More like what you'd expect from a ghost on a hot, moonlit night when you're a kid. So I looked out, and there she was. Only not like before, either."
Brave boy, Mitch thought, to look out instead of pulling the sleeping bag over his head. "What was it like?"
"She was in this white nightgown sort of thing. The way she was last spring when she was upstairs. Her hair was down, tangled and dirty. And I could see the moonlight going through her. Right through. Jesus." He took a deeper sip of beer.
"So I got David up, and Austin and Mason woke up, too. I wanted Austin to stay back with Mason, but there was no chance of that, so we all set out to follow her."
Mitch could imagine it very well. A pack of young boys, moonlight and lightning bugs and heavy summer heat. And a ghostly figure trailing through the gardens.
"She walked right over Mama's evening primrose, straight through the hollyhocks. Through them. I was too wound up to be scared. She kept making this noise, a kind of humming, or keening, I guess you could say. I think there were words mixed in there somewhere, but I couldn't make them out. She was going toward the carriage house. Seemed to me she was heading toward the carriage house anyway. And she turned, and she looked back. And her face . . ."
"What?"
"Like last spring again," he said, and let out a little breath. "She looked insane. Horror-movie insane. Wild and crazy. She was smiling, but it was horrible. And for a minute, when she looked at me and I looked back, it was so cold, I saw my own breath. Then she turned, kept walking, and I started after her."
"Started after her? An insane ghost? You had to be scared."
"Not so much, not that I realized anyway. I was caught up, I guess. Really fascinated. I had toknow . But Mason started screaming. Then I was scared spitless. I thought somehow she'd gotten him, which was stupid since she was up ahead and he was behind me. Farther behind me, all of them, than I'd realized. So I went running back, and there was Mason on the ground with his foot bleeding. And Austin's running back to the tent for a T-shirt or something to wrap it 'cause we're not wearing anything but our jockeys. David and I were trying to carry him back when Mama came running out like the wrath of God."
He laughed then, eyes twinkling at Mitch. "You should've seen her. She's wearing these little cotton shorts and some skinny little T-shirt. Her hair was longer back then, and it's flying as she came hauling ass. And I see - the others didn't, but I see she's got my granddaddy's pistol. I tell you what, if it had been some ghost after us, or anything else, she'd have run it off. But when she saw what was what, more or less, she shoved the pistol in the waistband of those little shorts, around the back. She picked Mason up, told us all to get some clothes on. And we all piled into the car to take Mason into the ER for stitches."
"You never said you'd seen the gun." Roz stepped into the library.
"I didn't think you wanted the others to know."
She walked right to him, bent down, and kissed the top of his head. "Didn't want you to know, either. You always saw too much." She turned her cheek, left it on top of Harper's head as she looked at Mitch. "Am I interrupting?"
"No. You could sit down if you have a