She sighed, left her head on Roz’s shoulder. “I can’t help it, even in this room, I feel sorry for her. She was cold and selfish, calculating. A whore, certainly, in the lowest sense of the word. But she’s paid for it, hasn’t she? More than a hundred years of being lost, of watching over other people’s children and never having more than that one mad moment with her own. She’s paid.”
“Maybe she has. Are you all right?”
Hayley nodded. “It wasn’t like before, not the way I could feel her pulling at me. I was stronger. I need life more than she does. I think she’s tired. Almost as tired as we are.”
“That may be, too. But you don’t let your guard down.” Stella looked up where once had hung an armed gaslight chandelier. “Not for a minute.”
“Let’s go back.” Stella rose, helped Hayley to her feet. “You did what you could. We all have.”
“It doesn’t seem like enough. It was a brutal death. It wasn’t quick, and she saw the maid run out with the baby. She reached out her arms for him, even when she was strangling.”
“That’s not a mother’s love, whatever she thought,” Roz said.
“No, it’s not. It wasn’t. But it was all she had.” Hayley moistened her lips, wished desperately for water. “She cursed him—Reginald. Cursed them all—the Harpers. She . . . she willed herself to stay here. But she’s tired. Part of her, the part that sings lullabies, is so tired and lost.”
She let out a sigh, then smiled when she saw Harper pacing the landing. “We’ve all got so much more than she did. We’re fine.” She left the other women to go to him. “I guess we didn’t get what we were after, but we’re fine.”
“What happened?”
“I saw her die, and I felt her in the dark. Awful. Dark and cold and alone. Lost.” She leaned against him, let him lead her downstairs. “I don’t know what happened to her, what they did with her. She was going down in the dark, in the dark and cold.”
“Buried?”
“I don’t know. It was more . . . floating away in the dark, drifting down where she couldn’t see or hear, or find her way out.” Unconsciously, she rubbed a hand over her throat, remembering the sensation of the rope biting in. “Maybe it was a soul thing—you know the opposite of the tunnel of light.”
“Floating, drifting?” Harper’s eyes went sharp. “How about sinking?”
“Ah . . . yeah. I guess.”
“The pond,” he said and looked at her. “We never thought of the pond.”
“THIS IS CRAZY.” In the hazy light of dawn, Hayley stood on the bank of the pond. “It could take hours, more. He should have help. We could get other people. Search-and-rescue people.”
Roz slid an arm over her shoulders. “He wants to do this. He needs to.” She watched while Harper pulled on flippers. “It’s time for us to step back, let them do.”
The pond looked so dark and deep with the skim of fog rising over its surface. The floating lilies, the spears of cattails and iris greens that had always seemed so charming to her were ominous now, fairy-tale foreign and frightening.
But she remembered how he’d paced the landing while she’d gone up the stairs into the nursery.
“He trusted me,” Hayley said quietly. “Now I have to trust him.”
Mitch crouched beside Harper, handed him an underwater lamp. “Got everything you need?”
“Yeah. Been a while since I scuba’d.” He took deep, steady breaths to expand his lungs. “But it’s like sex, you don’t forget the moves.”
“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.