In the Garden Trilogy (29 page)

“It was fun,” Hayley put in. “It was crazy a lot of the time, but fun. All those people, and the noise, and carts sailing out the door. Everybody seemed so happy. I guess being around plants, thinking about having them for yourself, does that.”

“Good customer service has a lot to do with those happy faces. And you”—Stella tipped her glass to Hayley—“have that knocked.”

“We’ve got a good team.” Roz sat, wiggled her bare toes. They were painted pale peach today. “We’ll take a good overview in the morning, see what areas Harper and I should add to.” She leaned forward to spread caviar on a toast point. “But tonight we’ll just bask.”

“This is the best job I’ve ever had. I just want to say that.” Hayley looked at Roz. “And not just because I get to drink fancy champagne and watch y’all eat caviar.”

Roz patted her arm. “I should bring up another subject. I’ve already told David. The calls I’ve made about Alice Harper Doyle’s death certificate? Natchez,” she said. “According to official records, she died in Natchez, in the home she shared with her husband and two children.”

“Damn.” Stella frowned into her wine. “I guess it was too easy.”

“We’ll just have to keep going through the household records, noting down the names of the female servants during that time period.”

“Big job,” Stella replied.

“Hey, we’re good.” Hayley brushed off the amount of work. “We can handle it. And, you know, I was thinking. David said they saw her going toward the old stables, right? So maybe she had a thing going with one of the stablehands. They got into a fight over something, and he killed her. Maybe an accident, maybe not. Violent deaths are supposed to be one of the things that trap spirits.”

“Murder,” Roz speculated. “It might be.”

“You sound like my stepmother. I talked to her about it,” Stella told Roz. “She and my father are willing and able to help with any research if we need them. I hope that’s all right.”

“It’s all right with me. I wondered if she’d show herself to one of us, since we started looking into it. Try to point us in the right direction.”

“I had a dream.” Since it made her feel silly to talk about it, Stella topped off her glass of champagne. “A kind of continuation of one I had a few weeks ago. Neither of them was very clear—or the details of them go foggy on me. But I know it—they—have to do with a garden I’ve planted, and a blue dahlia.”

“Do dahlias come in blue?” Hayley wondered.

“They do. They’re not common,” Roz explained, “but you can hybridize them in shades of blue.”

“This was like nothing I’ve ever seen. It was ... electric, intense. This wildly vivid blue, and huge. And she was in the dream. I didn’t see her, but I felt her.”

“Hey!” Hayley pushed herself forward. “Maybe her name was Dahlia.”

“That’s a good thought,” Roz commented. “If we’re researching ghosts, it’s not a stretch to consider that a dream’s connected in some way.”

“Maybe.” Frowning, Stella sipped again. “I could hear her, but I couldn’t see her. Even more, I could feel her, and there was something dark about it, something frightening. She wanted me to get rid of it. She was insistent, angry, and, I don’t know how to explain it, but she was
there.
How could she be in a dream?”

“I don’t know,” Roz replied. “But I don’t care for it.”

“Neither do I. It’s too ... intimate. Hearing her inside my head that way, whispering.” Even now, she shivered. “When I woke up, I knew she’d been there, in the room, just as she’d been there, in the dream.”

“It’s scary,” Hayley agreed. “Dreams are supposed to be personal, just for ourselves, unless we want to share them. Do you think the flower had something to do with her? I don’t get why she wants you to get rid of it.”

“I wish I knew. It could’ve been symbolic. Of the gardens here, or the nursery. I don’t know. But dahlias are a particular favorite of mine, and she wanted it gone.”

“Something else to put in the mix.” Roz took a long sip of champagne. “Let’s give it a rest tonight, before we spook ourselves completely. We can try to carve out some time this week to look for names.”

“Ah, I’ve made some tentative plans for Wednesday after work. If you wouldn’t mind watching the boys for a couple of hours.”

“I think between us we can manage them,” Roz agreed.

“Another date with Mr. Hunky?”

With a laugh, Roz ate more caviar. “I assume that would be Logan.”

“According to Hayley,” Stella stated. “I was going to go by and see his place. I’d like a firsthand look at how he’s landscaping it.” She downed more champagne. “And while that’s perfectly true, the main reason I’m going is to have sex with him. Probably. Unless I change my mind. Or he changes his. So.” She set down her empty glass. “There it is.”

“I’m not sure what you’d like us to say,” Roz said after a moment.

“Have fun?” Hayley suggested. Then looked down at her belly. “And play safe.”

“I’m only telling you because you’d know anyway, or suspect, or wonder. It seems better not to dance around it. And it doesn’t seem right for me to ask you to watch my kids while I’m off ... while I’m off without being honest about it.”

“It is your life, Stella,” Roz pointed out.

“Yeah.” Hayley took the last delicious sip of her champagne. “Not that I wouldn’t be willing to hear the details. I think hearing about sex is as close as I’m getting to it for a long time. So if you want to share ...”

“I’ll keep that in mind. Now I’d better go down and round up my boys. Thanks for the celebration, Roz.”

“We earned it.”

As Stella walked away, she heard Roz’s questioning “Mr. Hunky?” And the dual peals of female laughter.

GUILT TUGGED AT STELLA AS SHE BUZZED HOME TO clean up before her date with Logan. No, not date, she corrected as she jumped into the shower. It wasn’t a date unless there were plans. This was a drop-by.

So now they’d had an outing, a date, and a drop-by. It was the strangest relationship she’d ever had.

But whatever she called it, she felt guilty. She wasn’t the one giving her kids their evening meal and listening to their day’s adventures while they ate.

It wasn’t that she had to be with them every free moment, she thought as she jumped back out of the shower again. That sort of thing wasn’t good for them—or for her. It wasn’t as if they’d starve if she wasn’t the one to put food in front of them.

But still, it seemed awfully selfish of her to give them over to someone else’s care just so she could be with a man.

Be intimate with a man, if things went as she expected.

Sorry, kids, Mom can’t have dinner with you tonight. She’s going to go have some hot, sweaty sex.

God.

She slathered on cream as she struggled between anticipation and guilt.

Maybe she should put it off. Unquestionably she was rushing this step, and that wasn’t like her. When she did things that weren’t like her, it was usually a mistake.

She was thirty-three years old, and entitled to a physical relationship with a man she liked, a man who stirred her up, a man, who it turned out, she had considerable in common with.

Thirty-three. Thirty-four in August, she reminded herself and winced. Thirty-four wasn’t early thirties anymore. It was mid-thirties. Shit.

Okay, she wasn’t going to think about that. Forget the numbers. She’d just say she was a grown woman. That was better.

Grown woman, she thought, and tugged on her robe so she could work on her face. Grown, single woman. Grown, single man. Mutual interests between them, reasonable sense of companionship. Intense sexual tension.

How could a woman think straight when she kept imagining what it would be like to have a man’s hands—

She stared at her partially made-up face in the mirror. “Yes?”

The knocking was like machine-gun fire on the bathroom door.

“Mom! Can I come in? Can I? Mom!”

She pulled open the door herself to see Luke, rosy with rage, his fists bunched at his side. “What’s the matter?”

“He’s
looking
at me.”

“Oh, Luke.”

“With the face, Mom. With ... the ...
face.
”

She knew the face well. It was the squinty-eyed, smirky sneer that Gavin had designed to torment his brother. She knew damn well he practiced it in the mirror.

“Just don’t look back at him.”

“Then he makes the noise.”

The noise was a hissing puff, which Gavin could keep up for hours if called for. Stella was certain that even the most hardened CIA agent would crack under its brutal power.

“All right.” How the hell was she supposed to gear herself up for sex when she had to referee? She swung out of the bath, through the boys’ room and into the sitting room across the hall, where she’d hoped her sons could spend the twenty minutes it took her to get dressed companion-ably watching cartoons.

Foolish woman, she thought. Foolish, foolish woman.

Gavin looked up from his sprawl on the floor when she came in. His face was the picture of innocence under his mop of sunny hair.

Haircuts next week, she decided, and noted it in her mental files.

He held a Matchbox car and was absently spinning its wheels while cartoons rampaged on the screen. There were several other cars piled up, lying on their sides or backs as if there’d been a horrendous traffic accident. Unfortunately the miniature ambulance and police car appeared to have had a nasty head-on collision.

Help was not on the way.

“Mom, your face looks crooked.”

“Yes, I know. Gavin, I want you to stop it.”

“I’m not doing anything.”

She felt, actually felt, the sharp edges of the shrill scream razor up her throat. Choke it back, she ordered herself. Choke it back. She would
not
scream at her kids the way her mother had screamed at her.

“Maybe you’d like to not do anything in your room, alone, for the rest of the evening.”

“I wasn’t—”

“Gavin!” She cut off the denial before it dragged that scream out of her throat. Instead her voice was full of weight and aggravation. “Don’t look at your brother. Don’t hiss at your brother. You know it annoys him, which is exactly why you do it, and I want you to stop.”

Innocence turned into a scowl as Gavin rammed the last car into the tangle of disabled vehicles. “How come I always get in trouble?”

“Yes, how come?” Stella shot back, with equal exasperation.

“He’s just being a baby.”

“I’m not a baby. You’re a dickhead.”

“Luke!” Torn between laughter and shock, Stella rounded on Luke. “Where did you hear that word?”

“Somewhere. Is it a swear?”

“Yes, and I don’t want you to say it again.” Even when it’s apt, she thought as she caught Gavin making the face.

“Gavin, I can cancel my plans for this evening. Would you like me to do that, and stay home?” She spoke in calm, almost sweet tones. “We can spend your play hour cleaning your room.”

“No.” Outgunned, he poked at the pileup. “I won’t look at him anymore.”

“Then if it’s all right with you, I’ll go finish getting ready.”

She heard Luke whisper, “What’s a dickhead?” to Gavin as she walked out. Rolling her eyes to the ceiling, she kept going.

 

“THEY’RE AT EACH OTHER TONIGHT,” STELLA WARNED Roz.

“Wouldn’t be brothers if they weren’t at each other now and then.” She looked over to where the boys, the dog, and Hayley romped in the yard. “They seem all right now.”

“It’s brewing, under the surface, like a volcano. One of them’s just waiting for the right moment to spew over the other.”

“We’ll see if we can distract them. If not, and they get out of hand, I’ll just chain them in separate corners until you get back. I kept the shackles I used on my boys. Sentimental.”

Stella laughed, and felt completely reassured. “Okay. But you’ll call me if they decide to be horrible brats. I’ll be home in time to put them to bed.”

“Go, enjoy yourself. And if you’re not back, we can manage it.”

“You make it too easy,” Stella told her.

“No need for it to be hard. You know how to get there now?”

“Yes. That’s the easy part.”

She got in her car, gave a little toot of the horn and a wave. They’d be fine, she thought, watching in the rearview as her boys tumbled onto the ground with Parker. She couldn’t have driven away if she wasn’t sure of that.

It was tougher to be sure she’d be fine.

She could enjoy the drive. The early-spring breeze sang through the windows to play across her face. Tender green leaves hazed the trees, and the redbuds and wild dogwoods teased out blooms to add flashes of color.

She drove past the nursery and felt the quick zip of pride and satisfaction because she was a part of it now.

Spring had come to Tennessee, and she was here to experience it. With her windows down and the wind streaming over her, she thought she could smell the river. Just a hint of something great and powerful, contrasting with the sweet perfume of magnolia.