Black Rose

you need.”
    “A couple dozen years to organize all of this, a new pair of eyes...” He lifted the pot on the desk with him. “More coffee.”

    “I can help with the last at least.” She crossed over, mounted the steps to the second level.
    “No, that’s all right. My blood level’s probably ninety percent caffeine at this point. What time is it?”
    She noted the watch on his wrist, then looked at her own. “Ten after five.”
    “A.M. or P.M.?”
    “Been at it that long?”
    “Long enough to lose track, as usual.” He rubbed the back of one shoulder, circled his neck. “You have some fascinating relatives, Rosalind. I’ve gathered up enough newspaper clippings on the Harpers, going back to the mid-nineteenth century so far, to fill a banker’s box. Did you know, for instance, you have an ancestor who rode for the Pony Express in 1860, and in the 1880s traveled with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show?”
    “My great-great-uncle Jeremiah, who’d run off as a boy, it seems, to ride for the Pony Express. Fought Indians, scouted for the Army, took both a Comanche wife and, apparently, another in Kansas City—at more or less the same time. He was a trick rider in the Wild West Show, and was considered a black sheep by the stuffier members of the clan in his day.”
    “How about Lucybelle?”
    “Ah...”
    “Gotcha. Married Daniel C. Harper, 1858, left him two years later.” The chair creaked as he leaned back. “She pops up again in San Francisco, in 1862, where she opened her own saloon and bawdy house.”
    “That one slipped by me.”
    “Well, Daniel C. claimed that he sent her to a clinic in New York, for her health, and that she died there of a wasting disease. Wishful thinking on his part, I assume. But with a little work and magic, I found our Lucybelle entertaining the rough-and-ready crowd in California, where she lived in apparent good health for another twenty-three years.”
    “You really love this stuff.”
    “I really do. Imagine Jeremiah, age fifteen, galloping over the plains to deliver the mail. Young, gutsy, skinny. They advertised for skinny boys so they didn’t weigh down the horses.”
    “Really.” She eased a hip on the corner of his desk.
    “Bent over his mount, riding hell-for-leather, outrunning war parties, covered with dirt and sweat, or half frozen from the cold.”
    “And from your tone, you’d say having the time of his life.”
    “Had to be something, didn’t it? Then there’s Lucybelle, former Memphis society wife, in a red dress with a derringer in her garter—”
    “Aren’t you the romantic one.”
    “Had to have a derringer in her garter while she’s manning the bar or bilking miners at cards night after night.”
    “I wonder if their paths ever crossed.”
    “There you go,” he said, pleased. “That’s how you get caught up in all this. It’s possible, you know. Jeremiah might’ve swung through the doors of that saloon, had a whiskey at the bar.”
    “And enjoyed the other servings on the menu, all while the more staid of the family fanned themselves on the veranda and complained about the war.”
    “There’s a lot of staid, a lot of black sheep here. There was money and there was prestige.”
    He pushed some papers around, came up with a copy of another clipping. “And considerable charm.”
    She studied the photo of herself, on her engagement, a fresh and vibrant seventeen.
    “I wasn’t yet out of high school. Green as grass and mule stubborn. Nobody could talk me out of marrying John Ashby the June after this picture was taken. God, don’t I look ready for anything?”
    “I’ve got clippings of your parents in here. You don’t look like either of them.”
    “No. I was always told I resembled my grandfather Harper. He died when I was a child, but from the pictures I’ve seen, I favor him.”
    “Yeah, I’ve come across a few, and you do. Reginald Edward Harper, Jr, born... 1892, youngest child and only son of Reginald and Beatrice Harper.” He read his notes. “Married, ah...”
    “Elizabeth McKinnon. I remember her very well. It was she who gave me her love of gardening, and taught me about plants. My father claimed I was her favorite because I looked like my grandfather. Why don’t I get you some tea, something herbal, to offset the coffee?”
    “No, that’s okay. I can’t stay. I’ve got a date.”
    “Then I’ll let you go.”
    “With my son,” he added. “Pizza and ESPN. We try to fit one in every