Black Rose

That’s something both of us need to consider.”
    “Ever just jump off the ledge, Roz?”
    “I’ve been known to. But, except for the regrettable and rare occasion, I like to make certain I’m going to land on my feet. If I wasn’t interested, I’d tell you, flat out. I don’t play games in this arena. Instead, I’m telling you that I am interested, enough to think about it. Enough to regret, a little, that I’m no longer young and foolish enough to act without thinking.”
    The phone rang. “That’ll be Hayley again. I need to get that or she’ll panic. Drive carefully.”
    She walked out to get the phone, and heard, as she assured Hayley the baby was fine, was sleeping like an angel, had been no trouble at all, the front door close behind him.

EIGHT

    A LITTLE DISTANCE, Mitch decided, was in order. The woman was a paradox, and since there was no finite solution to a paradox, it was best accepted for what it was—instead of puzzling over it until blood leaked out of your ears.
    So he’d try a little distance where he could funnel his energies into puzzles other than the enigmatic Rosalind Harper.
    He had plenty of legwork, or, more accurately, butt work. A few hours on his computer and he could verify the births and deaths and marriages listed in the Harper family Bible. He’d already generated a chart of the family ancestry, using his on-line and his courthouse information.
    Clients liked charts. Beyond that, they were tools for him, as the copies of family pictures were, as letters were. He pinned everything onto a huge board. Two in this case. One for his office in his apartment, and one in the library at Harper House.
    Pictures, old photos, old letters, diaries, scribbled family recipes, all of those things brought the people alive for him. When they were alive for him, when he began to envision their daily routines, their habits, their flaws and grievances, they mattered to him more than any job or project could matter.
    He could lose hours paging through Elizabeth Harper’s gardening notes, or the baby book she’d kept on Roz’s father. How else would he know the man who’d sired Roz had suffered from celiac at three months, or had taken his first steps ten months later?
    It was the details, the small bits, that made the past full, and immediate.
    And in the wedding photo of Elizabeth and Reginald Junior, he could see Rosalind in her grandfather. The dark hair, the long eyes, the strong facial bones.
    What else had he passed to her, and through her to her children, this man she barely remembered?
    Business acumen for one, Mitch concluded. From other details, those small bits, found in clippings, in household records, he gained a picture of a man who’d had a sharp skill for making money, who’d avoided the fate of many of his contemporaries in the stock market crash. A careful man, and one who’d preserved the family home and holdings.
    Yet wasn’t there a coolness about him? Mitch thought as he studied the photographs on his board. A remoteness that showed in his eyes. More than just the photographic style of the day.
    Perhaps it came from being born wealthy—the only son on whose shoulders the responsibilities fell.
    “What,” Mitch wondered aloud, “did you know about Amelia? Did you ever meet her, in the flesh? Or was she already dead, already just a spirit in this house when your time came around?”
    Someone knew her, he thought. Someone spoke to her, touched her, knew her face, her voice.
    And someone who did lived or worked in Harper House.

    Mitch moved to a search of the servants he had by full names.
    It took time, and didn’t include the myriad other possibilities. Amelia had been a guest, a servant whose name was not included—or had been expunged from family records—a relative’s relative, a friend of the family.
    He could speculate, of course, that if a guest, a friend, a distant relation had died in the house, the information would have trickled down, and her identity would be known.
    Then again, that was speculation, and didn’t factor in the possibility of scandal, and the tendency to hush such matters up.
    Or the fact that she’d been no one important to the Harpers, had died in her sleep, and no one considered it worth discussing.
    And it was just another paradox, he supposed as he leaned back from his work, that he, a rational, fairly logical-thinking man, was spending considerable time and effort to research and identify a ghost.
    The trick was not to