Red Lily (In the Garden 3)

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.

Why risk it?

He moved to another area, skimmed his light.

Nearly another hour passed in the murk, in the wet. He’d have to finish for the day, he decided. Get his tanks refilled and continue tomorrow. Customers would be coming in soon, and nothing put off retail like hearing that some guy was looking for human remains.

He trailed his light through the roots of his water lilies, thought fleetingly that he might try to hybridize a red one. Something that really snapped. He studied the roots, pleased with the health and progress of what he’d begun, and decided to surface.

His light caught something below, and slightly south. He checked his watch, noted he was approaching borrowed time, but he kicked, dived, scanned.

And he saw her, what was left of her. Bones, filthy with mud, tangled with growth. Weighed down, he saw, with a stirring of pity, by bricks and stones, tied to those bones, hands, legs, waist by the rope he imagined she’d hanged herself with.

The rope she’d meant to use on her son.

Still, shouldn’t she have surfaced at some point? Why hadn’t the rope rotted, those weights shifted? It was basic physics, wasn’t it?

But basic physics didn’t take ghosts and curses into account.

He paddled a hand in the water, moving closer to her.

The blow knocked him back, sent him somersaulting and ripped the light from his hand.

He was in the dark, with the dead, and running out of air.

He fought not to panic, to let his body go loose and limp so that he would drop to the bottom, and be able to spring off to the surface.