It lies. It lies.
That whisper, somehow female, somehow raging, slithered into her sleeping brain. She whimpered a
little, tossed restlessly in her chilly bed.
Kill it! Kill it. Hurry before it's too late.
No, she couldn't kill something so beautiful, so alive, so vivid. But that didn't mean she could just leave
it there, out of its place, upsetting the rest of the bed.
All that work, the preparation, the planning, and now this. She'cf just have to plan another bed and work it in. With a sigh, she reached out, feathered her fingers over those bold blue petals. It would be a lot of work, she thought, a lot of trouble, but—
"Mom."
"Isn't it pretty?" she murmured. "It's so blue."
"Mom, wake up."
"What?" She tumbled out of the dream, shaking off sleep as she saw Luke kneeling in the bed beside her.
God, the room was freezing.
"Luke?" Instinctively she dragged the spread over him. "What's the matter?"
"I don't feel good in my tummy."
"Aw." She sat up, automatically laying a hand on his brow to check for fever. A little warm, she thought. "Does it hurt?"
He shook his head. She could see the gleam of his eyes, the sheen of tears. "It feels sick. Can I sleep in your bed?"
"Okay." She drew the sheets back. "Lie down and bundle up, baby. I don't know why it's so cold in here. I'm going to take your temperature, just to see." She pressed her lips to his forehead as he snuggled onto her pillow. Definitely a little warm.
Switching on the bedside lamp, she rolled out to get the thermometer from the bathroom.
"Let's find out if I can see through your brain." She stroked his hair as she set the gauge to his ear.
"Did you feel sick when you went to bed?"
"Nuh-uh, it was ..." His body tightened, and he made a little groan.
She knew he was going to retch before he did. With a mother's speed, she scooped him up, dashed into the bathroom. They made it, barely, and she murmured and stroked and fretted while he was sick.
Then he turned his pale little face up to hers. "I frew up."
"I know, baby. I'm sorry. We're going to make it all better soon."
She gave him a little water, cooled his face with a cloth, then carried him back to her bed. Strange, she thought, the room felt fine now.
"It doesn't feel as sick in my tummy anymore."
"That's good." Still, she took his temperature—99.1, not too bad—and brought the wastebasket over beside the bed. "Does it hurt anywhere?"
"Nuh-uh, but I don't like to frow up. It makes it taste bad in my throat. And my other tooth is loose, and maybe if I frow up again, it'll come out and I won't have it to put under my pillow."
"Don't you worry about that. You'll absolutely have your tooth for under your pillow, just like the other one. Now, I'll go down and get you some ginger ale. You stay right here, and I'll be back in just a minute. Okay?"
"Okay."
"If you have to be sick again, try to use this." She set the wastebasket beside him on the bed. "I'll be
right back, baby."
She hurried out, jogging down the stairs in her nightshirt. One of the disadvantages of a really big house, she realized, was that the kitchen was a mile away from the bedrooms.
She'd see about buying a little fridge, like the one she'd had in her dorm room at college, for the upstairs sitting room.
Low-grade fever, she thought as she rushed into the kitchen. He'd probably be better by tomorrow.
If he wasn't, she'd call the doctor.
She hunted up ginger ale, filled a tall glass with ice, grabbed a bottle of water, and dashed back upstairs.
"I get ginger ale," she heard Luke say as she walked back down the hall to her room. "Because I was
sick. Even though I feel better, I can still have it. You can have some, too, if you want."
"Thanks, honey, but—" When she swung into the room, she saw Luke was turned away from the door, sitting back against the pillows. And the room was cold again, so cold that she saw the vapor of her
own breath.
"She went away," Luke said.
Something that was more than the cold danced up her spine. "Who went away?"
"The lady." His sleepy eyes brightened a bit when he saw the ginger ale. "She stayed with me when
you went downstairs."
"What lady, Luke? Miss Roz? Hayley?"
"Nuh-uh. The lady who comes and sings. She's nice. Can I have all the ginger ale?"
"You can have some." Her hands shook lightly as she poured. "Where did you see her?"
"Right here." He pointed to the bed, then took the glass in both hands and drank. "This tastes good."
"You've seen her before?"
"Uh-huh. Sometimes I wake up and she's there. She sings the dilly-dilly song."
Lavender's blue, dilly dilly. Lavender's green. That's the song she'd heard, Stella realized with a numb fear. The song she'd caught herself humming.
"Did she—" No, don't frighten him, she warned herself. "What does she look like?"
"She's pretty, I guess. She has yellow hair. I think she's an angel, a lady angel? 'Member the story
about the guard angel?"
"Guardian angel."
"But she doesn't have wings. Gavin says she's maybe a witch, but a good one like in Harry Potter!'
Her throat went desert dry. "Gavin's seen her too?"
"Yeah, when she comes to sing." He handed the glass back to Stella, rubbed his eyes. "My tummy feels better now, but I'm sleepy. Can I still sleep in your bed?"
"Absolutely." But before she got into bed with him, Stella turned on the bathroom light.
She looked in on Gavin, struggled against the urge to pluck him out of his bed and carry him into hers.
Leaving the connecting doors wide open, she walked back into her room.
She turned off the bedside lamp, then slid into bed with her son.
And gathering him close, she held him as he slept.
* * *
He seemed fine the next morning. Bright and bouncy, and cheerfully told David over breakfast that
he'd thrown up and had ginger ale.
She considered keeping him home from school, but there was no fever and, judging by his appetite,
no stomach problems.
"No ill effects there," David commented when the boys ran up to get their books. "You, on the other hand, look like you put in a rough one." He poured her another cup of coffee.
"I did. And not all of it because Luke was sick. After he 'frew up,' he settled down and slept like a baby. But before he settled down, he told me something that kept me awake most of the night."
David rested his elbows on the island counter, leaned forward. "Tell Daddy all."
"He says ..." She glanced around, cocking an ear so she'd hear the boys when they came back down. "There's a lady with yellow hair who comes into his room at night and sings to him."
"Oh." He picked up his dishcloth and began to mop the counter.
"Don't say 'oh' with that silly little smile."
"Hey, I'll have you know this is my amused smirk. Nothing silly about it."
"David."
"Stella," he said with the same stern scowl. "Roz told you we have a ghost, didn't she?"
"She mentioned it. But there's just one little problem with that. There are no such things as ghosts."
"So, what, some blonde sneaks into the house every night, heads to the boys' room, and breaks out in song? That's more plausible?"
"I don't know what's going on. I've heard someone singing, and I've felt..." Edgy, she twisted the band
of her watch. "Regardless, the idea of a ghost is ridiculous. But something's going on with my boys."
"Is he afraid of her?"
"No. I probably just imagined the singing. And Luke, he's six. He can imagine anything."
"Have you asked Gavin?"
"No. Luke said they'd both seen her, but..."
"So have I."
"Oh, please."
David rinsed the dishcloth, squeezed out the excess water, then laid it over the lip of the sink to dry.
"Not since I was a kid, but I saw her a few times when I'd sleep over. Freaked me out at first, but she'd just sort of be there. You can ask Harper. He saw her plenty."
"Okay. Just who is this fictional ghost supposed to be?" She threw up a hand as she heard the thunder
of feet on the stairs. "Later."
* * *
She tried to put it out of her mind, and succeeded from time to time when the work took over. But it snuck back into her brain, and played there, like the ghostly lullaby.
By midday, she left Hayley working on bulb planters and Ruby at the counter, and grabbing a clipboard, headed toward the grafting house.
Two birds, she thought, one stone.
The music today was Rachmaninoff. Or was it Mozart? Either way, it was a lot of passionate strings
and flutes. She passed the staging areas, the tools, the soils and additives rooting mediums.
She found Harper down at the far end at a worktable with a pile of five-inch pots, several cacti as stock plants, and a tray of rooting medium. She noted the clothespins, the rubber bands, the raffia, the jar of denatured alcohol.
"What do you use on the Christmas cactus?"
He continued to work, using his knife to cut a shoot from the joint of a scion plant. He had beautiful hands, she noted. Long, artistic fingers. "Apical-wedge, then? Tricky, but probably best with that
specimen because of the flat stems. Are you creating a standard, or hybridizing?"
He made his vertical slit into the vascular bundle and still didn't answer.
"I'm just wondering because—" She set her hand on his shoulder, and when he jumped and let out a muffled shout, she stumbled back and rammed into the table behind her.
"Shit!" He dropped the knife and stuck the thumb it had nicked in his mouth. "Shit!" he said again,
around his thumb, and tugged headphones off with his free hand.
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry! How bad are you cut? Let me see."
"It's just a scratch." He took it out of his mouth, rubbed it absently on his grimy jeans. "Not nearly as fatal as the heart attack you just brought on."
"Let me see the thumb." She grabbed his hand. "You've got dirt in it now."
He saw her gaze slide over toward the alcohol and ripped his hand out of hers. "Don't even think
about it."
"Well, it should at least be cleaned. And I really am sorry. I didn't see the headphones. I thought you heard me."
"It's okay. No big. The classical's for the plants. If I listen to it for too long, my eyes get glassy."
"Oh?" She picked up the headphones, held one side to one ear. "Metallica?"
"Yeah. My kind of classical." Now he looked warily at her clipboard. "What's up?"
"I'm hoping to get an idea of what you'll have ready in here to put out for our big spring opening next month. And what you have at the stage you'd want it moved out to the stock greenhouse."
"Oh, well..." He looked around. "A lot of stuff. Probably. I keep the staging records on computer."
"Even better. Maybe you could just make me a copy. Floppy disk would be perfect."
"Yeah, okay. Okay, wait." He shifted his stool toward the computer.
"You don't have to do it this minute, when you're in the middle of something else."
"If I don't, I'll probably forget."
With a skill she admired, he tapped keys with somewhat grungy fingers, found what he was after. He dug out a floppy, slid it into the data slot. "Look, I'd rather you didn't take anything out when I'm not here."
"No problem."
"How's, um, Hayley working out?"
"An answer to a prayer."
"Yeah?" He reached for a can of Coke, took a quick drink. "She's not doing anything heavy or working around toxics. Right?"
"Absolutely not. I've got her doing bulb planters right now."
"Here you go." He handed her the floppy.
"Thanks, Harper. This makes my life easier. I've never done a Christmas cactus graft." She clipped the floppy to her board. "Can I watch?"
"Sure. Want to do one? I'll talk you through."
"I'd really like to."
"I'll finish this one up. See, I cut a two-, maybe two-and-a-half-inch shoot, straight through the joint.
I've cut the top couple inches from the stem of the stock plant. And on the way to slicing my finger—"
"Sorry."
"Wouldn't be the first time. I made this fine, vertical cut into the vascular bundle."
