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to Reginald Jr. And saying the stork got rich delivering that one. That her mother told her to hush, that blood money and curses aside, the child was innocent. When she asked what she meant, her mother wouldn’t speak of it, except to say she’d done her duty by the Harper family, and would have to live with it. But the happiest day of her life had been when she’d walked out the door of this house for the last time.”
    “She knew my grandfather had been taken from his mother.” Roz reached down, touched a hand to Harper’s shoulder. “And if this woman is remembering correctly, it sounds as though Amelia wasn’t willing to give him up.”
    “Blood money and curses,” Stella repeated. “Who was paid, and what was cursed?”
    “There would have been a doctor or a midwife, perhaps both, attending Amelia during the birth.” Mitch spread his hands. “Almost certainly they’d have been paid off. Some of the servants here might have been bribed.”
    “I know that’s awful,” Hayley said. “But you wouldn’t call that blood money, would you? Hush money more like.”
    “Bull’s-eye,” Mitch told her. “If there was blood money, where was the blood?”
    “Amelia’s death.” Logan shifted, leaned forward. “She haunts here, so she died here. You haven’t been able to find any record of that, so we have to assume it was covered up. Easiest way to cover something up is money.”
    “I agree.” Stella nodded. “But how did she get here? There’s no mention of Amelia in any of Beatrice’s journals. No mention of Reginald’s mistress by name, or of her coming to Harper House. She wrote about the baby, and how she felt about Reginald bringing him here, expecting her to pretend she’d given birth to him. Wouldn’t she have been just as outraged, and written of that, if he’d established Amelia in the house?”
    “He wouldn’t have.” Hayley spoke quietly. “From everything we’ve learned about him, he wouldn’t have brought a woman of her class, one he considered a convenience, a means to an end, into the house he was so proud of. He wouldn’t have wanted her around his son—the one he was passing as legitimate. It’d be a constant reminder.”
    “That’s a good point.” Harper stretched out his legs, crossed them at the ankles. “But if we believe she died here, then we have to believe she was here.”
    “Maybe she passed as a servant,” Stella suggested. She gestured, and her wedding ring glinted gold in the softening light. “If Beatrice didn’t know her, what she looked like, Amelia might have managed to get a position in the house, so she’d be close to her son. She sings to the children of the house, she’s obsessed with the children here, in her way. Wouldn’t she have been even more so with her own child?”
    “It’s a possibility,” Mitch commented. “We haven’t found her through the household records, but it’s a possibility.”
    “Or she came here to try to get him.” Roz looked at Stella, at Hayley. “A mother, frantic, desperate, and not completely balanced. She sure as hell didn’t go crazy after she died. I’m not willing to stretch credulity that far. Doesn’t it play that she would have come here, and something went terribly wrong? We have to consider that if she came here, she might have been murdered. Blood money to cover up the crime.”
    “So the house is cursed.” Harper lifted a shoulder. “And she haunts it until, what, she’s avenged? How?”
    “Maybe just recognized,” Hayley corrected. “Given her due, I guess. You’re her blood,” she said to Harper. “Maybe it’s going to take Harper blood to put her to rest.”
    “I have to say that sounds logical.” David gave a little shudder. “And creepy.”
    “We’re a bunch of rational adults sitting around talking about a ghost,” Stella reminded him. “It doesn’t get much more creepy.”
    “I saw her last night.”
    At Hayley’s statement all eyes turned to her. “And you didn’t