NRoberts - G1 Blue Dahlia

"Her hair was down. Always before, she'd had it up. Sort of sweet and old-fashioned ringlets spiraling down from the top of her head. But that night it was down, and kind of wild, spilling down her back, over her shoulders. And she was wearing something white and floaty. She looked more like a ghost that night than she ever did otherwise. And I was afraid of her, more than I was the first time, or ever was again. She moved off the path, walked over the flowers without touching them. I could hear my own breath pant in and out, and I must've slowed down because Harper was well ahead. She was going toward the old stables, or maybe the carriage house."

"The carriage house?" Hayley almost squealed it. "Where Harper lives?"

"Yeah. He wasn't living there then," he added with a laugh. "He wasn't more than ten. It seemed like she was heading for the stables, but she'd have to go right by the carriage house. So, she stopped, and she turned around, looking back. I know I stopped dead then, and the blood just drained out of me."

"I guess!" Hayley said, with feeling.

"She looked crazy, and that was worse than dead somehow. Before" I could decide whether to run after Harper, or hightail it like a yellow coward dog, Mason screamed. I thought somehow she'd gotten him, and damn near screamed myself. But Harper came flying back. Turned out Mason had gashed his foot open on a rock. When I looked back toward the old stables, she was gone."

He stopped, shuddered, then let out a weak laugh. "Scared myself."

"Me, too," Hayley managed.

"He needed six stitches." Roz scooted the notebook toward Stella. "That's how she looks to me."

"That's her." Stella studied the sketch of the thin, sad-eyed woman. "Is this how she looked to you, David?"

"Except that one night, yeah."

"Hayley?"

"Best I can tell."

"Same for me. This shows her in fairly simple dress, nipped-in waist, high neck, front buttons. Okay, the sleeves are a little poufed down to the elbow, then snug to the wrist. Skirt's smooth over the hips, then widens out some. Her hair's curly, lots of curls that are scooped up in a kind of topknot. I'm going to do an Internet search on fashion, but it's obviously after the 1860s, right? Scarlett O'Hara hoop skirts were the thing around then. And it'd be before, say, the 1920s and the shorter skirts."

"I think it's near the turn of the century," Hayley put in, then shrugged when gazes shifted to her.

"I know a lot of useless stuff. That looks like what they called hourglass style. I mean, even though

she's way thin, it looks like that's the style. Gay Nineties stuff."

"That's good. Okay, let's look it up and see." Stella tapped keys, hit Execute.

"I gotta pee. Don't find anything important until I get back." Hayley dashed out, as fast as her condition would allow.

Stella scanned the sites offered, and selected one on women's fashion in the 1890s.

"Late Victorian," she stated as she read and skimmed pictures. "Hourglass. These are all what I'd think

of as more stylish, but it seems like the same idea."

She moved to the end of the decade, and over into the early twentieth century. "No, see, these sleeves

are a lot bigger at the shoulder. They're calling them leg-o'-mutton, and the bodices on the daywear

seem a little sleeker."

She backtracked in the other direction. "No, we're getting into bustles here. I think Hayley may have it. Somewhere in the 1890s."

"Eighteen-nineties?" Hayley hurried back in. "Score one for me."

"Not so fast. If she was a servant," Roz reminded them, "she might not have been dressed fashionably."

"Damn." Hayley mimed erasing a Scoreboard.

"But even so, we could say between 1890 and, what, 1910?" Stella suggested. "And if we go with that, and an approximate age of twenty-five, we could estimate that she was born between 1865 and 1885."

She huffed out a breath. "That's too much scope, and too much margin for error."

"Hair," David said. "She may have been a servant, may have had secondhand clothes, but there'd be nothing to stop her from wearing her hair in the latest style."

"Excellent." She typed again, picked through sites. "Okay, the Gibson Girl deal—the smooth pompadour— was popularized after 1895. If we take a leap of faith, and figure our heroine dressed her hair stylishly, we'd narrow this down to between 1890 and 1895, or up to, say '98 if she was a little behind the times. Then we'd figure she died in that decade, anyway, between the ages of... oh, let's say between twenty-two and twenty-six."

"Family Bible first," Roz decided. "That should tell us if any of the Harper women, by blood or marriage, and of that age group, died in that decade."

She dragged it in front of her. The binding was black leather, ornately carved. Someone—Stella imagined it was Roz herself—kept it dusted and oiled.

Roz paged through to the family genealogy. "This goes back to 1793""and the marriage of John Andrew Harper to Fiona MacRoy. It lists the births of their eight children."

"Eight?" Hayley widened her eyes and laid a hand on her belly. "Holy God."