Lasher (11 page)

“Good man. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

Lark took Mitch’s hand.

“Don’t leave me dangling, Lark. This thing could breed with Rowan! And if this thing did…”

“I’ll call you.”

Lark caught one last glimpse of Mitch, standing there, staring, before the elevator doors closed. He remembered Rowan’s words on the phone. “There’s one guy at the Keplinger Institute who can be trusted with this. You have to get him. Mitch Flanagan. Tell him I said this is worth his time.”

Rowan had been dead right on that one. Mitch was that man all right. Lark had no fears there.

But as he drove to the airport he had plenty of fears about Rowan. He’d thought she had gone insane when he first heard her voice long distance and her warnings that the call might abruptly be cut off.

The whole problem was, all this was very exciting to Lark. It had been from the start. Rowan’s phone call, the samples themselves, the subsequent series of discoveries, even this bizarre New Orleans family. Lark had never experienced anything like this in his life. He wished he could feel more worry and less exhilaration. He was off on an adventure, taking an open-ended holiday from his life at University Hospital, and he couldn’t wait to see these people in New Orleans—to see the house there that Rowan had inherited, and the man she had
married—the family for whom Rowan had given up her entire medical career.

It was raining harder by the time he reached the airport. But Lark for years had traveled in all kinds of weather and this meant nothing to him, any more than snow in Chicago, or monsoons in Japan.

He hurried to the First Class counter to pick up his ticket and was on his way to the gate within minutes, timing it just exactly right. The flight to New Orleans was boarding now.

Of course there was the whole problem of this creature itself, he realized. He had not begun to separate out that mystery from the mystery of Rowan and her family. And for the first time, he had to admit to himself, he wasn’t sure he believed that this thing existed. He knew Rowan existed. But this offspring? Then he realized something else. Mitch Flanagan absolutely believed this being existed. And so did this Talamasca which kept calling him. And so did Rowan herself!

Of course this thing existed. There was as much proof of its existence as there is of bubonic plague.

Lark was the last one to reach the gate. Great timing, he thought again, no waiting, no standing.

Just as he handed his ticket to the young stewardess, someone took his arm.

“Dr. Larkin.”

He saw a tall robust man, very young, blond with near-colorless eyes.

“Yes, I’m Dr. Larkin,” he answered. What he wanted to say was
Not now
.

“Erich Stolov. I spoke to you on the phone.” The man flashed a little white card in front of Lark. Lark didn’t have a free hand to take it. Then the stewardess took his ticket and he took the card.

“Talamasca, you told me.”

“Where are the samples?”

“What samples?”

“The ones Rowan sent you.”

“Look, I can’t…”

“Tell me where they are, please, now.”

“I beg your pardon. I’ll do nothing of the sort. Now if you want to call me in New Orleans I’ll be seeing your friend Aaron Lightner there tomorrow afternoon.”

“Where are the samples?” said the young man, and he suddenly
slipped in front of Lark, blocking the entrance to the plane.

Lark dropped his voice to a whisper. “Get out of my way.” He was instantly and irreparably furious. He wanted to shove this guy against the wall.

“Please, sir,” the stewardess very quietly said to Stolov. “Unless you have a ticket for this flight, you’ll have to leave the gate now.”

“That’s right. Leave the gate,” said Lark, his temper cresting. “How dare you approach me like this!” And then he pushed past the young man and stormed down the ramp, heart pounding, sweat pouring down under his clothes.

“Damned son of a bitch, how dare he?” he muttered aloud.

Five minutes after takeoff, he was on the portable phone. The connection was abominable and he could never hear a thing on airline phones anyway, but he managed to reach Mitch.

“Just don’t tell anybody anything about any of it,” he said over and over.

“Got you,” said Mitch. “No one knows anything, I assure you. I have fifty technicians working on fifty pieces of the puzzle. I am the only one who sees the picture. No one will get into this building, this office, or these files.”

“Tomorrow, Mitch, I’ll call you.” Lark rang off. “Arrogant bastard,” he whispered as he replaced the phone. And Lightner had been such a nice man. Very British, very Old World, very formal when they’d spoken on the phone. Who were these people, the Talamasca?

And were they really friends of Rowan Mayfair as they claimed? Just didn’t seem so.

He sat back; he tried to think through his long conversation with Mitch, tried to relive his phone conversation with Rowan. Molecular evolution; DNA; cell membranes. All of it frightened and enthralled him.

The stewardess put a fresh drink in his hand; nice double martini for which he had not even had to ask. He drank a good icy swallow.

Then he remembered with a start that Mitch had told him he could produce a three-dimensional computer projection of what this creature looked like. Why the hell hadn’t he taken a look, for god’s sakes? Of course all he would have seen was some crazy neon drawing on the screen, an outline. What did Mitch
know about the way the creature really looked? Was it ugly for instance? Or was it beautiful?

He found himself trying to picture it, this thin reed of a being with the large brain and the incredibly long hands.

O
NE HOUR UNTIL
Ash Wednesday. All was quiet in the small house on the Gulf with its many doors open to the white beach. The stars hung low over the distant dark horizon, a mere stroke of light between heaven and sea. The soft wind swept through the small rooms of the house, beneath the low ceilings, bringing a tropical freshness to every nook and cranny, though the little house itself was cold.

Gifford didn’t care. Bundled in a long huge Shetland wool turtleneck, and legs snug in wool stockings, she enjoyed the chill of the breeze as much as the fierce and specific heat coming from the busy fire. The cold, the smell of the water, the smell of the fire—all of it was Florida in winter for Gifford, her hideaway, her refuge, her safe place to be.

She lay on the couch opposite the hearth, staring at the white ceiling, watching the play of the light on it, and wondering in a passive, uncurious sort of way, what it was about Destin that made her so happy—why it had always been such a perfect escape from the perpetual gloom of her life at home. She’d inherited this little beach house from her Great-grandmother Dorothy, on her father’s side, and over the years, she had spent her most contented moments here.

Gifford wasn’t happy now, however. She was only less miserable than she would have been if she had stayed in New Orleans for Mardi Gras, and she knew it. She knew this misery. She knew this tension. And she knew that she could not have gone to the old First Street house on Mardi Gras, no matter how much she might have wanted to, or how guilty she felt for running away.

Mardi Gras in Destin, Florida. Might as well have been any day of the year. Clean and quiet, and removed from all the ugliness of the parades, the crowds, the garbage littering St. Charles Avenue, the relatives drinking and arguing, and her beloved husband, Ryan, carrying on as if Rowan Mayfair had not
run away and left her husband, Michael Curry, as if there had not been some sort of bloody struggle on Christmas Day at First Street, as if everything could be smoothed over and tightened up, and reinforced by a series of careful legal pronouncements and predictions, when in fact, everything was falling apart.

Michael Curry had nearly died on Christmas. No one knew what had happened to Rowan. It was all too awful, and everyone knew it, yet everyone wanted to gather on Mardi Gras Day at First Street. Well, they would have to tell Gifford how it went.

Of course the great Mayfair legacy itself was in no real danger. Gifford’s mountainous trust funds were in no real danger. It was the Mayfair State of Mind that was threatened—the collective spirit of some six hundred local Mayfairs, some triple and quadruple cousins of each other, who had been lifted to the heights recently by the marriage of Rowan Mayfair, the new heiress of the legacy, and then dashed to the rocks of hell by her sudden defection, and the obvious sufferings of Michael Curry, who was still recovering from the heart attack he’d suffered on December 25th. Poor Michael. He had aged ten years in the month of January, as far as Gifford was concerned.

Gathering this Mardi Gras Day at the house had been an act, not of faith, but of desperation—of trying to hold to an optimism and excitement which in one afternoon of horror had become impossible to maintain. And what a dreadful thing they had all done to Michael. Didn’t anyone care what the man felt? Imagine. Surrounding him with Rowan’s family as if it were just business as usual, when Rowan had gone. The whole thing was typical Mayfair—bad judgment, bad manners, bad morals—all disguised as some sort of lofty family activity or celebration.

I wasn’t born a human being, I was born a Mayfair, Gifford thought. And I married a Mayfair, and I have given birth to Mayfairs; and I shall die a Mayfair death no doubt, and they will pile into the funeral parlor, Weeping in Mayfair style, and what will my life have been? This was often Gifford’s thought of late, but the disappearance of Rowan had driven her nearly to the brink. How much could she take? Why had she not warned Michael and Rowan not to marry, not to live in that house, not even to remain in New Orleans?

Also there was the whole question of Mayfair Medical—the giant neuro-research complex which Rowan had been master-
minding before her departure, a venture which had elicited enthusiasm from hundreds of family members, especially Gifford’s eldest and favorite son, Pierce, who was now heartbroken that the medical center along with everything else pertaining to Rowan was on indefinite hold. Shelby was also crushed, though being in law school still, she’d never been so involved; and even Lilia, Gifford’s youngest and most estranged, at Oxford now, who had written home to say they must—at all costs—go on with the medical center.

Gifford felt a sudden tensing all over, as once again she put it all together, only to be frightened by the picture and convinced that something had to be discovered, revealed, done!

And then there was Michael’s ultimate fate. What was it to be? He was recovering, so they said. But how could they tell Michael how bad things really were without causing him a setback? Michael could suffer another heart attack, one which might be fatal.

So the Mayfair legacy has destroyed another innocent male, Gifford thought bitterly. It’s no wonder we all marry our cousins; we don’t want to bring in the innocents. When you marry a Mayfair, you should be a Mayfair. You have lots of blood on your hands.

As for the idea that Rowan was in real danger, that Rowan had been forced somehow to leave on Christmas Day, that something might have happened to her—that was almost too terrible a thought for Gifford to bear. Yet Gifford was pretty sure something had happened to Rowan. Something really bad. They could all feel it. Mona could feel it, and when Gifford’s niece, Mona, felt something you had to pay attention. Mona had never been a melodramatic, bragging Mayfair, claiming to see ghosts on the St. Charles streetcar. Mona had said last week she didn’t think anybody should bank on Rowan coming back, that if they wanted the medical center, they ought to go ahead without her.

And to think, Gifford smiled to herself, that the august firm of Mayfair and Mayfair, representing Mayfair ad infinitum, stops to listen when a thirteen-year-old speaks. But it was true.

Gifford’s biggest secret regret was that she had not connected Rowan with Mona while there had been time. Maybe Mona would have sensed something and spoken up. But then Gifford had so many regrets. Sometimes it seemed to her that her entire life was a great sighing regret. Beneath the lovely surface of her picture-book Metairie home, her gorgeous children,
her handsome husband, and her own subdued southern style, was nothing but regret, as if her life had been built atop a great and secret dungeon.

She was just waiting to hear the news. Rowan dead. And for the first time in hundreds of years, no designee for the legacy. Ah, the legacy, and now that she had read Aaron Lightner’s long account, how would she ever feel the same way about the legacy? Where was the precious emerald, she wondered? Surely her efficient husband, Ryan, had stashed it in an appropriate vault. That was where he should have stashed that awful “history.” She could never forgive him for letting it slip into Mona’s hands, that long Talamasca discussion of generations of witchcraft.

Maybe Rowan had run away with the emerald. Oh, that made her realize something else, just one of those minor-league regrets—! She’d forgotten to send the medal to Michael.

She’d found the medal out by the pool only two days after Christmas, while the detectives and the coroner’s office were making all their tests inside the house, and while Aaron Lightner and that strange colleague of his, Erich Somethingorother, were gathering specimens of the blood that stained the wails and the carpets.

“You realize they will write all this in that file?” Gifford had protested, but Ryan had let these men proceed. It was Lightner. Everyone trusted him. Indeed Beatrice was in love with him. Gifford wouldn’t be surprised if Beatrice married him.

The medal was St. Michael the Archangel. A gorgeous old silver medal on a broken chain. She’d slipped it into her purse, and meant a thousand times to send it to him—after he came home from the hospital of course, so as not to upset him. Well, she should have given it to Ryan before she left. But then again, who knew? Maybe he’d been wearing that medal on Christmas Day, when he’d nearly drowned in the pool. Poor Michael.

The logs in the fire shifted noisily and the mellow soothing light flared on the plain sloped ceiling. It made Gifford aware of how very quiet the surf was and had been all day. Sometimes the surf died to absolutely nothing on the Gulf of Mexico. She wondered if that could happen on the ocean. She loved the sound of the waves, actually. She wished they were roaring away out there in the dark, as if the Gulf were threatening to invade the land. As if nature were lashing back at the
beach houses and the condominiums and the trailer parks, reminding them that they might be wiped off the smooth sandy face of the earth at any minute, should a hurricane or a tidal wave come. And certainly those things would inevitably come.