Lasher (5 page)

Michael could sound like a New Orleans policeman one moment and a headmaster at another. “Unbeatable combination of elements,” Mona had written in her computer diary. Then remembered Oncle Julien’s admonition. “The man is simply too good.”

“Am I evil?” she whispered aloud in the dark. “Doesn’t compute.” She really hadn’t the slightest doubt that she wasn’t evil. Such thoughts were old-fashioned to her, and typical of Oncle Julien, especially the way he was in her dreams. She hadn’t known the words for it when she was little, but she knew them now: “Self-deprecating, self-mocking.” That is
what she’d written into the computer in the subdirectory \WS\JULIEN\CHARACTER in the file DREAM.

She walked across the kitchen and slowly through the narrow butler’s pantry, a lovely white light falling on the floorboards from the porch outside. Such a grand dining room. Michael thought the hardwood floor had been laid in the thirties, but Julien had told Mona it was 1890s, a flooring they called wooden carpet, and it had come in a roll. What was Mona supposed to do with all the things Julien had told her in these dreams?

The dense murky murals were surprisingly visible to her in the darkness—Riverbend Plantation, where Julien had been born—and its quaint world of sugar mill, slave cabins, stables and carriages moving along the old river road. But then she had cat’s eyes, didn’t she? Always had. She loved the darkness. She felt safe and at home in it. It made her want to sing. Impossible to explain to people how good she felt when she roamed alone in the darkness.

She walked around the long table, now all cleared and stripped and polished, though only hours ago it had held the last Mardi Gras banquet complete with frosted King cakes, and a silver punch bowl full of champagne. Boy, the Mayfairs sure ate themselves sick when they came to First Street, she thought. Everybody was just so happy that Michael was willing to keep the place going though Rowan had flat-out disappeared, and under suspicious circumstances. Did Michael know where she was?

Aunt Bea had said, with tears in her eyes, “His heart is broken!”

Well, here comes the kid with the wonder glue for broken hearts! Stand back, world, it’s little Mona.

She passed through the high keyhole doorway into the front hall, and then she stopped and put her hands on the frame, as Oncle Julien had done in so many old pictures, in this door or the other, and she just felt the silence and bigness of the house around her, and smelled its wood.

That other smell. There it was again, making her…what? Almost hungry. It was delicious, whatever it was. Not butterscotch, no, not caramel, not chocolate, but something thick like that, a flavor that seemed a hundred flavors compressed into one. Like the first time you bit into a chocolate-covered cherry cordial. Or a Cadbury Easter egg.

No, she needed a better comparison. Something you didn’t
eat. What about the smell of hot tar? That tantalized her, too, and then there was the smell of gasoline that she just couldn’t tear herself away from. Well, this was more like that.

She moved down the hall, noting the winking lights of other alarm devices, none of them armed, all of them waiting, and the smell became strongest when she stood at the foot of the stairs.

She knew Uncle Ryan had investigated this entire area, that even after all the blood had been washed away, and the Chinese rug in the living room had been taken out, he had come with a chemical that made lots of other blood glow in the dark. Well, it was all gone now. Just gone. He’d seen to that before Michael came home from the hospital. And he’d sworn he detected no smell.

Mona took a deep breath of it. Yes, it made you feel a kind of craving. Like the time she was riding the bus downtown on one of her escapades, all alone and reckless and loaded with dough, and she’d smelled that delicious barbecue from the bus and actually gotten off to find the place from which it was coming, a little French Quarter restaurant in a ramshackle building on Esplanade. Hadn’t tasted half as good as it smelled.

But we’re back to food again and this isn’t food.

She looked into the living room, startled again, as she’d been earlier, to see how Michael had changed things after Rowan left. Of course the Chinese carpet had been taken out. It was all bloody. But he didn’t have to abolish the old scheme of double parlors, did he? Well, he had. Mayfair Blasphemy.

It was one vast room now, with a giant soft sofa beneath the arch against the inside wall. A nice scattering of French chairs—all Oncle Julien’s to hear him tell it, now tricked out in new gold damask or a striped fabric, wickedly rich looking, and a glass table through which you could see the dark amber colors of the enormous old rug. It must have been twenty-five feet, that rug, to stretch through both rooms as it did, embracing the floor before both of the hearths. And how old it looked, like something out of the attic upstairs, most likely. Maybe Michael had brought it down with the gilded chairs.

They’d said the only orders he’d given after he came home were to change that double parlor. Put Julien’s things down there. Make it look entirely different.

Made sense. He’d obviously wanted to erase all traces of Rowan; he had wanted to obliterate the rooms in which they
spent their happiest moments. Some of the chairs were faded, wood chipped here and there. And the carpet rested right on the heart-pine floor, thin and silky looking.

Maybe there had been blood all over that other furniture. Nobody would tell Mona exactly what had gone on. No one would tell her anything much except Oncle Julien. And in her dreams, she seldom had the presence of dream-mind to ask a question. Oncle Julien just talked and talked or danced and danced.

No Victrola in this room now. What a stroke of luck it would have been, if they’d brought it down too with all this other stuff. But they hadn’t. She hadn’t heard anybody say a thing about finding a Victrola.

She’d checked out the first floor every time she’d come. Michael listened to a little tape machine in the library. This room lay in stillness, and its great Bösendorfer piano, at an angle before the second fireplace, seemed more a piece of furniture than a thing which could sing.

The room was still beautiful. It had been nice earlier to flop on the big soft sofa, from which you could see all the mirrors, the two white marble fireplaces, one to your left, one to your right, across from you, and the two doors directly opposite to Deirdre’s old porch. Yes, Mona had thought, a good vantage point, and still an enchanting room. Sometimes she danced on the bare floors of the double parlor at Amelia, dreaming of mirrors, dreaming of making a killing in mutual funds with money she’d borrow from Mayfair and Mayfair.

Just give me another year, she thought, I’ll crack the market, then if I can find but one gambler in that whole stodgy law firm—! It was no use asking them now to fix up Amelia Street. Ancient Evelyn had always sent carpenters and workmen away. She cherished her “quiet.” And then what good was it to fix up a house in which Patrick and Alicia were simply drunk all the time, and Ancient Evelyn like a fixture?

Mona had her own space, as they say, the big bedroom upstairs on the Avenue. And there she kept her computer equipment, all her disks and files, and books. Her day would come. And until then she had plenty of time after school to study stocks, bonds, money instruments, and the like.

Her dream really was the management of her own mutual fund, called Mona One. She’d invite Mayfairs only to buy in, and she’d handpick every company in which the fund invested, on the basis of its environmental worthiness.

Mona knew from the
Wall Street Journal
and from the
New York Times
what was going on. Environmentally sensitive companies were making big bucks. Somebody had invented a microbe that ate oil spills and could even clean up your oven for you, if you turned it loose inside. This was the wave of the future. Mona One would be a legend among mutual funds, like Fidelity Magellan, or Nicholas II. Mona could have begun now, if anybody would take a chance on her. If only the Realm of Adults would open, just one tiny little bit, and let her in!

Uncle Ryan was interested, yes, and amused and amazed and confused, but not about to take a chance. “Keep studying,” he’d said. “But I must say I’m impressed with your knowledge of the market. How do you know all this stuff?”

“You kidding me? Same way you know it,” she had said. “From the
Journal
and from
Barron’s
, and from going online any time night or day for the latest statistics.” She’d been speaking of the modem in her computer, and of the many bulletin boards she could call. “You want to know something about stocks in the middle of the night? Don’t call the office. Call me.”

How Pierce had laughed. “Just call Mona!”

Uncle Ryan had been intrigued, Mardi Gras fatigue or no, but not enough not to back away with another lame comment: “Well, I’m pleased that you’re taking an interest in all this.”

“An interest!” Mona had replied. “I’m ready to take over! What makes you such a wimp, Uncle Ryan, when it comes to aggressive growth funds? And what about Japan? Don’t you know the simple principle that if you balance your United States stock market investments abroad then you’ve got global—”

“Hold it,” he’d said. “Who’s going to invest in a fund called Mona One?”

Mona had been quick on the reply. “Everyone!”

The best part was Uncle Ryan had finally laughed and promised again to buy her a black Porsche Carrera for her fifteenth birthday. She had never let him forget that from the moment she’d become obsessed with the car. She didn’t see why all the Mayfair money couldn’t buy her a fake driver’s license, too, so she could slam the pedal to the floor right now. She knew all about cars. The Porsche was her car, and every time she saw a parked Carrera she crawled all over it, hoping the owner would come. She’d hitched rides three times that way with perfect strangers. But never tell anyone that! They’ll die.

As if a witch couldn’t protect herself.

“Yes, yes,” he’d said this evening, “I haven’t forgotten the black Porsche, but you haven’t forgotten your promise to me, have you, that you’ll never drive it over fifty-five miles an hour?”

“There you go kidding again,” she said. “Why the hell would I want to drive a Porsche over fifty-five miles an hour?”

Pierce had nearly choked on his gin and tonic.

“You’re not buying that child a coffin on wheels!” Aunt Bea had declared. Always interfering. No doubt she’d be calling Gifford about the whole idea.

“What child? I don’t see any child around here, do you?” Pierce had said.

Mona would have kept things going on the mutual funds, but it was Mardi Gras, people were tired, and Uncle Ryan had been drawn into a bottomless pit of polite conversation with Uncle Randall. Uncle Randall had turned his back to her, to shut her out. He’d been doing this sort of thing ever since Mona had gotten him into bed. She didn’t care. That had been an experiment, nothing more, to compare a man in his eighties with young boys.

Now, Michael was her goal. To hell with Uncle Randall. Uncle Randall had been interesting because he was so old, and there is a way a really old man looks at a young girl which she found very exciting. But Uncle Randall wasn’t a kind man. And Michael was. And Mona liked kindness. She’d isolated that trait in herself a long time ago. Sometimes she divided the world between kind and unkind—fundamentally speaking.

Well, tomorrow she would get to the stocks.

Tomorrow, or the next day, maybe she’d work up the actual portfolio for Mona One, based on the top stock performers for the last five years. It was so easy for her to be carried away, with visions of Mona One becoming so large she had to clone it with a second mutual fund called Mona Two and then Mona Three, and traveling all over the world in her own plane to meet the CEOs of the companies in which she invested.

She’d check out factories in Mainland China, offices in Hong Kong, scientific research in Paris. She pictured herself wearing a cowboy hat when she did this. She didn’t actually have a cowboy hat right now. Her bow was her thing. But somehow or other she always had the hat on as she stepped off the imaginary plane. And all this was coming. She knew it.

Maybe it was time she showed Uncle Ryan the printout of
the stocks she’d tracked last year. If she’d really had money in them, she’d have her own fortune. Yes, got to boot that file and print that out.

Ah, but she was wasting the moment.

Tonight she was here, with her most important goal in mind. The conquest of the hunk known as Michael. And the finding of the mysterious Victrola.

The gilt fauteuils gleamed in the shadows, graceful straight-backed chairs. Tapestried pillows lay higgledy-piggledy in the deep damask sofa. A veil of stillness lay over all, as if the world beyond had gone up in smoke. Dust on the piano. That poor old Eugenia, she wasn’t much good, was she? And Henri was probably
too
good to dust or mop or sweep. And in their midst was Michael, too sick and indifferent to care what they did.

She left the double parlor, and moved to the foot of the stairs. Very dark up there, as it ought to be, like a ladder to a heaven of shadows. She touched the newel post, and then began her ascent. In the house, in it, wandering, free and in the dark alone! “Oncle Julien, I’m here,” she sang in a tiny whisper. When she reached the top she saw that Aunt Viv’s room stood empty, just as she had expected.

“Poor Michael, you’re all mine,” she said softly. And when she turned she saw that the door of the master bedroom was open, and the weak illumination of a little night-lamp poured out into the high narrow hall.

So you’re alone in there, big boy, she thought. Not scared to be in the very room where Deirdre died. And let’s not forget Great-aunt Mary Beth and all the people who saw the ghosts around her when she lay in that very same bed, and who knows what went on before that?

Gifford had thought it a deplorable decision for Michael to move back into that accursed room. But Mona understood. Why would he want to stay in the bridal chamber after Rowan had left him? Besides, it was the prettiest and fanciest room in the house, the north master bedroom. He himself had restored the plaster ceiling and the medallion. He had polished the enormous half tester bed.