The Witching Hour (111 page)

“She was that girl in high school who collected the bugs and the rocks, calling everything by a long Latin name.”

“Frightening, absolutely frightening,” said her high school chemistry teacher. “I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had reinvented the hydrogen bomb one weekend in her spare time.”

It has been speculated within the Talamasca that Rowan’s suppression of her telepathic power may have something to do with the growth of her telekinetic power, that she rechanneled her energy, so to speak, and that the two powers represent both sides of the same coin. To put it differently, Rowan turned away from mind and toward matter. Science and medicine became her obsessions from her junior high school years on.

Rowan’s only real boyfriend during her teen-age years was also brilliant and reclusive. He seems to have been unable to take the competition. When Rowan was admitted to U.C. Berkeley and he was not, they broke up bitterly. Friends blamed the boyfriend. He later went east and became a research scientist in New York.

One of our investigators “bumped into him” at a museum opening, and brought the conversation around to psychics and mind readers. The man opened up about his old high school sweetheart who had been psychic. He was still bitter about it. “I loved that girl. Really loved her. Her name was Rowan Mayfair and she was very unusual-looking. Not pretty in an ordinary way. But she was impossible. She knew what I was thinking even before I knew it. She knew when I’d been out with someone else. She was so damned quiet about it, it was eerie. I heard she became a neurosurgeon. That’s scary. What will happen if the patient thinks something negative about her before he goes under the anesthesia? Will she slice the thought right out of his head?”

The fact is, no one reporting on Rowan mentions pettiness in connection with her. She is described as “formidable,” just as Mary Beth Mayfair was once described, but never small-minded or vindictive, or unduly aggressive in any personal way.

By the time Rowan entered U.C. Berkeley in 1976, she knew that she wanted to be a doctor. She was a straight A student in the premedicine program, took courses every summer (though
she still went on vacation often with Graham and Ellie), skipped an entire year, and graduated at the top of her class in 1979. She entered medical school when she was twenty, apparently believing that neurological research would be her life’s work.

Her academic progress during this period was thought to be phenomenal. Numerous teachers speak of her as “the most brilliant student I have ever had.”

“She isn’t just smart. She’s intuitive! She makes astonishing connections. She doesn’t just read a book. She swallows it, and comes up with six different implications of the author’s basic theory of which the author never dreamed.”

“The students have nicknamed her Dr. Frankenstein because of her talk about brain transplants and creating whole new brains out of parts. But the thing about Rowan is, she’s a real human being. No need to worry about brilliance without a heart.”

“Oh, Rowan. Do I remember Rowan? You have to be kidding! Rowan could have been teaching the class instead of me. You want to know something funny—and don’t you ever tell anyone this! I had to go out of town at the end of the term, and I gave Rowan all the class papers to grade. She graded her own class! Now if that ever gets out I’m ruined, but we struck a bargain, you see. She wanted a key to the laboratory over the Christmas break, and I said, ‘Well, how about grading these papers?’ And the worst part of it was it was the first time I didn’t get a single student complaint about a grade. Rowan, I wish I could forget her. People like Rowan make the rest of us feel like jerks.”

“She isn’t brilliant. That’s what people think, but there’s more to it. She’s some sort of mutant. No, seriously. She can study the research animals and tell you what’s going to happen. She would lay her hands on them and say, ‘This drug isn’t going to do it.’ I’ll tell you something else she did too. She could cure those little creatures. She could. One of the older doctors told me once that if she didn’t watch it, she could upset the experiments by using her powers to cure. I believe it. I went out with her one time, and she didn’t cure me of anything, but boy, was she ever hot. I mean literally hot. It was like making love to somebody with a fever. And that’s what they say about faith healers, you know, the ones who’ve been studied. You can feel a heat coming from their hands. I believe it. I don’t think she should have gone into surgery. She should have gone into oncology. She could have really cured people. Surgery? Anybody can cut them up.”

(Let us add that this doctor himself is an oncologist, and non-surgeons frequently make extremely pejorative statements about surgeons, calling them plumbers and the like; and surgeons make
similar pejorative remarks about non-surgeons, saying things such as “All they do is get the patients ready for us.”)

As soon as Rowan entered the hospital as an intern (her third year of medical school), stories of her healing powers and diagnostic powers became so common that our investigators could pick and choose what they wanted to write down.

In sum, Rowan is the first Mayfair witch to be described as a healer since Marguerite Mayfair at Riverbend before 1835.

Just about every nurse ever questioned about Rowan has some “fantastic” story to tell. Rowan could diagnose anything; Rowan knew just what to do. Rowan patched up people who looked like they were ready for the morgue.

“She can stop bleeding. I’ve seen her do it. She grabbed a hold of this boy’s head and looked at his nose. ‘Stop,’ she whispered. I heard her. And he just didn’t bleed any more after that.”

Her more skeptical colleagues—including some male and female doctors—attribute her achievements to the “power of suggestion.” “Why, she practically uses voodoo, you know, saying to a patient, Now we’re going to make this pain stop! Of course it stops, she’s got them hypnotized.”

Older black nurses in the hospital know Rowan has “the power,” and sometimes ask her outright to “lay those hands” on them when they are suffering severe arthritis or other such aches and pains. They swear by Rowan.

“She looks into your eyes. ‘Tell me about it, where it hurts,’ she says. And she rubs with those hands, and it
don’t
hurt! That’s a fact.”

By all accounts, Rowan seems to have loved working in the hospital, and to have experienced an immediate conflict between her devotion to the laboratory and her newfound exhilaration on the wards.

“You could see the research scientist being seduced!” said one of her teachers sadly. “I knew we were losing her. And once she stepped into the Operating Room it was all over. Whatever they say about women being too emotional to be brain surgeons, no one would ever say such a thing about Rowan. She’s got the coolest hands in the field.”

(Note the coincidental use of cool and hot in reference to the hands.)

There are indications that Rowan’s decision to abandon research for surgery was a difficult, if not traumatic one. During
the fall of 1983, she apparently spent considerable time with a Dr. Karl Lemle, of the Keplinger Institute in San Francisco, who was working on cures for Parkinson’s disease.

Rumors at the hospital indicated that Lemle was trying to lure Rowan away from University, with an extremely high salary and ideal working conditions, but that Rowan did not feel she was ready to leave the Emergency Room or the Operating Room or the wards.

During Christmas of 1983, Rowan seems to have had a violent falling out with Lemle, and thereafter would not take his calls. Or so he told everyone at University over the next few months.

We have never been able to learn what happened between Rowan and Lemle. Apparently Rowan did agree to see him for lunch in the spring of 1984. Witnesses saw them in the hospital cafeteria where they had quite an argument. A week later Lemle entered the Keplinger private hospital having suffered a small stroke. Another stroke followed and then another, and he was dead within the month.

Some of Rowan’s colleagues criticized her severely for her failure to visit Lemle. Lemle’s assistant, who later took his place at the Institute, said to one of our investigators that Rowan was highly competitive and jealous of his boss. This seems unlikely.

No one to our knowledge has ever connected the death of Lemle with Rowan. However, we have made the connection.

Whatever happened between Rowan and her mentor—she frequently described him as such before their falling out—Rowan committed herself to neurosurgery shortly after 1983, and began operating exclusively on the brain after she completed her regular residency in 1985. She is at the time of this writing completing her residency in neurosurgery, and will undoubtedly be Board-certified, and probably hired as the Staff Attending at University within the year.

Rowan’s record as a neurosurgeon so far—though she is still a resident and technically operating under the eye of the Attending—is as exemplary as one might expect.

Stories abound of her saving lives on the operating table, of her uncanny ability to know in the Emergency Room whether surgery will save a patient, of her patching up ax wounds, bullet wounds, and skull fractures resulting from falls and car collisions, of her operating for ten hours straight without fainting, of her quiet and expert handling of frightened interns and cranky nurses, and of disapproving colleagues and administrators who have advised her from time to time that she takes too many risks.

Rowan, the miracle worker, has become a common epithet.

In spite of her success as a surgical resident, Rowan remains
extremely well liked at the hospital. She is a doctor upon whom others can rely. Also she elicits exceptional devotion from the nurses with whom she works. In fact, her relationship with these women (there are a few male nurses but the profession is still predominately female) is so exceptional as to beg for an explanation.

And the explanation seems to be that Rowan goes out of her way to establish personal contact with nurses, and that indeed, she displays the same extraordinary empathy regarding their personal problems that she displayed with her teachers years ago. Though none of these nurses report telepathic incidents, they say repeatedly that Rowan seems to know when they are feeling bad, to be sympathetic with their family difficulties, and that Rowan finds some way to express her gratitude to them for special services, and this from an uncompromising doctor who expects the highest standards of those on the staff.

Rowan’s conquest of the Operating Room nurses, including those famous for being uncooperative with women surgeons, is something of a legend in the hospital. Whereas other female surgeons are criticized as “having a chip on their shoulder,” or being “too superior” or “just plain bitchy”—remarks which seem to reflect considerable prejudice, all things considered—the same nurses speak of Rowan as if she were a saint.

“She never screams or throws a tantrum like the men do, she’s too good for that.”

“She’s as straight as a man.”

“I’d rather be in there with her than some of these men doctors, I tell you.”

“She’s beautiful to work with. She’s the best. I love just to watch her work. She’s like an artist.”

“She’s the only doctor who’s ever going to open my head, I can tell you that.”

To put this more clearly into perspective, we are still living in a world in which Operating Room nurses sometimes refuse to hand instruments to women surgeons, and patients in Emergency Rooms refuse to be treated by women doctors and insist that young male interns treat them while older, wiser, and more competent women doctors are forced to stand back and watch.

Rowan appears to have transcended this sort of prejudice entirely. If there is any complaint against her among members of her profession it is that she is too quiet. She doesn’t talk enough about what she’s doing to the young doctors who must learn from her. It’s hard for her. But she does the best she can.

As of 1984, she seemed to have escaped completely the curse
of the Mayfairs, the ghastly experiences that plagued her mother and her grandmother, and to be on the way to a brilliant career.

An exhaustive investigation of her life had turned up no evidence of Lasher’s presence, or indeed any connection between Rowan and ghosts or spirits or apparitions.

And her strong telepathic powers and healing powers seemed to have been put to extraordinarily productive use in her career as a surgeon.

Though everyone around her admired her for her exceptional accomplishments, no one thought of her as “weird” or “strange” or in any way connected with the supernatural.

As one doctor put it when asked to explain Rowan’s reputation, “She’s a genius. What else can I say?”

However, there is more to the story of Rowan which has surfaced only in the last few years. One part of that story is entirely personal and no concern of the Talamasca. The other part of it has us alarmed beyond our wildest expectations as to what may happen to Rowan in the years that lie ahead.

Allow us to deal with the insignificant part first.

In 1985, the complete lack of any social life on the part of Rowan aroused our curiosity. We asked our investigators to engage in closer surveillance.

Within weeks, they discovered that Rowan, far from having no social life, has a very special kind of social life including very virile working-class men whom she picks up from time to time in any one of four different San Francisco bars.

These men are predominately fire fighters or uniformed policemen. They are invariably single; they are always extremely good-looking and extremely well built. Rowan sees them only on the
Sweet Christine
, in which they sometimes go out to sea and other times remain in the harbor, and she rarely sees any one of them more than three times.

Though Rowan is very discreet and unobtrusive, she has become the subject of some gossip in the bars she frequents. At least two men have been embittered by their inevitable rejection by her and they talked freely to our investigators, but it became apparent that they knew almost nothing about Rowan. They thought she was “a rich girl from Tiburon” who had snubbed them, or used them. They had no idea she was a doctor. One of them repeatedly described the
Sweet Christine
as “Daddy’s fancy boat.”