The Witching Hour (121 page)

All the smallest sounds of the night seemed to die away and leave her in a void as she struggled to pick this thing out from the murky dark that enmeshed it. Was she deceiving herself or was that the scheme of a face? It seemed that a pair of dark eyes was watching her, that she could just make out the contour of a head. Perhaps she saw the white curve of a stiff collar.

“Don’t play games with me,” she whispered. Once again, the whole house echoed the sound with its uncertain creaks and sighs. And then wondrously, the figure brightened, confirmed itself magically, and yet even as she gasped aloud, it began to fade.

“No, don’t go!” she pleaded, doubting suddenly that she had ever seen anything at all.

And as she stared into the confusion of light and shadow, searching desperately, a darker form suddenly loomed against the dull faint light from the distant door. Closer it came, through the swirling dust, with heavy distinct footfalls. Without any chance of mistake she saw the massive shoulders, the black curly hair.

“Rowan? Is that you, Rowan?”

Solid, familiar, human.

“Oh Michael,” she cried, her voice soft and ragged. She moved into his waiting arms. “Michael, thank God!”

W
ELL, SHE THOUGHT
to herself, silent, hunched over, sitting alone at the dining table, the supposed victim of the horrors in this dark house—I am becoming one of those women now who just falls into a man’s arms and lets him take care of everything.

But it was beautiful to watch Michael in action. He made the calls to Ryan Mayfair, and to the police, to Lonigan and Sons. He spoke the language of the plainclothesmen who came up the steps. If anyone noticed the black gloves he wore, they did not say so, maybe because he was talking too fast, explaining things, and moving things along to hasten the inevitable conclusions.

“Now she just got here, she does not have the faintest idea
who in the hell this guy is up in the attic. The old woman didn’t tell her. And she’s in shock now. The old woman just died out there. Now this body in the attic has been there a long time, and what I’m asking you is not to disturb anything else in the room, if you can just take the remains, and she wants to know who this man was as much as you want to know.

“And look, this is Ryan Mayfair coming. Ryan, Rowan is in there. She’s in awful shape. Before Carlotta died, she showed her a body upstairs.”

“A body. Are you serious?”

“They need to take it out. Could you or Pierce go up there, see that they don’t touch all those old records and things? Rowan’s in there. She’s exhausted. She can talk in the morning.”

At once Pierce accepted the mission. Thunder of people going up the old staircase.

In hushed voices Ryan and Michael talked. Smell of cigarette smoke in the hall. Ryan came into the dining room and spoke to Rowan in a whisper.

“Tomorrow, I’ll call you at the hotel. Are you sure you don’t want to come with me and with Pierce out to Metairie?”

“Have to be close,” she said. “Want to walk over in the morning.”

“Your friend from California is a nice man, a local man.”

“Yes. Thank you.”

Even to old Eugenia, Michael had been the protector, putting his arm around her shoulder as he escorted her in to see “old Miss Carl” before Lonigan lifted the body from the rocker. Poor Eugenia who cried without making a sound. “Honey, do you want me to call someone for you? You don’t want to stay tonight in the house alone, do you? You tell me what you want to do. I can get someone to come here and stay with you.”

With Lonigan, his old friend, he fell right into stride. He lost all the California from his voice, and was talking just like Jerry, and just like Rita, who had come out with him in “the wagon.” Old friends, Jerry drinking beer with Michael’s father on the front steps thirty-five years ago, and Rita double-dating with Michael in the Elvis Presley days. Rita threw her arms around him. “Michael Curry.”

Roaming to the front, Rowan had watched them in the glare of the flashing lights. Pierce was talking on the phone in the library. She had not even seen the library. Now a dull electric light flooded the room, illuminating old leather and Chinese carpet.

“ … well, now, Mike,” said Lonigan, “you have to tell Dr. Mayfair this woman was ninety years old, the only thing keeping
her going was Deirdre. I mean we knew it was just a matter of time once Deirdre went, and so she can’t blame herself for whatever happened here tonight, I mean, she’s a doctor, Mike, but she ain’t no miracle worker.”

No, not much, Rowan had thought.

“Mike Curry? You’re not Tim Curry’s son!” said the uniformed policeman. “They told me it was you. Well, hell, my dad and your dad were third cousins, did you know that? Oh, yeah, my dad knew your dad real well, used to drink beer with him at Corona’s.”

At last the body in the attic, bagged and tagged, was taken away, and the small dried body of the old woman had been laid on the white padded stretcher as if it were alive, though it was only being moved into the undertaker’s wagon—perhaps to lie on the same embalming table where Deirdre had lain a day earlier.

No funeral, no interment ceremony, no nothing, said Ryan. She had told him that herself yesterday. Told Lonigan too, the man said. “There will be a Requiem Mass in a week,” said Ryan. “You’ll still be here?”

Where would I go? Why? I found where I belong. In this house. I’m a witch. I’m a killer. And this time I did it deliberately.

“ … And I know how terrible this has been for you.”

Wandering back into the dining room, she heard young Pierce in the library door.

“Now, she isn’t considering staying in this house, tonight, is she?”

“No, we’re going back to the hotel,” Michael said.

“It’s just that she shouldn’t be here alone. This can be a very unsettling house. A truly unsettling house. Would you think me crazy if I told you that just now when I went into the library there was a portrait of someone over the fireplace and that now there’s a mirror?”

“Pierce!” said Ryan wrathfully.

“I’m sorry, Dad, but … ”

“Not now, son, please.”

“I believe you,” said Michael with a little laugh. “I’ll be with her.”

“Rowan?” Ryan approached her again carefully—she the bereaved, the victim, when in fact she was the murderer. Agatha Christie would have known. But then I would have had to do it with a candle stick.

“Yes, Ryan.”

He settled down at the table, careful not to touch the dusty
surface with the sleeve of his perfectly tailored suit. The funeral suit. The light struck his thoroughbred face, his cold blue eyes, much lighter blue than Michael’s. “You know this house is yours.”

“She told me that.”

Young Pierce stood respectfully in the doorway.

“Well, there’s a lot more to it,” said Ryan.

“Liens, mortgages?”

He shook his head. “No, I don’t think you’ll ever have to worry about anything of that sort as long as you live. But the point is, that whenever you want you can come downtown and we’ll go over it.”

“Good God,” said Pierce, “is that the emerald?” He had spied the jewel case in the shadows at the other end. “And with all these people just trooping through there.”

His father gave him a subdued, patient look. “Nobody’s going to steal that emerald, son,” he said with a sigh. He glanced anxiously at Rowan. He gathered up the jewel case and looked at it as if he didn’t quite know what to do with it.

“What’s wrong?” Rowan asked. “What’s the matter?”

“Did she tell you about this?”

“Did anyone ever tell
you
?” she asked quietly, unchallengingly.

“Quite a story,” he said, with a subtle, forced smile. He laid the jewel box down in front of her and patted it with his hand. He stood up.

“Who was the man in the attic, do they know?” she asked.

“They will soon. There was a passport, and other papers with the corpse, or what was left of it.”

“Where’s Michael?” she asked.

“Here, honey, over here. Look, you want me to leave you alone?” In the dark, his gloved hands were almost invisible.

“I’m tired, can we go back? Ryan, can I call you tomorrow?”

“When you want, Rowan.”

Ryan hesitated at the door. Glanced at Michael. Michael made a move to leave. Rowan reached out and caught his hand, startled by the leather.

“Rowan, listen to me,” said Ryan, “I don’t know what the hell Aunt Carl told you, I don’t know how that body got upstairs, or what that’s about, or what she’s told you about the legacy. But you have to clean out this old place, you’ve got to burn the trash up there, get people to come here, maybe Michael will help you, and throw things out, all those old books, those jars. You have to let the air in and take stock. You don’t have to go through this place, examining every speck of dust and dirt and ugliness. It’s
an inheritance but it isn’t a curse. At least it doesn’t have to be.”

“I know,” she said.

Noise at the front door.

The two young black men who had come to collect Grandma Eugenia were now standing in the hallway. Michael went upstairs to help her. Ryan and then Pierce swept down to kiss Rowan on the cheek. Rather like kissing the corpse, it seemed to her suddenly. Then she realized it was the other way around. They kissed the dead people here the way they kissed the living.

Warm hands, and the parting flash of Pierce’s smile in the dark. Tomorrow, phone, lunch, talk, et cetera.

Sound of the elevator making its hellish descent. People did go to hell in elevators in the movies.

“And you have your key, Eugenia, you just come on over tomorrow, you come in as you always did, if you need or want anything. Now, honey, do you need any money?”

“I got my pay, Mr. Mike. Thank you, Mr. Mike.”

“Thank you, Mr. Curry,” said the younger black man. Smooth, educated voice.

The older policeman came back. He must have been in the very front hall because she could barely hear him. “Yeah, Townsend.”

“ … passport, wallet, everything right there in the shirt.”

Doors closed. Darkness. Quiet.

Michael coming back the hallway.

And now we are two, and the house is empty. He stood in the dining room doorway looking at her.

Silence. He drew a cigarette out of his pocket, mashing the pack back into it. Couldn’t be easy with the gloves, but they did not seem to slow him down.

“What do you say?” he asked. “Let’s get the hell out of here for tonight.” He packed his cigarette on the face of his watch. Explosion of a match, and the flash of light in his blue eyes as he looked up, taking in the dining room again, taking in the murals.

There are blue eyes and blue eyes. Could his black hair have grown so much in such a short time? Or was it just the moisture in the warm air that made it so thick and curly?

The silence rang in her ears. They were actually all gone.

And the whole place lay empty and vulnerable to Rowan’s touch, with its many drawers and cabinets and closets and jars and boxes. Yet the idea of touching anything was repugnant. It wasn’t hers, it was the old woman’s, all of it. Dank and stale, and awful, like the old woman. And Rowan had no spirit to
move, no spirit to climb the stairs again, or to see anything at all.

“His name was Townsend?” she asked.

“Yeah. Stuart Townsend.”

“Who the hell was he, do they have any idea?”

Michael thought for a moment, flicked a tiny bit of tobacco off his lip, shifted his weight from one hip to another. Pure beefcake, she thought. Downright pornographic.

“I know who he was,” he said with a sigh. “Aaron Lightner, you remember him? He knows all about him.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You want to talk here?” His eyes moved over the ceiling again, like antennae. “I’ve got Aaron’s car outside. We could go back to the hotel, or downtown somewhere.”

His eyes lingered lovingly on the plaster medallion, on the chandelier. There was something furtive and guilty about the way he was admiring it in the middle of this crisis. But he didn’t have to hide it from her.

“This is the house, isn’t it?” she asked. “The one you told me about in California.”

His eyes homed to her, locked.

“Yeah, it’s the one.” He gave a little sad smile and a shake of his head. “It’s the one all right.” He tapped the ash into his cupped hand, and then moved slowly away from the table towards the fireplace. The heavy shift of his hips, the movement of his thick leather belt, all distractingly erotic. She watched him tip the ashes into the empty grate, the invisible little ashes that probably would have made no difference at all, had they been allowed to drift to the dusty floor.

“What do you mean, Mr. Lightner knows who that man was?”

He looked uncomfortable. Extremely sexy and very uncomfortable. He took another drag off the cigarette, and looked around, figuring.

“Lightner belongs to an organization,” he said. He fished in his shirt pocket, and drew out a little card. He placed it on the table. “They call it an order. Like a religious order, but it isn’t religious. The name of it is the Talamasca.”

“Dabblers in the black arts?”

“No.”

“That’s what the old woman said.”

“Well, that’s a lie. Believers in the black arts, but not dabblers or practitioners.”

“She told a lot of lies. There was truth in what she said, too, but every damned time it was entangled with hate, and venom and meanness, and awful awful lies.” She shuddered. “I’m hot
and I’m cold,” she said. “I saw one of those cards before. He gave one to me in California. Did he tell you that? I met him in California.”

Michael nodded uneasily. “At Ellie’s grave.”

“Well, how is that possible? That you’re his friend, and that he knows all about this man in the attic? I’m tired, Michael. I feel like I might start screaming and never be able to stop. I feel like if you don’t start telling me … ” She broke off, staring listlessly at the table. “I don’t know what I’m saying,” she said.

“That man, Townsend,” said Michael apprehensively, “he was a member of the order. He came here in 1929 trying to make contact with the Mayfair family.”

“Why?”