The Witching Hour (45 page)

No, Rowan had not known. Another dull shock struck her at the mention of Ellie’s name. She found it painful to envision Ellie back there among these numberless and nameless cousins, whom she herself had never seen. The heat of her anger and bitterness surprised her. Ellie and the cousins. And Rowan here in this house alone. Once again, she struggled for composure. She wondered if this was not one of the more difficult moments she had endured since Ellie’s death.

“Yes, I would be grateful, Mr. Lonigan, if your wife would do what she thinks best. I would like to see the cousins … ” She stopped because she could not continue. “And Mr. Lonigan, regarding Ellie Mayfair, my adoptive mother—she is gone too now. She died last year. If you think any of these cousins would want to be told—”

“Oh, I’d be glad to do that, Dr. Mayfair. Save you telling them when you arrive. And I’m so sorry to hear it. We had no idea.”

It sounded so heartfelt. She could actually believe that he was sorry. Such a nice old-fashioned sort of man. There was almost a Damon Runyon quality to him.

“Good-bye Mr. Lonigan. I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon.”

For one moment, as she put down the phone, it seemed that if she let the tears go they’d never stop. The stir of emotions was so thick in her it was dizzying, and the pain demanded some violent action, and the strangest, most bizarre pictures filled her mind.

Choking back her tears, she saw herself rushing into Ellie’s room. She saw herself dragging clothes out of drawers and off hangers and ripping garments to shreds at random, in a near uncontrollable rage. She saw herself smashing Ellie’s mirror and the long row of bottles which still stood on her dresser, all those little bottles of scent in which the perfume had dried to nothing but color over the months. “Dead, dead, dead,” she whispered. “She was alive yesterday and the day before and the day before that, and I was here, and I did nothing! Dead! Dead! Dead!”

And then the bizarre scene shifted, as if the tragedy of her rage were passing into another act. She saw herself beating with her fists on all the walls of wood and glass around her, beating with her fists until the blood ran from her bruised hands. The hands that had operated on so many, healed so many, saved so many lives.

But Rowan did none of these things.

She sat down on the stool at the kitchen corner, her body crumpling, hand up to shield her face, and she began to sob aloud in the empty house, the images still passing through her mind. Finally she laid her head down on her folded arms, and she cried and cried, until she was choked and exhausted with it, and all she could do was whisper over and over: “Deirdre Mayfair, aged forty-eight, dead dead dead.”

At last, she wiped her face with the back of her hand, and she went to the rug before the fire and lay down. Her head hurt and all the world seemed empty to her and hostile and without the slightest promise of warmth or light.

It would pass. It had to. She had felt this misery on the day Ellie was buried. She had felt it before, standing in the hospital corridor as Ellie cried in pain. Yet it seemed impossible now that things could get better. When she thought of the paper in the safe, the paper which had kept her from going to New Orleans after Ellie’s death, she despised herself for honoring it. She despised Ellie for ever having made her sign it.

And her thoughts continued, abysmal and miserable, sapping her spirit and her belief in herself.

It must have been an hour that she lay there, the sun hot on the floorboards around her, and on the side of her face and her arms. She was ashamed of her loneliness. She was ashamed of being the victim of this anguish. Before Ellie’s death, she had been such a happy person, so carefree, utterly dedicated to her work, and coming and going in this house, assured of warmth and love, and giving warmth and love in return. When she thought of how much she had depended upon Michael, how much she wanted him now, she was doubly lost.

Inexcusable really, to have called him so desperately last night about the ghost, and to be wanting him so desperately now. She began to grow calm. Then slowly it came to her—the ghost last night, and last night her mother had died.

She sat up, folding her legs Indian-style, and trying to remember the experience in cold detail. She’d glanced at the clock last night only moments before the thing had appeared. It had been five minutes after three. And hadn’t that awful woman said, “Your mother died at five minutes after five”?

Same time
exactly
in New Orleans. But what a bewildering possibility, she thought, that the two were linked.

Of course, if her mother had appeared to her it would have been splendid beyond belief. It would have been the kind of sacramental moment people talk about forever. All the lovely clichés—“life-changing, miraculous, beautiful”—could have come into play. In fact, it was almost impossible to contemplate the comfort of such a moment. But it was not a woman who had appeared there, it was a man, a strange and curiously elegant man.

Just thinking about it again, thinking about the beseeching expression of the being, made her feel her alarm of the night before. She turned and glanced anxiously at the glass wall. Nothing there of course but the great empty blue sky over the dark distant bills, and the flashing, sparkling panorama of the bay.

She grew coldly and unexpectedly calm as she puzzled over it, as she reviewed in her mind all the popular myths she’d heard
about such apparitions, but then this brief interlude of excitement began to fade.

Whatever it was, it seemed vague, insubstantial, even trivial beside the fact of the death of her mother. That was what had to be dealt with. And she was wasting precious time.

She climbed to her feet and went to the phone. She called Dr. Larkin at home.

“Lark, I have to go on leave,” she explained. “It’s unavoidable. Can we talk about Slattery filling in?”

How cool her voice sounded, how like the old Rowan. But that was a lie. As they spoke, she stared at the glass wall again, at the empty space on the deck where the tall, slender being had stood. She saw his dark eyes again, searching her face. She could scarcely follow what Lark was saying. No way I imagined that damned thing, she thought.

T
HE DRIVE TO
the Talamasca retreat house took less than an hour and a half. The limousine took the dull path of the interstate, cutting over the river road only when they were within a few miles of the house.

But it seemed like far less to Michael, who was for the entire time immersed in his conversation with Aaron.

By the time they reached the house, Michael had a fairly good understanding of what the Talamasca was, and he had assured Aaron that he would keep confidential forever what he was about to read in the files. Michael loved the idea of the Talamasca; he loved the genteel civilized way in which Aaron presented things; and he thought to himself more than once, that had he not been hell-bent on this “purpose” of his, he would cheerfully have embraced the Talamasca.

But those were foolish thoughts, because it was the drowning which had led to the sense of purpose and to his psychic ability; and these things had led the Talamasca to him.

There also had sharpened in Michael a sense of his love for Rowan—and it was love, he felt—as something apart from his
involvement with the visions, even though he knew now that the visions had involved Rowan.

He tried to explain this to Aaron as they approached the retreat house gates.

“All you’ve told me sounds familiar; there is a sense of recognition, just as I felt when I saw the house last night. And you know of course that the Talamasca couldn’t be familiar to me, it’s not possible that I would have heard of you and forgotten except if
they
told me while I was drowned. But the point I’m trying to make is that my affection for Rowan doesn’t feel familiar. It doesn’t feel like something meant to be. It’s fresh; it’s tied up in my mind somehow with rebellion. Why, I remember when I was with her out there, you know, talking over breakfast, at her house in Tiburon, I looked out over the water and I said almost defiantly to those beings, that this thing with Rowan mattered to me.”

Aaron listened to all this carefully, as he had listened to Michael, intermittently, all along.

It seemed to Michael that both knew their knowledge of each other had deepened and become seemingly natural to them, that they were now completely at ease.

Michael had drunk only coffee since they’d left New Orleans. He intended to keep it that way, at least until he had read all that Aaron had to give him to read.

Michael was also weary of the limousine, weary of the smooth, brutal way it shot through the old swampy landscape. He wanted to breathe fresh air.

As soon as they entered the gates of the retreat house, turning left off the river road with the levee behind them, Michael knew the place from the picture books. The oak-lined avenue had been photographed countless times over the decades. It seemed lavishly dreamlike in its southern Gothic perfection, the gargantuan black-barked trees extending their gnarled and heavy limbs to form an unbroken ceiling of crude and broken arches leading all the way to the verandas of the house.

Great streaks of gray Spanish moss hung from the deep knotty elbows of these branches. Bulging roots crowded, on either side, the narrow rutted gravel drive.

Michael loved it. It lay its hands silently on his heart the same way that the beauty of the Garden District had done so; a quiet faith sprang up in him, that no matter what else happened to him, he was home in the south and things were somehow going to be all right.

The car tunneled deeper and deeper into the green-tinted light, ragged rays of sun here and there piercing the shadows, while
beyond, the low country on both sides, full of high grass, and tall shapeless shrubbery seemed to close in upon the sky and upon the house itself.

Michael pressed the button to lower the window. “God, feel that air,” he whispered.

“Yes, rather remarkable I think,” Aaron said softly. But he was smiling indulgently at Michael. The heat was wilting. Michael didn’t care.

It seemed a hush fell over the world as the car came to a stop and they climbed out before the broad two-story house. Built before the Civil War, it was one of those sublimely simple structures—massive yet tropical, a square box graced with floor-length windows, and surrounded on all sides by deep galleries and thick unfluted columns rising to support its flat roof.

It seemed a thing made to capture the breezes, for sitting and gazing out over fields and river—a strong brick structure made to survive hurricanes and drenching rains.

Hard to believe, Michael thought, that beyond the distant levee was the river traffic of tugs and barges which they had glimpsed less than an hour ago as a chugging ferry brought them to the southern bank. All that was real now was this soft breeze stealing over the brick floor on which they stood, the broad double doors of the house suddenly open to receive them, the errant sun glinting in the glass of the beautifully arched fanlight window above.

Where was the rest of the world? It didn’t matter. Michael heard again the wondrous sounds that had lulled him on First Street—the singing of insects, the wild, seemingly desperate cry of birds.

Aaron pressed his arm as he led Michael inside, apparently ignoring the shock of the artificially chilled air. “We’ll have a quick tour,” he said.

Michael scarcely followed his words. The house had caught him up, as houses always did. He loved houses made in this fashion with a wide central hallway, a simple staircase, and large square rooms in perfect balance on either side. The restoration and furnishings were sumptuous as well as meticulous. And rather characteristically British, what with dark green carpets, and books in mahogany cases and shelves rising to the ceilings in all the main rooms. Only a few ornate mirrors recalled the antebellum period, and a little harpsichord pushed into a corner. All the rest was solidly Victorian, but not unpleasing by any means.

“Like a private club,” Michael whispered. It was almost comical to him, the occasional person seated deep in a tapestried
chair who did not even glance up from a book or a paper as they glided soundlessly past. But the overall atmosphere was unmistakably inviting. He felt good here. He liked the quick smile of the woman who passed him on the staircase. He wanted to find a chair himself at some time or other in the library. And through all the many French doors, he caught the greenery outside, a great sprawling net swallowing up the blue sky.

“Come, we’ll take you to your room,” Aaron said.

“Aaron, I’m not staying. Where’s the file?”

“Of course,” Aaron said, “but you must have quiet to read as you like.”

He led Michael along the upper corridor to the front bedroom on the eastern side of the house. Floor-length windows opened onto both the front and the side galleries. And though the carpet was as dark and thick as everywhere else, the decor had yielded to the plantation tradition with a couple of marble-top bureaus and one of those overpowering poster beds which seemed made for this kind of house. Several layers of handmade quilts covered its shapeless feather mattress. No carvings ornamented its eight-foot-high posts.

But the room had a surprising array of modern conveniences, including the small refrigerator and television fitted into a carved armoire, and a chair and desk nestled in the inside corner, so that they faced both the front windows and those to the east. The phone was covered with buttons and tiny carefully inscribed numerals for various extensions. A pair of Queen Anne wing chairs stood on tiptoe before the fireplace. A door was open to an adjoining bath.

“I’m moving in,” Michael said. “Where’s the file?”

“But we should have lunch.”

“You should. I can get a sandwich and eat it while I’m reading. Please, you promised. The file.”

Aaron insisted that they go at once to a small screened porch off the back of the second story, and there, overlooking a formal garden with gravel paths and weathered fountains, they sat down to eat. It was an enormous southern breakfast, complete with biscuits, grits, and sausage; and plenty of chicory café au lait to drink.