THE MAYFAIR WITCHES 12 page

Nevertheless, she forgot the incident, Graham and Ellie, in the manner of good California parents, took her to a psychiatrist. She played with his little girl dolls. She said what he wanted her to say. And people died of “strokes” all the time.

Eight years passed before the man got out of his Jeep on that lonely road in the hills of Tiburon and clapped his hand over her mouth and said in that awful intimate and insolent voice: “Now, don’t you scream.”

Her adoptive parents never made a connection between the little girl and the rapist who had died as Rowan struggled, as the same blazing anger galvanized her, passing into that exquisite sensation which rendered her body suddenly rigid as the man let go of her and fell forward over the wheel.

But she had made the connection. Quietly and certainly she’d made it. Not then, when she had forced open the door of the Jeep and run down the road screaming. No, she had not even known she was safe. But later, as she lay alone in the dark after the Highway Patrol and the homicide detectives had left them, she knew.

Almost a decade and a half had elapsed before it happened with Graham. And Ellie was too sick with cancer by then to think of much of anything. And surely Rowan wasn’t going to pull up a chair to her bedside and say, “Mama, I think I killed him. He was cheating on you constantly. He was trying to divorce you. He couldn’t wait the bloody goddamned two months it’s going to take for you to die.”

It was all a pattern, as surely as a spiderweb is a pattern, but a pattern does not imply a purpose. Patterns exist everywhere, and purpose is at its safest when it is spontaneous and short-lived.

You will not do this. You will not take life. It was remembering heresy to remember slapping that little girl, even fighting the man in the Jeep. And it was too perfectly awful to remember the argument with Graham.

“What do you mean you’re having her served with the papers! She’s dying! You’re going to stick it out with me.”

He’d grabbed her by the arms, tried to kiss her. “Rowan, I love you, but she isn’t the woman I married … ”

“No? Not the woman you’ve cheated on for thirty years?”

“She’s just a thing in there, I want to remember her the way she used to be … ”

“You talk that crap to me!”

That had been the instant that his eyes fixed and the expression washed out of his face. People always die with such peaceful countenances. On the brink of rape, the man in the Jeep had just gone blank.

Before the ambulance had come, she had knelt beside Graham, put her stethoscope to his head. There was that sound, so faint that some doctors could not hear it. But she heard it—the sound of a great deal of blood rushing to one spot.

No one ever accused her of anything. How could they? Why, she was a doctor, and she’d been with him when the “awful thing” happened, and God knows, she did everything she could.

Of course everybody knew Graham was a thoroughly second-rate human being—his law partners, his secretaries, even his last mistress, that stupid little Karen Garfield person who had come over wanting some keepsake, everybody knew. Except, that is, Graham’s wife. But there wasn’t the slightest suspicion. How could there be? It was just death by natural causes when he was about to make away with the fortune made through his wife’s inheritance and a twenty-eight-year-old idiot who had already sold her furniture and bought their airline tickets for St. Croix.

But it wasn’t death by natural causes.

By this time she knew and understood the diagnostic sense; she’d practiced it and strengthened it. And when she had laid her hand on his shoulder, the diagnostic sense had said: no natural death.

That in itself ought to have been enough. Yet maybe she was mistaken. Maybe it was the great deceptiveness of pattern which we call coincidence. And nothing more than that.

But suppose she met with Michael Curry. Suppose he held her hand as she closed her eyes and thought about those deaths? Would he see only what she had seen, or would some objective truth be known to him? You killed them. It was worth a try.

What she realized tonight, as she wandered slowly and almost aimlessly through the hospital, as she took detours through vast carpeted waiting rooms and down long wards where she was not known, and would never be known, was that she had felt an overwhelming desire just to talk to Michael Curry for a long time. She felt connected to Michael Curry. As much by the accident at sea as by these psychic secrets. She wanted, perhaps for reasons she didn’t fully understand, to tell him and him alone what she’d done.

It wasn’t easy for her to face this weakness. Absolution for murder came only when she operated. She was at the altar of God when the nurses held out the sterile gown for her, when they held up the sterile gloves.

And all her life she’d been a solitary person, a good listener, but invariably colder than those around her. That special sense, the one that aided her so as a physician, had always made her too keenly aware of what others truly felt.

She’d been ten or twelve years old before she realized other people didn’t have it, sometimes not even a particle of it. That her beloved Ellie, for instance, didn’t have the slightest idea that Graham did not love her so much as he needed her, and needed to denigrate her and lie to her and to depend on her always being there, and being inferior to him.

Rowan had sometimes wished for that kind of ignorance—not to know when people envied you, or disliked you. Not to know that many people lied all the time. She liked the cops and the fire fighters because they were to some extent perfectly predictable. Or maybe it was simply that their particular brand of dishonesty didn’t bother her so much; it seemed harmless compared to the complex, insidious, and endlessly malicious insecurity of more educated men.

Of course diagnostic usefulness had redeemed this special psyche sense completely.

But what could ever redeem the ability to kill at will? To atone was another matter. To what proper use could a telekinetic ability like that ever be put?

And such a power was not beyond scientific possibility, that was the truly terrifying part. Like the psychometric power of Michael Curry, such things might have to do with measurable energy, complex physical talents which might someday be as definable as electricity or microwaves, or high-frequency sounds. Curry was capturing an impression from the objects he handled, and that impression was very likely the product of energy. Very likely every object in existence—every surface, every definable bit of matter—contained such stored “impressions.” They existed in a measurable field.

But parapsychology wasn’t Rowan’s love. She was mesmerized by what could be seen in test tubes, slides, and graphs. She didn’t care to test or analyze her own killing power. She wanted only to believe that she had never used it, that maybe there was some other explanation for what had happened, that maybe somehow she was innocent.

And the tragic thing was, maybe nobody could ever tell her what had really occurred with Graham, and the man in the Jeep and the kid on the playground. And all she could hope for was to tell someone, to unburden and exorcise, as everybody else did, through talk.

Talk, talk, talk.

That’s exactly what Rowan wanted. She knew.

Only once before had this desire to confide nearly overcome her. And that had been quite an unusual event. In fact, she had almost told a perfect stranger the entire story, and there were times since when she wished that she had done just that.

It was late last year, a full six months after Ellie’s death. Rowan was feeling the keenest loneliness she’d ever known. It seemed to her the great pattern called “our family” had been washed away overnight. Their life had been so good before Ellie’s illness. Even Graham’s affairs couldn’t spoil it, because Ellie pretended the affairs weren’t happening. And though Graham was not a man whom any human being would have called a good person, he possessed a relentless and infectious personal energy that maintained the family life in high gear.

And how Rowan had depended upon them both.

Her dedication to medicine had pretty much taken her away from her old college cronies. None of them had gone into the sciences. But the family was all that the three of them ever needed. From the time of Rowan’s earliest memories, they were an unshakable trio, whether cruising the Caribbean, or skiing in Aspen, or eating a midnight Christmas dinner on a room service table in a suite in the Plaza in New York.

Now the dream house on the Tiburon shore stood empty as a beached shell.

And Rowan had the odd feeling that the Sweet Christine did not belong so much to her and her various well-chosen love partners, but rather to the family who had left the more dominant impression over a decade of happy years.

One night after Ellie’s death, Rowan had stood alone in the wide living room beneath the high-beamed ceiling, talking aloud to herself, laughing even, thinking there is no one, no one to know, no one to hear. The glass walls were dark and indistinct with reflected carpet, furniture. She couldn’t see the tide that lapped ceaselessly at the pilings. The fire was dying out. The eternal chill of the coastal night was moving slowly through the rooms. She had learnt a painful lesson, she thought—that as they die, the ones we love, we lose our witnesses, our watchers, those who know and understand the tiny little meaningless patterns, those words drawn in water with a stick. And there is nothing left but the endless flow.

It was shortly after that that the bizarre moment had come, when she had almost taken hold of this stranger and poured out her tale.

He was an elderly gentleman, white-haired—British, quite obviously from the first words he spoke. And they had met, in of all places, the cemetery where her adoptive parents had been laid to rest.

It was a quaint old graveyard, sprinkled with weathered monuments on the edge of the small northern California town where Graham’s family had once lived. These people, not related to her by blood, had been completely unknown to her. She’d gone back several times after Ellie’s funeral, though why she wasn’t quite sure. On that particular day her reason was simple: the gravestone had finally been completed and she wanted to see that the names and the dates were correct.

It had occurred to her several times on the drive north that this new gravestone would stand as long as she was living, and after that, it would tumble and crack and lie there in the weeds. The relatives of Graham Franklin had not even been notified about his funeral. Ellie’s people—far away in the dim South—had not been notified of her death. Even in ten years, no one would know or care then about Graham and Ellie Mayfair Franklin. And by the end of Rowan’s life, everyone who had ever known them or even heard of them would be dead.

Spiderwebs broken and torn in a wind that is indifferent to their beauty. Why bother with this at all? But Ellie had wanted her to bother. Ellie had wanted a headstone, flowers. That was the way they did it in New Orleans when Ellie was a little girl. Only on her deathbed had she spoken of her home finally, and to say the strangest things—that they had laid out Stella in the parlor, that people had come to see Stella and kiss her even though her brother had shot her, that Lonigan and Sons had closed up the wound in Stella’s head.

“And Stella’s face was so beautiful in the coffin. She had such beautiful black hair, all in little waves, you know, and she was as pretty as her picture on the living room wall. I loved Stella! Stella let me hold the necklace. I sat on a chair by the coffin. I was kicking my feet and my Aunt Carlotta said to stop.”

Every word of that strange diatribe was engraved on Rowan’s memory. Stella, her brother, Aunt Carlotta. Even the name Lonigan. Because for a precious few seconds there had been a flash of color in the abyss.

These people were related to Rowan. Rowan was in fact Ellie’s third cousin. And of these people Rowan knew nothing, and must continue to know nothing, were her promises to Ellie to be kept.

Ellie had remembered herself, even in those painful hours. “Don’t you ever go back there, Rowan. Rowan, remember what you’ve promised. I burned all the pictures, the letters. Don’t go back there, Rowan, this is your home.”

“I know, Ellie. I’ll remember.”

And there was no more talk of Stella. Of her brother. Of Aunt Carlotta. Of the picture on the living room wall. Only the shock of the document presented to Rowan after Ellie’s death by her executor—a carefully worded pledge, with absolutely no legal validity whatever, that Rowan would never return to the city of New Orleans, never seek to know who her people were.

Yet in those last days, Ellie had spoken of them. Of Stella on the wall.

And because Ellie had talked too of headstones and flowers, of being remembered by her adopted daughter, Rowan had gone north that afternoon to keep that promise, and in the little hillside graveyard, she had met the Englishman with the white hair.

He’d been down on one knee before Ellie’s grave as if genuflecting, copying the very names which had only just been cut into the stone.

He seemed a little flustered when she interrupted him, though she had not spoken a word. In fact, for one second he looked at her as if she were a ghost. It had almost made her laugh. After all she was a slightly built woman, in spite of her height, wearing her usual boat clothes—a navy blue peacoat and jeans. And he himself seemed such an anachronism in his elegant three-piece suit of gray tweed.

But that special sense of hers told her he was a man of only good intentions, and when he explained that he had known Ellie’s people in New Orleans, she believed him. She felt a great confusion, however. Because she wanted to know these people too.

After all, there was no one left in the world for her but those people! And what an ungrateful and disloyal thought that was.

She said nothing to him as he chatted on in a lovely lyrical British fashion about the heat of the sun and the beauty of this little cemetery. Silence was her inveterate response to things, even when it confused others and made them uncomfortable. And so, out of habit, she gave back nothing, no matter what her inner thoughts. Knew my people? People of my blood?

“My name is Aaron Lightner,” the man said as he placed a small white card in her hand. “If ever you want to know about the Mayfair family in New Orleans, then by all means, please do give me a call. You can reach me in London, if you like. Please do reverse the charges. I’ll be happy to tell you what I know about the Mayfair family. Quite a history, you see.”

Numbing these words, so unintentionally hurtful in her loneliness, so unexpected on this strange deserted little hill. Had she looked helpless, standing there, unable to answer, unable to give the smallest nod in response? She hoped so. She didn’t want to think that she seemed cold or rude.

But it was quite out of the question to explain to him that she’d been adopted, taken away from New Orleans the day she was born. Impossible to explain she’d made a promise never to return there, never to seek the slightest knowledge about the woman who’d given her up. Why, she did not even know her mother’s first name. And she’d found herself wondering suddenly, did he know it? Know perhaps the identity of the Mayfair who had been pregnant out of wedlock and given away her child?

Best, certainly, not to say anything, lest he carry back with him some gossip. After all, perhaps her real mother had gone on to marry and have seven children. And talk now could only do the woman harm. Over the miles and the years, Rowan felt no malice for this faceless, nameless creature, only a dreary hopeless longing. No, she had not said a word.

He had studied her for a long moment, quite unruffled by her impassive face, her inevitable quiet. When she gave him back the card, he took it graciously, but he held it out tentatively as if he hoped she would take it again.

“I should so like to talk to you,” he continued. “I should like to discover how life has been for the transplanted one, so very far from the home soil.” He had hesitated, then: “I knew your mother years ago—”

He stopped, as if he sensed the effect of his words. Maybe their sheer impropriety disturbed him. Rowan didn’t know. The moment could not have been more excruciating if he had struck her. Yet she hadn’t turned away. She had merely remained there motionless, hands shoved in her coat pockets. Knew my mother?

How ghastly it had been. And this man with cheerful blue eyes regarding her so patiently, and the silence as it always was, a shroud binding her in. For the truth was, she could not make herself speak.

“I do wish you’d join me for a lunch, or only for a drink if there isn’t time for that. I’m really not a dreadful person, you see. There is a long history … ”

And the special sense told her he was telling the truth!

She had almost accepted his invitation—to everything, to talk about herself, and to ask him all about them. After all, she had not sought him out. He had come to her with his offer of information. And then, at that moment, had come the compulsion to reveal all, even the story of her strange power, as if he were inviting her to do it silently, exerting some force upon her mind so that she would open its innermost chambers. For he really did want to know about her! And that interest, so keenly personal, from one devoid of the slightest malicious taint, had warmed her as surely as a winter fire.

Patterns, witnesses, all her far-flung thoughts of these things flashed suddenly to the fore.

I have killed three people in my life. I can kill with anger. I know that I can. That is what has happened with the transplanted one as you called me. Is there any place in the family history for such a thing?

Had he flinched slightly as he looked at her? Or was it merely the slanting sun in his eyes?

But this could not happen. They were standing over the grave of the woman to whom she’d made the promise. “No, I will never go back to New Orleans. I will never try to find out.” The woman who had cared for her and loved her, and given her more perhaps than her real mother ever could. The mood of the sickroom had come back, the sound of soft, near inhuman cries of pain. “Promise me, Rowan, even if they write to you. Never … never … ”

“You are my mother, Ellie, my only mother. How could I ask for more?”

In those last agonizing weeks, she had feared her awful destructive power most keenly, for what if in her rage and grief she turned it on Ellie’s weakened body, and thereby ended this stupid, useless suffering once and for all? I could kill you, Ellie, I could deliver you. I know I could. I can feel it inside me, just waiting to be put to that test.

What am I? A witch, for the love of God! I am a healer, not a destroyer. I have a choice as all human beings have a choice!

And there the Englishman had stood, studying her as if fascinated, as if she had been speaking when she hadn’t been at all. It was almost as if he said I understand. But of course that was only an illusion. He had said nothing.

Tormented, confused, she’d turned on her heel and left him there. He must have thought her hostile, or mad even. But what did it matter? Aaron Lightner. She’d never even glanced at the card before she’d given it back to him. She did not know why she remembered the name, except that she remembered him and the strange things he’d said.

Months had passed since that awful day when she had driven home, opened the wall safe, and taken out the paper which Ellie’s executor had had her sign.

“I, Rowan Mayfair, do solemnly swear before God, and in the presence of the undersigned witness, that I shall never return to the city of New Orleans where I was born, that I shall never seek to know the identity of my biological parents, and that I shall eschew all contact with the family called Mayfair should any member approach me for any reason whatsoever, or on any pretext … ”

On and on it went in that near hysterical language, attempting to cover every foreseeable contingency, so many words to have so little meaning. No wonder Rowan distrusted language. It was Ellie’s wish that carried all the weight.

But Rowan had signed it. The lawyer, Milton Kramer, had witnessed it. Into his files the executed copy had gone.

Had Michael Curry’s life passed before his eyes like this, Rowan sometimes wondered, the way that my life is passing before my eyes now? Often she had stared at his smiling face, torn from a magazine and pasted to her mirror.

And she knew that if she saw him this dam might surely break. She dreamed of it, talking to Michael Curry, as if it might happen, as if she might bring him home with her to the house in Tiburon, as if they might drink coffee together, as if she might touch his gloved hand.

Ah, such a romantic notion. A tough guy who loved beautiful houses, drew beautiful pictures. Maybe he listened to Vivaldi, this tough guy, maybe he really read Dickens. And what would it be like to have such a man in her bed, naked except for his soft black leather gloves?

Ah, fantasy. Rather like imagining that the fire fighters she brought home would turn out to be poets, that the policemen she had seduced would reveal themselves to be great novelists, that the forest ranger she’d met in the bar in Bolinas was truly a great painter, and that the husky Vietnam veteran who’d taken her to his cabin in the woods was a great motion picture director hiding from a demanding and worshipful world.

She did imagine those things, and they were entirely possible, of course. But it was the body that commanded preeminence—the bulge in the jeans had to be big enough, the neck powerful, the voice deep, and the coarsely shaven chin rough enough to cut her.

But what if?

But what if Curry had gone on to the South where he came from. That was probably exactly what had happened. New Orleans, the one place in all the world that Rowan Mayfair couldn’t go.

The phone was ringing when she unlocked her office door.

“Dr. Mayfair?”

“Dr. Morris?”

“Yes, I’ve been trying to reach you. It’s about Michael Curry.”

“Yes, I know, Doctor. I got your message. I was just about to call.”

“He wants to talk to you.”

“Then he’s still in San Francisco.”

“He’s hiding out in his own home on Liberty Street.”

“I’ve seen it on the news.”

“But he wants to meet with you. I mean, well, to put it bluntly, he wants to see you in person. He has this idea … ”

“Yes?”

“Well, you’re going to think this madness is communicable, but I’m just relaying the message. Is there any chance you would meet with this guy on your boat—I mean it was your boat you were on the night you rescued him, wasn’t it?”

“I’d be glad to take him back on the boat.”

“What did you say?”

“I would be glad to see him. And I’ll take him out on the boat if he wants to go.”

“That is absolutely great of you, Doctor. But I have to explain a few things. I know this sounds absolutely bonkers, but he wants to take his gloves off and touch the boards of the deck where he was lying when you brought him around.”

“Of course he can do that. I don’t know why I didn’t think of that myself.”

“You’re serious? God, you don’t know how relieved I am. And Dr. Mayfair, let me tell you right now, this guy is just one very nice guy.”

“I know.”

“He is really suffering, this guy. He hit me with this idea last week. I hadn’t heard from him in a month! He was drunk when he called. I thought he’d forget about it.”

“It’s a very good idea, Dr. Morris. You said the power in his hands was real.”

“That’s right, I did. And it is. And you are a very special doctor, Dr. Mayfair. But do you know what you’re getting into? I begged him, I mean really begged him to come back in. Then he calls back last night, demanding I find you right this minute. He has to lay his hands on the boards of the deck, he’s going nuts. I told him, ‘Sober up, Michael, and I’ll give it a shot.’ Then he calls twenty minutes ago, right before I called you. ‘I won’t lie to you,’ he says. ‘I’ve drunk a case of beer today, but I haven’t touched the vodka or the Scotch. I am as straight as I can possibly get.’ ”

She laughed softly. “I should weep for his brain cells,” she said.

“I hear you. But what I’m getting to is the man is desperate. He isn’t getting any better. And I would never ask this of you if he wasn’t just one of the nicest—”

“I’ll go get him. Can you call him and tell him that I’m on my way?”

“God, that’s terrific. Dr. Mayfair, I can’t thank you enough.”

“No thanks is necessary. I want to see him.”

“Look, strike a bargain with him, Doctor. You’ll let him play psychic on the boat if he’ll come in here and dry out.”

“Call him now, Dr. Morris. Within the hour, I’ll be at his front door.”

She put down the phone and stood quite still staring at it for a moment. Then she removed her name tag, and stripped off her soiled white jacket, and slowly pulled the pins out of her hair.

Five

SO THEY HAD tried to put Deirdre Mayfair away again after all these years. With Miss Nancy gone and Miss Carl getting more feeble by the day, it was best. That was the talk, anyway. On August 13, they’d tried. But Deirdre had gone wild, and they had left her alone, and now she was going down badly, just real badly.

When Jerry Lonigan told his wife Rita, she cried.

It had been thirteen years since Deirdre came home from the sanitarium a mindless idiot who couldn’t tell you her own name, but that didn’t matter to Rita. Rita would never forget the real Deirdre.

Rita and Deirdre were sixteen when they went to boarding school at St. Rose de Lima’s. It was an ugly old brick building, on the very edge of the French Quarter. And Rita was sent there because she was “bad,” had been out drinking on the riverboat The President with boys. Her dad had said St. Ro’s would straighten her out. All the girls slept in an attic dormitory. And they went to bed at nine o’clock. Rita had cried herself to sleep down there.

Deirdre Mayfair had been at St. Ro’s for a long time. She didn’t mind that it was old and gloomy and strict. But she held Rita’s hand when Rita cried. She listened when Rita said it was like a prison.

The girls watched “Father Knows Best” on an old television set with a round six-inch screen, swear to God! And the creaky old wooden radio that stood on the floor under the window was no better. You couldn’t get to the phonograph. The South American girls always had it, playing that awful “La Cucaracha,” and doing those Spanish dances.

“Don’t mind them,” Deirdre said. She took Rita with her down to the play yard in the late afternoon. They swung on the swings under the pecan trees. You wouldn’t think that was much fun for a sixteen-year-old girl, but Rita loved it when she was with Deirdre.

Deirdre sang when they were on the swings—old Irish and Scotch ballads, she called them. She had a real true soprano voice, delicate and high, and the songs were so sad. It gave Rita chills to hear them. Deirdre loved to stay out until the sun was gone and the sky was a “pure purple” and the cicadas were really going in the trees. Deirdre called it twilight.

Rita had seen that word written out, all right, but she’d never heard anyone really say it. Twilight.

Deirdre took Rita’s hand and they walked along the brick wall, right under the pecan trees, so that they had to duck under the low leafy branches. There were places you could stand where you were completely hidden by the trees. It was crazy to describe it, but it had been such a strange and lovely time for Rita—standing there in the half dark with Deirdre, and the trees swaying in the breeze and the tiny leaves showering down on them.

In those days, Deirdre had looked like a real old-fashioned girl from a picture book, with a violet ribbon in her hair and her black curls tumbling down her back. She could have been real sharp if she’d wanted to be. She had the build for it, and new clothes in her locker she never bothered to try on. But it was easy to forget about things like that when you were with Deirdre. Her hair had been so soft. Rita had touched it once. So soft.

They walked in the dusty cloister beside the chapel. They peeped through the wooden gate into the nuns’ garden. Secret place, Deirdre said, full of the loveliest flowers.

“I don’t ever want to go home,” Deirdre explained. “It’s so peaceful here.”

Peaceful! Alone at night, Rita cried and cried. She could hear the jukebox of the Negro bar across the street, the music rising over the brick walls and all the way up to the fourth-story attic. Sometimes when she thought everybody was asleep, she got up and went out on the iron balcony and looked towards the lights of Canal Street. There was a red glow over Canal Street. All New Orleans was having fun out there, and Rita was locked up, with a nun sleeping behind a curtain at either end of the dormitory. What would she do if she didn’t have Deirdre?

Date: 2015-12-18; view: 535