The Witching Hour

  "There isn't going to be a public wake or funeral," said the woman. "It doesn't matter who knows or doesn't know. Your mother will be buried as soon as it can be arranged. I have asked that it be done tomorrow afternoon. I am trying to save you grief with my recommendations. But if you will not listen, then do what you feel you must do."

  "I'm coming," Rowan said. "What time tomorrow afternoon?"

  "Your mother will be buried through Lonigan and Sons on Magazine Street. The Requiem Mass will be at St. Mary's Assumption Church on Josephine Street. And the services will take place just as soon as I can arrange for them. It is pointless for you to come two thousand miles--"

  "I want to see my mother. I ask you please to wait until I can get there."

  "That is absolutely out of the question," said the woman with a slight touch of anger or impatience. "I advise you to leave immediately, if you are determined to come. And please don't expect to spend the night under this roof. I have no means of properly receiving you. The house is yours, of course, and I shall vacate it as soon as possible if that is your wish. But I ask that you remain in a hotel until I can conveniently do so. Again, I have no means of making you comfortable here."

  Carefully, in the same tired manner, the woman gave Rowan the address.

  "You said First Street?" Rowan asked. It was the street that Michael had described to her, she was sure of it. "This was my mother's house?" she asked.

  "I've been awake all night," said the woman, her words slow, spiritless. "If you're coming, then everything can be explained to you when you arrive."

  Rowan was about to ask another question when, to her astonishment, the woman rang off.

  She was so angry that for a moment she did not feel her hurt. Then the hurt overshadowed everything. "Who in the hell are you?" she whispered, the tears rising, but not flowing. "And why in the world would you speak this way to me!" She slammed down the phone, her teeth biting into her lip, and folded her arms. "God, what an awful, awful woman," she whispered.

  But this was no time for crying or wishing for Michael. Quickly, she took out her handkerchief, blew her nose and wiped her eyes, and then reached for the pad and pen on the kitchen counter, and she jotted down the information the woman had given her.

  First Street, she thought, looking at it after she'd written it. Probably no more than coincidence. And Lonigan and Sons, the words Ellie had mentioned in her delirium when she had rambled on about her childhood and home. Quickly she called New Orleans information, then the funeral home.

  It was a Mr. Jerry Lonigan who answered.

  "My name is Dr. Rowan Mayfair, I'm calling from California about a funeral."

  "Yes, Dr. Mayfair," he said in a most agreeable voice that reminded her of Michael at once. "I know who you are. I have your mother here now."

  Thank God, no subterfuge, no need for false explanations. Yet she couldn't help but wonder why did the man know about her? Hadn't the whole adoption been hush-hush?

  "Mr. Lonigan," she said, trying to speak clearly and ignore the thickness in her voice, "it's very important to me that I be there for the funeral. I want to see my mother before she is put into the ground."

  "Of course you do, Dr. Mayfair. I understand. But Miss Carlotta called here just now and said if we don't bury your mother tomorrow ... Well, let's just say she's insisting on it, Dr. Mayfair. I can schedule the Mass for as late as three P.M. Do you think you could make it by that time, Dr. Mayfair? I will hold everything up just as long as I can."

  "Yes, absolutely, I will make it," said Rowan. "I'll leave tonight or early tomorrow morning at the latest. But Mr. Lonigan--if I get delayed--"

  "Dr. Mayfair, if I know you're on your way, I won't shut that coffin before you arrive."

  "Thank you, Mr. Lonigan. I only just found out. I just ... "

  "Well, Dr. Mayfair, if you don't mind my saying so, it only just happened. I picked up your mother at six A.M. this morning. I think Miss Carlotta's rushing things. But then Miss Carlotta is so old now, Dr. Mayfair. So old ... "

  "Listen, let me give you my phone number at the hospital. If anything should happen, call me please."

  He took down the numbers. "Don't you worry, Dr. Mayfair. Your mother will be here at Lonigan and Sons when you come."

  Again the tears threatened. He sounded so simple, so hopelessly sincere. "Mr. Lonigan, can you tell me something else?" she said, her voice quavering badly.

  "Yes, Dr. Mayfair."

  "How old was my mother?"

  "Forty-eight, Dr. Mayfair."

  "What was her name?"

  Obviously this surprised him, but he recovered quickly. "Deirdre was her name, Dr. Mayfair. She was a very pretty woman. My wife was a good friend of hers. She loved Deirdre, used to go to visit. My wife is right here with me. My wife is glad that you called."

  For some reason, this affected Rowan almost as deeply as all the other bits and pieces of information had affected her. She pressed the handkerchief to her eyes tightly, and swallowed.

  "Can you tell me what my mother died of, Mr. Lonigan? What does the death certificate say?"

  "It says natural causes, Dr. Mayfair, but your mother had been sick, real sick for many years. I can give you the name of the doctor who treated her. I think he might talk to you, being that you are a doctor yourself."

  "I'll get it from you when I come," Rowan said. She could not continue this much longer. She blew her nose quickly and quietly. "Mr. Lonigan. I have the name of a hotel. The Pontchartrain. Is that convenient to the funeral home and the church?"

  "Why, you could walk over here from there, Dr. Mayfair, if the weather wasn't so hot."

  "I'll call you as soon as I get in. But please, again, promise me that you won't let my mother be buried without ... "

  "Don't worry about it another minute, Dr. Mayfair. But Dr. Mayfair, there's one thing more. It's my wife who wants me to take it up with you."

  "Go ahead, Mr. Lonigan."

  "Your aunt, Carlotta Mayfair, she doesn't want any announcement of this in the morning paper, and well, frankly, I don't think there's time for an announcement now. But there are so many Mayfairs who would want to know about the funeral, Dr. Mayfair. I mean the cousins are going to be up in arms when they find out how all this happened so fast. Now, it's entirely up to you, you understand, I'll do as you say, but my wife was wondering, would you maybe mind if she started calling the cousins. 'Course once she gets one or two of them, they'll call everybody else. Now, if you don't want her to do that, Dr. Mayfair, she won't do it. But Rita Mae, my wife, that is, she felt that it was a shame to bury Deirdre this way without anybody knowing, and she felt maybe, you know, that it might do you good to see the cousins who would turn out. God knows, they came out for Miss Nancy last year. And Miss Ellie was here, your Miss Ellie from California, as I'm sure you know ... "

  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 cliches--"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.

  Eleven

  THE 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 G
arden 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.