The Witching Hour

  There was no single noise in the night. Only a dim continuous purring as if the insects sang and the frogs sang and the faraway engines and cars, wherever they were, sang with them. It seemed a train passed somewhere close, clicking rhythmically and fast beneath the song. And there came the dull faraway sound of a whistle, like a guttural sob in the darkness.

  Rowan stood motionless, her hands dropped at her sides, limp and useless, as she stared dumbly through the rusted mesh of the screen, at the soft lacy movement of the trees against the sky. The deep singing of the frogs slowly broke itself away from the other night songs, and then faded. A car came down the empty street beyond the front fence, headlights piercing the thick wet foliage.

  Rowan felt the light on her skin. She saw it flash over the wooden cane lying on the floor of the porch, over Carlotta's black high-top shoe, bent painfully in as if the thin ankle had snapped.

  Did anyone see through the thick shrubs the dead woman in the chair? And the tall blond woman figure behind her?

  Rowan shuddered all over. She arched her back, her left hand rising and gripping a hank of her hair and pulling it until the pain in her scalp was sharp, so sharp she couldn't quite bear it.

  The rage was gone. Even the faintest most bitter flash of anger had died away; and she stood alone and cold in the dark, clinging to the pain as she held her own hair tight in her trembling fingers, cold as if the warm night were not there, alone as if the darkness were the darkness of the abyss from which all promise of light was gone, and all promise of hope or happiness. The world gone. The world with all its history, and all its vain logic, and all its dreams, and accomplishments.

  Slowly, she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, sloppily like a child, and she stood looking down at the limp hand of the dead woman, her own teeth chattering as the cold ate deep into her, truly chilling her. Then she went down on her knee and lifted the hand and felt for the pulse, which she knew wasn't there, and then laid it down in the woman's lap, and looked at the blood trickling down from the woman's ear, running down her neck and into her white collar.

  "I didn't mean to ... " she whispered, barely forming the words.

  Behind her the dark house yawned, waited. She couldn't bear to turn around. Some distant unidentifiable sound shocked her. It filled her with fear; it filled her with the worst and only real fear she'd ever known of a place in all her life, and when she thought of the dark rooms, she couldn't turn around. She couldn't go back into it. And the enclosed porch held her like a trap.

  She rose slowly and looked out over the deep grass, over a tangle of vine that clawed at the screen, and shivered now against it with its tiny pointed leaves. She looked up at the clouds moving beyond the trees, and she heard an awful little sound issuing from her own lips, a kind of awful desperate moaning.

  "I didn't mean to ... " she said again.

  This is when you pray, she thought miserably and quietly. This is when you pray to nothing and no one to take away the terror of what you've done, to make it right, to make it that you never never came here.

  She saw Ellie's face in the hospital bed. Promise me, you'll never never ...

  "I didn't mean to do it!" It came so low, the whisper, that nobody but God could have heard. "God, I didn't mean to. I swear it. I didn't mean to do this again."

  Far away somewhere in another realm other people existed. Michael and the Englishman and Rita Mae Lonigan, and the Mayfairs gathered at the restaurant table. Even Eugenia, lost somewhere within the house, asleep and dreaming perhaps. All those others.

  And she stood here alone. She, who had killed this mean and cruel old woman, killed her as cruelly as she herself had ever killed, God damn her for it. God damn her into hell for all she said and all she'd done. God damn her. But I didn't mean it, I swear ...

  Once again, she wiped her mouth. She folded her arms across her breasts and hunched her shoulders and shivered. She had to turn around, walk through the dark house. Walk back to the door, and leave here.

  Oh, but she couldn't do that, she had to call someone, she had to tell, she had to cry out for that woman Eugenia, and do what had to be done, what was right to be done.

  Yet the agony of speaking to strangers now, of telling official lies, was more than she could endure.

  She let her head fall lazily to one side. She stared down at the helpless body, broken and collapsed within its sack of a dress. The white hair so clean and soft-looking. All her paltry and miserable life in this house, all her sour and unhappy life. And this is how it ends for her.

  She closed her eyes, bringing her hands up wearily to her face, and then the prayers did come, Help me, because I don't know what to do, I don't know what I've done, and I can't undo it. And everything the old woman said was true, and I've always known, known it was evil inside me and inside them and that's why Ellie took me away. Evil.

  She saw the thin pale ghost outside the glass in Tiburon. She felt the invisible hands touching her, as she had on the plane.

  Evil.

  "And where are you?" she whispered in the darkness. "Why should I be afraid to walk back into this house?"

  She raised her head. In the long parlor, there came another faint, cracking noise behind her. Like an old board creaking under a step. Or was it just a rafter breathing? So faint it might have been a rat in the dark, creeping along the boards with its tiny repulsive feet. But she knew it wasn't. With every instinct in her, she felt a presence there, someone near, someone in the dark, someone in the parlor. Not the old black woman. Not the scratching of her slippers.

  "Show yourself to me," she whispered, the last of her fear turning to anger. "Do it now."

  Once again she heard it. And slowly she turned around. Silence. She looked down one last time at the old woman. And then she walked into the long front room. The high narrow mirrors stared at one another in the shadowy stillness. The dusty chandeliers gathered the light to themselves sullenly in the gloom.

  I'm not afraid of you. I'm not afraid of anything here. Show yourself as you did before.

  The very furniture seemed alive for one perilous instant, as if the small curved chairs were watching her, as if the bookcases with their glass doors had heard her vague challenge, and would bear witness to whatever took place.

  "Why don't you come?" she whispered aloud again. "Are you afraid of me?" Emptiness. A dull creak from somewhere overhead.

  With quiet even steps she made her way into the hallway, painfully aware of the sound of her own labored breathing. She gazed dumbly at the open front door. Milky the light from the street, and dark and shining the leaves of the dripping oaks. A long sigh came out of her, almost involuntarily, and then she turned and moved away from this comforting light, back through the hallway, against the thick shadows and towards the empty dining room, where the emerald lay, waiting, in its velvet box.

  He was here. He had to be.

  "Why don't you come?" she whispered, surprised at the frailty of her own voice. It seemed the shadows stirred, but no shape materialized. Maybe a tiny bit of breeze had caught the dusty draperies. A thin dull snap sounded in the boards under her feet.

  There on the table lay the jewel box. Smell of wax lingering in the air. Her fingers were trembling as she raised the lid, and touched the stone itself.

  "Come on, you devil," she said. She lifted the emerald, vaguely thrilled by its weight, in spite of her misery, and she lifted it higher, until the light caught it, and she put it on, easily manipulating the small strong clasp at the back of her neck.

  Then, in one very strange moment, she saw herself doing this. She saw herself, Rowan Mayfair, ripped out of her past, which had been so far removed from all of this that it now lacked detail, standing like a lost wanderer in this dark and strangely familiar house.

  And it was familiar, wasn't it? These high tapering doors were familiar. It seemed her eyes had drifted over these murals a thousand times. Ellie had walked here. Her mother had lived and died here. And how otherworldly and irretrievable
seemed the glass and redwood house in faraway California. Why had she waited so long to come?

  She had taken a detour in the dark gleaming path of her destiny. And what were all her past triumphs to the confrontation of this mystery, and to think, this mystery in all its dark splendor belonged by right to her. It had waited here all these years for her to claim it and now at last she was here.

  The emerald lay against the soft silk of her blouse heavily. Her fingers seemed unable to resist it, hovering about it as if it were a magnet.

  "Is this what you want?" she whispered.

  Behind her, in the hallway, an unmistakable sound answered her. The whole house felt it, echoed it, like the case of a great piano echoes the tiniest touch to a single string. Then again, it came. Soft but certain. Someone there.

  Her heart thudded almost painfully. She stood stranded, her head bowed, and as if in dreamy sleep, she turned and raised her eyes. Only a few feet away, she made out a dim and indistinct figure, what seemed a tall man.

  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!"

  Twenty-nine

  WELL, 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.