Lasher

Ten

NEW ORLEANS WAS very simply a fabulous place. Lark didn’t care if he never left here. The Pontchartrain Hotel was small, but utterly comfortable. He had a spacious suite over the Avenue, with agreeable, traditional furnishings, and the food from the Caribbean Room kitchen was the best he’d ever tasted. They could keep San Francisco for a while. He’d slept till noon today, then eaten a fabulous southern breakfast. When he got home, he was going to learn how to make grits. And this coffee with chicory was a funny thing-tasted awful the first time, and then you couldn’t do without it.

But these Mayfairs were driving him crazy. It was late afternoon of his second day in this town and he’d accomplished nothing. He sat on the long gold velvet couch, a very comfortable L-shaped affair, ankle on knee, scribbling away in his notebook, while Lightner made some call in the other room. Lightner had been really tired when he came back to the hotel. Lark figured he’d prefer to be upstairs asleep in his own room now. And a man that age ought to nap; he couldn’t simply drive himself night and day as Lightner did.

Lark could hear Lightner’s voice rising. Somebody on the other end of the line in London, or wherever it was, was exasperating him.

Of course it wasn’t the family’s fault that Gifford Mayfair had died unexpectedly in Destin, Florida, that the last two days had been entirely devoted to a wake and a funeral and a sustained pitch of grief which Lark had seldom witnessed in his lifetime. Lightner had been drawn away over and over again by the women of the family, sent on errands, called for consolation and advice. Lark had scarcely had two words with him.

Lark had gone to the wake last night out of prurient curiosity. He could not imagine Rowan Mayfair living with these strange garrulous southerners, who spoke of the living and the dead with equal enthusiasm. And what a handsome well-oiled crowd they were. Seems everybody drove a Beamer or Jag or Porsche. The jewels looked real. The genetic mix included good looks, whatever else came with it.

Then there was the husband; everybody was protecting this Michael Curry. The man looked ordinary enough; in fact, he looked as good as all the others. Well fed, well groomed. Certainly not like a man who’d just suffered a heart attack.

But Mitch Flanagan on the coast was breaking down Curry’s DNA now and he’d said it was extremely strange, that he had as unusual a blueprint as Rowan. Flanagan had “managed,” as the Keplinger Institute always did, to get the records on Michael Curry without the man’s knowledge or permission. But now Lark couldn’t get Flanagan!

Flanagan hadn’t answered last night or this morning. Some sort of machine kept giving Lark some minimal song and dance with the customary invitation to leave a number.

Lark didn’t like this at all. Why was Flanagan stalling him? Lark wanted to see Curry. He wanted to talk to him, ask him certain questions.

It was fun to party and all-he’d gotten much too drunk last night after the wake-and he was headed to Antoine’s tonight for dinner with two doctor friends from Tulane, both of them roaring sots, but he had business to do here, and now that Mrs. Ryan Mayfair was buried perhaps they could get on with it.

He stopped his scribbling as Lightner came back into the room.

“Bad news?” he asked.

Lightner took his usual seat in the morris chair, and pondered, finger curled beneath his lip, before he answered. He was a pale man with rather attractive white hair, and a very disarming personal manner. He was also really fatigued. Lark thought this was the one with the heart to worry about.

“Well,” said Lightner, “I’m in an awkward position. It seems Erich Stolov was the one who signed for Gifford’s clothes in Florida. He was here. He picked up her old clothes at the funeral parlor. And now he’s gone, and he and I have not consulted on all this with each other.”

“But he’s a member of your gang.”

“Yes,” Aaron answered with a slight sarcastic grimace. “A member of my gang. And the advice from the Elders according to the new Superior General is that I am not to question ‘that part’ of the investigation.”

“So what does all this mean?”

Lightner grew quiet before answering. Then he looked up.

“You said something earlier to me about genetic testing of this entire family. You want to try to broach that subject with Ryan? I think tomorrow morning would not be too early to do it.”

“Oh, I’m for it. But you do realize what they’d be getting into. I mean they are the ones taking the risk, essentially. If we turn up congenital diseases, if we turn up predispositions to certain conditions-well, this information might affect everything from insurance eligibility to qualifying for the military. Yes, I want to do it, but I’d much rather concentrate on Curry right now. And this woman Gifford. No way we can get records on Gifford? I mean, let’s take our time with this. This Ryan Mayfair is a pretty smart lawyer, as I see it. He won’t go for wholesale genetic testing of his entire family. He’d be a fool if he consented or encouraged it.”

“And I am not in his good graces just now. If it weren’t for my friendship with Beatrice Mayfair, he’d be far more suspicious than he is, and with reason.”

Lark had seen the woman in question. She’d come to the hotel yesterday with the news of the tragic death in Destin-a comely small-waisted woman, with upswept gray hair, and one of the most successful face-lifts he’d seen in recent years, though he figured it was probably not her first one. Eyes bright, cheeks perfectly sculpted, only a little telltale indentation beneath the chin and neck smooth as a young woman’s neck. So-it was she and Lightner. He should have figured from the wake; she had clung to Lightner desperately, and several times Lark had seen Lightner kiss her. Lark hoped he’d have that kind of luck when he reached eighty, assuming he would. If he didn’t stop hitting the booze, he might not make it.

“Look,” he said now, “if Gifford Mayfair has medical records in this city, I think I can access them through Keplinger, confidentially, without disturbing or alerting anyone.”

Lightner frowned and shook his head as if he thought this most distasteful. “Not again without consent,” he said.

“Ryan Mayfair will never know. You leave that to us, the Medical Secret Service or whatever you want to call it. But I want to see Curry.”

“I understand. We can arrange that tomorrow as well. Maybe even later this evening. I have to think.”

“About what?”

“All of this. Why the Elders would permit Stolov to come here and to interfere this way, to risk the displeasure of the family.” The man seemed to be thinking aloud, not really directing his comments to Lark for an answer. “You know, I’ve spent all my life in psychic investigation. I’ve never become so involved with a family before. I feel increasing loyalty to them, and increasing concern. I’m rather ashamed I didn’t interfere before Rowan left, but the Elders had given me a very specific directive.”

“Well, obviously they too think there is something genetically strange about this family,” said Lark. “They too are looking for hereditary traits. Good Lord, at least six people at the wake last night told me Gifford was psychic. They said she’d seen ‘the man,’ some sort of family ghost. They said she was more powerful than she ever let on. I think your friends in the Talamasca are simply on the same track.”

Lightner wasn’t quick to respond. Then he said, “But that’s just it. We should be on the same track, and I’m not sure we are. It’s all rather…puzzling.”

The phone interrupted, a low pulsing ring from the handset beside the couch, which looked rather crudely modern among all the mahogany and velvet furniture.

Lark picked it up. “Dr. Larkin,” he said, as he always had wherever he answered a phone, even one time a ringing pay phone in an airport, which had jerked him suddenly from his reverie.

“This is Ryan Mayfair,” said the man on the other end. “You’re the doctor from California?”

“Yes, glad to talk to you, Mr. Mayfair, didn’t want to bother you on this of all days. I can hang in here until tomorrow.”

“Is Aaron Lightner with you, Doctor?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact he is. Do you want to speak to him?”

“No. Please listen. Edith Mayfair died early today from a uterine hemorrhage. Edith Mayfair was Lauren Mayfair’s granddaughter by Jacques Mayfair, my cousin and Gifford’s cousin. And Rowan’s cousin. Same exact thing which had happened to my wife. Edith apparently bled to death alone in her apartment on Esplanade Avenue. Her grandmother found her this afternoon after the funeral. I think we should talk about this question of genetic testing. There may be problems…coming to the surface in this family.”

“Good God,” Lark whispered.

The man’s voice was so level, so cold.

“Can you come downtown to my office?” Ryan Mayfair asked. “And ask Lightner to come with you?”

“Absolutely. We’ll be there in-”

“Ten minutes,” Lightner said. He was already on his feet. He took the phone from Lark.

“Ryan,” he said. “Get the word out to the women of the family. You don’t want to alarm anyone, but none of the women should be alone just now. If something does happen, there should be someone there to call for medical help. Obviously neither Edith nor Gifford was able to do this. I know what I’m asking…Yes. Yes. All of them. Everyone. That’s exactly the way to go. Yes, we’ll see you in ten minutes.”

The two men left the suite, choosing the short flight of stairs to the street over the elegant little elevator.

“What the hell do you think is going on?” Lark asked. “I mean what does this mean, another death exactly like that of Gifford Mayfair?”

Lightner didn’t respond. He looked grim and impatient.

“And by the way, do you have super-hearing? How did you know what he’d told me on the phone?”

“Super-hearing,” murmured Lightner vaguely.

They slipped out the front door and right into a waiting cab. The air still had its coolness, but there was a bit of balmy warmth mixed up in it. Everywhere Lark looked he saw greenery, and some random, shabby bit of charm-an old-fashioned lamppost perhaps, or a bit of iron balcony on the upper facade of a house behind its stucco storefront.

“I think the question is,” Lightner said, once again talking to himself as much as to Lark, “what are we going to tell them. You know perfectly well what’s happening. You know this has nothing to do with genetic illness, except in the broadest interpretation of those words.”

The cab driver made a U-turn and tore down the Avenue, bouncing them uncomfortably together on the leather seat of the cab.

“I don’t follow you,” said Larkin. “I don’t know what’s going on. This is some kind of syndrome, like toxic shock.”

“Oh, come on, man,” said Lightner. “We both know. He’s trying to mate with them. You told me yourself, did you not? Rowan said she wanted to know if the creature could mate with humans or with her. She wanted an entire genetic examination of all material.”

Lark was stunned. He had not in all seriousness thought of this, and he realized once more that he had not been sure really that he believed in this new species of being, this male creature who had been born to Rowan Mayfair. He was still assuming in the back of his mind that all this would have some “natural” explanation.

“It’s natural,” said Lightner. “Natural is a deceptive word. I wonder if I shall ever before my time is up lay eyes on him. I wonder if he really can reason, if he possesses human self-control, if there is any moral framework to his mind, assuming it is a mind as we know mind…”

“But are you seriously suggesting that he is preying upon these women?”

“Of course I am,” said Lightner. “It’s obvious. Why do you think the Talamasca took Gifford’s bloodstained clothes? He impregnated her and she lost the child. Look, Dr. Larkin, you’d better come clean on all this. I understand your scholarly interest and your loyalty to Rowan. But we may have no further contact with Rowan.”

“God.”

“The point is you’d better come clean about what you know. We have to tell this family that this creature is on the prowl. We don’t have time for vague talk of genetic illness, and genetic testing. We don’t have time to go about gathering data. The family is too vulnerable. You realize that woman died today? She died while the family was burying Gifford!”

“Did you know her?”

“No. But I know she was thirty-five, a recluse by nature, and something of a family nut, as they call them, of which there are a great many. Her grandmother Lauren Mayfair didn’t approve of her very much. In fact, I’m fairly certain she went to see her this afternoon to condemn her roundly for not attending her cousin’s funeral.”

“Well, she sure had a good excuse, didn’t she?” said Lark He was instantly sorry. “God, if I had a single clue as to where Rowan was.”

“What an optimist you are,” said Lightner bitterly. “We have a lot of clues, don’t we, but they do not suggest that you or I will ever see or speak to Rowan Mayfair again.”