Lasher

Twenty-six

MONA HAD NEVER thought her first days at Mayfair and Mayfair would be like this. She was at the big desk in Pierce’s spacious dark-paneled office, typing furiously on a 386 SX IBM-compatible computer, just a tad slower than the monster she had at home.

Rowan Mayfair was still alive now eighteen hours after surgery, and twelve hours after they’d taken her off the machines. Any minute she might stop breathing. Or she might live for weeks. Nobody really knew.

The investigation was forging ahead. Nothing to do right now but stay with the others, and think, and wait, and write.

She banged away on the white keyboard, faintly annoyed by the noisy click. “Confidential to File from Mona Mayfair” was her title. It was protected. No one could access this material except Mona herself. When she got home, she’d transfer via modem. But for now, she couldn’t leave here. This is where she belonged. She had been here since last night. She was writing down everything she had seen, heard, felt, thought.

Meantime every room in the vast complex of offices was occupied, busy soft voices speaking steadily and in conflict with each other, into different phones, behind partially open doors. Couriers came and went.

It was quiet, without panic. Ryan was behind his desk in the large office, as they called it, with Randall, and Anne Marie. Lauren was down the hall. Sam Mayfair and two of the Grady Mayfairs from New York were in the conference rooms using all three phones. Somewhere, Liz Mayfair and Cecilia Mayfair made their calls. The family secretaries, Connie, Josephine and Louise Mayfair, were working in another conference room. Faxes kept rolling in on every machine in the place.

Pierce was here with Mona, letting her have the big machine, on his mammoth mahogany desk, and looking rather defenseless at his secretary’s smaller, more humble computer, in his tie and shirtsleeves, his coat on the back of the chair. He was not doing much of anything, however. He was simply too sleepy, and too grief-stricken, as Mona herself ought to have been, but was not.

The investigation was entirely private, and it could not have been handled any better by anyone else.

They had begun last night in earnest an hour after Rowan had been found. Several times Pierce and Mona had returned to the hospital. They had been there again at sunrise. And then gone back to work. Ryan, Pierce, Mona and Lauren were the nucleus of the investigation. Randall and several of the others came and went. It was now some eighteen hours since they had commenced their phone calls, their faxes, their communications. It was getting on dusk, and Mona was lightheaded and hungry, but much too excited to think about either thing.

Someone would bring some supper in a little while, wouldn’t they? Or maybe they would go uptown. Mona didn’t want to leave the office. She figured the next piece of information would be from a Houston emergency room, where the mysterious man, six and a half feet tall, had had to seek some sort of medical help.

The Houston truck driver had been the most important link.

This was the man who had picked up Rowan yesterday afternoon. He had stopped in St. Martinville last night to tell the local police about the thin, crazed woman who had struck off on her own into the swamps. On account of him, they had found Rowan. He had been called, questioned further. He had described the place in Houston where she’d run up to his truck. He told all the things she said, how she was desperate to get to New Orleans. He confirmed that as of yesterday evening when he last saw her, Rowan had been right in the head. Crazed perhaps, but talking, walking, thinking. Then she had gone off alone into the swamps.

“That woman was in pain,” he’d told Mona on the phone this morning, recapitulating the entire tale. “She was hugging herself, you know, like a woman having cramps.”

Gerald Mayfair, still stunned and sick over the fact that Dr. Samuel Larkin had slipped away from his care and vanished, had gone with Shelby, Pierce’s big sister, and Patrick, Mona’s father, off to the swamp near St. Martinville to search the spot where Rowan had been found.

Rowan had been hemorrhaging, just like the others, though she was not dead. At twelve last night they had performed an emergency hysterectomy on the unconscious woman, with only Michael there-in tears-to consent. It was either that or she’d never make it till morning. Incomplete miscarriage. Other complications. “Look, we’re lucky she’s still breathing.”

And breathing she was.

Who knew what they might discover up there in the grass in that St. Martinville swamp park? It was Mona who had suggested this and was all for going herself. Patrick, her dad, was all sobered up now and determined to be of help. Ryan had wanted Mona to remain here with him. Mona couldn’t quite figure that one. Was Ryan worried about her?

But then when Ryan started to buzz her over the intercom every few minutes to ask her some minor question, or make some minor suggestion, she knew that he simply wanted her support. OK by her. She was there to give it. In between calls, she typed, she wrote, she recorded, she described.

The Houston office building had been discovered before noon.

It was only walking distance from where Rowan had appeared on the highway. Unoccupied except for the fifteenth floor, which had been leased to a man and a woman. The fifteenth floor was a grim scene. Rowan had been a prisoner. For long periods Rowan had been tied to a bed. The mattress was filthy with urine and feces, yet it had been laid with fresh sheets, and surrounded by flowers, some of which were still fresh. There was fresh food.

It was ghastly, all of it. There had been plenty of blood-not Rowan’s-in the bathroom. The man had been hurt there, obviously, maybe even knocked unconscious. Photographs of the bathroom had already come in. But the bloody footprints leading to the elevator, and out the front doors of the building, clearly indicated he had left on his own.

“Looks to me from this like he fell again in the elevator. See that. That’s blood all over the carpet. He’s weak, he’s hurt.”

Well, he had been then, but was he still hurt now?

They were canvassing every emergency room in the entire city. Every hospital, clinic, doctor’s office. They would check the suburbs, and then move in concentric circles, checking, until they found where the bleeding man had gone. Within the direct vicinity of the building they were checking door to door. They were checking alleyways, and rooftops, restaurants, buildings that were boarded up. If the man was anywhere nearby, wounded, they would find him.

As it was, the bloody foot tracks had vanished under the wheels of the passing traffic. Whether the man had climbed into a vehicle or simply crossed to the other side could never be known.

The entire investigation was private, the best that money could buy.

One agency after another had been enlisted. Tasks were constantly being assigned, information collated. Private doctors had gathered the blood samples in the Houston bathroom and taken them to private laboratories, the names of which were known only to Lauren and Ryan. The grim prison rooms had been fingerprinted. Every article of clothing, and there had been many, had been packed, labeled and shipped to Mayfair and Mayfair. Things had already started to arrive.

Other leads were being followed. Crumpled stationery and a plastic door key card found in Houston had been traced to a hotel in New York. People were being questioned. Rowan’s truck driver was being brought in, at family expense, to give yet another thorough verbal report.

It was a hideous picture, the empty office tower, the filthy prison cell. Dead flowers. The broken porcelain on the bloody floor. Rowan had escaped, but then something dreadful had happened to Rowan. It had happened out in a grass field under a famous tree called Gabriel’s Oak. A beautiful spot. Mona knew it. Lots of schoolkids knew it. You went to St. Martinville to see it, the Arcadian Museum, and Gabriel’s Oak. There was Evangeline Oak in the city of St. Martinville, and Gabriel’s Oak out there near the old house. Gabriel leaning on his elbows, they said, to wait for Evangeline. Well, Rowan had gone down between the elbows in the grass.

Toxic shock, allergic reaction, immuno-failure. A hundred comparisons had been drawn. But the blood revealed no toxins any longer, not last night, not today. Whatever had happened with the miscarriage was over. Possibly she had simply lost the child and passed out.

Ugly, ugly, all of it.

But could anything have been uglier than the actual sight of Rowan Mayfair, in the white hospital bed, her head straight up on the pillow, her arms by her sides motionless, her eyes staring into space? She had been greatly emaciated, white as paper, but the worst part was the attitude of the arms, parallel, slightly turned in, and the utter blankness of her face. All personality was gone from her expression. She looked faintly idiotic lying there, eyes far too round, and completely unresponsive to movement or to light. Her mouth looked small and strangely round also, as though it had lost whatever character caused it to lengthen into a woman’s mouth. Even as Mona sat there watching, Rowan’s arms began to pull in closer to the body. The nurses would reach over to stretch them out.

Rowan’s hair was thin, as if much of it had fallen out. More evidence of severe malnutrition and the aborted pregnancy. She was so small in the white hospital gown she might as well have been an angel in a Christmas pageant.

And then there was Michael, mussed and shaken, sitting beside her, talking to her, telling her that he was going to take care of her, that everyone was gathered, that she mustn’t be afraid. He told her he would put colored pictures up in her room, and he would play music. He had found an old gramophone. He would play that for her. He talked on and on. “We’re going to take care of everything. We’re going to…going to take care of everything.”

He was scared of saying something like, “We’ll find this bastard thing, this monster.” No, who would want to say that to the innocent, blank creature lying there, the grotesque remnant of a woman who knew how to operate with perfect precision and success upon other people’s brains?

Mona knew that Rowan couldn’t hear anything. There was nothing in there listening anymore. The brain was still working, a little, causing the lungs to function at a completely mechanical pace, causing the heart to pump with the same frightening regularity, but the outer extremities of the body grew more and more cold.

At any moment the brain might stop giving orders. The body would die. The mind had no concern for itself any longer. The boss of the body had fled. The electroencephalogram was almost flat.

The tiny little blips here and there were no more than you would get if you hooked up the machine to a dead brain in a room on a table. You always got something, they said.

Rowan had been badly physically hurt. That was really ugly. There were bruises on her pale arms and legs. There was evidence of a spontaneous fracture in her left hip. She bore the bruises and marks of rape. The miscarriage had been extremely violent. There was blood and fluid on her thighs.

At six o’clock this morning they had shut off the respirator. She had suffered no complications from the swift and simple surgery. All the tests were completed.

They had rushed to take her home at ten a.m. for one simple reason. They had not expected her to live out the day. Her instructions had been very explicit. She had written them out when she took possession of the legacy. She was to die in the house on First Street. “My home.” It was all in her own handwriting, completed in the happy days right before the wedding, beautifully in keeping with the spirit of the legacy. To die in Mary Beth’s bed.

Also there was the superstition of the family to consider. People were standing in the corridors of Mercy Hospital and saying, “She should die in the master bedroom. She should be home.”

“They ought to take her home to First Street.” Old Grandpa Fielding had been adamant. “She will not die in this hospital. You are torturing her. To release her, you must take her home.”

Mayfair madness in high gear. Even Anne Marie was saying that she ought to be returned to the famous master bedroom. Who knew? Perhaps the spirits of the dead in the house could help her? Even Lauren said bitterly, “Take the woman home.”

The nuns might have been shocked, if anybody gave a damn, but probably not. Cecilia and Lily had said the rosary aloud in the hospital room all night. Magdalene and Liane and Guy Mayfair had prayed in the chapel with the two Mayfair nuns in the family, the little tiny nuns whose names Mona always mixed up.

Old Sister Michael Marie Mayfair-the oldest of Mayfair Sisters of Mercy-had come down and prayed over Rowan, loudly, chanting Hail Marys and Our Fathers and Glory Bes.

“If that doesn’t wake her up,” said Randall, “nothing will. Go home and get her bedroom ready.”

Beatrice had done it, with a heavy contingent of helpers-Stephanie and Spruce Mayfair, and two young black policemen-reluctant as she was to leave Aaron there.

Now, back at First Street, enshrined beneath the satin-lined half tester and covered with ancient quilts and imported coverlets, Rowan Mayfair continued to breathe, unaided. It was already six p.m. and she was not dead.

An hour ago, they had commenced intravenous feeding-fluids, lipids. “It is not life support,” said Dr. Fleming. “It is nourishment. Otherwise, we would be technically starving her to death.”

Michael apparently hadn’t argued. But then there were so many people involved. When he called, he told Mona the room was full of nurses and doctors. He confirmed that the security men were all over, and on the gallery outside the window, and down in the street. People were wondering what was happening.

But the armed guards were not such an unfamiliar sight in a city like New Orleans in this day and age. Everybody hired them for parties, get-togethers. When you went to school for a nighttime function there they were at the gates. The drugstores had guards near the register. Just the way of this banana republic, Gifford had said once.

Mona had answered, “Yeah, so brilliant. Guys at minimum wage with loaded thirty-eights.”

However crude, these measures had been relentless and effective for the family.

No further assaults had been made on Mayfair women. All the women were gathered in at various houses. There was no group smaller than six or seven. There was no group without men.

A separate fleet of detectives brought in from Dallas combed the city of Houston, fanning out from the building, asking anyone and everyone if he or she had seen this tall black-haired man. They had made drawings of him, based on Aaron’s verbal description, which had come to him through the Talamasca.

They were also searching for Dr. Samuel Larkin. They could not understand why he had left the Pontchartrain Hotel without telling anyone-until they found the message at the desk which had been called up to his room.

“Meet Rowan. Come alone.”

The message had everyone worried. It was a cinch Rowan had not called Dr. Larkin. Rowan was already on a hospital gurney in St. Martinville by the time the call had come in.

Samuel Larkin had been last seen walking fast up St. Charles Avenue, towards Jackson. “You be careful now,” a cabdriver had said, begrudgingly perhaps because the doctor wouldn’t hire the taxi. What did it matter? It had definitely been Dr. Larkin. And by the time Gerald hit the pavement, there was no sign of him in sight.

In a way, Beatrice Mayfair had been the biggest nuisance and the biggest consolation the entire time. Beatrice was the one who kept insisting on normal procedures, who kept refusing to believe that anything “horrible” had really happened, that they should send for specialists and take more tests.

Beatrice had always taken that position. She was the one who went to call on poor crazy Deirdre and take her candy, which she could not eat, and silk negligees she never wore. She was the one who came three or four times a year to visit Ancient Evelyn, even during periods when Ancient Evelyn had not talked for six months.

“Well, sweetheart, it’s just the most dreadful shame they closed the Holmes lunch counter. Do you remember all the times we went down there to lunch at D. H. Holmes, you and me and Millie and Belle?”

And there she was at the house now fussing in the bedroom, most likely. And gone back up to Amelia Street to make sure everyone had something to eat. Good thing Michael liked Beatrice. But then everybody liked her. And the most amazing thing about her constant optimism was that she was clearly going to marry Aaron Lightner, and if anybody knew something horrible had happened it was Lightner, beyond doubt.

Aaron Lightner had taken one long look at Rowan and then walked out of the room. The expression on his face had been so wrathful, so dark. He had stared at Mona for a moment, and then he had gone off fast down the corridor to find a phone he could use in private, to call Dr. Larkin, and that is when they discovered that Dr. Larkin had left the suite.

What in the world did Beatrice and Aaron talk about with each other? She would say one minute, “Well, we ought to inject her with something, you know, to give her energy!” And all but clap her hands. And he would just stand there in the dim corridor, refusing to answer the questions put to him by the others, staring fixedly at Mona, and then at nothing, and then at Mona, and then at nothing, until the others simply started talking to one another and forgot he was there.

Nobody reported a strange fragrance in the rooms in Houston. But as soon as the first package had come, containing clothing and pillow slips, Mona had smelled the fragrance.

“Yeah, that’s it, that’s the smell of this being,” she had said. Randall had raised his eyebrows. “Well, I sure as hell don’t know what that’s got to do with it.”

Mona had defeated him cold by answering simply, “Neither do I.”

Two hours later he had wandered in and said, “You ought to go home and be with Ancient Evelyn.”

“There are seventeen different women in that house now, and six different men. What makes you think I ought to go there? I don’t want to be there now. I don’t want to see my mother’s stuff, and her things and all. I don’t want to. It’s illogical to go up there. It makes no sense for the daughter of the dead woman to go up there. Which I am. Why don’t you lie down and take a nap?”

One of the agencies had called directly after, but only to report that no one, absolutely no one, had seen the mysterious man leave the Houston building. Every single reported death in the entire Houston area was being investigated. None fitted the pattern of the deceased Mayfair women. Each had its own context, precluding the involvement of the mysterious man.

The net was huge; the net was fine-spun; the net was strong.

Then at five had come the first reports from the airlines. Yes, a person with long black flowing hair, beard and mustache had taken the three o’clock flight Ash Wednesday from New Orleans to Houston. First Class aisle seat. Exceptionally tall and soft-spoken. Beautiful manner, beautiful eyes.

Had he taken a taxi from the airport-a limo? A bus? Houston’s airport was enormous. But there were hundreds of people asking questions, proceeding quietly to one potential witness after another. “If he walked, we’ll find somebody who saw him.”

“What about planes from Houston to here? Last night? Yesterday?” Checking, checking, checking.

Finally Mona thought, I’m going up there. I’m going to go see my cousin Rowan Mayfair. I’m going to make my call. It made her choke up. She couldn’t speak or think for a minute. But she had to go.

It was now dark.

A fax had just come in, a copy of the boarding ticket issued to the mysterious man by the airlines when he had flown back to Houston on Ash Wednesday. He had used the name Samuel Newton. He had paid for the ticket with cash. Samuel Newton. If there was such a person in any public record anywhere in the continental United States, he would surely be found.

But then he might have made up the name on the spur of the moment. He had drunk milk on the plane, glass after glass of milk. They had had to go back to coach to get him more milk. Not much happens on a flight between New Orleans and Houston. It isn’t long enough. But they had given him his milk.

Mona stared at the computer screen.

“We do not have a clue as to the man’s whereabouts. But all the women are protected. If another death is discovered, it will be an old death.”

Then she hit the key to save and close the file. She waited as the tiny lights flashed. Then she hit the off button. The low drone of the fan died away.

She stood up, groping for a purse, on instinct, her hand always going back at such a moment right to where she had dropped the purse, though she herself did not know where that was.

She slipped the strap over her shoulder. Her feet hurt just a little in her mother’s smooth grown-up leather shoes. The suit wasn’t all that bad. The blouse was pretty. But the shoes? Forget it. That part of being a woman held not the slightest charm.

A little memory came back to her. She was drifting. Aunt Gifford was telling her about buying the first pair of heels. “They would only let us have French heels. We went to Maison Blanche. Ancient Evelyn and I. And I wanted the high high heels, but she said no.”

Pierce gave a start. He had been almost asleep when he saw her standing behind the desk.

“I’m going uptown,” she said.

“Not by yourself, you’re not. You’re not even riding down in the elevator alone.”

“I know that. There are guards everywhere. I’m riding the streetcar. I have to think.”

Naturally he came with her.

He had not rested for one hour since his mother’s funeral and certainly not before that. Poor handsome Pierce, standing desolate and anxious on the corner of Carondolet and Canal, amid the common crowd, waiting for a streetcar. He’d probably never ridden it in his life.

“You should have called Clancy before you left,” she said to him. “Clancy called earlier. Did they tell you?”

He nodded. “Clancy’s all right. She’s with Claire and Jenn. Jenn is crying. She wanted you to be with her.”

“I can’t do that now.” Jenn. Jenn was still a little kid. You couldn’t tell any of this to Jenn. And protecting Jenn would be too much hard work.

The streetcar was jammed with tourists. Very few of the real people at all. The tourists wore bright, neatly pressed clothes because the weather was still cool. When the humid summer came on, they would be as disheveled and half-naked as everyone else. Mona and Pierce sat quiet together on a wooden seat as the car screeched and roared through lower St. Charles Avenue, the small Manhattan-style canyon of office buildings, then around Lee Circle and on uptown.

It was almost magical what happened at the corner of Jackson and St. Charles. The oaks sprang up, huge, dark and hovering over the Avenue. The shabby stucco buildings fell away. The world of the columns and the magnolias began. The Garden District. You could almost feel the quiet surround you, press against you, lift you out of yourself.

Mona got off the car in front of Pierce and crossed quickly over to the river side, cut across Jackson and started up St. Charles. It was not so cold right now. Not here. It was mild and windless. The cicadas were singing. It seemed early in the year for them, but she was glad, she loved the sound. She had never figured out if there was a season for cicadas. Seems they sang at all different times of the year. Maybe every time it got warm enough, they woke up. She had loved them all her life. Couldn’t live in a place that didn’t purr like this now and then, she thought, walking back the broken pavements of First Street.

Pierce walked along saying nothing, looking vaguely astonished whenever she glanced at him, as though he were falling asleep on his feet.

As they reached Prytania they could see people outside the big house, see the cars parked. See the guards. Some of the guards wore khaki and were from a private agency. Others were off-duty New Orleans policemen in their customary blue.

Mona couldn’t stand the high heels any longer. She took them off and walked in her stocking feet.

“If you step on one of those big roaches, you’re going to hate it,” Pierce said.

“Boy, you’re sure right about that.”

“Oh, that’s your new technique, Mona. I heard you use it on Randall. Just flat-out agree. You’re going to catch cold in your bare feet. You’re going to tear your stockings.”

“Pierce, the roaches don’t come out this time of year. But what’s the point of my telling you this? Are you going to listen? You realize our mothers are dead, Pierce? Our mothers? Both dead. Have I said this to you before?”

“I don’t remember,” he said. “It’s hard to remember that they’re dead, as a matter of fact. I keep thinking, my mother will know what to do about all this, she’ll be here any minute. Did you know that my father was not faithful to my mother?”

“You’re crazy.”

“No, there was another woman. I saw him with her this morning, down in the coffee shop in the building. He was holding her hand. She’s a Mayfair. Her name’s Clemence. He kissed her.”

“She’s a worried cousin. She works in the building. I used to see her all the time down there at lunch.”

“No, she’s a woman for my father. I’ll bet my mother knew all about it. I hope she didn’t care.”

“I’m not going to believe that about Uncle Ryan,” said Mona, instantly realizing that she did believe it. She did. Uncle Ryan was such a handsome man, so accomplished, so successful, and he’d been married so long to Gifford.

Best not to think of those things. Gifford in the vault, cleanly dead and buried before the slaughter. Mourned while there was still time to mourn. Of Alicia, what could you say, “Would she had died hereafter”? Mona realized she didn’t even know where her mother’s body had been taken. Was it at the hospital? At the morgue? She didn’t want to think it was in the morgue. Well, she can sleep now forever. Passed out for all time. Mona started to choke up again, and swallowed hard.

They crossed Chestnut Street, pushing through the small informal gathering of guards and cousins-Eulalee, and Tony, and Betsy Mayfair. Garvey Mayfair on the porch with Danny and Jim. Several voices rose at once to tell the guards that Mona and Pierce could come in.

Guards in the hallway. Guard in the double parlor. A guard in the door to the dining room, a dark hulking figure, with broad hips.

And only that faint old lingering smell. Nothing fresh, nothing new. Just faint, the way it had clung to the clothing from Houston. The way it had clung to Rowan when they brought her in.

Guards at the top of the stairs. Guard at the bedroom door. Guard inside at the long window to the gallery. Nurse in slick cheap nylon white with her arms raised, adjusting the IV. Rowan under the lace coverlet, small insignificant expressionless face against the big ruffled pillow. Michael sitting there, smoking a cigarette.

“There isn’t any oxygen in here, is there?”

“No, dear, they got on my case already about that.” He took another drag defiantly, and then crushed it out in the glass ashtray on the bedside table. His voice was beautifully low and soft, rubbed smooth by the tragedy.

In the corner opposite sat young Magdalene Mayfair, and old Aunt Lily, both very still in straight-backed chairs. Magdalene was saying her rosary, and the amber beads glinted just a little as she slipped one bead more through her hand. Lily’s eyes were closed.

Others in the shadows. The beam of the bedside lamp fell directly on the face of Rowan Mayfair. As if it were a keylight for a camera. The unconscious woman seemed smaller than a small child. Urchin or angelic. Her hair was all swept back.

Mona tried to find the old expression in her, the stamp of her personality. All gone.

“I was playing music,” Michael said, speaking in the same low thoughtful voice as before. He looked up at Mona. “I was playing the Victrola. Julien’s Victrola. And then the nurse said, perhaps she didn’t like that sound. It’s scratchy, it’s…special. You would have to like it, wouldn’t you?”

“The nurse probably didn’t like it,” said Mona. “You want me to put on a record? If you want, I can get your radio from the library downstairs. I saw it, yesterday, in there, by your chair.”

“No, that’s all right. Can you come here and sit for a little while? I’m glad to see you. You know I saw Julien.”

Pierce stiffened. In the corner, another Mayfair, was his name Hamilton, glanced suddenly at Michael and then away. Lily’s eyes opened and veered to the left to fix upon Michael. Magdalene went on with her rosary, eyes taking in all of them slowly, and then returning to Michael as he went on.

It was as if Michael had forgotten they were there. Or he didn’t give a damn anymore.

“I saw him,” he said in a raw ragged whisper, “and ah…he told me so many things. But he didn’t tell me this would happen. He didn’t tell me she was coming home.”

Mona took the small velvet chair beside him, facing the bed.

She said in a low voice, resenting the others, “Julien probably didn’t know.”

“Do you mean, Oncle Julien?” asked Pierce in a small timid whisper from across the room. Hamilton Mayfair turned and looked directly at Michael as though this was the most fascinating thing in the world.

“Hamilton, what are you doing here?” asked Mona.

“We’re all taking turns,” said Magdalene in a little whisper. Then Hamilton said, “We just want to be here.”

There was something decorous about all of them, yet despairing. Hamilton must have been about twenty-five now. He was good-looking, not beautiful and sparkling like Pierce, but very handsome in his own too narrow way. She couldn’t remember the last time she had spoken to him. He looked directly at her as he rested his back against the mantel.

“All the cousins are here,” he said.

Michael looked at her as if he hadn’t heard these others speaking. “What do you mean,” asked Michael, “that Julien didn’t know? He must have known.”

“It’s not like that, Michael,” she said, trying to keep it a whisper. “There’s an old Irish saying, ‘a ghost knows his own business.’ Besides, it wasn’t really him, you know. When the dead come, they aren’t there.”

“Oh no,” said Michael in a small, weary but very sincere voice. “It was Julien. He was there. We talked together for hours.”

“No, Michael. It’s like the record. You put the needle in the groove and she sings. But she’s not in the room.”

“No, he was there,” Michael said softly, though not argumentatively. He reached over almost absently and picked up Rowan’s hand. Rowan’s arm resisted him slightly, the hand wanted to be close to the body. He gripped it gently and then he leaned over and kissed it.

Mona wanted to kiss him, to touch him, to say something, to apologize, to confess, to say she was sorry, to say don’t worry, but she couldn’t think of the right words. She had a deep terrible fear that he hadn’t seen Oncle Julien, that he was simply losing his mind. She thought about the Victrola, about the moment when she and Ancient Evelyn had sat on the library floor with the Victrola between them, and Mona had wanted to crank it, and Ancient Evelyn said, “We cannot play music while Gifford is waiting. We cannot play radios or pianos while Gifford is laid out.”

“What did Oncle Julien actually tell you?” asked Pierce, in his baffled innocent fashion. Not making fun. Truly wanting to know what Michael would say.

“Don’t worry,” said Michael. “There’ll be a time. Soon, I think. And I’ll know what to do.”

“You sound so sure of yourself,” said Hamilton Mayfair in a low voice. “I wish I had an inkling of what was going on.”

“Forget about it,” said Mona.

“Now we should all be quiet,” said the nurse. “Remember Dr. Mayfair might be listening.” She nodded vigorously to them, a silent signal that they must pay attention. “You don’t want to say anything…disruptive, you know.”

The other nurse sat at a small mahogany table, writing, her white stockings stretched tight over her chubby legs.

“You hungry, Michael?” asked Pierce.

“No, son. Thank you.”

“I am,” said Mona. “We’ll be back. We’re going downstairs to get something to eat.”

“You will come back, won’t you?” asked Michael. “Lord, you must be so tired, Mona. Mona, I’m sorry about your mother. I didn’t know until afterwards.”

“That’s OK,” said Mona. She wanted to kiss him. She wanted to say I stayed away all day because of what we did. I couldn’t bring myself to come under her roof with her like this and me doing it with you, and I wouldn’t have done it with you if I’d known she was coming home so soon and like this. I thought…I thought…

“I know, baby doll,” he said, smiling at her brightly. “She doesn’t care about that now. It’s OK.”

Mona nodded, threw him her own secret passing smile.

Just before she went out the door, Michael lit another cigarette. Snap, flash, and both the nurses turned and glared at him.

“Shut up,” said Hamilton Mayfair.

“Let him smoke!” said Magdalene.

The nurses looked at each other, obdurate, cold. Why don’t we get some other nurses? thought Mona.

“Yes,” said Magdalene softly, “we’ll see to that right away.”

Right on, thought Mona. She went out with Pierce and down the steps.

In the dining room sat a very elderly priest who must have been Timothy Mayfair from Washington. Clean and old-fashioned in his unmistakable suit, black shirtfront and gleaming white Roman collar. As Mona and Pierce passed, the elderly priest said in a loud echoing whisper to the woman next to him:

“You realize when she dies…there won’t be a storm! For the first time, there won’t be a storm.”