Lasher

Two

THE HOUSE WAS all dark now. The cars were gone, and only one light burned in Michael Curry’s window, in the old room where Cousin Deirdre had died. Mona understood exactly what had happened tonight and had to admit she was glad. She had almost planned it, almost…

She’d told her father she would go back to Metairie with Uncle Ryan and Cousin Jenn and Clancy, but then she hadn’t told Uncle Ryan. And Uncle Ryan was long gone, assuming as everyone would that Mona had gone home to Amelia Street with her father, which of course she had not.

She’d been in the cemetery losing her bet that David wouldn’t do it with her, right there on Mardi Gras Night in front of the Mayfair tomb. David had done it. Not so very great, actually, but for a fifteen-year-old not bad. And Mona had loved it-sneaking away with him, his fear and her excitement, their climbing the whitewashed wall of the cemetery together and creeping through the alleyways of high marble tombs. To lie right down on the gravel path in the dampness and cold, that had been no small part of the dare, but she’d done it, smoothing her skirt under her, so that she could pull down her panties without getting dirty. “Now do it!” she’d said to David, who hadn’t needed any more encouragement, or direct orders, by that time at all. She’d stared past him at the cold cloudy sky, at a single visible star, and then let her eyes move up the wall of little rectangular tombstones to the name: Deirdre Mayfair.

Then David had finished. Just like that.

“You’re not afraid of anything,” he had said after.

“Like I’m supposed to be afraid of you?” She’d sat up, cheated, having not even pretended to enjoy it, overheated and really not much liking her cousin David, but still satisfied that it had been done.

Mission accomplished, she would write in her computer later, in the secret directory \WS\MONA\AGENDA, where she deposited all her confessions of the triumphs she could not share with anyone in the world. No one could crack her computer system, not even Uncle Ryan or Cousin Pierce, each of whom she had caught, at various times, firing up her system, and searching through various directories-“Some setup, Mona.” All it was, was the fastest 386 IBM clone on the market, with max memory and max hard drive. Ah, what people didn’t know about computers. It always amazed Mona. She herself learned more about them every day.

Yes, this was a moment that only the computer would witness. Maybe they would start to be a regular occurrence now that her father and mother were truly drinking themselves to death. And there were so many Mayfairs to be conquered. In fact, her agenda did not even include non-Mayfairs at this point, except, of course, for Michael Curry, but he was a Mayfair now, most definitely. The whole family had him in its grip.

Michael Curry in that house alone. Take stock. It was Mardi Gras Night, ten p.m., three hours after Comus, and Mona Mayfair was on her own, and on the corner of First and Chestnut, light as a ghost, looking at the house, with the whole soft dark night to do as she pleased.

Her father was surely passed out by now; in fact somebody had probably driven him home. If he’d walked the thirteen blocks up to Amelia and St. Charles, that was a miracle. He’d been so drunk before Comus even passed that he’d sat right down on the neutral ground on St. Charles, knees up, hands on a naked bottle of Southern Comfort, drinking right in front of Uncle Ryan and Aunt Bea and whoever else cared to look at him, and telling Mona in no uncertain terms to leave him alone.

Fine with Mona. Michael Curry had picked her up just like she weighed nothing and put her on his shoulders for the entire parade. How good it had felt to be riding that strong man, with one hand in his soft curly black hair. She’d loved the feeling of his face against her thighs, and she’d hugged him just a little, much as she dared, and let her left hand rest against his cheek.

Some man, Michael Curry. And her father much too drunk to notice anything that she did.

As for Mona’s mother, she’d passed out Mardi Gras afternoon. If she ever woke up to see Comus pass St. Charles and Amelia, that was a miracle too. Ancient Evelyn was there of course, her usual silent self, but she was awake. She knew what went on. If Alicia set the bed on fire, Ancient Evelyn could call for help. And you really couldn’t leave Alicia alone anymore.

The point was, everything was covered. Even Michael’s Aunt Vivian was not at home at First Street. She’d gone uptown for the night with Aunt Cecilia. Mona had seen them leave right after the parade. And Aaron Lightner, that mysterious scholar, he’d taken off with Aunt Bea. Mona had heard them planning it. Her car? His? It made Mona happy to think of Beatrice Mayfair and Aaron Lightner together. Aaron Lightner sloughed off ten years when he was around Beatrice, and she was that kind of gray-haired woman who can make men look at her anywhere and everywhere she goes. If she went into Walgreen’s, the men came out of the stock room to help her. Or some gentleman asked her opinion on a good dandruff shampoo. It was almost a joke, the way Aunt Bea attracted men, but Aaron Lightner was a man she wanted, and that was new.

If that old maid, Eugenia, was there, that was OK because she was tucked away in the farthest back bedroom and they said, once she drank her nightly glass of port, nothing could wake her up.

Nobody in that house-practically speaking-but her man. And now that Mona knew the history of the Mayfair Witches-now that she had finally got her hands on Aaron Lightner’s long document-there was no keeping her out of First Street any longer. Of course she had her questions about what she’d read; thirteen witches descended from a Scottish village called Donnelaith where the first, a poor cunning woman, had been burnt at the stake in 1659. It was just the kind of juicy history you dreamed about having. Well, she did anyway.

But there had been things in that long family tale that had special meaning for her, and the long account of Oncle Julien’s life had been the most intriguing part of all.

Even Mona’s very own Aunt Gifford was far away from New Orleans tonight, in her house in Destin, Florida, hiding from everyone and everything, and worrying about the entire clan. Gifford had begged the family not to go up to the house for Mardi Gras. Poor Aunt Gifford. She had banned the Talamasca History of the Mayfair Witches from her house and from her consciousness. “I don’t believe those things!”

Aunt Gifford lived and breathed fear. She shut her ears to the tales of the old days. Poor Aunt Gifford could be around her grandmother, Ancient Evelyn, only now because Ancient Evelyn said almost nothing anymore. Aunt Gifford didn’t even like to say that she was Julien’s granddaughter.

Sometimes Mona felt so deeply and hopelessly sad for Aunt Gifford, she almost burst into tears. Aunt Gifford seemed to suffer for the whole family, and no one was more distraught over Rowan Mayfair’s disappearance than Gifford. Not even Ryan. Aunt Gifford was at heart a tender and loving soul, and there was no one better when you needed to talk the practical things of life-clothes for a school dance; whether or not to shave one’s legs yet; which perfume was best for a girl of thirteen? (Laura Ashley No. 1.) And these were the dumb things Mona actually did not know, half the time.

Well, what was Mona going to do now that she was out on Mardi Gras Night, free, and nobody knew it, or might ever know it? Of course she knew. She was ready. First Street was hers! It was as if the great dark house with its white columns were whispering to her, saying, Mona, Mona, Come in. This is where Oncle Julien lived and died. This is the house of the witches, and you are a witch, Mona, as surely as any of them! You belong here.

Maybe it was Oncle Julien himself speaking to her. No, just a fancy. With an imagination like Mona’s you could make yourself see and hear whatever you liked.

But who knew? Once she got inside, maybe she’d actually see the ghost of Oncle Julien! Ah, that would be absolutely wonderful. Especially if it was the same debonair and playful Oncle Julien about whom she incessantly dreamed.

She walked across the intersection under the heavy dark roof of the oak branches, and quickly climbed the old wrought-iron fence. She came down heavily in the thick shrubbery and elephant ears, feeling the cold and the wet foliage against her face and not liking it. Pushing her pink skirt down, she tiptoed out of the dampish earth and onto the flagstone path.

Lamps burned dim on either side of the big keyhole doorway. The porch lay in darkness, its rocking chairs barely visible, painted black as they were to match the shutters. The garden seemed to gather round and press in.

The house itself looked to her as it always had, beautiful, mysterious, and inviting, though she had to admit in her heart of hearts she had liked it better when it was a spidery ruin, before Michael came with his hammer and nails. She had liked it when Aunt Deirdre sat forever on the side porch in a rocker, and the vines threatened to swallow the whole place.

Of course Michael saved it, but oh, if only she’d gotten into it once while it was still ruined. She’d known all about that body they found in the attic. She’d heard her mother and Aunt Gifford arguing about it for years and years. Mona’s mother had been only thirteen when Mona was born, and Gifford had been there from the time of Mona’s earliest memories.

In fact there had actually been a time when Mona wasn’t sure which one was her mother-Gifford or Alicia. And then there had been Ancient Evelyn always holding Mona on her lap, and even though Ancient Evelyn wouldn’t talk very much she still sang those old melancholy songs. Gifford had seemed the logical choice for a mother, because Alicia by that time was already a prodigious drunk, but Mona had it right and had for years. Mona was the woman of the house at Amelia Street.

They’d talked a lot in those days about that body upstairs. They’d talked about Cousin Deirdre, the heiress, who wasted away in her catatonia. They’d talked about all the mysteries of First Street.

The first time Mona had ever come into First Street-right before Rowan’s marriage to Michael-she had fancied she could smell that body still. She’d wanted to go up and lay her hands on the spot. Michael Curry had been restoring the house, and workmen were up there painting away. Aunt Gifford had said for Mona to “Stay put!” and given her a stern look every time Mona tried to wander.

It had been a miracle to watch Michael Curry’s work. Mona dreamed such a thing would someday happen to the house on St. Charles and Amelia.

Well, Mona would get to that third-floor room now. And thanks to the history she knew who the dead man had been, a young investigator from the Talamasca called Stuart Townsend. Still wasn’t clear who had poisoned the man. But Mona’s bet was it had been her Uncle Cortland, who really wasn’t her uncle at all, but actually her great-great-grandfather, which was really one of the most fun puzzles in the family history to figure out.

Smells. She wanted to investigate that other smell-the scent that lingered in the hallway and the living room of First Street. Nothing to do with a dead body, that one. The smell that had come with disaster at Christmas. The smell which no one else could smell, it seemed, unless Aunt Gifford had been lying when Mona asked her.

Aunt Gifford did that. She wouldn’t admit to “seeing things” or picking up strange scents. “I don’t smell anything!” she’d said with annoyance. Well, maybe that was true. Mayfairs could read other people’s minds a lot of the time, but they were good at blocking out each other.

Mona wanted to touch everything. She wanted to look for the Victrola. She did not care about the pearls. She wanted the Victrola. And she wanted to know THE BIG FAMILY SECRET-what had happened to Rowan Mayfair on Christmas Day. Why had Rowan left her new husband, Michael? And why had they found him drowned in the ice-cold swimming pool? Just nearly dead. Everybody had thought he was going to die after that, except Mona.

Of course Mona could conjecture what happened like everyone else. But she wanted more than that. She wanted the Michael Curry version. And to date, there was no such version. If he’d told anyone what happened on Christmas Day, it was his friend Aaron Lightner, from the Talamasca, who would not tell anyone else. But people felt too sorry for Michael to press it. They’d thought he was going to die from what happened to him.

Mona had managed to get into his room in Intensive Care on Christmas Night and hold his hand. He wasn’t going to die. There was hurt to his heart, yes, because he’d stopped breathing for a long time in the cold water, and he had to rest to heal that hurt, but he was nowhere near dying, she knew that as soon as she felt his pulse. And touching him had been rather like touching a Mayfair. He had something extra to him which Mayfairs always had. He could see ghosts, she knew. The History of the Mayfair Witches had not included him and Rowan, but she knew. She wondered if he’d tell the truth about it. Fact, she’d even heard some maddening whispers to the effect that he had.

Oh, so much to learn, so much to uncover. And being thirteen was kind of like a bad joke on her. She was no more thirteen than Joan of Arc had ever been thirteen, the way she saw it. Or Catherine of Siena. Of course they were saints but only by a hair. They were almost witches.

And what about the Children’s Crusade? If Mona had been there, they would have gotten back the Holy Land, she figured. What if she started a nationwide revolt of genius thirteen-year-olds right now-demand for the power to vote based on intelligence, a driver’s license as soon as you could qualify and see over the dashboard. Well, a lot of this would have to wait.

The point was, she’d known tonight as they walked back from the Comus parade that Michael was quite strong enough to go to bed with her, if only she could get him to do it, which was not going to be an easy thing.

Men Michael’s age had the best combination of conscience and self-control. An old man, like her Great-uncle Randall, that had been easy, and young boys, like her cousin David, were nothing at all.

But a thirteen-year-old going after Michael Curry? It was like scaling Everest, Mona thought with a smile. I’m going to do it if it kills me. And maybe then, when she had him, she’d know what he knew about Rowan, why Rowan and he had fought on Christmas Day, and why Rowan had disappeared. After all, this wasn’t really a betrayal of Rowan. Rowan had gone off with someone, that was almost for sure, and everybody in the family, whether they would talk about it or not, was terrified for Rowan.

It wasn’t like Rowan was dead; it was like she’d gone off and left the barn door open. And here was Mona coming along, mad for Michael Curry, this big woolly mammoth of a man.

Mona stared up at the huge keyhole doorway for one moment, thinking of all the pictures she’d seen of family members in that doorway, over the years. Great-oncle Julien’s portrait still hung at Amelia Street, though Mona’s mother had to take it down every time Aunt Gifford came, even though it was a dreadful insult to Ancient Evelyn. Ancient Evelyn rarely said a word-only drawn out of her reverie by her terrible worry for Mona and Mona’s mother, that Alicia was really dying finally from the drink, and Patrick was so far gone he didn’t know for sure who he even was.

Staring at the keyhole doorway, Mona felt almost as if she could see Oncle Julien now with his white hair and blue eyes. And to think he had once danced up there with Ancient Evelyn. The Talamasca hadn’t known about that. The history had passed over Ancient Evelyn and her granddaughters Gifford and Alicia, and Alicia’s only child, Mona.

But this was a game she was playing, making visions. Oncle Julien wasn’t in the door. Had to be careful. Those visions were not the real thing. But the real thing was coming.

Mona walked along the flagstone path to the side of the house, and then back to the flags, past the side porch where Aunt Deirdre had sat in her rocker for so many years. Poor Aunt Deirdre. Mona had seen her from the fence many a time, but she’d never managed to get inside the gate. And now to know the awful story of the way they’d drugged her.

The porch was all clean and pretty these days, with no screen on it anymore, though Uncle Michael had put back Deirdre’s rocking chair and did use it, as if he had become as crazy as she had been, sitting there for hours in the cold. The windows to the living room were hung with lace curtains and fancy silk drapes. Ah, such riches.

And here, where the path turned and widened, this was where Aunt Antha had fallen and died, years and years ago, as doomed a witch as her daughter, Deirdre, would become, Antha’s skull broken and blood flowing out of her head and her heart.

No one was here now to stop Mona from dropping down to her knees and laying her hands on the very stones. For one flashing instant, she thought she saw Antha, a girl of eighteen, with big dead eyes, and an emerald necklace tangled with blood and hair.

But again, this was making pictures. You couldn’t be sure they were any more than imagination, especially when you’d heard the stories all your life as Mona had, and dreamed so many strange dreams. Gifford sobbing at the kitchen table at Amelia Street. “That house is evil, evil, I tell you. Don’t let Mona go up there.”

“Oh, nonsense, Gifford, she wants to be the flower girl in Rowan Mayfair’s wedding. It’s an honor.”

It certainly had been an honor. The greatest family wedding ever. And Mona had loved it. If it hadn’t been for Aunt Gifford watching her, Mona would have made a sneaky search of the whole First Street house that very afternoon, while everyone else swilled champagne and talked about the wholesome side of things, and speculated about Mr. Lightner, who had not yet revealed his history to them.

But Mona would not have been in the wedding at all if Ancient Evelyn had not risen from her chair to overrule Gifford. “Let the child walk up the aisle,” she had said in her dry whisper. She was ninety-one years old now. And the great virtue of almost never speaking was that when Ancient Evelyn did, everybody stopped to listen. If she wasn’t mumbling, that is.

There were times when Mona hated Aunt Gifford for her fears and her worry, the constant look of dread on her face. But nobody could really hate Aunt Gifford. She was too good to everybody around her, especially to her sister, Alicia, Mona’s mother, whom everyone regarded as hopeless now that she’d been hospitalized three times for her drinking and it hadn’t done any good. And every Sunday without fail, Gifford came to Amelia Street, to clean up a bit, sweep the walk, and sit with Ancient Evelyn. She brought dresses for Mona, who hated to go shopping.

“You know you ought to dress more like a teenager these days,” Gifford had volunteered only a few weeks ago.

“I like my little-girl dresses, thanks,” said Mona, “they’re my disguise. Besides if you ask me, most teenagers look tacky. I wouldn’t mind looking corporate, but I’m a bit short for that.”

“Well, your bra cup is giving you away! It’s hard to find you sweet cotton frocks with enough room in them, you know.”

“One minute you want me to grow up; the next minute you want me to behave. What am I to you, a little girl or a sociological problem? I don’t like to conform. Aunt Gif, did it ever occur to you that conformity can be destructive? Take a look at men today on the news. Never in history have all the men in a nation’s capital dressed exactly alike. Ties, shirts, coats of gray. It’s appalling.”

“Responsibility, that’s what I’m talking about. To dress your age and behave your age. You don’t do either, and we’re talking about two contrary directions of course. The Whore of Babylon with a ribbon in her hair just isn’t your garden-variety teenage experience.”

Then Gifford had stopped, shocked that she’d said that word, whore, her cheeks flaming, and her hands clasped, her bobbed black hair falling down around her face. “Oh, Mona, darling, I love you.”

“I know that, Aunt Gif, but please for the love of God and all we hold sacred, never refer to me as garden-variety anything, ever again!”

Mona knelt on the flagstones for a long time, until the cold started to bother her knees.

“Poor Antha,” Mona whispered. She stood up, and once again smoothed her pink dress. She brushed her hair back off her shoulders, and made sure that her satin bow was still properly pinned to the back of her head. Uncle Michael loved her satin bow, he had told her that.

“As long as Mona has her bow,” he’d said this evening, on the way to see Comus, “everything is going to be all right.”

“I turned thirteen in November,” she’d told him in a whisper, drawing near to hold his hand. “They’re telling me to turn in my ribbon.”

“You? Thirteen?” His eyes had moved over her, lingering just for a split second on her breasts, and then he had actually blushed. “Well, Mona, I didn’t realize. But no, don’t you dare stop wearing that ribbon. I see that red hair and the ribbon in my dreams.”

Of course he meant all this poetically and playfully. He was an innocent and wholesome man, just really nice. Anyone could see that. But then again, there had been a bit of blush to his cheeks, hadn’t there? After all, there were some men his age who did see a thirteen-year-old with large breasts as just one species of uninteresting baby, but Michael didn’t happen to be one of those.

Well, she’d think a little bit more about strategy when she got inside the house, and close to him. For now, she wanted to walk around the pool. She went up the steps and out along the broad flagstone terrace. The lights were on beneath the surface of the water, making it a shining blue, and a faint bit of steam rose from the surface, though why it was heated, Mona didn’t know. Michael wouldn’t swim in it ever again. He’d said so. Well, Come St. Patrick’s Day, whatever the temperature, there would probably be a hundred Mayfair kids in there. So best to leave the heat on.

She followed the terrace to the far end, near the cabana, where they’d found the blood in the snow, which meant that a fight had taken place. All clean now and swept, with only a little sprinkling of leaves. The garden was still down a bit from the snows of this mad winter, so unusual for New Orleans, but due to the warmth of the last week, the four-o’clocks had come back and she could smell them, and see their tiny little blooms in the dark. Hard to imagine all this covered with snow and blood, and Michael Curry floating under the surface of the water, face bleeding and bruised, heart stopped.

Then another scent caught her-that same strange smell she’d picked up earlier in the hallway of the house and in the front parlor where the Chinese rug used to be. It was faint but it was here all right. When she drew near the balustrade she smelled it. All mingled with the cold four-o’clocks. A very seductive smell. Sort of, well, delicious, she thought. Like caramel or butterscotch could be delicious, only it wasn’t a food smell.

A little rage kindled in her suddenly for whoever had hurt Michael Curry. She’d liked him from the moment she laid eyes on him. She’d liked Rowan Mayfair too. She’d longed for moments alone with them to ask them things and tell them things, and especially to ask them to give her the Victrola, if they could find it. But those opportunities had never come.

She knelt down on the flags now as she had done before. She touched the cold stone that hurt her bare knees. The smell was here all right. But she saw nothing. She looked up at the dark servants’ porch of the main house. Not a light anywhere. Then she looked beyond the iron fence to the carriage house behind Deirdre’s oak.

One light. That meant Henri was still awake. Well, what about it? She could handle Henri. She had figured out tonight at the supper after Comus that Henri was already scared of this house, and didn’t like working in it, and probably wouldn’t stay long. He couldn’t quite figure how to make Michael happy, Michael who kept saying, “I’m what’s called a high prole, Henri. If you fix red beans and rice, I’ll be fine.”

A high prole. Mona had gone up to Uncle Michael after supper, just as he was trying to get away from everyone and take his nightly constitutional, as he called it, and said, “What the hell is a high prole, Uncle Michael?”

“Such language,” he’d whispered with mock surprise. Then before he could stop himself, he’d stroked the ribbon in her hair.

“Oh, sorry,” she’d said, “but for an uptown girl, it’s sort of, you know, de rigueur to have a large vocabulary.”

He’d laughed, a little fascinated maybe. “A high prole is a person who doesn’t have to worry about making the middle class happy,” he said. “Would an uptown girl understand that?”

“Sure would. It’s extremely logical, what you’re saying, and I want you to know I loathe conformity in any form.”

Again his gentle beguiling laughter.

“How did you get to be a high prole?” She’d pushed it. “Where do I go to sign on?”

“You can’t sign on, Mona,” he’d answered. “A high prole is born a prole. He is a fire fighter’s son who has made plenty of money. A high prole can mow his own grass any time he likes. He can wash his own car. Or he can drive a van when everybody keeps telling him he ought to drive a Mercedes. A high prole is a free man.” What a smile he had given her. Of course he was laughing at himself a little, in a weary sort of way. But he liked to look at her, that she could see. Yes, indeed, he did like to look at her. Only some weariness and some sense of propriety held him in check.

“Sounds good to me,” she’d said. “Do you take off your shirt when you mow the grass?”

“How old are you, Mona?” he’d asked her playfully, cocking his head to one side. But the eyes were completely innocent.

“I told you, thirteen,” she’d answered. She’d stood on tiptoe and kissed him quickly on the cheek, and there had come that blush again. Yes, he saw her, saw her breasts and the contour of her waist and hips under the loose pink cotton dress. Yet he’d seemed moved by her show of affection, an emotion quite entirely separate. His eyes had glassed over for a minute, and then he’d said he had to go walk outside. He’d said something about Mardi Gras Night, about passing this house once when he’d been a boy, on Mardi Gras Night, when they’d been on their way to see Comus.

No, nothing really wrong with his heart now at all, except that the doctors kept scaring him, and giving him much too much medicine, though he did now and then have those little pains, he’d told Ryan, which reminded him of what he could and couldn’t do. Well, Mona would find out what he could or couldn’t do.

She stood by the pool for a long moment, thinking of all the bits and pieces of the story-Rowan run off, some kind of miscarriage in the front hall, blood everywhere, and Michael bruised and knocked unconscious in the pool. Could the miscarriage account for the smell? She’d asked Pierce earlier if he could smell it. No. She’d asked Bea. No. She’d asked Ryan. Of course not. Stop going around looking for mysterious things! She thought of Aunt Gifford’s drawn face as she stood in the hospital corridor on Christmas Night, when they’d thought Michael was dying, and the way she had looked at Uncle Ryan.

“You know what’s happened!” she had said.

“That’s superstition and madness,” Ryan had answered. “I won’t listen to it. I won’t let you speak of it in front of the children.”

“I don’t want to talk about it in front of the children,” Aunt Gifford had said, her jaw trembling. “I don’t want the children to know! Keep them away from that house, I’m begging you. I’ve been begging you all along.”

“Like it’s my fault!” Uncle Ryan had whispered. Poor Uncle Ryan, the family lawyer, the family protector. Now that was a fine example of what conformity could do to one, because Uncle Ryan was in every respect a super-looking male animal, of the basically heroic type, with square jaw, and blue eyes, and good strong shoulders and a flat belly and a musician’s hands. But you never noticed it. All you saw when you looked at Uncle Ryan was his suit, and his oxford-cloth shirt, and the shine on his Church’s shoes. Every male at Mayfair and Mayfair dressed in exactly this fashion. It’s a wonder the women didn’t, that they had evolved a style which included pearls and pastel colors, and heels of varying height. Real wingdings, thought Mona. When she was a multimillionaire mogul, she would cut her own style.

But during that argument in the hallway, Uncle Ryan had showed how desperate he was, and how worried for Michael Curry; he hadn’t meant to hurt Aunt Gifford. He never did.

Then Aunt Bea had come and quieted them both. Mona would have told Aunt Gifford then and there that Michael Curry wasn’t going to die, but if she had she would have frightened Gifford all the more. You couldn’t talk to Aunt Gifford about anything.

And now that Mona’s mother was pretty much drunk all the time, you couldn’t talk to her either, and Ancient Evelyn often did not answer at all when Mona spoke to her. Of course when she did, her mind was all there. “Mentation perfect,” said her doctor.

Mona would never forget the time she’d asked to visit the house when it was still ruined and dirty, when Deirdre sat in her rocker. “I had a dream last night,” she’d explained to her mother and to Aunt Gifford. “Oncle Julien was in it, and he told me to climb the fence, whether Aunt Carlotta was there or not, and to sit in Deirdre’s lap.”

This was all true. Aunt Gifford had gotten hysterical. “Don’t you ever go near Cousin Deirdre.” And Alicia had laughed and laughed and laughed. Ancient Evelyn had merely watched them.

“Ever see anybody with your Aunt Deirdre when you pass there?” Alicia had asked.

“CeeCee, how could you!” Gifford had demanded.

“Only that young man who’s always with her.”

That had put Aunt Gifford over the edge. After that Mona was technically sworn to stay away from First and Chestnut, to never set eyes on the house again. Of course she didn’t pay much attention. She walked by whenever she could. Two of her friends from Sacred Heart lived pretty close to First and Chestnut. Sometimes she went home with them after school, just to have the excuse. They loved to have her help with their homework, and she was glad to do it. And they told her things about the house.

“The man’s a ghost,” her mother had whispered to her right in front of Gifford. “Don’t ever tell the others that you’ve seen him. But you can tell me. What did he look like?” And then Alicia had gone into shrieking laughter again until Gifford had actually begun to cry. Ancient Evelyn had said nothing, but she’d been listening to all of this. You could tell when she listened by the alert look in her small blue eyes. What in God’s name did she think of her two granddaughters?

Gifford had taken Mona aside later, as they walked to Gifford’s car (Jaguar sedan, very Gifford, very Metairie). “Please believe me when I tell you to stay away from there,” she’d said. “Nothing but evil comes out of that house.”

Mona had tried to promise. But it hadn’t interested her much at all; indeed, the die was cast for her. She had to know all about that place even then. And now, after the quarrel of Rowan and Michael, it was top priority: get inside and find out.

Finding the Talamasca document on Ryan’s desk downtown had only tripled her curiosity. The File on the Mayfair Witches. She’d scooped it up and hurried out to a lunch counter to read the whole thing, there had been no stopping her, before anybody caught on to what she’d done. Donnelaith, Scotland. Didn’t the family own property there still? Oh, what a history. The details about Antha and Deirdre of course were the real scandal. And it was perfectly clear to her that this document, in its original form, had gone on to include Michael and Rowan Mayfair. But it didn’t anymore.

Aaron Lightner had broken off “the narrative,” as he referred to it in those pages, before the birth of “the present designee.” This was not to violate the privacy of the living, though the Order feels that the family has every right to know its history, insofar as such a history is known by anyone and recorded anywhere.

Hmmmm. These Talamasca people were amazing. “And Aunt Bea is about to marry one of them,” thought Mona. That was like hearing that a juicy big fly had just been snared in one’s sticky web.

That Rowan Mayfair had slipped through Mona’s clutches, that Mona had never had five minutes alone with Rowan, that was a tragedy to be filed under \WS\MONA\DEFEAT.

But Mona had caught the very strong impression that Rowan was afraid of whatever power she had, just as the others were afraid.

Well, these powers didn’t scare Mona. More and more Mona felt like a dancer just coming into a time of perfect strength. So she was only five feet one inch tall, and not likely to grow much taller. Her body was maturing with every passing day.

She liked being strong and unusual. She liked reading people’s thoughts and seeing things that other people couldn’t see. The fact that the man she’d seen was a ghost thrilled her. And she hadn’t really been surprised to hear it. If only she had gotten into the house in those days.

Well, those days were gone, weren’t they? And now was now. And now was really quite terrific. The disappearance of Rowan Mayfair had stirred up the family; people were revealing things. And here was this great house, empty except for Michael Curry, and for her.

The smell by the pool had dissipated somewhat, or she’d gotten used to it. But it was still there.

And the moment was all hers.

She proceeded to the back screen porch and checked one by one the locks of the many kitchen doors. If only one door had been forgotten…but no, that stiff-necked Henri had locked up the place like a fort. Well, no problem. Mona knew how to get in this house.

She crept around to the very back of the house, to the end of the old kitchen, which was now a bathroom, and she looked up at the bathroom window. Who would lock a window that high? And how would she get to it? Pull up one of the big plastic garbage cans which weighed almost nothing at all. She went down the alley, caught the can by its handle, and what do you know, it rolled. How efficient! And then she climbed on top of it, knees first, then feet crushing down the flexible black plastic lid, and she pried open the green shutters, and pushed at the sash.

Up it went, just that easy. It didn’t jam until there was an opening quite big enough for her to get in. She was going to get her dress dirty on the dusty sill, but it didn’t matter. She gave herself a boost with both hands, and slipped through the window, and all but tumbled to the carpeted floor.

Inside First Street! And it had been a slam dunk! For one second she stood there in the little bathroom, staring at the glimmering white porcelain of the old toilet and the marble top of the washstand, and remembering that last dream of Oncle Julien where he had taken her to this house and together they had climbed the stairs.

It was hazy now, as dreams always get, but she had written it in her computer diary under \WS\DREAMS\JULIEN as she did all the dreams in which he came to her. She could remember now the file, which she had reread many times, though not the dream.

Oncle Julien had been playing the Victrola, the one that Mona was supposed to have, and he had been dancing about, in his long quilted satin robe. He’d said that Michael was too good. Angels have their limits. “Pure goodness has rarely defeated me, you understand, Mona,” he had said with his charming French accent, speaking English for her as he always did in her dreams, though she spoke French perfectly, “but it is invariably a nuisance to everyone else but the person who is so perfectly good.”

Perfectly good. Mona had typed in “Perfectly Scrumptious, Perfectly Delectable, Perfectly a hunk!” Then she’d gone and made those entries in the file marked “Michael.”

“Thoughts on Michael Curry: he is even more attractive now that he has had the heart attack, like a great beast with a wounded paw, a knight with a broken limb, Lord Byron with his club foot.”

She had always found Michael “to die for,” as the expression went. She hadn’t needed her dreams to tell her, though they did embolden her somewhat, all that drama of Oncle Julien suggesting it to her, that Michael was a splendid conquest, and telling her how when Ancient Evelyn was only thirteen-Mona’s age-Oncle Julien had bedded her in the attic at First Street, and from that illicit union had been born poor Laura Lee, the mother of Gifford and Alicia. Oncle Julien had given Ancient Evelyn the Victrola then and said, “Take it out of the house before they come. Take it away and keep it…”

“…It was a mad scheme. I never believed in witchcraft, you must understand, Mona. But I had to try something. Mary Beth had started to burn my books even before the end. She burnt them on the lawn outside, as if I were a child without rights or dignity. The Victrola was a little voodoo, magic, a focus of my will.”

All that had been very clear and understandable when she dreamed it but even by the next day the “mad scheme” was largely lost. OK. The Victrola. Oncle Julien wants me to have it. Witchcraft, my favorite thing.

And look what had happened to the damned Victrola, so far.

He’d gone to all that trouble in 1914 to get it out of the house-assuming that sleeping with thirteen-year-old Ancient Evelyn had been trouble-and when Ancient Evelyn tried to pass on that Victrola to Mona, Gifford and Alicia had had a terrible quarrel. Oh, that was the worst of days.

Mona had never seen such a fight as happened then between Alicia and Gifford. “You’re not giving her that Victrola,” Gifford had screamed. She’d run at Alicia and slapped her over and over, and tried to push her out of the bedroom where she had taken the Victrola.

“You can’t do this, she’s my daughter, and Ancient Evelyn said it is to be hers!” Alicia had screamed.

They had fought all the time like that as girls, think nothing of it, Ancient Evelyn had said. She had remained in the parlor. “Gifford will not destroy the Victrola. The time will come when you may have the Victrola. No Mayfair would destroy Oncle Julien’s Victrola. As for the pearls, Gifford can keep them for now.”

Mona didn’t care about the pearls.

That had pretty much been Ancient Evelyn’s quota of speech for the next three or four weeks.

Gifford had been sick after that, sick for months. Strife exhausted Gifford, which was only logical. Uncle Ryan had had to take her to Destin, Florida, to rest at the beach house. Same thing had happened after Deirdre’s funeral; Aunt Gifford had been so sick that Ryan had taken her up to Destin. Aunt Gifford always fled to Destin, to the white beach and the clean water of the Gulf, to the peace and quiet of a little modern house with no cobwebs and no stories.

But the truly awful part for Mona was that Aunt Gifford had never given her the Victrola! When Mona had finally cornered her and demanded to know where it was, Aunt Gifford had said, “I took it up to First Street. I took the pearls there too. I put them back in a safe place. There’s where all Oncle Julien’s things belong, in that house, along with his memory.” And Alicia had screamed and they’d started fighting again.

In one of the dreams, Oncle Julien had said, dancing to the record on the Victrola: “The waltz is from La Traviata, my child, good music for a courtesan.” Julien danced, and the pinched little soprano voice sang on and on.

She had heard the melody so distinctly. Rare to be able to hum a song that you hear in a dream. Lovely scratchy sound to the Victrola. Ancient Evelyn had later recognized the song Mona was humming. It was from Verdi-Violetta’s waltz.

“That was Julien’s record,” she’d said.

“Yes, but how am I going to get the “Victrola?” Mona had asked in the dream.

“Can’t anyone in this family figure out anything for herself!” Oncle Julien had almost wept. “I’m so tired. Don’t you see? I’m getting weaker and weaker. Chérie, please wear a violet ribbon, I don’t care for pink ribbons, though it is very shocking with red hair. Wear violet for your Oncle Julien. I am so weary-”

“Why?” she’d asked. But he had already disappeared.

That had been last spring, that dream. She had bought some violet ribbon, but Alicia swore it was bad luck and took it all away. Mona’s bow tonight was pink, like her cotton and lace dress.

Seems poor Cousin Deirdre had died last May right after Mona had had that dream, and First Street had come into the hands of Rowan and Michael, and the great restoration had begun. Every time she’d passed she’d seen Michael up there on the roof, or just climbing a ladder, or climbing over a high iron railing, or walking right on the parapet with his hammer in hand.

“Thor!” she’d called out to him once. He hadn’t heard her, but he’d waved and smiled. Yes, to die for, all right.

She wasn’t so sure about the times of all the dreams. When they’d started, she hadn’t known there would be so many of them. Her dreams floated in space. She hadn’t been smart enough in the beginning to date them, and to make a chronology of Mayfair events. She had that now in \WS\MAYFAIR\CHRONO. Every month she learned more tricks in her computer system, more ways of keeping track of all her thoughts and feelings, and plans.

She opened the bathroom door and stepped into the kitchen. Beyond the glass doors the swimming pool positively glittered for an instant as if a vagrant wind had touched its surface. As if it were alive. As she stepped forward, a tiny red light flashed on the motion detector, but she could see immediately by the control panel on the kitchen counter that the alarm wasn’t set. That was why it hadn’t gone off when she opened the window. What luck! She’d forgotten about that damned alarm, and it had been the alarm that had saved Michael’s life. He’d have drowned if the firemen had not come and found him-men from his father’s own firehouse, though Michael’s father had died a long long time ago.

Michael. Yes, it was fatal attraction from the moment she’d first met him. And the sheer size of the man had a lot to do with it-things like the perfect width of his neck. Mona had a keen appreciation of men’s necks. She could watch a whole movie just to get a load of Tom Berenger’s neck.

Then there was that constant good humor. When had she ever not gotten a smile from Uncle Michael, and often she’d gotten winks. She loved those immense and amazingly innocent blue eyes. Downright flashy, Bea had said once, but she’d meant it as a compliment. “The man’s just sort of too vivid!” Even Gifford had understood that.

Usually when a man was that well-built, he was an idiot. Intelligent Mayfair men were always perfectly proportioned. If Brooks Brothers or Burberrys’ couldn’t fit you, you were illegitimate. They’d put poison in your tea. And they behaved like windup toys once they came home from Harvard, always combed and tanned, and shaking people’s hands.

Even Cousin Pierce, Ryan’s pride and joy, was turning out that way-a shining replica of his father, down to the Princeton cut of the blond hair, and loving Cousin Clancy was perfect for Pierce. She was a small clone of Aunt Gifford-only without the pain. They looked like they were made of vinyl, Pierce and Ryan, and Clancy. Corporation lawyers; their whole goal in life was to see how much they could leave undisturbed.

Mayfair and Mayfair was a law firm full of vinyl people.

“Never mind,” her mother had said once to her criticism. “They take care of all the money so that you and I don’t have to worry about a thing.”

“I wonder if that’s such a good idea,” Mona had said, watching her mother miss her mouth with the cigarette, and then grope for the glass of wine on the table. Mona had pushed it towards her, disliking herself for doing it, disliking that she did it because it was torture to watch her mother not be able to find it on her own.

But Michael Curry was a different sort from the Mayfair men altogether-husky and relaxed, more beautifully hirsute, altogether lacking in the perpetual preppie gleam perfected by men like Ryan, yet very adorable in a beastly way when he wore his dark-rimmed glasses and read Dickens the way he’d been doing it this very afternoon when she’d gone up to his room. He hadn’t cared a thing about Mardi Gras. He hadn’t wanted to come down. He was still reeling from Rowan’s defection. Time just didn’t mean anything to him, because if he had started to think about it, he would have had to think on how long Rowan had been gone.

“What are you reading?” she’d asked.

“Oh, Great Expectations,” he’d said. “I read it over and over. I’m reading the part about Joe’s wife, Mrs. Joe. The way she kept making the T on the chalkboard. Ever read it? I like to read things I’ve read before. It’s like listening over and over to your favorite song.”

A brilliant Neanderthal slumbered in his body waiting to drag you into the cave by your hair. Yes, a Neanderthal with the brain of a Cro-Magnon, who could be all smiles and a gentleman and as well-bred as anybody in this family could possibly want. He had a great vocabulary, when he chose to use it. Mona admired his vocabulary. Mona’s vocabulary was ranked equal to that of a senior in college. In fact, someone at school had once said, she had the biggest words coming out of the littlest body in the world.

Michael could sound like a New Orleans policeman one moment and a headmaster at another. “Unbeatable combination of elements,” Mona had written in her computer diary. Then remembered Oncle Julien’s admonition. “The man is simply too good.”

“Am I evil?” she whispered aloud in the dark. “Doesn’t compute.” She really hadn’t the slightest doubt that she wasn’t evil. Such thoughts were old-fashioned to her, and typical of Oncle Julien, especially the way he was in her dreams. She hadn’t known the words for it when she was little, but she knew them now: “Self-deprecating, self-mocking.” That is what she’d written into the computer in the subdirectory \WS\JULIEN\CHARACTER in the file DREAM.

She walked across the kitchen and slowly through the narrow butler’s pantry, a lovely white light falling on the floorboards from the porch outside. Such a grand dining room. Michael thought the hardwood floor had been laid in the thirties, but Julien had told Mona it was 1890s, a flooring they called wooden carpet, and it had come in a roll. What was Mona supposed to do with all the things Julien had told her in these dreams?

The dense murky murals were surprisingly visible to her in the darkness-Riverbend Plantation, where Julien had been born-and its quaint world of sugar mill, slave cabins, stables and carriages moving along the old river road. But then she had cat’s eyes, didn’t she? Always had. She loved the darkness. She felt safe and at home in it. It made her want to sing. Impossible to explain to people how good she felt when she roamed alone in the darkness.

She walked around the long table, now all cleared and stripped and polished, though only hours ago it had held the last Mardi Gras banquet complete with frosted King cakes, and a silver punch bowl full of champagne. Boy, the Mayfairs sure ate themselves sick when they came to First Street, she thought. Everybody was just so happy that Michael was willing to keep the place going though Rowan had flat-out disappeared, and under suspicious circumstances. Did Michael know where she was?

Aunt Bea had said, with tears in her eyes, “His heart is broken!”

Well, here comes the kid with the wonder glue for broken hearts! Stand back, world, it’s little Mona.

She passed through the high keyhole doorway into the front hall, and then she stopped and put her hands on the frame, as Oncle Julien had done in so many old pictures, in this door or the other, and she just felt the silence and bigness of the house around her, and smelled its wood.

That other smell. There it was again, making her…what? Almost hungry. It was delicious, whatever it was. Not butterscotch, no, not caramel, not chocolate, but something thick like that, a flavor that seemed a hundred flavors compressed into one. Like the first time you bit into a chocolate-covered cherry cordial. Or a Cadbury Easter egg.

No, she needed a better comparison. Something you didn’t eat. What about the smell of hot tar? That tantalized her, too, and then there was the smell of gasoline that she just couldn’t tear herself away from. Well, this was more like that.

She moved down the hall, noting the winking lights of other alarm devices, none of them armed, all of them waiting, and the smell became strongest when she stood at the foot of the stairs.

She knew Uncle Ryan had investigated this entire area, that even after all the blood had been washed away, and the Chinese rug in the living room had been taken out, he had come with a chemical that made lots of other blood glow in the dark. Well, it was all gone now. Just gone. He’d seen to that before Michael came home from the hospital. And he’d sworn he detected no smell.

Mona took a deep breath of it. Yes, it made you feel a kind of craving. Like the time she was riding the bus downtown on one of her escapades, all alone and reckless and loaded with dough, and she’d smelled that delicious barbecue from the bus and actually gotten off to find the place from which it was coming, a little French Quarter restaurant in a ramshackle building on Esplanade. Hadn’t tasted half as good as it smelled.

But we’re back to food again and this isn’t food.

She looked into the living room, startled again, as she’d been earlier, to see how Michael had changed things after Rowan left. Of course the Chinese carpet had been taken out. It was all bloody. But he didn’t have to abolish the old scheme of double parlors, did he? Well, he had. Mayfair Blasphemy.

It was one vast room now, with a giant soft sofa beneath the arch against the inside wall. A nice scattering of French chairs-all Oncle Julien’s to hear him tell it, now tricked out in new gold damask or a striped fabric, wickedly rich looking, and a glass table through which you could see the dark amber colors of the enormous old rug. It must have been twentyfive feet, that rug, to stretch through both rooms as it did, embracing the floor before both of the hearths. And how old it looked, like something out of the attic upstairs, most likely. Maybe Michael had brought it down with the gilded chairs.

They’d said the only orders he’d given after he came home were to change that double parlor. Put Julien’s things down there. Make it look entirely different.

Made sense. He’d obviously wanted to erase all traces of Rowan; he had wanted to obliterate the rooms in which they spent their happiest moments. Some of the chairs were faded, wood chipped here and there. And the carpet rested right on the heart-pine floor, thin and silky looking.

Maybe there had been blood all over that other furniture. Nobody would tell Mona exactly what had gone on. No one would tell her anything much except Oncle Julien. And in her dreams, she seldom had the presence of dream-mind to ask a question. Oncle Julien just talked and talked or danced and danced.

No Victrola in this room now. What a stroke of luck it would have been, if they’d brought it down too with all this other stuff. But they hadn’t. She hadn’t heard anybody say a thing about finding a Victrola.

She’d checked out the first floor every time she’d come. Michael listened to a little tape machine in the library. This room lay in stillness, and its great Bösendorfer piano, at an angle before the second fireplace, seemed more a piece of furniture than a thing which could sing.

The room was still beautiful. It had been nice earlier to flop on the big soft sofa, from which you could see all the mirrors, the two white marble fireplaces, one to your left, one to your right, across from you, and the two doors directly opposite to Deirdre’s old porch. Yes, Mona had thought, a good vantage point, and still an enchanting room. Sometimes she danced on the bare floors of the double parlor at Amelia, dreaming of mirrors, dreaming of making a killing in mutual funds with money she’d borrow from Mayfair and Mayfair.

Just give me another year, she thought, I’ll crack the market, then if I can find but one gambler in that whole stodgy law firm-! It was no use asking them now to fix up Amelia Street. Ancient Evelyn had always sent carpenters and workmen away. She cherished her “quiet.” And then what good was it to fix up a house in which Patrick and Alicia were simply drunk all the time, and Ancient Evelyn like a fixture?

Mona had her own space, as they say, the big bedroom upstairs on the Avenue. And there she kept her computer equipment, all her disks and files, and books. Her day would come. And until then she had plenty of time after school to study stocks, bonds, money instruments, and the like.

Her dream really was the management of her own mutual fund, called Mona One. She’d invite Mayfairs only to buy in, and she’d handpick every company in which the fund invested, on the basis of its environmental worthiness.

Mona knew from the Wall Street Journal and from the New York Times what was going on. Environmentally sensitive companies were making big bucks. Somebody had invented a microbe that ate oil spills and could even clean up your oven for you, if you turned it loose inside. This was the wave of the future. Mona One would be a legend among mutual funds, like Fidelity Magellan, or Nicholas II. Mona could have begun now, if anybody would take a chance on her. If only the Realm of Adults would open, just one tiny little bit, and let her in!

Uncle Ryan was interested, yes, and amused and amazed and confused, but not about to take a chance. “Keep studying,” he’d said. “But I must say I’m impressed with your knowledge of the market. How do you know all this stuff?”

“You kidding me? Same way you know it,” she had said. “From the Journal and from Barron’s, and from going online any time night or day for the latest statistics.” She’d been speaking of the modem in her computer, and of the many bulletin boards she could call. “You want to know something about stocks in the middle of the night? Don’t call the office. Call me.”

How Pierce had laughed. “Just call Mona!”

Uncle Ryan had been intrigued, Mardi Gras fatigue or no, but not enough not to back away with another lame comment: “Well, I’m pleased that you’re taking an interest in all this.”

“An interest!” Mona had replied. “I’m ready to take over! What makes you such a wimp, Uncle Ryan, when it comes to aggressive growth funds? And what about Japan? Don’t you know the simple principle that if you balance your United States stock market investments abroad then you’ve got global-”

“Hold it,” he’d said. “Who’s going to invest in a fund called Mona One?”

Mona had been quick on the reply. “Everyone!”

The best part was Uncle Ryan had finally laughed and promised again to buy her a black Porsche Carrera for her fifteenth birthday. She had never let him forget that from the moment she’d become obsessed with the car. She didn’t see why all the Mayfair money couldn’t buy her a fake driver’s license, too, so she could slam the pedal to the floor right now. She knew all about cars. The Porsche was her car, and every time she saw a parked Carrera she crawled all over it, hoping the owner would come. She’d hitched rides three times that way with perfect strangers. But never tell anyone that! They’ll die.

As if a witch couldn’t protect herself.

“Yes, yes,” he’d said this evening, “I haven’t forgotten the black Porsche, but you haven’t forgotten your promise to me, have you, that you’ll never drive it over fifty-five miles an hour?”

“There you go kidding again,” she said. “Why the hell would I want to drive a Porsche over fifty-five miles an hour?”

Pierce had nearly choked on his gin and tonic.

“You’re not buying that child a coffin on wheels!” Aunt Bea had declared. Always interfering. No doubt she’d be calling Gifford about the whole idea.

“What child? I don’t see any child around here, do you?” Pierce had said.

Mona would have kept things going on the mutual funds, but it was Mardi Gras, people were tired, and Uncle Ryan had been drawn into a bottomless pit of polite conversation with Uncle Randall. Uncle Randall had turned his back to her, to shut her out. He’d been doing this sort of thing ever since Mona had gotten him into bed. She didn’t care. That had been an experiment, nothing more, to compare a man in his eighties with young boys.

Now, Michael was her goal. To hell with Uncle Randall. Uncle Randall had been interesting because he was so old, and there is a way a really old man looks at a young girl which she found very exciting. But Uncle Randall wasn’t a kind man. And Michael was. And Mona liked kindness. She’d isolated that trait in herself a long time ago. Sometimes she divided the world between kind and unkind-fundamentally speaking.

Well, tomorrow she would get to the stocks.

Tomorrow, or the next day, maybe she’d work up the actual portfolio for Mona One, based on the top stock performers for the last five years. It was so easy for her to be carried away, with visions of Mona One becoming so large she had to clone it with a second mutual fund called Mona Two and then Mona Three, and traveling all over the world in her own plane to meet the CEOs of the companies in which she invested.

She’d check out factories in Mainland China, offices in Hong Kong, scientific research in Paris. She pictured herself wearing a cowboy hat when she did this. She didn’t actually have a cowboy hat right now. Her bow was her thing. But somehow or other she always had the hat on as she stepped off the imaginary plane. And all this was coming. She knew it.

Maybe it was time she showed Uncle Ryan the printout of the stocks she’d tracked last year. If she’d really had money in them, she’d have her own fortune. Yes, got to boot that file and print that out.

Ah, but she was wasting the moment.

Tonight she was here, with her most important goal in mind. The conquest of the hunk known as Michael. And the finding of the mysterious Victrola.

The gilt fauteuils gleamed in the shadows, graceful straight-backed chairs. Tapestried pillows lay higgledy-piggledy in the deep damask sofa. A veil of stillness lay over all, as if the world beyond had gone up in smoke. Dust on the piano. That poor old Eugenia, she wasn’t much good, was she? And Henri was probably too good to dust or mop or sweep. And in their midst was Michael, too sick and indifferent to care what they did.

She left the double parlor, and moved to the foot of the stairs. Very dark up there, as it ought to be, like a ladder to a heaven of shadows. She touched the newel post, and then began her ascent. In the house, in it, wandering, free and in the dark alone! “Oncle Julien, I’m here,” she sang in a tiny whisper. When she reached the top she saw that Aunt Viv’s room stood empty, just as she had expected.

“Poor Michael, you’re all mine,” she said softly. And when she turned she saw that the door of the master bedroom was open, and the weak illumination of a little night-lamp poured out into the high narrow hall.

So you’re alone in there, big boy, she thought. Not scared to be in the very room where Deirdre died. And let’s not forget Great-aunt Mary Beth and all the people who saw the ghosts around her when she lay in that very same bed, and who knows what went on before that?

Gifford had thought it a deplorable decision for Michael to move back into that accursed room. But Mona understood. Why would he want to stay in the bridal chamber after Rowan had left him? Besides, it was the prettiest and fanciest room in the house, the north master bedroom. He himself had restored the plaster ceiling and the medallion. He had polished the enormous half tester bed.

Oh, she understood Michael. Michael liked darkness too, in his own way. Why else would anyone have married into this family? she thought. Something in him was seduced by darkness. He felt good in the twilight and good in the dark, just like she did. She knew that when she watched him walk in the nighttime garden. His thing. If he liked the early morning at all, which she doubted, it was only because it was dim and distorting.

“He is simply too good.” Oncle Julien’s words came back to her. Well, we’ll see.

She crept to the doorframe and saw the tiny night-light, plugged directly into the outlet over on the far wall. The light of the street lamps filtered softly through the lace curtains, and there lay Michael, his head turned away from her, in his immaculate white cotton pajamas, pressed so carefully by Henri that they had a perfect seam down the arm. Michael’s hand lay half open on the top of the comforter as though ready to accept a gift. She heard him take a long, raw and uneasy breath.

But he hadn’t heard her. He was dreaming. He turned on his side away from her, and sank deeper into a murmuring sleep.

She slipped into the room.

His diary was on the bedside table.

She knew it by the cover; she had seen him writing in it this very night. Oh, it was unconscionable to look into it. She couldn’t do it, but how she wanted just to glimpse a few words.

What if she just took a little peek?

Rowan, come back to me. I’m waiting. With a silent sigh she let it close.

Look at all the bottles of pills. They were bombing him with this stuff. She knew most of the names because they were common and other old Mayfairs had taken them often enough. Blood pressure medicines mostly, and then Lasix, that evil diuretic which probably pulled all the potassium out of him the way it had out of Alicia, when she’d straightened up and tried to lose weight, and three other dangerous-sounding potions that were probably what made him look all the time like he was trying to wake up.

Ought to do you a big favor and throw this junk in the garbage for you, she thought. What you need is Mayfair Witches’ Brew. When she got home, she’d look up all these drugs in one of the big pharmaceutical books she had in her library. Ah, look, Xanax. That could make anyone into a zombie. Why give him that four times a day? They’d taken Xanax away from her mother, because Alicia took it in handfuls with her wine and her beer.

Hmmm, this did feel like a very unlucky room. She liked the fancy decorative work above the windows, and the chandelier, but it was an unlucky room. And that smell was in here too.

Very faint, but it was here, the delicious smell, the smell that didn’t belong in the house, and had something to do with Christmas.

She came close to the bed, which was very high like so many old-fashioned beds, and she looked at Uncle Michael lying there, his profile deep in the snow-white cotton cover of the down pillow, dark lashes and eyebrows surprisingly distinct. Very much a man, just a smidgen more testosterone and you would have had a barrel-chested ape with bushy eyebrows. But there had not been the smidgen. Perfection had been the result.

“ ‘O brave new world,’ ” she whispered, “ ‘that has such people in’t!’ ”

He was drugged, all right. Totally out of it.

That was probably why he’d lost that gift with his hands. He’d worn gloves most of the time up till Christmas, telling people his hands were very sensitive. Oh, Mona had tried hard to get to talk to him about that! And tonight, he’d remarked several times he didn’t need the gloves anymore at all. Well, of course not if you were taking two milligrams of Xanax every four hours on top of all this other crap! That’s how they’d shut down Deirdre’s powers, drugging her. Oh, so many opportunities had passed by. Well, this opportunity wouldn’t.

And what was this cute little bottle, Elavil? That had a sedative effect too, didn’t it? And wow, what a dose. It’s a wonder Michael had been able to come downstairs tonight. And to think he’d held her on his shoulders for Comus. Poor guy. This was damn near sadistic.

She touched his cheek lightly. Very clean-shaven. He didn’t wake. Another long deep breath came out of him, almost a yawn, sounding very male.

She knew she could wake him, however, he wasn’t in a coma after all, and then the most disturbing thought came to her! She’d been with David already tonight! Damn! It had been safe, sanitary but still messy. She couldn’t wake Michael, not till she’d sunk down into a nice warm bath.

Hmmm. And she hadn’t even thought of that till now. Her clothes were still soiled. That was the whole trouble with being thirteen. Your brilliance was uneven. You forgot enormous things! Even Alicia had told her that.

“One minute, dear, you are a little computer whiz, and the next moment, you’re screaming ’cause you can’t find your dolls. I told you your dolls are in the cabinet. Nobody took your damned dolls! Oh, I’m so glad I don’t ever have to be thirteen again! You know I was thirteen when you were born!”

Tell me about it. And you were sixteen when I was three and you left me downtown in Maison Blanche and I was lost there for two hours! “I forgot, OK! Like I don’t take her downtown that much!” Who else but a sixteen-year-old mother would give an excuse like that? It wasn’t so bad. Mona had ridden the escalators up and down to her heart’s content.

“Take me in your arms,” she prayed, looking down at Michael. “I’ve had a terrible childhood!” But on he slept as if he’d been touched by the witch’s wand.

Maybe this wasn’t the night for getting him into bed. No, she’d rather everything be perfect for the assault. And not only had she been with David, she was soiled from the ground in the cemetery. Why, there were even a few dead leaves snarled in her hair, very Ophelia, but probably not very sexy.

Maybe it was the night for searching the attics. For finding the Victrola, and cranking it up. Maybe there were old records with it, that record that Ancient Evelyn used to play? Maybe it was time to meet Oncle Julien here in the shadows, and not time to be with Michael at all?

But he was so luscious there, gorgeously imperfect, her high prole Endymion, with the slight bump to his nose, and the soft creases in his forehead, very Spencer Tracy, yes, the man of her dreams. And a man in the hand is worth two ghosts in a dream.

And speaking of hands, look at it, his large, soft hand! Now that was a man’s hand. Nobody would say to him, “You have the fingers of a violinist.” And she used to find men like that sexy, the delicate kind, like Cousin David, with hairless chins, with eyes full of soul. Ah, her whole appreciation of masculinity was taking a turn for the rough and the deep and the better.

She touched Michael’s jaw, and the edge of his ear, his neck. She felt his curly black hair. Oh, nothing softer and finer than curly black hair. Her mother and Gifford had such fine black hair. But Mona’s red hair would never be soft, and then she caught the fragrance of his skin, very subtle and nice and warm, and she bent down and kissed his cheek.

His eyes opened, but it seemed he couldn’t see anything. She sank down beside him-just couldn’t stop herself, even though she knew this was an invasion of his privacy-and he turned over. What was her plan? Hmmm…She felt such a craving for him suddenly. It wasn’t even erotic. It was all a kind of swoony romance. She wanted to feel his arms around her; she wanted him to pick her up; she wanted him to kiss her; common things like that. A man’s arms, not a boy’s. They should dance. In fact, it was plain wonderful that there was no boy in him, that he was all wild beast in a way some men never would be, very jagged and roughened and overgrown, with skin-colored lips and slightly wild eyebrows.

She realized he was looking at her, and in the even light from the street, his face was pale yet clear.

“Mona!” he whispered.

“Yes, Uncle Michael. I got forgotten. It was a mix-up. Can I spend the night?”

“Well, honey, we have to call your father and mother.”

He started to sit up, deliciously rumpled, black hair tumbling over his eyes. He really was drugged, though, no doubt of it.

“Wrong, Uncle Michael!” she said quickly but gently. She put her hand on his chest. Ah, terrific. “My dad and mom are asleep. They think I’m with Uncle Ryan out in Metairie. And Uncle Ryan thinks I’m home with them. Don’t call anybody. You’ll just get everybody all excited, and I’ll have to take a cab home all alone and I don’t want to. I want to spend the night.”

“But they’ll realize…”

“My parents? You have it on good authority from me that they will not realize anything. Did you see my dad tonight, Uncle Michael?”

“Yeah, I did, honey.” He tried to stifle a yawn and failed. He looked very concerned for her suddenly, as if it wasn’t appropriate to yawn while discussing her alcoholic father.

“He’s not going to live very long,” she said in a bored voice. She didn’t want to talk about him either. “I can’t stand Amelia Street when they’re both drunk. Nobody there but Ancient Evelyn, and she never sleeps anymore. She’s watching them.”

“Ancient Evelyn,” he mused. “Such a lovely name. Do I know Ancient Evelyn?”

“Nope. She never leaves the house. She told them once to bring you up home, but they never did. She’s my great-grandmother.”

“Ah, yes, the Mayfairs of Amelia Street,” he said. “The big pink house.” He gave a little yawn again, and forced himself into a more truly upright position. “Bea pointed out the house. Nice house. Italianate. Bea said Gifford grew up there.”

Italianate. Architectural term, late nineteenth century. “Yeah, well, it’s a New Orleans bracketed style, as we call it,” she said. “Built 1882, remodeled once by an architect named Sully. Full of all kinds of junk from a plantation called Fontevrault.”

He was intrigued. But she didn’t want to talk history and plaster. She wanted him.

“So will you please let me stay here?” she asked. “I really really have to stay here now, Uncle Michael. I mean, like, there’s not really any other possibility now, logically, I mean. I should stay.”

He sat against the pillows, struggling to keep his eyes open.

She took his wrist suddenly. He didn’t seem to know what she was doing-that she was feeling the pulse the same way a doctor would do it. His hand was heavy and slightly cold, too cold. But the heartbeat was steady. It was OK. He wasn’t nearly as sick as her own father. Her own father wasn’t going to live six months. But it wasn’t his heart, it was his liver.

If she closed her eyes she could see the chambers of Michael’s heart. She could see things so brilliant and unnameable and complex as to be like modern painting-a sprawl of daring colors and clots and lines and swelling shapes! Ah. He was OK, this man. If she did get him into bed tonight, she wouldn’t kill him.

“You know your problem right now?” she asked. “It’s those bottles of medicine. Throw them in the trash. That much medicine will make anyone sick.”

“You think so?”

“You’re talking to Mona Mayfair, a twentyfold member of the Mayfair family, who knows things that others don’t know. Oncle Julien was my great-great-grandfather three times. You know what that means?”

“Three lines of descent, from Julien?”

“Yep, and then the other tangled lines from everybody else. Without a computer, no one could even put it all together. But I have a computer and I figured it all out. I’ve got more Mayfair blood in me than just about anybody in the whole family. It’s all ’cause my father and mother were too close as cousins to get married, but my father got my mother pregnant, and that was it. And besides, we’re all so intermarried it doesn’t make much difference…”

She stopped, she was doing her chattering number. Too much talk for a man his age who was this sleepy. Play it with more craft. “You’re OK, big boy,” she said. “Throw out the drugs.”

He smiled. “You mean I’m going to live? I will climb ladders and hammer nails once again?”

“You’ll wield your hammer like Thor,” she said. “But you do have to get off all these sedatives. I don’t know why they’re drugging you like this, probably scared if they don’t that you’ll worry yourself to death about Aunt Rowan.”

He laughed softly, and took her hand now with obvious affection. But there was a dark shadow in his face, in his eyes, and for a second it was in his voice. “But you have more faith in me, right, Mona?”

“Absolutely. But then I’m in love with you.”

“Oh no!” He scoffed.

She held fast to his hand as he tried to pull away. No, there was nothing wrong with his heart how. The drugs were doing him in.

“I am in love with you but you don’t have to do anything about it, Uncle Michael. Just be worthy of it.”

“Right. Be worthy of it, just what I was thinking. A nice little Sacred Heart Academy girl like you.”

“Uncle Michael, pa…leeze!” she said. “I began my erotic adventures when I was eight. I didn’t lose my virginity. I eradicated all traces of it. I am a full-grown woman only pretending to be this little girl sitting on the side of your bed. When you are thirteen, and you cannot disprove it, because all your relatives know, being a little girl becomes simply a political decision. Logical. But believe me, I am not what I seem,”

He gave the most knowing laugh, the most ironic laugh.

“And what if my wife, Rowan, comes home and finds you here with me, talking about sex and politics?”

“Your wife, Rowan, isn’t coming home,” she said, and then instantly regretted it. She hadn’t meant to say something so ominous, so depressing. And his face told her that he believed her. “I mean…she’s…”

“She’s what, Mona? Tell me.” He was quietly and deadly serious. “What do you know? Tell me what’s inside your little Mayfair heart? Where is my wife? Give me some witchcraft.”

Mona gave a sigh. She tried to make her voice as hushed and quiet as his voice. “Nobody knows,” she said. “They’re plenty scared, but nobody knows. And the feeling I get is…she’s not dead, but…well, it might not ever be the same again.” She looked at him. “Do you know what I mean?”

“You don’t have a good feeling about her, that she’s coming back? That’s what you’re saying.”

“Yeah, kind of. But then I don’t know what happened here on Christmas Day, not that I’m asking you to tell me. I can tell this, however. I’m holding your wrist, right? We’re talking all about it, and you’re worried about her, and your pulse is just fine. You aren’t that sick. They’ve doped you. They over-reacted. They got illogical. Detox is what you need.”

He sighed, and looked defeated.

She leant forward and kissed him on the mouth. Immediate connection. In fact, it startled her a little, and even startled him. But there wasn’t much follow-up. The drugs took care of that, like folding up the kiss in a blanket.

Age made such a difference. Kissing a man who’d been to bed a thousand times was nothing like kissing a boy who’d done it twice, maybe. All the machinery was here. She just needed a stronger jolt to turn it on.

“Hold on, honey, hold on,” he said gently, taking her by the left shoulder, and forcing her back.

She found it almost painful suddenly that this man was right there, and she probably couldn’t get him to do what she wanted, and maybe never would.

“I know, Uncle Michael. But you have to understand that we have our family traditions.”

“Is that so?”

“Oncle Julien slept with my great-grandmother in this house when she was thirteen. That’s how come I’m so clever.”

“And pretty,” he said. “But I inherited something from my ancestors too. It’s called moral fiber.” He raised his eyebrows, smiling at her slowly, taking her hand now and patting it as if she really were a little kitten or a child.

Best to step back. He looked groggier now than when they’d started. It seemed wrong, really, to try to draw him to her. Yet she ached for him. She really did; she ached for intimacy with him and the entire world of adults which he embodied for her. Stranded in childhood, she suddenly felt freakish and confused. She might have cried.

“Why don’t I put you in the front bedroom?” he said. “It’s all clean and neat in there, has been since Rowan left. You want to sleep in there? That’s a nice room.” His voice was thick. His eyes were closed as he talked. He stroked her hand affectionately.

“Front bedroom’s fine,” she said.

“There are some flannel nightgowns in there. They were Rowan’s. I gave them to her. They’ll be too long. But wait a minute, maybe Aunt Viv is still awake. Maybe I should tell her you’re here.”

“Aunt Viv is uptown, with Aunt Cecilia,” she said, venturing to squeeze his hand one more time. It was beginning to feel a little warm. “They’ve become famous friends, Aunt Viv and Aunt Cecilia. I think Aunt Viv is now an honorary Mayfair.”

“Aaron. Aaron is in the second bedroom,” he said, as though thinking aloud.

“Aaron’s with Aunt Bea. He and Bea have a thing together. They went back to his suite at the Pontchartrain, because she is far too proper to take him home.”

“Is that true? Bea and Aaron. Gee, I never noticed.”

“Well, you wouldn’t. I’ll bet Aaron will be an honorary Mayfair soon too.”

“Wouldn’t that be something? Beatrice is perfect. You need a woman for Aaron who appreciates a gentleman, don’t you think?” His eyes closed again, as if he couldn’t prevent it.

“Uncle Michael, there’s no such thing as a woman who doesn’t appreciate a gentleman,” said Mona.

He opened his eyes. “Do you know everything?”

“Nope. Wish I did, but then again, who would want to know everything? God must be bored. What do you think?”

“I can’t figure it out,” he said, smiling again. “You’re a firecracker, Mona.”

“Wait till you see me in a flannel nightgown.”

“I won’t. I expect you to lock your door, and go to sleep. Aaron might come home, Eugenia could get up and start her ceaseless walking…”

“Ceaseless walking?”

“You know old people. I’m so sleepy, Mona. Are you sleepy?”

“What if I get scared all alone in that front bedroom?”

“Doesn’t compute.”

“What did you say?”

“Just means you’re not scared of anything. And you know it, and you know I know it.”

“You want to sleep with me, don’t you?”

“No.”

“You’re lying.”

“Doesn’t matter. I won’t do what I’m not supposed to do. Honey, I think I should call somebody.”

“Trust me,” she said. “I’m going to go to bed now. We’ll have breakfast in the morning. Henri says he makes perfect Eggs Benedict.”

He smiled at her vaguely, too tired to argue, too tired perhaps to even remember the phone numbers he ought to call. What evil things drugs were. They made him grope for the simplest verbal constructions. She hated them. She never touched alcohol, or drugs in any form.

She wanted her mind like a scythe.

He laughed suddenly. “Like a scythe!” he whispered.

Ah, so he’d caught it. She had to stop herself from acknowledging this, because he didn’t realize that she hadn’t spoken. She smiled. She wanted to kiss him again, but didn’t think it would do any good. Probably do harm. He’d be dead asleep again in a few minutes. Then maybe, after a nice long bath, she’d search for the Victrola upstairs.

He surprised her by throwing back the covers and climbing out of the bed. He walked ahead of her, unsteady, but obviously chivalric.

“Come on, I’ll show you where everything is,” he said. Another yawn and a deep breath as he led her out the door.

The front bedroom was as beautiful as it had been on the day of the wedding. There was even a bouquet of yellow and white roses on the marble mantel, somewhat like the bouquet which had been there on that day. And Rowan’s white silk robe was laid out, as if she really were coming home again, on the pale damask coverlet of the four-poster bed.

He stopped for a moment, looking about as if he had forgotten what he meant to do. He wasn’t remembering. She would have felt it if he’d been remembering. He was struggling for the context. That’s what drugs did to you, they took the context of familiar things away.

“The nightgowns,” he said. He made a halfhearted little gesture towards the open bathroom door.

“I’ll find them, Uncle Michael. Go back to bed.”

“You’re not really scared, are you, honey?” Too innocent.

“No, Uncle Michael,” she said, “you go back to sleep.”

He stared at her for a long moment, as if he could not even concentrate on the words she spoke. But he was determined to be protective, determined to worry appropriately. “If you get scared…” he said.

“I won’t, Uncle Michael. I was teasing you.” She couldn’t help smiling. “I’m the thing to be afraid of, most of the time.”

He couldn’t repress a smile at that either. He shook his head and went out, throwing her one last very blue-eyed and adorable glance in which fire burned up the drugs for a moment, and then he closed the door.

The bathroom had a small pretty gas heater. She turned it on immediately. There were dozens of thick white towels on the wicker shelf. Then she found the flannel nightgowns, in rows on the top shelf of the closet-thick, old-fashioned gowns, in gay flowered patterns. She chose the most outrageous-a pink gown, with red roses on it, and she turned on the water in the long deep tub.

Carefully she removed the pink taffeta bow from the back of her hair, and laid it on the dressing table beside the brush and comb.

Ah, what a dream house, she thought. So unlike Amelia Street with its claw-foot tubs, and damp rotted floorboards; where the few remaining towels were chewed and worn, and would be until Aunt Bea brought by a new load of hand-me-downs. Mona was the only one who ever laundered them; she was the only one who ever laundered anything, though Ancient Evelyn swept the banquette, as she called the sidewalk, every day.

This house showed you what could be done with love. Old white tile, yes, but new and thick plum-colored carpet. Brass fixtures that really worked, and parchment shades over the sconces beside the mirror. A chair with a pink cushion; a small chandelier descending from the tiny medallion above, with four candle-shaped bulbs of pink glass.

“And money, don’t forget money,” Alicia had said to her not long ago, when she had wished aloud that Amelia could be beautiful again.

“Why don’t we ask Uncle Ryan for the money? We’re Mayfairs. There’s the legacy! Hell, I’m old enough to hire a contractor, to bring in a plumber. Why is everything always falling apart?”

Alicia had waved that away with disgust. Asking people for money meant inviting them to interfere. Nobody at Amelia Street wanted the Mayfair Police on the premises, did they? Ancient Evelyn did not like noise, or strange men. Mona’s father didn’t want anybody asking him questions. On and on it went. The excuses.

So things rusted, and rotted and broke, and no one did anything about them. And two of the rear bathrooms hadn’t worked now in years. Window sashes were broken, or painted shut. Ah, the list was endless.

An evil little thought crept into Mona’s head. It had almost crept into her head before, when Michael had said her house was Italianate. What would he think of the present state of affairs at Amelia Street? Maybe he could suggest a few things, like whether or not the plaster in her room would start falling again? At least he would know. That was his thing, of course, restoring houses. So bring him home to see the house, she thought.

But then the inevitable would happen. He was bound to see Alicia and Patrick drinking all the time, and then to call Uncle Ryan, the way everybody did sooner or later. There would be the usual row. Aunt Bea might come again and once more suggest a hospital.

But what nobody understood was that these hospitalizations did more harm than good. Alicia came back crazier, more eager to drown her misery. The tirade last time had been the worst ever. She’d tried to smash everything in Mona’s room. Mona had stood with her back to the computer.

“Lock your own mother up? You did that! You and Gifford, you lying little witch, you did that to me, your own mother! You think I would have done such a thing to my mother? You are a witch, Ancient Evelyn’s right, you’re a witch, take that bow out of your hair.” And then they’d fought, Mona holding Alicia’s wrists, forcing her back.

“Come on, Mom! Stop it!”

And then Alicia went limp as she always did, just a sack of potatoes on the floor, sobbing and pounding her fist. And the shock of seeing Ancient Evelyn in the doorway, which meant that she had made the long trek up the stairs by herself, not very good, and her dour words.

“Do not hurt that child! Alicia, you are a common drunkard. Your husband is a common drunkard.”

“That child hurts me!” Alicia had wailed.

No, Mona would never put her in a hospital again. But the others might. You never knew. Best not to drag Michael into it, even if he wanted to help her fix up the place. Scrap that plan. Go on to the next one.

By the time she’d peeled off her clothes, the room was filled with delicious warm steam. She turned off the lights, so the only illumination came from the orange flames of the gas heater, and then she sank down into the tub of hot water, letting her hair stream out as if she were Ophelia again, or so she always imagined, floating to her death in the famous stream.

She turned her head this way and that to stir her long hair in the water, seeing the swirl of red around her, to get it really clean. She pulled at the bits and pieces of dead leaf. God! One of these could have been a roach! How ghastly. It was this swirling back and forth that made her hair so thick and shining after, the long soak and the turning. A shower would just beat it flat. She loved her hair to be as big and thick as possible.

Perfumed soap. Wouldn’t you know it? And a bottle of pearly thick shampoo. These people knew how to live. This was like a fine hotel.

She washed her hair and body slowly, enjoying every minute of it, lathering gently all over and then sinking down to rinse the soap and shampoo away. Maybe she could somehow restore Amelia Street without inviting in all the new brooms of the family. Maybe she could explain to Uncle Michael that things had to be done cautiously and quietly, that he mustn’t talk about Patrick and Alicia, that everybody knew anyway. But then what would they do when Ancient Evelyn started to tell the workmen to go home, or that they could not use noisy equipment?

It was comforting to be clean. She thought again of Michael, the sleeping giant, in there in the witch’s bed.

She stood up and reached for the towel. She dried her hair roughly, tossing it forward and then backward, loving the freedom of being naked, and then she stepped out of the tub. The soft clean flannel gown felt snug and safe to her, though it was too long of course. So she’d pick it up like a little girl in an old-fashioned picture. That’s how it made her feel. That’s how her bow made her feel. Little old-fashioned girl was her favorite disguise, to the point where it wasn’t a disguise at all.

She rubbed her hair fiercely one more time, and then picked up the brush off the dressing table, stared at herself for a moment in the mirror, and then began brushing her hair firmly back away from her forehead and behind her shoulders, so that it would dry neatly as it should.

The gas heat seemed to curl and breathe around her, to tap on her forehead with fingers. She picked up her bow of ribbon, and pinned it in place on the back of her head. She could just see two little bits of it sticking up. Like devil’s horns.

“Oncle Julien, the hour has come,” she whispered, shutting her eyes tight. “Give me a clue. Where do I look for the Victrola?” She rocked from side to side, Ray Charles style, trying to recapture one vivid moment from all those ever-fading dreams.

A thin distant sound came to her, under the gentle roar of the gas heater, a song she could barely hear. Violins? Too thin a sound to tell what the instruments were, except there were many, and it was…it was…She opened the bathroom door. Far far away, but it was the waltz from La Traviata playing. It was…the soprano singing. She started to hum it, irresistibly, but then she couldn’t hear it! My God, what if the Victrola was down there in the living room!

She padded barefoot, towel over her shoulders like a shawl, into the hallway and peered down over the balusters. Very distinctly came the song of the waltz, louder than it had ever been in her dreams. The woman sang gaily in Italian, and now came the chorus behind her, sounding on the whole scratchy record like so many birds.

Her heart was pounding suddenly. She reached up and touched her bow to make sure it was securely clipped to her hair. Then she dropped the towel in a little careless heap and went to the head of the stairs. At that very instant, light softly leapt out of the doorways of the double parlor, and grew soundlessly brighter as she went down the steps. The wool carpet felt slightly rough to her bare feet, and when she incidentally saw her toes they looked very babyfied beneath the flannel, which she had to lift now, just like a picture-book kid.

She stopped. As she looked down, she saw that the carpet was no longer the red wool carpet. It was an oriental runner, very worn, very thin. She felt the change of texture. Or rather she became aware of standing on something more threadbare, and she followed the cascade of Persian blue and pink roses down the stairs. The walls had changed around her. The wallpaper was a deep dusty gold, and far below an unfamiliar chandelier hung from the oval cluster of plaster leaves on the hallway ceiling-something frothy and Venetian that she could never recall having seen before. And it had real lighted candles in it, this little chandelier.

She could smell the wax. The song of the soprano went on with its reliable and swinging rhythm, making her want to sing with it again. Her heart was brimming.

“Oncle Julien!” she whispered, almost bursting into tears. Oh, this was the grandest vision she had ever beheld!

She looked down into the hallway. More lovely patterns that she’d never seen before. And through the first of the high parlor doorways, the very doorway through which a long-ago cousin had been shot from this very stairway, she saw that the room was no longer the room of the present, and that tiny flames danced in the graceful crystal gasoliers.

Ah, but the rug was the same rug! And there were Julien’s gold damask chairs.

She hurried down, glancing to right and left as the details caught her-the old gas sconces with their fluted crystal saucers of light, and the leaded glass around the huge front door, which had not been there before.

The music was as loud perhaps as a Victrola could get. And ah, behold the whatnot shelf all crowded with tiny ceramic figures, and the brass clock on the front mantel, and the Greek statues on the rear mantel, and the draperies of a mellow old velvet, burnished and fringed, and puddling on the polished floor.

The doorframes were painted to look like marble! So were the baseboards. It was that old kind of graining, so popular at the end of the century, and the gaslight flickered steadily against the darkly papered ceiling as if the little jets were dancing to the rhythm of the waltz.

What flaw could there be in this fabric? The rug was the very same rug she’d seen earlier, but that made perfect sense, didn’t it, it had been Julien’s, and there were his lovely fauteuils grouped together for conversation in the very center of the rooms.

She lifted her arms, and found herself dancing on the balls of her feet, in a circle, round and round, till the narrow nightgown flared around her, making a perfect narrow bell. She sang with the soprano, understanding the Italian effortlessly, though that was the most recent of all the languages she’d learned, and enchanted with the simple rhythm, and then swaying wildly back and forth, bending from the waist and letting her hair whip out and all over her face and tossing it again, so it tumbled down her back. Her eyes swept the veined and yellowed paper of the ceiling, and then in a blur, she saw the big sofa, Michael’s new sofa, only it didn’t have the beige damask on it now, but rather a worn gold velvet like the draperies which hung from the windows, gorgeous and warm in the flickering light.

Michael was sitting motionless on the couch looking at her. She stopped in mid-step, her arms curved downward like those of a ballerina, and felt her hair shift and tumble again off her shoulders. He was afraid. He sat in the middle of the couch in his cotton pajamas staring at her, as if she were something utterly terrifying or grotesque. The music went on and on, and slowly she took a deep breath, getting her pulse under control again and then coming near to him, thinking that if she had ever seen anything truly scary in her life, it was the sight of him sitting there in this room, staring at her, as if he were about to go out of his mind.

He wasn’t trembling. He was like her. He feared nothing. He was just all anxious and upset and horrified by the vision, and he was seeing it, he had to be, and he was hearing the music, and as she drew closer, and sank down on the sofa beside him, he turned, looking at her, eyes wide with gentle amazement, and then she locked her mouth on his, pulled him down to her, and slam, bang, it connected, the chain reaction snapping through her. She had him. He was hers.

He pulled back for one instant as if to look at her again, as if to make sure that she was there. His eyes were still cloudy from the drugs. Maybe they were helping now-putting his sublime Catholic conscience to sleep. She kissed him again hurriedly and a little sloppily and then reached between his legs. Ah, he was ready!

His arms locked around her, and he gave some soft complaining sound that was very like him, like it’s just too late now, or something, or God forgive me. She could all but hear the words.

She pulled him down on top of her, sinking deep into the sofa, smelling dust, as the waltz surged and the soprano sang on. She stretched out beneath him as he rose up, protectively, and then she felt his hand, trembling slightly in a beguiling fashion, as it ripped up the flannel and felt her naked belly and then her naked thigh.

“You know what else is there,” she whispered, and she pulled him down hard again. But his hand went before him, pushing gently into her, awakening her, rather like setting off a burglar alarm, and she felt her own juices slipping between her legs.

“Come on, I can’t hold back,” she said, feeling the heat flood her face. “Give it to me.” It probably sounded savage, but she couldn’t play little girl a moment more. He went into her, hurting her deliriously, and then began the piston motion that made her throw back her head and almost scream. “Yes, yes, yes.”

“OK, Molly Bloom!” he cried out in a hoarse whisper, and then she came and came and came-gritting her teeth, scarce able to stand it, moaning, and then screaming with her lips shut-and so did he.

She lay to one side, out of breath, wet all over as if she were Ophelia and they had just found her in the flower-strewn stream. Her hand was caught in his hair, pulling it too hard maybe. And then a shrieking sound shocked her and she opened her eyes.

Someone had torn the needle from the Victrola record. She turned, just as he did, and she stared at the bent little figure of Eugenia, the black maid, standing grimly beside the table, her arms folded, her chin jutting.

And quite suddenly there was no Victrola. The sofa was damask. The dim lights were electric.

And Eugenia was standing by nothing, having merely taken a righteous position, dead opposite to them, as they lay tangled on the sofa, and she said:

“Mr. Mike, what do you think you are doing with that child!”

He was baffled, distressed, ashamed, confused, probably ready to commit suicide. He climbed up off her, tightening the string of his cotton pajamas, and staring at Eugenia and then at her.

It was time to be a Mayfair. Time to be Julien’s great-great-granddaughter. She stood up and went towards the old woman.

“You want to keep your job in this house, Eugenia? Then go back up to your room now and shut the door.”

The old woman’s dark wrinkled face froze for an instant in conscious outrage, and then softened as Mona looked right into her eyes. “Do as I tell you. There’s nothing here to worry about. Mona is doing what Mona wants. And Mona is good for Uncle Michael and you know it! Now go!”

Was she spellbound, or merely overwhelmed? It didn’t matter. Witch power was witch power. The woman gave in. They always gave in. It was almost a cowardly thing, to make them do her bidding, staring them down this way. But she had to do it.

Eugenia lowered her gaze uncertainly and hurried from the room, with a crazy, twisted neurotic gait, and went rustling up the stairs. What a surprise that she could do it so fast.

And there was Michael sitting back on the sofa, staring at her with his eyes narrow now, and very calm, as though trying to recall what happened, blinking a little to show his confusion. “Christ, Mona,” he whispered.

“It’s done, Uncle Michael,” she said. And suddenly her voice failed her! Her strength was failing her. She heard the catch as she spoke again, she felt the quaver. “Now, let me go up to bed with you,” she said, almost breaking down. “Because I am really really sort of scared.”

They lay in the big bed in the dark. She was staring at the pleated satin of the half tester, wondering what pattern Mary Beth had once looked at. He was quiet beside her, druggy and worn out. The door was locked.

“You awake?” she whispered. She wanted so badly to ask him what he had seen. But she didn’t dare. She held the picture of the double parlor in her mind, like a sacred sepia photograph-hadn’t she seen such pictures, with the gasoliers, and those very chairs?

“Can’t happen again, honey,” he said groggily. “Never, never again.” He nestled her close to him, but he was very sleepy, and his heart was laboring just a little now, just a little but it was OK.

“If you say so, Uncle Michael,” she whispered. “But I wish I had something to say about it.” In Mary Beth’s bed, in Deirdre’s bed. She snuggled close, feeling the warmth of his hand now, lying idly on her breast.

“Honey,” he whispered. “What was that waltz? Was that Verdi? La Traviata? It sounded like it was but…” and then he was gone.

She lay there smiling in the darkness. He’d heard it! He’d been there with her. She turned to him and kissed his cheek, carefully so he didn’t waken, and then she slept against his chest, one arm slipped beneath his shirt against his warm skin.