The witching hour

Twenty-three

The Story of Deirdre Mayfair

Revised Completely 1989

I arrived in New Orleans in July of 1958, and immediately checked into a small, informal French Quarter hotel. I then proceeded to meet with our ablest professional investigators, and to consult some public records, and to satisfy myself upon other points.

Over the years we had acquired the names of several people close to the Mayfair family. I attempted contact. With Richard Llewellyn I was quite successful, as has already been described, and this report alone occupied me for days.

I also managed “to run into” a young lay teacher from St. Rose de Lima’s who had known Deirdre during her months there, and more or less clarified the reasons for the expulsion. Tragically this young woman believed Deirdre to have had an affair with “an older man” and to have been a vile and deceitful girl. Other girls had known of the Mayfair emerald. It was concluded that Deirdre had stolen it from her aunt. For why else would the child have had such a valuable jewel at school?

The more I talked with the woman the more I realized that Deirdre’s aura of sensuality had made an impression on those around her. “She was so … mature, you know. A young girl has no business really having enormous breasts like that at the age of sixteen.”

Poor Deirdre. I found myself on the verge of asking whether or not the teacher thought mutilation was appropriate in these circumstances, then terminated the interview. I went back to the hotel, drank a stiff brandy, and lectured myself on the dangers of becoming emotionally involved.

Unfortunately I was no less emotional when I visited the Garden District the following day, and the day after that, during which time I spent hours walking through the quiet streets and observing the First Street house from all angles. After years of reading of this place and its inhabitants, I found this extremely exciting. But if ever a house exuded an atmosphere of evil, it was this house.

Why? I asked myself.

By this time it was extremely neglected. The violet paint had faded from the masonry. Weeds and tiny ferns grew in crevices on the parapets. Flowering vines covered the side galleries so that the ornamental ironwork was scarcely visible, and the wild cherry laurels screened the garden from view.

Nevertheless it ought to have been romantic. Yet in the heavy summer heat, with the burnished sun shining drowsily and dustily through the trees, the place looked damp and dark and decidedly unpleasant. During the idle hours that I stood contemplating it, I noted that passersby invariably crossed the street when they approached it. And though its flagstone walk was slick with moss and cracked from the roots of the oak trees, so were other sidewalks in the area which people did not seek to avoid.

Something evil lived in this house, lived and breathed as it were, and waited, and perhaps mourned.

Accusing myself again, and with reason, of being overemotional, I defined my terms. This something was evil, because it was destructive. It “lived and breathed” in the sense that it influenced the environment and its presence could be felt. As for my belief that this “something” was in mourning, I needed only to remind myself that no workman had made any repairs on the place since Stella’s death. Since Stella’s death the decline had been steady and unbroken. Did not the thing want the house to rot even as Stella’s body decayed in the grave?

Ah, so many unanswered questions. I went to the Lafayette Cemetery and visited the Mayfair tomb. A kindly caretaker volunteered the information that there were always fresh flowers in the stone vases before the face of the crypt, though no one ever saw the person who put them there.

“Do you think it is some old lover of Stella Mayfair’s?” I asked.

“Oh, no,” said the elderly man, with a cracking laugh. “Good heavens, no. It’s him, that’s who it is, the Mayfair ghost. He’s the one that puts those flowers there. And you want to know something? Sometimes he takes them off the altar at the chapel. You know, the chapel, down there on Prytania and Third? Father Morgan came here one afternoon just steaming. Seems he had just put out the gladiolus, and there they were in the vases before the Mayfair grave. He went by and rang the bell over there on First Street. I heard Miss Carl told him to go to hell.” The man laughed and laughed at such an idea … somebody telling a priest to go to hell.

Renting a car, I drove down the river road to Riverbend and explored what was left of the plantation, and then I called our undercover society investigator, Juliette Milton, and invited her to lunch.

She was more than happy to provide me with an introduction to Beatrice Mayfair. Beatrice agreed to meet me for lunch, accepting without the slightest question my superficial explanation that I was interested in southern history and the history of the Mayfair family.

Beatrice Mayfair was thirty-five years old, an attractively dressed dark-haired woman with a charming blend of southern and New Orleans (Brooklyn, Boston) accent, and something of a “rebel” as far as the family was concerned.

For three hours she talked to me nonstop at Galatoire’s, pouring out all sorts of little stories about the Mayfair family, and verifying what I had already suspected, that little or nothing was known in the present time about the family’s remote past. It was the most vague sort of legend, in which names were confused, and scandal had become near preposterous.

Beatrice didn’t know who built Riverbend, or when. Or even who had built First Street. She thought Julien had built it. As for stories of ghosts and legends of purses full of coins, she had believed all that when she was young, but not now. Her mother had been born at First Street (this woman, Alice Mayfair, was the second to the last daughter of Rémy Mayfair; Millie Dear, or Miss Millie as she was known, was Rémy’s youngest child, and Beatrice’s aunt) and she had said some awfully strange things about that house. But she’d left it when she was only seventeen to marry Aldrich Mayfair, a great-grandson of Maurice Mayfair, and Aldrich didn’t like Beatrice’s mother to talk about that house.

“Both my parents are so secretive,” said Beatrice. “I don’t think my dad really remembers anything anymore. He’s past eighty, and my mother just won’t tell me things. I myself didn’t marry a Mayfair, you know. My husband knows nothing about the family, really.” (Note: Beatrice’s husband died of throat cancer in the seventies.) “I don’t remember Mary Beth. I was only two years old when she died. I have some pictures of myself at her feet at one of the reunions, you know, with all the other little Mayfair babies. But I remember Stella. Oh, I loved Stella. I loved her so.

“It kills me not to be able to go up there. Years ago I stopped visiting Aunt Millie Dear. She’s sweet, but she doesn’t really know who I am. Every time I have to say, I’m Alice’s daughter, Rémy’s granddaughter. She remembers for a little while and then blanks out. And Carlotta doesn’t really want me there. She doesn’t want anyone there. She’s simply awful. She killed that house! She drove all the life out of it. I don’t care what anyone else says, she’s to blame.”

“Do you believe the house is haunted, that there’s something evil perhaps … ”

“Oh! Carlotta. She’s evil! But you know, if it’s that sort of thing you’re after, well, it’s too bad you couldn’t have talked to Amanda Grady Mayfair. She was Cortland’s wife. She’s been dead for years. She believed some fantastic things! But it was interesting actually … Well, in a way. They said that was why she left Cortland. She said Cortland knew the house was haunted. That he could see and talk to spirits. I was always shocked that a grown woman would believe things like that! But she became completely convinced of some sort of Satanic plot. I think Stella caused all that, inadvertently. I was too young then to really know. But Stella was no evil person! No voodoo queen. Stella went to bed with anybody and everybody, and if that’s witchcraft, well, half the city of New Orleans ought to be burnt at the stake.”

… And so on it went, the gossip becoming slightly more intimate and reckless as Beatrice continued to pick at her food and smoke Pall Mall cigarettes.

“Deirdre’s oversexed,” she said, “that’s all that’s wrong with her. She’s been ridiculously sheltered. No wonder she takes up with strange men. I’m relying upon Cortland to take care of Deirdre. Cortland has become the venerable elder of the family. And he is certainly the only one who can stand up to Carlotta. Now, that’s a witch in my book. Carlotta. She gives me the shivers. They ought to get Deirdre away from her.”

Indeed, there was already some talk about a school in Texas, a little university where Deirdre might go in the fall. It seemed that Rhonda Mayfair, a great-granddaughter of Suzette’s sister Marianne (this was an aunt of Cortland’s), had married a young man in Texas who taught at this school. It was in fact a small state school for women, heavily endowed, and with many of the traditions and accoutrements of an expensive private school. The whole question was, would that awful Carlotta let Deirdre go. “Now, Carlotta. That is a witch!”

Once more, Beatrice became quite worked up on the subject of Carlotta, her criticisms including Carlotta’s style of dressing (business suits) and style of talking (businesslike), when abruptly she leaned across the table and said:

“And you know that witch killed Irwin Dandrich, don’t you?”

Not only did I not know this, I had never heard the faintest whisper of such a thing. It had been reported to us in 1952 that Dandrich died of a heart attack in his apartment some time after four in the afternoon. It had been well-known that he had a heart condition.

“I talked to him,” Beatrice said, her manner one of great self-importance and thinly concealed drama. “I talked to him the day he died. He said Carlotta had called. Carlotta had accused him of spying on the family, and had said, ‘Well, if you want to know about us, come up here to First Street. I’ll tell you more than you’ll ever want to hear.’ I told him not to go. I said: ‘She’ll sue you. She’ll do something terrible to you. She’s out of her mind.’ But he wouldn’t listen to me. ‘I’m going to see that house for myself,’ he said. ‘Nobody I know has been in it since Stella died.’ I made him promise to call me as soon as he got home. Well, he never did call me. He died that very afternoon. She poisoned him. I know she did. She poisoned him. And they said it was a heart attack when they found him. She poisoned him but she gave it to him so he could go home on his own steam and die in his own bed.”

“What makes you so certain?” I asked.

“Because it isn’t the first time something like that has happened. Deirdre told Cortland there was a dead body in the attic of the house at First Street. Yes, a dead body.”

“Cortland told you this?”

She nodded gravely. “Poor Deirdre. She tells these doctors things like that and they give her shock treatment! Cortland thinks she’s seeing things!” She shook her head. “That’s Cortland. He believes the house is haunted, that there are ghosts up there you can talk to! But a body in the attic? Oh, no, he won’t believe in that!” She laughed softly, then became extremely serious. “But I’ll bet it’s true. I remember something about a young man who disappeared right before Stella died. I heard about it years later. Aunt Millie Dear said something about it to my cousin, Angela. Later on, Dandrich told me about it. The police were looking for him. Private detectives were looking. A Texan from England, Irwin said, who had actually spent the night with Stella, and then just disappeared.

“I’ll tell you who else knew about it. Amanda knew about it. Last time I saw her in New York we were rehashing the whole thing, and she said, ‘And what about that man who strangely disappeared!’ Of course she connected it with Cornell, you know the one who died in the hotel downtown after he called on Carlotta. I tell you, she poisons them and they go home and die afterwards. It’s one of those chemicals with a delayed effect. This Texan was some sort of historian from England. Knew about our family’s past-”

Suddenly she made a connection. I was a historian from England. She laughed. “Mr. Lightner, you better watch your step!” she said. She sat back laughing softly to herself.

“I suppose you’re right. But you don’t really believe all this, do you, Miss Mayfair?”

She thought for a moment. “Well, I do and I don’t.” Again, she laughed. “I wouldn’t put anything past Carlotta. But if the truth be known, the woman’s too dull to actually poison somebody. But I thought about it! I thought about it when Irwin Dandrich died. I loved Irwin. And he did die right after he went to see Carlotta. I hope Deirdre goes to college in Texas. And if Carlotta invites you up for tea, don’t go!”

“About the ghost particularly … ” I said. (Throughout this interview, it was rarely necessary for me to complete a sentence.)

“Oh, which one! There’s the ghost of Julien-everybody’s seen that ghost. I thought I saw it once. And then there’s the spook that throws over people’s ladders. That’s a regular invisible man.”

“But isn’t there one whom they call ‘the man’?”

She had never heard that expression. But I ought to talk to Cortland. That is, if Cortland would talk to me. Cortland didn’t like outsiders asking him questions. Cortland lived in a family world.

We parted ways at the corner as I helped her into her taxi. “If you do talk to Cortland,” she said, “don’t tell him you talked to me. He thinks I’m an awful gossip. But do ask him about that Texan. You never know what he might say.”

As soon as the cab drove away, I called Juliette Milton, our society spy.

“Don’t ever go near the house,” I said. “Don’t ever have anything to do personally with Carlotta Mayfair. Don’t ever go to lunch again with Beatrice. We’ll give you a handsome check. Simply bow out.”

“But what did I do? What did I say? Beatrice is an impossible gossip. She tells everyone those stories. I haven’t repeated anything that wasn’t common knowledge.”

“You’ve done a fine job. But there are dangers. Definite dangers. Just do as I say.”

“Oh, she told you that about Carlotta killing people. That’s nonsense. Carlotta’s an old stick. To hear her tell it, Carlotta went to New York and killed Deirdre’s father, Sean Lacy. Now, that is sheer nonsense!”

I repeated my warnings, or orders, for what they were worth.

The following day I drove out to Metairie, parked my car, and took a walk in the quiet streets around Cortland’s house. Except for the large oak trees and the soft velvet green of the grass, the neighborhood had nothing of the atmosphere of New Orleans. It might as well have been a rich suburb near Houston, Texas, or Oklahoma City. Very beautiful, very restful, very seemingly safe. I saw nothing of Deirdre. I hoped she was happy in this wholesome place.

I was convinced that I must see her from afar before I attempted to speak to her. In the meantime, I tried to make direct contact with Cortland, but he did not return my calls. Finally his secretary told me he did not want to talk to me, that he had heard I’d been talking to his cousins and he wished that I would leave the family alone.

I was undecided as to whether I should press the matter with Cortland. Same old questions that always plague us at such junctures-what were my obligations, my goals? I left the message finally that I had a great deal of information about the Mayfair family, going back to the 1600s, and would welcome an interview. I never received a response.

The following week, I learned from Juliette Milton that Deirdre had just left for Texas Woman’s University in Denton, Texas, where Rhonda Mayfair’s husband, Ellis Clement, taught English to small classes of well-bred girls. Carlotta was absolutely against it; it had been done without her permission, and Carlotta was not speaking to Cortland.

Cortland had driven Deirdre to Texas, and remained long enough to see that she was comfortable in the home of Rhonda Mayfair and Ellis Clement, and then came home.

It was not difficult for us to ascertain that Deirdre had been admitted as a “special student,” educated at home. She had been assigned a private room in the freshman dormitory, and was registered for a full schedule of routine course work.

I arrived in Denton two days later. Texas Woman’s University was a lovely little school situated on low rolling green hills with vine-covered brick buildings, and neatly tended lawns. It was quite impossible to believe that it was a state institution.

At the age of thirty-six, with prematurely gray hair and addicted to well-tailored linen suits, I found it effortlessly easy to roam about the campus probably passing for a faculty member to anyone who took notice. I stopped on benches for long periods to write in my notebook. I browsed in the small open library. I wandered the halls of the old buildings, exchanging pleasantries with a few elderly women teachers and with fresh-faced young women in blouses and pleated skirts.

I caught my first glimpse of Deirdre unexpectedly on the second day after my arrival. She came out of the freshman dormitory, a modest Georgian-style building, and walked for about an hour around the campus-a lovely young woman with long loose black hair, strolling idly up and down small winding paths beneath old trees. She wore the usual cotton blouse and skirt.

Seeing her at last overwhelmed me with confusion. I was glimpsing a great celebrity. And as I followed her, at a remove, I suffered unanticipated agonies over what I was doing. Should I leave this woman alone? Should I tell her what I knew of her early history? What right had I to be here?

In silence, I watched her return to her dormitory. The following morning, I followed her to the first of her classes, and then afterwards into a large basement canteen area where she drank coffee alone at a small table and put nickels into the jukebox over and over to play one selection repeatedly-a mournful Gershwin tune sung by Nina Simone.

It seemed to me she was enjoying her freedom. She read for a while, then sat looking around her. I found myself utterly unable to move from the chair and go towards her. I dreaded frightening her. How terrible to discover that one is being followed. I left before she did and went back to my little downtown hotel.

That afternoon, I again wandered the campus, and as soon as I approached her dormitory, she appeared. This time she wore a white cotton dress with short sleeves and a beautifully fitted bodice, and a rather loose billowy skirt.

Once again, she appeared to be walking aimlessly; however this time she took an unexpected turn towards the back of the campus, so to speak, away from the groomed lawns and the traffic, and I soon found myself following her into a large, deeply neglected botanical garden-a place so shadowy and wild and overgrown that I became fearful for her as she proceeded, way ahead of me, along the uneven path.

At last the large stands of bamboo blotted out all signs of the distant dormitories, and all noise from the even more distant streets. The air felt heavy as it feels in New Orleans, yet slightly more dry.

I came down a small walkway over a little bridge, and looked up to see Deirdre facing me as she stood quite still beneath a large flowering tree. She lifted her right hand and beckoned for me to come closer. Were my eyes deceiving me? No. She was staring straight at me.

“Mr. Lightner,” she said, “what is it you want?” Her voice was low, and faintly tremulous. She seemed neither angry nor afraid. I was unable to answer her. I realized suddenly she was wearing the Mayfair emerald around her neck. It must have been under her dress when she came out of the dormitory. Now it was plainly in view.

A tiny alarm sounded inside me. I struggled to say something simple and honest and thoughtful. Instead, I said, “I’ve been following you, Deirdre.”

“Yes,” she said, “I know.”

She turned her back to me, beckoning for me to follow, and went down a narrow overgrown set of steps to a near secret place where cement benches formed a circle, all but hidden from the main path. The bamboo was crackling faintly in the breeze. The smell of the nearby pond was rank. But the spot had an undeniable beauty to it.

She settled on the bench, her dress a shining whiteness in the shadows, the emerald flashing against her breast.

Danger, Lightner, I said to myself. You are in danger.

“Mr. Lightner,” she said, looking up as I sat opposite, “just tell me what you want!”

“Deirdre, I know many things,” I said. “Things about you and your mother, and your mother’s mother, and about her mother before her. History, secrets, gossip, genealogies … all sorts of things really. In a house in Amsterdam there is a portrait of a woman, your ancestor. Her name was Deborah. She was the one who bought that emerald from a jeweler in Holland hundreds of years ago.”

None of this seemed to surprise her. She was studying me, obviously scanning for lies and ill intentions. I myself was unaccountably shaken. I was talking to Deirdre Mayfair. I was sitting with Deirdre Mayfair at last.

“Deirdre,” I said, “tell me if you want to know what I know. Do you want to see the letters of a man who loved your ancestor, Deborah? Do you want to hear how she died in France, and how her daughter came across the sea to Saint-Domingue? On the day she died, Lasher brought a storm to the village … ”

I stopped. It was as if the words had dried up in my mouth. Her face had undergone a shocking change. For a moment I thought it was rage that had overwhelmed her. Then I realized it was some consuming inner struggle.

“Mr. Lightner,” she whispered, “I don’t want to know. I want to forget what I do know. I came here to get away.”

“Ah.” I said nothing for a moment.

I could feel her growing more calm. I was the one at a loss, quite completely. Then she said:

“Mr. Lightner”-her voice very steady yet infused with emotion-“my aunt says that you study us because you believe we are special people. That you would help the evil in us, out of curiosity, if you could. No, don’t misunderstand me. She means that by talking about the evil, you would feed it. By studying it, you would give it more life.” Her soft blue eyes pleaded for my understanding. How remarkably poised she seemed; how surprisingly calm.

“I understand your aunt’s point of view,” I said. In fact, I was amazed. Amazed that Carlotta Mayfair knew who we were, or understood even that much of our purpose. And then I thought of Stuart. Stuart must have spoken to her. There was the proof of it. This, and a thousand other thoughts were crowding my brain.

“It’s like the spiritualists, Mr. Lightner,” Deirdre said in the same polite sympathetic manner. “They want to speak with the spirits of dead ancestors; and in spite of all their good intentions, they merely strengthen demons about whom they understand nothing … ”

“Yes, I know what you’re saying, believe me I know. I wanted only to give you the information, to let you know that if you … ”

“But you see, I don’t want it. I want to put the past behind me.” Her voice faltered slightly. “I want never to go home again.”

“Very well then,” I said. “I understand perfectly. But will you do this for me? Memorize my name. Take this card from me. Memorize the phone numbers on it. Call me if ever you need me.”

She took the card from me. She studied it for a length of time and then slipped it into her pocket.

I found myself looking at her in silence, looking into her large innocent blue eyes, and trying not to dwell upon the beauty of her young body, her exquisitely molded breasts in the cotton dress. Her face seemed full of sadness to me in the shadows.

“He’s the devil, Mr. Lightner,” she whispered. “He really is.”

“Then why are you wearing the emerald, my dear?” I asked her impulsively.

A smile came over her face. She reached for it. closing her right hand around it, and then pulled hard on it so the chain broke. “For one very definite reason, Mr. Lightner. It was the simplest way to bring it here, and I mean to give it to you.” She reached out and dropped it in my hand.

I looked down at it, scarce believing that I was holding the thing Off the top of my head, I said, “He’ll kill me, you know. He’ll kill me and he’ll take it back.”

“No, he can’t do that!” she said. She stared at me blankly, in shock.

“Of course he can,” I said. But I was ashamed that I’d made such a statement. “Deirdre, let me tell you what I know about this spirit. Let me tell you what I know about others who see such things. You are not alone in this. You needn’t fight it alone.”

“Oh God,” she whispered. She closed her eyes for an instant. “He can’t do that,” she said again, but there was no conviction. “I don’t believe he can do something like that.”

“I’ll take my chances with him,” I said. “I’ll take the emerald. Some people have weapons of their own, so to speak. I can help you understand your weapons. Does your aunt do this? Tell me what you want of me.”

“That you go away,” she said miserably. “That you … that you … never speak to me about these things again.”

“Deirdre, can he make you see him when you don’t want him to come?”

“I want you to stop it, Mr. Lightner. If I don’t think of him, if I don’t speak of him”-she raised her hands to her temples-“if I refuse to look at him, maybe.… ”

“What do you want? For yourself.”

“Life, Mr. Lightner. Normal life. You can’t imagine what the words mean to me! Normal life. Life like they have, the girls over there in the dormitory, life with teddy bears and boyfriends and kissing in the back of cars. Just life!”

She was now so upset that I was fast becoming upset. And all this was so unforgivably dangerous. And yet she’d put this thing in my hand! I felt of it, rubbing my thumb across it. It was so cold, so hard.

“I’m sorry, Deirdre, I’m so sorry I disturbed you. I’m so sorry … ”

“Mr. Lightner, can’t you make him go away! Can’t you people do that? My aunt says no, only the priest can do it, but the priest doesn’t believe in him, Mr. Lightner. And you can’t exorcise a demon when you have no faith.”

“He doesn’t show himself to the priest, does he, Deirdre?”

“No,” she said bitterly with a trace of a smile. “What good would if do if he did? He’s no lowly spirit who can be driven off with holy water and Hail Marys. He makes fools of them.”

She had begun to cry. She reached for the emerald and pulled it by its chain from my fingers, and then flung it as far as she could through the underbrush. I heard it strike water, with a dull short sound. She was shaking violently. “It’ll come back,” she said. “It will come back! It always comes back.”

“Maybe you can exorcise him!” I said. “You and only you.”

“Oh, yes, that’s what she says, that’s what she always said. ‘Don’t look at him, don’t speak to him, don’t let him touch you!’ But he always comes back. He doesn’t ask my permission! And … ”

“Yes.”

“When I’m lonely, when I’m miserable … ”

“He’s there.”

“Yes, he’s there.”

This girl was in agony. Something had to be done!

“And what if he does come, Deirdre? What I am saying is, what if you do not fight him, and you let him come, let him be visible. What then?”

Stunned and hurt she looked at me. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“I know it’s driving you mad to fight him. What happens if you don’t fight him?”

“I die,” she answered. “And the world dies around me, and there’s only him.” She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

How long she has lived with this misery, I thought. And how strong she is, and so helpless and so afraid.

“Yes, Mr. Lightner, that’s true,” she said. “I am afraid. But I am not going to die. I’m going to fight him. And I’m going to win. You’re going to leave me. You’re never going to come near me again. And I’m never going to say his name again, or look at him, or invite him to come. And he’ll leave me. He’ll go away. He’ll find someone else to see him. Someone … to love.”

“Does he love you, Deirdre?”

“Yes,” she whispered. It was growing dark. I could no longer see her features clearly.

“What does he want, Deirdre?” I asked.

“You know what he wants!” she answered. “He wants me, Mr. Lightner. The same thing you want! Because I make him come through.”

She took a little knot of handkerchief out of her pocket and wiped at her nose. “He told me you were coming,” she said. “He said something strange, something I can’t remember. It was like a curse, what he said. It was ‘I shall eat the meat and drink the wine and have the woman when he is moldering in the grave.’ ”

“I’ve heard those words before,” I answered.

“I want you to go away,” she said. “You’re a nice man. I like you. I don’t want him to hurt you. I’ll tell him that he mustn’t-” She stopped, confused.

“Deirdre, I believe I can help you … ”

“No!”

“I can help you fight him if that’s your decision. I know people in England who … ”

“No!”

I waited, then said softly, “If you ever need my help, call me.” She didn’t answer. I could feel her utter exhaustion. Her near despair. I told her where I was staying in Denton, that I would be there until tomorrow, and that if I didn’t hear from her I would go. I felt an utter failure, but I could not hurt her any more! I gazed off into the whispering bamboo. It was getting darker and darker. And there were no lights in this rank garden.

“But your aunt is wrong about us,” I said, unsure of her attention. I stared up at the little bit of sky above which was now quite white. “We want to tell you what we know. We want to give you what we have. It’s true we care about you because you are a special person, but we care far more about you than we care about him. You could come to our house in London. Stay there as long as you like. We’ll introduce you to others who’ve seen such things, battled them. We’ll help you. And who knows, perhaps we can somehow make him go away. And any time you want to go, we’ll help you to go.” (She didn’t answer.) “You know I’m speaking the truth,” I said. “And I know that you know.”

I looked at her, quite afraid to see the pain in her face. She was staring at me exactly the way she had been before, her eyes sad and glazed with tears, and her hands limp in her lap. And directly behind her, he stood, not even an inch from her, brilliantly realized, staring with his brown eyes at me.

I cried out before I could stop myself. Like a fool, I leapt to my feet.

“What is it!” she cried. She was terrified. She sprang up off the bench and threw herself in my arms. “Tell me! What is it?”

He was gone. A gust of heated breeze moved the towering shoots of bamboo. Nothing but shadows there. Nothing but the rank closeness of the garden. And a gradual drop in temperature. As if the door to a furnace room had been swung shut.

I closed my eyes, holding her as firmly as I could, trying not to shake right out of my shoes, and to comfort her, while I memorized what I had seen. A malicious young man, smiling coldly as he stood behind her, clothes prim and dark and without detail as if the entire energy of the being were absorbed in the lustrous eyes and the white teeth and the gleaming skin. Otherwise he had been the man whom so many others had described.

She was now quite hysterical. Her hand was clamped over her mouth, and she was swallowing her sobs. She pushed away from me roughly. And ran up the small overgrown stairs to the path.

“Deirdre!” I called out. But she was already out of sight in the darkness. I glimpsed a smear of white through the distant trees, and then I did not even hear her footfall any longer.

I was alone in the old botanical garden, and it was dark, and I was mortally afraid for the first time in my life. I was so afraid that I became angry. I started to follow her, or rather the path she had taken, and I forced myself not to run, but to take one firm step after another until at last I saw the distant lights of the dormitories, and the service road behind them, and heard the traffic, and felt once again that I was safe.

Entering the freshman dormitory, I inquired of the gray-haired woman at the desk as to whether Deirdre Mayfair had just come in. She had. Safe and sound, I thought.

“It’s supper now, sir. You can leave a message if you like.”

“Yes, of course, I’ll call her later.” I took out a small plain envelope, wrote Deirdre’s name on it, then wrote a note explaining once more that I was at the hotel if she wished to contact me, and placing my card in the envelope with the note, I sealed the envelope and gave it to the woman for delivery, and went out.

Without mishap I reached the hotel, went to my room, and rang London. It was an hour before my call could be put through, during which time I lay there on the bed, with the phone beside me, and all I could think was, I’ve seen him. I’ve seen “the man.” I’ve seen “the man” for myself. I’ve seen what Petyr saw and what Arthur saw. I’ve seen Lasher with my own eyes.

Scott Reynolds, our director, was calm but adamant when I finally made the connection.

“Get the hell out of there. Come home.”

“Take a deep breath, Scott. I haven’t come this far to be frightened off by a spirit we have studied from afar for three hundred years.”

“This is how you use your own judgment, Aaron? You who know the history of the Mayfair Witches from beginning to end? The thing isn’t trying to frighten you. It’s trying to entice you. It wants you to torment the girl with your inquiries. It’s losing her, and you’re its hope of getting her back. The aunt, whatever else she may be, is on to the truth. You make that girl talk to you about what she’s been through and you’ll give that spirit the energy it wants.”

“I’m not trying to make her do anything, Scott. But I don’t think she is winning her battle. I’m going back to New Orleans. I want to be near at hand.”

Scott was on the verge of ordering me to leave when I pulled rank. I was older than he was. I had declined the appointment as director. Hence he’d received it. I was not going to be ordered off this case.

“Well, this is like offering a bromide to a person who’s burning to death, but don’t drive back to New Orleans. Take the train.”

That was a surprisingly welcome suggestion. No dark dismal shoulderless roads through the Louisiana swampland. But a nice cheerful, crowded train.

The following day, I left a note for Deirdre that I would be at the Royal Court in New Orleans. I drove the rental car to Dallas and took the train back to New Orleans from there. It was only an eight-hour trip, and I was able to write in my diary the entire way.

At length I considered what had happened. The girl had renounced her history and her psychic powers. Her aunt had reared her to reject the spirit, Lasher. But for years she’d been losing the battle, quite obviously. But what if we gave her our assistance? Might the hereditary chain be broken? Might the spirit depart the family like a spirit fleeing a burning house which it has haunted for years?

Even as I wrote out these thoughts, I was dogged by my remembrance of the apparition. The thing was so powerful! It was more seemingly incarnate and powerful than any such phantom I had ever beheld. Yet it had been a fragmentary image.

In my experience only the ghosts of people who have very recently died appear with such seeming substance. For example, the ghost of a pilot killed in action may appear on the very day of his death in his sister’s parlor, and she will say after, “Why, he was so real. I could see the mud on his shoes!”

Ghosts of the long departed almost never had such density or vividness.

And discarnate entities? They could possess bodies of the living and of the dead, yes, but appear on their own with such solidity and such intensity?

This thing liked to appear, didn’t it? Of course it did. That was why so many people saw it. It liked to have a body if only for a split second. So it didn’t just speak with a soundless voice to the witch, or make an image which existed entirely in her mind. No, it made itself somehow material so that others saw it and even heard it. And with great effort-perhaps very great effort, it could make itself appear to cry or smile.

So what was the agenda of this being? To gain strength so that it might make appearances of greater and greater duration and perfection? And above all what was the meaning of the curse, which in Petyr’s letter had read: “I shall drink the wine and eat the meat and know the warmth of the woman when you are no longer even bones”?

Lastly, why was it not tormenting me or enticing me now? Had it used the energy of Deirdre to make this appearance, or my energy? (I had seen very few spirits in my life. I was not a strong medium. In fact, at that point, I had never seen an apparition which could not have been explained as some sort of illusion created by light and shadow, or an overactive mind.)

Perhaps foolishly I had the feeling that as long as I was away from Deirdre it couldn’t do me harm. What had happened with Petyr van Abel had to do with his powers of mediumship and how the thing manipulated them. I had very little of that sort of power.

But it would be a very bad mistake to underestimate the being. I needed to be on guard from here on out.

I arrived in New Orleans at eight in the evening, and strange unpleasant little things began to happen at once. I was nearly run down by a taxi outside Union Station. Then the taxi which took me to my hotel nearly collided with another car as we pulled up to the curb.

In the small lobby of the Royal Court, a drunken tourist bumped into me and then tried to start a brawl. Fortunately, his wife diverted him, apologizing repeatedly, as the bellhops assisted her in getting the man upstairs. But my shoulder was bruised from this small incident. I was shaken from the close calls in the cab.

Imagination, I thought. Yet as I climbed the stairs to my first-floor room, a weak portion of the old wooden railing came loose in my hands. I almost lost my balance. The bellhop was immediately apologetic. An hour later, as I was noting all these things in my diary, a fire broke out on the third floor of the hotel.

I stood in the cramped French Quarter street with other uncomfortable guests for the better part of an hour before it was determined that the small blaze had been put out without smoke or water damage to any other rooms. “What was the cause?” I asked. An embarrassed employee murmured something about rubbish in a storage closet, and assured me that everything was all right.

For a long time, I considered the situation. Really, all this might have been coincidence. I was unharmed, and so was everyone else involved in these little incidents, and what was required of me now was a stalwart frame of mind. I resolved to move just a little bit more slowly through the world, to look around myself with greater care, and to try to remain conscious of all that was going on around me at all times.

The night passed without any further mishap, though I slept very uneasily and woke often. And the following morning after breakfast, I called our investigative detectives in London, asked them to hire a Texas investigator and to find out as discreetly as possible what he could about Deirdre Mayfair.

I then sat down and wrote a long letter to Cortland. I explained who I was, what the Talamasca was, and how we had followed the history of the Mayfair family since the seventeenth century during which one of our representatives had rescued Deborah Mayfair from serious jeopardy in her native Donnelaith. I explained about the Rembrandt of Deborah in Amsterdam. I went on to explain that we were interested in Deborah’s descendants because they seemed to possess genuine psychic powers, manifesting in every generation, and we were desirous of making contact with the family, with a view to sharing our records with those who were interested, and in offering information to Deirdre Mayfair, who seemed to be a person deeply burdened by her ability to see a spirit who in former times was called Lasher and might still be called Lasher to this day.

“Our representative, Petyr van Abel, first glimpsed this spirit in Donnelaith in the 1600s. It has been seen countless times since in the vicinity of your home on First Street. I have only just seen it in another location, with my own eyes.”

I then copied out the identical letter to Carlotta Mayfair, and after much consideration, put down the address and phone number of my hotel. After all, what was the point of hiding behind a post office box?

I drove up to First Street, placed Carlotta’s letter in the mailbox, and then drove out to Metairie, where I put Cortland’s letter through the slot in his door. After that, I found I was overcome by foreboding, and though I went back to my hotel, I did not go up to my room. Rather I told the desk I would be in the first-floor bar, and there I remained all evening, slowly savoring a good sample of Kentucky sipping whiskey and writing in my diary about the whole affair.

The bar was small and quiet, and opened onto a charming courtyard, and though I sat with my back to this view, facing the lobby doors for reasons I cannot quite explain, I enjoyed the little place. The feeling of foreboding was slowly melting away.

At about eight o’clock, I looked up from my diary to realize that someone was standing very near my table. It was Cortland.

I had only just completed my narrative of the Mayfair file, as indicated. I had studied countless photographs of Cortland. But it was not a photograph of Cortland which came to mind as our eyes met.

The tall, black-haired man smiling down at me was the image of Julien Mayfair, who had died in 1914. The differences seemed unimportant. It was Julien with larger eyes, darker hair, and perhaps a more generous mouth. But Julien nevertheless. And quite suddenly the smile appeared grotesque. A mask.

I made a mental note of these odd thoughts, even as I invited the man to sit down.

He was wearing a linen suit, much like my own, with a pale lemon-colored shirt and pale tie.

Thank God it’s not Carlotta, I thought, at which point he said: “I don’t think you will hear from my cousin Carlotta. But I think it’s time you and I had a talk.” Very pleasant and completely insincere voice. Deeply southern but in a unique New Orleans way. The gleam in the dark eyes was charming and faintly awful.

This man either hated me or regarded me as a damnable nuisance. He turned and signaled the bartender. “Another drink for Mr. Lightner, please, and a sherry for me.”

He sat opposite me across the little marble table, his long legs crossed and turned to one side. “You don’t mind if I smoke, do you, Mr. Lightner? Thank you.” He withdrew a beautiful gold cigarette case from his pocket, laid it down, offered me a cigarette, and when I refused, lit one for himself. Again his cheerful demeanor struck me as entirely contrived. I wondered how it might appear to a normal person.

“I’m so glad you’ve come, Mr. Mayfair,” I said.

“Oh, do call me Cortland,” he said. “There are so many Mr. Mayfairs, after all.”

I felt danger emanating from him, and made a conscious effort to veil my thoughts.

“If you will call me Aaron,” I said, “I shall call you Cortland with pleasure.”

He gave a little nod. Then he threw an offhanded smile at the young woman who set down our drinks, and at once he took a sip of his sherry.

He was a compellingly attractive person. His black hair was lustrous, and there was a touch of thin mustache, dappled with gray, above his lip. It seemed the lines in his face were an embellishment. I thought of Llewellyn and his descriptions of Julien, which I had heard only a few days before. But I had to put all this out of my mind completely. I was in danger. That was the overriding intuition and the man’s subdued charm was part of it. He thought himself very attractive and very clever. And both of these things he was.

I stared at the fresh bourbon and water. And was suddenly struck by the position of his hand on his gold cigarette case only an inch from the glass. I knew, absolutely knew, this man meant to do me harm. How unexpected. I had thought it was Carlotta all along.

“Oh, excuse me,” he said with a sudden look of surprise as though he had just remembered something. “A medicine I have to take, that is, if I can find it.” He felt of his pockets, then drew something out of his coat. A small bottle of tablets. “What a nuisance,” he said, shaking his head. “Have you enjoyed your stay in New Orleans?” He turned and asked for a glass of water. “Of course you’ve been to Texas to see my niece, I know that. But you’ve been touring the city as well, no doubt. What do you think of this garden here?” He pointed to the courtyard behind him. “Quite a story about that garden. Did they tell you?”

I turned in my chair and glanced over my shoulder at the garden. I saw the uneven flagstones, a weathered fountain, and beyond, in the shadows, a man standing before the fanlight door. Tall thin man, with the light behind him. Faceless. Motionless. The chill which ran down my back was almost delicious. I continued to look at the man, and slowly the figure melted completely away.

I waited for a draft of warm air, but I felt nothing. Perhaps I was too far from the being. Or perhaps I was altogether wrong about who or what it had been.

It seemed an age passed. Then, as I turned around, Cortland said, “A woman committed suicide in that little garden. They say that the fountain turns red with her blood once a year.”

“Charming,” I said under my breath. I watched him lift his glass of water and drink half the contents. Was he swallowing his tablets? The little bottle had disappeared. I glanced at my bourbon and water. I would not have touched it for anything in this world. I looked absently at my pen, lying there beside my diary, and then placed it in my pocket. I was so utterly absorbed in everything that I saw and heard that I felt not the slightest urge to speak a word.

“Well, then, Mr. Lightner, let’s get to the point.” Again that smile, that radiant smile.

“Of course,” I said. What was I feeling? I was curiously excited. I was sitting here with Julien’s son, Cortland, and he had just slipped a drug, no doubt lethal, into my drink. He thought he was going to get away with this. The whole dark history glittered suddenly in my mind. I was in it. I wasn’t reading about it in England. I was here.

Perhaps I smiled at him. I knew that a crushing misery would follow this curious peak of emotion. The damned son of a bitch was trying to kill me.

“I’ve looked into this matter, the Talamasca, etcetera,” he said in a bright, artificial voice. “There’s nothing we can do about you people. We can’t force you to disclose your information about our family because apparently it’s entirely private, and not intended for publication or for any malicious use. We can’t force you to stop collecting it either as long as you break no laws.”

“Yes, I suppose that’s all true.”

“However we can make you and your representatives uncomfortable, very uncomfortable; and we can make it legally impossible for you to come within so many feet of us and our property. But that would be costly to us, and wouldn’t really stop you, at least not if you are what you say you are.”

He paused, took a draw off his thin dark cigarette, and glanced at the bourbon and water. “Did I order the wrong drink for you, Mr. Lightner?”

“You didn’t order any drink,” I said. “The waiter brought another of what I had been drinking all afternoon. I should have stopped you. I’ve had quite enough.”

His eyes hardened for a moment as he looked at me. In fact, his mask of a smile vanished completely. And in a moment of blankness and lack of contrivance he looked almost young.

“You shouldn’t have made that trip to Texas, Mr. Lightner,” he said coldly. “You should never have upset my niece.”

“I agree with you. I shouldn’t have upset her. I was concerned about her. I wanted to offer my help.”

“That’s very presumptuous of you, you and your London friends.” Touch of anger. Or was it simply annoyance that I wasn’t going to drink the bourbon. I looked at him for a long moment, my mind emptying itself until there was no sound intruding, no movement, no color-only his face there, and a small voice in my head telling me what I wanted to know.

“Yes, it is presumptuous, isn’t it?” I said. “But you see, it was our representative Petyr van Abel who was the father of Charlotte Mayfair, born in France in 1664. When he later journeyed to Saint-Domingue to see his daughter, he was imprisoned by her. And before your spirit, Lasher, drove him to his death on a lonely road outside of Port-au-Prince, he coupled with his own daughter Charlotte, and thereby became the father of her daughter, Jeanne Louise. That means he was grandfather of Angélique and the great-grandfather of Marie Claudette, who built Riverbend, and created the legacy which you administer for Deirdre now. Do you follow my tale?”

Clearly he was utterly incapable of a response. He sat still looking at me, the cigarette smoking in his hand. I caught no emanation of malice or anger. Watching him keenly, I went on:

“Your ancestors are the descendants of our representative, Petyr van Abel. We are linked, the Mayfair Witches and the Talamasca. And then there are other matters which bring us together after all these years. Stuart Townsend, our representative who disappeared here in New Orleans after he visited Stella in 1929. Do you remember Stuart Townsend? The case of his disappearance was never solved.”

“You are mad, Mr. Lightner,” he said with no perceptible change of expression. He drew on his cigarette and crushed it out though it was not half spent.

“That spirit of yours, Lasher-he killed Petyr van Abel,” I said calmly. “Was it Lasher whom I saw only a moment ago? Over there?” I gestured to the distant garden. “He is driving your niece out of her mind, isn’t he?” I asked.

A remarkable change had now come over Cortland. His face, beautifully framed by his dark hair, looked totally innocent in its bewilderment.

“You’re perfectly serious, aren’t you?” he asked. These were the first honest words he’d spoken since he came into the bar.

“Of course I am,” I said. “Why would I try to deceive people who can read other people’s thoughts? That would be stupid, wouldn’t it?” I looked at the glass. “Rather like you expecting me to drink this bourbon and succumb to the drug you put into it, the way Stuart Townsend did, or Cornell Mayfair after that.”

He tried to shroud his shock behind a blank, dull look. “You are making a very serious accusation,” he said under his breath.

“All this time, I thought it was Carlotta. It was never Carlotta, was it? It was you.”

“Who cares what you think!” he whispered. “How dare you say such things to me.” Then he checked his anger. He shifted slightly in his chair, his eyes holding me as he opened the cigarette case and withdrew another cigarette. His whole demeanor changed suddenly to one of honest inquiry. “What the hell do you want, Mr. Lightner!” he asked, dropping his voice earnestly. “Seriously now, sir, what do you want?”

I reflected for a moment. I had been asking myself this very question for weeks on end. What did I mean to accomplish when I went to New Orleans? What did we, and what did I, really want?

“We want to know you!” I said, rather surprised myself to hear it come out. “To know you because we know so much about you and yet we don’t know anything at all. We want to tell you what we know about you-all the bits and pieces of information we’ve collected, what we know about the deep past! We want to tell you all we know about the whole mystery of who you are and what he is. And we wish you would talk to us. We wish you would trust us and let us in! And lastly, we want to reach out to Deirdre Mayfair and say, ‘There are others like you, others who see spirits. We know you’re suffering, and we can help you. You aren’t alone.’ ”

He studied me, eyes seemingly open, his face quite beyond dissembling. Then pulling back and glancing away, he tapped off the ash of his cigarette and motioned for another drink.

“Why don’t you drink the bourbon?” I asked. “I haven’t touched it.” Again, I had surprised myself. But I let the question stand.

He looked at me. “I don’t like bourbon,” he said. “Thank you.”

“What did you put in it?” I asked.

He shrank back into his thoughts. He appeared just a little miserable. He watched as the boy set down his drink. Sherry as before, in a crystal glass.

“This is true,” he asked, looking up at me, “what you wrote in your letter, about the portrait of Deborah Mayfair in Amsterdam?”

I nodded. “We have portraits of Charlotte, Jeanne Louise, Angélique, Marie Claudette, Marguerite, Katherine, Mary Beth, Julien, Stella, Antha, and Deirdre … ”

He made a sudden impatient motion for me to stop.

“Look, I came here because of Deirdre,” I said. “I came because she’s going mad. The girl I spoke to in Texas is on the edge of breakdown.”

“Do you think you helped her?”

“No, and I deeply regret that I didn’t. If you don’t want contact with us, I understand. Why the hell should you? But we can help Deirdre. We really can.”

No answer. He drank the sherry. I tried to see this from his point of view. I couldn’t. I’d never tried to poison someone. I didn’t have the faintest idea of who he really was. The man I’d known in the history wasn’t this man.

“Would your father, Julien, have spoken to me?” I asked.

“Not a chance of it,” he said, looking up as though awakening from his thoughts. For a moment he looked deeply distressed. “But don’t you know from all your observations,” he asked, “that he was one of them?” Again, he seemed completely earnest, his eyes searching my face as if to assure himself that I was earnest too.

“And you’re not one of them?” I asked.

“No,” he said with great quiet emphasis, slowly shaking his head. “Not really. Not ever!” He looked sad suddenly, and when he did he looked old. “Look, spy on us if you wish. Treat us as if we were a royal family … ”

“Exactly.”

“You’re historians, that’s what my contacts in London tell me. Historians, scholars, utterly harmless, completely respectable … ”

“I’m honored.”

“But leave my niece alone. My niece has a chance for happiness now. And this thing must come to an end, you see. It must. And perhaps she can see to it that it does.”

“Is she one of them?” I asked, echoing his early intonation.

“Of course she isn’t!” he said. “That’s just the point! There is no one of them now! Don’t you see that? What’s been the theme of your study of us? Haven’t you seen the disintegration of the power? Stella wasn’t one of them either! The last one was Mary Beth. Julien-my father, that is-and then Mary Beth.”

“I’ve seen it. But what about your spectral friend? Will he allow it to come to a finish?”

“You believe in him?” He cocked his head with a faint smile, his dark eyes creasing at the edges with silent laughter. “Really, now, Mr. Lightner? Do you believe in Lasher yourself?”

“I saw him,” I said simply.

“Imagination, sir. My niece told me it was a very dark garden.”

“Oh, please. Have we come this far to say such things to each other? I saw him, Cortland. He smiled when I saw him. He made himself very substantial and vivid indeed.”

Cortland’s smile became smaller, more ironic. He raised his eyebrows and gave a little sigh. “Oh, he would like your choice of words, Mr. Lightner.”

“Can Deirdre make him go away and leave her alone?”

“Of course she can’t. But she can ignore him. She can live her life as if he weren’t there. Antha couldn’t. Stella didn’t want to. But Deirdre’s stronger than Antha, and stronger than Stella too. Deirdre has a lot of Mary Beth in her. That’s what the others often don’t realize-” He appeared to catch himself suddenly in the act of saying more than he had ever intended to say.

He stared at me for a long moment, and then he gathered up his cigarette case and his lighter and slowly rose to his feet.

“Don’t go yet,” I said, imploringly.

“Send me your history. Send it to me and I’ll read it. And then maybe we can talk again. But don’t ever approach my niece again, Mr. Lightner. Understand that I would do anything to protect her from those who mean to exploit her or hurt her. Anything at all!”

He turned to go.

“What about the drink?” I asked, rising. I gestured to the bourbon. “Suppose I call the police and I offer the contaminated drink in evidence?”

“Mr. Lightner. This is New Orleans!” He smiled and winked at me in the most charming fashion. “Now please, go home to your watchtower and your telescope and gaze at us from afar!”

I watched him leave. He walked gracefully with very long, easy steps. He glanced back when he reached the doorway and gave me a quick, agreeable wave of his hand.

I sat down, ignoring the drugged bourbon, and wrote an account of the whole affair in my diary. I then took a small bottle of aspirin out of my pocket, emptied out the tablets, and poured some of the drugged bourbon into it, and capped it and put it away.

I was about to collect my diary and pen and make for the stairs when I looked up and saw the bellhop standing in the lobby just beyond the door. He came forward. “Your bags are ready, Mr. Lightner. Your car is here.” Bright, agreeable face. Nobody had told him he was personally throwing me out of town.

“Is that so?” I said. “Well, and you packed everything?” I surveyed the two bags. My diary I had with me, of course. I went into the lobby. I could see a large old black limousine stopping up the narrow French Quarter street like a giant cork.

“That’s my car?”

“Yes sir, Mr. Cortland said to see you made the ten o’clock flight to New York. Said he’d have someone meet you at the airport with the ticket. You ought to have plenty of time.”

“Isn’t that thoughtful?” I fished into my pocket for a couple of bills, but the boy refused them.

“Mr. Cortland’s taken care of everything, sir. You’d better hurry. You don’t want to miss your plane.”

“That’s true. But I have a superstition about big black cars. Get me a taxi, and do take this for it, please.”

The taxi took me not to the airport but to the train. I managed to get a sleeper for St. Louis, and went on to New York from there. When I spoke to Scott he was adamant. This data required a reevaluation. Don’t do any more research in New York. Come home.

Halfway across the Atlantic, I became ill. By the time I reached London I was running a high fever. An ambulance was waiting to take me to hospital, and Scott was there to ride with me. I was going in and out of consciousness. “Look for poison,” I said.

Those were my last words for eight hours. When I finally came around, I was still feverish and uncomfortable, but much reassured to be alive and to discover Scott and two other good friends in the room.

“You’ve been poisoned all right, but the worst is over. Can you remember your last drink before you boarded the plane?”

“That woman,” I said.

“Tell me.”

“I was in the bar at the New York airport, had a Scotch and soda. She was stumbling alone with an impossible bag, then asked me if I’d fetch the skycap for her. She was coughing as if she were tubercular. Very unhealthy-looking creature. She sat at my table while I went for the skycap. Probably a hireling, off the streets.”

“She slipped you a poison called ricin; its from the castor bean. Very powerful, and extremely common. Same thing Cortland put in your bourbon. You’re out of the woods, but you’re going to be sick for two more days.”

“Good Lord.” My stomach was cramping again.

“They aren’t ever going to talk to us, Aaron,” Scott said. “How could they? They kill people. It’s over. At least for now.”

“They always killed people, Scott,” I said weakly. “But Deirdre Mayfair doesn’t kill people. I want my diary.” The cramps became unbearable. The doctor came in and started to prepare me for an injection. I refused.

“Aaron, he’s the head of toxicology here, impeccable reputation. We’ve checked out the nurses. Our people are here in the room.”

It was the end of the week before I could return to the Motherhouse. I could scarcely bring myself to take any nourishment. I was convinced the entire Motherhouse might soon be poisoned. What was to stop them from hiring people to put commonplace toxins in our food? The food might be poisoned before it even reached our kitchen.

And though no such thing happened, it was a year before such thoughts left me, so shaken was I by what had occurred.

A great deal of shocking news came to us from New Orleans during that year …

During my convalescence I reviewed the entire Mayfair history. I revised some of it, including the testimony of Richard Llewellyn, and a few other persons I’d seen before I went to Texas to see Deirdre.

I concluded that Cortland had done away with Stuart, and probably with Cornell. It all made sense. Yet so many mysteries remained. What was Cortland protecting when he committed these crimes? And why was he engaged in constant battle with Carlotta?

We had in the meantime heard from Carlotta Mayfair-a barrage of threatening legal letters from her law firm to ours in London, demanding that we “cease and desist” with our “invasion” of her privacy, that we make “full disclosure” of any personal information we had obtained about her and her family, “that we restrict ourselves to a safe distance of one hundred yards from any person in her family, and any piece of family property, and that we make no effort whatsoever to contact in any way shape or form, Deirdre Mayfair,” et cetera, and so forth and so on ad nauseam, none of these legal threats or demands having the slightest validity.

Our legal representatives were instructed to make no response.

We discussed the matter with the full council.

Once again, we had tried to make contact and we had been pushed back. We would continue to investigate, and for this purpose I might have a carte blanche, but no one was going near the family in the foreseeable future. “If ever again,” Reynolds added with great emphasis.

I did not argue. I could not drink a glass of milk at the time without wondering if I was going to die from it. And I could not get the memory of Cortland’s artificial smile out of my mind.

I doubled the number of investigators in New Orleans and in Texas. But I also warned these people, personally by phone, that the objects of their surveillance were hostile and potentially very dangerous. I gave each and every one of our investigators full opportunity to refuse the job.

As it turned out, I lost no investigators whatsoever. But several raised their price.

As for Juliette Milton, our socialite undercover gossip, we retired her with an unofficial pension, over her protests. We did everything we could to make her sensible that certain members of this family were capable of violence. Reluctantly, she stopped writing to us, pleading in her letter of December 10, 1958 to understand what she had done wrong. We were to hear from her again several times over the years, however. She is still living as of 1989, in an expensive boarding house for elderly people in Mobile, Alabama.

My investigators in Texas were three highly professional detectives, two of whom had once worked for the United States government; and all three were cautioned that Deirdre was never to be disturbed or frightened by what we were doing in any way.

“I am very concerned for this girl’s happiness, and for her peace of mind. But understand, she is telepathic. If you come within fifty feet of her, she is likely to know you are watching her. Please take care.”

Whether they believed me or not, they followed my instructions. They kept a safe distance, gathering information about her through the school offices and from gossiping students, from old women who worked the desk in her dormitory, and from teachers who talked freely about her over coffee. If Deirdre ever knew she was being watched, we never found out.

Deirdre did well in the fall semester at Texas Woman’s University. She made excellent grades. The girls liked her. Her teachers liked her. About every six weeks or so she signed out of the dormitory for dinner with her cousin Rhonda Mayfair and Rhonda’s husband, Professor Ellis Clement, who was Deirdre’s English teacher at this time. There is also a record of one date on December 10 with a boy named Joey Dawson, but it lasted one hour if the register is to be believed.

The same register indicates that Cortland visited Deirdre often, frequently signing her out for a Friday or Saturday night in Dallas from which she returned before the “Late Check In” time of one A.M.

We know that Deirdre went home to Metairie to Cortland’s house for Christmas, and family gossip declared that she would not even see Carlotta when Carlotta came to call.

Legal gossip supports the idea that Carlotta and Cortland were still not speaking. Carlotta would not return Cortland’s routine business calls. Acrimonious letters went back and forth between the two over the smallest financial matters concerning Deirdre.

“He’s trying to get complete control of her for her own sake,” said one secretary to a friend, “but that old woman won’t have it. She’s threatening to take him to court.”

Whatever the particulars of that struggle, we know that Deirdre began to deteriorate during the spring term. She began to miss classes. Dorm mates said she cried all night sometimes, but would not answer their knocks on her door. One evening she was picked up by the campus police in a small downtown park, apparently confused as to where she was.

Finally she was called to the dean’s office for disciplinary action. She had missed too many classes. She was put on Compulsory Attendance, and though she did manage to appear in the classroom, teachers reported her as inattentive, and possibly ill.

Finally in April, Deirdre began to suffer nausea every morning. Girls up and down the hallway could hear her struggling with her sickness in the communal washroom. The girls went to the dorm mother.

“Nobody wanted to squeal on her. We were afraid. What if she tried to hurt herself?”

When the dorm mother finally suggested she might be pregnant, Deirdre broke down sobbing, and had to be hospitalized until Cortland could come and get her, which he did on May 1.

What happened afterwards has remained a mystery to this day. The records at the new Mercy Hospital in New Orleans indicate that Deirdre was probably taken there directly upon arrival from Texas, and that she was given a private room. Gossip among the old nuns, many of whom were retired teachers from St. Alphonsus School who remembered Deirdre, quickly verified that it was Carlotta’s attending physician, Dr. Gallagher, who visited Deirdre and ascertained that yes, she was going to have a child.

“Now, this girl is going to be married,” he told the sisters. “And I don’t want anything mean being said. The father is a college professor from Denton, Texas, and he is on his way to New Orleans now.”

By the time Deirdre was taken by ambulance to First Street three weeks later, heavily sedated and with a registered nurse in attendance, the gossip was all over the Redemptorist Parish that she was pregnant and soon to be married, and that her husband, the college professor, was “a married man.”

Quite the scandal it was to those who had watched the family for generations. Old ladies whispered about it on the church steps. Deirdre Mayfair and a married man! People glanced furtively at Miss Millie and Miss Belle as they passed. Some said that Carlotta would have no part of it. But then Miss Belle and Miss Millie took Deirdre with them to Gus Mayer and there they bought her a lovely blue dress and blue satin shoes for the wedding, and a new white purse and hat.

“She was so drugged, I don’t think she knew where she was,” said one of the salesgirls. “Miss Millie made all the choices for her. She just sat there, white as a sheet, and saying ‘Yes, Aunt Millie,’ in a slurred voice.”

Juliette Milton could not resist writing to us. We received a long letter from her detailing how Beatrice Mayfair had been to First Street to see Deirdre and brought her a whole shopping bag of gifts. “Why ever did she go home to that house, instead of Cortland’s!” wrote Juliette.

There is some indication that Deirdre had little choice in the matter. Medical science in those days believed the placenta of the baby protected it from drugs injected into the mother. And nurses said that Deirdre was so heavily drugged when she left the hospital that she did not even know what was happening to her. Carlotta had come in the early afternoon on a weekday and obtained her release.

“Now, Cortland Mayfair came looking for her that very evening,” Sister Bridget Marie told me later in strictest confidence. “And was he ever fit to be tied when he discovered that child was gone!”

Legal gossip deepened the mystery. Cortland and Carlotta were screaming at each other over the phone behind the office doors. Cortland told his secretary in a rage that Carlotta thought she could keep him out of the house where he was born. Well, she was out of her mind, if she thought so!

Years later, Ryan Mayfair talked about it. “They said my grandfather was simply locked out. He went up to First Street and Carlotta met him at the gate and threatened him. She said, ‘You come in here and I’ll call the police.’ ”

On the first of July, another volley of information rocked the parish gossips. Deirdre’s future husband, the “college professor” who was leaving his wife to marry her, had been killed driving to New Orleans on the river road. His car had suffered a broken tie rod and veered to the right at great speed, striking an oak tree, whereupon it exploded into flames. Deirdre Mayfair, unmarried and not yet eighteen, was going to be giving up her baby. It was to be a family adoption, and Miss Carlotta was arranging the whole thing.

“My grandfather was outraged when he heard about the adoption,” said Ryan Mayfair many years later. “He wanted to talk to Deirdre, hear it from her own lips that she wanted to give up this child. But he still couldn’t get in the house on First Street. Finally he went to Father Lafferty, the parish priest, but Carlotta had him in her pocket. The priest was squarely on Carlotta’s side.”

All this sounds extremely tragic. It sounds as if Deirdre almost escaped the curse of First Street, if only the father of her baby, driving from Texas to marry her, had not died. For years this sad scandalous story has been repeated throughout the Redemptorist Parish. It was repeated to me as late as 1988 by Rita Mae Lonigan. There is every indication that Father Lafferty believed the story of the Texas father of the baby. And countless reports indicate that the Mayfair cousins believed it. Beatrice Mayfair believed it. Pierce Mayfair believed it. Even Rhonda Mayfair and her husband, Ellis Clement, in Denton, Texas, seemed to have believed it, or at least the vague version which they were eventually told.

But the story wasn’t true.

Almost from the beginning, our investigators shook their heads in puzzlement. College professor with Deirdre Mayfair? Who? Constant surveillance ruled out completely the possibility of Rhonda Mayfair’s husband, Ellis Clement. He scarcely knew Deirdre.

Indeed, there never was any such man in Denton, Texas, who dated Deirdre Mayfair, or was ever observed by anyone in her company. And there was no college professor employed at that university or any other school in the vicinity who died in a car crash on the Louisiana river road. Indeed, no one died in such a crash on the river road in 1959, as far as we know.

Did an even more scandalous and tragic story lie behind this fabrication? We were slow in putting the pieces together. Indeed, by the time we learned of the River Road car accident, the adoption of Deirdre’s baby was already being legally arranged. By the time we learned that there had been no river road accident, the adoption was a fait accompli.

Later court records indicate that some time during August, Ellie Mayfair flew to New Orleans to sign adoption papers in the office of Carlotta Mayfair, though no one in the family seems to have known at the time that Ellie was there.

Graham Franklin, Ellie’s husband, told one of his business associates years later that the adoption had been a real kettle of fish. “My wife stopped speaking to her grandfather altogether. He didn’t want us to adopt Rowan. Fortunately the old bastard died before the baby was even born.”

Father Lafferty told his aging sister in the Irish Channel that the whole thing was a nightmare, but that Ellie Mayfair was a good woman and she would take the child to California where it would have a chance at a new life. All of Cortland’s grandchildren approved of the decision. It was only Cortland who was carrying on. “That girl can’t keep that baby. She’s crazy,” said the old priest. He sat at his sister’s kitchen table, eating his red beans and rice and drinking his small glass of beer. “I mean it, she’s crazy. It’s just got to be done.”

“It won’t work,” the old woman later told our representative. “You can’t escape a family curse by moving away.”

Miss Millie and Miss Belle bought beautiful bed jackets and nightgowns for Deirdre at Gus Mayer. The salesgirls asked about “poor Deirdre.”

“Oh, she is doing the best she can,” said Miss Millie. “It was a terrible, terrible thing.” Miss Belle told a woman at the chapel that Deirdre was having those “bad spells again.”

“She doesn’t even know where she is half the time!” said a grumpy Nancy, who was sweeping the walk when one of the Garden District matrons passed the gate.

What did happen behind the scenes all those months at First Street? We pressed our investigators to find out everything that they could. Only one person of whom we know saw Deirdre during the last months of her “confinement”-to use the old-fashioned term for it, which in this instance may be the correct one-but we did not interview that person until 1988.

At the time, the attending physician came and went in silence. So did the nurse who assisted Deirdre for eight hours each day.

Father Lafferty said the girl was resigned to the adoption. Beatrice Mayfair was told she couldn’t see Deirdre when she came to call, but she had a glass of wine with Millie Dear, who said the whole thing was heartbreaking indeed.

But by October 1, Cortland was desperate with worry over the situation. His secretaries report that he made continuous calls to Carlotta, that he took a taxi to First Street and was turned away over and over again. Finally on the afternoon of October 20, he told his secretary he would get into that house and see his niece even if he had to break down the door.

At five o’clock that afternoon a neighbor spotted Cortland sitting on the curbstone at First and Chestnut Streets, his clothes disheveled and blood flowing from a cut on his head.

“Get me an ambulance,” he said. “He pushed me down the stairs!”

Though the neighbor woman sat with him until the ambulance arrived, he would say nothing more. He was rushed from First Street to nearby Touro Infirmary. The intern on duty quickly ascertained that Cortland was covered with severe bruises, that his wrist was broken, and that he was bleeding from the mouth. “This man has internal injuries,” he said. He called for immediate assistance.

Cortland then grabbed the intern’s hand and told him to listen, that it was very important that he help Deirdre Mayfair, who was being held prisoner in her own home. “They’re taking her baby away from her against her will. Help her!” Then Cortland died.

A superficial postmortem indicated massive internal bleeding and severe blows to the head. When the young intern pressed for some sort of police investigation, Cortland’s sons immediately quieted him. They had talked to their cousin Carlotta Mayfair. Their father fell down the steps and then refused medical assistance, leaving the house on his own. Carlotta had never dreamed he was so badly hurt. She had not known he was sitting on the curb. She was beside herself with grief. The neighbor should have rung the bell.

At Cortland’s funeral-a huge affair out in Metairie-the family was told the same story. While Miss Belle and Miss Millie sat quietly in the background, Cortland’s son, Pierce, told everyone that Cortland had been confused when he made some vague statement to the neighbor about a man pushing him down the steps. In fact there had been no man in the First Street house who could have done such a thing. Carlotta herself saw him fall. So did Nancy, who rushed to try to catch him, but failed.

As for the adoption, Pierce was firmly behind it. His niece Ellie would give the baby exactly the environment it needed to have every chance. It was tragic that Cortland had been against the adoption, but Cortland had been eighty years old. His judgment had been impaired for some time.

The funeral proceeded, grandly and without incident, though the undertaker remembered years later that several of the cousins, older men, standing in the very rear of the room during Pierce’s “little speech” had joked bitterly and sarcastically amongst themselves. “Sure, there’s no man in that house,” one of them said. “Nooooo, no man at all. Just those nice ladies.”

“I’ve never seen a man there, have you?” And so on it went.

“Nope, no man at First Street. No sir!”

When cousins came to call on Deirdre, they were told pretty much the same story that Pierce had told at the funeral. Deirdre was too sick to see them. She hadn’t even wanted to see Cortland, she was so sick. And she didn’t know and mustn’t know that Cortland was dead.

“And look at that dark stairs,” said Millie Dear to Beatrice. “Cortland should have used the elevator. But he never would use the elevator. If he had just used the elevator, he would never have taken such a fall.”

Family legend today indicates that everyone agreed the adoption was for the best. Cortland should have stayed out of it. As Ryan Mayfair, Cortland’s grandson, said, “Poor Deirdre was no more fit to be a mother than the Madwoman of Chaillot. But I think my grandfather felt responsible. He had taken Deirdre to Texas. I think he blamed himself. He wanted to be sure she wanted to give up the baby. But maybe what Deirdre wanted wasn’t the important thing.”

At the time, I dreaded each new piece of news from Louisiana. I lay in bed at night in the Motherhouse thinking ceaselessly of Deirdre, wondering if there were not some way that we could discover what she truly wanted or felt. Scott Reynolds was more adamant than ever that we could not intervene further. Deirdre knew how to reach us. So did Cortland. So did Carlotta Mayfair, for what that was worth. There was nothing further that we could do.

Only in January of 1988, nearly thirty years later, did I learn in an interview with Deirdre’s old school friend Rita Mae Dwyer Lonigan that Deirdre had tried desperately to reach me, and failed.

In 1959, Rita Mae had only just married Jerry Lonigan of Lonigan and Sons funeral home, and when she heard that Deirdre was at home, pregnant, and had already lost the father of her baby, Rita Mae screwed up her courage and went to call. As so many others have been, she was turned away at the door, but not before she saw Deirdre at the top of the stairs. Deirdre called out to Rita Mae desperately:

“Rita Mae, they’re going to take my baby! Rita Mae, help me.” As Miss Nancy sought to force Deirdre back up to the second floor, Deirdre threw a small white card down to Rita Mae. “Contact this man. Get him to help me. Tell him they’re going to take my baby away.”

Carlotta Mayfair physically attacked Rita Mae and tried to get the card away from her, but Rita, even though her hair was being pulled and her face scratched, held it tight as she ran through a hail of leaves out the gate.

When she got home she discovered the card was almost unreadable. Carlotta had torn part of it; and Rita had inadvertently clenched the little card in the moist palm of her hand. Only the word Talamasca, and my name, handwritten on the back, could be made out.

Only in 1988, when I encountered Rita Mae at the funeral of Nancy Mayfair-and gave her a card identical to the one destroyed in 1959-did she recognize the names and call me at my hotel to report what she remembered from that long ago day.

It was heartbreaking to this investigator to learn of Deirdre’s vain plea for help. It was heartbreaking to remember those nights thirty years before when I lay in bed in London thinking, “I cannot help her, but I have to try to help her. But how do I dare to do it? And how could I possibly succeed?”

The fact is I probably could not have done anything to help Deirdre, no matter how hard I might have tried. If Cortland couldn’t stop the adoption, it is sensible to assume that I couldn’t have stopped it either. Yet in my dreams I see myself taking Deirdre out of the First Street house to London. I see her a healthy normal woman today.

The reality is utterly different.

On November 7, 1959, Deirdre gave birth at five o’clock in the morning to Rowan Mayfair, nine pounds, eight ounces, a healthy, fair-haired baby girl. Hours afterwards, emerging from the general anesthesia, Deirdre found her bed surrounded by Ellie Mayfair, Father Lafferty, and Carlotta Mayfair, and two of the Sisters of Mercy who later described the scene in detail to Sister Bridget Marie.

Father Lafferty held the baby in his arms. He explained that he had just baptized it in the Mercy Hospital chapel, naming it Rowan Mayfair. He showed her the signed baptismal certificate.

“Now kiss your baby, Deirdre,” said Father Lafferty, “and give her to Ellie. Ellie is ready to go.”

Parish gossip says that Deirdre did as she was told. She had insisted that the child have the name Mayfair and once that condition was met, she let her baby go. Crying so as she could scarce see, she kissed the baby and let Ellie Mayfair take it from her arms. Then she turned her head, sobbing, into the pillow. Father Lafferty said, “Best leave her alone.”

Over a decade later, Sister Bridget Marie explained the meaning of Rowan’s name.

“Carlotta stood godmother to the child. I believe they got some doctor off the ward to be its godfather, so determined were they to have the baptism done. And Carlotta said to Father Lafferty, the child’s to be named Rowan, and he said to her, ‘Now, you know, Carlotta Mayfair, that that is not a saint’s name. It sounds like a pagan name to me.’

“And she to him in her manner, you know the way she was, she says, ‘Father, don’t you know what the rowan tree was and that it was used to ward off witches and all manner of evil? There’s not a hut in Ireland where the woman of the house did not put up the rowan branch over the door to protect her family from witches and witchcraft, and that has been true throughout Christian times. Rowan is to be the name of this child!’ And Ellie Mayfair, the little mealymouth that she always was, just nodded her head.”

“Was it true?” I asked. “Did they put the rowan over the door in Ireland?”

Gravely Sister Bridget Marie nodded. “Lot of good that it did!”

Who is the father of Rowan Mayfair?

Routine blood typing done at the hospital indicates that the baby’s blood type matched that of Cortland Mayfair, who had died less than a month before. Allow us to repeat here that Cortland may also have been the father of Stella Mayfair, and that recent information obtained from Bellevue Hospital has at last confirmed that Antha Mayfair may have been his daughter as well.

Deirdre “went mad” before she ever left Mercy Hospital after Rowan’s birth. The nuns said she cried by the hour, men screamed in an empty room, “You killed him!” Then wandering into the hospital chapel during Mass, she shouted once more, “You killed him. You left me alone among my enemies. You betrayed me!” She had to be taken out by force, and was quickly committed to St. Ann’s Asylum, where she became catatonic by the end of the month.

“It was the invisible lover,” Sister Bridget Mane believes to this day. “She was shouting and cursing at him, don’t you know it, for he’d killed her college professor. He’d done it, because the devil wanted her for himself. The demon lover, that’s what he was, right here in the city of New Orleans. Walking the streets of the Garden District by night.”

That is a very lovely and eloquent statement, but since it is more than highly likely that the college professor never existed, what other meaning can we attach to Deirdre’s words? Was it Lasher who pushed Cortland down the staircase, or startled him so badly that he fell? And if so, why?

This is the end of the life of Deirdre Mayfair really. For seventeen years she was incarcerated in various mental institutions, given massive doses of drugs and ruthless courses of electric shock treatment, with only brief respites when she returned home, a ghost of the girl she had once been.

At last in 1976, she was brought back to First Street forever, a wide-eyed and mute invalid, in a perpetual state of alertness, yet with no connective memory at ail.

The side porch downstairs was screened in for her. For years she has been led out every day, rain or shine, to sit motionless in a rocking chair, her face turned ever so slightly towards the distant street.

“She cannot even remember from moment to moment,” said one physician. “She lives entirely in the present, in a way we simply cannot imagine. You might say there is no mind there at all.” It is a condition described in some very old people who reach the same state in advanced senility, and sit staring in geriatric hospitals throughout the world. Regardless, she is drugged heavily, to prevent bouts of “agitation,” or so her various doctors and nurses have been told.

How did Deirdre Mayfair become this “mindless idiot,” as the Irish Channel gossips call her, “this nice bunch of carrots” sitting in her chair? Shock treatments certainly contributed to it, course after course of them, given by every hospital in which she had ever stayed since 1959. Then there were the drugs-massive doses of near paralytic tranquilizers-given to her in astonishing combinations, or so the records, as we continue to gain access to them, reveal.

How does one justify such treatment? Deirdre Mayfair ceased to speak coherently as early as 1962. When not tranquilized, she screamed or cried incessantly. Now and then she broke things. Sometimes she simply lay back, with her eyes rolling up in her head, and howled.

As the years have passed, we have continued to collect information about Deirdre Mayfair. Every month or so we manage to “interview” some doctor or nurse, or other person who has been in the First Street house. But our record of what really happened remains fragmentary. Hospital files are, naturally, confidential and extremely difficult to obtain. But in at least two of the sanitariums where Deirdre was treated, we now know that no record of her treatment exists.

One of her doctors has clearly and by his own admission to an inquiring stranger destroyed his records of Deirdre’s case. Another physician retired shortly after he had treated Deirdre, leaving only a few cryptic notes in his brief file. “Incurable. Tragic. Aunt demands continued medication yet Aunt’s descriptions of behavior not credible.”

We continue, for obvious reasons, to rely upon anecdotal evidence, for our assessment of Deirdre’s history.

Though Deirdre has slumbered in a twilight induced by drugs all of her adult life, there have been countless sightings by those around her of “a mysterious brown-haired man.” Nurses in St. Ann’s Asylum claimed to have seen him-“some man going into her room! Now I know I saw that.” At a Texas hospital where she was incarcerated briefly, a doctor claimed to have seen “a mysterious visitor” who always “seemed somehow to just disappear when I wanted to question him or ask him who he was.”

At least one nurse in a northern Louisiana sanitarium insisted to her superiors that she had seen a ghost. Black orderlies in the various hospitals saw “that man all the time.” One woman told us, “He not human. I know him when I see him. I see spirits. I call them up. I know him and he know me and he don’t come near me at all.”

Most workmen cannot work on the First Street house any more today than they could in the days when Deirdre was a girl. There are the same old stories. There is even some talk of “a man around there” who doesn’t want things done.

Nevertheless some repairs are completed; air-conditioning units have been installed in some rooms, and some upgrading of the electricity has been carried out-these tasks almost invariably being done under Carlotta Mayfair’s on-site supervision.

The old gardener still comes, and he occasionally paints the rusted fence.

Otherwise First Street slumbers beneath the oak branches. The frogs sing in the night around Stella’s pool with its lily pads and wild irises. Deirdre’s wooden swing has long ago fallen from the oak at the far end of the property. The wooden seat-a mere slat of wood-lies bleached and warping in the high grass.

Many a person stopping to look at Deirdre in her rocking chair on the side porch has glimpsed “a handsome cousin” visiting her. Nurses have sometimes quit because of “that man who comes and goes like some kinda spook,” or because they kept seeing things out of the corner of their eye, or thought they were being watched.

“There’s some kind of ghost hovering near her,” said one young practical nurse who told the agency she would never, never go back to that house. “I saw him once, in the bright sunlight. Scariest thing I’ve ever seen.”

When I asked this nurse about it over lunch, she had few details to add to the story. “Just a man. A man with brown hair and brown eyes in a nice-looking coat and white shirt. But dear God, if I have ever seen anything more terrifying than that! He was just standing there in the sunlight beside her looking at me. I dropped the tray and just screamed and screamed.”

Numerous other medical persons left the service of the family abruptly. One doctor was fired off the case in 1976. We continue to track down these people, to take their testimony and record it. We try to tell them as little as we can of why we want to know what they saw and when.

What emerges from this data is a frightening possibility-that Deirdre’s mind has been destroyed to the point where she cannot control her evocation of Lasher. That is, she subconsciously gives him the power to appear near her in very convincing form. Yet she is not conscious enough to control him further, or indeed to drive him away, if on some level she does not want him there.

In sum, she is a mindless medium; a witch rendered inoperative, and at the mercy perhaps of her familiar, who is ever at hand.

There is another very distinct possibility. That Lasher is there to comfort her, to look out for her, and to keep her happy in ways perhaps that we do not understand.

In 1980, over eight years ago, I managed to obtain an article of Deirdre’s clothing, a cotton duster, or loose-fitting garment, which had been put in the dustbin in back of the house. I took this garment back with me to England, and placed it in the hands of Lauren Grant, the most powerful psychometric in the order today.

Lauren knew nothing per se about the Mayfair Witches, but one cannot rule out telepathy in such situations. I tried to keep out of it with my own thoughts as much as I could.

“I see happiness,” she said. “This is the garment of someone who is blissfully happy. She lives in dreams. Dreams of green gardens and twilight skies, and exquisite sunsets. There are low-hanging branches there. There is a swing hanging from a beautiful tree. Is this a child? No, this is a woman. There is a warm breeze.” Lauren massaged the garment ever more tightly, pressing its fabric to her cheek. “Oh, and she has the most beautiful lover. Oh, such a lover. He looks like a picture. Steerforth out of David Copperfield, that sort of man. He’s so gentle, and when he touches her, she yields to him utterly. Who is this woman? All the world would like to be this woman. At least for a little while.”

Is that the subconscious life of Deirdre Mayfair? Deirdre herself will never tell.

In closing allow me to add a few details. Since 1976, Deirdre Mayfair, whether clothed in a white flannel nightgown or a cotton duster, has always worn the Mayfair emerald around her neck.

I have seen Deirdre myself several times from a distance since 1976. By that time, I had made three visits to New Orleans to gather information. I have returned numerous times since.

I invariably spend some time walking in the Garden District on these return visits; I have attended the funerals over the years of Miss Belle, Miss Millie, and Miss Nancy, as well as Pierce, the last of Cortland’s sons, who died of a heart attack in 1984.

At each funeral, I have seen Carlotta Mayfair. Our eyes have met. I have three times during this decade placed my card in her hand as I passed her. She has never contacted me. She has never made any more legal threats.

She is very old now, white-haired, painfully thin. Yet she still goes to work every day. She can no longer climb up on the step of the St. Charles car, so she is taken by a regular taxi. Only one black servant works in the house regularly, with the exception of Deirdre’s devoted nurse.

With each visit, I encounter some new “witness” who can tell me more about “the brown-haired man” and the mysteries surrounding First Street. The stories are all much the same. But we have indeed come to the end of Deirdre’s history, though she herself is not yet dead.

It is time to examine in detail her only child and heir, Rowan Mayfair, who has never set foot in her native city since the day she was taken away from it, six hours after her birth, on a cross-continental jet flight.

And though it is much too soon to attempt to put the information on Rowan into a coherent narrative, we have made some critically important notes from our random material, and there is considerable indication that Rowan Mayfair-who knows nothing of her family, her history, or her inheritance-may be the strongest witch the Mayfair family has ever produced.