The witching hour

Twenty-five

Rowan Mayfair

STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL THIS SUMMARY AND UPDATED 1989

SEE CONFIDENTIAL FILE: ROWAN MAYFAIR, LONDON, FOR ALL

RELATED MATERIALS.

Rowan Mayfair was adopted legally by Ellen Louise Mayfair and her husband Graham Franklin, on the date of Rowan’s birth, November 7, 1959.

At this point Rowan was taken by plane to Los Angeles, where she lived with her adopted parents until she was three years old. The family then moved to San Francisco, California, where they lived in Pacific Heights for two years.

When Rowan was five, the family made its final move to a house on the shore of Tiburon, California-across the bay from San Francisco-which had been designed by architects Trammel, Porter and Davis expressly for Graham and Ellie and their daughter. The house is a marvel of glass walls, exposed redwood beams, and modern plumbing fixtures and appliances. It includes enormous decks, its own twenty-five-foot pier, and a boat channel, which is dredged twice yearly. It commands a view of Sausalito across Richardson Bay and San Francisco to the south. Rowan lives alone in this house now.

At the time of this writing, Rowan is almost thirty years old. She is five feet ten inches tall. She has short, softly bobbed blond hair and large pale gray eyes. She is undeniably attractive, with remarkably beautiful skin, and dark straight eyebrows and dark eyelashes and an extremely beautiful mouth. Yet for the sake of comparison, it can be said that she has none of the glamour of Stella, or the sweet prettiness of Antha, or the dark sensuality of Deirdre. Rowan is delicate yet boyish; in some of her pictures, her expression-on account of her straight dark eyebrows-is reminiscent of Mary Beth.

It is my belief that she resembles Petyr van Abel, but there are definite differences. She does not have his deep-set eyes, and her blond hair is ashen rather than gold. But her face is narrow like that of Petyr van Abel; and there is a Nordic look to Rowan, just as there is to Petyr in his portraits.

Rowan appears cold to people. Yet her voice is warm, and deep and slightly husky-what is called a whiskey voice in America. People say you have to know her, really, to like her. This is strange because our investigation indicates that very few people know her. But she is almost universally liked.

Ellen Louise Mayfair was the only daughter of Sheffield, son of Cortland Mayfair. She was born in 1923, and six years old when Stella died. Ellie lived in California almost exclusively from the time that she entered Stanford University at eighteen years of age. She married Graham Franklin, a Stanford law graduate, when she was thirty-one. Graham was eight years younger than Ellie. Ellie seems to have had very little contact with her family even before she went to California, as she went away to a boarding school in Canada when she was only eight, six months after her mother’s death.

Her father, Sheffield Mayfair, seems never to have recovered from the loss of his wife, and though he visited Ellie often, taking her on shopping sprees in New York, he kept her away from home. He was the most quiet and reclusive of Cortland’s sons, and possibly the most disappointing, in that he worked doggedly in the family firm but seldom excelled or participated in important decisions. Everyone depended upon him, Cortland said after his death.

What is relevant here is that after the age of eight, Ellie saw very little of the Mayfairs, and her lifelong friends in California were people she had met there, along with a few girls from the Canadian boarding school with whom she kept in touch. We don’t know what she knew of Antha’s life and death, or even of Deirdre’s life.

Her husband, Graham Franklin, knew nothing about Ellie’s family apparently, and some of the remarks he made over the years are entirely fanciful. “She came from a great plantation down there.” “They are the sort of people who keep gold under the floorboards.” “I think they were probably descended from the buccaneers.” “Oh, my wife’s people? They were slave traders, weren’t they, honey? They all have colored blood.”

Family gossip at the time of the adoption said that Ellie had signed papers for Carlotta Mayfair saying she would never let Rowan discover anything about her true background, and never permit her to return to Louisiana.

Indeed, these papers are part of the official adoption records, being formalized personal agreements between the parties, and involving staggering transfers of money.

During the first year of Rowan’s life, over five million dollars was transferred in successive installments from the account of Carlotta Mayfair in New Orleans to the accounts of Ellie Mayfair in California, in the Bank of America and the Wells Fargo Bank.

Ellie, rich in her own right, through the trust funds left to her from her father Sheffield, and later from her grandfather Cortland (maybe Cortland would have changed this arrangement had there been time, but the paperwork had been done decades before), set up an immense trust fund for her adoptive daughter, Rowan, to which half of this five million was added over the next two years.

The remaining half was transferred, as it came in, directly to Graham Franklin, who invested the money prudently and successfully, largely in real estate (a gold mine in California), and who continued to invest Ellie’s money-regular payments from her trust-in community property and investments over the years. Though he made a very high salary as a successful lawyer, Graham had no family money, and his enormous estate-owned in common with his wife-at the time of his death was the result of his skillful use of her inherited money.

There is considerable evidence that Graham resented his wife, and resented his emotional as well as financial dependence upon her. He could not have possibly supported his life-style-yachts, sports cars, extravagant vacations, a palatial modern house in Tiburon-on his salary. And he funneled enormous sums of Ellie’s money directly out of their joint account into the hands of various mistresses over the years.

Several of these women have told our investigators that Graham was a vain and slightly sadistic man. Yet they found him irresistible, giving up on him only when they realized that he really loved Ellie. It wasn’t just her money. He couldn’t live without her. “He has to get back at her from time to time, and that’s the only reason he cheats.”

Graham once explained to a young airline stewardess whom he subsequently put through college that his wife swallowed him, and that he had to have “something on the side” (meaning a woman) or he was nothing and nobody at all.

When he discovered that Ellie had fatal cancer, he went into a panic. Legal partners and friends have described in detail his “total inability” to deal with Ellie’s sickness. He would not discuss the illness with her; he would not listen to her doctors; he refused to enter her hospital room. He moved his mistress into a Jackson Street apartment right across from his office in San Francisco, and went over to see her as often as three times a day.

He immediately instigated an elaborate scheme to strip Ellie of all the family property-which now amounted to an immense fortune-and was in the process of trying to declare Ellie incompetent so that he could sell the Tiburon house to his mistress when he himself died suddenly-two months before Ellie-from a stroke. Ellie inherited his entire estate.

Graham’s last mistress, Karen Garfield, an exquisite young fashion model from New York, poured out her woes to one of our investigators over cocktails. She had been left with half a million and that was just fine, but she and Graham, had planned a whole life together-“the Virgin Islands, the Riviera, the works.”

Karen herself died of a series of massive heart attacks, the first of which occurred an hour after Karen visited Graham’s house in Tiburon to try to “explain things” to his daughter Rowan. “That bitch! She wouldn’t even let me have his things! All I wanted were a few keepsakes. She said, ‘Get out of my mother’s house.’ ”

Karen lived for two weeks after the visit, long enough to say many unkind things about Rowan, but apparently Karen never connected her sudden and inexplicable cardiac deterioration to her visit. Why should she?

We did make this connection as the following summary will show.

When Ellie died, Rowan told Ellie’s closest friends that she had lost her best and only friend in this world. This was probably true. Ellie Mayfair was all her life a very sweet and somewhat fragile human being, beloved by her daughter and her numerous friends. According to these friends, she always evinced something of a southern belle charm, though she was an athletic, modern California woman in every way, easily passing for twenty years younger than she was, which was not uncommon with her contemporaries. Indeed, her youthful looks may have constituted her only obsession, other than the welfare of her daughter, Rowan.

She had cosmetic surgery twice in her fifties (facial tightening), frequented expensive beauty salons, and dyed her hair continuously. In pictures with her husband, taken a year before her death, she appears to be the younger person. Devoted to Graham and completely dependent upon him, she ignored his affairs, and with reason. As she told one friend, “He’s always home at six o’clock for dinner. And he’s always there when I turn out the lights.”

Indeed, the source of Graham’s charm for Ellie and for others, other than his looks, was apparently his great enthusiasm for living, and the easy affection he lavished on those around him, including his wife.

One of his lifelong friends, an older lawyer, explained it this way to our investigator. “He got away with those affairs because he was never inattentive to Ellie. Some of the other guys around here should take a lesson from that. What women hate is when you turn cold to them. If you treat them like queens, they’ll let you have a concubine or two outside the palace.”

At this point, we simply do not know how important it is to gather more information about Graham Franklin and Ellie Mayfair. What seems relevant here is that they were normal upper-middle-class Californians, and extremely happy in spite of Graham’s deceptions, until the very last year of their lives. They went to the San Francisco Opera on Tuesday nights, the symphony on Saturday, the ballet now and then. They owned a dazzling succession of Bentleys, Rolls-Royces, Jaguars, and other fine cars. They spent as much as ten thousand dollars a month on clothes. On the open decks of their beautiful Tiburon home, they entertained friends lavishly and fashionably. They flew to Europe or Asia for brief, luxurious vacations. And they were extremely proud of “our daughter, the doctor,” as they called Rowan, lightheartedly, to their many friends.

Though Ellie was supposed to be telepathic, it was a parlor-game type of thing. She knew who it was when the phone rang. She could tell you what playing card you were holding in your hand. Otherwise there was nothing unusual about this woman, except perhaps that she was very pretty, resembling many other descendants of Julien Mayfair, and had her great-grandfather’s ingratiating manner and seductive smile.

The last time I myself saw Ellie was at the funeral of Nancy Mayfair in New Orleans in January of 1988; she was at that time sixty-three or four, a beautiful woman, about five feet six inches in height, with darkly tanned skin and jet black hair. Her blue eyes were concealed behind white-rimmed sunglasses; her fashionable cotton dress flattered her slender figure, and indeed, she had something of the glamour of a film actress, to wit a California patina. Within half a year, she was dead.

When Ellie died, Rowan inherited everything, including Ellie’s family trust fund, and an additional trust fund which had been set up-Rowan knew nothing about it-when Rowan was born.

As Rowan was then, and is now, an extremely hardworking physician, her inheritance has made almost no appreciable difference in her day-to-day life. But more on that in the proper time.

Nonobtrusive surveillance of Rowan indicated that this child was extremely precocious from the beginning, and may have had a variety of psychic powers of which her adoptive parents appeared unaware. There is also some evidence that Ellie Mayfair refused to acknowledge anything “strange” about her daughter. Whatever the case, Rowan seems to have been “the pride and joy” of both Ellie and Graham.

As already indicated, the bond between mother and child was extremely close until the time of Ellie’s death. However, Rowan never shared her mother’s love of parties, lunches, shopping sprees, and other such pursuits, and was never, even in later adolescence or young adulthood, drawn into Ellie’s wide circle of female friends.

Rowan did share her parents’ passion for boating. She accompanied the family on boat trips from her earliest years, learning to manage Graham’s small sailboat, The Wind Singer, on her own when she was only fourteen. When Graham bought an ocean-going cruiser named the Great Angela, the whole family took long trips together several times a year.

By the time Rowan was sixteen, Graham had bought her her own seaworthy twin-engine full displacement hull yacht, which Rowan named the Sweet Christine. The Great Angela was at that time retired, and the whole family used the Sweet Christine, but Rowan was the undisputed skipper. And over everyone’s advice and objections, Rowan frequently took the enormous boat out of the harbor by herself.

For years it was Rowan’s habit to come directly home from school and to go out of San Francisco Bay into the ocean for at least two hours. Only occasionally did she invite a close friend to go along.

“We never see her till eight o’clock,” Ellie would say. “And I worry! Oh, how I worry. But to take that boat away from Rowan would be to kill her. I just don’t know what to do.”

Though an expert swimmer, Rowan is not a daredevil sailor, so to speak. The Sweet Christine is a heavy, slow, forty-foot Dutch-built cruiser, designed for stability in rough seas, but not for speed.

What seems to delight Rowan is being alone in it, out of sight of land, in all kinds of weather. Like many people who respond to the northern California climate, she seems to enjoy fog, wind, and cold.

All who have observed Rowan seem to agree that she is a loner, and an extremely quiet person who would rather work than play. In school she was a compulsive student, and in college a compulsive researcher. Though her wardrobe was the envy of her classmates, it was, she always said, Ellie’s doing. She herself had almost no interest in clothes. Her characteristic off-duty attire has been for years rather nautical-jeans, yachting shoes, oversized sweaters and watch caps, and a sailor’s peacoat of navy blue wool.

In the world of medicine, particularly that of neurosurgery, Rowan’s compulsive habits are less remarkable, given the nature of the profession. Yet even in this field, Rowan has been seen as “obsessive.” In fact, Rowan seems born to have been a doctor, though her choice of surgery over research surprised many people who knew her. “When she was in the lab,” said one of her colleagues, “her mother had to call her and remind her to take time out to sleep or eat.”

One of Rowan’s early elementary-school teachers noted in the record, when Rowan was eight, that “this child thinks she is an adult. She identifies with adults. She becomes impatient with other children. But she is too well behaved to show it. She seems terribly, terribly alone.”

Rowan’s psychic powers began to surface in school from the time she was six years old. Indeed, they may have surfaced long before that, but we have not been able to find any evidence before that time. Teachers queried informally (or deviously) about Rowan tell truly amazing stories about the child’s ability to read minds.

However, nothing we have discovered indicates that Rowan was ever considered an outcast or a failure or maladjusted. She was throughout her school years an overachiever and an unqualified success. Her school pictures reveal her to have been an extremely pretty child, always, with tanned skin and sun-bleached blond hair. She appears secretive in these pictures, as if she does not quite like the intrusion of the camera, but never affected, or ill at ease.

Rowan’s telepathic abilities became known to teachers rather than to other students, and they follow a remarkable pattern:

“My mother had died,” said a first-grade teacher. “I couldn’t go back to Vermont for the funeral, and I felt terrible. Nobody knew about this, you understand. But Rowan came up to me at recess. She sat beside me and she took my hand. I almost burst into tears at this tenderness. ‘I’m sorry about your mother,’ she said. She sat there with me in silence. Later when I asked her how she knew, she said, ‘It just popped into my head.’ I think that child knew all kinds of things that way. She knew when the other kids were envious of her. How lonely she always was!”

Another time, when a little girl was absent from school for three days without explanation and school authorities could not reach her, Rowan quietly told the principal there was no reason to be alarmed. The girl’s grandmother had died, said Rowan, and the family had gone off to the funeral in another state, completely forgetting to call the school. This turned out to be true. Again Rowan could not explain how she had known except to say “It just came into my head.”

We have some two dozen stories similar to this one, and what characterizes almost all of them is that they involve not only telepathy, but empathy and sympathy on the part of Rowan-a clear desire to comfort or minister to a suffering or confused person. That person was invariably an adult. The telepathic power is never connected with tricks, frightening people, or quarrels of any kind.

In 1966, when Rowan was eight, she used this telepathic ability of hers for the last time as far as we know. During her fourth-grade term at a private school in Pacific Heights, she told the principal that another little girl was very sick and ought to see a doctor, but Rowan didn’t know how to tell anyone. The little girl was going to die.

The principal was horrified. She called Rowan’s mother and insisted that Rowan be taken to a psychiatrist. Only a deeply disturbed little girl would say “something like that.” Ellie promised to talk with Rowan. Rowan said nothing further.

However, the little girl in question was diagnosed within a week as having a rare form of bone cancer. She died before the end of the term.

The principal has told the story over dinner countless times. She deeply regretted her censure of Rowan. She wished in particular that she had not called Mrs. Mayfair, because Mrs. Mayfair became so terribly upset.

It may have been concern on Ellie’s part which put an end to this sort of incident in Rowan’s life. Ellie’s friends all knew about it. “Ellie was damned near hysterical. She wanted Rowan to be normal. She said she didn’t want a daughter with strange gifts.”

Graham thought the whole thing was a coincidence, according to the principal. He bawled out the woman for calling and telling Ellie when the poor little girl died.

Coincidence or not, this entire affair seems to have put an end to Rowan’s demonstrations of her power. It is safe to assume that she shrewdly decided to “go underground” as a mind reader. Or even that she deliberately suppressed her power to the point where it became nonexistent or extremely weak. Try as we might, we find nothing about her telepathic abilities from then on. People’s memories of her all have to do with her quiet brilliance, her indefatigable energy, and her love of science and medicine.

“She was that girl in high school who collected the bugs and the rocks, calling everything by a long Latin name.”

“Frightening, absolutely frightening,” said her high school chemistry teacher. “I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had reinvented the hydrogen bomb one weekend in her spare time.”

It has been speculated within the Talamasca that Rowan’s suppression of her telepathic power may have something to do with the growth of her telekinetic power, that she rechanneled her energy, so to speak, and that the two powers represent both sides of the same coin. To put it differently, Rowan turned away from mind and toward matter. Science and medicine became her obsessions from her junior high school years on.

Rowan’s only real boyfriend during her teenage years was also brilliant and reclusive. He seems to have been unable to take the competition. When Rowan was admitted to U.C. Berkeley and he was not, they broke up bitterly. Friends blamed the boyfriend. He later went east and became a research scientist in New York.

One of our investigators “bumped into him” at a museum opening, and brought the conversation around to psychics and mind readers. The man opened up about his old high school sweetheart who had been psychic. He was still bitter about it. “I loved that girl. Really loved her. Her name was Rowan Mayfair and she was very unusual-looking. Not pretty in an ordinary way. But she was impossible. She knew what I was thinking even before I knew it. She knew when I’d been out with someone else. She was so damned quiet about it, it was eerie. I heard she became a neurosurgeon. That’s scary. What will happen if the patient thinks something negative about her before he goes under the anesthesia? Will she slice the thought right out of his head?”

The fact is, no one reporting on Rowan mentions pettiness in connection with her. She is described as “formidable,” just as Mary Beth Mayfair was once described, but never small-minded or vindictive, or unduly aggressive in any personal way.

By the time Rowan entered U.C. Berkeley in 1976, she knew that she wanted to be a doctor. She was a straight A student in the premedicine program, took courses every summer (though she still went on vacation often with Graham and Ellie), skipped an entire year, and graduated at the top of her class in 1979. She entered medical school when she was twenty, apparently believing that neurological research would be her life’s work.

Her academic progress during this period was thought to be phenomenal. Numerous teachers speak of her as “the most brilliant student I have ever had.”

“She isn’t just smart. She’s intuitive! She makes astonishing connections. She doesn’t just read a book. She swallows it, and comes up with six different implications of the author’s basic theory of which the author never dreamed.”

“The students have nicknamed her Dr. Frankenstein because of her talk about brain transplants and creating whole new brains out of parts. But the thing about Rowan is, she’s a real human being. No need to worry about brilliance without a heart.”

“Oh, Rowan. Do I remember Rowan? You have to be kidding! Rowan could have been teaching the class instead of me. You want to know something funny-and don’t you ever tell anyone this! I had to go out of town at the end of the term, and I gave Rowan all the class papers to grade. She graded her own class! Now if that ever gets out I’m ruined, but we struck a bargain, you see. She wanted a key to the laboratory over the Christmas break, and I said, ‘Well, how about grading these papers?’ And the worst part of it was it was the first time I didn’t get a single student complaint about a grade. Rowan, I wish I could forget her. People like Rowan make the rest of us feel like jerks.”

“She isn’t brilliant. That’s what people think, but there’s more to it. She’s some sort of mutant. No, seriously. She can study the research animals and tell you what’s going to happen. She would lay her hands on them and say, ‘This drug isn’t going to do it.’ I’ll tell you something else she did too. She could cure those little creatures. She could. One of the older doctors told me once that if she didn’t watch it, she could upset the experiments by using her powers to cure. I believe it. I went out with her one time, and she didn’t cure me of anything, but boy, was she ever hot. I mean literally hot. It was like making love to somebody with a fever. And that’s what they say about faith healers, you know, the ones who’ve been studied. You can feel a heat coming from their hands. I believe it. I don’t think she should have gone into surgery. She should have gone into oncology. She could have really cured people. Surgery? Anybody can cut them up.”

(Let us add that this doctor himself is an oncologist, and non-surgeons frequently make extremely pejorative statements about surgeons, calling them plumbers and the like; and surgeons make similar pejorative remarks about non-surgeons, saying things such as “All they do is get the patients ready for us.”)

As soon as Rowan entered the hospital as an intern (her third year of medical school), stories of her healing powers and diagnostic powers became so common that our investigators could pick and choose what they wanted to write down.

In sum, Rowan is the first Mayfair witch to be described as a healer since Marguerite Mayfair at Riverbend before 1835.

Just about every nurse ever questioned about Rowan has some “fantastic” story to tell. Rowan could diagnose anything; Rowan knew just what to do. Rowan patched up people who looked like they were ready for the morgue.

“She can stop bleeding. I’ve seen her do it. She grabbed a hold of this boy’s head and looked at his nose. ‘Stop,’ she whispered. I heard her. And he just didn’t bleed any more after that.”

Her more skeptical colleagues-including some male and female doctors-attribute her achievements to the “power of suggestion.” “Why, she practically uses voodoo, you know, saying to a patient, Now we’re going to make this pain stop! Of course it stops, she’s got them hypnotized.”

Older black nurses in the hospital know Rowan has “the power,” and sometimes ask her outright to “lay those hands” on them when they are suffering severe arthritis or other such aches and pains. They swear by Rowan.

“She looks into your eyes. ‘Tell me about it, where it hurts,’ she says. And she rubs with those hands, and it don’t hurt! That’s a fact.”

By all accounts, Rowan seems to have loved working in the hospital, and to have experienced an immediate conflict between her devotion to the laboratory and her newfound exhilaration on the wards.

“You could see the research scientist being seduced!” said one of her teachers sadly. “I knew we were losing her. And once she stepped into the Operating Room it was all over. Whatever they say about women being too emotional to be brain surgeons, no one would ever say such a thing about Rowan. She’s got the coolest hands in the field.”

(Note the coincidental use of cool and hot in reference to the hands.)

There are indications that Rowan’s decision to abandon research for surgery was a difficult, if not traumatic one. During the fall of 1983, she apparently spent considerable time with a Dr. Karl Lemle, of the Keplinger Institute in San Francisco, who was working on cures for Parkinson’s disease.

Rumors at the hospital indicated that Lemle was trying to lure Rowan away from University, with an extremely high salary and ideal working conditions, but that Rowan did not feel she was ready to leave the Emergency Room or the Operating Room or the wards.

During Christmas of 1983, Rowan seems to have had a violent falling out with Lemle, and thereafter would not take his calls. Or so he told everyone at University over the next few months.

We have never been able to learn what happened between Rowan and Lemle. Apparently Rowan did agree to see him for lunch in the spring of 1984. Witnesses saw them in the hospital cafeteria where they had quite an argument. A week later Lemle entered the Keplinger private hospital having suffered a small stroke. Another stroke followed and then another, and he was dead within the month.

Some of Rowan’s colleagues criticized her severely for her failure to visit Lemle. Lemle’s assistant, who later took his place at the Institute, said to one of our investigators that Rowan was highly competitive and jealous of his boss. This seems unlikely.

No one to our knowledge has ever connected the death of Lemle with Rowan. However, we have made the connection.

Whatever happened between Rowan and her mentor-she frequently described him as such before their falling out-Rowan committed herself to neurosurgery shortly after 1983, and began operating exclusively on the brain after she completed her regular residency in 1985. She is at the time of this writing completing her residency in neurosurgery, and will undoubtedly be Board-certified, and probably hired as the Staff Attending at University within the year.

Rowan’s record as a neurosurgeon so far-though she is still a resident and technically operating under the eye of the Attending-is as exemplary as one might expect.

Stories abound of her saving lives on the operating table, of her uncanny ability to know in the Emergency Room whether surgery will save a patient, of her patching up ax wounds, bullet wounds, and skull fractures resulting from falls and car collisions, of her operating for ten hours straight without fainting, of her quiet and expert handling of frightened interns and cranky nurses, and of disapproving colleagues and administrators who have advised her from time to time that she takes too many risks.

Rowan, the miracle worker, has become a common epithet.

In spite of her success as a surgical resident, Rowan remains extremely well liked at the hospital. She is a doctor upon whom others can rely. Also she elicits exceptional devotion from the nurses with whom she works. In fact, her relationship with these women (there are a few male nurses but the profession is still predominately female) is so exceptional as to beg for an explanation.

And the explanation seems to be that Rowan goes out of her way to establish personal contact with nurses, and that indeed, she displays the same extraordinary empathy regarding their personal problems that she displayed with her teachers years ago. Though none of these nurses report telepathic incidents, they say repeatedly that Rowan seems to know when they are feeling bad, to be sympathetic with their family difficulties, and that Rowan finds some way to express her gratitude to them for special services, and this from an uncompromising doctor who expects the highest standards of those on the staff.

Rowan’s conquest of the Operating Room nurses, including those famous for being uncooperative with women surgeons, is something of a legend in the hospital. Whereas other female surgeons are criticized as “having a chip on their shoulder,” or being “too superior” or “just plain bitchy”-remarks which seem to reflect considerable prejudice, all things considered-the same nurses speak of Rowan as if she were a saint.

“She never screams or throws a tantrum like the men do, she’s too good for that.”

“She’s as straight as a man.”

“I’d rather be in there with her than some of these men doctors, I tell you.”

“She’s beautiful to work with. She’s the best. I love just to watch her work. She’s like an artist.”

“She’s the only doctor who’s ever going to open my head, I can tell you that.”

To put this more clearly into perspective, we are still living in a world in which Operating Room nurses sometimes refuse to hand instruments to women surgeons, and patients in Emergency Rooms refuse to be treated by women doctors and insist that young male interns treat them while older, wiser, and more competent women doctors are forced to stand back and watch.

Rowan appears to have transcended this sort of prejudice entirely. If there is any complaint against her among members of her profession it is that she is too quiet. She doesn’t talk enough about what she’s doing to the young doctors who must learn from her. It’s hard for her. But she does the best she can.

As of 1984, she seemed to have escaped completely the curse of the Mayfairs, the ghastly experiences that plagued her mother and her grandmother, and to be on the way to a brilliant career.

An exhaustive investigation of her life had turned up no evidence of Lasher’s presence, or indeed any connection between Rowan and ghosts or spirits or apparitions.

And her strong telepathic powers and healing powers seemed to have been put to extraordinarily productive use in her career as a surgeon.

Though everyone around her admired her for her exceptional accomplishments, no one thought of her as “weird” or “strange” or in any way connected with the supernatural.

As one doctor put it when asked to explain Rowan’s reputation, “She’s a genius. What else can I say?”

However, there is more to the story of Rowan which has surfaced only in the last few years. One part of that story is entirely personal and no concern of the Talamasca. The other part of it has us alarmed beyond our wildest expectations as to what may happen to Rowan in the years that lie ahead.

Allow us to deal with the insignificant part first.

In 1985, the complete lack of any social life on the part of Rowan aroused our curiosity. We asked our investigators to engage in closer surveillance.

Within weeks, they discovered that Rowan, far from having no social life, has a very special kind of social life including very virile working-class men whom she picks up from time to time in any one of four different San Francisco bars.

These men are predominately fire fighters or uniformed policemen. They are invariably single; they are always extremely good-looking and extremely well built. Rowan sees them only on the Sweet Christine, in which they sometimes go out to sea and other times remain in the harbor, and she rarely sees any one of them more than three times.

Though Rowan is very discreet and unobtrusive, she has become the subject of some gossip in the bars she frequents. At least two men have been embittered by their inevitable rejection by her and they talked freely to our investigators, but it became apparent that they knew almost nothing about Rowan. They thought she was “a rich girl from Tiburon” who had snubbed them, or used them. They had no idea she was a doctor. One of them repeatedly described the Sweet Christine as “Daddy’s fancy boat.”

Other men who have known Rowan are more objective. “She’s a loner, that’s all. I liked it, actually. She didn’t want any string attached and neither did I. I would have liked it once or twice more maybe, but it’s got to be mutual. I understand her. She’s an educated girl who likes old-fashioned men.”

A superficial investigation of twelve different men seen leaving Rowan’s house between 1986 and 1987 indicated that all were highly regarded fire fighters or policemen, some with sterling records and decorations, and all considered by their peers and later girlfriends to be “nice guys.”

Further digging also confirmed that Rowan’s parents knew about her preference for this sort of man as early as her undergraduate years. Graham told his secretary that Rowan wouldn’t even speak to a guy with a college degree. That she only went out with “hairy-chested galoots,” and one of these days she was going to discover that these non-compos-mentis apes were dangerous.

Ellie also expressed her concern to her friends. “She says they’re all cops and firemen and that those kind of men only save lives. I don’t think she knows what she’s doing. But as long as she doesn’t marry one of those men I suppose it’s all right. You should see the one she brought home last night. I got a glimpse of him on the side deck. Beautiful red hair and freckles. Just the cutest Irish cop you ever saw.”

As things stand now, I have put a halt to this investigation. I feel we had no grounds to pursue this aspect of Rowan’s life further. And indeed, the bars in which Rowan picks up her cops and firemen are so few that asking questions about Rowan truly violates her privacy by drawing attention to her; and in some instances our questions have encouraged rather degrading talk on the part of crude men, who actually knew nothing about Rowan, but claimed to have heard this or that vulgar detail from someone else.

I do not think that this aspect of Rowan’s life is any concern of ours, except to note that her taste seemed similar to that of Mary Beth Mayfair, and that such a pattern of random and limited contacts reinforces the idea that Rowan is a loner, and a mystery to everyone who knows her. That she does not talk about herself to these bed partners is obvious. Perhaps she cannot talk about herself to anyone, and this may be one key to understanding her compulsions and her ambitions.

The other aspect of Rowan’s life, only lately discovered, is far more significant, and represents one of the most disturbing chapters in the entire history of the Mayfair family. We have only begun to document this second secret aspect of Rowan, and we feel compelled to continue our investigations, and to consider the possibility of contact with Rowan in the very near future, though we are deeply troubled about disturbing her ignorance regarding her family background, and we cannot in conscience make contact without disturbing her ignorance. The responsibilities involved are immense.

In 1988, when Graham Franklin died of a cerebral hemorrhage, our investigator in the area wrote us a brief description of the event, adding only a few details, namely that the man had died in Rowan’s arms.

As we knew of the deep division between Graham Franklin and his dying wife, Ellie, we read this report with some care. Could Rowan have somehow caused Graham’s death? We were curious to know.

As our investigators sought more information about Graham’s plan to divorce his wife, they came in contact with Graham’s mistress, Karen Garfield, and reported in due time that Karen had suffered several severe heart attacks. Then they reported her death, two months following that of Graham.

Attaching no significance to it whatsoever, they had also reported a meeting between Rowan and Karen the day that Karen was rushed to the hospital with her first major attack. Karen had spoken to our investigator-“You’re a cute guy, I like you”-only hours after seeing Rowan. She was, in fact, talking to the man when she broke off because she wasn’t feeling well.

The investigations did not make the connection, but we did. Karen Garfield was only twenty-seven. Her autopsy records, which we obtained fairly easily, indicated that she had had an apparent congenital weakness of the heart muscle, and a congenital weakness of the artery wall. She sustained a hemorrhage in the artery and then major heart failure, and after the initial damage to the heart muscle, she simply could not recover. The subsequent bouts of heart failure weakened her progressively until she finally died.

Only a heart transplant could have saved her, and as she had a very rare blood type, that was out of the question. And besides, there wasn’t time.

The case struck us as very unusual, especially since Karen’s condition had never given her any trouble before. When we studied Graham’s autopsy we discovered that he too had died of an aneurysm, or weakness of the artery wall. A massive hemorrhage had killed him almost instantly.

We ordered our investigators to go back through Rowan’s life as best they could, and look for any sudden deaths through heart failure, cerebrovascular accident, or any such internal traumatic cause. In sum, this meant making casual and unobtrusive inquiries of teachers who might remember Rowan and her classmates, and inquiries of students who might remember such things at U.C. Berkeley, or University Hospital. Not such an easy thing to accomplish, but easier than one unfamiliar with our methods might suppose.

In truth, I expected the investigation to turn up nothing.

People with this kind of telekinetic power-the power to inflict severe internal damage-are almost unheard of, even in the annals of the Talamasca. And certainly we had never seen anyone in the Mayfair family who could bring death with that kind of force.

Many Mayfairs moved objects, slammed doors, caused windows to rattle. But in almost every incidence it could have been pure witchcraft-to wit, the manipulation of Lasher or other lowly spirits, rather than telekinesis. And if it was telekinesis it was the garden variety and nothing more.

Indeed, the history of the Mayfairs was the history of witchcraft, with only mild touches of telepathy or healing power or other psychic abilities mixed in.

In the meantime, I studied all the information we had on Rowan. I could not help but believe that Deirdre Mayfair would be happy if she could read such a history, if she could know that her daughter was so deeply admired and so uniformly successful, and I vowed to myself that I would never do anything to disturb the happiness or the peace of mind of Rowan Mayfair-that if the Mayfair history, as we knew it and understood it, was coming to an end in the liberated figure of Rowan, then we could only be glad for Rowan, and could do nothing to affect that history in any way.

After all, only a tiny bit of information about the past might change the course of Rowan’s life. We could not risk such intervention. In fact, I felt we had to be prepared to close the file on Rowan, and on the Mayfair Witches, as soon as Deirdre was released in death. On the other hand we had to be prepared to do something if, when Ellie died, Rowan went back to New Orleans to find out about her past.

Within two weeks of Ellie’s funeral, we knew that Rowan was not going back. She had just commenced her final year as senior resident in neurosurgery and could not possibly take the time. Also our investigators had discovered that Rowan had been asked by Ellie to sign a paper swearing officially that she would never go to New Orleans or seek to know who her real parents were. Rowan had signed this paper. There was no indication that she did not mean to honor it.

Perhaps she would never set eyes on the First Street house. Perhaps somehow “the curse” would be broken. And Carlotta Mayfair would be victorious in the end.

On the other hand, it was too soon to know. And what was to stop Lasher from revealing himself to this highly psychic young woman who could read people’s minds more strongly perhaps than her mother or grandmother, and whose enormous ambition and strength echoed that of ancestors like Marie Claudette, or Julien, or Mary Beth, about whom she knew nothing, but about whom she might soon find out a lot.

As I pondered all these things, I also found myself thinking often of Petyr van Abel-Petyr whose father had been a great surgeon and anatomist in Leiden, a name in the history books to this day. I longed to tell Rowan Mayfair: “See that name, that Dutch doctor who was famous for his study of anatomy. That is your ancestor. His blood and his skill perhaps have come down to you through all the generations and the years.”

These were my thoughts when in the fall of 1988 our investigators began to report some amazing findings regarding traumatic deaths in Rowan’s past. It seems that a little girl fighting with Rowan on the playground in San Francisco had suffered a violent cerebral hemorrhage and died within a few feet of the hysterical Rowan before an ambulance could even be called.

Then in 1974, when Rowan was a teenager, she was saved from assault at the hands of a convicted rapist when the man suffered a fatal heart attack as Rowan struggled to fight him off.

In 1984, on the afternoon that he first complained of a severe headache, Dr. Karl Lemle of the Keplinger Institute told his secretary, Berenice, that he had just seen Rowan unexpectedly and that he could not understand the animosity she felt for him. She had become so angry when he tried to speak to her that she had cut him off in front of the other doctors at University. In fact, she’d given him a bad headache. He needed some aspirin. He was hospitalized for the first of his successive hemorrhages that night, and died within a matter of weeks.

That made five deaths from cerebrovascular or cardiovascular accident among Rowan’s close associates. Three of these people had died while Rowan was present. Two had seen her within hours of taking ill.

I told my investigators to run an exhaustive check on every single one of Rowan’s classmates or colleagues, and to check each and every name with the death records in San Francisco and in the city of the person’s birth. Of course this would take months.

But within weeks, they had found yet another death. It was Owen Gander who called me, a man who has worked directly for the Talamasca for twenty years. He is not a member of the order, but he has visited the Motherhouse and he is one of our most trusted confidants, and one of the best investigators we have.

This was his report. At U.C. Berkeley in 1978, Rowan had had a terrible argument with another student over some laboratory work. Rowan felt that the girl had deliberately meddled with her equipment. Rowan had lost her temper-an extremely rare occurrence-and thrown a piece of equipment to the ground, breaking it, and then turned her back on the girl. The girl then ridiculed Rowan until other students came between them insisting that the girl stop.

The girl went home that night to Palo Alto, California, as the spring break began the following day. By the end of spring break she had died of a cerebrovascular hemorrhage. There was no indication from the record that Rowan ever knew.

When I read this, I called Gander immediately from London. “What makes you think Rowan didn’t know?” I asked.

“None of her friends knew. After I found the girl’s death in the Palo Alto records, I researched her with Rowan’s friends. They all remembered the fight, but they didn’t know what happened to the girl afterwards. Not a single one knew. I asked them pointedly. ‘Never saw her again.’ ‘Guess she dropped out of school.’ ‘Never knew her very well. Don’t know what happened to her. Maybe she went back to Stanford.’ That’s it. U.C. Berkeley is an enormous university. It could have happened like that.”

I then advised the investigator to proceed with the utmost discretion to discover whether Rowan knew what had happened to Graham’s mistress, Karen Garfield. “Call her some time in the evening. Ask for Graham Franklin. When she tells you Graham is dead, explain that you are trying to find Karen Garfield. But try to upset her as little as possible, and don’t stay on the line very long.”

The investigator called back the following evening.

“You’re right.”

“About what?” I asked.

“She doesn’t know she’s doing it! She doesn’t have any idea that Karen Garfield is dead. She told me Karen lived somewhere on Jackson Street in San Francisco. She suggested I try Graham’s old secretary. Aaron, she doesn’t know.”

“How did she sound?”

“Weary, faintly annoyed, but polite. She has a beautiful voice, really. Rather exceptional voice. I asked her if she’d seen Karen. I was really pushing it. She said that she didn’t actually know Karen, that Karen had been a friend of her father’s. I believe she was perfectly sincere!”

“Well, she had to know about her stepfather, and about the little girl on the playground. And she had to know about the rapist.”

“Yes, but Aaron, probably none of them was deliberate. Don’t you see? She was hysterical when that little girl died; she was hysterical after the rape attempt. As for the stepfather, she was doing everything she could to resuscitate him when the ambulance arrived. She doesn’t know. Or if she does know, she can’t control it. It might be scaring her half to death.”

I told Gander to reconsider the matter of the young lovers in greater detail. Look for any relevant deaths among policemen or fire fighters in San Francisco or Marin County. Go back to the bars Rowan frequented; start a conversation with one of her former lovers; say you’re looking for Rowan Mayfair. Has anybody seen her? Does anybody know her? Be as discreet and nondisruptive as possible. But dig.

Gander called four days later. There had been no such suspicious deaths among any young men in the departments who could conceivably be connected to Rowan. But one thing had emerged from the investigator’s talks in the bar. One young fireman, who admitted to knowing Rowan and liking her, said she was no mystery to him, rather she was an open book. “She’s a doctor; she likes saving people’s lives and she hangs around with us because we do the same thing.”

“Did Rowan actually say that to the young man?”

“Yes, she told him that. He made a joke about it. ‘Imagine, I went to bed with a brain surgeon. She fell in love with my medals. It was great while it lasted. You think if I pull somebody out of a burning building, she’ll give me another chance?’ ” Gander laughed. “She doesn’t know, Aaron. She’s hooked on saving people, and maybe she doesn’t even know why.”

“She has to know. She’s too good a doctor not to know,” I said. “Remember, this girl is a diagnostic genius. She must have known with the stepfather. Unless of course we’re wrong about the whole thing.”

“We’re not wrong,” said Gander. “What you’ve got here, Aaron, is a brilliant neurosurgeon descended from a family of witches, who can kill people just by looking at them; and on some level she knows it, she has to, and she spends every day of her life making up for it in the Operating Room, and when she goes out on the town it’s with some hero who’s just saved a kid from a burning attic, or a cop who’s stopped a drunk from stabbing his wife. She’s sort of mad, this lady. Maybe as mad as all the rest.”

In December of 1988, I went to California. I had been to the States in January to attend the funeral of Nancy Mayfair, and I deeply regretted not having gone on to the coast at that time to try to get a glimpse of Rowan. But no one had an inkling, then, that both Ellie and Graham would be dead within six months.

Rowan was now all alone in the house in Tiburon. I wanted to have a look at her, even if it was from a distance. I wanted to make some appraisal which depended upon my seeing her in the flesh.

By that time, we had not-thank God-turned up any more deaths in Rowan’s past. As the senior resident in neurosurgery, she was working a hectic if not inhuman schedule at the hospital, and I found it far more difficult to get a glimpse of her than I ever imagined. She left the hospital from a covered parking lot and drove into a covered garage at home. The Sweet Christine, moored at her very doorstep, was concealed entirely by a high redwood fence.

At last I entered University Hospital, sought out the doctors’ cafeteria, and hovered near it in a small visitors’ area for seven hours. To my knowledge Rowan never passed.

I resolved to follow her from the hospital only to discover that there was no way to discover when she might be leaving. When she arrived was also a mystery. There was no discreet way to press anyone for details. I could not risk hanging about in the area adjacent to the Operating Rooms. It wasn’t open to the public. The waiting room for the family members of those having surgery was strictly monitored. And the rest of the hospital was like a labyrinth. I didn’t know finally what to do.

I was thrown into consternation. I wanted to see Rowan, but I dreaded disturbing her. I could not bear the thought of bringing darkness into her life, of clouding the isolation from the past which seemed, on the surface, to have served her so well. On the other hand, if she was actually responsible for the deaths of six human beings! Well, I had to see her before I could make a decision. I had to see her.

Unable to come to any decision, I invited Gander for a drink at the hotel. Gander felt Rowan was deeply troubled. He had watched her off and on for over fifteen years. She had had the wind knocked out of her by the death of her parents, he said. And we could now pretty fairly well confirm that her random contact with the “boys in blue,” as he called her lovers, had dropped off in the last few months.

I told Gander I would not leave California without a glimpse of her, if I had to hover in the underground parking lot near her car-the absolutely worst way possible to achieve a sighting-until she appeared.

“I wouldn’t try that, old man,” said Gander. “Underground parking lots are the spookiest places. Her little psychic antennae will pick you up instantly. Then she’ll misinterpret the intensity of your interest in her, and you’ll get a sudden stabbing pain in the side of your head. Next you’ll suddenly … ”

“I follow the drift, Owen,” I said dismally. “But I must get a good look at her in some public place where she isn’t aware of me.”

“Well, make it happen,” said Gander. “Do a little witchcraft yourself. Synchronicity? Isn’t that what they call it?”

The following day I decided to do some routine work. I went to the cemetery where Graham and Ellie were buried, to photograph the inscriptions on the stones. I had twice asked Gander to do this, but somehow he had never gotten around to it. I think he enjoyed the other aspects of the investigation much more.

While I was there, the most remarkable thing happened. Rowan Mayfair appeared.

I was down on my knees in the sun, making a few notes on the inscriptions, having already taken the photographs, when I became aware of this tall young woman in a sailor’s coat and faded dungarees coming up the hill. She seemed all legs and blowing hair for a moment, a very fresh-faced and lovely young creature. Quite impossible to believe she was thirty years old.

On the contrary, her face had almost no lines in it at all. She looked exactly like the photographs taken of her years ago, yet she looked very much like someone else, and for one moment the resemblance so distracted me that I could not think who it was. Then it came to me. It was Petyr van Abel. She had the same blond, pale-eyed look. It was very nearly Scandinavian, and she appeared extremely independent and extremely strong.

She approached the grave, and stopped only a few feet away where I knelt, clearly taking notes from her stepmother’s headstone.

At once I began to talk to her. I cannot remember precisely what I said. I was so flustered that I didn’t know what I should say to explain my appearance mere, and very slowly I sensed danger just as surely as I had sensed it with Cortland years ago. I sensed enormous danger. In fact, her smooth pale face with its large gray eyes seemed suddenly filled with pure malice. Then a wall went up behind her expression. She closed down, rather like a giant receiver which is suddenly and soundlessly turned off.

I realized with horror that I had been talking about her family. I had told her that I knew the Mayfairs of New Orleans. It was my feeble excuse for what I was doing there. Did she want to have a drink, talk about old family matters. Dear God! What if she said yes!

But she said nothing. Absolutely nothing, at least not in words. I could have sworn, however, that the closed receiver suddenly became a highly focused speaker and she communicated to me quite deliberately that she couldn’t avail herself of my offer, something dark and terrible and painful prevented her from doing it, and then she seemed lost in confusion; lost in misery. In fact, I have seldom if ever in my life felt such pure pain.

It came to me in a silent flash that she knew she had killed people. She knew she was different in a horrible and mortal way. She knew it and the knowledge sealed her up as if she were buried alive inside herself.

Perhaps it had not been malice which I felt only moments before. But whatever had taken place was now concluded. I was losing her. She was turning away. Why she had come, what she meant to do, I would never know.

At once I offered her my card. I put it in her hand. She gave it back to me. She wasn’t rude when she did it. She simply did it. She put it right back in my hand. The malice leapt out of her like a flash of light from a keyhole. Then she went dim. Her body tensed and she turned and walked off.

I was so badly shaken that for a long moment I could not move. I stood in the cemetery watching her walk down the hill. I saw her get into a green Jaguar sedan. Off she drove without glancing back.

Was I ill? Had I suffered a severe pain somewhere? Was I about to die? Of course not. Nothing like that had happened. Yet I knew what she could do. I knew and she knew and she had told me! But why?

By the time I reached the Campton Place Hotel in San Francisco, I was thoroughly confused. I decided I would do nothing further for the present.

When I met with Gander, I said: “Keep up the surveillance. Get as close as you dare. Watch for anything that indicates she is using the power. Report to me at once.”

“Then you’re not going to make contact.”

“Not now. I can’t justify it. Not until something else happens and that could be either of two things: she kills someone else, deliberately or accidentally. Or her mother dies in New Orleans and she decides to go home.”

“Aaron, that’s madness! You have to make contact. You can’t wait until she goes back to New Orleans. Look, old man, you have pretty much told me the whole story over the years. And I don’t claim to know what you people know about it. But from everything you’ve told me, this is the most powerful psychic the family has ever produced. Who’s to say she’s not a powerful witch as well? When her mother finally goes, why would this spook Lasher miss an opportunity like this?”

I couldn’t answer, except to say what Owen already knew. There were absolutely no sightings of Lasher in Rowan’s history.

“So he’s biding his time. The other woman’s still alive. She has the necklace. But when she dies, they have to give it to Rowan. From what you’ve told me, it’s the law.”

I called Scott Reynolds in London. Scott is no longer our director, but he is the most knowledgeable person in the order on the subject of the Mayfair Witches, next to me.

“I agree with Owen. You have to make contact. You have to. What you said to her in the cemetery was exactly what you should have said, and on some level you know it. That’s why you told her you knew her family. That’s why you offered her the card. Talk to her. You have to.”

“No, I disagree with you. It isn’t justified.”

“Aaron, this woman is a conscientious physician, yet she’s killing people! Do you think she wants to do that sort of thing? On the other hand … ”

“ … what?”

“If she does know, this contact could be dangerous. I have to confess, I don’t know how I would feel about all this if I were there, if I were you.”

I thought it over. I decided that I would not do it. Everything that Owen and Scott had said was true. But it was all conjecture. We did not know whether Rowan had ever deliberately killed anyone. Possibly she was not responsible for the six deaths.

We could not know whether she would ever lay her hands on the emerald necklace. We did not know if she would ever go to New Orleans. We did not know whether or not Rowan’s power included the ability to see a spirit, or to help Lasher to materialize … ah, but of course we could pretty well conjecture that Rowan could do all that … But that was just it, it was conjecture. Conjecture and nothing more.

And here was this hardworking doctor saving lives daily in a big city Operating Room. A woman untouched by the darkness that shrouded the First Street house. True, she had a ghastly power, and she might again use it, either deliberately or inadvertently. And if that happened, then I would make contact.

“Ah, I see, you want another body on the slab,” said Owen.

“I don’t believe there is going to be another,” I said angrily. “Besides, if she doesn’t know she’s doing it, why should she believe us?”

“Conjecture,” said Owen. “Like everything else.”

SUMMATION

As of January 1989, Rowan has not been connected with any other suspicious deaths. On the contrary, she has worked tirelessly at University Hospital at “working miracles,” and will very likely be appointed Attending Physician in neurosurgery before the end of the year.

In New Orleans, Deirdre Mayfair continues to sit in her rocking chair, staring out over the ruined garden. The last sighting of Lasher-“a nice young man standing beside her”-was reported two weeks ago.

Carlotta Mayfair is nearing ninety years of age. Her hair is entirely white, though the style of it has not changed in fifty years. Her skin is milky and her ankles are perpetually swollen over the tops of her plain black leather shoes. But her voice remains quite steady. And she still goes to the office every morning for four hours. Sometimes, she has lunch with the younger lawyers before she takes her regular taxi home.

On Sundays she walks to Mother of Perpetual Help Chapel to go to Mass. People in the parish have offered to drive her to Mass, and indeed, anyplace else that she would like to go. But she says that she likes walking. She needs the fresh air. It keeps her in good health.

When Sister Bridget Marie died in the fall of 1987, Carlotta attended the funeral with her nephew (cousin, actually) Gerald Mayfair, a great-grandson of Clay Mayfair. She is said to like Gerald. She is said to be afraid she may not live long enough to see Deirdre at peace. Maybe Gerald will have to take care of Deirdre after Carlotta is gone.

To the best of our knowledge Rowan Mayfair knows none of these people. She knows no more today of her family history than she did when she was a little girl.

“Ellie was so afraid Rowan would try to find out about her real parents,” said a friend recently to Gander. “I got the feeling it was an awful story. But Ellie would never talk about it, except to say that Rowan must be protected, at all costs, from the past.”

I am content to watch and to wait.

I feel, irrationally perhaps, that I owe this much to Deirdre. That she did not want to give up Rowan is quite obvious to me. That she would have wanted Rowan to have a normal life is beyond doubt. There are times when I am tempted to destroy our file on the Mayfair Witches. Has any other history involved us in so much violence and so much pain? Of course such a thing is unthinkable. The Talamasca would never allow it. And never forgive it, if I did it on my own.

Last night after I completed my final draft of the above summary, I dreamed of Stuart Townsend, whom I had met only once when I was a small boy. In the dream, he was in my room and had been talking to me for hours. Yet when I awoke, I could recall only his last words. “You see what I am saying? It’s all planned!”

He was dreadfully upset with me.

“I don’t see!” I said out loud when I woke up. In fact, it was my own voice which awakened me. I was amazed to discover that the room was empty, that I had been dreaming, that Stuart wasn’t really there.

I don’t see. That is the truth. I don’t know why Cortland tried to kill me. I don’t know why such a man would go to such a ghastly extreme. I don’t know what really happened to Smart. I don’t even really know why Stella was so desperate that Arthur Langtry take her away. I don’t know what Carlotta did to Antha, or whether or not Cortland fathered Stella, Antha, and Deirdre’s baby. I don’t see!

But there is one thing of which I am certain. Some day, regardless of whatever she promised Ellie Mayfair, Rowan Mayfair may go back to New Orleans and if she does, she will want answers. Dozens upon dozens of answers. And I fear I am the only one now-we in the Talamasca are the only ones-who can possibly hope to reconstruct for her this sad tale.

Aaron Lightner,

The Talamasca

LONDON

January 15, 1989