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.