“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
Twenty-six
ON AND ON it went, exotic and dreamlike still in its strangeness, a ritual from another country, quaint and darkly beautiful, as the whole party spilled out into the warm air and then into a fleet of limousines which drove them silently through narrow, crowded, treeless little streets.
Before a high brick church-St. Mary’s Assumption-the long lumbering shiny cars stopped, one after another, oblivious to the derelict school buildings with their broken windows, and the weeds rising triumphant from every fissure and crack.
Carlotta stood on the church steps, tall, stiff, her thin spotted hand locked on the curve of her gleaming wooden cane. Beside her an attractive man, white-haired and blue-eyed, and not much older than Michael perhaps, whom the old woman dismissed with a brittle gesture beckoning for Rowan to follow her.
The older man stepped back with young Pierce, after quickly clasping Rowan’s hand. There was something furtive in the way he whispered his name, “Ryan Mayfair,” glancing anxiously at the old woman. Rowan understood he was young Pierce’s father.