The witching hour

was whispering to her, but his eyes were fixed on Rowan. I know you. He looked at her as if she’d spoken to him, and then it came to her-the cemetery in Sonoma County where Graham and Ellie were buried, this was the man she had seen that day by the grave. I know your family in New Orleans. And quite unexpectedly another piece of the same puzzle fell into place. This was the man who’d been standing outside Michael’s house two nights ago on Liberty Street.

“Honey, do you want a glass of water?” said Jerry Lonigan.

But how could that be? How could that man have been there, and here, and what had all this to do with Michael, who had described to her the house with the iron roses in the railing?

Pierce said he would go get a chair. “Let her just sit right here.”

She had to move. She couldn’t just remain here staring at the white-haired Englishman, demanding of him that he explain himself, explain what he’d been doing on Liberty Street. And out of the corner of her eye, something she couldn’t bear to see, something in the coffin waiting.

“Here, Rowan, this is nice and cold.” Smell of wine. “Take a drink, darling.”

I would like to, I really would, but I can’t move my mouth. She shook her head, tried to smile. I don’t think I can move my hand. And you are all expecting me to move, I really should move. She used to think the doctors who fainted at an autopsy were fools, really. How could such a thing affect one so physically? If you hit me with a baseball bat, I might pass out. Oh, God, what you don’t know about life is really just beginning to reveal itself in this room. And your mother is in that coffin.

What did you think, that she would wait here, alive, until you came? Until you finally realized … Down here, in this strange land! Why, this is like another country, this.

The white-haired Englishman came towards her. Yes, who are you? Why are you here? Why are you so dramatically and grotesquely out of place? But then again, he wasn’t. He was just like all of them, the inhabitants of this strange land, so decorous and so gentle, and not a touch of irony or self-consciousness or false sentiment in his kindly face. He drew close to her, gently making the handsome young man give way.

Remember those tortured faces at Ellie’s funeral. Not a one under sixty yet not a gray hair, not a sagging muscle. Nothing like this. Why, this is what they mean when they talk about “the people.”

She lowered her eyes. Banks of flowers on either side of the velvet prie-dieu. She moved forward, her nails digging into Mr. Lonigan before she could stop herself. She struggled to relax her hand and to her utter amazement, she felt she was going to fall. The Englishman took hold of her left arm, as Mr. Lonigan held her by the right one.

“Rowan, listen to me.” said the Englishman softly in her ear, in that clipped yet melodious accent. “Michael would be here if he could. I’m here in Michael’s place. Michael will come tonight. Just as soon as he can.”

She looked at him. shocked, the relief almost making her shudder. Michael was coming. Michael was somewhere close. But how could this be?

“Yes, very close, and unavoidably detained,” he said, as sincerely as if he’d invented the words “and truly put out that he cannot be here … ”

She saw the dim dark featureless First Street house again, the house Michael had been talking about all that time. And when she’d first seen him in the water, he had looked like a tiny speck of clothes floating on the surface, that can’t be a drowned man, not out here, miles and miles from the land …

“What can I do for you now?” said the Englishman, his voice low and secretive and utterly solicitous. “Do you want to step up to the coffin?”

Yes, please, take me up. Please help me! Make my legs move. But they were moving. He had slipped his arm around her and he was guiding her, so easily, and the conversation had started up again, thank God, though it was a low respectful hum, from which she could extract various threads at will. “ … she just didn’t want to come to the funeral parlor, that’s the truth of it. She’s furious that we’re all here.” “Keep quiet, she’s ninety if she’s a day and it’s a hundred degrees outside.” “I know, I know. Well, everyone can come to my place afterwards, I told you … ”

She kept her eyes down, on the silver handles, on the flowers, on the velvet kneeler right in front of her now. Sick again. Sick from the heat and this motionless cool air with the scent of the flowers hanging around her like an invisible mist. But you have to do this. You have to do it calmly and quietly. You cannot lose it. Promise me you’ll never go back there, you’ll never try to find out.

The Englishman was holding her, Michael will come, his right hand comfortingly against her arm, his left hand steadying her left wrist as she touched the velvet-covered side of the casket.

Slowly, she forced herself to look up from the floor, to raise her eyes until she saw the face of the dead woman lying right there on the satin pillow. And slowly her mouth began to open, to pull open, the rigidity shifting into a spasm. She struggled with all her strength to keep from opening her mouth. She clenched her teeth. And the shudder that passed through her was so violent that the Englishman tightened his grip. He too was looking down. He had known her!

Look at her. Nothing else matters now. It is not important to hurry, or to think of anything else, or to worry. Just look at her, look at her face with all its secrets locked away now forever.

And Stella’s face was so beautiful in the coffin. She had such beautiful black hair …

“She is going to faint, help her! Pierce, help her.”

“No, we have her, she’s all right,” said Jerry Lonigan.

So perfectly, hideously dead she looked, and so lovely. Groomed she was for eternity-with the pink lipstick gleaming on her shapely mouth and the rouge on the flawless girlish cheeks, and her black hair brushed out on the satin, like girl’s hair, free and beautiful, and the rosary beads, yes, rosary beads, threaded through her fingers, which are like dough as they lie on her breast, not human hands at all, but something made crudely by a sculptor.

In all these years, Rowan had never seen such a thing. She had seen them drowned, and stabbed, and after they had died on the wards in their sleep. She had seen them colorless and pumped with chemicals, slit open after weeks and months and even years, for the anatomy lesson. She had seen them at the autopsy with the bloodred organs being lifted out in the doctor’s gloved hands.

But never this. Never this dead and pretty thing in blue silk and lace, smelling of face powder, with her hands clasped over the rosary beads. Ageless she looked, almost like a giant little girl with her innocent hair, her face devoid of lines, even the shiny lipstick the color of rose petals.

Oh, if it were only possible to open her eyes! I wish I could see my mother’s eyes! And in this room filled with the very old, she is so young still …

She bent down. She withdrew her hands ever so gently from the Englishman. She laid them on her pale hands, her softly melting hands. Hard! Hard as the rosary beads. Cold and hard. She closed her eyes, and pressed her fingers into this unyielding white flesh. So absolutely dead, so beyond any breath of life, so firmly finished.

If Michael were here, could he know from her hands if she had died without pain or fear? Could he know why the secrecy? Could he touch this horrid, lifeless flesh and hear the song of life still from it? Oh, please God, whoever she was, why ever she gave me away, I hope it was without fear and pain that she died. In peace, in a sweetness like her face. Look at her closed eyes, her smooth forehead.

Slowly, she raised her hand and wiped the tears off her own cheek, and realized that her face was relaxed now. That she could speak if she wanted to, and that others around her were crying too, that the woman with the iron gray hair was crying, and that the poor black-haired woman who had been crying all along was sobbing silently against the chest of the man beside her, and that the faces of those who didn’t cry-everywhere she looked in the glow beyond the coffin-had become thoughtful and quiet, and rather like those faces in great Florentine paintings where the passive, faintly sad souls regard the world beyond the frame as if from a dream, gazing out from the corners of their eyes, languidly.

She backed away, but her eyes remained fixed on the woman in the coffin. She let the Englishman guide her again, away, to a small room that waited. Mr. Lonigan was saying it was time for them all to come up one by one, that the priest was here, and he was ready.

In astonishment, Rowan saw a tall old man bend gracefully and kiss the dead woman’s forehead. Beatrice, the pretty one with the gray hair, came next and whispered something as she kissed the dead woman in the same manner. A child was lifted next to do the same; and the old bald man came, heavy with his big belly making it hard, but he bent to give the kiss, whispering hoarsely for everyone to hear, “Good-bye, darlin’.”

Mr. Lonigan pushed her gently down in the chair. As he turned, the crying woman with the black hair