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
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
