she met Deirdre Mayfair. I remember Rita Mae going to St. Ro’s.
“Does this mean nothing?
“And something else too. What if my ancestors worked in the Garden District? I don’t know that they did or didn’t. I know my father’s mother was an orphan, reared at St. Margaret’s. I don’t think she had a legal father. What if her mother had been a maid in the First Street house … but my mind is just going crazy.
“After all, look what these people have done in terms of breeding. When you do this with horses and dogs, it’s called inbreeding or line breeding.
“Over and over again, the finest male specimens have inbred with the witches, so that the genetic mix is strengthened in terms of certain traits, undoubtedly including psychic traits, but what about others? If I read this damn thing properly, Cortland wasn’t just the father of Stella and Rowan. He could have been the father of Antha too, though everybody thought it was Lionel.
“Now if Julien was Mary Beth’s father, ah, but they ought to do some kind of computer thing just on that aspect of it, the inbreeding. Make a chart. And if they have the photographs, they can get into more genetic science. But I have to tell all this to Rowan. Rowan will understand all this. When we were talking Rowan said something about genetic research being so unpopular. People don’t want to admit what they can determine about human beings genetically. Which brings me to free will, and my belief in free will is part of why I’m going crazy.
“Anyway, Rowan is the genetic beneficiary of all this-tall, slim, sexy, extremely healthy, brilliant, strong, and successful. A medical genius with a telekinetic power to take life who chooses instead to save life. And there it is, free will, again. Free will.
“But how the hell do I fit in with my free will intact, that is? I mean what is ‘all planned’ to use Townsend’s words in the dream. Christ!
“Am I perhaps related somehow to these people through the Irish servants that worked for them? Or is it simply that they outcross when they need stamina? But any of Rowan’s police/fire fighter heroes would have done the job. Why me? Why did I have to drown, if indeed, they accomplished the drowning, which I still don’t believe they did-but then Lasher was revealing himself alone to me all the way back to my earliest years.
“God, there is no one way to interpret any of this. Maybe I was destined for Rowan all along, and my drowning wasn’t meant, and that’s why the rescue happened. If the drowning was meant, I can’t accept it! Because if that was meant, then too much else could be meant. It’s too awful.
“I cannot read this history and conclude that the terrible tragedies here were inevitable-Deirdre to die like that.
“I could write on like this for the next three days, rambling, discussing this point or that. But I’m going crazy. I still haven’t a clue to the meaning of the doorway. Not a single thing in what I’ve read illuminates this single image. Don’t see any specific number involved in this either. Unless the number thirteen is on a doorway, and that has some meaning.
“Now the doorway may simply be the doorway to First Street; or the house itself could be some sort of portal. But I’m reaching. There is no feeling of rightness to what I say.
“As for the psychometric power in my hands, I still don’t know how that is to be used, unless I am to touch Lasher when he materializes, and thereby know what this spirit really is, whence he comes and what he wants of the witches. But how can I touch Lasher unless Lasher chooses to be touched?
“Of course I will remove the gloves and lay my hands on objects related to this history, to First Street, if Rowan, who is now the mistress of First Street, will allow. But somehow the prospect fills me with terror. I can’t see it as the consummation of my purpose. I see it as intimacy with countless objects, surfaces, and images … and also … for the first time I’m afraid of touching objects which belonged to the dead. But I must attempt it. I must attempt everything!
“Almost nine o’clock. Still Aaron isn’t here. And it’s dark and creepy and quiet out here. I don’t want to sound like Marlon Brando in
“I hate being scared.
“And I can’t stand waiting here. Perhaps it’s unfair to expect Aaron to arrive the minute I finish reading. But Deirdre’s funeral is over, and here I sit waiting for Aaron, with Mayfairs on the brain and pressing on my heart, but I wait! I wait because I promised I would, and Aaron hasn’t called, and I have to see Rowan.
“Aaron is going to have to trust me on this, he really is. We’ll talk tonight, tomorrow, and the next day, but tonight I am going to be with Rowan!
“One final note: if I sit here and close my eyes, and I think back on the visions. If I evoke the feeling, that is, for all the facts are gone, I still find myself believing that the people I saw were good. I was sent back for a higher purpose. And it was my choice-free will-to accept that mission.
“Now I cannot attach any negative or positive feeling to the idea of the doorway or the number thirteen. And that is distressing, deeply distressing. But I continue to feel that my people up there were good.
“I don’t believe Lasher is good. Not at all. The evidence seems incontrovertible that he has destroyed some of these women. Maybe he has destroyed everyone who ever resisted him. And Aaron’s question,
“This entity is evil.
“So why did he smile at me in the church when I was six? Surely he can’t want me to touch him and discover his agenda? Or can he?
“Again the words ‘meant’ and ‘planned’ are driving me mad. Everything in me revolts against such an idea. I can believe in a mission, in a destiny, in a great purpose. All those words have to do with courage and heroism, with free will. But ‘meant’ and ‘planned’ fill me with this despair.
“Whatever the case, I don’t feel despair right now. I feel crazed, unable to stay in this room much longer, desperate to reach Rowan. And desperate to put all these pieces together, to fulfill the mission I was given out there, because I believe that the best part of me accepted that mission.
“Why do I hear that guy in San Francisco, Gander or whatever his name was, saying, ‘Conjecture!’
“I wish Aaron were here. For the record, I like him. I like them. I understand what they did here. I understand. None of us likes to believe that we are being watched, written about, spied upon, that sort of thing. But I understand. Rowan will understand. She has to.
“The resulting document is just too nearly unique, too important. And when I think about how deeply implicated in all this I am, how involved I’ve been from the moment that entity looked out at me through the iron fence-well, thank God, they’re here, that they ‘watch,’ as they say. That they know what they know.
“Because otherwise … And Rowan will understand that. Rowan will understand perhaps better than I understand, because she will see things I don’t see. And maybe that’s what’s planned, but there I go again.
“Aaron! Come back!”
Twenty-eight
SHE STOOD BEFORE the iron gate as the cab crawled away, the rustling silence closing in around her. Impossible to imagine a house that was any more desolate or forbidding. The merciless light of the street lamp poured down like the full moon through the branches of the trees-on the cracked flags and the marble steps banked with dead leaves, and on the high thick fluted columns with their peeling white paint and black patches of rot, on the crumbling boards of the porch which ran back unevenly to the open door and the dull pale light from within wobbling ever so faintly.
Slowly she let her eyes roam the shuttered windows, the dense overgrown garden. A thin rain had begun to fall even as she left the hotel, and it was so very faint now that it was little more than a mist, giving its shine to the asphalt street, and hovering in the gleaming leaves above the fence, and just touching her face and shoulders.
Here my mother, lived out her life, she thought. And here her mother was born, and her mother before her.
