Lonigan, and the Mayfairs gathered at the restaurant table. Even Eugenia, lost somewhere within the house, asleep and dreaming perhaps. All those others.
And she stood here alone. She, who had killed this mean and cruel old woman, killed her as cruelly as she herself had ever killed, God damn her for it. God damn her into hell for all she said and all she’d done. God damn her. But I didn’t mean it, I swear …
Once again, she wiped her mouth. She folded her arms across her breasts and hunched her shoulders and shivered. She had to turn around, walk through the dark house. Walk back to the door, and leave here.
Oh, but she couldn’t do that, she had to call someone, she had to tell, she had to cry out for that woman Eugenia, and do what had to be done, what was right to be done.
Yet the agony of speaking to strangers now, of telling official lies, was more than she could endure.
She let her head fall lazily to one side. She stared down at the helpless body, broken and collapsed within its sack of a dress. The white hair so clean and soft-looking. All her paltry and miserable life in this house, all her sour and unhappy life. And this is how it ends for her.
She closed her eyes, bringing her hands up wearily to her face, and then the prayers did come, Help me, because I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what I’ve done, and I can’t undo it. And everything the old woman said was true, and I’ve always known, known it was evil inside me and inside them and that’s why Ellie took me away. Evil.
She saw the thin pale ghost outside the glass in Tiburon. She felt the invisible hands touching her, as she had on the plane.
Evil.
“And where are you?” she whispered in the darkness. “Why should I be afraid to walk back into this house?”
She raised her head. In the long parlor, there came another faint, cracking noise behind her. Like an old board creaking under a step. Or was it just a rafter breathing? So faint it might have been a rat in the dark, creeping along the boards with its tiny repulsive feet. But she knew it wasn’t. With every instinct in her, she felt a presence there, someone near, someone in the dark, someone in the parlor. Not the old black woman. Not the scratching of her slippers.
“Show yourself to me,” she whispered, the last of her fear turning to anger. “Do it now.”
Once again she heard it. And slowly she turned around. Silence. She looked down one last time at the old woman. And then she walked into the long front room. The high narrow mirrors stared at one another in the shadowy stillness. The dusty chandeliers gathered the light to themselves sullenly in the gloom.
The very furniture seemed alive for one perilous instant, as if the small curved chairs were watching her, as if the bookcases with their glass doors had heard her vague challenge, and would bear witness to whatever took place.
“Why don’t you come?” she whispered aloud again. “Are you afraid of me?” Emptiness. A dull creak from somewhere overhead.
With quiet even steps she made her way into the hallway, painfully aware of the sound of her own labored breathing. She gazed dumbly at the open front door. Milky the light from the street, and dark and shining the leaves of the dripping oaks. A long sigh came out of her, almost involuntarily, and then she turned and moved away from this comforting light, back through the hallway, against the thick shadows and towards the empty dining room, where the emerald lay, waiting, in its velvet box.
He was here. He had to be.
“Why don’t you come?” she whispered, surprised at the frailty of her own voice. It seemed the shadows stirred, but no shape materialized. Maybe a tiny bit of breeze had caught the dusty draperies. A thin dull snap sounded in the boards under her feet.
There on the table lay the jewel box. Smell of wax lingering in the air. Her fingers were trembling as she raised the lid, and touched the stone itself.
“Come on, you devil,” she said. She lifted the emerald, vaguely thrilled by its weight, in spite of her misery, and she lifted it higher, until the light caught it, and she put it on, easily manipulating the small strong clasp at the back of her neck.
Then, in one very strange moment, she saw herself doing this. She saw herself, Rowan Mayfair, ripped out of her past, which had been so far removed from all of this that it now lacked detail, standing like a lost wanderer in this dark and strangely familiar house.
And it was familiar, wasn’t it? These high tapering doors were familiar. It seemed her eyes had drifted over these murals a thousand times. Ellie had walked here. Her mother had lived and died here. And how otherworldly and irretrievable seemed the glass and redwood house in faraway California. Why had she waited so long to come?
She had taken a detour in the dark gleaming path of her destiny. And what were all her past triumphs to the confrontation of this mystery, and to think, this mystery in all its dark splendor belonged by right to her. It had waited here all these years for her to claim it and now at last she was here.
The emerald lay against the soft silk of her blouse heavily. Her fingers seemed unable to resist it, hovering about it as if it were a magnet.
“Is this what you want?” she whispered.
Behind her, in the hallway, an unmistakable sound answered her. The whole house felt it, echoed it, like the case of a great piano echoes the tiniest touch to a single string. Then again, it came. Soft but certain. Someone there.
Her heart thudded almost painfully. She stood stranded, her head bowed, and as if in dreamy sleep, she turned and raised her eyes. Only a few feet away, she made out a dim and indistinct figure, what seemed a tall man.
All the smallest sounds of the night seemed to die away and leave her in a void as she struggled to pick this thing out from the murky dark that enmeshed it. Was she deceiving herself or was that the scheme of a face? It seemed that a pair of dark eyes was watching her, that she could just make out the contour of a head. Perhaps she saw the white curve of a stiff collar.
“Don’t play games with me,” she whispered. Once again, the whole house echoed the sound with its uncertain creaks and sighs. And then wondrously, the figure brightened, confirmed itself magically, and yet even as she gasped aloud, it began to fade.
“No, don’t go!” she pleaded, doubting suddenly that she had ever seen anything at all.
And as she stared into the confusion of light and shadow, searching desperately, a darker form suddenly loomed against the dull faint light from the distant door. Closer it came, through the swirling dust, with heavy distinct footfalls. Without any chance of mistake she saw the massive shoulders, the black curly hair.
“Rowan? Is that you, Rowan?”
Solid, familiar, human.
“Oh Michael,” she cried, her voice soft and ragged. She moved into his waiting arms. “Michael, thank God!”
Twenty-nine
WELL, SHE THOUGHT to herself, silent, hunched over, sitting alone at the dining table, the supposed victim of the horrors in this dark house-I am becoming one of those women now who just falls into a man’s arms and lets him take care of everything.
But it was beautiful to watch Michael in action. He made the calls to Ryan Mayfair, and to the police, to Lonigan and Sons. He spoke the language of the plainclothesmen who came up the steps. If anyone noticed the black gloves he wore, they did not say so, maybe because he was talking too fast, explaining things, and moving things along to hasten the inevitable conclusions.
“Now she just got here, she does not have the faintest idea who in the hell this guy is up in the attic. The old
