Probably left there by Pierce. And what did it matter? She’d call him from the hotel just to make sure, and tell him she appreciated it.
She moved on to the front of the house, trying to capture the feeling of well-being again, breathing in the luxurious warmth around her. Very like a temple, this house. She looked back at the stairs. All the way up there, Arthur had seen Stuart Townsend.
Well, there was no one there now.
No one. No one in the long parlor. No one out there on the porch where the vines crawled on the screens.
No one.
“Are you afraid of me?” she asked out loud. It gave her a curious tingling excitement to speak the words. “Or is it that you expected me to be afraid of you and you’re angry that I’m not? That’s it, isn’t it?”
Only the stillness answered her. And the soft rustling sound of the rose petals falling on the marble table.
With a faint smile, she went back to the roses, picked one from the vase, and gently holding it to her lips to feel its silky petals, she went out the front door.
It really was just an enormous rose, and look how many petals, and how strangely confused they seemed. And the thing was already withering.
In fact, the petals were already brown at the edges and curling. She savored the sweet perfume for another slow second, and then dropped the rose into the garden as she went out the gate.
PART THREE. COME INTO MY PARLOR
Thirty-three
THE MADNESS OF restoration began on Thursday morning, though the night before over dinner at Oak Haven with Aaron and Rowan, he had begun to outline what steps he would take.
As far as the grave was concerned, and all his thoughts about it and the doorway and the number thirteen, they had gone into the notebook, and he did not wish to dwell on them anymore.
The whole trip to the cemetery had been grim. The morning itself had been overcast yet beautiful, of course, and he had liked walking there with Aaron, and Aaron had shown him how to block some of the sensations that came through his hands. He’d been practicing, going without the gloves, and here and there touching gateposts, or picking sprigs of wild lantana, and turning off the images, pretty much the way one blocks a bad or obsessive thought, and to his surprise it more or less worked.
But the cemetery. He had hated it, hated its crumbling romantic beauty, and hated the great heap of withering flowers from Deirdre’s funeral which still surrounded the crypt. And the gaping hole where Carlotta Mayfair was soon to be laid to rest, so to speak.
Then as he was standing there, realizing in a sort of stunned miserable state that there were twelve crypts in the tomb and the doorway carved on the top made thirteen portals, up came his old friend Jerry Lonigan with some very pale-faced Mayfairs, and a coffin on wheels which could only belong to Carlotta, which was slipped, with only the briefest ceremony by the officiating priest, into the vacant slot.
Twelve crypts, the keyhole door, and then that coffin sliding in, blam! And his eyes moving up to that keyhole door again, which did look exactly like the doors in the house, but why? And then they were all going, with a quick exchange of pleasantries, for the Mayfairs assumed he and Aaron were there for the ceremony and expressed their appreciation before they went away.
“Come have a beer with me sometime,” said Jerry.
“Best to Rita.”
The cemetery had dropped into a buzzing, dizzying silence. Not a single thing he had seen since the beginning of this odyssey, not even the images from the jars, had filled him with as much dread as the sight of this tomb. “There’s the thirteen,” he had said to Aaron.
“But they have buried so many in those crypts,” Aaron had explained. “You know how it’s done.”
“It’s a pattern,” he’d murmured halfheartedly, feeling the blood drain from his face. “Look at it, twelve crypts and a doorway. It’s a pattern, I tell you. I knew the number and the door were connected. I just don’t know what they mean.”
Later that afternoon waiting for Rowan, while Aaron typed away on his computer in the front room, presumably on the Mayfair history, Michael had drawn the doorway in his notebook. He hated it. He hated the empty middle of it, for that’s what it had been in the bas-relief, not a door, but a doorway.
“And I’ve seen that doorway somewhere else, in some other representation,” he wrote. “But I don’t know where.”
He had hated even thinking about it. Even the thing trying to be human had not filled him with such apprehension.
But over supper, on the patio at Oak Haven, with the ashen twilight surrounding them and the candles flickering in their glass shades, they had resolved again to spend no more time poring over interpretations. They would move forward as they said. He and Rowan had spent the night in the front bedroom of the plantation, a lovely change from the hotel, and in the morning when he woke up at six, with the sun beating on his face, Rowan was already on the gallery, enjoying her second pot of coffee, and raring to go.
As soon as he arrived back in New Orleans, at nine o’clock, the work began.
He had never had so much fun.
He rented a car and roamed the city, taking down the names of the construction crews who were working on the finest of the uptown houses and the classy restorations going on in the Quarter downtown. He got out and talked to the bosses and the men; sometimes he went inside with the more talkative people who were willing to show him their work in progress, discussing the local wage scales and expectations, and asking for the names of carpenters and painters who needed work.
He called the local architectural firms who were famous for handling the grand homes, and requested various recommendations. The sheer friendliness of people astonished him. And the mere mention of the Mayfair house kindled excitement. People were only too eager to give advice.
For all the work that was going on, the city was full of unemployed craftsmen. The oil boom of the 1970s and early 1980s had generated tremendous interest and activity in restoration. And now the city lay under the cloud of the oil depression, with an economy bruised by numerous foreclosures. Money was tight. There were mansions on the market for half of what they were worth.
By one o’clock he had hired three crews of excellent painters, and a team of the finest plasterers in the city- quadroons descended from the colored families who had been free long before the Civil War, and who had been plastering the ceilings and walls of New Orleans houses for over seven and eight generations.
He had also signed up two teams of plumbers, one excellent roofing company, and a well-known uptown landscaping expert to begin the clearing and the restoration of the garden. At two P.M. the man walked the property with Michael for half an hour, pointing out the giant camellias and azaleas, the bridal wreath and the antique roses, all of which could be saved.
Two cleaning women had also been hired-upon recommendation of Beatrice Mayfair-who began the detailed dusting of furniture, the polishing of the silver, and the washing of the china which had lain under its layer of dust for many a year.
A special crew was scheduled to come in Friday morning to commence draining the pool, and seeing what had to be done to restore it and revamp its antiquated equipment. A kitchen specialist was also scheduled for Friday. Engineers were scheduled to examine the foundation and the porches. And an excellent carpenter and jack-of-all-trades named Dart Henley was eager to become Michael’s second in command.
At five o’clock, while there was still plenty of light, Michael went under the house with a flashlight and a dust mask and confirmed, after forty-five minutes of serious crawling, that indeed the interior walls were chain walls, descending directly to the ground, that the underneath was dry and clean, and that there was ample space for a central air and heat duct system.
