mirrors and doors open along Bourbon Street. It seemed exotic to Rita the way the Quarter always had. She almost never got to go down there.
They sat at a marble-top table, and she had a glass of white wine because that’s what the Englishman had and it sounded very nice to her. What a good-looking man he was. With a man like that it didn’t matter about his age, he was handsomer than younger men. It made her slightly nervous to sit so close to him. And the way his eyes fixed her, it made her melt as if she was a kid again in high school.
“Talk to me, Mrs. Lonigan,” he said. “I’ll listen.”
She tried to take it slow, but once she started it just came pouring out of her. Soon she was crying, and he probably couldn’t understand a word she was saying. She gave him that old, twisted little bit of card. She told about the ads she’d run, and how she’d told Deirdre that she could never find him.
Then came the difficult part. “There are things that girl in California doesn’t know! That property’s hers, and maybe the lawyers will tell her that, but what about the curse, Mr. Lightner? I’m putting my trust in you, I’m telling you things my husband doesn’t want me to tell a living soul. But if Deirdre put her trust in you back then, well, that’s enough for me. I’m telling you, the jewels and the house are cursed.”
Finally, she told him everything. She told him all that Jerry had told her. She told him all that Red had ever said. She told him anything and everything she could remember.
And the funny thing was that he was never surprised or shocked. And over and over again, he assured her that he would do his best to get this information to the girl in California.
When it was all said, and she sat there wiping her nose, her white wine untouched, the man asked her if she would keep his card, if she would call him when there was any “change” with Deirdre. If she could not reach him she was to leave a message. The people who answered the phone would understand. She need only say it was in connection with Deirdre Mayfair.
She took her prayer book out of her purse. “Give me those numbers again,” she said, and she wrote down the words, “In connection with Deirdre Mayfair.”
Only after she had written it all out, did she think to ask, “But tell me, Mr. Lightner, how did you come to know Deirdre?”
“It’s a long story, Mrs. Lonigan,” he said. “You might say I’ve been watching that family for years. I have two paintings done by Deirdre’s father, Sean Lacy. One of them is of Antha. He was the one who was killed on the highway in New York before Deirdre was born.”
“He was killed on the highway? I never knew.”
“It’s doubtful anyone down here ever did,” he said. “Quite a painter he was. He did a beautiful portrait of Antha with the famous emerald necklace. I came by it through a New York dealer some years after both of them were dead. Deirdre was probably ten years old by that time. I didn’t meet her until she went off to college.”
“That’s a funny thing, about Deirdre’s father going off the road,” she said. “It’s just what happened to Deirdre’s boyfriend too, the man she was going to marry. Did you know that? That he went off the river road when he was driving down to New Orleans?”
She thought she saw a little change in the Englishman’s face then, but she couldn’t be sure. Seemed his eyes got smaller for just a second.
“Yes, I did know,” he said. He seemed to be thinking about things he didn’t want to tell her. Then he started talking again. “Mrs. Lonigan, will you promise me something?”
“What is it, Mr. Lightner?”
“If something should happen, something wholly unexpected, and the daughter from California should come home, please don’t try to talk to her. Call me instead. Call me any time day or night, and I promise I shall be here as soon as I can get a plane out of London.”
“You mean I shouldn’t tell her these things myself, that’s what you’re saying?”
“Yes,” he answered, very serious-like, touching her hand for the first time but in a very gentlemanly way that was completely proper. “Don’t go to that house again, especially not if the daughter is there. I promise you that if I cannot come myself, someone else will come, someone else who will accomplish what we want done, someone quite familiar with the whole story.”
“Oh, that would be a big load off my mind,” Rita said. She sure didn’t want to talk to that girl, a total stranger, and try to tell her all these things. But suddenly the whole thing began to puzzle her. For the first time she started wondering-who was this nice man? Was she wrong to trust him?
“You can trust me, Mrs. Lonigan,” he said, just as if he knew what she was thinking. “Please be certain of it. And I’ve met Deirdre’s daughter, and I know that she is a rather quiet and-well, shall we say-forbidding individual. Not an easy person to talk to, if you understand. But I think I can explain things to her.”
Well, now, that made perfect sense.
“Sure, Mr. Lightner.”
He was looking at her. Maybe he knew how confused she was, how strange the whole afternoon seemed, all this talk of curses and things, and dead people and that weird old necklace.
“Yes, they are very strange,” he said.
Rita laughed. “It was like you read my mind,” she said.
“Don’t worry anymore,” he said. “I’ll see that Rowan Mayfair knows her mother didn’t want to give her up; I’ll see she knows all that you want her to know. I owe that much to Deirdre, don’t you think? I wish I’d been there when she needed me.”
Well, that was plenty enough for Rita.
Every Sunday after that, when Rita was at Mass, she flipped to the back of her prayer book and looked at the phone number for the man in London. She read those words “In connection with Deirdre Mayfair.” Then she said a prayer for Deirdre, and it didn’t seem wrong that it was the prayer for the dead, it seemed to be the right one for the occasion.
“May perpetual light shine upon her. O Lord, and may she rest in peace, Amen.”
*
And now it was over twelve years since Deirdre had taken her place on the porch, over a year since the Englishman had come and gone-and they were talking of putting Deirdre away again. It was her house that was tumbling down all around her in that sad overgrown garden and they were going to lock her away again.
Maybe Rita should call that man. Maybe she should tell him. She just didn’t know.
“It’s the wise thing, them putting her away,” Jerry said, “before Miss Carl is too far gone to make the decision. And the fact is, well, I hate to say it, honey. But Deirdre’s going down fast. They say she’s dying.”
She waited till Jerry had gone to work. Then she made the call. She knew it would show on the bill, and she probably would have to say something eventually to Jerry. But it didn’t matter. What mattered now was getting the operator to understand that she had to call a number all the way across the ocean.
It was a nice woman who answered over there, and they did reverse the charges just as the Englishman had promised. At first Rita couldn’t understand everything the woman said-she spoke so fast-but then it came out that Mr. Lightner was in the United States. He was out in San Francisco. The woman would call him right away. Would Rita care to leave her number?
“Oh, no. I don’t want him to call here,” she said. “You just tell him this for me. It’s real important. That Rita Mae Lonigan called in connection with Deirdre Mayfair. Can you write that down? Tell him that Deirdre Mayfair is very sick; that Deirdre Mayfair is going down fast. That maybe Deirdre Mayfair is dying.”
It took the breath out of Rita to say that last word. She couldn’t say any more after that. She tried to answer clearly when the woman repeated the message. The woman would call Mr. Lightner right away at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. Rita was in tears when she put down the phone.
That night she dreamed of Deirdre, but she could remember nothing when she woke up, except that Deirdre was there, and it was twilight, and the wind was blowing in the trees behind St. Rose de Lima’s. When she opened her eyes, she thought of wind blowing through trees. She heard Jerry tell of how it had been when they went to get the body of Antha. She remembered the storm in the trees that horrible day when she and Miss Carl had fought for the little card that said Talamasca. Wind in the trees in the garden behind St. Rose de Lima’s.
Rita got up and went to early Mass. She went to the shrine of the Blessed Virgin and lighted a candle. Please let Mr. Lightner come, she prayed. Please let him talk to Deirdre’s daughter.
And she realized as she prayed that it was not the inheritance that worried her, or the curse upon that
