wants me to take it up with you.”
“Go ahead, Mr. Lonigan.”
“Your aunt, Carlotta Mayfair, she doesn’t want any announcement of this in the morning paper, and well, frankly, I don’t think there’s time for an announcement now. But there are so many Mayfairs who would want to know about the funeral, Dr. Mayfair. I mean the cousins are going to be up in arms when they find out how all this happened so fast. Now, it’s entirely up to you, you understand, I’ll do as you say, but my wife was wondering, would you maybe mind if she started calling the cousins. ’Course once she gets one or two of them, they’ll call everybody else. Now, if you don’t want her to do that, Dr. Mayfair, she won’t do it. But Rita Mae, my wife, that is, she felt that it was a shame to bury Deirdre this way without anybody knowing, and she felt maybe, you know, that it might do you good to see the cousins who would turn out. God knows, they came out for Miss Nancy last year. And Miss Ellie was here, your Miss Ellie from California, as I’m sure you know … ”
No, Rowan had not known. Another dull shock struck her at the mention of Ellie’s name. She found it painful to envision Ellie back there among these numberless and nameless cousins, whom she herself had never seen. The heat of her anger and bitterness surprised her. Ellie and the cousins. And Rowan here in this house alone. Once again, she struggled for composure. She wondered if this was not one of the more difficult moments she had endured since Ellie’s death.
“Yes, I would be grateful, Mr. Lonigan, if your wife would do what she thinks best. I would like to see the cousins … ” She stopped because she could not continue. “And Mr. Lonigan, regarding Ellie Mayfair, my adoptive mother-she is gone too now. She died last year. If you think any of these cousins would want to be told-”
“Oh, I’d be glad to do that, Dr. Mayfair. Save you telling them when you arrive. And I’m so sorry to hear it. We had no idea.”
It sounded so heartfelt. She could actually believe that he was sorry. Such a nice old-fashioned sort of man. There was almost a Damon Runyon quality to him.
“Good-bye Mr. Lonigan. I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon.”
For one moment, as she put down the phone, it seemed that if she let the tears go they’d never stop. The stir of emotions was so thick in her it was dizzying, and the pain demanded some violent action, and the strangest, most bizarre pictures filled her mind.
Choking back her tears, she saw herself rushing into Ellie’s room. She saw herself dragging clothes out of drawers and off hangers and ripping garments to shreds at random, in a near uncontrollable rage. She saw herself smashing Ellie’s mirror and the long row of bottles which still stood on her dresser, all those little bottles of scent in which the perfume had dried to nothing but color over the months. “Dead, dead, dead,” she whispered. “She was alive yesterday and the day before and the day before that, and I was here, and I did nothing! Dead! Dead! Dead!”
And then the bizarre scene shifted, as if the tragedy of her rage were passing into another act. She saw herself beating with her fists on all the walls of wood and glass around her, beating with her fists until the blood ran from her bruised hands. The hands that had operated on so many, healed so many, saved so many lives.
But Rowan did none of these things.
She sat down on the stool at the kitchen corner, her body crumpling, hand up to shield her face, and she began to sob aloud in the empty house, the images still passing through her mind. Finally she laid her head down on her folded arms, and she cried and cried, until she was choked and exhausted with it, and all she could do was whisper over and over: “Deirdre Mayfair, aged forty-eight, dead dead dead.”
At last, she wiped her face with the back of her hand, and she went to the rug before the fire and lay down. Her head hurt and all the world seemed empty to her and hostile and without the slightest promise of warmth or light.
It would pass. It had to. She had felt this misery on the day Ellie was buried. She had felt it before, standing in the hospital corridor as Ellie cried in pain. Yet it seemed impossible now that things could get better. When she thought of the paper in the safe, the paper which had kept her from going to New Orleans after Ellie’s death, she despised herself for honoring it. She despised Ellie for ever having made her sign it.
And her thoughts continued, abysmal and miserable, sapping her spirit and her belief in herself.
It must have been an hour that she lay there, the sun hot on the floorboards around her, and on the side of her face and her arms. She was ashamed of her loneliness. She was ashamed of being the victim of this anguish. Before Ellie’s death, she had been such a happy person, so carefree, utterly dedicated to her work, and coming and going in this house, assured of warmth and love, and giving warmth and love in return. When she thought of how much she had depended upon Michael, how much she wanted him now, she was doubly lost.
Inexcusable really, to have called him so desperately last night about the ghost, and to be wanting him so desperately now. She began to grow calm. Then slowly it came to her-the ghost last night, and last night her mother had died.
She sat up, folding her legs Indian-style, and trying to remember the experience in cold detail. She’d glanced at the clock last night only moments before the thing had appeared. It had been five minutes after three. And hadn’t that awful woman said, “Your mother died at five minutes after five”?
Same time
Of course, if her mother had appeared to her it would have been splendid beyond belief. It would have been the kind of sacramental moment people talk about forever. All the lovely cliches-“life-changing, miraculous, beautiful”-could have come into play. In fact, it was almost impossible to contemplate the comfort of such a moment. But it was not a woman who had appeared there, it was a man, a strange and curiously elegant man.
Just thinking about it again, thinking about the beseeching expression of the being, made her feel her alarm of the night before. She turned and glanced anxiously at the glass wall. Nothing there of course but the great empty blue sky over the dark distant bills, and the flashing, sparkling panorama of the bay.
She grew coldly and unexpectedly calm as she puzzled over it, as she reviewed in her mind all the popular myths she’d heard about such apparitions, but then this brief interlude of excitement began to fade.
Whatever it was, it seemed vague, insubstantial, even trivial beside the fact of the death of her mother. That was what had to be dealt with. And she was wasting precious time.
She climbed to her feet and went to the phone. She called Dr. Larkin at home.
“Lark, I have to go on leave,” she explained. “It’s unavoidable. Can we talk about Slattery filling in?”
How cool her voice sounded, how like the old Rowan. But that was a lie. As they spoke, she stared at the glass wall again, at the empty space on the deck where the tall, slender being had stood. She saw his dark eyes again, searching her face. She could scarcely follow what Lark was saying. No way I imagined that damned thing, she thought.
Eleven
THE DRIVE TO the Talamasca retreat house took less than an hour and a half. The limousine took the dull path of the interstate, cutting over the river road only when they were within a few miles of the house.
But it seemed like far less to Michael, who was for the entire time immersed in his conversation with Aaron.
By the time they reached the house, Michael had a fairly good understanding of what the Talamasca was, and he had assured Aaron that he would keep confidential forever what he was about to read in the files. Michael loved the idea of the Talamasca; he loved the genteel civilized way in which Aaron presented things; and he thought to himself more than once, that had he not been hell-bent on this “purpose” of his, he would cheerfully have embraced the Talamasca.
But those were foolish thoughts, because it was the drowning which had led to the sense of purpose and to his psychic ability; and these things had led the Talamasca to him.
There also had sharpened in Michael a sense of his love for Rowan-and it was love, he felt-as something apart from his involvement with the visions, even though he knew now that the visions had involved Rowan.
He tried to explain this to Aaron as they approached the retreat house gates.
