Lasher

her purse, and meant a thousand times to send it to him-after he came home from the hospital of course, so as not to upset him. Well, she should have given it to Ryan before she left. But then again, who knew? Maybe he’d been wearing that medal on Christmas Day, when he’d nearly drowned in the pool. Poor Michael.

The logs in the fire shifted noisily and the mellow soothing light flared on the plain sloped ceiling. It made Gifford aware of how very quiet the surf was and had been all day. Sometimes the surf died to absolutely nothing on the Gulf of Mexico. She wondered if that could happen on the ocean. She loved the sound of the waves, actually. She wished they were roaring away out there in the dark, as if the Gulf were threatening to invade the land. As if nature were lashing back at the beach houses and the condominiums and the trailer parks, reminding them that they might be wiped off the smooth sandy face of the earth at any minute, should a hurricane or a tidal wave come. And certainly those things would inevitably come.

Gifford liked that idea. She could always sleep well when the waves were fierce and rapid. Her dreads and miseries didn’t stem from the fear of anything natural. They came from legends, and secrets, and tales of the family’s past. She loved her little house on account of its fragility, that a storm would most surely fold it up like a pack of cards.

This afternoon she had walked several miles south to inspect the house bought so recently by Michael and Rowan, a high contemporary structure built as it ought to be built-on pilings, and looking down upon a deserted sweep of beach. No sign of life there, but what had she expected?

She’d wandered back, heavily depressed by the mere sight of the place-how Rowan and Michael had loved it; they’d gone there on their honeymoon-and glad that her own little house was low and old and hidden behind a small and insignificant little dune, the way you couldn’t and shouldn’t build them today. She loved its privacy, its intimacy with the beach and the water. She loved that she could walk out her doors, and up three steps and along her boardwalk, and then down and out across the sand to the lip of the sea.

And the Gulf was the sea. Noisy or quiet, it was the sea. The great and endless open sea. The Gulf was the entire southern horizon. This might as well have been the end of the world.

One hour more and then it would be Ash Wednesday; she waited as if waiting for the witching hour, tense and resentful of Mardi Gras, a festival which had never made her particularly happy and always involved far more than she could endure.

She wanted to be awake when it was over; she wanted to feel Lent come on, as if the temperature itself would change. Earlier she’d built up the fire, and slumped down on the couch, merely to think away the hours, as if working on something, counting the minutes, feeling guilty naturally, for not going to First Street, for not having done all sorts of things to try to prevent this disaster, and then tensing with resentment against those who always tried to stop her from implementing her good intentions, those who seemed unable to distinguish between the real and imagined threat, and dismissed everything Gifford said out of hand.

Should have warned Michael Curry, she thought. Should have warned Rowan Mayfair. But they had read that tale. They should have known! Nobody could be happy in that First Street house. Fixing it up, that was sheer nonsense. The evil in that house lived in every brick and every bit of mortar; thirteen witches; and to think, all those old possessions of Julien’s were up in the attic. The evil lived in those things; it lived in the plaster ceilings, and under the porches and eaves, like bees’ nests hidden in the capitals of the Corinthian columns. That house had no hope, no future. And Gifford had known it all her life.

She hadn’t needed these Talamasca scholars from Amsterdam to tell her. She knew.

She’d known it when she’d first gone to First Street-a little girl with her beloved grandmother Ancient Evelyn, who was even then called Ancient because she was already old, and there were several young Evelyns then-one married to Charles Mayfair and another to Bryce-though whatever became of them, she couldn’t now remember.

She and Ancient Evelyn had gone to First Street, to visit Aunt Carl and poor doomed Deirdre Mayfair, the heiress in her rocking-chair throne. Gifford had seen the famous ghost of First Street-clearly and distinctly-a male figure standing behind Deirdre’s chair. Ancient Evelyn had seen it too, no doubt in Gifford’s mind. And Aunt Carlotta, that steely, cold and vicious Aunt Carlotta, had chatted with them in the dreary parlor as if there were no ghost there at all.

As for Deirdre, she had been already catatonic. “Poor child,” Ancient Evelyn had said. “Julien foresaw everything.” That was one of those statements Ancient Evelyn always refused to explain, though she often repeated it. And later, to her little granddaughter Gifford: “Deirdre’s known all the sorrow and never knew the fun of being one of us.”

“There was fun?” Gifford wondered about that now, as she had wondered then. What did Ancient Evelyn mean by fun? Gifford suspected she knew. It was all recorded in those old photographs of her with Oncle Julien. Julien and Evelyn in the Stutz Bearcat on a summer day, in white coats and goggles. Julien and Evelyn under the oaks at Audubon Park; Julien and Evelyn in Julien’s third-floor room. And then there was the decade after Julien’s death, when Evelyn had gone away with Stella to Europe, and they had had their “affair,” of which Evelyn spoke with great solemnity.

In Gilford’s early years, before Ancient Evelyn had gone silent, Ancient Evelyn had always been willing to tell those tales in a whispered but steady voice-of how Julien had bedded her when she was thirteen, of how he’d come up to Amelia Street, and cried from the sidewalk, “Evelyn, come down, come down!” and forced Evelyn’s grandfather Walker to let her loose from the attic bedroom where he had locked her up.

Bad bad blood between Julien and Evelyn’s grandfather-going way back to a murder at Riverbend when Julien was a boy, and a gun had gone off by accident, killing his cousin Augustin. The grandson of Augustin swore hate for the man who had shot his ancestor, though all were ancestors of everyone involved in some way or another. Tangle, tangle. Family trees of the Mayfair clan were like the thorny vines that choked off the windows and doors of Sleeping Beauty’s castle.

And to think, Mona was working it all out on her computer, and had only recently made the proud announcement that she had more lines of descent from Julien, and from Angelique, than anyone. Not to mention the lines feeding in from the old Mayfairs of Saint-Domingue. It made Gifford dizzy and sad, and she wished Mona would go for boys her own age, and care a little about clothes, and stop this obsession with family, and computers, and race cars, and guns.

“Doesn’t it teach you something about guns?” Gifford had demanded. “This huge rift between us and the Mayfairs of First Street? All happened on account of a gun.”

But there was no stopping Mona’s obsessions, large or small. She had dragged Gifford five times to a miserable little shooting gallery across the river just so they both could learn how to shoot their big noisy.38s. It was enough to make Gifford go mad. But better to be with Mona than to worry what Mona was doing on her own.

And to think, Ryan had approved of it. Made Gifford keep a gun after that in her glove compartment. Made her bring a gun to this house.

There was so much for Mona to learn. Had Ancient Evelyn ever told Mona those old tales? Now and then Ancient Evelyn emerged from her silence. And her voice was still her voice, and she could still begin her chant, like the elder of a tribe giving forth the oral history:

“I would have died in that attic had it not been for Julien-mad and mute, and white as a plant that has never seen sun. Julien got me with child and that was your mother, poor thing that she became.”

“But why, why did Oncle Julien do it with a girl so young?” Gifford had asked only once, so great was the thunder in response:

“Be proud of your Mayfair blood. Be proud. Julien foresaw everything. The legacy line was losing his strength. And I loved Julien. And Julien loved me. Don’t seek to understand those people-Julien and Mary Beth and Cortland- for then there were giants in the earth which there are not now.”

Giants in the earth. Cortland, Julien’s own son, had been Ancient Evelyn’s father, though Ancient Evelyn would never admit it! And Laura Lee, Julien’s child! Dear God, Gilford couldn’t even keep track of the lines unless she took a pen and paper and traced them out, and that she frankly never wanted to do. Giants in the earth! More truly devils from hell.

“Oh, how perfectly delicious,” Alicia had said, listening gleefully and always ready to mock Gifford and her fears. “Go on, Ancient Evelyn, what happened then? Tell us about Stella.”

Alicia had already been a drunk by the age of thirteen. She had looked old for her age, though thin and slight like Gifford. She’d gone into barrooms downtown and drunk with strange men, and then Granddaddy Fielding had