Rice, Anne - The Witching Hour

by Greyspid

  And what it spelled out in the layman’s language was a secret weakness in the wall of an artery, which for no discernible reason finally ruptured, causing totally unforeseen and sudden death. No way to predict, in other words, that a six-year-old child would suddenly go into seizures on the playground, a six-year-old who’d be healthy enough to be kicking six-year-old Rowan and pulling her hair only moments before. Nothing anybody could do for the child either, as the blood poured out of her nose and her ears, and her eyes rolled up into her head. On the contrary, they’d protected the other children, shielding their eyes from the spectacle as they took them into the schoolroom.

  ‘Poor Rowan,’ said the teacher, later. ‘Darling, I want you to understand it was something in her head that killed her. It was medical. It had nothing to do with the fight.’

  And that’s when Rowan had known, absolutely, what the teacher would never know. She did it. She caused that kid to die.

  Now, that you could dismiss easily enough — a child’s natural guilt for an accident she didn’t understand. But Rowan had felt something when it happened. She had felt something inside herself — a great pervasive sensation which was not unlike sex when she thought about it; it had washed through her and seemingly out of her at the moment the child fell over backwards. And then there had been the diagnostic sense, operative even then, which had told her that the child would die.

  Nevertheless, she forgot the incident. Graham and Ellie, in the manner of good California parents, took her to a psychiatrist. She played with his little girl dolls. She said what he wanted her to say. And people died of’strokes’ all the time.

  Eight years passed before the man got out of his Jeep on that lonely road in the hills of Tiburon and clapped his hand over her mouth and said in that awful intimate and insolent voice: ‘Now, don’t you scream.’

  Her adoptive parents never made a connection between the little girl and the rapist who had died as Rowan struggled, as the same blazing anger galvanized her, passing into that exquisite sensation which rendered her body suddenly rigid as the man let go of her and fell forward over the wheel.

  But she had made the connection. Quietly and certainly she’d made it. Not then, when she had forced open the door of the Jeep and run down the road screaming. No, she had not even known she was safe. But later, as she lay alone in the dark after the Highway Patrol and the homicide detectives had left them, she knew.

  Almost a decade and a half had elapsed before it happened with Graham. And Ellie was too sick with cancer by then to think of much of anything. And surely Rowan wasn’t going to pull up a chair to her bedside and say, ‘Mama, I think I killed him. He was cheating on you constantly. He was trying to divorce you. He couldn’t wait the bloody goddamned two months it’s going to take for you to die.’

  It was all a pattern, as surely as a spiderweb is a pattern, but a pattern does not imply a purpose. Patterns exist everywhere, and purpose is at its safest when it is spontaneous and shortlived.

  You will not do this. You will not take life. It was remembering heresy to remember slapping that little girl, even fighting the man in the Jeep. And it was too perfectly awful to remember the argument with Graham.

  ‘What do you mean you’re having her served with the papers! She’s dying! You’re going to stick it out with me.’

  He’d grabbed her by the arms, tried to kiss her. ‘Rowan, I love you, but she isn’t the woman I married…"

  ‘No? Not the woman you’ve cheated on for thirty years?’

  ‘She’s just a thing in there, I want to remember her the way she used to be…"

  ‘You talk that crap to me!’

  That had been the instant that his eyes fixed and the expression washed out of his face. People always die with such peaceful countenances. On the brink of rape, the man in the Jeep had just gone blank.

  Before the ambulance had come, she had knelt beside Graham, put her stethoscope to his head. There was that sound, so faint that some doctors could not hear it. But she heard it — the sound of a great deal of blood rushing to one spot.

  No one ever accused her of anything. How could they? Why, she was a doctor, and she’d been with him when the ’awful thing’ happened, and God knows, she did everything she could.

  Of course everybody knew Graham was a thoroughly second-rate human being — his law partners, his secretaries, even his last mistress, that stupid little Karen Garfield person who had come over wanting some keepsake, everybody knew. Except, that is, Graham’s wife. But there wasn’t the slightest suspicion. How could there be? It was just death by natural causes when he was about to make away with the fortune made through his wife’s inheritance and a twenty-eight-year-old idiot who had already sold her furniture and bought their airline tickets for St Croix.

  But it wasn’t death by natural causes.

  By this time she knew and understood the diagnostic sense; she’d practiced it and strengthened it. And when she had laid her hand on his shoulder, the diagnostic sense had said: no natural death.

  That in itself ought to have been enough. Yet maybe she was mistaken. Maybe it was the great deceptiveness of pattern which we call coincidence. And nothing more than that.

  But suppose she met with Michael Curry. Suppose he held her hand as she closed her eyes and thought about those deaths? Would he see only what she had seen, or would some objective truth be known to him? You killed them. It was worth a try.

  What she realized tonight, as she wandered slowly and almost aimlessly through the hospital, as she took detours through vast carpeted waiting rooms and down long wards where she was not known, and would never be known, was that she had felt an overwhelming desire just to talk to Michael Curry for a long time. She felt connected to Michael Curry. As much by the accident at sea as by these psychic secrets. She wanted, perhaps for reasons she didn’t fully understand, to tell him and him alone what she’d done.

  It wasn’t easy for her to face this weakness. Absolution for murder came only when she operated. She was at the altar of God when the nurses held out the sterile gown for her, when they held up the sterile gloves.

  And all her life she’d been a solitary person, a good listener, but invariably colder than those around her. That special sense, the one that aided her so as a physician, had always made her too keenly aware of what others truly felt.

  She’d been ten or twelve years old before she realized other people didn’t have it, sometimes not even a particle of it. That her beloved Ellie, for instance, didn’t have the slightest idea that Graham did not love her so much as he needed her, and needed to denigrate her and lie to her and to depend on her always being there, and being inferior to him.

  Rowan had sometimes wished for that kind of ignorance not to know when people envied you, or disliked you. Not to know that many people lied all the time. She liked the cops and the fire fighters because they were to some extent perfectly predictable. Or maybe it was simply that their particular brand of dishonesty didn’t bother her so much; it seemed harmless compared to the complex, insidious, and endlessly malicious insecurity of more educated men.

  Of course diagnostic usefulness had redeemed this special psyche sense completely.

  But what could ever redeem the ability to kill at will? To atone was another matter. To what proper use could a telekinetic ability like that ever be put?

  And such a power was not beyond scientific possibility, that was the truly terrifying part. Like the psychometric power of Michael Curry, such things might have to do with measurable energy, complex physical talents which might someday be as definable as electricity or microwaves, or high-frequency sounds. Curry was capturing an impression from the objects he handled, and that impression was very likely the product of energy. Very likely every object in existence — every surface, every definable bit of matter - contained such stored ’impressions.’ They existed in a measurable field.

  But parapsychology wasn’t Rowan’s love. She was mesmerized by what could be seen in test tubes, slide
s, and graphs. She didn’t care to test or analyze her own killing power. She wanted only to believe that she had never used it, that maybe there was some other explanation for what had happened, that maybe somehow she was innocent.

  And the tragic thing was, maybe nobody could ever tell her what had really occurred with Graham, and the man in the Jeep and the kid on the playground. And all she could hope for was to tell someone, to unburden and exorcise, as everybody else did, through talk.

  Talk, talk, talk.

  That’s exactly what Rowan wanted. She knew.

  Only once before had this desire to confide nearly overcome her. And that had been quite an unusual event. In fact, she had almost told a perfect stranger the entire story, and there were times since when she wished that she had done just that.

  It was late last year, a full six months after Ellie’s death. Rowan was feeling the keenest loneliness she’d ever known. It seemed to her the great pattern called ’our family’ had been washed away overnight. Their life had been so good before Ellie’s illness. Even Graham’s affairs couldn’t spoil it, because Ellie pretended the affairs weren’t happening. And though Graham was not a man whom any human being would have called a good person, he possessed a relentless and infectious personal energy that maintained the family life in high gear.

  And how Rowan had depended upon them both.

  Her dedication to medicine had pretty much taken her away from her old college cronies. None of them had gone into the sciences. But the family was all that the three of them ever needed. From the time of Rowan’s earliest memories, they were an unshakable trio, whether cruising the Caribbean, or skiing in Aspen, or eating a midnight Christmas dinner on a room service table in a suite in the Plaza in New York.

  Now the dream house on the Tiburon shore stood empty as a beached shell.

  And Rowan had the odd feeling that the Sweet Christine did not belong so much to her and her various well-chosen love partners, but rather to the family who had left the more dominant impression over a decade of happy years.

  One night after Ellie’s death, Rowan had stood alone in the wide living room beneath the high-beamed ceiling, talking aloud to herself, laughing even, thinking there is no one, no one to know, no one to hear. The glass walls were dark and indistinct with reflected carpet, furniture. She couldn’t see the tide that lapped ceaselessly at the pilings. The fire was dying out. The eternal chill of the coastal night was moving slowly through the rooms. She had learnt a painful lesson, she thought — that as they die, the ones we love, we lose our witnesses, our watchers, those who know and understand the tiny little meaningless patterns, those words drawn in water with a stick. And there is nothing left but the endless flow.

  It was shortly after that that the bizarre moment had come, when she had almost taken hold of this stranger and poured out her tale.

  He was an elderly gentleman, white-haired — British, quite obviously from the first words he spoke. And they had met, in of all places, the cemetery where her adoptive parents had been laid to rest.

  It was a quaint old graveyard, sprinkled with weathered monuments on the edge of the small northern California town where Graham’s family had once lived. These people, not related to her by blood, had been completely unknown to her. She’d gone back several times after Ellie’s funeral, though why she wasn’t quite sure. On that particular day her reason was simple: the gravestone had finally been completed and she wanted to see that the names and dates were correct.

  It had occurred to her several times on the drive north that this new gravestone would stand as long as she was living, and after that, it would tumble and crack and lie there in the weeds. The relatives of Graham Franklin had not even been notified about his funeral. Ellie’s people - far away in the dim South - had not been notified of her death. Even in ten years, no one would know or care then about Graham and Ellie Mayfair Franklin. And by the end of Rowan’s life, everyone who had ever known them or even heard of them would be dead.

  Spiderwebs broken and torn in a wind that is indifferent to their beauty. Why bother with this at all? But Ellie had wanted her to bother. Ellie had wanted a headstone, flowers. That was the way they did it in New Orleans when Ellie was a little girl. Only on her deathbed had she spoken of her home finally, and to say the strangest things — that they had laid out Stella in the parlor, that people had come to see Stella and kiss her even though her brother had shot her, that Lonigan and Sons had closed up the wound in Stella’s head.

  ‘And Stella’s face was so beautiful in the coffin. She had such beautiful black hair, all in little waves, you know, and she was as pretty as her picture on the living room wall. I loved Stella! Stella let me hold the necklace. I sat on a chair by the coffin. I was kicking my feet and my Aunt Carlotta said to stop.’

  Every word of that strange diatribe was engraved on Rowan’s memory. Stella, her brother, Aunt Carlotta. Even the name Lonigan. Because for a precious few seconds there had been a flash of color in the abyss.

  These people were related to Rowan. Rowan was in fact Ellie’s third cousin. And of these people Rowan knew nothing, and must continue to know nothing, were her promises to Ellie to be kept.

  Ellie had remembered herself, even in those painful hours. ‘Don’t you ever go back there, Rowan. Rowan, remember what you’ve promised. I burned all the pictures, the letters. Don’t go back there, Rowan, this is your home.’

  ‘I know, Ellie. I’ll remember.’

  And there was no more talk of Stella. Of her brother. Of Aunt Carlotta. Of the picture on the living room wall. Only the shock of the document presented to Rowan after Ellie’s death by her executor — a carefully worded pledge, with absolutely no legal validity whatever, that Rowan would never return to the city of New Orleans, never seek to know who her people were.

  Yet in those last days, Ellie had spoken of them. Of Stella on the wall.

  And because Ellie had talked too of headstones and flowers, of being remembered by her adopted daughter, Rowan had gone north that afternoon to keep that promise, and in the little hillside graveyard, she had met the Englishman with the white hair.

  He’d been down on one knee before Ellie’s grave as if genuflecting, copying the very names which had only just been cut into the stone.

  He seemed a little flustered when she interrupted him, though she had not spoken a word. In fact, for one second he looked at her as if she were a ghost. It had almost made her laugh. After all she was a slightly built woman, in spite of her height, wearing her usual boat clothes — a navy blue peacoat and jeans. And he himself seemed such an anachronism in his elegant three-piece suit of gray tweed.

  But that special sense of hers told her he was a man of only good intentions, and when he explained that he had known Ellie’s people in New Orleans, she believed him. She felt a great confusion, however. Because she wanted to know these people too.

  After all, there was no one left in the world for her but those people! And what an ungrateful and disloyal thought that was.

  She said nothing to him as he chatted on in a lovely lyrical British fashion about the heat of the sun and the beauty of this little cemetery. Silence was her inveterate response to things, even when it confused others and made them uncomfortable. And so, out of habit, she gave back nothing, no matter what her inner thoughts. Knew my people? People of my blood?

  ‘My name is Aaron Lightner,’ the man said as he placed a small white card in her hand. ‘If ever you want to know about the Mayfair family in New Orleans, then by all means, please do give me a call. You can reach me in London, if you like. Please do reverse the charges. I’ll be happy to tell you what I know about the Mayfair family. Quite a history, you see.’

  Numbing these words, so unintentionally hurtful in her loneliness, so unexpected on this strange deserted little hill. Had she looked helpless, standing there, unable to answer, unable to give the smallest nod in response? She hoped so. She didn’t want to think that she seemed cold or rude.

  But it was
quite out of the question to explain to him that she’d been adopted, taken away from New Orleans the day she was born. Impossible to explain she’d made a promise never to return there, never to seek the slightest knowledge about the woman who’d given her up. Why, she did not even know her mother’s first name. And she’d found herself wondering suddenly, did he know it? Know perhaps the identity of the Mayfair who had been pregnant out of wedlock and given away her child?

  Best, certainly, not to say anything, lest he carry back with him some gossip. After all, perhaps her real mother had gone on to marry and have seven children. And talk now could only do the woman harm. Over the miles and the years, Rowan felt no malice for this faceless, nameless creature, only a dreary hopeless longing. No, she had not said a word.

  He had studied her for a long moment, quite unruffled by her impassive face, her inevitable quiet. When she gave him back the card, he took it graciously, but he held it out tentatively as if he hoped she would take it again.

  ‘I should so like to talk to you,’ he continued. ‘I should like to discover how life has been for the transplanted one, so very far from the home soil.’ He had hesitated, then: ‘I knew your mother years ago -’

  He stopped, as if he sensed the effect of his words. Maybe their sheer impropriety disturbed him. Rowan didn’t know. The moment could not have been more excruciating if he had struck her. Yet she hadn’t turned away. She had merely remained there motionless, hands shoved in her coat pockets. Knew my mother?

  How ghastly it had been. And this man with cheerful blue eyes regarding her so patiently, and the silence as it always was, a shroud binding her in. For the truth was, she could not make herself speak.

  ‘I do wish you’d join me for a lunch, or only for a drink if there isn’t time for that. I’m really not a dreadful person, you see. There is a long history…"

  And the special sense told her he was telling the truth!