Rice, Anne - The Witching Hour

by Greyspid

  Look at her. Nothing else matters now. It is not important to hurry, or to think of anything else, or to worry. Just look at her, look at her face with all its secrets locked away now forever.

  And Stella’s face was so beautiful in the coffin. She had such beautiful black hair…

  ‘She is going to faint, help her! Pierce, help her.’

  ‘No, we have her, she’s all right,’ said Jerry Lonigan.

  So perfectly, hideously dead she looked, and so lovely. Groomed she was for eternity — with the pink lipstick gleaming on her shapely mouth and the rouge on the flawless girlish cheeks, and her black hair brushed out on the satin, like girl’s hair, free and beautiful, and the rosary beads, yes, rosary beads, threaded through her fingers, which are like dough as they lie on her breast, not human hands at all, but something made crudely by a sculptor.

  In all these years, Rowan had never seen such a thing. She had seen them drowned, and stabbed, and after they had died on the wards in their sleep. She had seen them colorless and pumped with chemicals, slit open after weeks and months and even years, for the anatomy lesson. She had seen them at the autopsy with the blood red organs being lifted out in the doctor’s gloved hands.

  But never this. Never this dead and pretty thing in blue silk and lace, smelling of face powder, with her hands clasped over the rosary beads. Ageless she looked, almost like a giant little girl with her innocent hair, her face devoid of lines, even the shiny lipstick the color of rose petals.

  Oh, if it were only possible to open her eyes! I wish I could see my mother’s eyes! And in this room filled with the very old, she is so young still…

  She bent down. She withdrew her hands ever so gently from the Englishman. She laid them on her pale hands, her softly melting hands. Hard! Hard as the rosary beads. Cold and hard. She closed her eyes, and pressed her fingers into this unyielding white flesh. So absolutely dead, so beyond any breath of life, so firmly finished.

  If Michael were here, could he know from her hands if she had died without pain or fear? Could he know why the secrecy? Could he touch this horrid, lifeless flesh and hear the song of life still from it? Oh, please God, whoever she was, why ever she gave me away, I hope it was without fear and pain that she died. In peace, in a sweetness like her face. Look at her closed eyes, her smooth forehead.

  Slowly, she raised her hand and wiped the tears off her own cheek, and realized that her face was relaxed now. That she could speak if she wanted to, and that others around her were crying too, that the woman with the iron gray hair was crying, and that the poor black-haired woman who had been crying all along was sobbing silently against the chest of the man beside her, and that the faces of those who didn’t cry - everywhere she looked in the glow beyond the coffin - had become thoughtful and quiet, and rather like those faces in great Florentine paintings where the passive, faintly sad souls regard the world beyond the frame as if from a dream, gazing out from the corners of their eyes, languidly.

  She backed away, but her eyes remained fixed on the woman in the coffin. She let the Englishman guide her again, away, to a small room that waited. Mr Lonigan was saying it was time for them all to come up one by one, that the priest was here, and he was ready.

  In astonishment, Rowan saw a tall old man bend gracefully and kiss the dead woman’s forehead. Beatrice, the pretty one with the gray hair, came next and whispered something as she kissed the dead woman in the same manner. A child was lifted next to do the same; and the old bald man came, heavy with his big belly making it hard, but he bent to give the kiss, whispering hoarsely for everyone to hear, ‘Good-bye, darlin’.’

  Mr Lonigan pushed her gently down in the chair. As he turned, the crying woman with the black hair suddenly bent near and looked into her eyes. ‘She didn’t want to give you up,’ she said, her voice so thin and quick it was like a thought.

  ‘Rita Mae!’ Mr Lonigan hissed, turning on her, taking her by the arm, and drawing her back.

  ‘Is that true?’ Rowan whispered. Rowan reached out to capture her retreating hand. Mr Lonigan’s face flushed, his jowls shivering slightly. He pushed the black-haired woman away, out of the door, down a small hallway.

  The Englishman looked down at her from the door to the big room. He gave her a little nod, his eyebrows rising as if it filled him with sadness and wondering.

  Slowly Rowan withdrew her gaze from him. She stared at the procession, still coming one by one, each bending as if to drink from the cool splash of a low water fountain. ‘Goodbye, Deirdre, dear.’ Did they all know? Did they all remember, the older ones, the ones who had come up to her at first? Had all the children heard, in one form or another, at some time or another? The handsome one was watching her from far away.

  ‘Good-bye, sweetheart…" On and on they came, seemingly without end, the rooms behind them dark and crowded as the line pressed in tighter.

  Didn’t want to give you up.

  What must it feel like to kiss her smooth hard skin? And they did it as if it were the most natural thing in the world, the simplest thing in the world, the baby held aloft, the mother bending, the man coming so quick and then another very old one with spotted hands and thinning hair, ‘Help me up, Cecil,’ her foot on the velvet prie-dieu. The twelve-year-old with the hair ribbon stood on tiptoe.

  ‘Rowan, do you want to be alone with her again?’ Lonigan’s voice. ‘That’s your time at the end, when they’ve all passed. The priest will wait. But you don’t have to.’

  She looked into the Englishman’s mild, gray eyes. But he wasn’t the one who’d spoken. It was Lonigan with his flushed and shining face, and china blue eyes. Far down the little hallway stood his wife, Rita Mae, not daring now to come closer.

  ‘Yes, alone, one more time,’ Rowan whispered. Her eyes searched out the eyes of Rita Mae, in the shadows at the end of the little hall. ‘True,’ Rita Mae mouthed the word, as she nodded gravely.

  Yes. To kiss her good-bye, yes, the way they are kissing her…

  TWENTY-FIVE

  THE FILE ON THE MAYFAIR

  WITCHES

  PART X

  Rowan Mayfair

  STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL THIS SUMMARY AND

  UPDATED

  SEE CONFIDENTIAL FILE: ROWAN MAYFAIR,

  LONDON FOR ALL RELATED MATERIALS.

  COMPUTER PASSWORD REQUIRED.

  ROWAN MAYFAIR was adopted legally by Ellen Louise Mayfair and her husband Graham Franklin, on the date of Rowan’s birth, November 7, 1959.

  At this point Rowan was taken by plane to Los Angeles, where she lived with her adopted parents until she was three years old. The family then moved to San Francisco, California, where they lived in Pacific Heights for two years.

  When Rowan was five, the family made its final move to a house on the shore of Tiburon, California — across the bay from San Francisco - which had been designed by architects Trammel, Porter and Davis expressly for Graham and Ellie and their daughter. The house is a marvel of glass walls, exposed redwood beams, and modern plumbing fixtures and appliances. It includes enormous decks, its own twenty-five-foot pier, and a boat channel, which is dredged twice yearly. It commands a view of Sausalito across Richardson Bay and San Francisco to the south. Rowan lives alone in this house now.

  At the time of this writing, Rowan is almost thirty years old. She is five feet ten inches tall. She has short, softly bobbed blond hair and large pale gray eyes. She is undeniably attractive, with remarkably beautiful skin, and dark straight eyebrows and dark eyelashes and an extremely beautiful mouth. Yet for the sake of comparison, it can be said that she has none of the glamour of Stella, or the sweet prettiness of Antha, or the dark sensuality of Deirdre. Rowan is delicate yet boyish; in some of her pictures, her expression - on account of her straight dark eyebrows - is reminiscent of Mary Beth.

  It is my belief that she resembles Petyr van Abel, but there are definite differences. She does not have his deep-set eyes, and her blond hair is ashen rather than gold. But her face is narrow like that of
Petyr van Abel; and there is a Nordic look to Rowan, just as there is to Petyr in his portraits.

  Rowan appears cold to people. Yet her voice is warm, and deep and slightly husky - what is called a whiskey voice in America. People say you have to know her, really, to like her. This is strange because our investigation indicates that very few people know her. But she is almost universally liked.

  SUMMARY OF MATERIALS ON ROWAN‘S

  ADOPTIVE PARENTS ELLIE MAYFAIR AND GRAHAM FRANKLIN

  Ellen Louise Mayfair was the only daughter of Sheffield, son of Cortland Mayfair. She was born in 1923, and six years old when Stella died. Ellie lived in California almost exclusively from the time that she entered Stanford University at eighteen years of age. She married Graham Franklin, a Stanford law graduate, when she was thirty-one, Graham was eight years younger than Ellie. Ellie seems to have had very little contact with her family even before she went to California, as she went away to a boarding school in Canada when she was only eight, six months after her mother’s death.

  Her father, Sheffield Mayfair, seems never to have recovered from the loss of his wife, and though he visited Ellie often, taking her on shopping sprees in New York, he kept her away from home. He was the most quiet and reclusive of Cortland’s sons, and possibly the most disappointing, in that he worked doggedly in the family firm but seldom excelled or participated in important decisions. Everyone depended upon him, Cortland said after his death.

  What is relevant here is that after the age of eight, Ellie saw very little of the Mayfairs, and her lifelong friends in California were people she had met there, along with a few girls from the Canadian boarding school with whom she kept in touch. We don’t know what she knew of Antha’s life and death, or even of Deirdre’s life.

  Her husband, Graham Franklin, knew nothing about Ellie’s family apparently, and some of the remarks he made over the years are entirely fanciful. ‘She came from a great plantation down there.’

  ‘They are the sort of people who keep gold under the floorboards.’

  ‘I think they were probably descended from the buccaneers.’

  ‘Oh, my wife’s people? They were slave traders, weren’t they, honey? They all have colored blood.’

  Family gossip at the time of the adoption said that Ellie had signed papers for Carlotta Mayfair saying she would never let Rowan discover anything about her true background, and never permit her to return to Louisiana.

  Indeed, these papers are part of the official adoption records, being formalized personal agreements between the parties, and involving staggering transfers of money.

  During the first year of Rowan’s life, over five million dollars were transferred in successive installments from the account of Carlotta Mayfair in New Orleans to the accounts of Ellie Mayfair in California, in the Bank of America and the Wells Fargo Bank.

  Ellie, rich in her own right, through the trust funds left to her from her father Sheffield, and later from her grandfather Cortland (maybe Cortland would have changed this arrangement had there been time, but the paperwork had been done decades before), set up an immense trust fund for her adoptive daughter, Rowan, to which half of this five million was added over the next two years.

  The remaining half was transferred, as it came in, directly to Graham Franklin, who invested the money prudently and success-fully, largely in real estate (a gold mine in California), and who continued to invest Ellie’s money - regular payments from her trust -in community property and investments over the years. Though he made a very high salary as a successful lawyer, Graham had no family money, and his enormous estate — owned in common with his wife — at the time of his death was the result of his skillful use of her inherited money.

  There is considerable evidence that Graham resented his wife, and resented his emotional as well as financial dependence upon her. He could not have possibly supported his life-style - yachts, sports cars, extravagant vacations, a palatial modern house in Tiburon — on his salary. And he funneled enormous sums of Ellie’s money directly out of their joint account into the hands of various mistresses over the years.

  Several of these women have told our investigators that Graham was a vain and slightly sadistic man. Yet they found him irresistible, giving up on him only when they realized he really loved Ellie. It wasn’t just her money. He couldn’t live without her. ‘He has to get back at her from time to time, and that’s the only reason he cheats.’

  Graham once explained to a young airline stewardess whom he subsequently put through college that his wife swallowed him, and that he had to have ‘something on the side’ (meaning a woman) or he was nothing and nobody at all.

  When he discovered that Ellie had fatal cancer, he went into a panic. Legal partners and friends have described in detail his ‘total inability’ to deal with Ellie’s sickness. He would not discuss the illness with her; he would not listen to her doctors; he refused to enter her hospital room. He moved his mistress into a Jackson Street apartment right across from his office in San Francisco, and went over to see her as often as three times a day.

  He immediately instigated an elaborate scheme to strip Ellie of all the family property — which now amounted to an immense fortune — and was in the process of trying to declare Ellie incompetent so that he could sell the Tiburon house to his mistress when he himself died suddenly — two months before Ellie — from a stroke. Ellie inherited his entire estate.

  Graham’s last mistress, Karen Garfield, an exquisite young fashion model from New York, poured out her woes to one of our investigators over cocktails. She had been left with half a million and that was just fine, but she and Graham had planned a whole life together -’the Virgin Islands, the Riviera, the works.’

  Karen herself died of a series of massive heart attacks, the first of which occurred an hour after Karen visited Graham’s house in Tiburon to try to ’explain things’ to his daughter Rowan. ‘That bitch! She wouldn’t even let me have his things! All I wanted were a few keepsakes. She said, "Get out of my mother’s house."’

  Karen lived for two weeks after the visit, long enough to say many unkind things about Rowan, but apparently Karen never connected her sudden and inexplicable cardiac deterioration to her visit. Why should she!

  We did make this connection as the following summary will show.

  When Ellie died, Rowan told Ellie’s closest friends that she had lost her best and only friend in this world. This was probably true. Ellie Mayfair was all her life a very sweet and somewhat fragile human being, beloved by her daughter and her numerous friends. According to these friends, she always evinced something of a southern belle charm, though she was an athletic, modern California woman in every way, easily passing for twenty years younger than she was, which was not uncommon with her contemporaries. Indeed, her youthful looks may have constituted her only obsession, other than the welfare of her daughter, Rowan.

  She had cosmetic surgery twice in her fifties (facial tightening), frequented expensive beauty salons, and dyed her hair continuously. In pictures with her husband, taken a year before her death, she appears to be the younger person. Devoted to Graham and completely dependent upon him, she ignored his affairs, and with reason. As she told one friend, ‘He’s always home at six o’clock for dinner. And he’s always there when I turn out the lights.’

  Indeed, the source of Graham’s charm for Ellie and for others, other than his looks, was apparently his great enthusiasm for living, and the easy affection he lavished on those around him, including his wife.

  One of his lifelong friends, an older lawyer, explained it this way to our investigator. ‘He got away with those affairs because he was never inattentive to Ellie. Some of the other guys around here should take a lesson from that. What women hate is when you turn cold to them. If you treat them like queens, they’ll let you have a concubine or two outside the palace.’

  At this point, we simply do not know how important it is to gather more information about Graham Franklin and Ellie Mayfair. Wha
t seems relevant here is that they were normal upper-middle-class Californians, and extremely happy in spite of Graham’s deceptions, until the very last year of their lives. They went to the San Francisco Opera on Tuesday nights, the symphony on Saturday, the ballet now and then. They owned a dazzling succession of Bentleys, Rolls-Royces, Jaguars, and other fine cars. They spent as much as ten thousand dollars a month on clothes. On the open decks of their beautiful Tiburon home, they entertained friends lavishly and fashionably. They flew to Europe or Asia for brief, luxurious vacations. And they were extremely proud of ’our daughter, the doctor,’ as they called Rowan, light-heartedly, to their many friends.

  Though Ellie was supposed to be telepathic, it was a parlor-game type of thing. She knew who it was when the phone rang. She could tell you what playing card you were holding in your hand. Otherwise there was nothing unusual about this woman, except perhaps that she was very pretty, resembling many other descendants of Julien Mayfair, and had her great-grandfather’s ingratiating manner and seductive smile.

  The last time I myself saw Ellie was at the funeral of Nancy Mayfair in New Orleans in January of 1988; she was at that time sixty-three or four, a beautiful woman, about five feet six inches in height, with darkly tanned skin and jet black hair. Her blue eyes were concealed behind white-rimmed sunglasses; her fashionable cotton dress flattered her slender figure, and indeed, she had something of the glamour of a film actress, to wit a California patina. Within half a year, she was dead.

  When Ellie died, Rowan inherited everything, including Ellie’s family trust fund, and an additional trust fund which had been set up — Rowan knew nothing about it — when Rowan was born.

  As Rowan was then, and is now, an extremely hardworking physician, her inheritance has made almost no appreciable difference in her day-to-day life. But more on that in the proper time.