Taltos (Lives of the Mayfair Witches 3)

But imagine a flooded plantation house of Greek Revival grandeur, gradually sinking into the duckweed, with globs of plaster falling off "with a splash" into the murky waters. Imagine fish swimming through the stairway balusters.

"What if that house falls on her?" Bea had asked. "The house is in the water. She can't stay there. This girl must be brought here to New Orleans."

"Swamp water, Bea," Celia had said. "Swamp water, remember. It's not a lake or the Gulf Stream. And besides, if this child does not have sense to get out of there and take the old woman to safety--"

The old woman.

Mona had all of this fresh in her memory this last weekend when Mary Jane had walked into the backyard and plunged into the little crowd that surrounded the silent Rowan as if it were a picnic.

"I knew about y'all," Mary Jane had declared. She'd addressed her words to Michael too, who stood by Rowan's chair as if posing for an elegant family portrait. And how Michael's eyes had locked onto her.

"I come over here sometimes and look at you," said Mary Jane. "Yeah, I do. I came the day of the wedding. You know, when you married her?" She pointed to Michael, then to Rowan. "I stood over there, 'cross the street, and looked at your party?"

Her sentences kept going up on the end, though they weren't questions, as though she was always asking for a nod or a word of agreement.

"You should have come inside," Michael had said kindly, hanging on every syllable the girl spouted. The trouble with Michael was that he did have a weakness for pubescent pulchritude. His tryst with Mona had been no freak of nature or twist of witchcraft. And Mary Jane Mayfair was as succulent a little swamp hen as Mona had ever beheld. Even wore her bright yellow hair in braids over the top of her head, and filthy white patent leather shoes with straps, like a little kid. The fact that her skin was dark, sort of olive and possibly tanned, made the girl look something like a human palomino.

"What did the tests say on you?" Mona had asked. "That's what you're doing here, isn't it? They tested you?"

"I don't know," said the genius, the mighty powerful swamp witch. "They're so mixed up over there, wonder they got anything right. First they called me Florence Mayfair and then Ducky Mayfair, finally I says, 'Look, I'm Mary Jane Mayfair, looky there, right there, on that form you got in front of you.' "

"Well, that's not very good," Celia had muttered.

"But they said I was fine and go home and they'd tell me if anything was wrong with me. Look, I figure I've probably got witch genes coming out the kazoo, I expect to blow the top off the graph, you know? And, boy, I have never seen so many Mayfairs as I saw in that building."

"We own the building," said Mona.

"And every one of them I could recognize on sight, every single person. I never made a mistake. There was one infidel in there, one outcast, you know, or no, it was a half-breed type, that's what it was, ever notice that there are all these Mayfair types? I mean there are a whole bunch that have no chins and have kind of pretty noses that dip down just a little right here and eyes that tilt at the outside. And then there's a bunch that look like you," she said to Michael, "yeah, just like you, real Irish with bushy brows and curly hair and big crazy Irish eyes."

"But, honey," Michael had protested in vain, "I'm not a Mayfair."

"--and the ones with the red hair like her, only she's just about the most pretty one I've seen. You must be Mona. You have the gleam and glow of somebody who's just come into tons of money."

"Mary Jane, darling," said Celia, unable to follow up with an intelligent bit of advice or a meaningless little question.

"Well, what does it feel like to be so rich?" Mary Jane asked, big, quivering eyes fastened still to Mona. "I mean really deep in here." She pounded her cheap little gaping blouse with a knotted fist, squinting up her eyes again, and bending forward so that the well between her breasts was plainly visible even to someone as short as Mona. "Never mind, I know I'm not supposed to ask that sort of question. I came over here to see her, you know, because Paige and Beatrice told me to do it."

"Why did they do that?" asked Mona.

"Hush up, dear," said Beatrice. "Mary Jane is a Mayfair's Mayfair. Darling Mary Jane, you ought to bring your grandmother up here immediately. I'm serious, child. We want you to come. We have an entire list of addresses, both temporary and permanent."

"I know what she means," Celia had said. She'd been sitting beside Rowan, and was the only one bold enough to wipe Rowan's face now and then with a white handkerchief. "I mean about the Mayfairs with no chins. She means Polly. Polly has an implant. She wasn't born with that chin."

"Well, if she has an implant," declared Beatrice, "then Polly has a visible chin, doesn't she?"

"Yeah, but she's got the slanty eyes and the tipped nose," said Mary Jane.

"Exactly," said Celia.

"You all afraid of the extra genes?" Mary Jane had thrown her voice out like a lasso, catching everybody's attention. "You, Mona, you afraid?"

"I don't know," said Mona, who was in fact not afraid.

"Of course, it's nothing that's even remotely likely to happen!" Bea said. "The genes. It's purely theoretical, of course. Do we have to talk about this?" Beatrice threw a meaningful look at Rowan.

Rowan had stared, as she always did, at the wall, maybe at the sunshine on the bricks, who could possibly know?

Mary Jane had plunged ahead. "I don't think anything that wild will ever happen to this family again. I think the moment for that kind of witchcraft is past, and another eon of new witchcraft--"

"Darling, we really don't take this entire witchcraft thing too seriously," said Bea.

"You know the family history?" Celia had asked gravely.

"Know it? I know th

ings about it you don't know. I know things my granny told me, that she heard from Old Tobias, I know things that are written on the walls in that house, still. When I was a little child, I sat on Ancient Evelyn's knee. Ancient Evelyn told me all kinds of things that I remember. Just one afternoon, that's all it took."

"But the file on our family, the file by the Talamasca ..." Celia had pressed. "They did give it to you at the clinic?"

"Oh, yeah, Bea and Paige brought that stuff to me," said Mary Jane. "Look here." She pointed to the Band-Aid on her arm that was just like the Band-Aid on her knee. "This is where they stuck me! Took enough blood to sacrifice to the devil. I understand the entire situation. Some of us have a whole string of extra genes. You breed two close kins with the double dose of double helix, and wham, you've got a Taltos. Maybe! Maybe! After all, think about it, how many cousins have married and married, and it never happened, did it, till ... Look, we shouldn't talk about it in front of her, you're right."

Michael had given a weary little smile of gratitude.

Mary Jane again squinted at Rowan. Mary Jane blew a big bubble with her gum, sucked it in, and popped it.

Mona laughed. "Now that's some trick," she said. "I could never do that."

"Oh, well, that might be a blessing," said Bea.

"But you did read the file," Celia had pressed. "It's very important that you know everything."

"Oh, yeah, I read every word of it," Mary Jane had confessed, "even the ones I had to look up." She slapped her slender, tanned little thigh and shrieked with laughter. "Y'all talking about giving me things. Help me get some education, that's about the only thing I could really use. You know, the worst thing that ever happened to me was my mama taking me out of school. 'Course, I didn't want to go to school then. I had much more fun in the public library, but--"

"I think you're right about the extra genes," Mona said. And right about needing the education.

Many, many of the family had the extra chromosomes which could make monsters, but none had ever been born to the clan, no matter what the coupling, until this terrible time.

And what of the ghost this monster had been for so long, a phantom to drive young women mad, to keep First Street under a cloud of thorns and gloom? There was something poetic about the strange bodies lying right here, beneath the oak, under the very grass where Mary Jane stood in her short denim skirt with her flesh-colored Band-Aid on her little knee, and her hands on her little hips, and her little filthy white patent leather buckle shoe rolled to one side and smeared with fresh mud--with her little dirty sock half down in her heel.