Lasher (Lives of the Mayfair Witches 2)

"You really believe that, Gifford. In your heart of hearts, you, my beloved Gifford, believe that."

She didn't answer. Couldn't. She felt too defeated. They had been arguing all of their lives, it seemed. Would it storm, would it shine? Would a stranger rape Mona on St. Charles Avenue as she walked alone at night? Would income taxes go up again? Would Castro be overthrown? Were there ghosts? Were the Mayfairs witches? Could anyone really speak with the dead? Why did the dead behave so strangely? What the hell did the dead want? Butter is not unhealthy, and neither is red meat. Drink your milk. One cannot metabolize milk as an adult, and so forth and so on, forever.

"Yes, Ryan," she said sadly and almost offhandedly. "I believe it. But you see, Ryan, seeing is believing. And I always saw him. You never could."

She had used the wrong word. Could. Real mistake, that. She could hear the little soft sighs with which he drew away from her, away from the possibility of belief or trust, into his well-constructed universe where ghosts did not exist, and Mayfair witchcraft was a family joke, as much fun as all the old houses, and quaint trust funds, and jewelry and gold coins in the vaults. As much fun as Clancy Mayfair marrying Pierce Mayfair, which really, really, really shouldn't happen, since both were--like Alicia and Patrick--descended from Julien, but what was the use of telling him? What was the use? There was no reason, there was no exchange of ideas, there was no genuine trust.

But there's love, she thought. There is love and there is a form of respect. She didn't depend on anyone in the world the way she did on Ryan. So she said what she always said at such times:

"I love you, my darling," and it was wonderful to say an Ingrid Bergman line like that with so much heart and mean it so completely. "I really do." Lucky Gifford.

"Gifford..." Silence on the other end of the line. A lawyer thinking quietly, the man with the silver-white hair and blue eyes, who did the practical worrying with her for the whole family. Why should he believe in ghosts? Ghosts don't try to break wills, they don't sue you, they don't threaten you with Internal Revenue investigations, they don't bill you for the two-martini lunch.

"What is it, darling?" she asked softly.

"If you believe that," he said. "If you really believe what you just said to me...if this ghost got through...and the house is empty...then why wouldn't you go there, Gifford? Why wouldn't you come today?"

"The thing took Rowan away," she said angrily. "This isn't finished, Ryan!" Suddenly she was sitting up. Every bit of goodwill she felt for her husband had done its usual evaporation act. He was the same tiresome and impossible man who had wrecked her life. That was true. It was true that she loved him. It was true that the ghost had come through. "Ryan, don't you feel things in that house? Don't you sense things? It isn't over, it's just begun! We have to find Rowan!"

"I'm going to come get you in the morning," he said. He was furious. Her anger had drawn out his anger. But he was struggling. "I want to come up there and drive you back home."

"OK, Ryan," she said. "I wish you would." She heard the plea in her own voice, the plea that meant surrender.

She was only glad that she'd had the courage to say the little bit she had about "the man," that for the record, she had spoken her piece, and he could argue with her, and beat her down, and criticize her to death later on, perhaps, Tomorrow.

"Gifford, Gifford, Gifford..." he sang softly. "I'm going to drive up. I'll be there before you wake up."

And she felt so weak suddenly, so irrationally incapable of moving until he came there, until she saw him come through the door.

"Now, lock up the house tight, please," he said, "and go to sleep. I'll bet you're sacked out on the couch and everything's open..."

"This is Destin, Ryan."

"Lock up, make sure the gun is in the chest by the bed, and please, please, please set the alarm."

The gun, good Lord! "As if I'd use it with you not here."

"That's when you need it, darling, when I'm not there." She smiled again, remembering Mona. Bang, bang, bang. Kisses.

They still blew kisses to each other before they rang off.

The first time she had kissed him, she was fifteen, and they were "in love," and later Alicia said, when Mona was born: "You're lucky. You love your Mayfair. I married mine 'cause of this!"

Gifford wished she had taken Mona, then and there. Probably Alicia would have let her do it. Alicia was already a full-time drunk. It's a wonder Mona had been born at all, let alone robust and healthy. But Gifford hadn't really thought of taking Alicia's baby from her; she could still remember when Ellie Mayfair, whom Gifford never knew, had taken Deirdre's baby, Rowan, all the way to California, to save her from the family curse, and everyone had hated her for it. That had been the same terrible year that Oncle Cortland had died, after falling down the steps at First Street. So terrible for Ryan.

Gifford had been fifteen and already they were very much in love. No, you simply did not take a baby away from a mother, no matter what you thought. They'd driven Deirdre mad, and Oncle Cortland had tried to stop it.

Of course Gifford could have taken better care of Mona. Hell, anybody could have taken better care of Mona than Alicia and Patrick. And in her own way, Gifford always had taken care of Mona, as surely as she took care of her own children.

The fire had died away. She was getting just a little uncomfortably cold. Best to build it up again. She didn't need much sleep anymore. If she dozed off sometime around two, she'd be fine when Ryan got here. That was one thing about being forty-six. She didn't need sleep anymore.

She went down on her knees in front of the broad stone hearth and, lifting another small oak log from the neat stack beside the fireplace, threw it into the weak little fire. A bunch of newspaper, crumpled, with kindling, and off it went, curling and flaring against the soot-blackened bricks. The bright warmth came out all over her hands and her face, until she was driven back by it, and there was a sudden moment of remembering something unpleasant, something to do with fire and the family history, but then she deliberately and carefully forgot.

She stood in the living room looking out over the white beach. Now she could not hear the waves at all. The breeze covered everything in a heavy drape of silence. The stars shone as brightly as if they were tumbling on the Final Day. And the sheer cleanness of the breeze delighted her and made her want to cry.

She wished she could stay until all this seemed too much. Until she longed for the oaks of home again. But that had never happened. She'd always left before she truly wanted to. Duty, family, something--always compelled her home from Destin before she was ready.

That was not to say that she didn't love the cobwebs and old oaks, that she didn't love the crumbling walls, and listing town houses, and broken pavements; and the lovely endless embrace of her good cousins and cousins and cousins. Yes, she loved it, but sometimes she only wanted to be away.

This was away.

She shuddered. "I wish I could die," she whispered, her voice trembling and fading away on the breeze. She went into the open kitchen--no more than a section of the giant main room--and filled a glass with water, and drank the water down. Then she went out through the open glass doors, through the yard, and up the steps and out the boardwalk over the little dune and down on the clean-swept sand.

Now you could hear the Gulf. The sound filled you. There was nothing else in the world. The breeze broke you loose from everything, and all sensation. When she glanced back, the house looked deceptively small and insignificant, more of a bunker than the handsome little cottage it was, behind its levee of sand.

The law couldn't make you change something which had been built in 1955. And that is when Great-grandmother Dorothy had built it for her children and her grandchildren, and Destin was no more than a sleepy little fishing village, or so everyone said. No condominium towers in those days. No Goofy Golf. Just this.

And the Mayfairs still had their bits and pieces of it, tucked away every few miles from Pensacola all the way down to Se

aside--old bungalows of various size and age built before the thundering hordes--and the building codes--had come.

Gifford felt chilled, pummeled by the breeze suddenly, as if it had doubled its fist and tried to push her rudely to one side. She walked against it, down to the water, eyes fixed on the soft waves that barely lapped on the glittering beach. She wanted to lie down here and sleep. She had done that when she was a girl. What safer beach was there than this unknown sweep of Destin, where no dune buggies or vehicles of any kind could ever come to hurt you with their wheels or their hideousness, or their noise.