Lasher (Lives of the Mayfair Witches 2)

Oh, it was restored! What a good thing Michael Curry had done.

And there, there on the upstairs porch he stood looking down at her. Michael Curry. Yes, that was the man.

He was in his pajamas and very rumpled, robe open in front and he was smoking a cigarette. Like Spencer Tracy he looked, that chunky and Irish and rough, though his hair was black. Nice good-looking man with lots of black hair. And weren't his eyes blue? Certainly seemed so.

"Hello there, Michael Curry," she said. "I've come to see you. I've come to talk to Mona Mayfair."

Good Lord, what a shock that gave him. How alarmed he was. But she sang it out loud and clear.

"I know Mona's inside. You tell her to come out."

And then there was her sleepy girl, in a white gown, all frazzled and yawning the way children do, as if no one is holding them accountable.

Up in the treetops they stood behind the black railing, and it struck her suddenly what had happened, where they had been together. Oh, good Lord, and Gifford had warned her about this, that Mona was "on the path" so to speak, and must be watched, and that child hadn't been looking for the "Victrola at all, she'd been looking for Mary Beth's style of Irish boy, Rowan Mayfair's husband: Michael Curry.

Ancient Evelyn felt a lovely desire to laugh and laugh.

As Stella would have said, "What a scream!"

But Ancient Evelyn was tired and her fingers curled over the black wire of the fence and she was relieved as she bowed her head to hear the big front door open, to hear naked feet slap across the porch, that intimate unmistakable patter, and to see Mona standing there, until she realized what she had to tell Mona.

"What is it, Ancient Evelyn?" she asked. "What's happened?"

"You didn't see anything, child? She didn't call your name? Think, my precious girl, before I tell you. No, it's not your mother."

And then Mona's little-girl face crumpled and became wet with tears, and, opening the gate, she wiped at her eye with the back of her hand.

"Aunt Gifford," she cried in a wee voice, so fragile and young and so unlike Mona the Strong, and Mona the Genius. "Aunt Gifford! And I had been so glad that she wasn't here."

"You didn't do it, darling child," she said. "Blood in the sand. Happened this morning. Maybe she didn't suffer. Maybe she's in heaven this very minute looking down on us and wondering why we are sad."

Michael Curry stood at the top of the marble steps, robe properly closed, with slippers on his feet, hands in his pockets, hair even combed.

"Why, that young man isn't sick," she said.

Mona broke into sobs, staring helplessly from Ancient Evelyn to the ruddy dark-haired man on the porch.

"Who said he was dying of a bad heart?" asked Ancient Evelyn as she watched him come down the steps. She reached out and clasped the young man's hand. "There's nothing wrong with this strapping young man at all!"

Nine

HE HAD ASKED them to gather in the library. The little brown portable gramophone was in the corner and that splendid necklace of long pearls, and the little packet of pictures of Stella and Ancient Evelyn when they had been young together. But he didn't want to talk about that now. He had to talk about Rowan.

It made Mona happy that these things had been found, very happy, in the middle of her grief for the death of Gifford, but Mona was not his concern. He was suffering agonies over his indiscretion with Mona; well, one minute he was, and the next he had other things to think about. Like that two months had passed, and he had lived in this house like one of its ghosts, and that was over, and he had to search for his wife.

They had just come back from Ryan's house, from the two hours of drinking and talking after Gifford's funeral. They had come back to the house--come for this conference, and come merely to be with each other a little longer, crying for Gifford as it was the family custom to do.

All during last night's wake and the funeral today he had seen the looks of amazement on their faces as they shook his hand, as they told him he looked "so much better," as they whispered about him to one another. "Look at Michael! Michael's come back from the dead."

There was the awful raucous shock of Gifford's untimely death on the one hand--a perfect wife and mother removed from life, leaving behind a brilliant and beloved lawyer husband and three exquisite children. And then there was the shock that Michael was OK, that the legendary abandoned husband, the latest male victim of the Mayfair legacy, was not actually wasting away. Michael was fine. He was up and dressed and driving his own car in the funeral procession. And he wasn't short of breath, or dizzy or sick to his stomach.

And he and Dr. Rhodes had fought it out about the drugs in the foyer of the funeral home, and Michael had won. He wasn't experiencing any bad withdrawal. He had emptied the bottles, and then put them away. Later he would check the labels. He would discover what he had been taking, but not now. The sickness was over. He had work to do.

And there was Mona always in the corner of his eyes, staring at him, and now and then whispering, "I told you so." Mona with her slightly chubby cheeks and pale pale freckles, and her long rich red hair. No one ever called that kind of redhead a carrot top. People always turned to stare.

And then there was the house. How explain about the house? That the house felt alive again. That the moment he'd wakened in Mona's arms, he'd known the old awareness--of something unseen, and present, and watching. The house creaked as it had before. It looked as it had before. Then of course there was the entire mystery of the music in the parlor and what he had done with Mona. Had his powers to see the invisible actually returned?

He and Mona had never talked for one moment about what had happened. Nor had Eugenia ever said a word. Poor old soul. Undoubtedly she thought him a rapist and a monster. And technically he was both, and he had apparently gotten away with it. But he would never forget the sight of her, so real, so familiar, standing before a small portable gramophone that had not been there, a gramophone that looked exactly like the one later found in the library wall.

No, they had talked about none of it yet. The death of Gifford had swept everything in its path.

Ancient Evelyn had held Mona in her arms all yesterday morning as Mona cried over Gifford, struggling to remember a dream in which she felt she had struck down her aunt, deliberately and hatefully. Of course it was all irrational. She knew that. They all knew

that. Finally he had taken Mona's hand, and said, "Whatever happened here, it was my fault, and you didn't kill your aunt. It wasn't you. It was a coincidence. How could what you were doing here kill her?"

And Mona, indeed, had seemed to snap back with the fierce exuberance of the very young--and something else too, a steadiness he had sensed in her from the beginning, the cold self-sufficiency of a drunkard's child, of which he knew a great deal on his own account. She was no ordinary little girl, Mona. But it still had been wrong, a man of his age with a girl of thirteen. How could he have done it? But the strange thing was this--the house did not despise him for it, and it seemed that the house knew.

For the moment, however, the sin had been lost in the shuffle. Just lost. Last night, before the wake, Mona and Ancient Evelyn had taken out the books from the shelf and discovered the pearls and the gramophone and Violetta's waltz on a shiny old RCA Victor record. The same gramophone. He had wanted to ask--but they had talked in rushed, excited voices. And Gifford had been waiting for them.

"We cannot play it now," said Ancient Evelyn, "not with Gifford dead. Close the piano. Drape the mirrors. Gifford would have wanted it that way."

Henri had driven Mona and Ancient Evelyn home to change for the wake, and then out to the funeral parlor. Michael had gone with Bea, Aaron, his Aunt Vivian and several others. The world had baffled him and confronted him and shamed him in its vivid beauty, the night alive with new flowers, trees laden with new leaves. The gentle nighttime of spring.

Gifford looked all wrong in the coffin. Short hair too black, face too thin, lips too red, too sharply pointed all over, even to the tips of her folded fingers, and her small breasts beneath the austere wool of her suit. One of those mannequins upon which they have skimped that does not wear clothes well in its stiffness, but makes even fashion look like junk. Frozen. You would have thought it was a deep-freeze, the coffin. And the Metairie funeral home was just like any one anywhere in the nation, carpeted in gray, with grand plaster ornament beneath a low ceiling, and packed with flowers and middling Queen Anne chairs.

But it had been a Mayfair wake for sure, with lots of wine and talk and crying, and several Catholic dignitaries come to pay their respects, and flocks of nuns like birds in their blue and white, and dozens of business friends and lawyer friends, and Metairie neighbors, who might as well have been blue-birds in their blue suits, also.