While I was there, the most remarkable thing happened. Rowan Mayfair appeared.
I was down on my knees in the sun, making a few notes on the inscriptions, having already taken the photographs, when I became aware of this tall young woman in a sailor's coat and faded dungarees coming up the hill. She seemed all legs and blowing hair for a moment, a very fresh-faced and lovely young creature. Quite impossible to believe she was thirty years old.
On the contrary, her face had almost no lines in it at all. She looked exactly like the photographs taken of her years ago, yet she looked very much like someone else, and for one moment the resemblance so distracted me that I could not think who it was. Then it came to me. It was Petyr van Abel. She had the same blond, pale-eyed look. It was very nearly Scandinavian, and she appeared extremely independent and extremely strong.
She approached the grave, and stopped only a few feet away where I knelt, clearly taking notes from her stepmother's headstone.
At once I began to talk to her. I cannot remember precisely what I said. I was so flustered that I didn't know what I should say to explain my appearance mere, and very slowly I sensed danger just as surely as I had sensed it with Cortland years ago. I sensed enormous danger. In fact, her smooth pale face with its large gray eyes seemed suddenly filled with pure malice. Then a wall went up behind her expression. She closed down, rather like a giant receiver which is suddenly and soundlessly turned off.
I realized with horror that I had been talking about her family. I had told her that I knew the Mayfairs of New Orleans. It was my feeble excuse for what I was doing there. Did she want to have a drink, talk about old family matters. Dear God! What if she said yes!
But she said nothing. Absolutely nothing, at least not in words. I could have sworn, however, that the closed receiver suddenly became a highly focused speaker and she communicated to me quite deliberately that she couldn't avail herself of my offer, something dark and terrible and painful prevented her from doing it, and then she seemed lost in confusion; lost in misery. In fact, I have seldom if ever in my life felt such pure pain.
It came to me in a silent flash that she knew she had killed people. She knew she was different in a horrible and mortal way. She knew it and the knowledge sealed her up as if she were buried alive inside herself.
Perhaps it had not been malice which I felt only moments before. But whatever had taken place was now concluded. I was losing her. She was turning away. Why she had come, what she meant to do, I would never know.
At once I offered her my card. I put it in her hand. She gave it back to me. She wasn't rude when she did it. She simply did it. She put it right back in my hand. The malice leapt out of her like a flash of light from a keyhole. Then she went dim. Her body tensed and she turned and walked off.
I was so badly shaken that for a long moment I could not move. I stood in the cemetery watching her walk down the hill. I saw her get into a green Jaguar sedan. Off she drove without glancing back.
Was I ill? Had I suffered a severe pain somewhere? Was I about to die? Of course not. Nothing like that had happened. Yet I knew what she could do. I knew and she knew and she had told me! But why?
By the time I reached the Campton Place Hotel in San Francisco, I was thoroughly confused. I decided I would do nothing further for the present.
When I met with Gander, I said: "Keep up the surveillance. Get as close as you dare. Watch for anything that indicates she is using the power. Report to me at once."
"Then you're not going to make contact."
"Not now. I can't justify it. Not until something else happens and that could be either of two things: she kills someone else, deliberately or accidentally. Or her mother dies in New Orleans and she decides to go home."
"Aaron, that's madness! You have to make contact. You can't wait until she goes back to New Orleans. Look, old man, you have pretty much told me the whole story over the years. And I don't claim to know what you people know about it. But from everything you've told me, this is the most powerful psychic the family has ever produced. Who's to say she's not a powerful witch as well? When her mother finally goes, why would this spook Lasher miss an opportunity like this?"
I couldn't answer, except to say what Owen already knew. There were absolutely no sightings of Lasher in Rowan's history.
"So he's biding his time. The other woman's still alive. She has the necklace. But when she dies, they have to give it to Rowan. From what you've told me, it's the law."
I called Scott Reynolds in London. Scott is no longer our director, but he is the most knowledgeable person in the order on the subject of the Mayfair Witches, next to me.
"I agree with Owen. You have to make contact. You have to. What you said to her in the cemetery was exactly what you should have said, and on some level you know it. That's why you told her you knew her family. That's why you offered her the card. Talk to her. You have to."
"No, I disagree with you. It isn't justified."
"Aaron, this woman is a conscientious physician, yet she's killing people! Do you think she wants to do that sort of thing? On the other hand ... "
" ... what?"
"If she does know, this contact could be dangerous. I have to confess, I don't know how I would feel about all this if I were there, if I were you."
I thought it over. I decided that I would not do it. Everything that Owen and Scott had said was true. But it was all conjecture. We did not know whether Rowan had ever deliberately killed anyone. Possibly she was not responsible for the six deaths.
We could not know whether she would ever lay her hands on the emerald necklace. We did not know if she would ever go to New Orleans. We did not know whether or not Rowan's power included the ability to see a spirit, or to help Lasher to materialize ... ah, but of course we could pretty well conjecture that Rowan could do all that ... But that was just it, it was conjecture. Conjecture and nothing more.
And here was this h
ardworking doctor saving lives daily in a big city Operating Room. A woman untouched by the darkness that shrouded the First Street house. True, she had a ghastly power, and she might again use it, either deliberately or inadvertently. And if that happened, then I would make contact.
"Ah, I see, you want another body on the slab," said Owen.
"I don't believe there is going to be another," I said angrily. "Besides, if she doesn't know she's doing it, why should she believe us?"
"Conjecture," said Owen. "Like everything else."
SUMMATION
As of January 1989, Rowan has not been connected with any other suspicious deaths. On the contrary, she has worked tirelessly at University Hospital at "working miracles," and will very likely be appointed Attending Physician in neurosurgery before the end of the year.
In New Orleans, Deirdre Mayfair continues to sit in her rocking chair, staring out over the ruined garden. The last sighting of Lasher--"a nice young man standing beside her"--was reported two weeks ago.
Carlotta Mayfair is nearing ninety years of age. Her hair is entirely white, though the style of it has not changed in fifty years. Her skin is milky and her ankles are perpetually swollen over the tops of her plain black leather shoes. But her voice remains quite steady. And she still goes to the office every morning for four hours. Sometimes, she has lunch with the younger lawyers before she takes her regular taxi home.
On Sundays she walks to Mother of Perpetual Help Chapel to go to Mass. People in the parish have offered to drive her to Mass, and indeed, anyplace else that she would like to go. But she says that she likes walking. She needs the fresh air. It keeps her in good health.
When Sister Bridget Marie died in the fall of 1987, Carlotta attended the funeral with her nephew (cousin, actually) Gerald Mayfair, a great-grandson of Clay Mayfair. She is said to like Gerald. She is said to be afraid she may not live long enough to see Deirdre at peace. Maybe Gerald will have to take care of Deirdre after Carlotta is gone.