The Witching Hour (Lives of the Mayfair Witches 1)

Father Mattingly stopped in the church on his way back to the rectory. He stood for a long time in the silent chamber of the sacristy looking through the door at the main altar.

For a sordid history he could forgive the Mayfairs easily enough. They were born ignorant into this world like the rest of us. But for warping a little girl with lies of the devil who drove a mother to suicide? But there was nothing, absolutely nothing, Father Mattingly could do but pray for Deirdre as he was praying now.

Deirdre was expelled from St. Margaret's Private Academy near Christmastime and her aunts packed her off to a private school up north.

Some time after that he'd heard she was home again, sickly, studying with a governess, and once after that he did glimpse her at a crowded ten o'clock Mass. She had not come to Communion. But he had seen her seated in the pew with her aunts.

More and more of the Mayfair story came to him in bits and pieces. Seems everybody in the parish knew he'd been to that house. Over a kitchen table, Grandma Lucy O'Hara took his hand. "So I hear Deirdre Mayfair's been sent away, and you've been to that house on her account, is that not so, Father?" What on earth could he say? And so he listened.

"Now I know that family. Mary Beth, she was the grande dame, she could tell you all about how it had been on the old plantation, born there right after the Civil War, didn't come to New Orleans until the 1880s, though, when her uncle Julien brought her. And such an old southern gentleman he was. I can still remember Mr. Julien riding his horse up St. Charles Avenue; he was the handsomest old man I ever saw. And that was a real grand plantation house at Riverbend, they said, used to be pictures of it in the books even when it was all falling down. Mr. Julien and Miss Mary Beth did everything they could to save it. But you can't stop the river when the river has a mind to take a house.

"Now, she was a real beauty, Mary Beth, dark and wild-looking, not delicate like Stella--or plain like Miss Carlotta--and they said Antha was a beauty though I never did get to see her, or that poor baby Deirdre. But Stella was a real true voodoo queen. Yes, I mean Stella, Father. Stella knew the powders, the potions, the ceremonies. She could read your fortune in the cards. She did it to my grandson, Sean, frightened him half out of his wits with the things she told him. That was at one of those wild parties up there on First Street when they were swilling the bootleg liquor and had a dance band right there in the parlor. That was Stella.

"She liked my Billy, she did." Sudden gesture to the faded photograph on the bureau top. "The one who died in the War. I told him, 'Billy, you listen to me. Don't you go near the Mayfair women.' She liked all the handsome young men. That's how come her brother killed her. On a clear day she could make the sky above you cloud over. That's the God's truth, Father. She used to scare the sisters at St. Alphonsus making storms like that right over the garden. And when she died that night, you should have seen the storm over that house. Why, they said, every window in the place was broken. Rain and wind like a hurricane around that place. Stella made the heavens weep for her."

Speechless, Father Mattingly sat, trying to like the tepid tea full of milk and sugar, but he was remembering every word.

He didn't call on the Mayfairs anymore. He didn't dare. He could not have that child think--if she was there at all--that he meant to tell what he was bound forever to keep secret. He watched for the women at Mass. He seldom saw them. But this was a big parish of course. They could have gone to either church, or to the little chapel for the rich over there in the Garden District.

Miss Carlotta's checks were coming in, however. That he knew. Father Lafferty, who did the accounts for the parish, showed him the check near Christmastime--it was for two thousand dollars--quietly remarking on how Carlotta Mayfair used her money to keep the world around her nice and quiet.

"They've sent the little niece home from the school in Boston, I suppose you heard that."

Father Mattingly said that he hadn't. He stood in the door of Father Lafferty's office, waiting ...

"Well, I thought you got on famous with those ladies," Father Lafferty said. Father Lafferty was a plainspoken man, older than his sixty years, not a gossip.

"Only visited once or twice," said Father Mattingly.

"Now they're saying little Deirdre's sickly," Father Lafferty said. He laid the check down on the green blotter of his desk, looked at it. "Can't go to regular school, has to stay home with a private tutor."

"Sad thing."

"So it seems. But nobody's going to question it. Nobody's going to go over and see if that child's really getting a decent education."

"They have money enough ... "

"Indeed, enough to keep everything quiet, and they always have. They could get away with murder."

"You think so?"

Father Lafferty seemed to be having a little debate with himself. He kept looking at Carlotta Mayfair's check.

"You heard about the shooting, I suppose," he said, "when Lionel Mayfair shot his sister Stella? Never spent a day in prison for it. Miss Carlotta fixed all that. So did Mr. Cortland, Julien's son. Between them those two could have fixed anything. No questions asked here by anyone."

"But how on earth did they ... "

"The insane asylum of course, and there Lionel took his own life, though how no one knows since he was in a straitjacket."

"You don't mean it."

Father Lafferty nodded. "Of course I do. And again no questions asked. Requiem Mass same as always. And the

n little Antha, she came here, Stella's daughter, you know--crying, screaming, saying it was Miss Carlotta who made Lionel murder her mother. Told the pastor downstairs in the left parlor. I was there, Father Morgan was there, so was Father Graham, too. We all heard her."

Father Mattingly listened in silence.

"Little Antha said she was afraid to go home. Afraid of Miss Carlotta. She said Miss Carlotta said to Lionel, 'You're no man if you don't put a stop to what's going on,' even gave him the thirty-eight-caliber pistol to shoot Stella. You'd think somebody would have asked a few questions about that, but the pastor didn't. Just picked up the phone and called Miss Carlotta. Few minutes later a big black limousine comes and gets little Antha."

Father Mattingly stared at the small thin man at the desk. No questions asked by me either.

"The pastor said later the child was insane, she'd told the children she could hear people talking through the walls, and she could read their minds. He said she'd calm down, she was just wild over the death of Stella."

"But she got worse after that?"

"Jumped out of the attic window when she was twenty, that's what she did. No questions asked. She wasn't in her right mind, and besides, she was just a child. Requiem Mass as usual."

Father Lafferty turned the check over, hit the back of it with the rubber stamp that carried the parish endorsement.

"Are you saying, Father, that I should call on the Mayfairs?"

"No, Father, I'm not. I don't know what I'm saying if you want the truth. But I wish now Miss Carlotta had given that child up, gotten her out of that house. There are too many bad memories under that roof. It's no place for a child now."

When Father Mattingly heard that Deirdre Mayfair had been sent off to school again--this time in Europe--he decided he had to call. It was spring, well over three years since the haunting confession. He had to make himself go up to that gate, if for no other reason than because he could think of nothing else.

It came as no surprise that Carlotta invited him into the long double parlor and the coffee things were brought in on the silver tray, all quite cordial. He loved that big room. He loved its mirrors facing each other. Miss Millie joined them, then Miss Nancy, though she apologized for her dirty apron, and even old Miss Belle came down by means of an elevator he had not even known was there, hidden as it was behind a great twelve-foot-high door that looked like all the others. Old Miss Belle was deaf, he caught on to that immediately.