The Witching Hour (Lives of the Mayfair Witches 1)

She let Rita touch it when they sat on the side of the bed at St. Ro's. No nuns around to tell them not to rumple the bedspread.

Rita had turned the emerald pendant over in her hands. So heavy, the gold setting. It looked like something was engraved on the back. Rita made out a big capital L. It looked like a name to her.

"Oh, no, don't read it," Deirdre said. "It's a secret!" And she'd looked frightened for a moment, her cheeks suddenly red and her eyes moist, and then she took Rita's hand and squeezed it. You couldn't be mad at Deirdre.

"Is it real?" Rita asked. Must have cost a fortune.

"Oh, yes," Deirdre said. "It came from Europe years and years ago. It belonged to a great-great-great-great-grandmother back then."

They both laughed at all the greats.

It was innocent the way Deirdre said it. She never bragged. It wasn't like that at all. She never hurt anybody's feelings. Everybody loved her.

"My mother left it to me," Deirdre explained. "And someday I'll pass it on, that is ... if I ever have a daughter." Trouble in her face. Rita put her arm around Deirdre. You just wanted to protect Deirdre. Deirdre brought out that feeling in everybody.

Deirdre said she'd never known her mother. "She died when I was a baby. They say she fell from the upstairs window. And they said her mother died when she was young, too, but they never talk about her. I don't think we're like other people."

Rita was stunned. Nobody she knew said such things.

"But how do you mean, Dee Dee?" she asked.

"Oh, I don't know," Deirdre said. "We feel things, sense things. We know when people don't like us and mean to hurt us."

"Who could ever want to hurt you, Dee Dee?" Rita asked. "You'll live to be a hundred and you'll have ten children."

"I love you, Rita Mae," Deirdre said. "You're pure of heart, that's what you are."

"Oh, Dee Dee, no." Rita Mae shook her head. She thought of her boyfriend from Holy Cross, the things they had done.

And just as if Deirdre had read her mind, she said:

"No, Rita Mae, that doesn't matter. You're good. You never want to hurt anybody, even when you're really unhappy."

"I love you, too," Rita said, though she did not understand all that Deirdre was telling her. And Rita never ever in her whole life told any other woman that she loved her.

Rita almost died when Deirdre was expelled from St. Ro's. But Rita knew it was going to happen.

She herself saw a young man with Deirdre in the convent garden. She had seen Deirdre slip out after supper when no one was looking. They were supposed to be taking their baths, setting their hair. That was one thing Rita really thought was funny about St. Ro's. They made you set your hair and wear a little lipstick because Sister Daniel said that was "etiquette." And Deirdre didn't have to set her hair. It hung in perfect curls. All she needed was a ribbon.

Deirdre was always disappearing at that time. She took her bath first and then snuck downstairs, and didn't come back till almost lights out. Always late, always hurrying in for night prayers, her face flushed. But then she'd give Sister Daniel that beautiful innocent smile. And when Deirdre prayed she seemed to mean it.

Rita thought she was the only one who noticed that Deirdre slipped out. She hated it when Deirdre wasn't around. Deirdre was the only one that made her feel all right there.

And one night she'd gone down to look for Deirdre. Maybe Deirdre was swinging on the swings. Winter was over and twilight was coming now after supper. And Rita knew about Deirdre and twilight.

But Rita didn't find Deirdre in the play yard. She went to the open gate of the nuns' garden. It was very dark in there. You could see the Easter lilies in the dark, shining white. The nuns would cut them on Easter Sunday. But Deirdre would never break the rules and go in there.

Yet Rita heard Deirdre's voice. And gradually she made out the figure of Deirdre on the stone bench in the shadows. The pecan trees were as big and low there as they were in the play yard. All Rita could see was the white blouse at first, and then she saw Deirdre's face and even the violet ribbon in her hair, and she saw the tall man seated beside her.

Things were so still. The jukebox of the Negro bar wasn't playing just then. No sound came from the convent. And even the lights in the nuns' refectory looked far away because there were so many trees growing along the cloister.

The man said to Deirdre: "My beloved." It was just a whisper, but Rita heard it. And she heard Deirdre say: "Yes, you're speaking, I can hear you."

"My beloved!" came the whisper again.

Then Deirdre was crying. And she said something else, maybe a name, Rita would never know. It sounded as if she said: "My Lasher."

They kissed, Deirdre's head back, the white of the man's fingers very clear against her dark hair. And the man spoke again:

"Only want to make you happy, my beloved."

"Dear God," Deirdre whispered. And suddenly she got up off the bench and Rita saw her running along the path through the beds of lilies. The man was nowhere in sight. And the wind had come up, sweeping through the pecan trees so that their high branches crashed against the porches of the convent. All the garden was moving suddenly. And Rita was alone there.

Rita turned away ashamed. She shouldn't have been listening. And she, too, ran away, all the way up the four flights of wooden stairs from the basement to the attic.

It was an hour before Deirdre came. Rita was miserable to have spied on her like that.

But late that night when she lay in bed, Rita repeated those words: My beloved. Only want to make you happy, my beloved. Oh, to think that a man would say such things to Deirdre.

All Rita had ever known were the boys who wanted to "feel you up," if they got a chance. Clumsy, stupid guys like her boyfriend Terry from Holy Cross, who said, "You know, I think I like you a lot, Rita." Sure, sure. 'Cause I let you "feel me up." You ox.

"You tramp!" Rita's father had said. "You're going to boarding school, that's where you're going. I don't care what it costs."

My beloved. It made her think of beautiful music, of elegant gentlemen in old movies she saw on late night television. Of voices from another time, soft and distinct, the very words like kisses.

And he was so handsome too. She hadn't really seen his face, but she saw he was dark-haired with large eyes, and tall, and he wore fine clothes, beautiful clothes. She'd seen the white cuffs of his shirt and his collar.

Rita would have met him in the garden too, a man like that. Rita would have done anything with him.

Oh, Rita couldn't really figure it out, the feelings it gave her. She cried but it was a sweet, silent kind of crying. She knew she'd remember the moment all her life--the garden under the dark purple twilight sky with the evening stars out already and the man's voice saying those words.

When they accused Deirdre, it was a nightmare. They were in the recreation room and the other girls were made to stay in the dormitory, but everybody could hear it. Deirdre burst into tears, but she wouldn't confess anything.

"I saw the man myself!" Sister Daniel said. "Are you calling me a liar!" Then they took Deirdre

down to the convent to talk to old Mother Bernard but even she couldn't do anything with Deirdre.

Rita was broken-hearted when the nuns came to pack up Deirdre's clothes. She saw Sister Daniel take the emerald necklace out of its box and stare at it. Sister Daniel thought it was glass, you could tell by the way she held it. It hurt Rita to see her touch it, to see her snatch up Deirdre's nightgowns and things and stuff them into the suitcase.

And later that week, when the terrible accident happened with Sister Daniel, Rita wasn't sorry. She never meant for the mean old nun to die the way she did, smothered in a closed-up room with a gas heater left on, but so be it.

Rita had other things on her mind than weeping for somebody who'd been mean to Deirdre.

That Saturday she got together all the nickels she could and called and called from the pay phone in the basement. Somebody must know the Mayfairs' phone number. They lived on First Street only five blocks down from Rita's house but it might as well have been across the world. It wasn't the Irish Channel there. It was the Garden District. And the Mayfair house was a mansion.

Then Rita got into a terrible fight with Sandy. Sandy said Deirdre had been crazy. "You know what she did at night? I'll tell what she did. When everybody was asleep she pushed the covers off and she moved her body just like somebody was kissing her! I saw her, she'd open her mouth and she'd move on the bed--you know, move--just like, you know, she was really feeling it!"

"Shut your filthy mouth!" Rita screamed. She tried to slap Sandy. Everybody got on Rita. But Liz Conklin took Rita aside and told her to calm down. She said that Deirdre had done worse than meet that man in the garden.

"Rita Mae, she, let him into the building. She brought him right upstairs to our floor, I saw him." Liz was whispering, looking over her shoulder as if somebody was going to overhear them.

"I don't believe you," Rita said.

"I wasn't following her around," Liz said. "I didn't want her to get in trouble. I had just gotten up to go to the bathroom. And I saw them by the window of the recreation room--her and him together, Rita Mae--not ten feet from where we were all sleeping."

"What did he look like?" Rita demanded, sure it was a lie. Rita would know because she'd seen him.