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  “The man’s a ghost,” her mother had whispered to her right in front of Gifford. “Don’t ever tell the others that you’ve seen him. But you can tell me. What did he look like?” And then Alicia had gone into shrieking laughter again until Gifford had actually begun to cry. Ancient Evelyn had said nothing, but she’d been listening to all of this. You could tell when she listened by the alert look in her small blue eyes. What in God’s name did she think of her two granddaughters?

  Gifford had taken Mona aside later, as they walked to Gifford’s car (Jaguar sedan, very Gifford, very Metairie). “Please believe me when I tell you to stay away from there,” she’d said. “Nothing but evil comes out of that house.”

  Mona had tried to promise. But it hadn’t interested her much at all; indeed, the die was cast for her. She had to know all about that place even then. And now, after the quarrel of Rowan and Michael, it was top priority: get inside and find out.

  Finding the Talamasca document on Ryan’s desk downtown had only tripled her curiosity. The File on the Mayfair Witches. She’d scooped it up and hurried out to a lunch counter to read the whole thing, there had been no stopping her, before anybody caught on to what she’d done. Donnelaith, Scotland. Didn’t the family own property there still? Oh, what a history. The details about Antha and Deirdre of course were the real scandal. And it was perfectly clear to her that this document, in its original form, had gone on to include Michael and Rowan Mayfair. But it didn’t anymore.

  Aaron Lightner had broken off “the narrative,” as he referred to it in those pages, before the birth of “the present designee.” This was not to violate the privacy of the living, though the Order feels that the family has every right to know its history, insofar as such a history is known by anyone and recorded anywhere.

  Hmmmm. These Talamasca people were amazing. “And Aunt Bea is about to marry one of them,” thought Mona. That was like hearing that a juicy big fly had just been snared in one’s sticky web.

  That Rowan Mayfair had slipped through Mona’s clutches, that Mona had never had five minutes alone with Rowan, that was a tragedy to be filed under WSMONADEFEAT.

  But Mona had caught the very strong impression that Rowan was afraid of whatever power she had, just as the others were afraid.

  Well, these powers didn’t scare Mona. More and more Mona felt like a dancer just coming into a time of perfect strength. So she was only five feet one inch tall, and not likely to grow much taller. Her body was maturing with every passing day.

  She liked being strong and unusual. She liked reading people’s thoughts and seeing things that other people couldn’t see. The fact that the man she’d seen was a ghost thrilled her. And she hadn’t really been surprised to hear it. If only she had gotten into the house in those days.

  Well, those days were gone, weren’t they? And now was now. And now was really quite terrific. The disappearance of Rowan Mayfair had stirred up the family; people were revealing things. And here was this great house, empty except for Michael Curry, and for her.

  The smell by the pool had dissipated somewhat, or she’d gotten used to it. But it was still there.

  And the moment was all hers.

  She proceeded to the back screen porch and checked one by one the locks of the many kitchen doors. If only one door had been forgotten…but no, that stiff-necked Henri had locked up the place like a fort. Well, no problem. Mona knew how to get in this house.

  She crept around to the very back of the house, to the end of the old kitchen, which was now a bathroom, and she looked up at the bathroom window. Who would lock a window that high? And how would she get to it? Pull up one of the big plastic garbage cans which weighed almost nothing at all. She went down the alley, caught the can by its handle, and what do you know, it rolled. How efficient! And then she climbed on top of it, knees first, then feet crushing down the flexible black plastic lid, and she pried open the green shutters, and pushed at the sash.

  Up it went, just that easy. It didn’t jam until there was an opening quite big enough for her to get in. She was going to get her dress dirty on the dusty sill, but it didn’t matter. She gave herself a boost with both hands, and slipped through the window, and all but tumbled to the carpeted floor.

  Inside First Street! And it had been a slam dunk! For one second she stood there in the little bathroom, staring at the glimmering white porcelain of the old toilet and the marble top of the washstand, and remembering that last dream of Oncle Julien where he had taken her to this house and together they had climbed the stairs.

  It was hazy now, as dreams always get, but she had written it in her computer diary under WSDREAMSJULIEN as she did all the dreams in which he came to her. She could remember now the file, which she had reread many times, though not the dream.

  Oncle Julien had been playing the Victrola, the one that Mona was supposed to have, and he had been dancing about, in his long quilted satin robe. He’d said that Michael was too good. Angels have their limits. “Pure goodness has rarely defeated me, you understand, Mona,” he had said with his charming French accent, speaking English for her as he always did in her dreams, though she spoke French perfectly, “but it is invariably a nuisance to everyone else but the person who is so perfectly good.”

  Perfectly good. Mona had typed in “Perfectly Scrumptious, Perfectly Delectable, Perfectly a hunk!” Then she’d gone and made those entries in the file marked “Michael.”

  “Thoughts on Michael Curry: he is even more attractive now that he has had the heart attack, like a great beast with a wounded paw, a knight with a broken limb, Lord Byron with his club foot.”

  She had always found Michael “to die for,” as the expression went. She hadn’t needed her dreams to tell her, though they did embolden her somewhat, all that drama of Oncle Julien suggesting it to her, that Michael was a splendid conquest, and telling her how when Ancient Evelyn was only thirteen-Mona’s age-Oncle Julien had bedded her in the attic at First Street, and from that illicit union had been born poor Laura Lee, the mother of Gifford and Alicia. Oncle Julien had given Ancient Evelyn the Victrola then and said, “Take it out of the house before they come. Take it away and keep it…”

  “…It was a mad scheme. I never believed in witchcraft, you must understand, Mona. But I had to try something. Mary Beth had started to burn my books even before the end. She burnt them on the lawn outside, as if I were a child without rights or dignity. The Victrola was a little voodoo, magic, a focus of my will.”

  All that had been very clear and understandable when she dreamed it but even by the next day the “mad scheme” was largely lost. OK. The Victrola. Oncle Julien wants me to have it. Witchcraft, my favorite thing.

  And look what had happened to the damned Victrola, so far.

  He’d gone to all that trouble in 1914 to get it out of the house-assuming that sleeping with thirteen-year-old Ancient Evelyn had been trouble-and when Ancient Evelyn tried to pass on that Victrola to Mona, Gifford and Alicia had had a terrible quarrel. Oh, that was the worst of days.

  Mona had never seen such a fight as happened then between Alicia and Gifford. “You’re not giving her that Victrola,” Gifford had screamed. She’d run at Alicia and slapped her over and over, and tried to push her out of the bedroom where she had taken the Victrola.

  “You can’t do this, she’s my daughter, and Ancient Evelyn said it is to be hers!” Alicia had screamed.

  They had fought all the time like that as girls, think nothing of it, Ancient Evelyn had said. She had remained in the parlor. “Gifford will not destroy the Victrola. The time will come when you may have the Victrola. No Mayfair would destroy Oncle Julien’s Victrola. As for the pearls, Gifford can keep them for now.”

  Mona didn’t care about the pearls.

  That had pretty much been Ancient Evelyn’s quota of speech for the next three or four weeks.

  Gifford had been sick after that, sick for months. Strife exhausted Gifford, which was only logical. Uncle Ryan had had to take her to Des
tin, Florida, to rest at the beach house. Same thing had happened after Deirdre’s funeral; Aunt Gifford had been so sick that Ryan had taken her up to Destin. Aunt Gifford always fled to Destin, to the white beach and the clean water of the Gulf, to the peace and quiet of a little modern house with no cobwebs and no stories.

  But the truly awful part for Mona was that Aunt Gifford had never given her the Victrola! When Mona had finally cornered her and demanded to know where it was, Aunt Gifford had said, “I took it up to First Street. I took the pearls there too. I put them back in a safe place. There’s where all Oncle Julien’s things belong, in that house, along with his memory.” And Alicia had screamed and they’d started fighting again.

  In one of the dreams, Oncle Julien had said, dancing to the record on the Victrola: “The waltz is from La Traviata, my child, good music for a courtesan.” Julien danced, and the pinched little soprano voice sang on and on.

  She had heard the melody so distinctly. Rare to be able to hum a song that you hear in a dream. Lovely scratchy sound to the Victrola. Ancient Evelyn had later recognized the song Mona was humming. It was from Verdi-Violetta’s waltz.

  “That was Julien’s record,” she’d said.

  “Yes, but how am I going to get the “Victrola?” Mona had asked in the dream.

  “Can’t anyone in this family figure out anything for herself!” Oncle Julien had almost wept. “I’m so tired. Don’t you see? I’m getting weaker and weaker. Chérie, please wear a violet ribbon, I don’t care for pink ribbons, though it is very shocking with red hair. Wear violet for your Oncle Julien. I am so weary-”

  “Why?” she’d asked. But he had already disappeared.

  That had been last spring, that dream. She had bought some violet ribbon, but Alicia swore it was bad luck and took it all away. Mona’s bow tonight was pink, like her cotton and lace dress.

  Seems poor Cousin Deirdre had died last May right after Mona had had that dream, and First Street had come into the hands of Rowan and Michael, and the great restoration had begun. Every time she’d passed she’d seen Michael up there on the roof, or just climbing a ladder, or climbing over a high iron railing, or walking right on the parapet with his hammer in hand.

  “Thor!” she’d called out to him once. He hadn’t heard her, but he’d waved and smiled. Yes, to die for, all right.

  She wasn’t so sure about the times of all the dreams. When they’d started, she hadn’t known there would be so many of them. Her dreams floated in space. She hadn’t been smart enough in the beginning to date them, and to make a chronology of Mayfair events. She had that now in WSMAYFAIRCHRONO. Every month she learned more tricks in her computer system, more ways of keeping track of all her thoughts and feelings, and plans.

  She opened the bathroom door and stepped into the kitchen. Beyond the glass doors the swimming pool positively glittered for an instant as if a vagrant wind had touched its surface. As if it were alive. As she stepped forward, a tiny red light flashed on the motion detector, but she could see immediately by the control panel on the kitchen counter that the alarm wasn’t set. That was why it hadn’t gone off when she opened the window. What luck! She’d forgotten about that damned alarm, and it had been the alarm that had saved Michael’s life. He’d have drowned if the firemen had not come and found him-men from his father’s own firehouse, though Michael’s father had died a long long time ago.

  Michael. Yes, it was fatal attraction from the moment she’d first met him. And the sheer size of the man had a lot to do with it-things like the perfect width of his neck. Mona had a keen appreciation of men’s necks. She could watch a whole movie just to get a load of Tom Berenger’s neck.

  Then there was that constant good humor. When had she ever not gotten a smile from Uncle Michael, and often she’d gotten winks. She loved those immense and amazingly innocent blue eyes. Downright flashy, Bea had said once, but she’d meant it as a compliment. “The man’s just sort of too vivid!” Even Gifford had understood that.

  Usually when a man was that well-built, he was an idiot. Intelligent Mayfair men were always perfectly proportioned. If Brooks Brothers or Burberrys’ couldn’t fit you, you were illegitimate. They’d put poison in your tea. And they behaved like windup toys once they came home from Harvard, always combed and tanned, and shaking people’s hands.

  Even Cousin Pierce, Ryan’s pride and joy, was turning out that way-a shining replica of his father, down to the Princeton cut of the blond hair, and loving Cousin Clancy was perfect for Pierce. She was a small clone of Aunt Gifford-only without the pain. They looked like they were made of vinyl, Pierce and Ryan, and Clancy. Corporation lawyers; their whole goal in life was to see how much they could leave undisturbed.

  Mayfair and Mayfair was a law firm full of vinyl people.

  “Never mind,” her mother had said once to her criticism. “They take care of all the money so that you and I don’t have to worry about a thing.”

  “I wonder if that’s such a good idea,” Mona had said, watching her mother miss her mouth with the cigarette, and then grope for the glass of wine on the table. Mona had pushed it towards her, disliking herself for doing it, disliking that she did it because it was torture to watch her mother not be able to find it on her own.

  But Michael Curry was a different sort from the Mayfair men altogether-husky and relaxed, more beautifully hirsute, altogether lacking in the perpetual preppie gleam perfected by men like Ryan, yet very adorable in a beastly way when he wore his dark-rimmed glasses and read Dickens the way he’d been doing it this very afternoon when she’d gone up to his room. He hadn’t cared a thing about Mardi Gras. He hadn’t wanted to come down. He was still reeling from Rowan’s defection. Time just didn’t mean anything to him, because if he had started to think about it, he would have had to think on how long Rowan had been gone.

  “What are you reading?” she’d asked.

  “Oh, Great Expectations,” he’d said. “I read it over and over. I’m reading the part about Joe’s wife, Mrs. Joe. The way she kept making the T on the chalkboard. Ever read it? I like to read things I’ve read before. It’s like listening over and over to your favorite song.”

  A brilliant Neanderthal slumbered in his body waiting to drag you into the cave by your hair. Yes, a Neanderthal with the brain of a Cro-Magnon, who could be all smiles and a gentleman and as well-bred as anybody in this family could possibly want. He had a great vocabulary, when he chose to use it. Mona admired his vocabulary. Mona’s vocabulary was ranked equal to that of a senior in college. In fact, someone at school had once said, she had the biggest words coming out of the littlest body in the world.

  Michael could sound like a New Orleans policeman one moment and a headmaster at another. “Unbeatable combination of elements,” Mona had written in her computer diary. Then remembered Oncle Julien’s admonition. “The man is simply too good.”

  “Am I evil?” she whispered aloud in the dark. “Doesn’t compute.” She really hadn’t the slightest doubt that she wasn’t evil. Such thoughts were old-fashioned to her, and typical of Oncle Julien, especially the way he was in her dreams. She hadn’t known the words for it when she was little, but she knew them now: “Self-deprecating, self-mocking.” That is what she’d written into the computer in the subdirectory WSJULIENCHARACTER in the file DREAM.

  She walked across the kitchen and slowly through the narrow butler’s pantry, a lovely white light falling on the floorboards from the porch outside. Such a grand dining room. Michael thought the hardwood floor had been laid in the thirties, but Julien had told Mona it was 1890s, a flooring they called wooden carpet, and it had come in a roll. What was Mona supposed to do with all the things Julien had told her in these dreams?

  The dense murky murals were surprisingly visible to her in the darkness-Riverbend Plantation, where Julien had been born-and its quaint world of sugar mill, slave cabins, stables and carriages moving along the old river road. But then she had cat’s eyes, didn’t she? Always had. She loved the darkness.
She felt safe and at home in it. It made her want to sing. Impossible to explain to people how good she felt when she roamed alone in the darkness.

  She walked around the long table, now all cleared and stripped and polished, though only hours ago it had held the last Mardi Gras banquet complete with frosted King cakes, and a silver punch bowl full of champagne. Boy, the Mayfairs sure ate themselves sick when they came to First Street, she thought. Everybody was just so happy that Michael was willing to keep the place going though Rowan had flat-out disappeared, and under suspicious circumstances. Did Michael know where she was?

  Aunt Bea had said, with tears in her eyes, “His heart is broken!”

  Well, here comes the kid with the wonder glue for broken hearts! Stand back, world, it’s little Mona.

  She passed through the high keyhole doorway into the front hall, and then she stopped and put her hands on the frame, as Oncle Julien had done in so many old pictures, in this door or the other, and she just felt the silence and bigness of the house around her, and smelled its wood.

  That other smell. There it was again, making her…what? Almost hungry. It was delicious, whatever it was. Not butterscotch, no, not caramel, not chocolate, but something thick like that, a flavor that seemed a hundred flavors compressed into one. Like the first time you bit into a chocolate-covered cherry cordial. Or a Cadbury Easter egg.

  No, she needed a better comparison. Something you didn’t eat. What about the smell of hot tar? That tantalized her, too, and then there was the smell of gasoline that she just couldn’t tear herself away from. Well, this was more like that.

  She moved down the hall, noting the winking lights of other alarm devices, none of them armed, all of them waiting, and the smell became strongest when she stood at the foot of the stairs.

  She knew Uncle Ryan had investigated this entire area, that even after all the blood had been washed away, and the Chinese rug in the living room had been taken out, he had come with a chemical that made lots of other blood glow in the dark. Well, it was all gone now. Just gone. He’d seen to that before Michael came home from the hospital. And he’d sworn he detected no smell.