The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,292

fine.”

Finally, in 1924, Stella, Lionel, little Antha and her nurse, Maria, came home. Mary Beth threw a huge family party at First Street, and descendants still mention sadly that it was the last affair before Mary Beth took sick.

At this time a very strange incident occurred.

As mentioned, the Talamasca had a team of trained investigators working in New Orleans, private eyes who never asked why they were being asked to gather information on a certain family or a certain house. One of these investigators, a man who specialized in divorce cases, had long let it out among the fashionable photographers of New Orleans that he would pay well for any discarded pictures of the Mayfair family, particularly those who lived in the First Street house.

One of these photographers, Nathan Brand, who had a fashionable studio on St. Charles Avenue, was called to the First Street house for this big homecoming party, and there took a whole series of pictures of Mary Beth, Stella, and Antha, as well as pictures of other Mayfairs throughout the afternoon as a wedding photographer might do.

A week later when he brought the pictures to the house for Mary Beth and Stella to choose what it was they wanted, the women picked out a fair number and laid the discards aside.

But then Stella retrieved one of the discards—a group shot of her with her mother and her daughter in which Mary Beth was holding a big emerald necklace around little Antha’s neck. On the back of it, Stella wrote:

“To the Talamasca, with love, Stella! P.S. There are others who watch, too,” and then, giving it back to the photographer, she went into peels of laughter, explaining that his investigator friend would know what the writing meant.

The photographer was embarrassed; he claimed innocence, then made excuses for his arrangement with the investigator, but no matter what he said, Stella only laughed. Then Stella said to him in a very charming and reassuring manner, “Mr. Brand, you’re working yourself into a fit. Just give the picture to the investigator.” And that is what Mr. Brand did.

It reached us about a month later. And was to have a decisive effect upon our approach to the Mayfair family.

At this time the Talamasca had no specific member assigned to the Mayfair investigation, and information was being added to the file by several archivists as it came in. Arthur Langtry—an outstanding scholar and a brilliant student of witchcraft—was familiar with the entire record, but he had been busy all of his adult life with three other cases, which were to obsess him till the day he died.

Nevertheless, the whole family history had been discussed numerous times by the grand council, but the judgment not to make contact had never been lifted. And indeed, it is doubtful that anyone among us at that time knew the full story.

This photograph, with its obvious message, caused quite a stir. A young member of the order, an American from Texas named Stuart Townsend (who had been Anglicized by years of living in London), asked to make a study of the Mayfair Witches with a view to direct investigation, and after careful consideration the entire file was placed in his hands.

Arthur Langtry agreed to reread all the material, but pressing matters kept him from ever doing it, though he was responsible for increasing the number of investigators in New Orleans from three professional private eyes to four and of discovering another excellent contact—a man named Irwin Dandrich, the penniless son of a fabulously rich family, who moved in the highest circles while selling information secretly to anyone who wanted it, including detectives, divorce lawyers, insurance investigators, and even scandal sheets.

Allow me to remind the reader that the file did not then include this narrative, as no such collation of materials had yet been done. It contained Petyr van Abel’s letters and diary and a giant compendium of witness testimony, as well as photographs, articles from newspapers, and the like. There was a running chronology, updated periodically by the archivists, but it was very sketchy, to say the least.

Stuart was at that time engaged in several other significant investigations, and it took him some three years to complete his examination of the Mayfair material. We shall return to him and to Arthur Langtry at the appropriate time.

After Stella’s return, she began to live very much as she had before she ever went to Europe, that is, she frequented speakeasies, once again gave parties for her friends, was invited