The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,319

what Carlotta said. How the hell was I supposed to stop it? She couldn’t stop it. Antha was under the trees out there singing with him, tossing the flowers in the air, and he was making them float there. I saw that! I saw that so many times! I could hear her laughing. That’s how Stella used to laugh! And what did Mother ever do, for Christ’s sake! Oh, God, you don’t understand. A household of children. And why were we children? Because we didn’t know how to be evil. Did Mother know how? Did Julien know how?

“Do you know why Belle’s an idiot? It was inbreeding! And Millie Dear’s no better! Good God, do you know that Millie Dear is Julien’s daughter! Oh, yes, she is! As God is my witness, yes, she is. And she sees him and she lies about it! I know she sees him.

“ ‘Leave her alone,’ Stella says to me, ‘It doesn’t matter.’ I know Millie can see him. I know she can. They were carrying cases of champagne for the party. Cases and cases, and there was Stella up there dancing to her phonograph records. ‘Just try to be decent for the party, will you, Lionel?’ For the love of heaven. Didn’t anybody know what was going on?

“And Carl talking about sending Stella to Europe! How could anyone get Stella to do anything! And what did it matter if Stella was in Europe? I tried to tell Pierce. I grabbed that young man by the throat and I said, ‘I’m going to make you listen.’ I would have shot him too if I could have done it. I would have, oh God, in heaven, why did they stop me! ‘Don’t you see, it’s Antha he’s got now! Are you blind?’ That’s what I said. You tell me! Are they all blind!”

On and on it went, we are told, for days on end. Yet the above is the only fragment noted verbatim in the doctor’s file, after which we are informed that “the patient continues on about she and her and him and he, and one of these persons is supposed to be the devil.” Or, “Raving again, incoherent, implying someone put him up to it, but it is not clear who this person is.”

On the eve of Stella’s funeral, three days after the murder, Lionel tried to escape. Thereafter he was kept permanently in restraints.

“How they managed to patch up Stella, I’ll never know,” one of the cousins said long after. “But she looked lovely.

“That was Stella’s last party, really. She’d left detailed instructions as to how it was to be handled, and do you know what I heard later? That she’d written all that out when she was thirteen! Imagine, the romantic notions of a girl of thirteen!”

Legal gossip indicated otherwise. Stella’s funeral instructions (which were in no way legally binding) had been included with the will she made in 1925 after Mary Beth’s death. And for all their romantic effect they were extremely simple. Stella was to be buried from home. Florists were to be informed that the “preferred flower” was the calla or some other white lily, and only candles would, be used to light the main floor. Wine should be served. The wake should continue from the time of laying out until the body was removed to the church for the Requiem Mass.

But romantic it was, by anyone’s standards, with Stella dressed in white in an open coffin at the front end of the long parlor, and dozens of wax candles giving off a rather spectacular light.

“I’ll tell you what it was like,” said one of the cousins long after. “The May processions! Exactly, with all those lilies, all that fragrance, and Stella like the May Queen in white.”

Cortland, Barclay, and Garland greeted the cousins who came by the hundreds. Pierce was allowed to pay his respects, though he was immediately thereafter packed off to his mother’s family in New York. Mirrors were draped in the old Irish fashion, though by whose order no one seemed to know.

The Requiem Mass was even more crowded, for cousins whom Stella had not invited to First Street while she was alive went directly to the church. The crowd in the cemetery was as big as it had been for Miss Mary Beth.

“Oh, but you must realize that it was a scandal!” said Irwin Dandrich. “It was the murder of 1929! And Stella was Stella, you see. It couldn’t have been more interesting