The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,342

away!’ she screamed.

“Then something happened to Miss Carl. She was looking at the girl standing at the curb by our squad car, and she started prying. She tried to hide it. She took out her handkerchief and covered her face. But we could see, the lady was crying. The girl really had the lady at her wit’s ends.

“C. J. said, ‘Miss Carl, what do you want us to do?’ She went past him down to the sidewalk, and she laid her hand on the girl and she said, ‘Deirdre, do you want to go back to the asylum? Please, Deirdre. Please.’ And then she just broke down. She couldn’t talk. The girl stared at her, all wild-eyed and crazy, and then she broke into sobs. And Miss Carl put her arm around the girl and took her back up the steps and inside.”

“Are you sure it was Carl?” I asked the officer.

“Oh, yeah, everybody knows her. Boy, I’ll never forget her. She called the captain the next day and tried to have C. J. and me fired.”

A different squad car answered the neighbor’s call a week later. All we know of this occasion is that Deirdre was trying to leave the house when the police arrived; they persuaded her to sit down on the porch steps and wait until her Uncle Cortland arrived.

Deirdre ran away the following day. Legal gossip reports of numerous phone calls back and forth, of Cortland rushing up to First Street, and Mayfair and Mayfair calling the New York cousins in search for Deirdre as they had when Antha disappeared years before.

Amanda Grady Mayfair was dead. Dr. Cornell Mayfair’s mother, Rosalind Mayfair, wanted nothing to do with “the First Street crowd” as she called them. Nevertheless she called the other New York cousins. Then the police contacted Cortland in New Orleans. Deirdre had been found wandering around barefoot and incoherent in Greenwich Village. There was some evidence that she had been raped. Cortland flew to New York that night. The following morning he brought Deirdre back with him.

The repeat of history came full circle with Deirdre’s second commitment to St. Ann’s Asylum. A week later she was released, and went to live with Cortland in his old family home in Metairie.

Family gossip described Carlotta as beaten down and discouraged. She told Judge Byrnes and his wife that she had failed with her niece. She feared the girl would “never be normal.”

When Beatrice Mayfair went to call on Carlotta one Saturday, she found her sitting alone in the parlor at First Street with all the curtains drawn. Carlotta wouldn’t talk.

“I realized later she had been staring at the very spot where they put the coffin in the old days when the funerals were still at home. All she said to me was yes or no, or hmmmm when I asked her questions. Finally that horrible Nancy came in and offered me some iced tea. She acted put upon when I accepted. I told her I would get it myself and she said, oh, no Aunt Carl wouldn’t have that.”

When Beatrice had had her fill of sadness and rudeness she left. She went out to Metairie to visit Deirdre at Cortland’s house on Country Club Lane.

This house had been in the Mayfair family since Cortland built it when he was a young man. A brick mansion with white columns and French windows and every “modern convenience,” it later passed to Ryan Mayfair, Pierce’s son, who lives there now. For years Sheffield and Eugenie Mayfair shared it with Cortland. Their only child, Ellie Mayfair, the woman who later adopted Deirdre’s daughter, Rowan, was born in this house.

At this period, Sheffield Mayfair had already died of a heart attack; Eugenie had been gone for years. Ellie lived in California, where she had just gotten married to a lawyer named Graham Franklin. And Cortland lived in the Metairie mansion on his own.

By all reports, the house was extremely cheerful, filled with bright colors, gay wallpaper, traditional furnishings, and books. Numerous French doors opened to the garden, the pool, and the front lawn.

The entire family seems to have thought it was the best place for Deirdre. Metairie had none of the gloom of the Garden District. Cortland assured Beatrice that Deirdre was resting, that the girl’s problems had been compounded by a lot of secrecy and bad judgment on the part of Carlotta.

“But he won’t really tell me what’s happening,” Beatrice complained to Juliette. “He never does. What does he mean, secrecy?”

Beatrice