The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,360

the baby protected it from drugs injected into the mother. And nurses said that Deirdre was so heavily drugged when she left the hospital that she did not even know what was happening to her. Carlotta had come in the early afternoon on a weekday and obtained her release.

“Now, Cortland Mayfair came looking for her that very evening,” Sister Bridget Marie told me later in strictest confidence. “And was he ever fit to be tied when he discovered that child was gone!”

Legal gossip deepened the mystery. Cortland and Carlotta were screaming at each other over the phone behind the office doors. Cortland told his secretary in a rage that Carlotta thought she could keep him out of the house where he was born. Well, she was out of her mind, if she thought so!

Years later, Ryan Mayfair talked about it. “They said my grandfather was simply locked out. He went up to First Street and Carlotta met him at the gate and threatened him. She said, ‘You come in here and I’ll call the police.’ ”

On the first of July, another volley of information rocked the parish gossips. Deirdre’s future husband, the “college professor” who was leaving his wife to marry her, had been killed driving to New Orleans on the river road. His car had suffered a broken tie rod and veered to the right at great speed, striking an oak tree, whereupon it exploded into flames. Deirdre Mayfair, unmarried and not yet eighteen, was going to be giving up her baby. It was to be a family adoption, and Miss Carlotta was arranging the whole thing.

“My grandfather was outraged when he heard about the adoption,” said Ryan Mayfair many years later. “He wanted to talk to Deirdre, hear it from her own lips that she wanted to give up this child. But he still couldn’t get in the house on First Street. Finally he went to Father Lafferty, the parish priest, but Carlotta had him in her pocket. The priest was squarely on Carlotta’s side.”

All this sounds extremely tragic. It sounds as if Deirdre almost escaped the curse of First Street, if only the father of her baby, driving from Texas to marry her, had not died. For years this sad scandalous story has been repeated throughout the Redemptorist Parish. It was repeated to me as late as 1988 by Rita Mae Lonigan. There is every indication that Father Lafferty believed the story of the Texas father of the baby. And countless reports indicate that the Mayfair cousins believed it. Beatrice Mayfair believed it. Pierce Mayfair believed it. Even Rhonda Mayfair and her husband, Ellis Clement, in Denton, Texas, seemed to have believed it, or at least the vague version which they were eventually told.

But the story wasn’t true.

Almost from the beginning, our investigators shook their heads in puzzlement. College professor with Deirdre Mayfair? Who? Constant surveillance ruled out completely the possibility of Rhonda Mayfair’s husband, Ellis Clement. He scarcely knew Deirdre.

Indeed, there never was any such man in Denton, Texas, who dated Deirdre Mayfair, or was ever observed by anyone in her company. And there was no college professor employed at that university or any other school in the vicinity who died in a car crash on the Louisiana river road. Indeed, no one died in such a crash on the river road in 1959, as far as we know.

Did an even more scandalous and tragic story lie behind this fabrication? We were slow in putting the pieces together. Indeed, by the time we learned of the River Road car accident, the adoption of Deirdre’s baby was already being legally arranged. By the time we learned that there had been no river road accident, the adoption was a fait accompli.

Later court records indicate that some time during August, Ellie Mayfair flew to New Orleans to sign adoption papers in the office of Carlotta Mayfair, though no one in the family seems to have known at the time that Ellie was there.

Graham Franklin, Ellie’s husband, told one of his business associates years later that the adoption had been a real kettle of fish. “My wife stopped speaking to her grandfather altogether. He didn’t want us to adopt Rowan. Fortunately the old bastard died before the baby was even born.”

Father Lafferty told his aging sister in the Irish Channel that the whole thing was a nightmare, but that Ellie Mayfair was a good woman and she would take the child to California where it would have a chance at