The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,373

eyes. But he wasn’t the one who’d spoken. It was Lonigan with his flushed and shining face, and china blue eyes. Far down the little hallway stood his wife, Rita Mae, not daring now to come closer.

“Yes, alone, one more time,” Rowan whispered. Her eyes searched out the eyes of Rita Mae, in the shadows at the end of the little hall. “True,” Rita Mae mouthed the word, as she nodded gravely.

Yes. To kiss her good-bye, yes, the way they are kissing her …

Twenty-five

THE FILE ON THE MAYFAIR WITCHES

PART X

Rowan Mayfair

STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL THIS SUMMARY AND UPDATED 1989

SEE CONFIDENTIAL FILE: ROWAN MAYFAIR, LONDON, FOR ALL

RELATED MATERIALS.

COMPUTER PASSWORD REQUIRED.

Rowan Mayfair was adopted legally by Ellen Louise Mayfair and her husband Graham Franklin, on the date of Rowan’s birth, November 7, 1959.

At this point Rowan was taken by plane to Los Angeles, where she lived with her adopted parents until she was three years old. The family then moved to San Francisco, California, where they lived in Pacific Heights for two years.

When Rowan was five, the family made its final move to a house on the shore of Tiburon, California—across the bay from San Francisco—which had been designed by architects Trammel, Porter and Davis expressly for Graham and Ellie and their daughter. The house is a marvel of glass walls, exposed redwood beams, and modern plumbing fixtures and appliances. It includes enormous decks, its own twenty-five-foot pier, and a boat channel, which is dredged twice yearly. It commands a view of Sausalito across Richardson Bay and San Francisco to the south. Rowan lives alone in this house now.

At the time of this writing, Rowan is almost thirty years old. She is five feet ten inches tall. She has short, softly bobbed blond hair and large pale gray eyes. She is undeniably attractive, with remarkably beautiful skin, and dark straight eyebrows and dark eyelashes and an extremely beautiful mouth. Yet for the sake of comparison, it can be said that she has none of the glamour of Stella, or the sweet prettiness of Antha, or the dark sensuality of Deirdre. Rowan is delicate yet boyish; in some of her pictures, her expression—on account of her straight dark eyebrows—is reminiscent of Mary Beth.

It is my belief that she resembles Petyr van Abel, but there are definite differences. She does not have his deep-set eyes, and her blond hair is ashen rather than gold. But her face is narrow like that of Petyr van Abel; and there is a Nordic look to Rowan, just as there is to Petyr in his portraits.

Rowan appears cold to people. Yet her voice is warm, and deep and slightly husky—what is called a whiskey voice in America. People say you have to know her, really, to like her. This is strange because our investigation indicates that very few people know her. But she is almost universally liked.

SUMMARY OF MATERIALS ON ROWAN’S ADOPTIVE PARENTS ELLIE MAYFAIR AND GRAHAM FRANKLIN

Ellen Louise Mayfair was the only daughter of Sheffield, son of Cortland Mayfair. She was born in 1923, and six years old when Stella died. Ellie lived in California almost exclusively from the time that she entered Stanford University at eighteen years of age. She married Graham Franklin, a Stanford law graduate, when she was thirty-one. Graham was eight years younger than Ellie. Ellie seems to have had very little contact with her family even before she went to California, as she went away to a boarding school in Canada when she was only eight, six months after her mother’s death.

Her father, Sheffield Mayfair, seems never to have recovered from the loss of his wife, and though he visited Ellie often, taking her on shopping sprees in New York, he kept her away from home. He was the most quiet and reclusive of Cortland’s sons, and possibly the most disappointing, in that he worked doggedly in the family firm but seldom excelled or participated in important decisions. Everyone depended upon him, Cortland said after his death.

What is relevant here is that after the age of eight, Ellie saw very little of the Mayfairs, and her lifelong friends in California were people she had met there, along with a few girls from the Canadian boarding school with whom she kept in touch. We don’t know what she knew of Antha’s life and death, or even of Deirdre’s life.

Her husband, Graham Franklin, knew nothing about Ellie’s family apparently, and some of the remarks he made over the years are entirely fanciful. “She came from a