The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,376

trips from her earliest years, learning to manage Graham’s small sailboat, The Wind Singer, on her own when she was only fourteen. When Graham bought an ocean-going cruiser named the Great Angela, the whole family took long trips together several times a year.

By the time Rowan was sixteen, Graham had bought her her own seaworthy twin-engine full displacement hull yacht, which Rowan named the Sweet Christine. The Great Angela was at that time retired, and the whole family used the Sweet Christine, but Rowan was the undisputed skipper. And over everyone’s advice and objections, Rowan frequently took the enormous boat out of the harbor by herself.

For years it was Rowan’s habit to come directly home from school and to go out of San Francisco Bay into the ocean for at least two hours. Only occasionally did she invite a close friend to go along.

“We never see her till eight o’clock,” Ellie would say. “And I worry! Oh, how I worry. But to take that boat away from Rowan would be to kill her. I just don’t know what to do.”

Though an expert swimmer, Rowan is not a daredevil sailor, so to speak. The Sweet Christine is a heavy, slow, forty-foot Dutch-built cruiser, designed for stability in rough seas, but not for speed.

What seems to delight Rowan is being alone in it, out of sight of land, in all kinds of weather. Like many people who respond to the northern California climate, she seems to enjoy fog, wind, and cold.

All who have observed Rowan seem to agree that she is a loner, and an extremely quiet person who would rather work than play. In school she was a compulsive student, and in college a compulsive researcher. Though her wardrobe was the envy of her classmates, it was, she always said, Ellie’s doing. She herself had almost no interest in clothes. Her characteristic off-duty attire has been for years rather nautical—jeans, yachting shoes, oversized sweaters and watch caps, and a sailor’s peacoat of navy blue wool.

In the world of medicine, particularly that of neurosurgery, Rowan’s compulsive habits are less remarkable, given the nature of the profession. Yet even in this field, Rowan has been seen as “obsessive.” In fact, Rowan seems born to have been a doctor, though her choice of surgery over research surprised many people who knew her. “When she was in the lab,” said one of her colleagues, “her mother had to call her and remind her to take time out to sleep or eat.”

One of Rowan’s early elementary-school teachers noted in the record, when Rowan was eight, that “this child thinks she is an adult. She identifies with adults. She becomes impatient with other children. But she is too well behaved to show it. She seems terribly, terribly alone.”

TELEPATHIC POWERS

Rowan’s psychic powers began to surface in school from the time she was six years old. Indeed, they may have surfaced long before that, but we have not been able to find any evidence before that time. Teachers queried informally (or deviously) about Rowan tell truly amazing stories about the child’s ability to read minds.

However, nothing we have discovered indicates that Rowan was ever considered an outcast or a failure or maladjusted. She was throughout her school years an overachiever and an unqualified success. Her school pictures reveal her to have been an extremely pretty child, always, with tanned skin and sun-bleached blond hair. She appears secretive in these pictures, as if she does not quite like the intrusion of the camera, but never affected, or ill at ease.

Rowan’s telepathic abilities became known to teachers rather than to other students, and they follow a remarkable pattern:

“My mother had died,” said a first-grade teacher. “I couldn’t go back to Vermont for the funeral, and I felt terrible. Nobody knew about this, you understand. But Rowan came up to me at recess. She sat beside me and she took my hand. I almost burst into tears at this tenderness. ‘I’m sorry about your mother,’ she said. She sat there with me in silence. Later when I asked her how she knew, she said, ‘It just popped into my head.’ I think that child knew all kinds of things that way. She knew when the other kids were envious of her. How lonely she always was!”

Another time, when a little girl was absent from school for three days without explanation and school authorities could not reach her, Rowan quietly told the principal there was no reason to be alarmed. The girl’s grandmother