The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,382

any sudden deaths through heart failure, cerebrovascular accident, or any such internal traumatic cause. In sum, this meant making casual and unobtrusive inquiries of teachers who might remember Rowan and her classmates, and inquiries of students who might remember such things at U.C. Berkeley, or University Hospital. Not such an easy thing to accomplish, but easier than one unfamiliar with our methods might suppose.

In truth, I expected the investigation to turn up nothing.

People with this kind of telekinetic power—the power to inflict severe internal damage—are almost unheard of, even in the annals of the Talamasca. And certainly we had never seen anyone in the Mayfair family who could bring death with that kind of force.

Many Mayfairs moved objects, slammed doors, caused windows to rattle. But in almost every incidence it could have been pure witchcraft—to wit, the manipulation of Lasher or other lowly spirits, rather than telekinesis. And if it was telekinesis it was the garden variety and nothing more.

Indeed, the history of the Mayfairs was the history of witchcraft, with only mild touches of telepathy or healing power or other psychic abilities mixed in.

In the meantime, I studied all the information we had on Rowan. I could not help but believe that Deirdre Mayfair would be happy if she could read such a history, if she could know that her daughter was so deeply admired and so uniformly successful, and I vowed to myself that I would never do anything to disturb the happiness or the peace of mind of Rowan Mayfair—that if the Mayfair history, as we knew it and understood it, was coming to an end in the liberated figure of Rowan, then we could only be glad for Rowan, and could do nothing to affect that history in any way.

After all, only a tiny bit of information about the past might change the course of Rowan’s life. We could not risk such intervention. In fact, I felt we had to be prepared to close the file on Rowan, and on the Mayfair Witches, as soon as Deirdre was released in death. On the other hand we had to be prepared to do something if, when Ellie died, Rowan went back to New Orleans to find out about her past.

Within two weeks of Ellie’s funeral, we knew that Rowan was not going back. She had just commenced her final year as senior resident in neurosurgery and could not possibly take the time. Also our investigators had discovered that Rowan had been asked by Ellie to sign a paper swearing officially that she would never go to New Orleans or seek to know who her real parents were. Rowan had signed this paper. There was no indication that she did not mean to honor it.

Perhaps she would never set eyes on the First Street house. Perhaps somehow “the curse” would be broken. And Carlotta Mayfair would be victorious in the end.

On the other hand, it was too soon to know. And what was to stop Lasher from revealing himself to this highly psychic young woman who could read people’s minds more strongly perhaps than her mother or grandmother, and whose enormous ambition and strength echoed that of ancestors like Marie Claudette, or Julien, or Mary Beth, about whom she knew nothing, but about whom she might soon find out a lot.

As I pondered all these things, I also found myself thinking often of Petyr van Abel—Petyr whose father had been a great surgeon and anatomist in Leiden, a name in the history books to this day. I longed to tell Rowan Mayfair: “See that name, that Dutch doctor who was famous for his study of anatomy. That is your ancestor. His blood and his skill perhaps have come down to you through all the generations and the years.”

These were my thoughts when in the fall of 1988 our investigators began to report some amazing findings regarding traumatic deaths in Rowan’s past. It seems that a little girl fighting with Rowan on the playground in San Francisco had suffered a violent cerebral hemorrhage and died within a few feet of the hysterical Rowan before an ambulance could even be called.

Then in 1974, when Rowan was a teenager, she was saved from assault at the hands of a convicted rapist when the man suffered a fatal heart attack as Rowan struggled to fight him off.

In 1984, on the afternoon that he first complained of a severe headache, Dr. Karl Lemle of the Keplinger Institute told his secretary, Berenice, that he