The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,383

had just seen Rowan unexpectedly and that he could not understand the animosity she felt for him. She had become so angry when he tried to speak to her that she had cut him off in front of the other doctors at University. In fact, she’d given him a bad headache. He needed some aspirin. He was hospitalized for the first of his successive hemorrhages that night, and died within a matter of weeks.

That made five deaths from cerebrovascular or cardiovascular accident among Rowan’s close associates. Three of these people had died while Rowan was present. Two had seen her within hours of taking ill.

I told my investigators to run an exhaustive check on every single one of Rowan’s classmates or colleagues, and to check each and every name with the death records in San Francisco and in the city of the person’s birth. Of course this would take months.

But within weeks, they had found yet another death. It was Owen Gander who called me, a man who has worked directly for the Talamasca for twenty years. He is not a member of the order, but he has visited the Motherhouse and he is one of our most trusted confidants, and one of the best investigators we have.

This was his report. At U.C. Berkeley in 1978, Rowan had had a terrible argument with another student over some laboratory work. Rowan felt that the girl had deliberately meddled with her equipment. Rowan had lost her temper—an extremely rare occurrence—and thrown a piece of equipment to the ground, breaking it, and then turned her back on the girl. The girl then ridiculed Rowan until other students came between them insisting that the girl stop.

The girl went home that night to Palo Alto, California, as the spring break began the following day. By the end of spring break she had died of a cerebrovascular hemorrhage. There was no indication from the record that Rowan ever knew.

When I read this, I called Gander immediately from London. “What makes you think Rowan didn’t know?” I asked.

“None of her friends knew. After I found the girl’s death in the Palo Alto records, I researched her with Rowan’s friends. They all remembered the fight, but they didn’t know what happened to the girl afterwards. Not a single one knew. I asked them pointedly. ‘Never saw her again.’ ‘Guess she dropped out of school.’ ‘Never knew her very well. Don’t know what happened to her. Maybe she went back to Stanford.’ That’s it. U.C. Berkeley is an enormous university. It could have happened like that.”

I then advised the investigator to proceed with the utmost discretion to discover whether Rowan knew what had happened to Graham’s mistress, Karen Garfield. “Call her some time in the evening. Ask for Graham Franklin. When she tells you Graham is dead, explain that you are trying to find Karen Garfield. But try to upset her as little as possible, and don’t stay on the line very long.”

The investigator called back the following evening.

“You’re right.”

“About what?” I asked.

“She doesn’t know she’s doing it! She doesn’t have any idea that Karen Garfield is dead. She told me Karen lived somewhere on Jackson Street in San Francisco. She suggested I try Graham’s old secretary. Aaron, she doesn’t know.”

“How did she sound?”

“Weary, faintly annoyed, but polite. She has a beautiful voice, really. Rather exceptional voice. I asked her if she’d seen Karen. I was really pushing it. She said that she didn’t actually know Karen, that Karen had been a friend of her father’s. I believe she was perfectly sincere!”

“Well, she had to know about her stepfather, and about the little girl on the playground. And she had to know about the rapist.”

“Yes, but Aaron, probably none of them was deliberate. Don’t you see? She was hysterical when that little girl died; she was hysterical after the rape attempt. As for the stepfather, she was doing everything she could to resuscitate him when the ambulance arrived. She doesn’t know. Or if she does know, she can’t control it. It might be scaring her half to death.”

I told Gander to reconsider the matter of the young lovers in greater detail. Look for any relevant deaths among policemen or fire fighters in San Francisco or Marin County. Go back to the bars Rowan frequented; start a conversation with one of her former lovers; say you’re looking for Rowan Mayfair. Has anybody seen her? Does anybody know her? Be as discreet and nondisruptive as possible. But dig.

Gander called four days