The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,412

leave her in a void as she struggled to pick this thing out from the murky dark that enmeshed it. Was she deceiving herself or was that the scheme of a face? It seemed that a pair of dark eyes was watching her, that she could just make out the contour of a head. Perhaps she saw the white curve of a stiff collar.

“Don’t play games with me,” she whispered. Once again, the whole house echoed the sound with its uncertain creaks and sighs. And then wondrously, the figure brightened, confirmed itself magically, and yet even as she gasped aloud, it began to fade.

“No, don’t go!” she pleaded, doubting suddenly that she had ever seen anything at all.

And as she stared into the confusion of light and shadow, searching desperately, a darker form suddenly loomed against the dull faint light from the distant door. Closer it came, through the swirling dust, with heavy distinct footfalls. Without any chance of mistake she saw the massive shoulders, the black curly hair.

“Rowan? Is that you, Rowan?”

Solid, familiar, human.

“Oh Michael,” she cried, her voice soft and ragged. She moved into his waiting arms. “Michael, thank God!”

Twenty-nine

WELL, SHE THOUGHT to herself, silent, hunched over, sitting alone at the dining table, the supposed victim of the horrors in this dark house—I am becoming one of those women now who just falls into a man’s arms and lets him take care of everything.

But it was beautiful to watch Michael in action. He made the calls to Ryan Mayfair, and to the police, to Lonigan and Sons. He spoke the language of the plainclothesmen who came up the steps. If anyone noticed the black gloves he wore, they did not say so, maybe because he was talking too fast, explaining things, and moving things along to hasten the inevitable conclusions.

“Now she just got here, she does not have the faintest idea who in the hell this guy is up in the attic. The old woman didn’t tell her. And she’s in shock now. The old woman just died out there. Now this body in the attic has been there a long time, and what I’m asking you is not to disturb anything else in the room, if you can just take the remains, and she wants to know who this man was as much as you want to know.

“And look, this is Ryan Mayfair coming. Ryan, Rowan is in there. She’s in awful shape. Before Carlotta died, she showed her a body upstairs.”

“A body. Are you serious?”

“They need to take it out. Could you or Pierce go up there, see that they don’t touch all those old records and things? Rowan’s in there. She’s exhausted. She can talk in the morning.”

At once Pierce accepted the mission. Thunder of people going up the old staircase.

In hushed voices Ryan and Michael talked. Smell of cigarette smoke in the hall. Ryan came into the dining room and spoke to Rowan in a whisper.

“Tomorrow, I’ll call you at the hotel. Are you sure you don’t want to come with me and with Pierce out to Metairie?”

“Have to be close,” she said. “Want to walk over in the morning.”

“Your friend from California is a nice man, a local man.”

“Yes. Thank you.”

Even to old Eugenia, Michael had been the protector, putting his arm around her shoulder as he escorted her in to see “old Miss Carl” before Lonigan lifted the body from the rocker. Poor Eugenia who cried without making a sound. “Honey, do you want me to call someone for you? You don’t want to stay tonight in the house alone, do you? You tell me what you want to do. I can get someone to come here and stay with you.”

With Lonigan, his old friend, he fell right into stride. He lost all the California from his voice, and was talking just like Jerry, and just like Rita, who had come out with him in “the wagon.” Old friends, Jerry drinking beer with Michael’s father on the front steps thirty-five years ago, and Rita double-dating with Michael in the Elvis Presley days. Rita threw her arms around him. “Michael Curry.”

Roaming to the front, Rowan had watched them in the glare of the flashing lights. Pierce was talking on the phone in the library. She had not even seen the library. Now a dull electric light flooded the room, illuminating old leather and Chinese carpet.

“ … well, now, Mike,” said Lonigan, “you have to tell Dr. Mayfair this woman was ninety years old,