The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,426

answered all the worst and most tormenting questions of my life. In fact, you can’t know what you’ve done for me. You and your watchers—they found the darkest part of me; and you knew what it was, and you turned a light on it—and you connected it to something greater and older, and just as real.” She shook her head, still holding his hand, struggling to continue. “I don’t know how to say what I want to say,” she confessed. “I’m not alone anymore! I mean me, all of me, not merely the name and the part that the family wants. I mean who I am.” She sighed. The words were so clumsy, and the feelings behind them so enormous, as enormous as her relief. “I thank you,” she said, “that you didn’t keep your secrets. I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

She could see his amazement, and his faint confusion. Slowly he nodded. And she felt his goodness, and above all his willingness to trust.

“What can I do for you now?” he asked, with total and disarming candor.

“Come inside,” she said. “Let’s talk.”

Thirty

ELEVEN O’CLOCK. He sat up in the dark, staring at the digital clock on the table. How ever did he sleep that long? He’d left the drapes open so the light would wake him. But somebody had closed them. And his gloves? Where were his gloves? He found them and slipped them on, and then climbed out of bed.

The briefcase was gone. He knew it before he looked behind the chair. Foiled.

At once he put on his robe and walked down the little hallway to the living room. No one here. Just the scorched smell of old coffee coming from the kitchen, and the lingering perfume of a cigarette. Made him want one immediately.

And there on the coffee table, the empty sack of a briefcase, and the file—manila folders in two neat stacks.

“Ah Rowan,” he groaned. And Aaron was never going to forgive him. And Rowan had read the part about Karen Garfield and Dr. Lemle dying after they had seen her. She’d read all the delicious gossip gleaned over the years from Ryan Mayfair and from Bea and from others whom she had most surely met at the funeral. That, and a thousand other things he couldn’t even think of at the moment.

If he went into the bedroom and discovered that all her clothes were gone … But her clothes weren’t here anyway, they were in her room.

He stood there scratching his head, uncertain what to do first—ring her room, call Aaron, or go screaming crazy. And then he saw the note.

It was right beside the two stacks of manila folders—a single sheet of hotel stationery covered in a very clear, straight hand.

Eight thirty A.M.

Michael,

Read the file. I love you. Don’t worry. Going to nine o’clock appointment with Aaron. Can you meet me at the house at three o’clock? I need some time alone mere. I’ll be looking for you around three. If not, leave word for me here.

The Witch of Endor

“The Witch of Endor.” Who was the Witch of Endor? Ah, the woman to whom King Saul had gone to conjure the faces of his ancestors? Don’t overinterpret. It means she has survived the file. The whiz kid. The brain surgeon. Read the file! It had taken him two days. Read the file!

He peeled off his right glove and laid his hand on the note. Flash of Rowan, dressed, bending over the desk in the little room off this parlor. Then a flash of someone who’d put the stationery here days ago, a uniformed maid, and other foolish things, cascading in, none of which mattered. He lifted his fingers, waited until the tingling stopped. “Give me Rowan,” he said, and touched the paper again. Rowan and Rowan not angry, but deeply secretive and … what? In the midst of an adventure?

Yes, what he was sensing was a strange, defiant excitement. And this he understood perfectly. He saw her again, with shocking clarity, only it was someplace else, and at once the image was confused, and then he lost it, and he put back on the glove.

He sat there for a moment, drawing back into himself, instinctively hating this power, yet thinking about the question of excitement. He remembered what Aaron had told him last night. “I can teach you how to use it; but it will never be precise; it will always be confusing.” God, how he hated it. Hated even the sharp