The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,458

have killed. To have done something so wrong .…

* * *

At six o’clock, when her breakfast arrived, the newspaper came with it.

SKELETON FOUND IN FAMOUS GARDEN DISTRICT HOUSE

Well, that was inevitable, wasn’t it? Seems Ryan had warned her that they couldn’t quash it. Numbly, she scanned the several paragraphs, amused in spite of herself, at the gothic tale unfolding in a quaint old-fashioned journalistic style.

Who could argue with the statement that the Mayfair mansion had always been associated with tragedy? Or that the one person who might have shed light upon the demise of Texan Stuart Townsend was Carlotta Mayfair, who had died the very night that the remains were discovered, after a long and distinguished legal career?

The rest was an elegy to Carlotta, which filled Rowan with coldness and guilt.

Surely someone from the Talamasca was clipping this story. Perhaps Aaron was reading it in his rooms above. What would he write in the file about it? It comforted her to think of the file.

In fact, she was a lot more comfortable now than a sane person ought to be. For no matter what was happening, she was a Mayfair, among all the other Mayfairs; and her secret sorrows were tangled with older, more intricate sorrows.

Even yesterday when Michael had been smashing the jars and wrestling with the power, it had not been the worst for her, not by any means. She had him, she had Aaron, she had all the cousins. She wasn’t alone. Even with the murder of the old woman, she wasn’t alone.

She sat still for a long time after reading the story, her hands clasped on top of the folded newspaper, as rain came down hard outside, and the food on the breakfast table grew cold.

No matter what else she felt, she ought to grieve in silence for the old woman. She ought to let the misery coagulate in her soul. And the woman was going to be dead forever now. Wasn’t she?

The truth was, so much was happening to her, and so rapidly, that she could no longer catalog her responses; or even manifest any response at all. She passed in and out of emotion. Yesterday when Michael was lying on the bed, his pulse racing and his face flushed, she had been frantic. She had thought, If I lose this man, I’ll die with him. I swear it. And an hour after, she had broken one jar after another, spilling the contents into the white dishpan, and poking at it with an ice pick as she examined it, before handing it over to Aaron to be packed in the ice. Clinical as any doctor. No difference at all.

In between these moments of crisis, she was drifting, watching, remembering, because it was all too different, too purely unusual, and finally too much.

This morning, waking at four A.M., she had not known where she was. Then it all came back to her, the mingled flood of curses and blessings, her dream of the hospitals, and Michael beside her, and the desire for him like a drug.

Not his fault really that his every gesture, word, movement, or facial expression was electrically erotic to her, no matter what else might be going on. He was a sex object and delightfully oblivious to it, because in his innocence he didn’t really understand the greed of her desire.

Sitting up in bed with her arms wrapped around her knees, she had wondered if this wasn’t somehow worse for a woman than a man, because a woman could find the smallest things about a man violently erotic, such as the way his curly hair was mashed down now on his forehead, or the way it curled on the back of his neck.

Weren’t men a little more direct about things? Did they go mad over a woman’s ankle? Seems Dostoyevski said they did. But she had doubted it. It was excruciating for her to look at the dark fleece on the back of Michael’s wrist, to see his gold watch-band cutting into it, to imagine his arm later, with the white cuff rolled up, which for some reason made it even more sexy than when the arm was naked, and the flash of his fingers as he lighted his cigarettes. All directly genitally erotic. Everything done with a sharp edge, a punch. Or his low growly voice, full of tenderness, when he talked on the phone to his Aunt Viv.

When he’d been on his knees in that foul, ugly room, he’d been battling,