was never sure what Richard Llewellyn knew, really. Years ago Richard Llewellyn had talked to that last Talamasca man, though Evelyn had warned him not to. Richard had come up to see her the next day.
“Well, you didn’t tell him about me, did you?” Ancient Evelyn had demanded. Richard was so old. He didn’t have very long.
“No, I didn’t tell him that story. I didn’t want him to think—”
“What? That Julien would bed a girl my age?” She had laughed. “You shouldn’t have talked to that man at all.” Richard hadn’t lasted out the year, and when he died, they gave her his old records. He must have known about the Victrola, why else would he have left those old records to her?
Evelyn should have given Mona the little Victrola a long time ago, and not with such ceremony in front of the other two, her idiot granddaughters, Alicia and Gifford. Leave it to Gifford to confiscate everything—the music box itself and the beautiful necklace.
“You dare!”
Leave it to Gifford to have made the very wrong choice, leave it to Gifford to misunderstand. To gasp in horror when Ancient Evelyn had said the poem. “Why would he want you to have this? What did he think it could do? He was a witch and you know it. A witch as surely as the others.”
And then the terrible confession from Gifford, that she had gone and taken those things and hidden them back up at First Street, in that house whence they’d come.
“You little fool, how could you do such a thing?” Ancient Evelyn had asked. “Mona should have had it! Mona is his great-granddaughter! Gifford, not back to that house where Carlotta will find it, where it will be destroyed.”
She remembered suddenly. Gifford had died this morning!
She was walking on St. Charles Avenue, going up to First Street, and her aggravating, annoying, grating, nerve-wracking grandchild was dead!
“Why didn’t I know it? Julien, why didn’t you come to tell me!”
Well over half a century ago, she’d heard Julien’s voice an hour before his death. She’d heard him calling from beneath her window. She’d sprung up and opened it wide to the rain, and there was Julien down there, only at once she knew it wasn’t really Julien. She’d been terrified he was already dead. He had waved at her, so cheerful and gay, with a big dark mare beside him. “Au revoir, ma Chérie,” he had called out.
And then she had gone to him, running all the way those ten blocks downtown, and climbed the trellis, and for those precious moments seen his eyes—the life still in them—fixed on her. Oh, Julien, I heard you calling me. I saw you. I saw the embodiment of your love. She had raised the window. She had lifted him.
“Eve,” he had whispered. “Evie, I want to sit up. Evie, help me, I’m dying, Evie! It’s happening, it’s come!”
They had never known she was there.
She’d crouched outside on the porch roof in the fury of the storm, listening to them. They’d never thought to even look outside as they closed the window and laid him out, and sent for everyone. And there she’d been huddled against the chimney, watching the lightning and thinking, Why don’t you strike me? Why don’t I die? Julien is dead.
“What did he give you?” Mary Beth had asked her every time she saw her. Year after year she came.
Mary Beth had stared at little Laura Lee, such a weak, thin baby, never a baby that people wanted to hold. Mary Beth had always known that Julien had been Laura Lee’s father.
And how the others had hated her. “Julien’s spawn, look at her, with the witch’s mark on her hand, look, like you!”
It wasn’t so bad, just a tiny extra finger. Why, most people had never noticed it, though Laura Lee had been so self-conscious, and no one at Sacred Heart knew what it meant.
“The mark of the witch,” Tobias used to say. “There are many. Red hair is the worst, and a sixth finger the second, and a monster’s height, the third. And you with the sixth finger. Go live up at First Street, live with the damned who gave you your talents. Get out of my house.”
Of course she had never gone, not with Carlotta there! Better to ignore the old men as she and her little daughter went about their business. Laura Lee had been too sickly ever to finish high school. Poor Laura Lee, who spent her life