negligee. Michael swore he didn’t do those things for her. She’d buttoned three buttons. Yesterday it had only been one.
But Mona knew that despair can fill up a mind so completely that trying to read its thoughts is like trying to read through thick smoke. Was it despair that had settled on Rowan?
Mary Jane Mayfair had come this last weekend, the mad country girl from Fontevrault. Wanderer, buccaneer, seer, and genius, to hear her tell it, and part old lady and part fun-loving girl, at the ripe old age of nineteen and a half. A fearsome, powerful witch, so she described herself.
“Rowan’s just fine,” Mary Jane had declared after staring and squinting at Rowan, and then pushing her own cowboy hat off her head so it laid against the back of her neck. “Yep, just brace yourself. She’s taking her time, but this lady here knows what’s happening.”
“Who is this nut case?” Mona had demanded, though she’d felt a wild compassion for the child actually, never mind that she was six years older than Mona. This was a noble savage decked out in a Wal-Mart denim skirt no longer than the middle of her thighs, and a cheap white blouse that was much too tight across her egregious breasts, and even missing a crucial button. Severely deprived, and playing it off beautifully.
Of course, Mona had known who Mary Jane was. Mary Jane Mayfair actually lived in the ruins of Fontevrault Plantation, in the Bayou Country. This was the legendary land of poachers who killed beautiful white-necked herons just for their meat, alligators that could overturn your boat and eat your child, and crazy Mayfairs who’d never made it to New Orleans and the wooden steps of the famous New Orleans Fontevrault outpost, otherwise known as the house on St. Charles and Amelia.
Mona was actually dying to see this place, Fontevrault, that stood still with its six columns up and six columns down, even though the first floor was flooded with three feet of water. Seeing the legendary Mary Jane was the next best thing, the cousin only recently returned from “away” who tethered her pirogue to the newel post, and paddled across a stagnant pool of treacherous slime to get to the pickup truck she drove into town for her groceries.
Everybody was talking about Mary Jane Mayfair. And because Mona was thirteen, and the heiress now, and the only legacy-connected person who would talk to people or acknowledge their presence, everybody thought Mona would find it especially interesting to speak about a teen-aged hick cousin who was “brilliant” and “psychic” and wandered about the way Mona did, on her own.
Nineteen and a half. Until Mona laid eyes on this brilliant bit of work, she had not considered someone of that age a true teenager.
Mary Jane was just about the most interesting discovery they had made since they’d started rounding up everyone for genetic testing of the entire Mayfair family. It was bound to happen, finding a throwback like Mary Jane. Mona wondered what else might crawl out of the swamps soon.
But imagine a flooded plantation house of Greek Revival grandeur, gradually sinking into the duckweed, with globs of plaster falling off “with a splash” into the murky waters. Imagine fish swimming through the stairway balusters.
“What if that house falls on her?” Bea had asked. “The house is in the water. She can’t stay there. This girl must be brought here to New Orleans.”
“Swamp water, Bea,” Celia had said. “Swamp water, remember. It’s not a lake or the Gulf Stream. And besides, if this child does not have sense to get out of there and take the old woman to safety—”
The old woman.
Mona had all of this fresh in her memory this last weekend when Mary Jane had walked into the backyard and plunged into the little crowd that surrounded the silent Rowan as if it were a picnic.
“I knew about y’all,” Mary Jane had declared. She’d addressed her words to Michael too, who stood by Rowan’s chair as if posing for an elegant family portrait. And how Michael’s eyes had locked onto her.
“I come over here sometimes and look at you,” said Mary Jane. “Yeah, I do. I came the day of the wedding. You know, when you married her?” She pointed to Michael, then to Rowan. “I stood over there, ’cross the street, and looked at your party?”
Her sentences kept going up on the end, though they weren’t questions, as though she was always asking for a nod or