“It’s unforgivable,” said Rowan. “Can we talk in the morning?”
“Yeah, sure,” Mona had said, with an exhausted shrug. She’s talking to me like I’m a grown woman, thought Mona, which is more than anybody else around here ever does.
“You are a woman, Mona Mayfair,” Rowan had said, with a sudden, deeply personal smile. She’d immediately sat down again and resumed her conversation with Ryan.
“There should have been papers there, in my room in Houston, reams of scribbled writing. This was his writing, genealogies he had made before his memory deteriorated….”
Boy, Mona had thought, stepping away about as slowly as she could—she’s talking to Ryan of all people about Lasher, and Ryan still can’t say that name, and now Ryan has to deal with hard evidence of what he still won’t accept. Papers, genealogies, things written by the monster who killed his wife, Gifford.
But what Mona had realized in a flash was that she wasn’t necessarily going to be shut out of all this. Rowan had just spoken to her again as if she were important. Everything was changed. And if Mona asked Rowan tomorrow or the day after what those papers were—Lasher’s scribblings—Rowan might even tell her.
Incredible to have seen Rowan’s smile, to have seen the mask of cold power broken, to have seen the gray eyes crinkle and glisten for an instant, to have heard the deep chocolate voice take on that extra little warmth that a smile can give it—amazing.
Mona had finally hurried out of sight. Quit while you’re ahead. You’re too sleepy to be eavesdropping, anyway.
The last thing she’d heard was Ryan saying in a strained voice that everything from Houston had been examined and cataloged.
Mona could still remember when all of those things had reached Mayfair and Mayfair. She could still remember that scent of him that came from the boxes. She could still—occasionally—catch that scent in the living room, but it was almost gone now.
She had flopped on the living room couch, too tired to think about it all just now.
All the others had left by that time. Lily was sleeping upstairs near Beatrice. Michael’s Aunt Vivian had moved back to her own apartment on St. Charles Avenue.
The living room had been empty, the breeze floating in through the windows to the side porch. A guard had been walking back and forth out there, so Mona had figured, I don’t have to close those windows, and facedown on the couch she had crashed, thinking Yuri, then Michael, and pushing her face into the velvet and going sound asleep.
They said when you grew older you couldn’t sleep that way. Well, Mona was ready for it. That sort of blotto sleep always made her feel cheated, as if she’d checked out on the universe for a span of time that she herself could not control.
But at four o’clock she’d awakened, unsure of why.
The floor-length windows had been open still, and the guard was out there smoking a cigarette.
Sleepily she’d listened to the sounds of the night, the birds crying in the dark trees, the distant roar of a train along the waterfront, the sound of water splashing as in a fountain or a pool.
She must have listened for half an hour before the sound of the water began to prey on her. There was no fountain. Someone was swimming in the pool.
Half expecting to see some delicious ghost—poor Stella, for instance, or God only knew what other apparition—Mona had slipped out in her bare feet and crossed the lawn. The guard was nowhere in sight now, but that didn’t mean much on a property of this size.
Someone had been swimming steadily back and forth across the pool.
Through the gardenia bushes, Mona had seen that it was Rowan, naked, and moving with incredible speed through lap after lap. Rowan took her breaths regularly, head to the side, the way professional swimmers do it, or the way that athletic doctors do it, who want to work the body and condition it, and maybe even heal it and bring it back into prime form.
No time to disturb her, Mona had thought, still sleepy, longing for the couch again, in fact, so sluggish she might have fallen down on the cool grass. Something about the scene had disturbed her, however; maybe that Rowan was nude, or that she swam so rapidly and so steadily; or maybe just that the guard was around and might be a peeping Tom in the bushes right now, which Mona