And such a power was not beyond scientific possibility, that was the truly terrifying part. Like the psychometric power of Michael Curry, such things might have to do with measurable energy, complex physical talents which might someday be as definable as electricity or microwaves, or high-frequency sounds. Curry was capturing an impression from the objects he handled, and that impression was very likely the product of energy. Very likely every object in existence-every surface, every definable bit of matter-contained such stored “impressions.” They existed in a measurable field.
But parapsychology wasn’t Rowan’s love. She was mesmerized by what could be seen in test tubes, slides, and graphs. She didn’t care to test or analyze her own killing power. She wanted only to believe that she had never used it, that maybe there was some other explanation for what had happened, that maybe somehow she was innocent.
And the tragic thing was, maybe nobody could ever tell her what had really occurred with Graham, and the man in the Jeep and the kid on the playground. And all she could hope for was to tell someone, to unburden and exorcise, as everybody else did, through talk.
Talk, talk, talk.
That’s exactly what Rowan wanted. She knew.
Only once before had this desire to confide nearly overcome her. And that had been quite an unusual event. In fact, she had almost told a perfect stranger the entire story, and there were times since when she wished that she had done just that.
It was late last year, a full six months after Ellie’s death. Rowan was feeling the keenest loneliness she’d ever known. It seemed to her the great pattern called “our family” had been washed away overnight. Their life had been so good before Ellie’s illness. Even Graham’s affairs couldn’t spoil it, because Ellie pretended the affairs weren’t happening. And though Graham was not a man whom any human being would have called a good person, he possessed a relentless and infectious personal energy that maintained the family life in high gear.
And how Rowan had depended upon them both.
Her dedication to medicine had pretty much taken her away from her old college cronies. None of them had gone into the sciences. But the family was all that the three of them ever needed. From the time of Rowan’s earliest memories, they were an unshakable trio, whether cruising the Caribbean, or skiing in Aspen, or eating a midnight Christmas dinner on a room service table in a suite in the Plaza in New York.
Now the dream house on the Tiburon shore stood empty as a beached shell.
And Rowan had the odd feeling that the Sweet Christine did not belong so much to her and her various well-chosen love partners, but rather to the family who had left the more dominant impression over a decade of happy years.
One night after Ellie’s death, Rowan had stood alone in the wide living room beneath the high-beamed ceiling, talking aloud to herself, laughing even, thinking there is no one, no one to know, no one to hear. The glass walls were dark and indistinct with reflected carpet, furniture. She couldn’t see the tide that lapped ceaselessly at the pilings. The fire was dying out. The eternal chill of the coastal night was moving slowly through the rooms. She had learnt a painful lesson, she thought-that as they die, the ones we love, we lose our witnesses, our watchers, those who know and understand the tiny little meaningless patterns, those words drawn in water with a stick. And there is nothing left but the endless flow.
It was shortly after that that the bizarre moment had come, when she had almost taken hold of this stranger and poured out her tale.
He was an elderly gentleman, white-haired-British, quite obviously from the first words he spoke. And they had met, in of all places, the cemetery where her adoptive parents had been laid to rest.
It was a quaint old graveyard, sprinkled with weathered monuments on the edge of the small northern California town where Graham’s family had once lived. These people, not related to her by blood, had been completely unknown to her. She’d gone back several times after Ellie’s funeral, though why she wasn’t quite sure. On that particular day her reason was simple: the gravestone had finally been completed and she wanted to see that the names and the dates were correct.
It had occurred to her several times on the drive north that this new gravestone would stand as long as she was living, and after that, it would tumble and crack and lie there in the weeds. The relatives of Graham Franklin had not even been notified about his funeral. Ellie’s people-far away in the dim South-had not been notified of her death. Even in ten years, no one would know or care then about Graham and Ellie Mayfair Franklin. And by the end of Rowan’s life, everyone who had ever known them or even heard of them would be dead.
Spiderwebs broken and torn in a wind that is indifferent to their beauty. Why bother with this at all? But Ellie had wanted her to bother. Ellie had wanted a headstone, flowers. That was the way they did it in New Orleans when Ellie was a little girl. Only on her deathbed had she spoken of her home finally, and to say the strangest things-that they had laid out Stella in the parlor, that people had come to see Stella and kiss her even though her brother had shot her, that Lonigan and Sons had closed up the wound in Stella’s head.
“And Stella’s face was so beautiful in the coffin. She had such beautiful black hair, all in little waves, you know, and she was as pretty as her picture on the living room wall. I loved Stella! Stella let me hold the necklace. I sat on a chair by the coffin. I was kicking my feet and my Aunt Carlotta said to stop.”
Every word of that strange diatribe was engraved on Rowan’s memory. Stella, her brother, Aunt Carlotta. Even the name Lonigan. Because for a precious few seconds there had been a flash of color in the abyss.
These people were related to Rowan. Rowan was in fact Ellie’s third cousin. And of these people Rowan knew nothing, and must continue to know nothing, were her promises to Ellie to be kept.
Ellie had remembered herself, even in those painful hours. “Don’t you ever go back there, Rowan. Rowan, remember what you’ve promised. I burned all the pictures, the letters. Don’t go back there, Rowan, this is your home.”
“I know, Ellie. I’ll remember.”
And there was no more talk of Stella. Of her brother. Of Aunt Carlotta. Of the picture on the living room wall. Only the shock of the document presented to Rowan after Ellie’s death by her executor-a carefully worded pledge, with absolutely no legal validity whatever, that Rowan would never return to the city of New Orleans, never seek to know who her people were.
Yet in those last days, Ellie had spoken of them. Of Stella on the wall.
And because Ellie had talked too of headstones and flowers, of being remembered by her adopted daughter, Rowan had gone north that afternoon to keep that promise, and in the little hillside graveyard, she had met the Englishman with the white hair.
He’d been down on one knee before Ellie’s grave as if genuflecting, copying the very names which had only just been cut into the stone.
He seemed a little flustered when she interrupted him, though she had not spoken a word. In fact, for one second he looked at her as if she were a ghost. It had almost made her laugh. After all she was a slightly built woman, in spite of her height, wearing her usual boat clothes-a navy blue peacoat and jeans. And he himself seemed such an anachronism in his elegant three-piece suit of gray tweed.
But that special sense of hers told her he was a man of only good intentions, and when he explained that he had known Ellie’s people in New Orleans, she believed him. She felt a great confusion, however. Because she wanted to know these people too.
After all, there was no one left in the world for her but those people! And what an ungrateful and disloyal thought that was.