And I was NOT riding over the lake in the car with that unforgivable Valkyrie in her sequined chemise! I would take to the clouds, thank you.
I went outside.
That twinge of autumn again in my beloved heat. I didn’t so much like it. I fretted the winter coming on. But what was all this to me with my broken heart, and illegitimate soul, and what
had
I done to Rowan with my furtive, disgraceful whispers? And Michael, that powerful and soft-spoken Michael, who had trusted me with his wife’s heart, what had I done to him?
And how could Mona say such hurtful things, how could she? And how could I have behaved so childishly in response?
I closed my eyes.
I cleared my mind of all distractions and random images.
Again I spoke only to Maharet. Wherever you are, I need you.
And now came some artifice—to describe once more my needs without casting to the winds unnecessary details for every other immortal who might pick up my message and ponder the precise nature of what I sought.
To find a tribe of tall beings, tender of bone, ancient, simple, tangled with my fledgling, unknown to the world of records, history and location essential to the sanity of those I love. Guidance. Mistakes I’ve made with my fledgling, spiraling out of control. Give to me your wisdom, your keen hearing, your vision. Where are the tall creatures? I am your loyal subject. More or less. I send my love.
Would she answer? I didn’t know. In all honesty (yeah, like all the rest of this is a pack of lies?), I had only once, years ago, called out to her for help, and she had not answered me. However, I’d been guilty of the most ridiculous blunder at the time. I’d switched bodies with a mortal, and been abandoned by him. Idiocy. I had to go after my own supernatural body and recover it. And on my own—well, almost on my own—I’d found a solution to my problem. And so it had ended well.
But I had seen her since, this mysterious ancestor, when she did come to my aid of her own volition, and she had taken great pains with me. She’d forgiven my ranting and raving and my temper. I’d described her in my writings, and she had borne it. From me, she’d borne many things.
Perhaps she had heard me last night. Perhaps she would hear me now.
If nothing came of the call, I would try again. And again. And if her silence continued, I would call to others. I would enlist Marius, my sometime mentor, and wise Child of the Millennia. And if that failed, I would scan the Earth on my own for the Taltos, be they one or many.
I knew I had to make good on my promise to find the Taltos—for Michael and for Rowan, my precious Rowan, even if Mona utterly deserted me, which was most likely the case.
Yes, I felt my heart shrinking. I had already somehow lost Mona. And soon Quinn would follow. And precisely how I’d done it, I really didn’t grasp.
Somewhere in the back of my conscious was taking shape the horrid realization that a modern-minded fledgling was as complex as a nuclear reactor, a communications satellite, a Pentium 4 computer, a microwave oven, a cell phone and all the other intricate overarching newfangled creations I couldn’t understand. Of course, it was all a matter of exploding sophistication.
Or mystification.
Vixen. I hated her. That’s why I was crying my own blood tears, wasn’t it? Well, there was nobody to see it.
Eh bien,
it was on to Blackwood Farm, and as I ascended I prayed to Maharet. Maharet was my prayer of the winds all the way there.
21
B
LACKWOOD
M
ANOR WAS LIT UP
like a lantern in the rural dark, doors thrown open on the front porch, floodlights on, Jasmine sitting on the steps crying with a white handkerchief, knees up, black heels, navy blue sheath, chocolate skin and bleached curls looking lovely as was routine, her crying brokenhearted and exhausting and terribly sad.
“Oh, Les-Dot, help me, help me!” she cried. “Where is Quinn? Where is Little Boss? I need him. I’m going out of my mind! And that boy’s running rampant. Nash doesn’t believe in ghosts, Tommy’s scared to death of them, and Grandma’s sending for the priest to drive the Devil out of me! As if it was my doing!”
I walked up to her, picked her up, with her utter soft silky willingness, and carried her inside. She lay her head against my chest.
The front room was full of people.
“The car’s turning into the drive,” I said, “what’s wrong?”
We sat down on the living room couch, me with her in my lap. I patted her. She was really drained and miserable.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” she cried, “we’ve been so alone out here.”
Little Tommy Blackwood, aged thirteen, Quinn’s uncle by blood, sat in one of the chairs opposite and watched me in a really formal sort of way, his fingers on one arm of the chair. He was a truly marvelous young man, much as Quinn had described, and from his travels with Aunt Queen and the all too human Quinn in Europe, he had imbibed an entire attitude towards life which would stand him in good stead always.
Cool to see him again.
Nash Penfield, his tutor, was there also, attired in an impeccable herringbone suit, a man who seemed born to have a calming effect on others, though why he could not calm Jasmine I wasn’t certain. He seemed puzzled as he stood near to Tommy’s chair, eying Jasmine with profound concern, and nodding to me respectfully.
Big Ramona, Jasmine’s grandmother, sat glowering near the couch, in a somber wine-colored gabardine dress with an ornate diamond pin just below her right shoulder. Big Ramona’s hair was brushed back artfully to a twist on the back of her head, and she was wearing stockings and fancy black shoes.
“Oh hush up, girl,” Big Ramona said at once to Jasmine, “you’re just drawing attention to yourself. Sit up straight! Stop talking like a fool!”
Two of the Shed Men, still in their work clothes, were standing awkwardly behind her. One of them was cheerful Allen, with the round face and white hair. I didn’t know the name of the other one. Correct. Yes I did. Joel.
And nobody said anything after Big Ramona bawled out Jasmine.
Before I could begin a mind search, Quinn came into the room, and Mona, the sequined harpy, went on back the hall like a streak of silver light, and into Aunt Queen’s bedroom. Aunt Queen’s bedroom was the only bedroom on the main floor.
A ripple of interest and wonder went through the assembly as to Mona’s presence and Mona’s appearance, but nobody had gotten a really good look at her. The insolent little monster.
It was Quinn who mattered here. He sat opposite me just inside the huge hallway door. His characteristic innocence slowly alchemized into a gentlemanly air of command as he scanned the gathering. Then he rose to his feet quickly as Cyndy, the Nurse, came in, looking quite lovely in her starched white uniform, also quite tearful and sad, and took a chair far away, by the piano.
Next there appeared the sheriff, a rotund and jocular human being whom I’d met the night of Aunt Queen’s death, followed by a person whom I identified at once as Grady Breen, the family lawyer, aged, portly and stuffed into a three-piece pinstriped suit, whom Quinn had described to me when he’d been telling me his life story.
“Whoa, this is quite serious,” I said under my breath.
Jasmine was shuddering against me, and clinging to me. “Don’t you let me go, Lestat,” she said. “Don’t you let me go. You don’t know what’s after me.”
“Honey bunch, nothing can get you when you’re with me,” I whispered. With loving hands I tried to distract her from the fact that my body feels like a chunk of marble.
“Jasmine, get off that man’s lap,” whispered Big Ramona, “and start behaving like the Head Housekeeper here, where you are supposed to be! I tell you, the only thing holding some people back is their own selves!”
Jasmine did not obey.
The two official gentlemen found chairs in the shadows rather close to Cyndy, the Nurse, as though they didn’t want to invade the family circle. The sheriff’s belly poured over his belt, which was laden with weapons and a crackling walkie-talkie, which he silenced with embarrassed suddenness.
Jasmine put her left arm around me and hung on as though I were trying to release her, which I wasn’t. I stroked her back and kissed her head. She was a delicious little person. Her long silky legs were stretched out to my left.
The fact that Quinn had once made love to her, fathered little Jerome by her, was suddenly uppermost in my heated evil ever-churning half-human half-vampiric mind. Indeed people’s charms should not go to waste, that is my motto, may it never have dire consequences for the mortal world.
“If only I hadn’t been so mean to her,” Jasmine said. “She’s never going to leave me alone.” She ground her forehead against my chest. She tightened her grip. I closed my arm completely around her.
“You’re just fine, honey bunch,” I said.
“What in the world do you mean?” asked Quinn. He was deeply distressed to see Jasmine suffering. “Jasmine, what’s going on? Somebody please bring me up to speed.”
“So there’s news of Patsy?” I asked. For that was clearly everybody’s concern, and I was getting it in sputters and waves, whether I searched for it or not.
“Well, seems so,” said Grady Breen. “But it seems to me that Big Ramona, well, what with Jasmine unable to talk, maybe you should tell the story.”
“Who says I’m unable to talk!” Jasmine cried, head still bowed, body shuddering. “You think I can’t tell you what I saw with my own eyes, coming right to the window of my bedroom, all soaked and wet and streaming with duckweed and swamp water; you think I don’t know what I saw, that it was Patsy, you think I don’t know Patsy’s voice, when she said, ‘Jasmine, Jasmine,’ over and over again? You think I don’t know it was a dead person who said, ‘Jasmine, Jasmine,’ over and over again? And me in that bed with little Jerome, and me scared to death he would wake up, and her clawing at the window with her red fingernails, saying, ‘Jasmine, Jasmine,’ in that pitiful voice?”
Quinn went bloodless with shock.
Cyndy, the Nurse, burst into tears. “She has to be buried in consecrated ground, I don’t care what anyone says.”
“Buried in consecrated ground!” said Big Ramona. “All we have of her is some of her hair pulled out of her hairbrush, what are you talking about, Cyndy? Are we going to bury a hairbrush, for the love of Heaven?”
Nash Penfield was so frustrated, I could feel it. I didn’t have to read it from his thoughts. He had wanted to take charge for some time, for the sake of everyone. But he felt he had no authority to speak here.
Mona came clicking down the marble-tiled hall and appeared in the door, soberly dressed in a high-neck black dress with long sleeves and tight cuffs and a high hem, and black heels, calves once again flexed magnificently. She took a place to the left of Quinn. Her face was very sweet and serious, the little dissembler.
Everyone looked at her at once, even Jasmine, with a covert turn of her head, but no one knew what to make of it. I refused to even give her a glance. I have excellent peripheral vision.
“When did this ghost appear to you?” I asked at once to distract everyone from Mona and the inevitable questions about her transformation.
“Now tell the story from the start,” said earnest and forthright Grady Breen, “as we are dealing with what constitute legal documents.”
“What legal documents?” said Quinn patiently.
“Well,” said Big Ramona, moving just a little bit forward in her chair, her dark face very commanding, “I think that everybody present knows that for years the ghost of William Blackwood has appeared often in this very room, pointing at that French desk there between the windows, and no one has ever known what to make of it. Quinn, you saw that ghost plenty times, and Jasmine, you did too. And I have to confess, as God is my witness, so did I, though I always said a Hail Mary and the ghost went away like that, just like pinching out a candle flame. And when we opened up that desk, well, we always found nothing. Just nothing. And we put the key back into the cup in the kitchen, though why we so carefully kept locking up nothing I’m not the one to explain.
“But what you don’t know is that right after you took Mona Mayfair out of here, Quinn, that is, right after your mother went missing, leaving all her medicine behind, the ghost started to appear again night and day! I’m telling you, all I had to do was to walk in this room and there was Grandpa William standing there pointing at that desk! And same held true for my grandchild Jasmine. Jasmine, sit up straight!”
(The desk in question was fancy Louis XV, with one central drawer, cabriole legs and much ornate ormolu.)
“Well, finally, Jasmine says to me she just can’t stand this any longer, and she couldn’t reach Quinn and she couldn’t do her work, and neither could I, and then my boy Clem comes in here and even he sees this ghost, and so we decided, well, we were going to search that desk one more time, whether Quinn was here or not to give his permission. But before we had made up our minds that we were going to do this, Jasmine is laying up in the bed asleep with her blessed little boy, Jerome, and up to her window out there comes Patsy, yes, I’m telling you, Patsy, all full of swamp water and crying, ‘Jasmine, Jasmine,’ and scratching at the glass with her long painted fingernails, and Jasmine grabs up little Jerome and runs out of the house screaming!”
Jasmine nodded furiously, making of herself a tiny ball in my lap.
“Fact was,” said Big Ramona, “Jasmine was the only one on this property who was ever kind to Patsy! Except for you, Cyndy, honey, but you didn’t live here! And how’s Patsy’s ghost gonna crawl out of the swamp and find you all the way over in Mapleville? And then we told Grady Breen we were opening that desk, he best come on over here, because it was locked and the key was not in the cup in the kitchen after all these years of that key being in that cup in the kitchen, and we had to use a knife to get the desk open.”
“That makes perfect sense,” said Quinn agreeably.
Big Ramona cast her eyes in the direction of Grady Breen, a most respectful man, who now drew from his brown leather briefcase what appeared to be a sheaf of handwritten papers in a clear plastic folder.
“And when we opened the drawer of the desk,” Big Ramona proceeded, “what did we find but Patsy’s handwritten letters, saying that ‘by the time you find this I will be dead,’ and then going on to describe how she meant to go out into Sugar Devil Swamp and lean over the edge of the pirogue and shoot herself in the right side of her head so she’d fall in the water, and that not one scrap of her remains would be left to put in the family tomb next to her father on account of her hating him, which we all knew that she did.”
“She was so sick,” cried Cyndy, the Nurse. “She was in pain. She didn’t know what she was doing, God help her.”
“Yes, indeed,” said Grady, “and fortunately, well, no, not fortunately, but, conveniently, well, no, not conveniently, but coincidentally, Patsy had been arrested many times for drug possession and her fingerprints were on file, and so we were able to match up the prints on these pages with her prints, and also this is her handwriting—.” Grady rose and hurried across the room and presented the plastic cache to a stunned and silent Quinn—”and she did write about ten drafts of her letter, as she apparently wasn’t satisfied, even with the very last, when she apparently jumped the . . . I mean when she finally decided to go out there and execute her plan.”
Quinn held the packet as though it was about to explode, merely staring at the letter that he could see through the plastic, and then he reached out and laid the packet on the famous haunted desk in which it had been discovered.
He said softly, “That’s her handwriting.”
Everybody nodded, mumbled, concurred, the Shed Men murmuring that Patsy was a great one for scribbling notes saying, “Have my van gassed-up right now!” and “Wash my car and do it right,” and they knew that that was her writing too.
Then the hefty sheriff, a devoutly ignorant man, cleared his throat and announced: “And then of course we found the conclusive evidence in the pirogue.”
“Which was what?” asked Quinn with a small frown.
“Her hair,” said the sheriff, “which matched right up to the hair on her brushes upstairs, and everybody knew Patsy’d never gone out there for any other reason, so it had to be she shot herself out there, ‘cause why else would she come to be in the pirogue?”
“You’ve made a DNA match this quickly?” asked Quinn coldly.
“We didn’t have to. Everybody could see it was the same hair all stuck with her hairspray, you could smell it,” said the sheriff, “but the DNA will be coming if you mean to bury the strands in that little cemetery of yours where you like to bury things and hold séances with big fires and such!”
“Sheriff, please be kind to this boy,” said Cyndy, the Nurse, in a sweet voice, “we are talking about his mother.”
“Yes, please, if we could stick to the facts at hand,” said Nash Penfield, in his deep authoritative voice. His frustration had gotten the better of him. He felt protective of just about everyone, but especially Tommy.
“So the coroner is satisfied?” asked Quinn. “And has ruled it suicide?”
“Well, yes, he would be!” declared the sheriff, “if you’d stop going around the house saying you murdered your mother and threw her to the gators, Quinn Blackwood! And Jasmine here would stop telling everybody Patsy’s come a-crawling up to her window, all full of swamp weed, crying for help, for the love of the Lord in Heaven.”
“She did, she did,” gasped Jasmine under her breath. “Lestat, don’t you let me go!”
“I won’t,” I whispered. “No ghost is going to get you, Jasmine.”