Blackwood Farm - Anne Rice [128]
“No answer.
“ ‘What did you see when you saw the stranger? What did he look like to you? You must remember that to my eyes he was only a dark shape. Goblin, listen. Tell me.’
“A breeze sifted through the room, something chilling against my cheek—but no answer. He didn’t have the strength. He had done enough for one day. Or he didn’t want to answer. Whatever the case, there was only the silence now.
“I was no longer sleepy, only tired, and a deep sweet exhaustion swallowed up my grief and my panic. I wanted to fold down into my wing chair by the fireplace and sleep again, safe in the knowledge that there were armed guards around the property and the mysterious stranger couldn’t harm me. But I couldn’t do that.
“No, Little Lord Tarquin was the man of Blackwood Manor now.
“I went downstairs to see to Aunt Queen.
“Fr. Kevin Mayfair was in her room, seated by the bed, talking softly to her. He was wearing his severe and spotless clerical black along with his white Roman collar.
“And when I watched him from the door, I knew for the first time that I found both men and women erotically beautiful. Rebecca in the lace-trimmed bed, Goblin in the warm steamy thunderstorm of the shower. Fr. Kevin Mayfair with that dark curly red hair and those green eyes and not a freckle on his pale face. Men and women.
“I went out back and walked way over to the right to the bungalow in which Jasmine, Ramona, Clem and Lolly lived. Jasmine was in her green-painted rocking chair, just rocking and smoking.
“I was in a daze. I tried not to notice Jasmine’s breasts in her tight shirt. I tried not to look at the front seam of her jeans. When she turned away from me to exhale I saw the light down the line of her throat to her breasts. Beautiful woman. Aged thirty-five. What were my chances? Like, maybe if I sold her a bill of goods that I doubted my manhood???
“Oh, that was a lovely thought. Wonderfully comforting. And where could we do it? Just go over to the shed, go up the steps and do it in Patsy’s bed? I rolled that dream around for a moment. You don’t get HIV from a bed. What if—and then—and so—and I felt the panic when I looked at the dim house—they had forgotten the four o’clock lights.
“ ‘What’s going to happen now?’ I asked.
“ ‘Come sit with me, little boy lost,’ she said. ‘I’ve been asking myself that very question.’ ”
17
“FOR THE NEXT WEEK I was under lock and key, or armed escort.
“I didn’t find out about it until the morning after Pops’ funeral, when I tried to leave my room and discovered I had a security guard with me, pledged to go where I would go.
“I didn’t too terribly mind, since I alone knew how real the mysterious stranger had been and I didn’t want to be shocked by him. But I made a nuisance of myself by warning everyone about the dangers of the island.
“Our investigations proceeded rapidly, and I know that I focused on them to escape the pure horror of Pops’ death—the loss of the only man who had ever been my father. We had the reading of his will to attend to, and I was dreadfully concerned that he might have cut out Patsy altogether. If I had been left anything at all I resolved to split it with Patsy or at least to give her some of it.
“Meantime she was still out roaming the South, playing beer joints and small clubs, and Aunt Queen was desperately chasing after her by phone, trying to get her to come back so we could all face what Pops had done, whatever it was.
“Now let me return to the investigation.
“Regarding the mysterious letter, Mayfair Medical’s laboratory could find no discernible fingerprints on it and reported that the brand of paper was rare, marketed in Europe and not in the United States, the ink was India ink and that the writing did not indicate any pathology and might have been done by a woman or a man. They noted further that the writer had used a quill pen, pressing down uncommonly hard for such an instrument, implying that the letter writer had been extremely sure of himself.
“In other words, they could tell almost nothing about the letter. And it had