Blackwood Farm - Anne Rice [133]
“I wanted to snatch the pages out of her hand, but she wouldn’t allow it and read out the words,
“ ‘Here sleeps Petronia, whose mortal hands once made the most beautiful of cameos, even for emperors and kings. Guard me, ye gods and goddesses whose images I rendered so well. A curse on those who attempt to disturb my resting place.’
“She gave me the page of the letter. I read it over and over. ‘Petronia,’ I whispered. ‘What can all this mean?’ I gave the page back to her. ‘Who translated it, Aunt Queen?’ I asked.
“ ‘A man I want you to meet, Quinn, a man who’s going to change the course of your life the way Lynelle changed it, a man who’s going to accompany you and me on the Grand Tour you should have had a long time ago. The man’s name is Nash Penfield. He’s an English professor from California, and I like him very much.’
“ ‘But what if I don’t like him, Aunt Queen?’ I asked. ‘Aunt Queen, I don’t want to go to Europe yet. I don’t want to leave here. What’s going to happen to this place? Aunt Queen, Pops just died. We can’t be making plans.’
“ ‘We have to make plans, my dear boy,’ she said. ‘And Nash Penfield is flying here Friday. We’ll have a nice dinner together and we’ll see how you like him, and if you don’t care for the man, which I truly cannot imagine, then we’ll find someone else. But you need a tutor, Quinn, you need someone to take up where Lynelle left off.’
“ ‘All right. We’ll make a bargain. You get up out of bed, eat three square meals tomorrow and I’ll meet Mr. Penfield. How’s that?’
“ ‘I’ll go you one better,’ she said. ‘You check into Mayfair Medical tomorrow for a series of tests, and I’ll get up, eat breakfast and go with you, how’s that?’
“ ‘What tests?’ I asked. But I already knew. They’d do brain scans on me, MRIs, electroencephalograms, whatever they called them. They’d be looking for lesions on the temporal lobe—something physical to account for what I claimed to see and hear. I wasn’t surprised, even with all the verification that Rebecca Stanford had been real and had been murdered, I wasn’t surprised.
“If anything, I was surprised that it hadn’t come sooner. And I thought to myself, Well, we’ll get this over with and I won’t have to think about it anymore.
“ ‘All right, I’ll check into Mayfair Medical,’ I said. ‘But I won’t find myself on the psychiatric ward, will I?’
“ ‘My boy, I despise the idea of nuthouses as much as you do,’ she replied. ‘But I think I’d be remiss if I didn’t request certain purely medical tests to be done. As for Mayfair Medical, it’s a marvel, with the finest doctors and equipment in the South.’
“ ‘I know, Aunt Queen. You have to remember, Lynelle was going to work in research there. Who in the environs of New Orleans doesn’t know all about Mayfair Medical? I’ve been there, beloved aunt, I walked those granite-tiled hallways with Lynelle. It was her dream come true, remember?’
“The fear came on me, it came on dark and strong when I thought of Lynelle in her breakneck high heels clicking on beside me through the hospital corridors, pointing out all the special features of this revolutionary clinic and hospital.
“I remembered the smallest, most special detail—that every ward in Mayfair Medical had broad comfortable benches along its walls, benches for the comfort of relatives and friends who were visiting with the patients. Every room was a private room. Every room had easy chairs for visitors.
“ ‘Oh, it’s too sad to think of poor Lynelle,’ Aunt Queen said, as if she were reading my mind or my wandering eyes. ‘Lynelle, Sweetheart, Pops, it’s too sad, too dreadful. But we cannot take our minds off the details of life, Quinn. The details will save us. We’ll have these tests done and we’ll discover if there’s anything to be worried about.’
“ ‘Worried about? You have a letter from the stranger! You know I didn’t write it or cook it up myself. I told you he was in my room, and he has been on the island since I warned him away. I burnt his books, I was so angry. And now this inscription. What can it mean? And the cameos. Why is it all connected?