Blood Canticle - Anne Rice [93]
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