“She looked at the big columns. She liked the feeling of the place.

“ ‘Even the house I grew up in,’ she said, ‘poor as it was, it was a huge Victorian on St. Charles Avenue. It was chock-full of ghosts and people. You know, I didn’t grow up rich. I was a poor kind of down-at-the-heel Mayfair when it comes right down to it. My parents were both spineless drunks. They gave their lives to the bottle. And now I’m the technical owner of a private plane and the designated heiress to billions of dollars. It makes me crazy sometimes, the switch, but there I go again talking about dreams, because I always dreamed I’d be the Designée of the Mayfair Legacy.’

“She started to look a little bit sad, which alarmed me.

“ ‘Someday I have to tell you all about our family,’ she said. ‘But right now I’m with you. Tell me about you.’

“I thought she was absolutely brilliant. I had never thought much about the kind of woman I’d marry, if any, and now it seemed perfectly right that she be brilliant as well as beautiful. And her beauty, it was natural. She wore no lipstick or eyebrow pencil. She had come out of the shower pure and young. I was totally captivated.

“It was getting dusk. The sky was streaked with amethyst and burning gold. I took her down to the old cemetery. I explained to her how the West Ruby River fed our lonely two hundred acres of Sugar Devil Swamp.

“I told her about Sugar Devil Island and the Hermitage, about the strange inscription on the mausoleum and about the strange trespasser breaking into the house, and that it was his attack which got me taken to Mayfair Medical.

“ ‘Can we go to the island, Quinn?’ she asked. ‘Can you show me? I have to see this place for myself. How can I be Ophelia forever if I fear to travel ever-flowing streams?’

“ ‘Well, not now, my precious immortal Ophelia,’ I said. ‘It’s getting dark and I’m not macho enough to be going into the swamp in the dark. But I can take you there in the day. You saw the security guys all around? We’ll take two of them with us. That way if the stranger shows his face we can blast him.’

“She was very curious. She wanted to know more about the Hermitage and its circular structure. Had there been a stairs up to the cupola?

“ ‘Yes, there is, and you know I never went up there. It was a circular iron stairs, and I hardly took notice of it, and I’m sure if you go up there you can have a better view over the swamp to Blackwood Manor.’

“ ‘I just have to see it,’ she said. ‘It’s too grandly mysterious. And what do you plan to do about the trespasser?’