“Dr. Rowan Mayfair came behind me and put her hands on my shoulders. I felt soothed immediately by the way that she massaged me. She actually bent down and kissed my cheek. Rampant, comforting chills went through me. Oh, the pure sweetness of it. Michael Curry sat opposite and he took my hand and held it firmly. He was like the uncle I never knew.

“God, how I loved them. How I wanted to be connected to them. How I wanted to love Mona with their blessing. Desperately, I needed their comfort now.

“ ‘I’m going to be locked up,’ I stammered. ‘Julien Mayfair. Was he ever a real man?’

“ ‘He was real, all right,’ said Rowan Mayfair in her patient and sincere husky voice. ‘He’s a legend in the Mayfair clan. He died in 1914.’ ”

CHAPTER 31

31

“THEY BROUGHT me into the house. It was dim and magnificent. They showed me the shadowy double parlor with its carved archway and shining floors and they took me through the handsome dining room with its murals of Riverbend Plantation, long ago sacrificed to the curvature of the Mississippi River as it changed its fickle path.

“Rowan was the tour guide, pointing out details with a low-key simplicity, her voice warm, though her gray eyes were always cold. She was very shapely in her white shirt and pants and seemed at times to be ruminating in a dream.

“Then it was in the sunlit kitchen that we settled at a glass table with brass dolphins as a base to it, and we were ranged in comfortable brushed-steel chairs. There was a cozy back stairs in the corner and a small gas fireplace for cold days, but this wasn’t one of them, and beyond the French doors we could see the rampant jasmine and the banana trees that grew around the wall of the rear garden where I had sat with Julien, so oblivious to the real world.

“ ‘But how do I know you’re real?’ I asked them logically. ‘He seemed in those moments as real as anybody, except—.’ And then I had to admit it, the things that were wrong, that he had been a friend to my ancestor Manfred, a sheer impossibility in terms of his appearance, and then there was the matter of his old-fashioned nineteenth-century clothes.

“ ‘Ghosts tip you off and then distract you,’ I confessed.

“Michael Curry nodded his head. I knew instinctively that he had seen spirits, plenty of them. And he was such a genial man, almost humble. Yet he gave an impression of incredible strength. He had exceptionally large hands and they looked gentle.

“ ‘What did he tell you, son?’ he asked. ‘Can you share this information with us?’