“Oh, what a curse to live to that age to be slobbering as he was, like a bulldog. I think of a bulldog every time I think of him. And mind you, a sickroom in those days, no matter how well attended, wasn’t what a sickroom is today! It reeked, I tell you. If I ever become that old and start to slobber, Quinn has my express permission to blow my brains out with my own pearl-handled gun, or to sink me with morphine! Remember that, Little Boy.”

“Of course,” I rejoined, winking at her.

“Oh, you little devil, I’m serious—you can’t imagine how revolting it can be, and all I ask is permission to say my Rosary before you execute the sentence, and then I’ll be gone.” She looked at the cameos and then about herself and back to Lestat.

“The Old Man, yes, the Old Man,” she said, “and he was staring blankly into nothing before he saw me, mumbling to himself until he started to mumble to me. There was a little chest of drawers beside him where it was rumored he kept his money, but how I knew this I don’t now recall.

“As I was saying, the old reprobate told me to come in, and then he unlocked the top drawer of this chest and he took out a small velvet box and, letting his cane fall over on the floor, he put the box in my hands. ‘Open that up and hurry,’ he said. ‘Because you’re my only granddaughter and I want you to have it, and your mother is too foolish to want it. I said hurry up.’

“Well, I did precisely what he told me, and inside were all these cameos, and I thought they were fascinating with all their tiny little people on them and their frames of gold.

“ ‘Rebecca at the Well,’ he said. ‘All of them of the same story, Rebecca at the Well.’ And then, ‘If they tell you I murdered her they’re telling you the truth. She couldn’t be satisfied with cameos and diamonds and pearls, not that one. I killed her, or more truthfully, and it’s time for the truth, I dragged her to her death.’

“Of course I was awestruck by his words,” said Aunt Queen, “but instead of being suspicious and horrified, I was impressed that he was addressing these words to me. And he went on talking, the slobber coming down the side of his mouth to his chin. I should have helped him wipe his face, but I was too young to do anything as compassionate as that.

“ ‘Those were the old days,’ he said to me, ‘and she wore those high-collared lace blouses, and the cameos looked so very precious at her throat. She was so precious when I first brought her here. They’re all so precious in the beginning and then they turn rotten. Except my poor dead Virginia Lee. My lovely, unforgettable Virginia Lee. Would she had lived forever, my own Virginia Lee. But the others, rotten, I tell you, greedy and rotten every time.