Lasher Read Free Page A

really one of the most fun puzzles in the family history to figure out.
    Smells. She wanted to investigate that other smell—the scent that lingered in the hallway and the living room of First Street. Nothing to do with a dead body, that one. The smell that had come with disaster at Christmas. The smell which noone else could smell, it seemed, unless Aunt Gifford had been lying when Mona asked her.
    Aunt Gifford did that. She wouldn’t admit to “seeing things” or picking up strange scents. “I don’t smell anything!” she’d said with annoyance. Well, maybe that was true. Mayfairs could read other people’s minds a lot of the time, but they were good at blocking out each other.
    Mona wanted to touch everything. She wanted to look for the Victrola. She did not care about the pearls. She wanted the Victrola. And she wanted to know THE BIG FAMILY SECRET— what had happened to Rowan Mayfair on Christmas Day. Why had Rowan left her new husband, Michael? And why had they found him drowned in the ice-cold swimming pool? Just nearly dead. Everybody had thought he was going to die after that, except Mona.
    Of course Mona could conjecture what happened like everyone else. But she wanted more than that. She wanted the Michael Curry version. And to date, there was no such version. If he’d told anyone what happened on Christmas Day, it was his friend Aaron Lightner, from the Talamasca, who would not tell anyone else. But people felt too sorry for Michael to press it. They’d thought he was going to die from what happened to him.
    Mona had managed to get into his room in Intensive Care on Christmas Night and hold his hand. He wasn’t going to die. There was hurt to his heart, yes, because he’d stopped breathing for a long time in the cold water, and he had to rest to heal that hurt, but he was nowhere near dying, she knew that as soon as she felt his pulse. And touching him had been rather like touching a Mayfair. He had something extra to him which Mayfairs always had. He could see ghosts, she knew. The History of the Mayfair Witches had not included him and Rowan, but she knew. She wondered if he’d tell the truth about it. Fact, she’d even heard some maddening whispers to the effect that he had.
    Oh, so much to learn, so much to uncover. And being thirteen was kind of like a bad joke on her. She was no more thirteen than Joan of Arc had ever been thirteen, the way she saw it. Or Catherine of Siena. Of course they were saints but only by a hair. They were almost witches.
    And what about the Children’s Crusade? If Mona had been there, they would have gotten back the Holy Land, she figured. What if she started a nationwide revolt of genius thirteen-year-oldsright now—demand for the power to vote based on intelligence, a driver’s license as soon as you could qualify and see over the dashboard. Well, a lot of this would have to wait.
    The point was, she’d known tonight as they walked back from the Comus parade that Michael was quite strong enough to go to bed with her, if only she could get him to do it, which was not going to be an easy thing.
    Men Michael’s age had the best combination of conscience and self-control. An old man, like her Great-uncle Randall, that had been easy, and young boys, like her cousin David, were nothing at all.
    But a thirteen-year-old going after Michael Curry? It was like scaling Everest, Mona thought with a smile.
I’m going to do it if it kills me
. And maybe then, when she had him, she’d know what he knew about Rowan, why Rowan and he had fought on Christmas Day, and why Rowan had disappeared. After all, this wasn’t really a betrayal of Rowan. Rowan had gone off with someone, that was almost for sure, and everybody in the family, whether they would talk about it or not, was terrified for Rowan.
    It wasn’t like Rowan was dead; it was like she’d gone off and left the barn door open. And here was Mona coming along, mad for Michael Curry, this big woolly mammoth of a