The Witching Hour Read Online Free

plenty old enough to be told a few things about one’s own mother.
    And surely common sense dictated a break in Deirdre’s medication once in a while. And what about a complete reevaluation? He had to at least suggest it.
    “You just give her the shots,” said the old doctor. “Visit with her an hour a day. That’s what you’re asked to do.” Slight coldness this time around. Old fool!
    No wonder he was so glad the afternoon he had first seen the man visiting her.
    It was early September, and still warm. And as he turned in the gate, he saw the man on the screen porch beside her, obviously talking to her, his arm resting on the back of her chair.
    A tall, brown-haired man, rather slender.
    The doctor felt a curious possessive feeling. A man he didn’t know with his patient. But he was eager to meet him actually. Maybe the man would explain things that the women would not. And surely he was a good friend. There was something intimate in the way he stood so close, the way he inclined towards the silent Deirdre.
    But when the doctor came out on the porch there was no visitor. And he could find no one in the front rooms.
    “You know, I saw a man here awhile ago,” he said to the nurse when she came in. “He was talking to Miss Deirdre.”
    “I didn’t see him,” the nurse had said offhandedly.
    Miss Nancy, shelling peas in the kitchen when he found her, stared at him for a long moment, then shook her head, her chin jutting. “I didn’t hear anybody come in.”
    Well, isn’t that the damnedest thing! But he had to confess, it had only been for an instant—a glimpse through the screens. No, but he
saw
the man there.
    “If only you could speak to me,” he said to Deirdre when they were alone. He was preparing the injection. “If only you could tell me if you want to have visitors, if it matters … ” Her arm was so thin. When he glanced at her, the needle ready, she was staring at him!
    “Deirdre?”
    His heart pounded.
    The eyes rolled to the left, and she stared forward, mute and listless as before. And the heat, which the doctor had come to like, seemed suddenly oppressive. The doctor felt light-headed in fact, as though he was about to faint. Beyond the blackened, dusty screen, the lawn seemed to move.
    Now, he’d never fainted in his life, and as he thought that over, as he tried to think it over, he realized he’d been talking with the man, yes, the man was here, no, not here now, but just had been. They had been in the middle of a conversation, and now he’d lost the thread, or no, that wasn’t it, it was that he suddenly couldn’t remember how long they’d been talking, and it was so strange to have been talking all this time together, and not recall how it started!
    He was suddenly trying to clear his head, and have a better look at the guy, but what had the man just said? It was all very confusing because there was no one there to talk to, no one but her, but yes, he’d just said to the brown-haired man, “Of course, stop the injections … ” and the absolute rectitude of his position was beyond doubt, the old doctor—“A fool, yes!” said the brown-haired man—would just have to listen!
    This was monstrous all this, and the daughter in California … 
    He shook himself. He stood up on the porch. What had happened? He had fallen asleep in the wicker chair. He had been dreaming. The murmur of the bees grew disconcertingly loud in his ears and the fragrance of the gardenias seemed to drug him suddenly. He looked down over the railing at the patio to his left. Had something moved there?
    Only the limbs of the trees beyond as the breeze traveled through them. He’d seen it a thousand times in New Orleans, that graceful dance, as if one tree releases the breeze to another. Such lovely embracing heat.
Stop the injections! She will wake.
    Slowly, awkwardly, a monarch butterfly climbed the screen in front of him. Gorgeous wings. But gradually he focused upon the body of the thing, small