The Witching Hour (110 page)

The remaining half was transferred, as it came in, directly to Graham Franklin, who invested the money prudently and successfully, largely in real estate (a gold mine in California), and who continued to invest Ellie’s money—regular payments from her trust—in community property and investments over the years. Though he made a very high salary as a successful lawyer, Graham had no family money, and his enormous estate—owned in common with his wife—at the time of his death was the result of his skillful use of her inherited money.

There is considerable evidence that Graham resented his wife, and resented his emotional as well as financial dependence upon her. He could not have possibly supported his life-style—yachts, sports cars, extravagant vacations, a palatial modern house in Tiburon—on his salary. And he funneled enormous sums of Ellie’s money directly out of their joint account into the hands of various mistresses over the years.

Several of these women have told our investigators that Graham was a vain and slightly sadistic man. Yet they found him irresistible, giving up on him only when they realized that he really loved Ellie. It wasn’t just her money. He couldn’t live without her. “He has to get back at her from time to time, and that’s the only reason he cheats.”

Graham once explained to a young airline stewardess whom he subsequently put through college that his wife swallowed him, and that he had to have “something on the side” (meaning a woman) or he was nothing and nobody at all.

When he discovered that Ellie had fatal cancer, he went into a panic. Legal partners and friends have described in detail his “total inability” to deal with Ellie’s sickness. He would not discuss the illness with her; he would not listen to her doctors; he refused to enter her hospital room. He moved his mistress into a Jackson Street apartment right across from his office in San Francisco, and went over to see her as often as three times a day.

He immediately instigated an elaborate scheme to strip Ellie of all the family property—which now amounted to an immense fortune—and was in the process of trying to declare Ellie incompetent so that he could sell the Tiburon house to his mistress
when he himself died suddenly—two months before Ellie—from a stroke. Ellie inherited his entire estate.

Graham’s last mistress, Karen Garfield, an exquisite young fashion model from New York, poured out her woes to one of our investigators over cocktails. She had been left with half a million and that was just fine, but she and Graham, had planned a whole life together—“the Virgin Islands, the Riviera, the works.”

Karen herself died of a series of massive heart attacks, the first of which occurred an hour after Karen visited Graham’s house in Tiburon to try to “explain things” to his daughter Rowan. “That bitch! She wouldn’t even let me have his things! All I wanted were a few keepsakes. She said, ‘Get out of my mother’s house.’ ”

Karen lived for two weeks after the visit, long enough to say many unkind things about Rowan, but apparently Karen never connected her sudden and inexplicable cardiac deterioration to her visit. Why should she?

We did make this connection as the following summary will show.

When Ellie died, Rowan told Ellie’s closest friends that she had lost her best and only friend in this world. This was probably true. Ellie Mayfair was all her life a very sweet and somewhat fragile human being, beloved by her daughter and her numerous friends. According to these friends, she always evinced something of a southern belle charm, though she was an athletic, modern California woman in every way, easily passing for twenty years younger than she was, which was not uncommon with her contemporaries. Indeed, her youthful looks may have constituted her only obsession, other than the welfare of her daughter, Rowan.

She had cosmetic surgery twice in her fifties (facial tightening), frequented expensive beauty salons, and dyed her hair continuously. In pictures with her husband, taken a year before her death, she appears to be the younger person. Devoted to Graham and completely dependent upon him, she ignored his affairs, and with reason. As she told one friend, “He’s always home at six o’clock for dinner. And he’s always there when I turn out the lights.”

Indeed, the source of Graham’s charm for Ellie and for others, other than his looks, was apparently his great enthusiasm for living, and the easy affection he lavished on those around him, including his wife.

One of his lifelong friends, an older lawyer, explained it this way to our investigator. “He got away with those affairs because
he was never inattentive to Ellie. Some of the other guys around here should take a lesson from that. What women hate is when you turn cold to them. If you treat them like queens, they’ll let you have a concubine or two outside the palace.”

At this point, we simply do not know how important it is to gather more information about Graham Franklin and Ellie Mayfair. What seems relevant here is that they were normal upper-middle-class Californians, and extremely happy in spite of Graham’s deceptions, until the very last year of their lives. They went to the San Francisco Opera on Tuesday nights, the symphony on Saturday, the ballet now and then. They owned a dazzling succession of Bentleys, Rolls-Royces, Jaguars, and other fine cars. They spent as much as ten thousand dollars a month on clothes. On the open decks of their beautiful Tiburon home, they entertained friends lavishly and fashionably. They flew to Europe or Asia for brief, luxurious vacations. And they were extremely proud of “our daughter, the doctor,” as they called Rowan, lightheartedly, to their many friends.

Though Ellie was supposed to be telepathic, it was a parlor-game type of thing. She knew who it was when the phone rang. She could tell you what playing card you were holding in your hand. Otherwise there was nothing unusual about this woman, except perhaps that she was very pretty, resembling many other descendants of Julien Mayfair, and had her great-grandfather’s ingratiating manner and seductive smile.

The last time I myself saw Ellie was at the funeral of Nancy Mayfair in New Orleans in January of 1988; she was at that time sixty-three or four, a beautiful woman, about five feet six inches in height, with darkly tanned skin and jet black hair. Her blue eyes were concealed behind white-rimmed sunglasses; her fashionable cotton dress flattered her slender figure, and indeed, she had something of the glamour of a film actress, to wit a California patina. Within half a year, she was dead.

When Ellie died, Rowan inherited everything, including Ellie’s family trust fund, and an additional trust fund which had been set up—Rowan knew nothing about it—when Rowan was born.

As Rowan was then, and is now, an extremely hardworking physician, her inheritance has made almost no appreciable difference in her day-to-day life. But more on that in the proper time.

Nonobtrusive surveillance of Rowan indicated that this child was extremely precocious from the beginning, and may have had a variety of psychic powers of which her adoptive parents appeared unaware. There is also some evidence that Ellie Mayfair refused to acknowledge anything “strange” about her daughter. Whatever the case, Rowan seems to have been “the pride and joy” of both Ellie and Graham.

As already indicated, the bond between mother and child was extremely close until the time of Ellie’s death. However, Rowan never shared her mother’s love of parties, lunches, shopping sprees, and other such pursuits, and was never, even in later adolescence or young adulthood, drawn into Ellie’s wide circle of female friends.

Rowan did share her parents’ passion for boating. She accompanied the family on boat trips from her earliest years, learning to manage Graham’s small sailboat,
The Wind Singer
, on her own when she was only fourteen. When Graham bought an ocean-going cruiser named the
Great Angela
, the whole family took long trips together several times a year.

By the time Rowan was sixteen, Graham had bought her her own seaworthy twin-engine full displacement hull yacht, which Rowan named the
Sweet Christine. The Great Angela
was at that time retired, and the whole family used the
Sweet Christine
, but Rowan was the undisputed skipper. And over everyone’s advice and objections, Rowan frequently took the enormous boat out of the harbor by herself.

For years it was Rowan’s habit to come directly home from school and to go out of San Francisco Bay into the ocean for at least two hours. Only occasionally did she invite a close friend to go along.

“We never see her till eight o’clock,” Ellie would say. “And I worry! Oh, how I worry. But to take that boat away from Rowan would be to kill her. I just don’t know what to do.”

Though an expert swimmer, Rowan is not a daredevil sailor, so to speak. The
Sweet Christine
is a heavy, slow, forty-foot Dutch-built cruiser, designed for stability in rough seas, but not for speed.

What seems to delight Rowan is being alone in it, out of sight of land, in all kinds of weather. Like many people who respond to the northern California climate, she seems to enjoy fog, wind, and cold.

All who have observed Rowan seem to agree that she is a
loner, and an extremely quiet person who would rather work than play. In school she was a compulsive student, and in college a compulsive researcher. Though her wardrobe was the envy of her classmates, it was, she always said, Ellie’s doing. She herself had almost no interest in clothes. Her characteristic off-duty attire has been for years rather nautical—jeans, yachting shoes, oversized sweaters and watch caps, and a sailor’s peacoat of navy blue wool.

In the world of medicine, particularly that of neurosurgery, Rowan’s compulsive habits are less remarkable, given the nature of the profession. Yet even in this field, Rowan has been seen as “obsessive.” In fact, Rowan seems born to have been a doctor, though her choice of surgery over research surprised many people who knew her. “When she was in the lab,” said one of her colleagues, “her mother had to call her and remind her to take time out to sleep or eat.”

One of Rowan’s early elementary-school teachers noted in the record, when Rowan was eight, that “this child thinks she is an adult. She identifies with adults. She becomes impatient with other children. But she is too well behaved to show it. She seems terribly, terribly alone.”

Rowan’s psychic powers began to surface in school from the time she was six years old. Indeed, they may have surfaced long before that, but we have not been able to find any evidence before that time. Teachers queried informally (or deviously) about Rowan tell truly amazing stories about the child’s ability to read minds.

However, nothing we have discovered indicates that Rowan was ever considered an outcast or a failure or maladjusted. She was throughout her school years an overachiever and an unqualified success. Her school pictures reveal her to have been an extremely pretty child, always, with tanned skin and sun-bleached blond hair. She appears secretive in these pictures, as if she does not quite like the intrusion of the camera, but never affected, or ill at ease.

Rowan’s telepathic abilities became known to teachers rather than to other students, and they follow a remarkable pattern:

“My mother had died,” said a first-grade teacher. “I couldn’t go back to Vermont for the funeral, and I felt terrible. Nobody knew about this, you understand. But Rowan came up to me at recess. She sat beside me and she took my hand. I almost burst into tears at this tenderness. ‘I’m sorry about your mother,’ she
said. She sat there with me in silence. Later when I asked her how she knew, she said, ‘It just popped into my head.’ I think that child knew all kinds of things that way. She knew when the other kids were envious of her. How lonely she always was!”

Another time, when a little girl was absent from school for three days without explanation and school authorities could not reach her, Rowan quietly told the principal there was no reason to be alarmed. The girl’s grandmother had died, said Rowan, and the family had gone off to the funeral in another state, completely forgetting to call the school. This turned out to be true. Again Rowan could not explain how she had known except to say “It just came into my head.”

We have some two dozen stories similar to this one, and what characterizes almost all of them is that they involve not only telepathy, but empathy and sympathy on the part of Rowan—
a clear desire to comfort or minister to a suffering or confused person.
That person was invariably an adult. The telepathic power is never connected with tricks, frightening people, or quarrels of any kind.

In 1966, when Rowan was eight, she used this telepathic ability of hers for the last time
as far as we know.
During her fourth-grade term at a private school in Pacific Heights, she told the principal that another little girl was very sick and ought to see a doctor, but Rowan didn’t know how to tell anyone. The little girl was going to die.

The principal was horrified. She called Rowan’s mother and insisted that Rowan be taken to a psychiatrist. Only a deeply disturbed little girl would say “something like that.” Ellie promised to talk with Rowan. Rowan said nothing further.

However, the little girl in question was diagnosed within a week as having a rare form of bone cancer. She died before the end of the term.

The principal has told the story over dinner countless times. She deeply regretted her censure of Rowan. She wished in particular that she had not called Mrs. Mayfair, because Mrs. Mayfair became so terribly upset.

It may have been concern on Ellie’s part which put an end to this sort of incident in Rowan’s life. Ellie’s friends all knew about it. “Ellie was damned near hysterical. She wanted Rowan to be normal. She said she didn’t want a daughter with strange gifts.”

Graham thought the whole thing was a coincidence, according to the principal. He bawled out the woman for calling and telling Ellie when the poor little girl died.

Coincidence or not, this entire affair seems to have put an end
to Rowan’s demonstrations of her power. It is safe to assume that she shrewdly decided to “go underground” as a mind reader. Or even that she deliberately suppressed her power to the point where it became nonexistent or extremely weak. Try as we might, we find nothing about her telepathic abilities from then on. People’s memories of her all have to do with her quiet brilliance, her indefatigable energy, and her love of science and medicine.