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All that had been very clear and understandable when she dreamed it but even by the next day the "mad scheme" was largely lost. OK. The Victrola. Oncle Julien wants me to have it. Witchcraft, my favorite thing.

And look what had happened to the damned Victrola, so far.

He'd gone to all that trouble in 1914 to get it out of the house--assuming that sleeping with thirteen-year-old Ancient Evelyn had been trouble--and when Ancient Evelyn tried to pass on that Victrola to Mona, Gifford and Alicia had had a terrible quarrel. Oh, that was the worst of days.

Mona had never seen such a fight as happened then between Alicia and Gifford. "You're not giving her that Victrola," Gifford had screamed. She'd run at Alicia and slapped her over and over, and tried to push her out of the bedroom where she had taken the Victrola.

"You can't do this, she's my daughter, and Ancient Evelyn said it is to be hers!" Alicia had screamed.

They had fought all the time like that as girls, think nothing of it, Ancient Evelyn had said. She had remained in the parlor. "Gifford will not destroy the Victrola. The time will come when you may have the Victrola. No Mayfair would destroy Oncle Julien's Victrola. As for the pearls, Gifford can keep them for now."

Mona didn't care about the pearls.

That had pretty much been Ancient Evelyn's quota of speech for the next three or four weeks.

Gifford had been sick after that, sick for months. Strife exhausted Gifford, which was only logical. Uncle Ryan had had to take her to Destin, Florida, to rest at the beach house. Same thing had happened after Deirdre's funeral; Aunt Gifford had been so sick that Ryan had taken her up to Destin. Aunt Gifford always fled to Destin, to the white beach and the clean water of the Gulf, to the peace and quiet of a little modern house with no cobwebs and no stories.

But the truly awful part for Mona was that Aunt Gifford had never given her the Victrola! When Mona had finally cornered her and demanded to know where it was, Aunt Gifford had said, "I took it up to First Street. I took the pearls there too. I put them back in a safe place. There's where all Oncle Julien's things belong, in that house, along with his memory." And Alicia had screamed and they'd started fighting again.

In one of the dreams, Oncle Julien had said, dancing to the record on the Victrola: "The waltz is from La Traviata, my child, good music for a courtesan." Julien danced, and the pinched little soprano voice sang on and on.

She had heard the melody so distinctly. Rare to be able to hum a song that you hear in a dream. Lovely scratchy sound to the Victrola. Ancient Evelyn had later recognized the song Mona was humming. It was from Verdi--Violetta's waltz.

"That was Julien's record," she'd said.

"Yes, but how am I going to get the "Victrola?" Mona had asked in the dream.

"Can't anyone in this family figure out anything for herself!" Oncle Julien had almost wept. "I'm so tired. Don't you see? I'm getting weaker and weaker. Cherie, please wear a violet ribbon, I don't care for pink ribbons, though it is very shocking with red hair. Wear violet for your Oncle Julien. I am so weary--"

"Why?" she'd asked. But he had already disappeared.

That had been last spring, that dream. She had bought some violet ribbon, but Alicia swore it was bad luck and took it all away. Mona's bow tonight was pink, like her cotton and lace dress.

Seems poor Cousin Deirdre had died last May right after Mona had had that dream, and First Street had come into the hands of Rowan and Michael, and the great restoration had begun. Every time she'd passed she'd seen Michael up there on the roof, or just climbing a ladder, or climbing over a high iron railing, or walking right on the parapet with his hammer in hand.

"Thor!" she'd called out to him once. He hadn't heard her, but he'd waved and smiled. Yes, to die for, all right.

She wasn't so sure about the times of all the dreams. When they'd started, she hadn't known there would be so many of them. Her dreams floated in space. She hadn't been smart enough in the beginning to date them, and to make a chronology of Mayfair events. She had that now in WSMAYFAIRCHRONO. Every month she learned more tricks in her computer system, more ways of keeping track of all her thoughts and feelings, and plans.

She opened the bathroom door and stepped into the kitchen. Beyond the glass doors the swimming pool positively glittered for an instant as if a vagrant wind had touched its surface. As if it were alive. As she stepped forward, a tiny red light flashed on the motion detector, but she could see immediately by the control panel on the kitchen counter that the alarm wasn't set. That was why it hadn't gone off when she opened the window. What luck! She'd forgotten about that damned alarm, and it had been the alarm that had saved Michael's life. He'd have drowned if the firemen had not come and found him--men from his father's own firehouse, though Michael's father had died a long long time ago.

Michael. Yes, it was fatal attraction from the moment she'd first met him. And the sheer size of the man had a lot to do with it--things like the perfect width of his neck. Mona had a keen appreciation of men's necks. She could watch a whole movie just to get a load of Tom Berenger's neck.

Then there was that constant good humor. When had she ever not gotten a smile from Uncle Michael, and often she'd gotten winks. She loved those immense and amazingly innocent blue eyes. Downright flashy, Bea had said once, but she'd meant it as a compliment. "The man's just sort of too vivid!" Even Gifford had understood that.

Usually when a man was that well-built, he was an idiot. Intelligent Mayfair men were always perfectly proportioned. If Brooks Brothers or Burberrys' couldn't fit you, you were illegitimate. They'd put poison in your tea. And they behaved like windup toys once they came home from Harvard, always combed and tanned, and shaking people's hands.

Even Cousin Pierce, Ryan's pride and joy, was turning out that way--a shining replica of his father, down to the Princeton cut of the blond hair, and loving Cousin Clancy was perfect for Pierce. She was a small clone of Aunt Gifford--only without the pain. They looked like they were made of vinyl, Pierce and Ryan, and Clancy. Corporation lawyers; their whole goal in life was to see how much they could leave undisturbed.

Mayfair and Mayfair was a law firm full of vinyl people.

"Never mind," her mother had said once to her criticism. "They take care of all the money so that you and I don't have to worry about a thing."

"I wonder if that's such a good idea," Mona had said, watching her mother miss her mouth with the cigarette, and then grope for the glass of wine on the table. Mona had pushed it towards her, disliking herself for doing it, disliking that she did it because it was torture to watch her mother not be able to find it on her own.

But Michael Curry was a differen

t sort from the Mayfair men altogether--husky and relaxed, more beautifully hirsute, altogether lacking in the perpetual preppie gleam perfected by men like Ryan, yet very adorable in a beastly way when he wore his dark-rimmed glasses and read Dickens the way he'd been doing it this very afternoon when she'd gone up to his room. He hadn't cared a thing about Mardi Gras. He hadn't wanted to come down. He was still reeling from Rowan's defection. Time just didn't mean anything to him, because if he had started to think about it, he would have had to think on how long Rowan had been gone.

"What are you reading?" she'd asked.

"Oh, Great Expectations," he'd said. "I read it over and over. I'm reading the part about Joe's wife, Mrs. Joe. The way she kept making the T on the chalkboard. Ever read it? I like to read things I've read before. It's like listening over and over to your favorite song."

A brilliant Neanderthal slumbered in his body waiting to drag you into the cave by your hair. Yes, a Neanderthal with the brain of a Cro-Magnon, who could be all smiles and a gentleman and as well-bred as anybody in this family could possibly want. He had a great vocabulary, when he chose to use it. Mona admired his vocabulary. Mona's vocabulary was ranked equal to that of a senior in college. In fact, someone at school had once said, she had the biggest words coming out of the littlest body in the world.

Michael could sound like a New Orleans policeman one moment and a headmaster at another. "Unbeatable combination of elements," Mona had written in her computer diary. Then remembered Oncle Julien's admonition. "The man is simply too good."

"Am I evil?" she whispered aloud in the dark. "Doesn't compute." She really hadn't the slightest doubt that she wasn't evil. Such thoughts were old-fashioned to her, and typical of Oncle Julien, especially the way he was in her dreams. She hadn't known the words for it when she was little, but she knew them now: "Self-deprecating, self-mocking." That is what she'd written into the computer in the subdirectory WSJULIENCHARACTER in the file DREAM.

She walked across the kitchen and slowly through the narrow butler's pantry, a lovely white light falling on the floorboards from the porch outside. Such a grand dining room. Michael thought the hardwood floor had been laid in the thirties, but Julien had told Mona it was 1890s, a flooring they called wooden carpet, and it had come in a roll. What was Mona supposed to do with all the things Julien had told her in these dreams?