City of Masks cb-1 Read online

  "Different every time. It takes a while for me to get there. Usually, it starts with moods or vague feelings. I'm highly synesthetic, so the… impressions or sensations come across to me as sounds of a particular color, or tactile feelings of a specific odor, or, I don't know, maybe vertigo that's like citrus mixed with sadness — not easy to translate. Further along, I experience their specific thoughts, sensations, and emotions. In some cases, it can be just like a conversation."

  That was it for Fitzpatrick. Abruptly he turned aside and threw himself down on a bench that faced the rippling expanse of water. At a picnic table forty feet behind him, a family was busy with a big pile of steamed orange crawfish, breaking the little lobsters apart and bickering noisily. Sprawling at one end of the bench, Fitzpatrick gestured for Cree to sit also, and then laughed at himself. "Okay. I'm out of my depth. I've run out of academic terminology. I have to go back to when I was a kid. Question: If ghosts are just these… pieces of a personality, sort of floating loose, how come they wear clothes? How come they even look like human beings?"

  Cree chuckled with him. A childish question, and a good one. "They don't always. But if they do, it goes back to their being mental constructs. And for better or worse, our sense of ourselves is that we have human forms and wear clothes. How do you picture your mother — the way she looked when you were a kid?"

  Fitzpatrick thought about it. "Yeah. I sure don't picture her without clothes."

  "Now take it a step further — picture yourself back then."

  "Yup. I'm a little freckly guy wearing blue corduroy overalls. Damn!" Fitzpatrick thought for a moment. "Okay, another question. How come they hang out in particular places? Why do they haunt particular houses? Why don't they just, I don't know… drift off into space?"

  Again Cree laughed. Fitzpatrick had set this up nicely — being honest about his skepticism but truly trying to understand, easing it with good-natured self-deprecation. He'd set this up as a game of twenty questions, not an interrogation.

  "Well, maybe a lot of them do just dissipate. But most ghosts are highly localized, haunting a specific place such as a house, or even just a specific room of a house, and nowhere else. My colleague Edgar Mayfield has a theory that localized haunts happen because the ghost came into existence in a particular geomagnetic field, a particular locale. He thinks an intense human experience can make an electromagnetic imprint on a local field, like a recording that can be played back only in that environment."

  "You sound a little dubious about such a mechanistic explanation."

  He was perceptive. "Yeah. I tend to think of it in existential terms. As a mental construct, especially one reenacting a specific experience, a ghost thinks of itself not only in terms of a body image — male or female, with a specific face and wearing specific clothes, for example — but also in terms of a particular physical environment. Usually it's the perimortem environment — the place the person was in at the moment of death, which is a very poignant moment. But often crucial memories replay at that moment, too, so it can be confusing for me. If you had died suddenly back at the Wan-ens' house, and your consciousness perseverated in some way, you would most likely manifest elements of their living room along with your own body image. A ghost is just an echo of a whole being's experience at a crucial moment, complete with an environment, smells, sounds, objects, thoughts, feelings. I experience the ghost's world as much as the ghost itself. That's because 'world' is in fact equally an artifact of consciousness."

  Fitzpatrick was nodding thoughtfully, and Cree got the sense he had not only followed the line of reasoning but also appreciated its ramifications. "So this is really a very… metaphysical field. And that's the part that attracts you, isn't it? You're after the big truths."

  Cree smiled, pleased to be understood.

  "And you tune in, um, you sort of commune with the ghost. You share its experience?"

  "The ghost and the people who perceive it. They reveal a lot about each other. It's not so different from standard psychoanalysis. People who come to you for treatment have unresolved issues that trouble them, right? As a psychiatrist, you're a detective of the subconscious — you go and try to figure out what's unresolved or dissonant between their emotional world and their situational world, what's missing, what's longed for and refused, and so on. And when you identify that issue, you help patients resolve it in a way that lets them get on with their lives."

  He chewed on that for a moment. "If you're that sensitive, don't you also pick up on the experiences of living people? Doesn't a living person generate a powerful field?"

  "Oh, yeah." Ruefully.

  That troubled him, "So… what's the difference between a ghost and a living person?"

  Cree felt suddenly jarred. She glanced up to see that the landscape had dimmed around them, the sun now partly eclipsed by distant buildings and trees, the light beginning to drain out of the sky. She looked at her hands and found them knotted on her lap.

  "I'm still working on that one," she said.

  "Seems like a kind of lonesome perspective," he said quietly. Very serious now, he watched her closely. "And all this connects back to your own, personal paranormal experience, doesn't it?"

  Cree bit her lips and nodded.

  "I read in one of your bios on the Internet that your husband died some years ago… Did that influence your — "

  "It's not something I'd like to discuss right now." Strangely, though the pain was there, she didn't recoil that hard from his probing.

  He nodded, aware that he'd pushed it too far. But he didn't labor through apologies, just let it go easily, gracefully. And Cree had to admit he must be a damned good shrink. Maybe even a decent human being. Throughout their conversation, his presence had seemed to her as open and clear as the breezy day. Now, appropriately, it became somber, the same hue as the band of blue-black deepening at the horizon.

  They sat for a while longer, watching darkness infiltrate water and sky. Cree felt her melancholy grow, but it was a serene moment, and she let it take her. She thought it spoke well of Fitzpatrick that he could sit and share silence with a virtual stranger, as if they'd both found the same state of mind. The sense was reaffirmed when, without either saying anything, they got up simultaneously and started back the way they'd come. The park was quieter now, the crawfishers mostly gone from the bridge.

  "You've given me an enormous amount to think about," Fitzpatrick said. "But there's a lot we haven't discussed, and we should meet again to compare notes on Lila. And to figure out where this goes from here. For my part, I'd like to hear your tape of her narrative, and then tomorrow I've got to see if I can move up the schedule for her cranial diagnostics. How about you — what's your next step?"

  "I'm going to spend some time at the house. Probably go over there at around ten tonight."

  "Huh," he grunted. "Want company?"

  That surprised her, and it took her a moment to sort through it. "Dr. Fitzpatrick, I can't rationally defend everything I do or think or experience. My job requires just as much method, and just as much empathy, intuition, and guesswork as yours does. What I'm saying is, I don't mind company, but I have no need of distracting or dogmatically skeptical company."

  He mulled that over as they climbed the levee again and headed back along its top toward the Warrens' house. The breeze was chilly now, and lights had come on in most of the houses. Cree wondered what Lila was doing. Talking to Jack? Cooking dinner for the two of them? Washing the dishes? How would she be girding herself to face another night in a world turned so deceptive and uncertain?

  They shuffled down the landward slope onto the street, where Fitzpatrick stopped to find his key ring and beep his car doors open. Cree went to her car, found the audiotape of Lila's narrative, and came back to where he stood flipping his keys into the air and catching them.

  "How about relatively open-minded, very curious company?" he asked.

  Cree looked at him as he waited for her reply. In the mixed streetlight and suns
et glow, he looked amiable, gently irrepressible, and, yes, relatively open-minded. Face it, a cute guy.

  But she shook her head. "Some other time, I think. Tonight, I'd better go alone." She tossed the tape to him and he caught it easily. She started to walk away and then found herself turning back toward him. "Hey," she called, "thanks for showing me the lake and the levee. It really is lovely."

  He nodded, waved, and dipped into his car. When he drove past her, he gave her a little good-bye beep on his horn.

  11

  By the time Cree black and Paul Fitzpatrick left the house, Lila w7as too furious with Ro-Ro and Jack to stay in the same room with them, and too uncertain she could keep up the facade of defiance. So she went into the kitchen and made up a marinade, then boned and skinned the dinner chicken and put the meat in to soak. Something useful to do with her hands, that always helped. The men sat together drinking whiskey in the living room, leaving her some time to be alone, to try to think.

  Her thoughts scurried like panicked mice trying to find shelter. Wherever they went, it was scary and troubling. The only place of some reassurance was Cree Black.

  The ghost hunter was not at all what Lila had anticipated. Somehow, she'd expected a smaller woman who'd exude the self-dramatizing, snake-oil-scented aura of mystery Lila had seen all her life in the palm readers, Cajun fortune-tellers, and self-proclaimed voodoo queens at the street stalls around Jackson Square. Instead, Cree Black was disconcertingly straightforward. She was tallish, with brown hair worn in a simple, loose ponytail, and a face that would probably be very pretty if she accented her features with some makeup. She had green-hazel eyes and a level, direct gaze that was sympathetic without condescension, appraising without judgment. Her clothes were comfortable looking, tasteful but not flashy. She had a steady, quiet voice, and though there was definitely something vulnerable about her, she also came across as unflappable.

  More than anything else, it was clear she believed.

  Lila hadn't felt that supported or affirmed since… forever, practically. Not since Josephine. She had been unflappable, too. Where had Josephine gotten her strength? "Our Lord Jesus Christ," she would say. She had always been so devoted, so active in her church. Her long, serious face, the color of dark, aged mahogany, was full of piety and moral resolve and that fierce unswerving loyalty and love for Lila. So much more certain than Momma's love, so unqualified. She'd know how to fix this. She had always known.

  Lila hadn't seen Josephine Dupree for almost thirty years, and yet she could remember her face well enough to realize that the old nanny and Cree Black had something in common. You could see it in their eyes: They had both stared hard into the unfathomable. The infinite.

  It was Cree's belief that had given Lila the strength to be so assertive when Ro-Ro and Jack and Paul had called their little powwow. It also helped that there was something of a science or a vocabulary for this kind of thing, that there was known precedent and maybe a method for dealing with it. It wasn't just herself alone in an uncharted wilderness.

  Her thoughts were interrupted by a knock at the kitchen door frame, and there was Ro-Ro, who must have had his fill of whiskey.

  "Hey, little sister," he said, trying to look nonchalant.

  "Go home, Ronald. I'm busy, you're just about potted, and I don't need whatever it is you're selling."

  He grinned appreciatively. "My God, you do sound just like Momma when you talk like that!"

  Lila just reached up to the array of copper-bottomed cookware that hung above the island, selected one of the three-quart pots, and measured in water for rice.

  He watched her, frowning at being ignored. "Except I don't believe Momma's hands ever shook like that in her whole life."

  "I guess that makes two of us missed out on the good genes. Because you don't exactly measure up to Daddy, either."

  Ron twitched his head as if dodging something she'd thrown. He came into the room to stand beside her at the counter. "Listen, Lila, can't we just make some kind of a deal here?" His voice was quieter and though she could smell the whiskey he'd drunk, up close his eyes didn't look like a drunken man's eyes at all. "This thing of living at the old house — look what it's doing to you. Right? If I said, 'Hey, okay, let's sell the place and I'll take less than my half,' would that help? If you and Jack took sixty to my forty? Momma'd go for that, I'd bet."

  "I've got to get dinner up. You're in my way." She opened a cupboard door so that it swung into his face, and he had to step away to keep looking at her. Her hands clattered among the spice jars, not certain what they were looking for.

  "You trying to go back to the good ol' days? Is that it? Think you can re-create your youth?"

  She was bringing out jars without even knowing what they were, setting them on the counter. "Yes, I'm sure that's it. Something you wouldn't understand, Ro-Ro, given your arrested development. Having never relinquished your adolescence in the first place."

  He grabbed her hands and pulled them down to the counter, stilling the frantic reaching and sorting. "I was at home while you went off to school! Remember? I had to do a lot of growing up and coming to grips, real fast. Maybe I have the misfortune of remembering some things you don't."

  His pain was real, too, she saw, and suddenly she felt terrible about provoking him, wounding him. She'd rather see him smug and insulated than laid so bare and vulnerable. Fler heart panged with sympathy so powerful it was as if she'd been stabbed. In the intent look he was giving her, she could vaguely see her remembered big brother, once her best friend, protector, ally. She turned her hands in his and held on desperately, all her defiance going out of her.

  "I'm sorry!" she blurted. "I'm just all shook up today. I don't know what you're trying to say to me!"

  "You don't remember a goddamned thing, do you?" He was whispering, and though his words were harsh, his eyes were only intently curious and his hands held hers softly. "You really don't? I'm always trying to figure how much. How much you might be pretending."

  "Pretending? I'm not pretending anything!"

  Clearly, she'd misinterpreted him. He flicked his eyes at the ceiling, a token look to God Almighty for the strength to forbear, then looked around the room as if trying to find the words that would allow him to say what he meant.

  At last, his face very close to hers, he said, "Lila, put the shoe on the other foot. What if… let's say you knew there was something that happened — something I did, something that put me in danger. How would you handle that? What would you do?"

  "Well, I don't know… it depends, I — "

  "If you knew I could barely live with having done it," he whispered, "if you knew it was something I could never ever do again. Wouldn't you try to protect me? Wouldn't you try to keep it from catching up to me? Wouldn't you look out for your family? Even though you think I'm the lowest scum lowlife in the world, isn't blood finally thicker than water?"

  "Well, yes, of course, Ronald! Is that what this is about? You did something that — "

  He shook his head, frustrated. "I just want you to think about that. What I just said. What you just answered."

  Jack stumped past the kitchen doorway and went into the bathroom in the hall. In a moment they heard the clank of the toilet seat and the sound of his urinating. It sounded as if he'd left the door open, and Lila wondered if he was drunk or just didn't know company was still present.

  "Does it have to do with the house?" she whispered. "Is that it? Is that why you — ?"

  "You're just not getting this, are you? Just think about what I said, goddamn it!" Ronald took his hands away from hers. He glanced over at the doorway as Jack flushed and ran the tap, and when he looked back at her he was angry again. He shook his head in disgust, made a flinging-away gesture in her direction, and strode away.

  Lila heard Jack's voice in the hall as Ronald headed toward the front of the house: "Hey, Ro-Ro. Done with your sibling heart-to-heart? Sure you don't want to stay on for supper, now?"

  Ron's answer was to sl
am the front door.

  Lila squeezed a glob of cerulean blue into the dimple in the little plastic palette. This was probably hopeless. In the past, she'd found some comfort in painting, but that, like everything else, seemed to have been taken from her. She wished her hands would stop shaking.

  The sun was setting, sending long shafts of peach-colored light through the west-facing window of her second-floor studio. The room had been a walk-in closet before she'd set it up to get her painting stuff out of the rest of the house, and it was cramped, too small for the worktable, drafting stool, easel, bureau, and shelves she'd put in. The table held several jars of brushes, a cubbyhole for her paint tubes, and the easel she almost always used, a little table-mounted tripod just the right size for smaller canvases.

  Just outside the door, she heard a floorboard creak and knew it was Jackie, finding excuses to walk by, wanting to talk to her but not mustering the resolve to intrude into her sanctum. She'd fled to her closet as much to get away from his well-meaning, ineffectual concern as to paint. Especially after the drinks he'd downed with Ro-Ro, he'd be too maudlin and suffocating to bear. Though his compassion for her was genuine, it was so infused with male condescension for the weaker sex and so diluted by his own insecurity as to be worthless. It meant his solicitousness was really something of a shoehorn by which he hoped he could ease her back into her prior state of mind, her prior role, their prior life. And she didn't fit any more.

  She worked her way through the blues and into the greens, a circle of rainbow on the white palette, then began with the earth tones.

  As she'd feared, returning to the house and telling about the horrors had awakened it all again. The frightful images, the awful memories kept springing suddenly up into her thoughts. The world had become a frightening place, as pliant as a dream, where nothing held certain, where things twisted and distorted and became other things — bad things. But unlike a nightmare, you couldn't wake up from it.

  And though she'd clutched some slight reassurance from her meetings with Cree Black, it had all been swept away by her talk with Ron, which seemed to promise another horrible secret, another awful transformation. He'd been trying to say something and couldn't find the words, or she couldn't hear them right, and he'd given up on her. It sounded as if he'd been pleading with her, asking her to understand that he could be in danger. "Something I did…" The only thing she could think of was Temp Chase, the horrible murder. Was he suggesting that he killed Temp? k That somehow her moving back to the house could expose him? How could it possibly?