City of Masks cb-1 Page 13

  Its stealthiness was frightening: something wanting to stay hidden.

  She tried to calm her heart and struggled to keep staring fixedly into the tunnel, using only her peripheral vision to monitor the doorway. There was no movement there for a long time, but when it came again it seemed closer. Maybe in the central room now.

  Part of her was screaming, telling her to run. The silver face of her reflection looked like a theatrical mask of alarm. The thing coming shook the psychic space like a storm front advancing fast. As the feeling swelled, Cree could distinguish some of its separate elements. Overwhelmingly, it was a sadistic, predatory excitement — wild, careless, charged with violent lust. Within that, anger and envy. But more than anything else, that exuberant, savage, animal lust.

  She could hardly hold herself still. In the reflected doorway, the shape hunched and darted again, and Cree realized that the slightly musty smell of the room had thickened and soured into the rank scent of sweat, skin musk.

  Her fear spiked intolerably, and before she was aware of doing it she had leapt forward and slammed the armoire's mirror door shut. Her flashlight had appeared in her hand and its beam flashed blindingly past her own eyes.

  The tunnel vanished. All that remained in the mirror was a fractured Cree Black, chest heaving as she stood alone in a big, dim room. High ceilings, walls cut with streetlight glow and tree shadows, crazy angles of reflected flashlight beams. She spun around and held the light on the doorway.

  Nothing.

  It took her a moment to catch her breath. She berated herself for her cowardice, for closing the aperture between herself and whatever it was that moved in these rooms. But the feeling of the thing! That ugly sexuality. That desperation. That hungry carnality, swollen, tumescent.

  She kept the flashlight on as she stepped shakily into the central room, scanning, probing doorways and shadows. A volatile darkness. She went quickly down the stairs, suddenly hating the house and wanting nothing more than to be out of it. At the bottom of the stairway, she leapt toward the entrance as if the animal thing were pursuing her. She opened the door, slammed it behind her, and didn't stop until she was out on the front walk among the gentle lights and noises of the Garden District. She turned to look back at the house, which seemed to hunker down in its shadows, baleful and loathsome.

  No wonder the woman's a wreck, she thought. And again the other side of that hit her: Lila had to have enormous, hidden strength to have done as well as she had in the face of that. Whatever that was.

  Cree slipped through the iron gate and shut it behind her, hoping she herself could find comparable strength.

  13

  "Mmmph. Cree. Hi. What's, uh, what's going on?" Edgar's voice was deep and sleep muffled. It would be three A.M. in Massachusetts; even ghost hunters had to sleep sometime. Cree pictured him sitting up in some rumpled hotel bed just like the one she was sitting in, his long face bleary and stubbled as he squinted at the digits of some clock radio just like the one she was squinting at. The image made her feel better.

  "I had a real good one. I mean a bad one."

  "One of those, huh." He sounded muzzy but very much there. It wasn't the first time he'd gotten this kind of call.

  "Yeah. Hey, I didn't mean to wake you up — "

  "No — no, 's fine. Just a little out of it. You know." She heard him work his lips, trying to get them functioning. "You want to talk about it?"

  Cree had thought she did, but now realized she didn't. "No. What I really want is for you to… tell me about something."

  "Like, uh — "

  "Something regular that happened. Something, you know… normal. Nice."

  "Nice. Nice. Urn." Ed took a moment to rally to the challenge.

  "Well, today I went into Boston. Never really been to Beantown, thought I'd check things out? Took the T to get around. So I'm there on the platform, waiting for my train, and I look up and there's a sign that says, 'Take the Blue Line to Wonderland.' " He chuckled. "It sounds so… psychedelic, or something. Shades of Alice, I don't know."

  Cree chuckled with him. It was very Ed to find amusement in that."What the hell is Wonderland?" he asked.

  "Dog-racing track. Up in Revere."

  "Oh, and then there was this guitarist, playing on the street with his guitar case open, people throwing money in? Mother and her two kids stop to listen, right, and the kids are eating ice-cream cones? And one of the kids drops his cone into the case, blop, right on its head! The mother is mortified. So when she picks it up, it's got coins stuck in the ice cream, I mean it's covered, like those, you know, what do you call them — "

  "Jimmies."

  "Yeah, jimmies. What a mess. I mean, what could anybody do? Pick out quarters and dimes one by one, get your hands all sticky? Throw it away? The guy was trying to be nice about it. Fortunately the mother left him a fiver, so maybe it wasn't such a bad deal after all. Funny." He was silent for a moment. "Sorry, Cree. Guess I'm kind of sleepy. Can't think of anything really great."

  "No, that's good," Cree assured him. "Thanks."

  They were both quiet for a long time. She realized she'd been childish, expecting Edgar to solve her late-night insecurities by long distance.

  "Maybe you ought to just tell me about it," he suggested. He sounded more like his regular self.

  "The witness is really on the edge. She's been seeing animals and half-animal, half-human figures. Highly interactive. They chase her and call her name — "

  "Oh, man. So you're thinking it's psychological?"

  "Well, I was. But I went to the house tonight. I got a really light touch in the library, but then I went upstairs and something came at me, scared the living bejeezus out of me. I'm having a hard time getting rid of it. I didn't really get a good visual, but I got enough to know she's not just hallucinating. I suspect the animals are by-products of the stress of being around the real entity. Whatever it is."

  "But it's a bad one."

  "A nasty one," Cree confirmed. "And I've got this unusual degree of identification, I mean, I'm picking up her gestures, I'm — "

  "You don't have to do it, Cree. There are lots of screwed up things in the world, it's not your job to take them all on. If this one really gets to you, you should just — "

  "No. I can't just leave this woman high and dry. She needs some support on this. She's a person at a critical passage." Cree sensed dubiousness on the other end of the line. "Plus, this is totally selfish, but she and I have a lot in common, and I keep thinking if I help her, maybe it's an opportunity to… sort through some of my own stuff."

  Edgar sighed. Cree knew what he was thinking: Cree's losing her borders, the empath doing her job too well. And he was right.

  "And there are some unusual elements here, I want to find out what we're dealing with. And I don't like feeling afraid — that what's out there is so awful we can't even look at it." She knew Edgar agreed with that, philosophically anyway, but he still didn't say anything. So she switched gears, tried to put on a chipper tone. "Anyway. So how're things at your end?"

  "Today's… Sunday? I could be in New Orleans by Tuesday."

  "No. I mean, no hurry. I'm okay, Ed, really. There's a lot more I should do here before we bring in all the artillery. I was just checking in. I shouldn't have called so late."

  "Uh-huh." Skeptical.

  "I feel much better, now. Thanks, Ed. You're the greatest." She was dodging again, they both knew it, but every word was true. Who else could she call with the heebie-jeebies at three A.M.? "I'm sorry I woke you up. You always make me feel better. I don't know what I'd do without you."

  "You'd do fine, Cree. The real question is, what're you going to do with me." Just a little sad, a little miffed, mostly resigned.

  And there was no answer to that. Cree thanked him again and told him good night, hoping he'd heard her, hoping it was enough.

  Lakeside Manor, where Charmian Beauforte lived, wasn't actually on the lake but several blocks below it, not that far from the Warrens' h
ouse and just east of the huge park that stretched down from Ponchartrain toward the center of New Orleans. It was a gated retirement community of splendidly maintained lawns, gardens, and waterways centered around a cluster of private residences and larger common buildings. Cree stopped her car at the gatehouse, waited as the guard verified her appointment, then drove through when he raised the barrier.

  Charmian Beauforte's house was one of a dozen similar houses built along a short cul-de-sac. All were one-story modern structures of brick with white trim in what Cree now knew enough to think of as a neoCreole cottage style. She checked her tape recorder and suppressed a twinge of trepidation: Over the telephone, Mrs. Beauforte came across as an aristocratic old bird, rather formidable. Whatever her stroke had done to her ten years ago, it hadn't subdued her pride or dulled her razor tongue.

  It was almost eleven o'clock. Cree had awakened at eight to the muffled sound of jackhammers from a road repair crew starting up outside. She'd lurched out of bed and made coffee from the hotel brewing setup, sipping it as she looked down on Canal Street, seven floors below. A pair of cops did white-gloved mime to direct traffic around the road work, but the boulevard was choked with cars and pedestrians. Delivery trucks pulled onto the curb to disgorge supplies for the restaurants.

  Daylight and the workaday bustle below brought with it a welcome relief from the troubling images of the night before. She still felt the murky hangover of nightmare, but she also felt oddly refreshed, confident. And it wasn't just the caffeine. Part of it was talking to Edgar: He really did give her strength and reassurance, more than he knew — his steadiness, the reliability of his concern and affection. And some of it was the residual high that close encounters brought, even bad ones: Mystery and danger had energizing powers, and she was a little addicted to them.

  Whatever, she felt okay, and there was a lot to be done. After stoking down a diner breakfast of eggs and grits with a side of biscuits and gravy, she'd returned to the hotel and made phone calls. She'd scheduled the impending meeting with Mrs. Beauforte, then made appointments for later in the day with Dr. Fitzpatrick and with Detective Bobby Guidry, the lead investigator for the Temp Chase shooting. She'd tried to reach Lila Warren, too, but no one had picked up and she'd had to leave a message. That made her a little nervous, and she resolved to try again from Charmian's house.

  A housemaid let her in and wordlessly led her to the kitchen at the back of the house. Cree found Mrs. Beauforte standing at the central island, arranging flowers in a crystal vase. Next to her on the counter was a bundle of untrimmed blooms, mostly roses. The kitchen was bright and immaculate, with a wall of windows opening to a backyard garden that was the obvious source of the flowers.

  "Miz Black to see you, ma'am," the maid announced. She disappeared into another room.

  "Ms. Black. How nice to meet you," Mrs. Beauforte said. She barely glanced at Cree before she selected a large rose, inspected it critically, and began trimming bits from it. "My son tells me you're already stirring up trouble." Each syllable was stretched and softened, the accent of Southern aristocracy, and spoken in a cool, dry voice; either her sense of humor was equally cool and dry, or she wasn't trying to be amusing.

  "Doing my best to, anyway," Cree said. "That's a lovely rose!"

  "You aren't what I expected. I had the impression you'd be pale and delicate — one of those ethereal wisps with the devastated eyes, that otherworldly yearning. I can see why Ro-Ro's attracted to you."

  The old woman liked to keep people off balance, Cree decided, throwing two or three provocations at you at once. "Actually, I do have the otherworldly yearning pretty well covered. But I got my father's big bones, and you're right, they disguise it pretty well."

  "Mmm." Mrs. Beauforte pruned the rose stem at a sharp angle and inserted it quickly among the others in the vase. She picked up another and began inspecting it closely. Her apparent disinterest in her guest was deliberate, Cree decided, intended to show this out-of-town charlatan ghost buster her place in the order of things: a mere hireling, a member of the laboring classes. She felt a flash of pity for the housemaid.

  Mrs. Beauforte's straight back and square shoulders gave the impression of a bigger woman, but she was actually almost a head shorter than Cree. Lila had gotten her mother's nose and chin, no mistake, but while Lila had plumped and softened with age, Charmian had gone dry and sinewy. With her crisp white blouse and pants covered by a spotless raw linen apron, her yellow Smith amp; Hawken gardening clogs, her helmet of sculpted gray hair, the acute focus she gave to her flowers, she projected competence and vitality. Again Cree wondered just how the stroke had impaired her.

  "As I explained over the phone," Cree began, "part of my process is to interview anyone close to a witness or who has spent time at the site of the haunting? You're both, so you were first on my list?" She caught the questioning tone of her statements and berated herself for feeling so intimidated. "I've got a lot of questions for you about your family, particularly Lila, and about Beauforte House — "

  "Have you been to Decatur Street or Bourbon Street yet?"

  "I spent some time in the Quarter my first night here. It's fascinating."

  "Then you know that ghosts and hauntings are a New Orleans tradition. Did you see the cemetery tours they advertise? The voodoo tours? For ten dollars, you can ride in a van with a bunch of other tourists to five haunted houses and listen to the driver recite terrible tales. You can visit Marie Laveau's tomb at midnight. You can even pay to witness a voodoo ceremony complete with snakes and chickens and half-naked trance dancers."

  "Yes, I saw a couple of ads — "

  "I could go to any of a dozen voodoo queens or Cajun witches and hire supernatural services. To cure or kill someone, cast a love charm, find lost objects, read the future." For the first time, Mrs. Beauforte lifted her eyes to Cree's, a shrewd gaze. "Or banish ghosts. For, oh, about fifty dollars."

  Cree wasn't sure where this was leading. Yet another declaration of skepticism from a Beauforte? Or another routine to make sure Cree knew her place?

  "Great," Cree said. "And I can go visit old people's homes and retirement villages in Seattle, keep them company for a few hours, entirely on a voluntary basis. Some are kind of cranky, but if you just humor them they usually come around."

  Mrs. Beauforte's right cheek tightened, but otherwise her face remained inscrutable. "Is this how you endear yourself to your clients?"

  "Not usually. But I bet this is how you've tyrannized your kids all their lives."

  The seamed cheek tugged again as Mrs. Beauforte put down her clipper and began pulling off her gloves. The twitch grew and Cree realized it was the beginning of a sardonic grin. Mrs. Beauforte took off her apron and brushed unnecessarily at the front of her blouse.

  "I think you'll do, Ms. Black," she said, drily appreciative. "You may call me Charmian. Would you care for some tea?"

  When Charmian moved away from the kitchen counter, carrying the vase of flowers, Cree immediately noticed her limp. Her left leg seemed reluctant, the toe slightly outturned, a well-concealed clumsiness at odds with her otherwise impeccable appearance and movements. So she had lost something from that stroke after all. She limped ahead of Cree through a large living room furnished in a tasteful mix of contemporary pieces and expensive replicas of antiques. There were a few photos on the mantel, showing Ron and Lila and some children Cree assumed to be Lila's, but otherwise the room struck her as somewhat impersonal, with few telling curios or mementos.

  Charmian led her to a sunroom in which a silver tea service had already been laid out, a wisp of steam escaping the teapot's spout, as if the resolution of their first clash had been anticipated. Charmian set the vase on a white wrought-iron table, primped the blooms, sat, and beckoned Cree to the chair opposite her.

  The housemaid remained invisible. They let the tea steep for a few minutes as Cree presented an overview of her theory of ghosts and her investigative methods. She concluded by explaining why it was crucial fo
r her to understand Lila's state of mind.

  Cree's return to the subject of Lila seemed to give Charmian an opening she'd wanted. "Do you have children, Ms. Black?"

  Charmian's non sequiturs were calculated, Cree decided. They surprised and seemed to deflect you, but ultimately wove back in somehow, and it was best just to roll with them. "No. I often wish I did, but — "

  "Then it may be hard for you to understand what I'm about to say.''With a steady, blue-veined hand, Charmian began pouring tea into two cups. "Whether they admit it or not, all parents harbor a secret hope that their children will be exceptional, will embody all their lineages' virtues and none of their failings. Now, of course I love my children. But I would be lying if I didn't admit they've disappointed me in many ways. Lila has always been prone to emotional frailty. She never had the… starch… I'd hoped to see in a child of mine. I've always believed you need a stiff upper lip and a firm chin to get by in this world, but she gives up too easily. She doesn't demand and therefore doesn't command respect. Her marriage to Jack Warren was just another example of her failure to respect herself or her family name. No doubt you're right, I tyrannized my children, I pushed them. But it was an attempt to get them to do their best. The world does not forgive those who squander what they've been given."

  Cree thought of Deirdre's twins and how secure in themselves the girls were, and had to stifle the urge to argue parenting philosophy with Charmian Beauforte. Instead, she accepted the cup of tea Charmian handed her and took a sip of the richly aromatic brew.

  "Why do you think that is? You're a powerful presence, there's a proud family history on both sides, Lila and Ronald were raised with every advantage. Why should Lila have been so… timid?"