City of Masks cb-1 Read online

  "Did you know her when you were younger?"

  Fitzpatrick shook his head. "Oh God, no. Lila's six years older than me. I was barely getting into baseball cards by the time she was getting into boys. We never played with the Beauforte kids. After my father died, about fifteen years ago, our contact with the family kind of fell off."His eyes narrowed and he looked at Cree with a touch of accusation. "If you're wondering if they came to me because of the old family connection, I like to think I have enough of a reputation in this town, on my own — that they came to me because I am good. Even if I didn't win the Christ-forsaken Haverford."

  Cree grinned. "Never crossed my mind. I can tell you're good."

  "In any case, I'm not surprised she got the blues back then — that's a tough time for any kid. But in Lila's case it was a particularly lousy period. Apparently her uncle had died in a fishing accident the year before, and just before she went off to school her father died of a heart attack."Fitzpatrick stared out into the bustling restaurant, drumming his fingers."Beyond that, I'd have said I've got a patient in some kind of denial. A lot of repression, especially in her feelings toward her birth family, focused on ambivalences — pride and resentment, love and dislike. A yearning to live up to expectations and a desire to be free of them. Has a domineering mother who probably found her kids a bother and a disappointment and didn't mind letting them know it. Loved her father, his loss hurt her probably more than she admits, doesn't want to get too close to that. Poor self-esteem, probably based on a sense of failure. Guilt for those supposed failures." He thought about it some more. "But she's a patient who's hard to probe, reluctant to reveal too much. One minute she's defiant, her pride won't let her open up, the next her guilt and shame take over and she's too ashamed to talk about it. It's hard for her to let anyone near her."

  Fitzpatrick glanced at Cree and then looked away. "I know it's not much. Could fit a lot of women her age. Doesn't explain what she claims to be seeing. I've really only had, what, four sessions with her," he finished apologetically.

  Cree was thinking that the oscillation between poles of affect and response Fitzpatrick reported matched exactly Lila's behavior in the last two days. Going to the house alone was one such extreme act of defiance; the backside of it was hopeless collapse.

  "Paul, what's your take on the repressed memory theory?"

  He tossed an equivocal hand. "I've read both sides. I guess I'd say repression is possible, but the satanic ritual abuse business really discredited it. Recovered memories of buried trauma are too often programmed by the therapist. They say more about the therapist's unconscious fantasies and fears than they do about any experience of the patient's."

  He stopped as the waitress appeared again. She regarded them with expectant disapproval.

  "Sorry," Cree told her. "We'll need just another minute. We'll be good, I promise." She picked up her menu to prove it.

  When she'd gone, Cree put the menu down. "I agree completely. But, Paul, /experienced something there. I know you can't readily accept my

  … approach… but I believe Lila is reacting to the presence of an entity at that house. It is interacting with her. I don't know who or what it is, but there's something there. I agree with you about conducting diagnostics, but don't be too surprised when they come back clean."

  Fitzpatrick had turned sideways on his chair, staring with a frown at the lobster tank. One lobster was particularly active, climbing on the backs of its sluggish fellows, working its way clumsily up the glass and falling back.

  "Can I ask you a question?" he said finally.

  "Sure. I guess."

  "Where'd you grow up?"

  "Northeast and New England. Bom in Philly, lived in eastern New York State and New Hampshire as a kid. Why?"

  He tossed his head, puzzled. "Your accent. Listening to you tonight, if I didn't know better, I'd say you were a local. Lou'siana born and bred. I didn't notice it so much when we first met."

  Cree felt a tingle of alarm. Part of her wanted to tell him the truth: that she'd been appropriating it from the environment, and most of all from Lila, as her borders seemed to dissolve. But by his standards that was beyond far-fetched. And even if he believed it possible, he wouldn't approve of it as a therapeutic process. She wouldn't blame him.

  " I… I guess I just do that," she said lightly. "Pick up accents fast. I've been told that before. You know, we should probably look at these menus, or that waitress is going to throw us out of here." She tried to smile.

  "You're duckin' me, Dr. Black." He turned toward her, looking straight into her eyes.

  Cree returned the gaze, trying not to reflexively rebel against his probing. She liked his eyes: intelligent, honest, insightful. A sweet sensuality in their blue clarity and dark lashes.

  "You are something of a medium, after all, aren't you?" he went on quietly. "You pick up on things. That's one of your skills, right? Your talents? You… resonate. You've got your… antennae… up there in Jung's transpersonal space, you probe the collective unconscious. Only you're not a medium just for ghosts. You do it for the living, too."

  Cree took a breath, exhaled. "You're not too bad at it yourself."

  "Not in your league. Not even close."

  Their eyes remained locked. The hubbub of the restaurant seemed distant, and for a long moment they paused in a sudden intimacy. Cree felt a growing warmth inside her, a magnetism that was at once foreign and deeply familiar. It was alarming but exhilarating, and for once she didn't recoil from it.

  And then the waitress reappeared. This time she didn't say anything, just stood flat-footed as if indicating she intended to stay there until they damned well ordered.

  "I'll have the special," Cree blurted.

  "Same for me," Paul said.

  The waitress jotted something on her pad, snatched their menus, and spun away.

  "Whatever the hell the special is," Paul whispered.

  They attended to their drinks, as if the moment of intimacy, once shattered, had made them both shy. The warmth ebbed, leaving only the jitter ball in Cree's solar plexus.

  "Why'd you ask about repressed memory?" Fitzpatrick asked. "Is that what you think this is about?"

  Cree drained the last of her beer. "I believe Lila is the victim of some past trauma. If she was, the ghost could be someone who had a role in the original trauma. Or it could simply be that the ghost triggers her memory of it, and she conflates the two experiences. But there's some reason, psychological or situational, why Lila connects with it."

  "Trauma like rape?"

  "Rape, or the emotional equivalent of it, yeah. Some extreme violation of self, of boundaries, of self-determinacy."

  Fitzpatrick nodded in agreement. "Her defiance-submission thing — a common affective polarity for rape victims. Especially incest victims."

  They warmed to the topic, Cree speaking in her language, he in his, yet somehow able to ignore the divergences in their pursuit of a common goal. Fitzpatrick became more animated, and Cree knew it wasn't the wine. It was the joy of the hunt: Fitzpatrick was a fellow bloodhound.

  The special turned out to be a mixed seafood plate, everything dunked in a slightly peppery batter and fried: soft-shell crabs, shrimp, oysters, and catfish, stacked carefully in a pyramid a foot high. Cree began eating tentatively, feeling simultaneously starved and a little sick, but the flavors soon got to her and she indulged her appetite. She'd never had soft-shell crabs before and couldn't get over their sweet, nutlike flavor. Fitzpatrick warmed to his plate, too, eyeing Cree with amusement between bites.

  "I know," she said, "I eat like a stevedore."

  "Or a plumber."

  "Gotta eat." Cree held her fork in her fist and stuffed in an oversized mouthful.

  The warmth burgeoned again as they laughed, and they set to in earnest, eating in preoccupied silence for a time. When they talked again, it was about other things; Paul told her some scandalous tales of New Orleans city politics.

  As Cree's hunger waned, t
he exhaustion returned, ashes and shards. The active lobster continued to trundle around on the backs of its fellows and climb the glass, a tiny, muck green, coral-speckled dragon. Then a cook came from the back of the restaurant, hesitated briefly over the tank with a pair of tongs, and snatched up the most obvious and available choice. The lobster came up waving its legs and claws in slow-motion panic, a stranger to the air, and Cree looked away. Somehow it struck her as a dour omen.

  Fitzpatrick seemed to sense her mood. He set down his fork, wiped his mouth, and tipped his head to look around the restaurant. "I gotta get you home. Where's our waitress? She was here every two seconds when she wanted our order, but when you want the check she's nowhere in sight. You know?"

  They came out into a night chilled by a breeze that whispered in off the water. Over the top of the levee, a block away, the darkness of the lake's western horizon was stitched with a string of pinpoint lights that dwindled and disappeared into obscurity, the famous Ponchartrain causeway. Above, a few stars dotted the night sky.

  Fitzpatrick frowned over at her. "Are you limping?"

  Cree had forgotten it. "Had a bit of a tussle at Beauforte House. Sprained my ankle a little. It'll be fine."

  "Jesus." He shook his head. "The rigors of parapsychological fieldwork. We got to get this woman to bed."

  Cree didn't think he intended a double entendre. Paul unlocked his car and this time opened the door for her, solicitousness for an injured person.

  They drove east along the lake, then dipped south through darkening neighborhoods, saying nothing. The silence was somehow pregnant but not disagreeable, and Cree relaxed and watched the city slide by. They had been driving for about five minutes when suddenly she sat bolt upright.

  "What is that?" she asked pointing.

  "Hm?" Paul was startled out of his own ruminations. "Oh — the cemetery. I think this one's Greenwood. Or Saint Patrick's, they all kind of run together here." He looked over at Cree, saw the intensity of her interest, and pulled over to the curb. "Another beloved peculiarity of New Orleans. This isn't the best time of day to see 'em, though. Looks a little grisly now, but in daylight they're really very charming places."

  Cree had never seen anything like it. Stretching off into the darkness was what seemed to be a miniature city. The streetlights cast an angular chiaroscuro of silver-blue and black shadow over a tightly packed, haphazard jumble of masonry walls, pitched roofs, gables, and columns. The crypts appeared to be built of white marble, their roofs just over head height — tiny temples, or giant doghouses, many topped with stubby crosses. Hundreds and hundreds were ranged along little streets that diminished in the distance and darkness. The architecture was Old World — probably, as Paul said, charming — but the streetlights on pollution grime gave them a stark, metallic look.

  "It's a whole… city," Cree said.

  "Yeah, that's what people call them — 'cities of the dead.' I should have realized they'd be of particular interest to a ghost hunter."

  "No. That's folklore. Cemeteries are among the least haunted places nobody's ever lived or died in them. I've just… never seen anything like this." Cree couldn't stop looking at the scene. The cemetery hung in the dark, its miniaturized perspectives confounding the eye like a theater set or museum diorama.

  "You really didn't know about burial customs here?" Paul chuckled."Well. It seems weird to an outsider, I suppose, but it all makes perfect sense. When the first Europeans came here, they tried to bury their dead underground, but New Orleans is too low and too wet. Whenever the river would rise, or after a good rain, the water table would come up and the coffins would float out of the soil. Pretty gruesome. So they had to start burying aboveground. You just build a little house, put your departed in there, brick up the door, fait accompli. Perfectly sensible."

  He put the car into gear and drove on for half a block more, then turned onto another street to continue along the wall of the seemingly endless graveyard. "You see some of those bigger crypts?"

  Cree could see a few larger structures, rearing square topped above the gabled roofs. Their flat facades held many panels, three or four rows tall and six or eight wide. Each panel was about the size of an oven door, just big enough to receive a coffin.

  "They look like apartment buildings in a neighborhood of single residences."

  "Yeah, exactly! Those're society crypts — kind of burial cooperatives. There are society crypts for fire departments, nurses' organizations, fraternal clubs, you name it. Say you were of Italian descent, you might have yourself buried in the Sons of Italy crypt along with a few dozen of your compatriots. Saves space and burial costs. And the wall here? Can't see it from this side, but it's crypt, too, with hundreds of vaults in it. That's kind of the low-rent district."

  Paul turned again onto another, smaller street.

  "Where are we going?" Cree asked.

  "I'm hoping we'll get lucky," Paul said mysteriously. He was obviously enjoying playing the tour guide. He drove slowly, glancing often toward the cemetery wall. "This is Metairie Cemetery, now, biggest one in town."

  Cree looked out the window, spellbound. "You said a few dozen could be buried in the society crypts. But that would have to be a pretty huge one. I don't see any with that many vaults."

  "Aha! But the peculiarities of the tradition don't end with aboveground burial. See, space was at a premium in the old city — not much room in this swampy terrain for the living, let alone the dead. But they discovered that if you build an aboveground, closed masonry structure in this climate, it turns into an oven. In summer, lots of sun and hundred-degree heat every day, it gets very hot in those things. Reduction and decomposition are very fast, it's actually almost a form of cremation. So back when, they came up with the 'year-and-a-day' law, which is still in effect."

  "What's that?"

  Instead of answering, Paul yanked the wheel and pulled the car to the curb. They were at a break in the cemetery wall — a service entrance, Cree realized, judging from the functional shed and big Dumpsters ranged to the side of the iron gate. Sticking at odd angles out of the Dumpsters were several rectangular shapes that looked familiar but were so incongruous it took Cree a moment to recognize them.

  Coffins, she realized. Lidless coffins, plush interiors open to the city night. A couple more lay on the ground, lids stacked nearby.

  Paul watched the involuntary start she gave at the realization. "Yeah coffins. Used coffins. We practice multiple burial here. After a year and a day, you can bury someone else in the same crypt. You just pull out the old coffin, rake the remains into a plastic bag, shove the bag back in there, and you've got room for a new customer. Like I say, aboveground burial is more like cremation, all that's left is dust and chunks of bone. Doesn't look like there'd be room, but behind each of those doors are the remains of several people. All those individual crypts you saw? Whole families, many generations, are in some of them. Very cozy, very efficient. And since nobody's too keen on reusing a coffin, they go into the Dumpster."

  Paul gazed with satisfaction at the scene: stained, shadowed coffin interiors emerging from the Dumpster in the streetlights, the eerie miniature city disappearing into gloom behind. Caught up in his narrative, he seemed oblivious to how nightmarish it might look — the Gothic, funereal elegance of coffins juxtaposed with the crude, industrial functionality of the garbage containers, all in the harsh mercury-vapor light.

  "Do I detect a note of civic pride?" Cree asked.

  Still smiling, he thought about that. "I guess so. We're fond of our own peculiarities hereabouts." He looked at her face for a moment and must have seen her fatigue there. "I'm sorry, Cree. I shouldn't have taken this detour. I guess I got carried away — 1 don't often get to initiate an out of towner to our quirkier traditions. Provoking that appalled and astonished look — it's kind of irresistible." He looked back to the coffin scene. "You're right, this probably isn't the best thing to show you right now. It's different in sunlight, really… I am sorry."

 
; He resumed driving. The city flowed past and Cree was thinking and then she realized she must have dozed because suddenly the lights were bright and they were pulling up at the hotel. She stirred, momentarily disoriented.

  Fitzpatrick turned to her. "I know you're kaput. But can I ask one more personal question?"

  "I think so."

  He hesitated, then reached out and with his thumb swept her hair up off her forehead, out of her eyes, and tucked it behind her ear. His touch was gentle, yet the contact startled her with what seemed an electrical charge. He looked at her, considered, then shook his head, smiling. "I changed my mind. No questions. Just, thanks for dinner, Dr. Black. This has been really fine. A real surprise. That's all."

  Cree found her purse. She gave him a tired smile, opened the door, and got out without saying anything. She'd made it all the way through the glass doors and the BMW had pulled away before she realized she had leaned over and kissed him, quickly, good night.

  18

  Monday morning, Cree awoke disoriented, momentarily not sure where she was. When she looked over at the clock she saw it was nine-thirty; she'd been down so deep that even the jackhammers on Canal Street hadn't penetrated her sleep.

  She'd been exhausted when she'd gotten back to the hotel, but she'd felt an irresistible desire to check in with home. She had called both Deirdre and Mom and had nice but somewhat stilted talks, as if they'd both been waiting for the other shoe to drop, for Cree to confess some catastrophe. Cree had compensated by forcing cheerfulness. It wasn't until she'd talked to Dee for a few minutes, unable to tell much about why she'd called, that she'd realized she wanted to talk about Paul. She wanted an excuse to say his name to someone close to her, not make a big thing of it, but just touch that connection ever so lightly. But she didn't. Too soon. Instead, she talked about the way the city looked, about the food. She told Dee New Orleans was great and so far not too scary. Dee told her the twins missed her and that she should take care.

  Mom was different. Cree had been thinking about her anyway, and then meeting Charmian had begun a cascade of thoughts. What was it between Lila and Charmian — the love, the distance, the distrust?