City of Masks Page 23

  She had come here with the goal of convincing Lila to do as Paul said: to admit herself for a period of observation and treatment. But there didn't seem to be any way to ask that of her, even to open the subject.

  Cree took a deep breath, reminding herself that in any case, she had to seize this opportunity to look through the Beauforte family archives. There were a thousand threads here; synesthesically, she could feel them almost as if they were tangible filaments beneath her fingers. Each led to some element of Lila's past, and she was sure one would lead her to the connection she sought: the link to the ghost, to Lila's vulnerability.

  Randomly, she pulled over a school yearbook: Jean Cavelier Country Day school, 1969. Lila would have been in seventh grade. Opening to the index, she was astonished to find a long column of listings under Lila Beauforte's name: drama club, chamber orchestra, debate team, honor roll. She'd also been active in what sounded like school-sponsored community groups, Save Our Shores and Neighborhood Friends. Cree chose a page and opened it to see Lila with four other kids of mixed races, all holding the slender trunk of a sapling they'd apparently just planted. They looked proud and happy, Lila particularly — that wise, innocent spark ofjoie.

  Cree heard the distant chunk! of the refrigerator door and the rattle of ice cubes, and suddenly she felt that there was something she had to do before Lila came back. She stood to rummage quickly through the materials on the table. She found several more yearbooks but not what she was looking for. Then she saw that there were still materials in one of the plastic file boxes under the table, and when she bent to open it saw that it contained what she'd hoped: yearbooks from the Excelsior Academy Girls' School. She opened the one from 1974, found Lila's name, and turned to the solitary listing. It was just a small portrait in a row of photos, a plumpish sort of girl staring out of the frame with a mix of uncertainty, hopelessness, and sorrow — an early version of the look Lila wore today.

  Another reason for locking away the photos of Mike: having to face the difference between the Cree who appeared in them and the Cree she met in the mirror every day - the desolation there, the aching hollowness that refused to be filled.

  Abruptly hopelessness descended on her like a heavy curtain falling. Someone in her predicament had nothing whatever to offer Lila. She was showing too many signs of instability herself; she had too much emotional baggage of her own. Paul was right: All she was doing was compromising Lila's recovery process.

  She heard footsteps in the hall and quickly dropped the book into the box. She was back in her chair by the time Lila came in with her little silver tray and two glasses of tea, a wedge of lemon clipped to each rim.

  Lila handed her one and then held hers uncertainly, as if she wanted to apologize for the tea's inadequacy. Instead, she gestured toward the spill of photos. "I'm sorry," she said, "I know this is something you need to do . . . but I really don't know if I'm up for any more of it today."

  "I was just thinking the same thing. Me neither."

  "You? Why not?"

  "Look, Lila, I - " Cree grappled with what to say. She swigged her tea but set it down quickly, frustrated at her inability to express what she felt. "You want to go for a walk or something? Just to get outside? I . . . I'm feeling a little cooped up, I think I have to get out of here."

  "I don't know - "

  "What do New Orleans women do when they have guests over? How about showing me your garden? I got just a glimpse from the levee the other day, it looks lovely."

  Lila looked completely taken aback. "It . . . the groundskeeping service does it all. I used to love working in my garden, but I haven't even — I don't think I've even been back there since . . . you know."

  Cree stood up awkwardly. "All the better. We can both explore. We can both pretend we're normal."

  They went out through a rear door to a tall, narrow, columned gallery set with a white wrought-iron table and several chairs. Beyond, the grass stretched level for a hundred feet or so before the steep green slope of the levee began. A big live oak and a longleaf pine shifted in the lake breeze, and two palmettos rattled their spiky fronds. Islands of blossoming shrubs and flowers exulted in the dappled sun.

  Without waiting for Lila's invitation, she stepped off the gallery and into the lawn. The mat of grass was deep and spongy, and she kicked off her shoes to feel it with her toes. Wishing the tea she carried were a beer, she headed back across the yard to the levee, found a spot of tree shade, and sat down with her back to the levee. It was better out here. She eased her back down against the grass and lay looking up at the heat-hazy sky. When she lifted her head she could see Lila, a little, forlorn figure still standing indecisively between the tall white pillars.

  She laid her head back again. No question: Paul was right. She'd be better off quitting this case. She was showing serious indications of psychological instability. She was too tied up in her own knots, fighting with her own "ghosts," to do anything about the ghost at Beauforte House. She was just screwing things up. She'd do Lila a favor by leaving. Today. Now. Really, the only thing left was to tell her.

  Lila's voice, nearby, surprised her. "I'm sorry, but the ground's probably moist. I'm worried you'll ruin you skirt." Cree looked up to see her standing anxiously a few feet away, holding her tea glass carefully. She was barefoot; her shoes were set neatly side by side on the steps of the gallery.

  "Screw my skirt," Cree said despondently.

  Lila looked slightly aghast.

  "Don't you ever feel that way? You know? Screw it all, totally?"

  Lila seemed to think about that. "Yes, I guess I do." She sounded surprised at herself.

  "My father had an expression: 'Heck wit'.' He was a plumber, born in Brooklyn. It translates as 'the heck with it.' It meant, 'Sometimes you just have to let it go.' Or maybe it was 'You can't win 'em all.' Or, more like, 'It's not worth getting bent out of shape about.' It was actually a profound philosophical statement."

  Lila nodded equivocally.

  Cree dropped her head back and stared up at the sky, wondering why her father came back to her so strongly at moments like this. After another moment Lila sat primly down on the slope next to her, her glass in her lap. Behind and above them, a couple of women rode bikes along the top of the levee, chatting. Through her blouse, Cree felt insects move in the grass.

  Cree was trying to think of how to say it: / think Dr. Fitzpatrick is right.I'm lousing things up for your work with him. I've got too much shit of my own, and some of the stuff I do, it's crazy. I have to quit. I'm sorry I can't help you, but —

  "Something happened to me." Lila said it quietly but with great certainty.

  Startled, Cree lifted her head again. Lila was sitting with her legs straight out in front of her, flexing her feet. Her big toes angled hard over toward the second toes, Cree saw: feet long imprisoned in a proper woman's confining shoes.

  Cree sat up to look at her.

  "I don't mean the ghost," Lila said. "I mean a long time ago."

  "What was it?"

  "I don't know. But I know it changed me. Most of the time I run away, or I shut it off in me. But sometimes I want to run right at it — chase it away, or . . . or know it and take away its power. And you help me do that. You're the only one who's ever helped."

  Cree felt her face flush, trying to find the way to tell her, I can't! I want to run, too!

  "You act like . . . something happened to you, too," Lila went on.

  "Yeah. But I know what it was."

  "What?"

  "Oh, I don't usually talk about it. Just something I have to get over." Lila nodded at that. Sitting there side by side, gravity drew them slightly down the slope, their skirts rising unavoidably higher on their legs. Lila's plump, dimpled thighs looked unaccustomed to daylight, a blue-white now marbled with awful purple bmises from yesterday's violence. She stared perplexedly down at her legs, as if they were strange to her.

  "Cree, could a ghost be the, what did you call it - perseveration? - of more tha
n one emotion? More than one experience?"

  "Yes. As a matter of fact, I count on that. It's always mixed. It's one of the ways you release them - you find the part that's willing to let go. Why?"

  Lila tore up a tuft of grass and inspected it disinterestedly. "Because this one isn't all bad. It's hard to explain."

  Cree thought about the affective locus in the library, which she hoped was a perseveration of the boar-headed man's dying moments. "Nobody's all bad or all good."

  Lila nodded, accepting that. "Why can't you tell people what happened to you?"

  "You know, Lila, I'm . . . I'm kind of unbalanced myself right now. I haven't been through what you have, but the last few days've been very draining for me, too, and - "

  "I mean, maybe that's how you find the part that's willing to let go. In yourself. Does that make sense?"

  They just looked at each other. For the first time, Lila held her gaze for a long moment, shy but not permitting of evasion, imploring yet somehow . . . what? Determined.

  Cree felt a gust in her chest, a welling toward release. Maybe, she thought. She realized suddenly that on some level, Lila was bargaining. Seeking an equal exchange: You try it, I'll try it. You dare, maybe lean dare.But it was too big. The consequences of opening that repository of feeling could ruin Cree for this case. Right now, it felt as if it would rip her apart.

  Again Lila startled her. "Do you know what Jackie did last night? He took away all the kitchen knives, right out of the house."

  "What! Why?"

  "And his shotgun, and most of the pills in the medicine cabinet. Even the single-edged razor blades in the hardware drawer." Lila paused to observe Cree's expression. "Because after I came home from the doctor, I had . . . thoughts. I told him I had thoughts."

  That sent a chill through Cree. She had known all along that suicide was a real danger. A bad experience with a ghost could be like terminal disease, settling in along the nerves and synapses, gripping the psyche, killing the will to live. Cree could feel the impulse in Lila, brooding like a bruise-colored cloud at her center. Besides all the damage they wrought among the living, suicides made for the very worst kind of ghosts: an enduring echo of self- and life-hatred that poisoned the place where it happened, hard to banish.

  "But I told him," Lila went on determinedly, "I told him I wouldn't. I told him there was a way through this. That the answer was, There's a ghost in that house, and we've got to understand why it's there and get rid of it. That you had seen it, too, it couldn't be just me going crazy. That you'd been through this before and you knew what to do about it. That no way was I going to give up before we'd given this all a try. So he shouldn't . . . worry."

  Cree felt a sudden admiration for her - her concern for those around her despite her own predicament. And it dawned on her that, as if she' dintuited Cree's faltering resolve, Lila was consciously or unconsciously asking her to persevere, to see this process through. Again, she had challenged Cree and had proposed something like a pact: You have to stick this out. If you don't, how can I?

  Cree was trying to frame an answer when the back door of the house opened, and there was Jack Warren, coming out onto the gallery, loosening his tie.

  "Darlin'?" he called.

  He looked toward them in bafflement, and for a moment Cree saw the scene through his eyes: two women sitting at the base of the levee with their legs awkwardly straight out in front, skirts bunched around bare thighs, looking at each other like frightened, battle-weary comrades-inarms who had just forged a pact to charge out of the foxhole and face enemy fire together one more time.

  22

  IT WAS EVENING BY THE TIME Cree made it to the house. The air was cooling fast, and the darkening sky above the Garden District was lined with tendrils of high cloud that presaged a change in weather. She let herself in the front door, set her equipment case down to tap in the security code, and paused to allow her eyes to adjust. She faced the black hallway and the hush of the big house with a mix of reluctance and anticipation. She felt dangerously off balance and vulnerable, but the desperate thought occurred to her that maybe that was exactly the state this case required.

  Yeah, she thought, the way beating a steak with a tenderizing hammer prepares it for cooking.

  Whether or not Lila had intended to shore up Cree's resolve, she'd succeeded in doing so. It occurred to her that her sudden, intense desire to quit, her doubt of her own process, was just another way she'd taken on Lila's state of mind - another proof she'd taken her empathic process to an unusual extreme.

  That was a cause for concern because in the rarified world of empathic parapsychology, the risks of extreme projective identification were well documented. Her process had always depended on balance. The way into the world of the ghost was through the mind of the witness, and to enter either one she had to surrender her own identity to a considerable degree. If taken too far, the process could lead to madness, but it worked for her and she'd proved she could survive it. The key was to retain a core sense of self during even the most poignant, consuming encounter. Only by keeping a sure through-line could she set either the haunt or the haunted free. On this case, that had evaded her from the start. Why? Her appropriation of Lila's ambivalences — that oscillation between fear and retreat on one hand, and defiance and determination on the other — was only one explanation. The other was Paul Fitzpatrick: Their unexpected encounter had awakened a dormant part of her. And with that unavoidably came Mike and all the emotional pain and rational confusion that had never been resolved.

  After leaving Lila's house, she'd called Paul's office to report, but only the machine answered. Same at his house. The message she'd left at both places was curt and professional: "Lila agreed to go in for diagnostics tomorrow, on an outpatient basis. Best I could do. I hope it helps."

  She hadn't asked for a follow-up meeting. It all left a sad ache of disappointment. But it was best to start getting over those yearnings, abort them early.

  Cree sighed and picked up the equipment case again. If the vulnerability was extreme, she told herself, it would have to be matched by an equally extreme degree of determination, some equally forceful way to anchor her identity, to find a foundation of stability. It would mean, she knew, facing a lot of things she'd dodged for a long time. A daunting prospect.

  She had decided earlier that the library would be her chief concern tonight, and anyway, as she'd feared, the upstairs was still too forbidding, the boar-headed man too near to nascence. Hoping again that he was indeed limited to the second floor, she passed the stairway and headed into the depths of the house. The curtains were still open in some rooms, letting in enough of the evening light to navigate by, and the kitchen was brighter still, especially the alcove where Temp Chase had died. For a moment she paused there, feeling a faint reprise of that cold breath of compressed whispers. It passed quickly.

  The house was full of innumerable whispers and mutters, as any old house would be, the psychic "residuals" -just transient echoes, really - of all the experiences lived here over the years. But she instinctively felt that only the affective locus in the library had any prospect of turning out to be boar-head's perimortem component. If it was, it might well provide the handle she needed on his monstrous manifestation upstairs.

  Through the kitchen, down the darker corridor to the east wing and the library. She passed the doorway to the storage room she'd glimpsed with Ron and the Historical Preservation ladies, came to the library door, then hesitated and turned back. It occurred to her the storage room was the only place in the whole house she had not yet spent any time. She tried several keys on the ring Lila had given her before she found the right one.

  It was a fairly big room, perhaps twenty by thirty, mostly empty, with bare, wide-board floors. Its two windows were lined with security-system tape on the inside and barred on the outside; thick foliage pressed between the bars and against the glass, turning the dim light greenish. Only a couple of odd pieces of furniture were left: various mysterious
humps under dust cloths, a little grove of ugly antique floor lamps, and a couple of oak file cabinets that hunkered against the far wall.

  She pulled off one of the dust cloths to reveal what she'd expected, a hideous S-curved love seat. When she turned to sit in it, a flicker of movement across the room gave her a jolt, but she saw that it was just her own motion in a slender, full-length mirror that leaned against the wall. Looking back at her was her own face, dust muted and fractured by a single fissure. Another broken mirror.

  The Cree in the glass looked alarmed and a little demented. And ghoulish, she realized. In the fading light, with the crack splitting her face into two mismatched planes, her brow naturally split with its crease of worry, and that . . . thing . . . forever in the eyes: yes, almost a mirror phantom, a ghost emerging from the mirror world's confusions and inversions.

  Yes, Lila, she thought bitterly, something happened to me. And I can't talk about it. And, yes, that's probably how you let it go — sooner or later you have to face it. If you don't, you become suspended between your yearning and your fear, and you're doomed to repeat the same sad acts without end, without completion or satisfaction.

  You become a ghost.

  That thought struck her breathless. The face in the mirror could be nothing but a perseveration, lost and tangled, unable to fully live, afraid to fully die.

  I'm becoming a ghost!

  This had to end, she realized. She couldn't live locked into the constraints of emotion and memory she'd imposed on her world since Mike's death. She had to face herself. She didn't want to be a ghost, a fragment. She wanted to be alive, and whole.

  She shut her eyes, took three deep breaths, then went to the mirror and turned it to the wall. It didn't help much.