City of Masks (29 page)

26

T
HE RAIN HAD SLACKENED
by the time Cree made it to Charmian's house the next morning. Before going in, she sat for a moment in the car to gird herself for another encounter with the dowager. It wasn't easy. Inside, she felt like a port city in a hurricane, all the boats broken loose from their moorings and beating themselves against the shore. She was torn from her own identity, even from her anchor in the present. Adrift in too many ways, susceptible to every wind.

Yesterday afternoon, she had napped as Joyce had settled into her hotel room, three doors down from Cree's. Dreams of Mike troubled her. By the time she'd awakened, it was dark, and the rain still swirled madly outside. She checked her voice mail and found a message from Charmian Beauforte scheduling this meeting. She stifled a pang of disappointment that there wasn't one from Paul, and then the confusion of loyalties rose up to torment her.

Even Joyce admitted that it was not a good night for cruising the Quarter, so while she set up her computer and began doing some Web research, Cree drove over to Beauforte House.

The Garden District was battened down in the rain, its streets empty and few porch lights lit. The live oaks roared and groaned in the wind and cast thrashing patterns of shadow and streetlight against the walls of the big house. Inside, Cree took off her raincoat and left it in the front hall.
No high tech tonight,
she'd resolved earlier. Edgar would be furious if she had a good contact but missed an opportunity to record some empirical evidence of it. But the devices always demanded some share of her attention, and right now she didn't need any more distractions. She groped in near-total dark back to the study, feeling desperate for progress in this case. Identify the ghost or ghosts, release them before somebody got hurt. Go home, get a life.

Beyond the ubiquitous rush and hiss of rain, the house was full of little noises as the wind probed and bullied it: ticks and taps, groans and scraping noises. The windows of the kitchen were vague, mist-opaqued rectangles, the back hall doorway just a black rectangle. The library itself was a cave of darkness.

Cree knocked her thigh painfully against the arm of her chair before she knew it was there but otherwise managed to get seated without making a ruckus. She sat and tried to muster her professional discipline. Calm the breath, the mind will follow.

Much later, the darkness seemed to have a mist in it. It was turgid with feeling: rage and regret, a soul-wrenching confusion. A keening sense of betrayal and loss, replaced by outrage and wrath. The hazy phantom materialized again, stuff of mind and darkness, the outrage burst like a boil, the beating motion began. A paroxysm, a convulsion. There seemed to be a disturbance in the wind of darkness near the door: another figure?

Then she penetrated the beating, and she saw it was only the edge, the outer layer, of something more urgent. What was really happening was the sharp smell of almonds and that pain in the abdomen. This time Cree felt it, low in her gut, doubling her over, felt herself fall and become the writhing puddle on the floor. Then came the calling out, the seeking, as some part of the ghost's psyche homed toward what was most important to it. The arrow of yearning lofted toward the dying person's heart's desire: the girl on the swing, the house with patches of sunlight on its walls, the green canopy of leaves with blue sky behind, and a feeling of things being right and in their place.

Paradoxically, though she was better able to sustain the violence of the beating this time, she pulled away from that last part. It felt as if that arrow of poignancy could kill her.

Dismayed at her inability to overcome her own fears and self protective reflexes, she pulled back from it, left the library, and returned to the front of the house. She considered trying to brave the upstairs, to challenge the boar-headed ghost in his domain. For a time she stood looking up the stairway into the patchwork light and dark, straining to hear through the white noise of the rain. All it took was a vague sense of his presence, a faint reprise of the dark lust and self-hatred, to make her realize she couldn't do it. She was still too afraid, exhausted and in turmoil and defenseless. She was being crazy and desperate and everything Edgar had warned her about.

She left the house hurriedly, returning to the hotel after two in the morning, feeling bruised and ragged.

And of course Charmian was sure to see her state and exploit it in some sadistic way.

"I've been thinking about you," Charmian said. She walked straight-backed ahead of Cree to the living room, mastering her limp almost completely. Today she wore a tailored beige pants suit, a yellow silk scarf knotted stylishly at her wizened throat, pearl earrings, a tasteful blush of makeup.

"I'm flattered. Why?"

"Paul Fitzpatrick tells me that you saved my daughter's life. I'm grateful."

"Really, I just happened to go to the house while she was there. I was lucky."

"And did you see the ghost?" Charmian sat herself in a wingback chair, poised and regal, crossing her good leg over the other at the knee. The tightening of her face gave way to a hard little smile that flickered at the corners of her lips, showing that she intended the question rhetorically, condescendingly.

"As a matter of fact, I did."

"Did it reveal its terrible secrets?"

Cree tossed her purse onto the couch and threw herself beside it. "You know what I think? I think
you're
the one with the secrets, Charmian. I can't make you tell me, but I'm not going to sit here and play straight man for your sarcastic wit. If you want entertainment, go watch another slide show with your geriatric buddies. I've got a job to do. Are you going to help me or not?"

"Why are you so out of sorts?" Charmian countered. "I hope this doesn't mean your budding romance with Dr. Fitzpatrick is going awry?"

Cree gaped.

"It doesn't take extrasensory perception to notice the way you two speak of each other. Your excessive 'professional' respect and consideration, the way your voices modulate when you pronounce each other's names. I'm pleased for you, really I am."

"Tell me what happened to Lila when she was fourteen. What changed her."

Charmian didn't gape; Cree thought she was probably incapable of it. But her lower eyelids ticced before her face stiffened into its inscrutable mask. "Her father died. They'd been very close. She went off to school. It was a very difficult time for - "

"Worse than that."

"She had something of a nervous breakdown during her first term. A battle with depression and anxiety. It was completely understandable. Two family deaths within one year, going away from home . . . I was a wreck and had nothing to offer her. Her world was coming apart."

"
Before
she went to school. Something that made her hate herself so much that now she breaks mirrors so she won't have to
look
at herself!"

Charmian held herself absolutely motionless. "I haven't any earthly idea. Why don't you ask your ghost?"

Cree returned the implacable stare. Then the telephone on the table next to Charmian rang, startling both women and breaking their locked gazes. Charmian answered it, spoke briefly, and hung up.

"I am going on an outing today," Charmian said drily, "a jaunt with some of my 'geriatric buddies' of the Garden Society. The van will be here in fifteen minutes."

"Why did you schedule - "

"I'm so sorry. We had planned a garden tour in Baton Rouge, but I'd assumed it would be canceled due to the weather. Now they say the rain is letting up and it's on again. I'm sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused you." Charmian stood, limped into the kitchen. Cree followed her. With her back to Cree, she began packing a large leather handbag: a pill bottle, a pack of facial tissues, an apple, a pair of fine calfskin gloves.

Cree spoke to her back. "Do you have any idea where Josephine Dupree went after she left your employ?"

"None."

"Have you any idea who would put hoodoo hexes at Beauforte House? Or why?"

That seemed to bring a stiffening to the squared shoulders, but Charmian just said, "Of course not."

Charmian had clearly decided not to give anything, and Cree's frustration spiked. "There's something you should know, Charmian. Bad ghosts kill and maim people. Some do it directly, most do it by driving people to suicide. Or to incurable psychosis. Are you aware that this situation could kill your daughter? That information you give me could save her life? Do you even
care?"

That brought Charmian around fast. "Don't you
ever
impugn my concern for my children! Don't you
dare
presume to educate me about my familial responsibilities! You know
nothing
about my feelings toward my children!"

The old woman was breathing hard now, and with the tendons on her corded neck standing forward, her brows arched and eyes blazing, she was physically intimidating despite her age and size. Cree felt the radiation of her emotion, a fierce, enormous, invisible energy like heat from a smelter.

"I think there are two ghosts," Cree persisted. "Do you know who they are?"

A flicker of the eyelids, something hitting the target, but no other response.

"A little girl in a swing," Cree blurted desperately. "A sunny day. One of the ghosts, that's his. . . his homing impulse, that's what he yearns for, that's the big unresolved thing for him."

Charmian's shoulders hunched suddenly as if Cree had punched her in the stomach, and she lurched forward a half step to keep her balance. It lasted only an instant; she drew herself back up with implacable will. Still she said nothing.

"Who are they, Charmian?" Cree asked, trying to tame her urgency. "Could the girl be Lila? Could the ghost be Richard?"

That didn't completely make sense, not with the beating motion, the other figure there, the affect of wrath and regret, but it was the only possibility Cree could think of. Two ghosts - one being Richard, dying of his heart attack and overcome with love for his daughter, and the other one the boar-headed man? But no, the figure dying on the floor was not having a heart attack: The pain had been too low, gut-deep.

Charmian's face changed. The angry blaze had given way to a look of shock and, for the first time in Cree's memory, uncertainty. But by degrees that faded, mastered with difficulty, to be replaced by the ancient, wise, hard look. She turned and limped away to the windows, where she stared sightlessly out at her garden. The rain had not fully stopped, but the overcast was broken now with brighter spots.

"Life is not a simple proposition, is it Ms. Black? It is mysterious, as you well know. It surprises us and confounds us continually. And all we can do is make the best judgments we can at the time and hope we've made the right choices and done the right things. But we are wrong at least half the time, aren't we? And then our mistakes compound our quandary tenfold. You of all people must know what it is to be something of a prisoner to one's own past. To one's own stubborn predilections." She gestured at the garden, where petals strewn by last night's winds spotted the glistening leaves.

"We're only prisoner to things we've left unresolved. Those haunt us until we deal with them." Cree wanted to press Charmian for specifics but stopped herself: better to see where the old woman took it.

"You're very talented," Charmian went on. "I can see now that I underestimated you."

She seemed about to say more, but the housemaid appeared in the doorway. "The van is here, ma'am. They waitin' out front."

Charmian flipped a hand and the maid vanished again. Still facing the garden, Charmian bit her lips and appeared deep in thought.

At last she turned, limped toward Cree, stopped in front of her, and gave her a penetratingly candid, curious look. "You're like a mirror, aren't you? You change around me - you become like me. I must admit it's quite remarkable, even if the reflection you offer is most unflattering!" The raying wrinkles revealed a flash of sardonic humor as she said that, but the expression passed and she became serious again. "And you do it for each person you meet, don't you? At moments I see Lila in you so strongly! Look at you now, the way you wring your wrists, that's one of her gestures! It's not really something you can control, is it?"

Cree took her hands away from each other but didn't say anything. The old woman seemed to be hesitating at the edge of some important decision.

The maid returned. "I'm sorry, ma'am, I tell him to wait, but he say they goin' be late they don't go soon - "

"Tell him I'll be right
there,
Tarika," Charmian ordered. When Tarika had gone again, she continued to look at Cree with that curious light. "I can imagine it would be difficult — that you could lose yourself in the process. And one has to wonder whether it is something you can do for yourself." The question didn't seem intended as just another of Charmian's provocations.

"I'm workin' on it, Charmian," Cree said gruffly.

Charmian limped past, looping the strap of her handbag over one shoulder as she headed for the door. She stopped at the hall doorway and turned again. " 'That which is unresolved lives on.' You're absolutely right - that's really what all this adds up to, isn't it? So true. In so many ways. If only we had all been wise enough to know that from the start."