City of Masks (32 page)

One is the boar-headed man who chases you and hurts you. The other manifests mainly in the library. He goes through some act of violent beating and then later dies and feels a sad, beautiful longing. They're not the same person. Do you know who they are?"

"No!" Lila's eyes had widened at the idea. "I thought there's only one! How can you be sure?"

"It's more than the difference in their moods or their affects. They spring from different impulses. They're completely different kinds of manifestation. Different . . . levels."

"I don't understand anything you're saying! I only know what happens to me!" Lila's hand were working busily among the leaves and stems, but she was clipping anything, hacking away at healthy branches and tops full of unopened buds. Cree put her hand on her arm and was alarmed at the tension she felt there.

"We don't have to go into that now. Lila, I . . . I've been taking on your susceptibility to these ghosts - you understand that, right? But if I'm going to survive, I've got to take on your strength, too. I've got to absorb your determination and your persistence and your stubbornness. I've got to know your desire to . . . fix what's wrong with your life. You've got to show me how you survive." Cree hoped any of that made sense to her.

Lila's arm seemed to shiver beneath Cree's fingers. "I know why you told me about you and your husband," she said in a darkly hollow voice. "And I'm grateful. But see, your story, it's . . . beautiful. Sad, but beautiful. Mine - it's
not.
And there's nothing either of us can do about that."

Cree didn't know what to say.

"And as for how I survive," Lila went on, looking more like her mother now, "I survive by doing the next thing that needs doing. And the thing after that. Which right now probably means working on the yard here. You're very right — it is a mess."

The plumbers had left by the time they went back inside, but the tilers were still at work and the house was filled with the sharp chemical smell of adhesive. As Lila conferred with the men upstairs, Cree spent a few more minutes leafing through the Beauforte photos. Nothing new caught her eye. When Lila came back down, they hugged good-bye wordlessly and Cree left.

She wondered whether she had accomplished anything at all. Her attempts to build upon their earlier spirit of companionship had failed. Lila had closed down, especially when Cree had told her there were two ghosts. The idea had upset her greatly; the image of her hands rooting and clipping blindly, indiscriminately, seemed to bode ill.

The only ray of hope Cree could find was a subtle one. It had to do with why Lila had chosen to move back to Beauforte House in the first place. Yes, Lila was in a box, a jar, constructed equally by herself, her family, her society. But her original desire to move back to Beauforte House was a proactive effort to break out of her boxed-in life. She had sought to reclaim that depth, that richness of texture. To reclaim the past, too. Lila's determination to move back there had to have an unconscious element of wanting to come to grips with her sealed-away past. On some level she understood her fundamental predicament and was willing to face it. That motivation was the essential foundation of any therapeutic process.

Cree turned left at the street and walked along the front of the Warrens' yard. They hadn't gotten this far in their cleanup effort, and leaves and twigs still littered the shmbs and flower beds. She walked toward the Taurus, absentmindedly picking fallen twigs from the front plantings. At the corner of the Warrens' lot, where the growth met the side fence, a larger branch had fallen, crimping the shrubs beneath, and reflexively she stopped to disengage it. When she pulled aside the surrounding foliage to lift it free, she saw something that turned the world suddenly upside down.

Behind the leaves, lashed against the rail of the fence at the corner: a finger-sized stick. It was tied with long blades of grass, or maybe the thin fronds of a palmetto. It had one notch carved crudely into it.

A hoodoo hex, just like the ones Deelie Brown had found at Beauforte House.

29

J
OYCE WAS IN A GOOD MOOD
when Cree got back to the hotel. "Mr. Beauforte agreed to meet us at the house at seven. But he sounded prickly. What'd you do to get him so bent out of shape?"

"My job."

Joyce nodded without conviction. Then she looked Cree up and down, noticing the wet grass stains on the knees of her jeans, the many faint scratches on her forearms.
"What
happened to
you?"

"Gardening. The storm kind of wrecked up Lila's yard, so - "

"I mean what's got you so upset?"

Cree debated telling her about the hex but thought she'd wait, try to fit it into the pattern that teased at the edge of her thoughts. "Listen, Joyce . . . I don't know if I'm up for going to the house tonight. I've got some thinking to do. You don't really need me for this, anyway, you're better at it than I am. You go without me."

Joyce nodded, suspicious but apparently not too dismayed at the prospect of spending an evening alone with a guy who looked like Clark Gable with some meat on him.

"And you're right that Ro-Ro has something of a grudge against me right now. I have a feeling he'll be . . . more responsive to you."

In fact, Joyce had put on a short, form-fitting cotton knit dress and shoes with heels higher than one would normally consider helpful for fieldwork. Her hair was loose, a smooth fall of burnished ebony around her shoulders and over one eye, and she looked stunning.

Yes, Ro-Ro was likely to be very helpful tonight. Cree almost commented further, then thought better of it.

" 'Ro-Ro'?"

"Nickname. Some fraternity or Mardi Gras thing, I don't know."

When they looked over the plans, Cree felt a moment's dismay. As far as she could tell, the original builder's drawings seemed to accord perfectly with the current floor plan. The absence of architectural discrepancies would make it much harder to narrow down a ghost's time frame, to name the individuals and identify their predicaments. But you couldn't always tell at first; it could come down to a matter of inches, and for Joyce's benefit she carefully diagrammed Lila's sightings and her own. Downstairs, the library would be their primary focus. Upstairs, Cree was particularly interested in the central room, the hallway down the left wing, and the doorways to the bedrooms along that hall - the boar-headed ghost's preferred hiding places and hunting grounds.

Joyce took notes and asked the right questions, all business despite her outfit. It wasn't until after she'd gone that Cree felt some misgivings about letting her go alone. The more she thought about it, the more she realized that the hex at the Warrens' house implied a solid connection between the Chase murder and the Beaufortes. Couldn't be a coincidence. But what was the connection? Did it mean that Lila and Jack had been targets of the killer, too? Were they still?

But in any case, that the murder was still unsolved, as Joyce had pointed out earlier, meant that there was a murderer on the loose. For all they knew, the killer would decide that Joyce and Cree needed some murdering, too, if they started turning up facts that implicated him or her.

For all they knew, it was Ronald himself.

The thought gave Cree a jolt. Joyce walking around in the big dark house, alone with Ro-Ro. Was he capable of murder? She thought not —he was at bottom too cowardly, too lazy. But again it was hard to say: The propensity seemed intrinsic to human nature, lurking inside everyone, waiting for the right trigger. When Mike died, Cree had discovered it in herself as she lay awake at night and imagined revenge on the drunken bastard who had killed him.

She showered long and hot, scrubbed her skin until it was red, as if scouring her outside could cleanse the inside. When she came out she spread a couple of towels on the floor and sat in lotus position. Back straight, hands in the
dhyana mudra.
Breathe. Clear the mind.

But it didn't help. Frantically her thoughts scurried in search of some place of comfort and gravitated toward Mike. She fought back by reminding herself sternly that she was alone in a hotel room in New Orleans, that Mike was just a tiny memory circuit in her brain, glimmering and now going dark again. And that was no help, either.

Enough of this,
she told herself. She hadn't been this bad in years.

She dressed quickly and fled the room. Maybe there'd be surcease in the streets.

This time she let the flow of Canal Street carry her past the narrow streets of the French Quarter, toward the Mississippi. It was after sunset now, but the many bright windows, streetlights, and illuminated signs made a cheerful false daylight. Every view promised excitement and diversion. She was briefly tempted by the mindless glitter and bustle of Harrah's huge casino complex but got only as far as the door, where the cacophony of thousands of electronic slot machine chimes felt as if it would burst her eardrums. Instead, she went another block down and made her way through to the riverfront. The scent of muddy water and diesel exhaust surrounded her as she mounted the levee steps. Riverfront promenades stretched to both sides; on the right, the docked paddle wheelers were alight with life and music, but to the left she could see heavy freighters forging slowly along or berthed under lighted loading gantries. Tourists strolled Moon Walk, couples hand in hand. Beneath a street lamp, an elderly black man sat on a bench playing a tenor sax, sweet, melancholy slow blues that wove seamlessly into the river-scented breeze.

Better,
Cree decided.

She walked the length of the lighted section of the walk, turned back, sat briefly, then decided to keep moving. Sitting still invited memories she didn't want; walking seemed to give her energy. She needed to stay in the present.

Two ghosts. A woman with a locked-up life and something buried in her memory. An overbearing, aristocratic mother with secrets. A playboy brother who wouldn't mind some liquid capital. The beating motion in the library, the man dying and yearning toward the girl on the swing. The Chase murder. Hexes at Beauforte House and at Lila Warren's. It was all a whirling constellation of unconnected dots, suggesting but never revealing a pattern. Dizzying.

And that was
without
trying to figure in the imponderable: the wolf, the snake, the living table claws! Most of all, the predatory upstairs ghost with his hateful affect and the double anomalies of his boar's head and his complete lack of a perimortem dimension.

After a while, the teeming streets of the Quarter seemed to call to her. She left the riverbank, crossed the streetcar tracks, and came to the terraced park just below Jackson Square. On the other side, she descended to the street through a crowd gathered around a trio playing something that sounded like bayou bluegrass.

Decatur Street, she discovered, was a more family-oriented version of Bourbon Street, a broader avenue that separated the narrow streets of the Quarter from the river. New high-rise apartment buildings and hotels dominated the south side, but on the north side it was lined with fine historic buildings that housed shops and restaurants, in better repair than elsewhere in the Quarter. Unlike Bourbon Street, there were no strip clubs or body-piercing parlors, and only a couple of the low-budget, black-painted voodoo shops. Most stores maintained cheerful windows and catered to the impulses of middle-class consumers, offering strings of beads, packages of Cajun and Creole spices, postcards, dried and varnished alligator heads and other bayou kitsch, bogus
gris-gris
bags, crawfish- and jazz-themed artwork, illustrated T-shirts and billed caps. The sidewalks were crowded, the restaurants and bars wide open to the evening, the cars bumper to bumper.

Better,
Cree thought. Flux. All the appetites of the living. It did help.

Drifting, she window-shopped. She lingered for a few moments in front of a store that specialized in hot sauces. Its window featured hundreds of bottles with luridly illustrated labels and hyperbolic names: Ass in Hell, Thermonuclear Holocaust, Liquid Lucifer, Mother-in-Law's Revenge, Pain & Suffering, Bayou Butt Burner.

She drifted to the next window and was admiring its contents when abruptly she felt as though she'd stepped through a hole and fallen and hit hard.

The store was crammed with Mardi Gras supplies: overflowing racks of beads of every description in sizzling colors, racks of gaudy gowns and capes and boas. Armies of manikins strutting in full-body costumes. Wigs and hats of every kind on Styrofoam heads.

And
masks.
Hundreds of them: faces grimacing, leering, snarling, laughing, conniving, drunken, murderous, seductive, imperious, pathetic, dead. Dainty eye masks, feathered face masks, and whole-head, pullover rubber masks of Nixons, werewolves, aliens, clowns, corpses, witches, Satans, queens and kings, kindly grannies, chubby babies, drag queens, vampires.

Bird heads, frog heads, dog heads, alligator heads.

No boar heads, true. And the idea didn't solve the mystery of the wolf, the snake, the table and other changelings. But here at last was a possible explanation for at least one of the anomalous aspects of Lila's experience. Of course that's how he would clothe himself in his thoughts. Of course that's how she would see him - half memory, half spectral being. She was appalled that the possibility hadn't occurred to her sooner, in this of all places.
City of masks.

With the realization came another, meshing with the first like pieces of a puzzle fitting seamlessly. She'd spent hours pouring over the Beauforte family archives, and they had revealed almost nothing of value. But now she realized that what the material had to tell her lay not in what it contained but in what it omitted.

There were no photos or clippings relating to the family's Mardi Gras activities.

The Beaufortes had been involved in all kinds of civic activities, and from everything she'd read or heard from Paul, Mardi Gras was the ultimate civic function in New Orleans. It had been a family tradition for both Lamberts and Beaufortes: Lila had spoken of her father's involve ment in one of the krewes, what was it? Epicurus. The Krewe of Epicurus. Uncle Brad had been a member. Ro-Ro was a member. Even Paul Fitzpatrick was a member, as his father had been. Yet Cree had looked at all the family records, and they showed no indication that the Beaufortes participated in Mardi Gras in any way.

No, she hadn't looked at all of them. She'd looked at the ones Lila had. But Lila had said her mother had kept some at the old house, that they'd stayed over there when Charmian had moved on to Lakeside Manor and they'd rented to the Chases. No doubt in the locked storage room she'd sat in briefly, pondering her own cracked image in the mirror: those two oak file cabinets against the far wall of the room.

She checked her watch as she hurried through the teeming crowds back toward the hotel to get the car. It had been more than three hours since Joyce had gone to the house to meet Ronald. She wondered if they were still there. She hoped not. Ro-Ro would not approve of what she was going to do. If Charmian heard about it, she'd have apoplexy.

She was relieved to find the house dark when she pulled up in front: Joyce and Ro-Ro must have finished the architectural comparison.

Inside, she locked the door behind her, reset the security system, and headed immediately through the black central hall to the back of the house. The hush wrapped around her, filling her ears with a ringing silence that seemed composed of a chorus of faint whispers and mutters.

Hoping the boar-headed man was indeed confined to the upstairs, she turned from the kitchen to the back hall, found the storage room door largely by feel, and used her penlight to sort among the keys on the ring Lila had given her. When she went inside, she flipped the light switch: This was a night for nonnal-world processes.

The central chandelier gave the room a depressing yellow cast but shed enough light to see the humped dust cloths, the mirror with its face to the wall, the big file cabinets against the far wall. The leaves reaching between the window bars seemed to press against the glass like desperate hands.

Cree crossed the room and yanked on one of the drawer pulls. Locked, of course. She tried a drawer in the second cabinet with the same result. She fished in her jacket pocket and tried several keys from the key ring. None worked.

Who would have the keys? Definitely not Lila; that had been the whole point of separating these files and keeping them here. Ron, maybe; Charmian, definitely. But Cree couldn't ask her for them, couldn't reveal where her thoughts were leading her. Not until she knew more. Charmian would figure out some new level of obstruction, some new complication.

Her father's voice spoke to her from memory, another one of his humorous philosophical axioms:
Hey, it's nothin' that brute force and
ignorance won't fix.
A comment on the human penchant for crude, stupid solutions, as well as an admission that you could outsubtle yourself and were sometimes better off keeping things straightforward.

Cree took a turn through the room, looking for a tool, something like a crowbar. The best she could do was the rack of fireplace tools beside the old coal grate. The poker was by far the strongest, but its head was too thick to insert between drawer and case, so she started with the ash shovel, wedging the blade into the gap and prying until it opened enough to receive the point of the poker. It was a murderous implement, with a thumb-thick steel shaft and heavy, elephant-goad head — for all she knew, the very weapon that had been used to beat Lionel to death. The long shaft gave her excellent leverage, and though her first two heaves just broke away the edge of the drawer, the third made something snap loudly inside the cabinet. All three drawers had been freed.