City of Masks (34 page)

If only the evening had ended there!
she thought. But then the thing on the stairs had to happen.
Gawd, of course, Murphy's Law.

They had turned out the lights in the upper central room and Joyce was following Ron down the stairway. She had deliberately
not
let him carry the toolboxes or the rolled plans for her so as to not invite assumptions or patronizing displays. And as a result she was burdened and couldn't see the stairs as well as she might have. Ron had just reached the floor and she was about three steps above him. He half turned to say something, and at that instant she lost her footing and pitched forward and down. And big handsome Ronald adroitly caught her in his arms.

And as if that wasn't bad enough, she didn't pull away immediately! Ron held her firmly against his broad chest, arms around her, supporting almost her whole weight, and she was so shocked by her fall, by suddenly finding his face so close to hers, by how . . . interesting his arms and chest and thighs felt pressed against her, that she
hesitated.
For all of five wordless seconds, probably.

At last she regained her wits enough to pull away. Ron didn't resist, just sort of let his hands trail off her shoulders and hip to show he let go only reluctantly.

"My God, excuse me!" Joyce said. "God, what a klutz I am!" Completely flustered, like a teenager. She bent to recover the things she'd dropped and held them to her chest as if they'd shield her. "I'm so sorry!"

"My pleasure, I assure you," Ron had said. Then he went to the security panel, paused with his hand over the keypad, and said nonchalantly, "Remind me - what was it ol' Doc Freud said about accidents, again?"

"He also said sometimes a cigar is just a cigar," she'd rejoined. And then realized that for Ron, that would carry all kinds of suggestive overtones, too.

They'd gotten out the door without further mishaps. Out on the sidewalk, she'd declined his invitation to go out for drinks. "Some other time, then," he'd said as a farewell. "I'll most definitely look forward to it."

Joyce winced at the memory. She hoped that her own lapses of professionalism wouldn't impede this case in some unforseen way. Cree had described Ron as a womanizer - unnecessarily, because anyone could tell that within the first thirty seconds of meeting him. But he was handsome and rich and he smelled good and this was
New Orleans.
And though true love was a terrific idea, Joyce had been divorced long enough to know that a good roll in the hay with someone who knew how to roll could be awfully damned terrific, too - in many ways preferable to a "relationship" and the sticky complications that too often came with. Ron was no doubt a loser, but his confidence in dealing with women probably had
some
basis in experience. It could come across as smug, if you didn't have comparable confidence yourself. Which Joyce prided herself on having.

So why had she let the encounter fluster her? Maybe because there were other things besides weakness and lust in his eyes - something hidden, something dark and repellent. Dangerous? Maybe. More obviously, she decided, some kind of internal
desperation.
No, that wasn't quite right. Cree would be better at giving it a name —

Cree!
Joyce glanced at the clock radio again and was shocked to find that it was eleven-thirty. She had to be definitive: Would Cree, or would she not, call to let her know where she was? Ordinarily, yes, she would: A, because she wouldn't want Joyce to worry, and B, because tonight in particular Cree would be very interested in the outcome of the architectural work.

Okay, so would Cree, or would she not, call to let her know she was at Paul Fitzpatrick's, either staying very late or spending the night?

This was tougher to answer. Being a considerate person, Cree would probably
want
to call, but in certain situations the opportunity to do so gracefully might not present itself. Joyce sincerely hoped exactly those situations had arisen tonight.

So the real question, Joyce decided, was: Would Joyce nee Wu formerly Feingold, or would she not, solely on the basis of her current anxiety, call Cree's possible lover's house to make sure she was okay?

She gave it another ten minutes of rising concern and decided that damn straight she would. She dialed information and got the number for Dr. Paul Fitzpatrick, already rehearsing her apologies.

32

T
HE CLATTER AND BUMP
of things falling, the jolt and jar of hitting and rolling, merged with another noise - a harsh banging and rattling that didn't stop when the other noises did. Cree's head lolled dizzily as the geometric pattern of dark and darker above her spun and stabilized and she realized that she was looking up at the open rectangle of the stairwell and the line of the balustrade. She was lying diagonally on the stairs just below the landing. Her breath left her chest as she felt the boar-headed man moving up there, but with the clacking and banging at the door he seemed to withdraw, like a toxic smoke sucked away, inhaled by the house again.

She moved one arm and slid bruisingly down another step, barely catching herself before she tipped and rolled the rest of the way down.

"Cree! Cree! Are you there? Open the door!" A muffled voice accompanied the clacking. That heavy brass door knocker, that's what it was. And Joyce.

"Cree" referred to her. She wasn't Lila. Some relief in that.

Carefully, Cree rotated her body until her feet were lower than her head, disturbing a couple of broken balustrade rails that slid noisily down. When she sat up, her arms and legs and spine felt as if their component bones didn't fit any more, as if she'd been wrenched apart and put together incorrectly. Her hips hurt and her head was bruised, but the worst pain came from her left index finger, which must have gotten bent wrong when she landed. It had taken only a split second: flipping over the balustrade, knees smashing the rails hard enough to break several loose. Flailing into space. Her hands and head had hit the wall an instant before the rest of her had landed half on the landing and half on the steps just below it. It was a drop of only about six feet. She'd been lucky she hadn't fallen farther toward the front of the stairwell, or impaled herself on one of the broken rails that fell with her.

Clack-clack-clack-clack-clack! Clack-clack-clack-clack-clack!

Not ready to stand, she moved her butt down one step and then another and then another. When her feet hit the floorboards, she lurched upright and staggered to the front door. It was hard to unlock in the dark with her uncooperative index finger, but after a moment of fumbling she got the door open and Joyce burst in with a shaft of blue light from the street.

"Cree! Are you all right?"

"There
is
a doorbell, Joyce. Jesus!" That didn't seem appropriate. Joyce had asked her something, and after a hesitation, Cree remembered what. "I'm shitty. But I'm okay," she muttered. Her jaw felt joined wrong, too. She turned to the security panel and reset it, feeling a little proud of herself for being so lucid. No point in bringing the
gendarmes
or whatever they'd be called here.

Joyce brushed past her, groping on the walls until she found the light switch. The chandelier came on and there was Joyce, face fierce, eyes wide, can of pepper spray at the ready. The stairway was littered with broken rails, and Cree saw one of her shoes there, too. She hadn't realized she'd lost it until that moment. She had only one shoe on, which helped account for some of the difficulty of standing. That was nice, she thought, because it meant you could put on your other shoe and then maybe your legs would work right.

"Sit down!" Joyce ordered. "Tell me exactly what happened. I need to check you out."

That's right, Cree thought appreciatively, Joyce had been an EMT in one of her previous careers. Amazing Joyce.

Loving her enormously, Cree said, "I'm so very glad to see you." It struck her as sounding formal and funny.

She told the story of being pursued by the boar-headed ghost as Joyce felt her limbs and tested her joints, inspected her abrasions, palpated her abdomen, found Cree's flashlight and checked the pupils of her eyes. At last Joyce made her get up, walk a bit, and balance on one foot.

"The finger's badly sprained, but otherwise I think you're all right," Joyce said incredulously. She looked up at the long flight of stairs, shaking her head. "You could have been killed! You're in shock, Cree. We've got to get you to a hospital."

"Nah. I'm great."

"Bullshit!" Joyce probably would have gone on more of a tirade, but another realization struck her: "Cree . . . you've never run away from a ghost before!" She sounded frightened.

"Not so good, huh? Not a good trend, no."

"Listen to yourself] Your being flippant just proves you're in shock."

Cree kept pacing, trying to flex out kinks, trying to get her thoughts together. At the rear of the entry hall, she caught sight of herself in the big, gilt-framed mirror there. Her hair was snarled, her jaw marred with a red swelling, her lips and teeth rimmed with blood. Both armpits of her jacket had sprung, and one pocket had become an upside-down flap of fabric. Her blouse was untucked and had lost buttons at top and bottom, and her knees had burst through the denim of her jeans. She'd been feeling almost giddy, opiated by shock and her unexpected rescue from the boar-headed man, but the image in the mirror threw cold water on that fast.

She looked like Lila.

Things were getting out of hand, she realized. There was work to be done, and there was a lot to tell Joyce. She whirled to face her just as a jarring buzz echoed from the dark hallway near the kitchen. Cree startled and retreated several steps before she realized it was the doorbell.

Joyce didn't seem as surprised. She opened the door to let Paul Fitzpatrick in.

The three of them sat on a bench in the emergency ward admitting room, waiting for someone to treat Cree's finger. In the nightly triage of New Orleans, Paul warned them, it might be a longish wait: the Big Easy had the highest violent crime rate in the country, and sprained fingers and contusions didn't rate against bullet and knife wounds. The finger throbbed and swelled to an obscene size despite the ice pack an orderly had given her.

Cree hated emergency wards. They were jagged, scary psychic spaces where a lot of pain and anxiety had been concentrated and where many deaths had taken place. The unending energy and determination of generations of medical staff were also here, a strong, bright river that cleansed and renewed, but nothing could wash away all the sorrows.

Cree concentrated on the welcome distraction of physical pain.

And on the growing excitement she felt. She knew it was partly the irrational euphoria of shock, but part of it was real, too: the thrill of the chase and the close encounter. Every new insight was costing her a lot, but she had grabbed a thread. It was more than the mask idea and the missing Mardi Gras files; she had learned something crucial from the ghost. This mystery was starting to unravel.

Back at the house, Cree's first thought upon seeing Paul was that she was not looking her best at the moment. But he came to her and warily held her shoulders, searching her face with concern. He looked good, Cree thought, in a frowsy, unshaven, hastily dressed sort of way.

But for all that, he struck her as diffident, too. Holding back. As they'd driven to the hospital in Paul's car, she'd told them the story of her realizations: the boar head as mask, the absence of Mardi Gras materials among Lila's family archives, the years missing from the Epicurus files at the house. Throughout, Paul had said next to nothing. When she'd asked him what he thought, he said only, "Right now, I'm just concerned about your health and your safety. We can worry about all that tomorrow." She got the sense he was stalling, giving himself time to appraise the situation from a psychiatrist's perspective.

Probably, she realized, he saw this as a psychological breakdown of grave consequence. Hysteria. Incipient schizophrenia.

That got her mad. Sitting here in the bright fluorescents of the waiting room, in that inimitable one A.M. emergency ward ambience, she knew she was emotionally labile from shock and exhaustion, and the best course would be to stay calm. But she couldn't let his skepticism be. Not after what she'd been through. The world owed her some credence.

"You're sitting there thinking I've flipped my friggin' gourd," she told him, "and that really pisses me off."

He shot a glance at Joyce, who just blinked expressionlessly. "I admit I'm trying to retain some objectivity here, Cree, but - "

" 'Objectivity'? How often has that been used as a euphemism for an unwillingness to face the obvious? How long did 'objectivity' keep multiple personality disorder, or Tourette's syndrome, from being properly diagnosed and adequately researched?"

"Only as long as it took for credible clinical evidence to accumulate," he said quietly.

His levelheadedness infuriated her further. "You want to see some friggin' 'credible evidence'? Lemme show you something!" And she lifted her shirt to show the four painful red stripes across her stomach, just above the waistband of her jeans. "That thing
grabbed
me, and I ripped myself out his grip, and he left some
evidence
right here!"

There were a dozen other people in the lounge, other triaged patients biding their time or tired family members waiting for news, and heads turned. Paul gently took her hands and made her lower her blouse. Cree felt suddenly ashamed of herself.

Joyce looked at the two of them, blinked again, then stood up and brushed her skirt smooth. "Well," she said briskly, "I think I'll go powder my nose." She gathered her purse and walked away.

Her absence changed everything as if someone had flipped a switch.

Cree got control of her breathing. "I'm sorry, Paul. I'm - I'm upset, I'm in shock. I'm all over the place."

"I've been wanting to call you."

The anger flared again, different this time: "Then why the hell didn't you?

"I wasn't retreating. I wasn't hiding. I just had some things of my own to sort out, and I needed to think about what you told me. I thought you deserved that. I wasn't sure what I'd say when I saw you again."

"So did you figure it out?" Still angry.

"Some, anyway. But I don't want to talk now. Not here. I'd rather wait for . . . happier circumstances. One thing at a time."

Part of her wanted to rage at him again, part of her wanted to give up and cry and put her face against his chest and surrender everything and be comforted. But old reflexes kicked in, holding her back: Mike, and, yes, Edgar, who had sacrificed so many shirts to Cree's tears. Suddenly she missed Ed terribly. If he'd been here, Cree would have let it all go, it would be simple. He'd seen it all, she didn't need to impress him or pretend anything. It was too complex with Paul.

He was right, though: one thing at a time. She nodded, but still he was looking at her warily, as if
he
were the one needing some reassurance. He did look stubbly and funky.

After a while she reached over and began unbuttoning his shirt. It was tricky with the sore finger. He didn't pull away or try to stop her, though he gave her a questioning eyebrow.

"You've got your shirt buttoned wrong," she explained.

He let her continue, and the moment felt very intimate.

By general consent a drink was called for, and of course Paul knew a bar for the occasion, even at two A.M. It was a battered-looking place in a charmingly decrepit district on Magazine Street. Even at this hour, there were at least a dozen other customers, making a soothing mutter of conversation. They took a table near the windows in front, and Cree and Paul ordered bottles of Jax beer; Joyce couldn't resist ordering a gaudy, oversized, New Orleans tourist drink. Cree's splinted finger stuck out awkwardly as she gripped her bottle.

The endorphins were wearing off, and the industrial-strength ibuprofen they'd given her hadn't kicked in yet, so every part of her body was starting to stiffen and complain. But that hot little flame still flared, blue-white, at her center - the hunger to understand and the sense that the mystery was at last becoming accessible.

The flame had an ugly green tinge, too: hatred of the boar-headed man.

"Paul, I need you to tell me some more about Mardi Gras. Particularly Epicurus. You're a member, right?"

"Yeah. I'm not the most fanatical participant by any means, though. Some of the society rites and traditions strike me as juvenile and they get old after a few decades. But it can be a lot of fun."

"So, what," Joyce asked, "a krewe is like a secret society? Like the KKK?"

Paul chuckled, shook his head. "Hardly! More of a civic group. Some of the more historic krewes cling to the trappings of mystery, the image of a secret brotherhood, but nowadays it's a halfhearted effort. Epicurus is like most krewes, pretty straightforward. Mainly, you just plan festivities at Carnival. Anybody can join Epicurus - if they can afford it. Meetings use Robert's Rules of Order, the secretary takes minutes, all very legit. Meetings are full of gossip and pranks, fraternal put-downs, and talk about money. You plan a few parties, build a float, do the Mardi Gras parade. That's it. Really, a krewe here is not so different from, oh, a softball team in other cities. In Seattle, you probably have gay teams and women's teams and office teams and all-lawyer teams, right? Basically the same thing."

"Give me a more psychological perspective. A more sociological one." Cree winced at the pain of talking and held the cold bottle against the bruises on her jaw.

Paul made a tired smile through a shadow of beard. "You know, I've never really thought about it — it's just what we
do
hereabouts? But let's see . . . The idea of a period of feasting before Lent is probably a Christian modification of older rites that go way back to pre-Christian times. Probably has roots in ancient fertility rites, that would account for the libidinous overtones here - the tradition of women baring their breasts and so on. Very sexualized. In New Orleans, it's an excuse to get together with people of your social sphere - in Epicurus's case, other rich people, or at least people from established families - and get plastered. You have masked parties at various members' houses. You indulge in extramarital flirtations, maybe even risk a quick fling. You make minor fools of yourselves, enough to show that though you're an aristocrat, your blood still runs hot, you know how to cut loose and have a good time. You provide yourselves with a year's worth of gossip that lubricates business and social transactions. There're status issues, too. You compete with other krewes for public profile and within your own membership for the role of king."