City of Masks (35 page)

"The parties get pretty uninhibited?"

"In Epicurus? Not as extreme as some, not by a long shot. But, sure, that's the point. That's the psychology of the mask - you can act out in ways you wouldn't if people knew who you were. Of course, most people settle into the same costumes, the same roles, year after year, so everybody more or less knows who's who after a while. At this point, it's just part of the ritual of license or disinhibition."

Cree was trying to see how the boar-masked rapist theory fit with the social lives of the Beaufortes of 1971 or '72. Clearly, she didn't yet know enough. Charmian knew the answers, she was sure, but would never reveal them.

Joyce had been frowning, at what Paul was saying or at her own thoughts. "I've got a question for you, Cree," she said at last. She sounded reluctant to bring it up. "We've talked about this over the years, but this boar-headed guy is going to stretch the principle. You always say experiences of the
living
can linger too, right?"

"If they're intense enough."

"Paul, you're probably skeptical, but just bear with me here, okay? Cree, this is a very
physical
ghost. He makes noise when he runs? You felt his hands on you?"

A shiver of revulsion shook Cree. "Yeah."

"And that's very rare," Joyce explained to Paul. "The most common manifestation of kinetic activity is poltergeists, which can move objects around, throw things, break things - "

"I see where you're going with this!" Cree felt a twinge of excitement. "Paul, poltergeist activity generally manifests around living adolescents, often girls in their early teens. They don't seem to consciously be doing it, but they are able to manifest psychokinetic activity. It's not a well-understood phenomenon. But Joyce's point is that poltergeists are an example of a living person manifesting a paranormal entity. Or paranormal activity, anyway. There's plenty of historical precedent for the idea - in the old days, it was considered one of the standard activities of witches. The so-called witches of Salem were supposedly able to manifest 'specters' that tormented the witnesses. There are a few contemporary examples in the literature, but I've always taken them with a grain of salt."

To his credit, Paul was willing to suspend disbelief and entertain the concept. "Meaning that maybe this ghost is not the . . . residuum of a dead person - he's an unconscious expression of some living person. Of someone's psychotic sexual sadism and anger." He tugged absently at his hair, pulling it into standing tufts, and Cree sensed he was frustrated at having his belief tested still further.

She felt the same way. True, the universe was a strange place, and human consciousness was the strangest thing in it. But this idea was getting very far out. It opened up too many possibilities. Yes, Cree felt the accumulated emotions and experiences of the living, but it had always been . . . impressionistic, a collage of synesthesic sensations, a "mood," an intuitive knowledge - not
seeing znc\ feeling
a distinct entity! On the other hand, the specter idea would explain the most troubling aspect of the boar-headed ghost, the lack of a perimortem resonance. If Joyce was right, the answer would be that there was no echo of a dying experience because the creature's originator hadn't died.

Just thinking about it, she felt a reprise of that vertigo she'd felt in midair over the stairwell. Free fall.

But it was not without parallels or precedent. Even Paul seemed troubled by the idea, and they all seemed to need a moment to think about it. Then Cree wondered: the boar-headed ghost as an unconscious expression of some living person's psychosis - what had given Joyce the idea in the first place?

After another moment, she turned to Joyce. "I take it you had an . . . interesting evening with Ronald Beauforte?"

33

P
AUL TOOK HIS TIME
driving back from the Garden District, cruising the quiet three A.M. streets, thinking. The events of the day, especially the last few hours, had put him in a lousy mood. He felt compromised, tainted by ambivalences and conflicting loyalties.

He was very attracted to Cree, fascinated by her. Seeing her after her ordeal tonight had broken his heart — she was in such disarray, such a state of shock and disconnection. Yet he'd also found himself unbearably attracted to her - her wild hair, that look of wide-eyed alarm, and later, when they'd talked about Lila, her fierce concentration. Even when she'd blazed at him - the way her emotions were right there, her anger and need and hurt. He could still feel the sweetness of her light, fumbling touch as she rebuttoned his shirt.

But she was right about the other things. His feelings toward her
were
compromised.

The supernatural issue - the existence of ghosts, enduring noncorporeal impulses, whatever you called them - was a big part of it. Like a religious person, Cree was someone who had built her life on belief, who acted out of belief. You could argue that
all
belief was a kind of commitment to the invisible, the unprovable, and that Cree's was no different from faith in God, or luck, or democracy, or the stock market. But despite all the warmth and fascination he felt toward her, he couldn't get past his skepticism. The things she claimed she saw, heard, felt, did - they struck him as unscientific. Impossible by the laws of physics. The idea they'd batted around for a while, that maybe Ron Beauforte was manifesting a specter or poltergeist that raped his sister, showed just how far out this stuff could get.

The depth of her commitment, the passion there, was arguably delusive, obsessive, morbid. Many people believed in ghosts, in some vague way, but few made it central to their lives. That being the case, it radically affected the prospect of a relationship with her. This wasn't a little difference of taste or opinion, something you could chuckle over like whether one person liked Chinese food and the other Italian. It was central to her sense of herself and the world, and Cree demanded it be taken seriously.

And he did - as some form of psychological disturbance. For all of Cree's intelligence and persuasiveness, for all the insights her intuitions or supposed supernatural experiences had provided again and again, when push came to shove, he couldn't deal with it as anything else.

He wished he could suspend rational analysis and just go with his heart. What did his heart say?
One in a million,
it said.
Go to her.
It said,
Trust this.
How would Cree's synesthetic sensibilities describe the feeling he had when he saw her? Swallows swooping and weaving in the sunlit air.

No, it was bigger than that. Being around Cree made him feel as he had as a child, those three years when his father had taken a hospital administration job up north and they'd endured the dour winters of Michigan. He'd learned the way winter makes you appreciate the change of seasons. That first day in early April when earth and sky seem to celebrate, and your whole being opened to it. You became something of a blithe spirit in a new world. That's how being around Cree made him feel.

If he could forget the delusional pathology represented by her belief in ghosts.

He'd done his best to rationalize it. For all their unconventionality, her methodologies as a psychologist were slightly more defensible. Back when he was an undergraduate, he'd taken a cultural anthropology course that had briefly explored "etic" and "emic" approaches to understanding other cultures. Advocates for the "etic" approach insisted that you had to study cultures and belief systems from something of a distance, bringing an objective and comparative perspective to bear. The "emic" people argued that, no, you couldn't know how people thought, why they behaved the way they did, what traditions meant, unless you stepped inside. You had to experience what the subject tribe or group experienced, adopt their beliefs, see the world through their eyes. The best examples of the emic school were the anthropologists who studied the mysticism of Native American tribes by actually taking hallucinogens during traditional divinatory rites and vision quests.

Back then, he'd flattered himself by deciding that if he became an anthropologist, he'd combine the rigor and objectivity of the etics and the open-mindedness, the daring deep immersion, of the emics.

If you could apply the same concept to psychology, Cree was definitely the emic type. She empathically entered the world of her client, felt what the client felt. She learned the client's problems from the inside out, took them as her own. She
became
the client. She said she even became the supposed ghost, as much as she could stand to. Emic to the hilt.

Fine and dandy. Except that ghosts didn't exist. A woman who conversed with and communed telepathically with ghosts was not quite sane.

He crossed Canal Street and navigated through the streets of the Quarter. It almost always felt good to be enfolded again in those narrow ways, the balconies overhanging, the patchwork facades. It felt like home, especially at this time of night when even the die-hard tourists had petered out. Squint your eyes, and you could easily imagine you were here in 1840, or 1760. The old buildings and rough textures, the whole style of the place, created something of a refuge from the twenty-first century and its uncertainties.

But tonight it did little for him. He felt sour and depressed as he found a parking space and pulled the Beemer into it. He went upstairs, unlocked the door, kicked it open, and threw his keys on the counter.

The ghost thing was only one of the compromises, the conflicted loyalties.

He thought about what he had to do for a moment, then decided to fortify himself. He poured a couple of fingers of Jack Daniel's into a tall glass, swirled it, sniffed it, and then tipped some back. It scalded away some of the sour taste in his mouth.

He picked up the phone, dialed, waited. It was after three in the morning, but she had insisted he call any time, day or night. Serve her right if it woke her out of a sound sleep. Or maybe she wouldn't answer. He hoped she wouldn't.

But the phone rang only once before Charmian picked up.

"She's very smart, Charmian. She zeroed in on the right years, she figured out the mask, she figured out the Mardi Gras connection. Then she deduced that there might be something in your files at the house, went over there, and broke into them."

At the other end of the line, Charmian spluttered in speechless outrage.

"Needless to say she didn't find anything," Paul went on. "But she will. She and her assistant are top-notch researchers. Even if they don't get at the Epicurus archives, there's bound to be something at the
Times
Picayune
records. And they're looking for Josephine."

Her voice, when she regained it, was acerbic: "And you are calling me at this hour because — ?"

"Because you told me to keep you informed of developments."

"And precisely what has developed at three-fourteen in the morning?"

"After she broke in the file cabinets, she says the boar-headed ghost chased her. She went off the stairwell, could have broken her neck. Her assistant called me, and we went over there. I just got back from the emergency ward."

"Was she badly hurt?"

"No, but - "

"How very unfortunate."

"I hope you've got a plan B. Because she'll be back at it tomorrow, Charmian. This isn't staying under the rug. Maybe it's time to tell her the truth."

Charmian thought about that a long time. Paul heard nothing but her breath, steady, controlled, for a full minute.

"You may be right," she said at last. "You are probably right."

"I think we've exhausted your attempts at deflection, Charmian. It's time to face the truth and start trying to figure out how to cope with the consequences."

Again, she needed to think about that. "Consequences," she said at last. "Paul, you're very drawn to her, aren't you? And she reciprocates, doesn't she?"

"That's irrelevant to - "

"No, it's not irrelevant at all. Because you two
would
be something very special together. And I think you really want that, and if you have half a brain, if you're even half a man, you'll go to her. But you've been something of a double agent in all this, haven't you? How do you think she'll react when she finds that out? If she has any trust issues at all, which we both know she does, you think that won't wreck any chances you might have with the oh-so-vulnerable Dr. Black?"

Now it was Paul's turn to be speechless with anger. It should never have gone this far. There seemed to be no limit to Charmian's willingness to intrigue, to control everyone around her, to bring anyone down if she didn't get what she wanted. At last he croaked, "You mean you'll tell her about our . . . arrangement . . . if I don't keep doing what you want."

At the other end of the line, Charmian made a pleased sound in her throat. "Exactly! And before you play indignant with me, Paul, let me remind you, you signed on from the start. You know what's at stake here. You're right, it's time for the truth. But even in your most self-righteous moments, you'll agree that it needs to be revealed . . . tactfully, right? So now I'm going to tell you exactly what we're going to do."

34

D
ON'T PRETEND TO BELIEVE ME
, Paul. It's condescending. I don't need it right now."

She hadn't meant to say it like that, but the tension she felt was making her cross, impatient. She was leaning against the door of the BMW as Paul piloted it through the sunlit streets. Even with the sunglasses she'd put on, the light seemed too bright to Cree. She felt like road kill, but six hours of sleep, a scalding shower, and a half hour of cautious yoga stretching had taken away the worst of the pain and stiffness. Joyce was long gone to City Hall and the libraries, charged with locating Josephine Dupree. At Paul's suggestion, they were going to the office of Phil Galveston, the man who had been the Epicures organization's secretary for thirty years and who had charged himself with maintaining an archive of the krewe's activities.

If the Beaufortes hadn't kept records of the years after 1968, maybe Phil Galveston had. Maybe in his files they'd find photos of the man in the boar-head mask, and a name for him. If Cree's assumption was correct.

Paul shook his head. "I'm not pretending. I'm curious - I want to understand how the parts fit together. You seem to have an integrated methodology, you have your version of clinical observation and literature. So far, it looks pretty consistent and - "

"Yeah. The only hard part is the fundamental premise."

"That what we're talking about is the psychology of dead people? Yes. That's hard. Can you blame me? Put the shoe on the other foot, Cree. Suppose you'd been going merrily along with your private psychiatry practice, never had a paranormal experience in your life, and then you met
me,
and I told you the things you're telling me. How would you react? Would you revise your whole personal and professional belief system, overnight, on the basis of what I said?"

Cree shrugged and looked out the window, giving the point only grudgingly.

"So go on," he urged. "You were saying you learned something last night, something about the ghost's affective complex."

Cree sighed. "I have to give you some background first. I use the word 'complex' the same way Freud did, as in Oedipus complex, inferiority complex, and so on - a connected group of repressed ideas that compel habitual actions of thought, feeling, and action. My point was going to be that though every ghost relives the experience of the death to a large degree, the act of physically dying is not necessarily the foremost aspect of the dying person's experience. At the moment of death, people experience an enormous range of emotions. It's not just about pain or fear. They might remember or relive things that seem unconnected with the circumstances of death. They often yearn toward or call out to loved ones. They might feel lonely or ecstatic or serene. They might cling to, or retreat toward reassuring thoughts. Sometimes their concerns seem at first trivial or absurd."

"Okay. But you were saying something about 'distillation' - "

"A dying person's perimortem emotions and thoughts are not random. They derive from some central, overpowering concern or issue in his or her life. Death is a moment of absolute desperation and surrender, and a person's thoughts home in on a crucial, defining image, event, emotion, or concern. If I can understand what that is, I can release the ghost."

"Example, please."

Cree took a moment to recall one that was appropriate. "A case in Arizona. The ghost - the man who had died - was a Hopi Indian, not particularly identified with Native American culture, who was making extra money stealing relics from historic Hopi sites. The physical circumstance of his death was that he'd gotten trapped in an under ground kiva, badly injured after part of the rock ceiling fell in. So the immediate dying experience was one of physical pain, fear, and the frantic desire to try to survive, all very typical. The secondary experience was one of guilt at desecrating the holy place, and with the guilt came regret over having ignored his grandfather's lifelong pleas to understand and respect traditions — this accident and injury seemed like a punishment for that, for which he blamed and hated his grandfather. The ghost relived moments of conflict with his grandfather from twenty years earlier, an incident when he'd driven away from the grandfather's home after an argument, swearing at him and deliberately running over a couple of his chickens. That's the affect that witnesses felt when they saw his ghost, and that's what I first encountered, too - rage, impulsive violence, resentment, shame. Very scary. But deeper still was another layer, more affirmative - the knowledge that his grandfather loved him unconditionally and forgave him. That was associated with a look his grandfather had given him, literally a single momentary gaze, when they were out fishing when he was a kid. Sunset, just the two of them, a powerful glance of kinship and love. In its pain and remorse, the dying man's psyche yearned for, tried to flee to, that . . . sanctuary."

Remembering brought tears to her eyes, and she was very glad she had sunglasses on. She didn't look at Paul, didn't know how he was hearing it, but she decided,
Screw him, he can take it or leave it.

"And that's what you used, right?" he said softly. "You helped him . . . find his way to that sanctuary? Helped him accept that the grandfather's love could overcome and transcend his transgressions?"

"Yes. I led him to his grandfather's eyes at the moment of that gaze."

Paul came up behind cars at a light and stopped. They sat there without talking, listening to muffled heavy metal music from the SUV in front of them,

"That's a beautiful story," Paul said, shaking his head. "Man! Every time I get around you, it's another . . . revelation. You . . . you kind of boot my brain into
orbit
every time we talk, so help me."

Cree didn't answer. She was glad he seemed to understand and appreciate. But it was becoming increasingly clear to her that their metaphysical differences were a real impediment to having a relationship. Last night, when they'd gone back to the Garden District to retrieve the other cars, Joyce had driven away immediately, leaving Paul and Cree standing together in the cool night, just down the block from Beauforte House. "Would you like to spend the night at my place?" Paul had asked simply. By then Cree had been on the edge of exhaustion. She'd put her arms around him and leaned her face against his. He'd held her softly, careful of her injuries, and for a full minute they'd just stood in the humid night air like that, and it felt very nice. He was warm, and she liked the rhythm of his bones, the way their bodies fit.

But other things didn't fit.

"Would you sleep with a woman you thought was presenting as schizophrenic?" she'd asked.

Against the side of her face, she'd felt his cheek move in a smile. "Not unless I was really head over heels. I'd have to be pretty far gone."

Yes, he'd framed it as sort of a joke, and it was a sweet way of affirming his attraction. But it had also been a deflection. Maybe she was still fleeing from her own ghosts, but Cree didn't think she could enter into any real intimacy unless it was truly reciprocal, equal, balanced. And as long as Paul believed she was at the very least misguided, and quite possibly in the grip of a delusive, clinically definable, aberrant mental condition, that equality wasn't possible.

She had pulled away, given his hand one last squeeze, and gone to her car.

"Here we are," Paul said, and Cree roused from her thoughts to notice her surroundings. Paul pulled over in front of a big brick building, three stories tall, with a Greek-revival-style entrance framed by four white columns. On the side of the building, a decorative sign in the style of the nineteenth century announced that it was Galveston & Sons Press.

"Phil's a fussy ol' fuddy-duddy," Paul told her as they went up the steps. "I don't know him well, but my father knew him, and of course I see him maybe twice a year at Epicurus functions. This is his family's business, since forever. It's a bindery, too."

A receptionist at the lobby desk told them how to find Phil's office; which adjoined the main press room. The noise of machines and the smells of ink and paper grew around them as they headed down the building's long central corridor. Cree's nervous anticipation grew with each step: This could be where they identified the boar-headed man. His identity, if her theory was correct, would make all the difference.

"For me," she finished, "that case was like watching three movies projected simultaneously onto the same screen - that raging moment of death, the fight with the grandfather, the long-ago evening of fishing. At any given moment, I had to figure out what image I was seeing, where I should start, which was most important. This case is the same way. When I experience the ghost, I sense many narratives at play at once - the affective complex of the ghost."

Paul nodded. They had come to a pair of wide glass doors that opened into a huge, high-ceilinged room lined with gigantic printing and binding machines. When Paul opened the door, the racket of the equipment enveloped them. Paul mouthed "Phil Galveston?" and a blue-uniformed technician gestured toward the back of the room, where a stairway led to a balcony lined with glass-enclosed offices. They walked along the rows of machines, skirting stacks of printed materials on pallets. Workers eyed them incuriously as they passed.

They climbed the metal stairs and entered a glass-walled lobby, where a secretary greeted them. She was a striking young black woman with the most elaborate hairdo Cree had ever seen, layers of oiled braids and curls woven and piled high on her head, and three-inch, curling fingernails. The sign on her desk said her name was Sharon Kincaid.

"Mr. Galveston is very sorry," she told them, "but he can't be here to help you. He got called to an emergency at our plant in Gretna." After all the rising expectation, the sudden letdown felt crushing to Cree. But Sharon smiled and went on. "So he told me to get you whatever you wanted from the Epicurus files. He got a whole room off his office just for those files. Sort of his hobby, you know? You all just have seat at the table there and tell me what you want, I'll go get it for you."

They told her they were looking for photos and clippings of Epicurus parties and balls and parades for 1969 through 1972. They didn't need dues ledgers, charitable donation receipts, float construction invoices, or the rest of it.

"I am sorry. Mr. Galveston is very particular, I'm supposed to bring out only one file at a time? It's a
lot of
stuff, the records have a way of getting mussed up. I'll be happy to bring you the other years when you're done with the first one."

They started with 1969. Sharon disappeared down a corridor between glassed offices, leaving them alone in the lobby.

Mr. Galveston was apparently an old-fashioned boss who liked the catbird seat. From this vantage they could see the entire printing room, the rows of web presses gobbling endless belts of white paper from gigantic rolls, the cutting and binding machines with their rhythmically rising and falling arms. Forklifts came and went with loads of bound books on pallets or giant spools of paper on spindles. The double-glass wall kept most of the noise out, but the floor vibrated slightly.

"You look frightened, Cree," Paul said quietly.

In fact, she felt sick with anticipation. "I was going to tell you what I learned from getting so . . . close to the ghost last night. First, his pursuit and rape is not his dying experience. I can't get any sense of the act of dying. That's been bothering me from the start, enough that I'd almost consider Joyce's specter idea. But for now, I'm still going to operate on the theory that the boar-headed man is a memory - a crucial, pivotal memory that in some way defines his life. The memory perseverates because it was
so
intense an experience - a peak of sadistic indulgence. I have to assume he perseverates because the guilt and regret he feels are so extreme, even though I can't find them in him. He's reenacting his worst deed. His perseverating as this pursuit and rape is his
self punishment.
In effect, he's condemned himself to reenact his most destructive, self-demeaning act."

Paul nodded thoughtfully, as if they were consulting about a living person. "That's how you'll reach him, right? That'll be your handle on him? Appeal to his contrition?"

"Maybe. It'd be nice if it was that easy." Cree slowed, feeling her nervousness spike, feeling suddenly not equal to the revelation that she was sure was imminent. "But there's one other thing I got last night, Paul. His arousal is predatory and sadistic as much as it is sexual. The pursuit and Lila's terror, the sense of power that gives him, are just as important to him as the rapes that culminate it. A big part of the thrill is the sense of
violation.
There's an element of that in all sexual encounters, even normal sexuality, the violation of social distance, right? But in his case, there's an acute sense of
violating taboos.
That really floats this bastard's boat."

"Well, sure, rape is pretty damned taboo - "

"I'm afraid it's more than that. I think it's the taboo against incest. He's related to his victim, Paul, he's aware of how taboo it is. That's part of the excitement for him."

Paul's shoulders slumped and his eyes fell to his empty hands on the tabletop. After a moment he stared out across the press room floor, a distant gaze oblivious to the activity below. Cree knew he was plugging the idea into his analysis of Lila; more, she could see genuine compassion in his face. He was as nervous as she was, drumming all ten fingers rapidly.