Unbroken (2 page)

And how could Rebecca ever begin to explain the shocking secret she’d learned in New Orleans: that
her
real name was Bowman, not Brown. That she and the awful Helena were actually cousins, and that either she or Helena would have to die for the curse to end?

Now that Rebecca was back in New York, she sometimes wondered if the whole thing had been a dream — or a nightmare. She tried not to think too much about the night the curse ended, when she had almost died on the steps of the Bowman tomb. But it was impossible to forget. Lisette had helped her run away, and a boy named Anton Grey — the other person Rebecca had connected with in New Orleans — had helped her escape from the cemetery. But there’d been no escape for Helena. The stone angel that loomed over the Bowman tomb had crashed to the ground, killing Helena instantly.

That meant the curse was over, and Lisette could finally rest in peace. But Rebecca still felt guilty and sad and confused about everything that had happened in New Orleans. She was still in touch with Anton, and really wanted to see him again. But Rebecca wasn’t sure she wanted to return to that haunted
city any time soon. And she was a hundred percent positive she didn’t want to deal with anything involving ghosts and curses ever again.

Rebecca’s dad was waiting for them in the tiny restaurant, at the end of a row of brick houses in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. He’d been in the area anyway for work, so Ling had suggested Rebecca invite him along. Rebecca appreciated how well her dad got along with her friends — he never seemed stuffy or unapproachable like some other parents she knew.

The three of them sat by the window, at a scrubbed wooden table, and they each ordered chowder as an appetizer. But later, whenever Rebecca thought about this particular evening, she could barely remember what else they ate. One minute she was unfolding her napkin, and the next she was looking straight into the piercing blue eyes of that strange boy.

Through the steamed-up window she could see his pale face, out there in the cold street, gazing in at her. Rebecca let out an involuntary squeak and almost knocked her water glass to the floor.

“Are you OK, honey?” her father asked. All Rebecca could do was shake her head and stare at the window. One moment the boy was there, his angular face bright as the moon, and then he was gone.

“What is it?” Ling peered at the steamy window, following Rebecca’s gaze.

“I thought … I thought I saw someone,” she stammered. There was no point in trying to explain it all now. Her father would just get worried if he thought some creepy guy was stalking her. “It’s nothing. Just my imagination.”

Throughout dinner Rebecca kept glancing up at the window in case the boy came back. She was so preoccupied wondering who he was, and why he seemed to be following her, Rebecca didn’t realize that her father was asking her a question.

“Rebecca?” Ling looked excited. “What do you think?”

“About what?”

“About us renting a place in the Quarter during your spring break,” said her father, pushing his plate away. “Ling could come with us.”

“The Quarter?” Rebecca’s brain was struggling to catch up. “You mean, the French Quarter? In New Orleans?”

Her father gave her a concerned look. “Too soon?” he asked quietly.

Ling frowned at her. “But it’s, like, almost a year since you left,” she said. “Don’t you think it would be fun?”

Rebecca nodded. She didn’t trust herself to speak.
Fun
wasn’t quite the word that sprang to mind.

“My company has just signed a tech contract with the city council,” her father was saying, “so I need to go down there soon anyway for meetings. And I thought maybe you might want to meet up with your friends.”

“I don’t really have so many friends there,” Rebecca mumbled. Ling looked at her as though she was crazy.

“Hello? What about Anton? Tall, cute, rich, texts you all the time? The one who helped you with that house-rebuilding project in — where was it again?”

“Tremé,” Rebecca’s father told Ling. Rebecca was glad he was doing the talking, because just the mention of Anton’s name suddenly rendered her tongue-tied.

“Why the Quarter?” Rebecca asked. Her father was looking at her so expectantly, she had to say something, even though her head was reeling — New Orleans, Anton, the boy outside the window …

“Your Aunt Claudia knows a place we can rent there. Tremé is just a short walk away, Ling, if you want to see the house Rebecca and Anton helped fix up. Maybe there are some other projects you girls could help with. There’s still plenty of rebuilding work to do.”

“It would be my absolute
dream
spring break,” Ling enthused.

“I think it would be good for us as well.” Her father shot Rebecca one of his trademark Meaningful Looks. “Starting over again with the city, in a way. A fresh start. Able to come and go without … without fear of anything.”

“I guess,” said Rebecca, and she tried to smile when he squeezed her arm. However hard she tried to forget, her father was also a member of the Bowman family, born and raised in
New Orleans. He’d lived in self-imposed exile for years, but Rebecca knew that he missed it — the way she would miss New York if someone told her she could never come home again.

“Fear … hmm, that’s a good point,” Ling said, ripping a bread roll apart. “My parents will probably say there’s way too much crime down there.”

“We’ll watch out for you.” Rebecca’s dad stared down at the tablecloth. Rebecca wondered if he was thinking about the other kinds of dangers she’d had to confront in New Orleans last year, ones Ling could never imagine.

But that was all in the past now. Maybe her father was right. A fresh start, in a different neighborhood, with Ling by her side for support — that might be the best possible thing. And going back to New Orleans meant seeing Anton again. Just thinking of him washed another wave of nerves through Rebecca’s body. She’d never met any guy in New York who was anywhere near as smart and interesting and — she had to admit — as handsome as Anton Grey.

When her father stood up to pay the bill, and Ling went to the bathroom, Rebecca tapped a quick text to Anton into her phone: going 2 NOLA 4 spring break with dad + my friend Ling. But the message failed; the reception in the restaurant was terrible. She’d have to go outside.

Rebecca wriggled into her coat and darted out the red front door. It was drizzling, so she huddled under the small awning,
shoulders hunched, resending her text. When she looked up, the boy with blue eyes was standing right in front of her, close enough to touch.

“Please,” he said. His eyes were the deep blue of the Chagal painting her father liked so much in the Met: They were intense, almost unnatural. The boy was tall, like Anton, but his face was as white as chiseled marble, and he sounded foreign — British or Irish or something.

“What do you want?” Rebecca hissed, edging toward the restaurant door. Just because he was good-looking didn’t mean this guy wasn’t dangerous.

“You don’t know me,” he said, still staring at her, “but I … I’ve seen you before.”

“Are you following me?”

“No — please!” the boy pleaded, and he stepped forward, one hand outstretched as though he was going to grab her. “I’m not talking about last week. I mean last year, or even longer ago. You were down in New Orleans. I saw you with Lisette.”

Lisette
. The name hit Rebecca harder than the cold wind. The trees that lined the street, budding their spring leaves, whispered the name over and over:
Lisette
,
Lisette
,
Lisette
.

Nobody in New York — apart from Rebecca’s dad — knew about Lisette. It had been ages since anyone had said her name out loud. Rebecca’s stomach twisted; she felt short of breath.

Something surged through her — a sickening dread, charged with the electric tingle of excitement. This boy knew Lisette.
He knew her name, at any rate, and he was saying that he’d seen Rebecca
with
Lisette. So did this mean he was a ghost, too? No, that was ridiculous. It was impossible.

“I saw you with her on St. Philip Street, in Faubourg Tremé,” the boy went on, his eyes huge in his face. “It was November. Not the November just passed. The year before.”

“Uh-uh.” Rebecca shook her head, averting her own eyes to avoid the boy’s intense gaze. She could barely speak. How could he possibly know all this?

Every November, on the anniversary of her mother’s death, Lisette had made the long pilgrimage on foot from Lafayette Cemetery in the Garden District to the streets she’d known as a child in Tremé.

“You were with her that day,” the boy was telling her, and Rebecca’s feet felt frozen to the spot. Every word he said clanged in her ears, loud as cathedral bells. “I saw you with her, holding her hand.”

Rebecca bit her lip, still saying nothing. She’d
had
to hang on tight to Lisette’s hand that day, because that was the only way she could see the other ghosts of New Orleans. If she’d dropped Lisette’s hand, the ghost world around her, thronged with the dead of many centuries, would have disappeared from sight.

“I saw you with her,” the boy said again, a desperate edge to his voice. Rebecca’s heart thudded. Nobody could have seen her that day on St. Philip Street, because when Rebecca held Lisette’s hand, she disappeared from view. She was invisible,
just as Lisette was invisible to other people. They could walk through the crowded streets of the city, unseen and undetected by anyone. Anyone, that is, except other ghosts.

As though he understood what she was looking for, the boy inched back his jacket. His white shirt was stained with a huge dark splotch of what might have been ink, or was more likely blood.

Rebecca gasped. The day she had walked through the streets of New Orleans with Lisette, she’d seen dozens of people with similar stains sullying their clothing, or clotted and mashed on their skin. They were wounds, Lisette had explained — from knives, gunshots, chains, blunt instruments. If someone was murdered, they kept walking the earth as a ghost. The signs of violent deaths were visible everywhere in the ghost world. This boy looked as though he’d taken some mortal blow to the stomach.

“You have to help me,” he said. “I have to return to New Orleans tomorrow. Please. I need someone who can find something for me. Something very precious. Very valuable. If it isn’t found, then I’m doomed to haunt the docks, here and down there, for eternity. Back and forth, back and forth …”

He looked so utterly despairing, Rebecca felt sorry for him.

“What’s this thing you need to find?” she asked. But before the boy answered, the front door of the restaurant squeaked open.

“There you are!” It was Ling. “Aren’t you freezing to death out here?”

In the instant it took for Rebecca to glance at Ling in the restaurant doorway, the boy with blue eyes disappeared.

One speedy cab ride later, Rebecca was back in her bedroom. She was trying to calm down from her encounter with the blue-eyed ghost when her phone began buzzing like an enraged wasp.

“Hey,” said a familiar voice. Anton. Her heart skipped, just as it always did when they talked on the phone. “Is it too late to call?”

“Sure — no. I mean, it’s OK.” Rebecca pushed her door shut. Should she tell him about the ghost boy downtown? She hadn’t said a word about it to Ling or her father, but she was aching to share the story with someone.

“So,” said Anton. “I got your text.”

Right.
After the confrontation with the ghost, Rebecca had forgotten all about texting Anton. Now, something in the tone of his voice worried Rebecca. He didn’t sound very enthusiastic.

“The thing is …” he said, trailing off.

“What?” Rebecca braced herself. He was going to give some excuse for not seeing her, she just knew it. Too much time had passed since they last saw each other.

Too much time since they last kissed.

Rebecca felt herself blushing. He probably had a girlfriend in New Orleans now. This was probably going to be one of those awkward “we have to talk” conversations.

“It’s … It’s Toby,” Anton said at last. “Toby Sutton. He’s run away from home and from school — his new school, the one in Mississippi.”

Rebecca swallowed hard. She felt relieved that the “thing” was about Toby, but no news about Toby Sutton was ever good. Toby had been part of Helena Bowman’s gang; his sister, Marianne, was Helena’s best friend. He was thuggish at the best of times, and to say that he disliked Rebecca was a major understatement. Wherever Toby went, trouble turned up as well — usually in the form of an arson attack. He’d even tried to burn down his own school.

“So,” said Anton, “I think he’s hiding out somewhere in New Orleans. He’s been sending me all these weird texts, rambling stuff about unfinished business. He’s still pretty bitter about what … you know, what happened to Helena. If he finds out you’re back in New Orleans, I don’t know what he’ll do.”

“Maybe he won’t find out that I’m there,” Rebecca suggested, though she knew this was unlikely. Some Temple Mead girl would probably spot her at the airport and send alert texts to everyone on the entire Gulf Coast. And then Toby would turn up with a bad attitude and a box of matches. Who knew what would happen?

“Maybe.” Anton sounded doubtful. “But I was kind of hoping that …”

“What?” Rebecca had to prompt him again. They were always
really awkward with each other on the phone. Texting was so much easier.

“Well, um,” Anton mumbled. “I was thinking that maybe you would come to the Spring Dance with me. Your friend could come as well. There’s a new guy at school from California. He doesn’t know anyone here, and I promised him I’d help him find a date. Spring Dance is stupid, I know, but it’s kind of a big deal here.”

The Spring Dance. Rebecca knew
exactly
how big a deal it was. It was one of the social highlights of the teen year in the Garden District, when the boys of St. Simeon’s escorted the girls of Temple Mead to a dance at the country club. The girls in her old class at Temple Mead were probably working themselves up into a hysterical fever pitch about it right now.