City of Masks (41 page)

The relentless gaze probed deep, and Cree felt a growing discomfort. "I'm a parapsychologist. A ghost hunter." Josephine's eyes widened slightly, and Cree felt she had to hurry on or she would lose the old woman again. "Lila tried to move back into Beauforte House. She was . . . troubled . . . by a ghost there. It attacked her. Lila asked me to investigate. I've seen the ghost, I know who it is. But Lila has been badly shaken up. She tried to kill herself yesterday, Josephine! If I can't figure out exactly what happened back then, if I can't help her be rid of the ghost, she'll just try again and again until she succeeds. Charmian won't tell me anything. You're the only one who can tell me. Please, Josephine!"

Josephine's rigid stance didn't change as she considered that, but the news of Lila's suicide attempt clearly hurt her, and suddenly she looked very old and brittle. " 'The truth shall set ye free'?" she rasped.

"Yes. Exactly." Cree allowed herself a tiny welling of relief: Josephine had not resisted the idea of ghosts or hauntings in the slightest.

"And you gone help Lila 'cause you know the
truth.
You help her see the truth what happened, she gone get all better."

Cree nodded, feeling the relief spread. Josephine understood and would cooperate. "I hope so."

Josephine took the photo from Cree's hand, stared at it with that ancient look for a moment. Then the creased lips turned down, the wooden face moved on its bones, pain and sorrow and love all worked together. Leaving the tea on the counter, she turned and walked stiffly to the door to the screened back porch. Cree felt the disturbance in her: The old woman was burning up inside.

The man hacking at the soil paused to look over at them, his sweat-sheened forehead creasing when he saw Cree. "You okay, Auntie?" he called across the yard.

"You just go on workin', Hiram. I'se talkin' to this lady."

Hiram hesitated, doubtful, then dutifully went back to his mattock work, his powerful back and shoulder muscles banding with each stroke.

"You can sit, you want to," Josephine told Cree. Three wired-together wooden chairs stood on the canted deck, facing the backyard. Cree sat, but the old woman stood looking out at the expanse of weedy grass, the garden plots where Hiram worked, and trees that stretched away into the scrubby forest beyond. One of her stiff hands knotted and kinked in jerky, painful motions.

" 'The truth shall set ye free,' " Josephine intoned again, shaking her grizzled head slowly. "You just a baby, ghost lady. You like me, way I was. Got the same idea. But what if you wrong? What's left o' your faith, you wrong? What you do with your faith? How you live, after that?"

"I'm not sure what - "

"You want to know why I killed that man."

"I know why. I need to know the details of what he did to Lila and what Charmian did when she found out about it. I need to know more about him, what kind of person he really was, so I can figure out how to set his ghost free."
And why you left the hexes. And how it connects with the
murder of Temp Chase. And . . .
But that would come later, if the old woman seemed willing to go that far.

Josephine digested that for a moment, her eyes losing their immediate focus as some internal view took precedence. When she spoke again, it was with a quiet, impassioned urgency: "You gotta understand how I loved that girl. She was a . . . like a
star,
so bright, even when she a baby." Josephine put a hand to her hard, hollow stomach. "I had a sickness when I was a chil', couldn't have no chil'ren my own. Maybe she was that for me, closest I could have to my own daughter. But that not all of it. She every shinin', pretty thing you could ever think of. Strong, determined, she take on the whole worl', she got to! Biggest heart there could be. I love that girl, do anything for her. Oh, Charmian, she love her chil'ren, too, don't ever doubt that! But a different way, more like a lady lion love her cubs, teach 'em be strong hunters, be kings an' queens. She never see inside Lila like me. Lila, she knew that. We close."

"Lila has told me that many times. How important you were to her."

"An' what happen to her was so bad. What he do to her."

"It was the worst thing that could happen. That's why Lila has hidden it from herself. But it isn't staying down, it isn't staying forgotten. His ghost chases her and rapes her again. It's all coming back, and it's killing her now."

Josephine looked at Cree with an unfathomable grief in her eyes, and something else — a look directed at Cree herself, something like pity. "That the worst, huh? That what you think? That the worst?"

It was clearly a rhetorical question, and the way Josephine asked it gave Cree a chill. What could possibly be worse?

But Josephine had opened the screen door and was beckoning Cree to follow her. Hiram paused again, shaded his eyes to look Cree over, then wiped his brow and went back to work. By the side of the steps, the old woman found a gnarled stick that she used to help her hobble over the uneven ground.

"Hiram, this here lady's a healin' woman. You don't mind if I's soundin' upset, you just keep workin'. We got stuff to talk about, you hear?"

"Yes'm," Hiram said.

Closer, Cree could see that he was a huge man and was older than he looked from a distance, in his forties. The look he gave Cree contained a clear warning:
You on notice - you don't do nothin' to hurt my old aunt.

"This my family house," Josephine said as they walked on. "I's born here in 1920. When Mama moved to N'Orleans, I went with her, but one my brothers stay on here - he Hiram's gran'daddy, Hiram get the place when I's gone. When I lef the Beaufortes, an' then Mama died, I moved back. She a root doctor, Mama. People call her a conjo woman. Had a little shop on St. Philip Street, made her livin' at it. Knew all the ol' medicines, cures, charms. Learned from her momma and aunts. Some these plots here, still the same one she made when I's a girl."

"I read about her in a newspaper. You must have learned a lot from her."

Josephine tipped her head ambiguously as she walked on to the end of the grassy area, where several dirt paths led into the scrub. The view to the left was closed by the wall of the levee, overgrown with bushes and vines; above, the tree canopy cast a mottled shade. The smell of the bayou was stronger here and mixed with a sharp smell like insecticide the ubiquitous stink of chemical factories.

Josephine started down one of the paths, stiff and slow. "You know how he wore that pig mask? How he chase her an' let her go and chase her again? How he torture her?"

"Yes."

"I's out that night. Should have been home, never would have happened. Some the other colored servants in the distric', they go their own party, I go along." Josephine's voice was bone weary with self-condemnation, sepulchral. "Lila come home, she feelin' a little sick and besides she never like seein' her folks so drunk."

"Did she tell you? Is that how you found out?"

Josephine stopped beneath one of the windy, scaly-barked trees. Her eyes were beyond sad and beyond angry now, more like the eyes of a dead person. "No. Not the first way I know. Come home, there's things knocked over. I figure it's party night, maybe some Beauforte friend extra drunk and cuttin' loose, I straighten things up before Charmian gets in. But when I see Lila in the mornin', she's
walkin'
wrong an' her
eyes
are wrong!
Her fire,
see, her fire was different! Mos'ly it was out, but then it burn
too
hot. Then it out again. An' she
scared
—
scared to talk to me, even look at me! An' later I'm doin' my job, I'm changin' her sheets an' I see the blood. After that I ask her an' she tell me."

Josephine was vibrating slightly, a shiver that shook every inch of her gaunt frame. The habitual control had vanished as the ancient pain and rage took over again, and now her voice was just a rasp, coming out under great pressure: "I's a Christian woman. I knowed to kill's a sin. But I knowed he had to be punished. Couldn't do anything right away, seemed to take forever, havin' to wait. Even then, didn't mean to kill him. Didn't go into the lib'ary thinkin' to kill him. But when the time come, Lord Jesus, I did it, I took that iron an' I hit him. He layin' there, movin' around like a snake with its back broke, an' that exactly what he was, a snake, an' Lord forgive, I took that poker an' hit him in his head. Hard as I could. Did it again! Didn't hardly know I's doin' it. An' after that, that snake didn't move no more. No he didn't. No he didn't. God Jesus, help me an' forgive me!"

Josephine had gotten breathless and unsteady, and now she sort of swooned as her eyes rolled up and the tall straight body toppled into the bushes. Cree rushed to her and held her, lifted her out of the tangle. They limped together to a fallen log and Cree helped her sit, folding her body in long rigid sections like a hinged thing.

A terrible sense of alarm shrilled in Cree's nerves, the awareness that something was very wrong.

"Josephine, I don't understand. Richard Beauforte died of
poison.
You poisoned his drink. Something in his amaretto."

Josephine looked up at her with those frighteningly dead eyes, eyes that had looked for answers and had found none. "Not Richard. Talkin' 'bout
Bradford.
Bradford the one chased Lila, raped her. Bradford the one I killed. Richard, he help me. Richard beat him till he down, mos'ly dead. I just finish it."

Cree felt suddenly dizzy herself, and she caught at a nearby branch to stabilize herself as she sat down on the ground. "No, Josephine, I saw the photos!
Richard
wore the boar mask! Brad, he was a pirate, he - "

A pair of military jets roared by overhead, deafening, making the foliage shiver and startling a flock of blackbirds from the bushes thirty feet away. The birds scattered like buckshot but then swarmed together again as the thunder diminished.

And Josephine explained: Yes, Richard had worn the boar head and the tattered swamp rat clothes for three or four years, and Bradford had worn the pirate getup, the patched and bearded face mask, the wig and low-slung three-cornered hat. But of course everybody knew who everybody was, so that year the two of them had worked out a prank to play on the other Epicurus partyers, even on Charmian and Ron and Lila. They switched costumes. Only Josephine, who had helped Richard get done up, knew about the joke. For the whole evening, they played not only their masked parts, but they played each other, a disguise within the disguise. They avoided talking, but when they did their voices were muffled by the masks and camouflaged by the outlandish accents they each put on. It was a big success, and later in the evening it took everybody by surprise when they unmasked. But Lila had gone home before then. And it had been Bradford, wearing the boar mask, who had slipped away after her, so drunk, so abandoned, so angry inside, that night.

There was no question that Josephine told the truth: She was implacable, beyond doubting. More, it made sense at last of the differences between the two ghosts, two ghosts after all, and the beating motion in the library.

It was a horrifying story, but as Cree thought it through, she began to realize it was in many ways the best possible discovery. This alone made coming down here worthwhile. The fact that she could now identify both ghosts and their issues was the least of it. Knowing the truth brought a huge gust of relief and hope: It wasn't Lila's beloved father who had raped her! Richard was, after all, the good man he seemed. Lila could recover memory of the night and cope with it, and, crucially, live on with a sure knowledge of her father's love. She could love him in return without the nagging ambivalence, subconsciously blaming him for the long-forgotten violation. She would learn that far from being her attacker himself, Richard in outrage had helped kill her real violator, her real betrayer. And if Cree could bring her to share his dying moment, to receive into her heart the arrow of love Richard lofted her way, she would be strengthened enormously.

Cree played through therapeutic scenarios, feeling hugely relieved, grateful for the truth.

But then a lingering problem occurred to her. Josephine had fallen silent as she let Cree sort through the ramifications, just watching her, clearly anticipating where it would take her.

"But . . . but Richard
was
poisoned!" Cree cried. "If you didn't kill him, who did? Charmian?"

Josephine looked at her with that implacable sympathy. "You poor baby. You poor girl. Now you got to grow into a ol' lady. Now you gon' know what's worse'n Lila got raped by her daddy."

"Nothing's worse!"

"Worse is,
Lila
killed her daddy! Lila burnt hot, she thought it was him had raped her, she stood up for herself, she put that poison in his drink. And she'd be right to! 'Cept Richard di'n't do it. He love her like I did! He the one beat Bradford near to death for it! But Lila didn't know. She killed her own daddy for somethin' he di'n't do. An' now you know why she got to forget."

40

T
HE HEAT WAS STILL INTENSIFYING
as they hobbled along the paths in the dappled tree shade. Cree found herself limping, too, all the injuries of the past weeks coming back to pain her. She felt almost too weak to carry her own weight, as old as Josephine, as stiff. Behind them they heard the rhythmic
whunk!
of Hiram's mattock, and to the west the faint rush of cars on the highway. Here and there in the little ragtag wilderness were partially cultivated areas, Josephine's extended garden of wild herbs.

Broken mirrors,
Cree was thinking. Murdering your own father, even if you believed him guilty of the ultimate betrayal - yes, that would freight you with enough subconscious guilt and self-hatred for a lifetime.

For the life of her, she could not imagine a way to free Lila. In this case, the truth set no one free. She walked numb and stiff and speechless as Josephine filled in the story.

Bradford had always been wild and reckless. The kids loved him because he was charming and funny and let them do things their parents didn't and because Charmian and Richard both adored him. Brad was smart, affectionate, and engaging - he quickly understood people and their feelings and motivations. Richard and he were very close. Josephine thought it was because each provided the other with a counterbalance for the excesses of his nature. Where Richard was responsible, overcom-mitted, staid, dutiful, Brad was freewheeling, pleasure seeking, risk taking, free of constraints and obligations. Around Brad, Richard could have fun, let his guard down, feel young and free and easy; around Richard, Brad could feel more important, useful, legitimate, connected. They could talk about Charmian, they could talk about women in general, they could talk about Ron's development. Their fishing trips together were a chance for both to leave behind their habitual roles and connect in some primal male way, as equals. Richard sometimes helped Brad out in business matters. Brad occasionally helped smooth over arguments between Richard and Charmian, or served as mediator between Richard and his sometimes rebellious son, his spirited daughter. Over the years, they had forged a deep bond, more like brothers than brothers-in-law.

But Brad had grown up with too much money and privilege and good looks. For all the shallow social successes his charm bought him, he harbored the nagging sense that he was worthless, that he lived off the Lambert family's accomplishments and not his own, that he used his sister's family to anchor him because he lacked what it took to create one of his own. As he got older, he noticed changes in his relationship with other scions of the aristocracy: He became less of a peer than an icon of perpetual immaturity, the one who never quite grew up. People liked him, but they didn't respect him, didn't trust him in business dealings; as a result, his entrepreneurial efforts never panned out. The same was true in his intimate life. Women of his class learned he was fun for a fling but not any kind of candidate for marriage. Aside from his connection with his sister's household, he found himself increasingly outside the main channel of New Orleans social and business life.

Except for Carnival — that was an arena in which he could earn respect. Carnival had different standards. Status then was measured by the very things that jeopardized it in daily life: hard drinking, pranks, flirtations and risque talk, sexual escapades and braggadocio, wild dancing, lavish spending, showing off, pushing every boundary of acceptable behavior. Fat Tuesday was almost a competition to see who could cut most loose, especially among the younger men. And here Bradford excelled.

Josephine's implacable rasp painted a clear portrait: For Bradford, the Mardi Gras of 1971 folded together the toxic psychological elements required for the sadistic rape of his niece. The lust-charged exuberance and abandon combined with the frustration and rage at his growing sense of irrelevance, his impotence in other spheres of life, an unending string of failed romances.

And Lila had turned into a beauty. At fourteen, she had already grown into a woman's shape, with fuller breasts and broader hips than her friends, and that
confidence,
that assertiveness, that spunk. Brad had long since begun injecting playful sexual innuendo into their conversations, flattering and teasing her, and Lila had thrown it right back, vamping and scorning him. The family laughed at the whole thing.

The morning after, when Josephine had seen the blood on Lila's sheets and had put it together with the change in Lila's affect and the mess in the house, she had gone straight to Lila. Lila had at first denied that anything was wrong. But after only a few moments of Josephine's probing she broke, crawled crying like a toddler into her nanny's lap, and told the story.

She was afraid to tell Momma, she said. She hurt inside. He had said things that suggested it was her fault, her own secret wish. It was 1971, the miniskirt had finally hit New Orleans, she had taken to wearing one over Daddy's objections, and she and all her friends were dancing to that kind of music he disapproved of. Maybe he was right, she deserved it, she had sort of asked for it? When he'd made those animal noises, pig noises, the whole time, it was like he'd wanted her to feel like an animal. And she did, she felt filthy and disgusting. She hated herself.

In that moment, Josephine learned that she herself was capable of the worst sin, that she could kill a man.

Lila couldn't face Charmian, so Josephine went to her. She was sitting in the study next to her bedroom, hungover, nursing her coffee and going through some Polaroids from the night before. Charmian confirmed that Richard - dressed as a pirate, dressed as Brad - had never left the Hardings' last night, and that he and Brad had revealed the costume switch near the end of the evening, as planned. And the proof was right there: the partyers grinning at the camera, Richard smiling ear-to-ear after lifting off his pirate face mask and wig. And Bradford, the boar mask under his arm, hair wet with sweat, mouth smiling but eyes to one side as if the enormity of what he'd done was catching up to him.

Charmian's rage had been terrifying to behold, and Josephine recognized the blood look in her eyes because she'd felt it in her own only moments before: Charmian, too, could kill. And yet Josephine knew she was also wounded, in agony over her daughter's distress and staggered by the fact that her younger brother was capable of this.

Telling it, Josephine had to sit down again. There was a stump among the maze of paths, and Cree helped her fold her length onto it.

"Before I lef that room, she tol' me one thing. She say, 'You don't tell anyone.' I knowed that woman, know she hurtin' for Lila, see, but she thinkin' of Ron, too, she thinkin' of the Lambert name an' the Beauforte name. Me, I can't get past thinkin' 'bout that sweet baby girl and 'bout somebody could do that to her. But Charmian, she thinkin' ahead. She playin' it out in her mind. I says, 'No, ma'am,' but she know I don't ean it and she stop me at the door. She tell me to look at her. And what I see, I never forget. Never forget that woman's eye. She say again, 'You don't tell
anyone.
You don't talk to Lila. You don't talk to Richard. This is
my
family, and this is
my
respons'bility.' She say, 'Don't underestimate me, Jos'phine. What I will do to keep this from doin' more damage than it already done.' And I know she mean she kill me or anybody, not just the man raped her daughter. I b'lieve it down to my shoes."

Cree could easily imagine Charmian saying it, the cold steel in her eyes, the saber of her voice.

Later, passing by the door to Lila's bedroom, she several times overheard Charmian talking to her daughter in hushed, urgent, hard tones. But Josephine couldn't be quiet about it. The anger and concern were too great. She tried to talk to Lila, but Lila wouldn't open up again, and Josephine thought maybe that was a good thing, she was hardening herself as she had to. It took another week or more to find a time to tell Richard. She was shocked to learn that Charmian hadn't told him. But he admitted he had seen the difference in his beloved daughter, and now he was outraged to learn its reason. He stormed off to talk to Charmian.

Another two weeks went by and the household started to fragment into secrets, quiet hatreds, hushed conversations, and tense silences. Poor Ron, knowing nothing, was especially confused. Lila grew increasingly distant, her light dimming, the lid coming over her.

Bradford had not returned to the house, but Richard and Brad's regular three-day fishing expedition was coming up. The night before the trip, Richard came to Josephine, told her to help ready his gear for their early morning departure. The way it always worked was Bradford got up early, came to the house at three-thirty or four A.M., they'd drive down to the private dock where Richard kept his boat, then continue by water the last ten miles or so. The place was an old trapper's cabin Brad had won in a card game years before, deep in the brackish swamps of Terrebonne Parish, back where water and land merged in a labyrinthine lacework.

Three in the morning, and Richard woke Josephine up. The rest of the household was fast asleep as she joined him in the library. When Brad came in, Richard locked the library door and confronted him. Brad looked sick with nervousness, but at first he pretended he thought Richard was joking. Richard threatened him and then had Josephine confront him as well. Brad shifted strategies, claimed it hadn't really been rape, it didn't get that far, it was just horsing around. When that didn't stick, he shifted again, saying it was Lila's fault. She was a ripe one, a hot one, a little slut who knew perfectly well what she was doing; he wasn't the first, she was lying if she said he was.

At that, Richard's rage built in him until he became a human bomb. At first he just demanded that Brad admit what he did, apologize on his hands and knees to Lila, and then leave New Orleans forever. But Brad resisted and anyway it wasn't enough. Richard bulled him, pushed him, took up the poker and threatened him with it. And Brad, afraid now, admitted, wept, swore he was sorry. But it was too late. The admission only inflamed Richard, the bomb had been triggered. Richard's face was a knot of red bulging veins, the enonnity of it was catching up with him; he hit Brad, he kept beating Brad, he couldn't stop himself. At first Josephine was shocked, but when Richard finally came to his senses and looked at the poker, appalled, she took it from his hands. Bradford was lying on the floor, maybe already critically injured. And Josephine struck him, too - once, and then again, with all the strength her capable arms could muster. And then he stopped moving. Josephine's heart rose up, joyous in vengeance.

There was almost no blood, and what there was they worked quickly to clean up. Then they had another task.

Josephine had never been clear if Richard had envisioned everything from the start - the murder and then the concealment of the murder - or whether he had just been overtaken by his own rage and had improvised a solution afterward.

Whichever, in New Orleans, as nowhere else, there was a convenient way to dispose of dead bodies.

They packed Brad out through the former carriage house and into Richard's car. They drove to Lafayette Cemetery, only five blocks away, and carried the corpse quickly inside. Josephine moved the car away from the gate as Richard carried the body to the Lambert family tomb, deep in the center of the mazelike necropolis. When she rejoined him, they unbolted the crypt's marble front cover and used a small sledgehammer to batter away the bricks behind it. When they'd opened a hole big enough to squeeze the body through, they stuffed Brad onto the top of his mother's coffin, then bolted the cover back on.

So within half an hour of Brad's death, he had disappeared for good. Josephine and Richard knew no one would ever open the Lambert crypt to find the gap in the bricks or the remains atop the coffin. Because there would never be cause to open the grave: Brad was the last of the Lambert name. When her time came, Charmian would be buried in the Beauforte tomb. Anyway, in only a year and a day Bradford would be baked to dust and flakes of bone.

It wasn't yet sunrise when Richard dropped Josephine off at the house and went on down to the shack just as he and Brad had done so many times over the years. He came back two days later with a terrible story. The lie he'd told the police was that they'd separated in the cypress labyrinth, Brad taking a little pirogue he favored and Richard using the larger boat as they fished for black bass and flatheads. Later, when Richard arrived at their planned rendezvous, he'd been shocked to find the pirogue floating untethered and untended. Some accident must have happened. Police rescue teams combed the area, but no one could say for certain how far the pirogue might have drifted before Richard found it, and in the endless maze of cypress lanes, the tangle of roots groping down into coffee-dark water, it was no wonder they couldn't find his body. With all the alligators around, there probably wasn't much to find.

It made the newspapers as a tragedy for one of New Orleans's oldest and most respected families. At the church ceremony they eventually held, Brad's survivors - Charmian, Ron, Lila, Richard - appeared much distraught.

A family grieved.