City of Masks (43 page)

But every choice had ramifications, and all the ramifications were bad. A family's reputation
was
a valuable thing, and not just from the standpoint of appearances. Recovering from this would require recovering some small share of family identity and coherence and pride. True, for something this unsavory to get out would hurt Richard's business relationships, and it would sully the Lambert name forever. But what mattered was that if there was any hope Lila could get past it, she couldn't have everyone she met knowing all about it, she couldn't see the knowledge in the eyes of her friends, her teachers at school, all their family friends. And Lila
had
to get past it.

She and Lila were having another talk. Lila had alternated between a slumping, spiritless despondency and a bristling rage that let no one near. Charmian was trying again, trying to reach out to her, trying to help her find a way of coping.

Lila had started out hard but had caved in again, crying, crying, crying. "Why did he do that to me? How could Daddy do that to me? How could you
forgive
him!"

Charmian was confused. "Do what? What did Daddy do?"

Lila's eyes were outraged when they turned to her. "What he did! What he
did!
When he hurt me!"

"No, baby, Daddy didn't hurt you - "

"He
did!
He chased me all over, he threw me down! He
ripped
my — "

"No, Lila, wait - " The revelation shook Charmian to her marrow. The enormity of the oversight. The enormity of how poorly they'd communicated. The enormity of the pain and sense of betrayal Lila's misperception must have caused her.

"He didn't even take off the mask! He kept making the pig noise! It was like he wanted me to feel like — "

"Lila!" Charmian shouted. "Stop! Stop saying that!"

"And you act like you
forgive
him! You act like it doesn't
matter!"

"Your father would never hurt you! You were so upset, you were so scared, it makes sense that you'd see things the wrong way, or think that - "

"So I
imagined
everything?"

"Your father
never raped
you!"

Lila was backing away, her mouth agape, seeing only utter betrayal in Charmian.

And the moment came, the moment to set it straight, to make it perfectly clear. And Charmian failed it. She couldn't say the words. She couldn't say Bradford's name. She couldn't make her mouth say,
It wasn't
your father, it was your uncle Brad. My baby brother.

As she hesitated, choking on it, Lila grabbed a book from her desk and pitched it at her. It hit Charmian on the cheek and shocked her, and she shouted, "You get a grip on yourself, young lady!"

Lila fled past her and out of the room.

It wasn't until the next day that Charmian cornered her again and told it straight out: "It was Bradford, not Daddy." She explained the mask switch. But by then Lila was a sort of demented creature, hollow eyed, sleeping on the floor because she couldn't bear to touch the bed where the first of the rapes had happened. She had become torpid and depressed, unresponsive, with only flashes of rage. A veil had come over her eyes, hard to see through. She nodded her head, but skepticism and accusation were the only emotions Charmian could read in her face. There were many questions Lila could have asked, such as,
Then why
don't you tell someone about Brad? How can you protect
him? But she didn't. And Charmian was grateful, because she had not yet figured out the answers.

"You understand now, right?" Charmian persisted.

"Yes, Momma, I understand," Lila had said in a monotone. She was telling the truth. What she understood was betrayal.

Then Richard returned from his business trip, and they discussed it and agreed that before they went to the police or anything else that would come to public attention, he'd confront Bradford. After a time, he managed to make contact with Brad, and they supposedly went on their regular fishing trip, and Bradford didn't come back. And later, when Richard told her what he'd done, that he'd killed Bradford in the library and lied to the police about his drowning, Charmian understood why he'd done it. Of course she did. She even knew how it hurt him to have done it.

But she hated him for it, too. She couldn't bring herself to sleep with the man who had beaten her brother to death, couldn't bear to be touched by the hands that had swung that poker.

And so yet another crack formed in the family, another piece of it broke away. Another kind of distance intruded.

Charmian couldn't do anything about that, either. What - go to the police and tell them her husband had murdered her brother? They'd ask why, they'd find out why.

And the converse was also true: Now they really would have to keep the rape secret. There was no longer any choice about that. The police would put the rape and Brad's disappearance together, and Richard would go to jail for murder. The family would be destroyed. Ironically, Brad's death was what really sealed the secret of the rape - it cemented the family's complicity in the lie that it never happened.

So she hammered the lesson into Lila: Sometimes a woman just has to be strong. To move on. To act like everything is all right until the act is so habitual that it's just like real. To try to forget the bad things that happened. To remember that the family is more important than any one member's pain.

And she took her own advice. Drinking helped the forgetting.

In there somewhere, poor Ronald had come to her in his own misery. Not yet sixteen years old, very much an innocent boy, troubled by seeing so many inexplicable, bad things happening in the family. He missed Uncle Brad terribly. But he'd felt the changes even before the "drowning," he'd heard the hushed conversations and hard voices, felt the dissonances and distances. And yesterday Lila had said something that scared him. She'd said that sometimes she thought about killing herself. She even told him how she'd do it: She'd use one of the poisons Josephine had told them about, long ago when she used to tell them stories about her mother's voodoo magic. There was a recipe you made with the seeds and flowers from the wild black cherry tree, it tasted like almonds - like amaretto, Daddy's favorite drink. Why would you do that? Ro-Ro asked. His sister had been frightening him for weeks now, with her hollow eyes, her numb lassitude alternating with that disjointed, crazy, sudden heat. Because of what he did, she told him. Who did? he asked. You mean Dad? What did he do? Nothing, Lila said. He did nothing. Ask Momma, he did nothing.

So he'd asked Josephine, and Josephine had told him to pray to our Lord Jesus Christ and to strive to emulate His life through acts of compassion and charity.

Hearing this, Charmian concealed her bitterness that not just Lila but also R o - R o would go to Josephine before he came to his own mother. She did her best to calm and reassure Ronald. She fired Josephine, telling her if she valued her life she'd never come back or attempt to contact any of them again. She made arrangements for Lila to go off to boarding school. She talked to Lila again and again, and made her promise she'd never do anything like suicide.

And she drank like a fish, trying to drown her sorrows,
Charmian thought feverishly.
She pretended to have self-control while inside she wallowed in
confusion and self-pity. She missed all the crucial signs and signals.

For a time she thought her efforts were succeeding. With Josephine gone, with time passing, Lila began walling up her knowledge in a secret vault in her memory. She stopped speaking of the event. Then she went to school, fell apart, and came back home toward the end of the first semester. Charmian brought in old Dr. Fitzpatrick to treat her, and she did seem to improve through semester break. The holidays were dismal, but Charmian felt a glimmer of hope that they were beginning to recover, that you could survive even something this extreme. Brad had paid in full. Lila could recover.

And the very day Lila was supposed to return to school, she poisoned her father for an atrocity he would never have been capable of.

Charmian had been upstairs, trying to get everything ready for Lila's departure. She went downstairs and into the library, and there he was, dead on the rug, curled like a baby, a thin foam of vomit trailing from his mouth. The room reeked of almonds. And though she'd so recently been through two heartbreaks that she had thought to be unsurpassable, this was far worse. This broke her. She found herself on the floor. She moved up behind Richard's body and pressed herself against his curled back, tucked her knees in behind his, and lay with him the way they slept together, one arm around his chest, her face against the back of his neck.

That's how Lila found them when she came looking.

"Hey, Gran'mere, wake up," Loup Garou said. "Wake up now."

"I am awake, trust me," Charmian told him drily. "I'm just thinking."

"Yeh? I'm stoppin' for gas. You need to pee or somet'ing, this is it. Port Sulphur's ten minutes down." He swung the car over into a gas station, stopped at the self-service pumps. He reached down to pull the lever that opened the gas-fill cover, then stayed hunched as he dug under his seat. Charmian looked down to see two license plates slide out, facedown, and then a big black automatic pistol that Loup held between his knees and did something to before he slipped it back out of view.

He caught her look and returned it with a little grin. "Listen, this's your trip, gotta pay travel. Need some cash for the gas."

Charmian acted as if she did this every day. She opened her purse again and handed him a twenty, chiding herself for her reaction. Of course he'd have stolen somebody's license plates and replaced his own with them before starting this trip. Of course he wouldn't rely only on the switchblade in his boot. Good.

The Werewolf went to the back of the car to lean jauntily against the fender as he filled the tank. Then they were on their way again.

Ten more minutes,
Charmian thought.

Richard was dead. In the worst possible way. And again, there was nothing Charmian could say or do except to manage it, minimize the damage. When she'd recovered to the point where she could physically let go of Richard's body, she had called Dr. Fitzpatrick, New Orleans coroner and trusted friend, and, swearing him to secrecy, told him the many reasons why he must misrepresent the cause of death. Old Fitz had come through and had presumably taken the secrets with him to his own grave.

One image burned in Charmian's memory from that day on: the sight of Lila's face as she saw them on the floor, the mix of feelings there. It would be at the center of everything she did for years to come. It would wake her from the deepest sleep. It would startle her when she was working in the garden, come between her and any rose. It would motivate her to anything at all. She knew she owed a lifetime of atonement for having allowed her daughter ever to wear that expression, feel those feelings.

And then they went their own ways. Ronald was suspicious of the death of his father, and she'd had to tell him, only him, the whole story. He understood completely why he must never,
ever
speak to his sister of her rape and the death of their father. If she ever found out she'd wrongly blamed him, wrongly avenged the rape, it would destroy her. It would be a cruelty heaped upon a cruelty. Another irony: The concealment was the only way through, but it also served as something of a collective, tacit admission that Richard
was
the guilty one. That the family, what remained of it, agreed he'd deserved it.

Ronald did his best. He remained devoted to his sister even as he deformed inside and became what he now was. Lila went off to school, having killed her father, half strengthened by this victory over her presumed attacker and half dying with guilt and grief. Between the drugs Andre had prescribed, and the distance, and the inconceivable enormity of it, she stayed numb. Something like a scar thickened over that part of her mind, that part of her past. The first few times she came home from school, Charmian thought she was faking forgetfulness, putting on the act as her mother had instructed and punishing her with how dutifully she did so. But after a time, as she became by degrees softer, weaker, sadder, Charmian began to believe the forgetting was real. Some of her sweetness returned, and she talked with sincere fondness about her childhood — about Daddy, about Uncle Brad. She became a good, dutiful, emotionally distant adult daughter. She managed to concoct a semblance of a normal life. Jack Warren was no great catch, but they did seem to care for each other, and Charmian deemed it best not to try to derail the relationship. Lila got pregnant, had kids. The past faded. Sometimes at night, Charmian lay and mourned them, all three: her beloved insouciant brother, her dear, good husband, and the splendid, brilliant daughter who was also gone for good. But Lila had survived, more or less. All three of them had, more or less. No one had ever found out. With the passage of years, Charmian let herself think it was done with.

And then, twenty-seven years after she'd disappeared from their lives,
Josephine
returned to ruin everything. The messy Temp Chase business happened. And then Lila's ghosts entered the picture, and that horrible Cree Black with her relentless prying, that frightening supernatural instinct that allowed her to discover exactly that which must be kept hidden.