City of Masks (48 page)

Joyce went on, methodically, logically, remorselessly. Cree was feeling her carefully nurtured, righteous anger unraveling, and it scared her. It had been sustaining her for a week.

"Joyce. The fact remains, he
cut a deal
with Charmian. They concocted these half-truths, they deceived Lila!"

Joyce gave her the dead eye. "Unlike you, of course. Who didn't cut a deal with Charmian. Who didn't agree to any half-truths to protect Lila."

Cree's resistance suddenly ran out of gas. She turned her own eyes to the window. Somehow she hadn't seen it quite that way. It really was simple, wasn't it? Joyce was right. Joyce was always right.

The problem with accepting any of it was that it left her with only one grievance with Paul: his terrifying, penetrating insight. The hard truths he'd told her about Mike. And she couldn't think of a good excuse to flee that.

Joyce knew she'd scored a direct hit and was smart enough to know when to leave it. She gathered her papers and went to the door.

"So what do you recommend I do about it?" Cree called softly."Given that it's a little too late."

"No way, Cree. No more advice to the lovelorn, it's not in my job description. You're the one with ESP or whatever it is, you figure it out."

Ed got into the office around noon. Cree heard him bumping through the outer office door with his equipment cases, heard him greet Joyce, heard the big kiss he gave her even through the partially closed door. Cree decided she needed one of those, too.

They hugged in the outer office, a solid, thorough hug, as Joyce busied herself with paperwork. The familiar length of his body felt good against her, but the kiss felt rather
measured,
deliberately administered. She realized she had been worried about him. They made small talk as she helped carry some of the cases back into his office, then helped him put things back on the shelves.

Ed had thrown himself slouching into his desk chair. He was looking around his big room, looking vaguely dissatisfied and drumrning his fingers on the desk. "You want to take a walk? I haven't eaten lunch. We could take a stroll and then find a bite."

"You don't want to debrief?"

He hesitated. "Sure. Yeah. But let's do it as we walk."

They turned south on First Avenue, ambling toward Pioneer Square. The weather was cool and changeable, and at cross streets where the long views broke through, they could see the clouds roiling in from the west, sending shadows down the piebald slopes of the mountains. After a few blocks they turned downhill toward Alaskan Way, with the assumption they'd talk for a while and then grab lunch at Pike Place Market. They hadn't even discussed it, but of course Ed would know Cree needed the ambience of flux: The energy and flow made a safe haven for an empath. Both were new enough to Seattle to enjoy the bustle and color of the market's stalls, the endless variety of fresh fish and fruit and vegetables and breads, displayed so beautifully and temptingly.

Cree told him about her last days in New Orleans. They agreed that Richard's ghost had had a very typical double aspect - his memory of the beating, and of Lila in the swing, had been clearly linked with his experience of the moments of dying. But Bradford's doubleness was a different matter. The boar-headed phantom had been a remote generation. Its lack of an apparent link to its origin as a memory of a dying man, coupled with its high degree of independence, troubled them both.

Cree talked about the red herrings she'd considered: the idea of Richard as a multiple personality, and Joyce's all-too-plausible idea of a specter generated by a living person. Though those hadn't proved true, the boar-headed man still gave them a whole new category of manifestation to fit into their respective schemes of things.

Of course, the remote generation idea was only one of many troubling aspects of Bradford's second ghost. His solidity was one of them: Cree lifted her shirt to show Ed the faintly lingering scratches his hand had made on her stomach. In some ways more disturbing was his adaptability: He could perceive and interact with living beings in the current time.

Both features were as frightening for the fieldworking ghost hunter as they were challenging for the paranormal theorist. Together, these two aspects of the boar-headed man affirmed what many witnesses and parapsychologists had long claimed: that ghosts
were
capable of inflicting more than psychological injury upon a living person, and that ghosts
could
pursue something like an intentional, interactive agenda with the living, adapting to circumstances. It gave strength to the premise of folk legends all over the world, that ghosts sometimes pursued vendettas on those who had wronged them.

As they continued along Alaskan Way, Ed began to look increasingly troubled. Part of his dismay, Cree knew, was his concern for her, knowing that ghosts could hurt or kill a ghost hunter. The other part was theoretical. His lovingly constructed geomagnetic theory, now buttressed by the tidal-cycle evidence he'd brought back from Gloucester, might explain very limited perseverations, but it would never explain the phenomenon of the boar-headed man.

Nor, she knew, of Mike, that day in Philly.

"So," Ed asked, "how did she come out of it? Lila."

"She wouldn't tell me much about how it went with her father's ghost. She was exhausted. But she definitely emerged much stronger. She'd always had a core of strength, really, it was just a matter of putting her parts together, you know? She's a very different woman now. There's a
calm
in her now. A resolve. Hard to describe."

"Weren't you worried she'd learn the truth when she met him — that she'd killed him?"

"A little. But Richard was mainly an . . . emotional ghost. He was as affectively powerful as he was physically insubstantial. Remember, he didn't know who had poisoned him. And he never really thought about it as he was dying, he just wanted his kids to be all right. I was less worried that he'd reveal something than that her memories would spontaneously awaken from being around him. But it didn't happen. No, if Ron or Charmian don't tell her, I'm pretty sure she'll never know. And her psychiatrist is in on the deception, so I doubt he'll dig it up if she keeps working with him."

Ed's brow remained wrinkled.

"What else?" she prodded.

He shook his head, looking depressed and worn. "We go out on these expeditions wanting to figure out how the world works. We're trying to map this hidden terrain. We make terrific progress every time. And yet every time we come back, we have more questions than we have answers. We have new phenomena we can't integrate. Logic fails us. Our categories and taxonomies and theories all fall apart. When are going to
know
something, Cree?"

"Dunno," she admitted. She squeezed his hand.

"Speaking of which, what ever happened with that 'episode' of yours? The Civil War daydream?"

"Joyce and I checked it out. The house I saw across the gardens was definitely there, as I saw it, in 1862 - it's on all the plot maps of the period, and we even found a portrait of it the owners'd had painted. The original house burned down in 1954, but the family rebuilt and still lives there. Another old New Orleans family, the Millards. I even found their family crypt, not far from the Lamberts'. The names of the kids of that generation are all on it. Elizabeth - I thought of her as Lizzie — and Jane. The youngest was a boy named William John, who would have been six in 1862. Just as I saw him."

"Oh, man," Ed groaned.

"We checked the old Beauforte House site plans, too. They show the old cistern, right behind the kitchen garden. Just where I saw the soldiers drinking."

Ed was making such hyperbolic expressions of overwhelmedness that she had to laugh: His knees went wobbly and he staggered all over the sidewalk, clutching his chest as if having a heart attack.

"I think we even figured out whose mind I was seeing it through, Ed! General Beauforte had one daughter still living at home in May of 1862.Her name was Claudette, and she was fifteen when the Union Army took over the house. I was seeing it through her eyes as she waited in the slave quarters for them to take her and her mother away. It would have been a powerful moment. The experience lived on and I . . . I found it. I relived it."

Ed was looking around with theatrical paranoia. "Don't tell anyone!" he whispered. "We'll lose all our credibility. Or the CIA or somebody will kidnap you and make you do remote past viewing or something. Goddamn you, Cree! So help me, I'm going to catch up to you. I'm going to give
you
something that throws your theories into a tailspin. So help me."

She came to his side, put her arm around his waist; he did the same, and they walked on with matched strides, hip to hip. "You know, it's not too early to get a Bloody Mary with lunch," she told him. "Take the edge off these outrageous slings and arrows. Celebrate us both getting home. God, it's nice to see you!"

"Cree." His tone killed the exuberance dead.

"Yeah?"

"Tell me about the psychiatrist. How he fits in."

Cree saw it all in his eyes. "Joyce," she managed, feeling betrayed."Joyce told you. That's why you didn't come to New Orleans."

Ed just blinked once.

She was at a loss. "He was . . . he and I worked on Lila together. Compared notes. He doesn't 'fit in.' He and I, we — "

"What's this? What're we doing?" He gestured at the two of them, the street, the sky. He meant the good feeling that came so easily with them."This is nice, isn't it?"

"Of course! It's lovely! It's - " But Ed was walking on, and she had to jog to keep up with his long strides. She took his arm to slow him down, but he didn't look at her.

"So what's
wrong
with this?" he insisted. This time he sort of meant
me.

Nothing!
she almost said.
This is as good as it gets!
But her heart seemed to cleave inside her as she knew it wasn't quite so. "I don't know, Ed," she said.

They walked on for another minute, silent, not looking at each other, side by side but utterly distant.

"You should probably try to figure it out, Cree," he said at last. "Do what you have to. You know? We all gotta do what we gotta do. Let me know how it comes out."

He was offering some sort of permission, and she loved him fiercely for it. But when she tried to figure out what it was she had to do, no answer came. She clung to his arm, almost panicking, afraid he'd get away."Okay," she told him. "I'll try. Thanks."

They kept walking. They reached Waterfront Park, looked out at the water for a time. The Highway 99 overpass roared behind them as the Bainbridge Island ferry came in from the Sound, its hull banded in white froth. Excursion boats took off from the piers immediately to the south, and beyond them a couple of freighters hove slowly to the forest of gantries of the lower port. After a time they climbed the steps to Pike Place Market, got sandwiches, sat in one of the public seating stalls. They talked about other things. No Bloody Marys; the giddy sense of celebration was gone. Their conversation felt stiff, obstructed, but they forged along with determination. Ed said he'd heard about several other interesting cases in the Gloucester area: Various friends of the Wainwrights had heard about his prelim in their house and cautiously approached him with accounts of their own hauntings. It seemed everybody had some brush with the mysterious.

He said it reminded him again that, for all its weirdness, the world beyond vision was awfully close and immediate. Life — you really never knew what to expect, he said. What would come at you next.

Cree's heart felt as if it would break. Life was indeed strange, she agreed. She shook her head, feeling it: an ache.

Ed bit his lips and nodded his agreement.

47

B
OURBON STREET HADN'T CHANGED
.

It was still a circus, a perpetual mini-Mardi Gras packed with tourists seeking abandon from purveyors offering a thousand varieties of it. Lights bounced in the bars, shadows of dancers played on the windows, blaring rhythms battled as Cree walked past doorways. She'd had the airport shuttle drop her on Canal Street right at the end of Bourbon. Her flight hadn't gotten in until five o'clock, and now it was well past dinnertime. She was hungry and thirsty and still a little stiff from sitting in jets and shuttle buses so long.

Tuesday. She'd been away only twelve days, but New Orleans seemed to welcome her back like a long-lost friend, the kind you've formed a deep attachment to not because you've known each other for a long time but because the times you shared were so hard and so revealing. You know each other well. You greet each other with a certain gritty, guilty, wry intimacy. Cree liked the feeling.

She went into a cheap restaurant and ordered a sausage po'boy, which she washed down with a beer from a plastic cup.

Better,
she decided.

Back on the sidewalk, her hunger stilled, she let the flow of the street pull her. She window-shopped, stopped to listen to street musicians, tossed quarters into the cardboard box set out by two little boys tap dancing. For a couple of blocks, curious about where such a person would be going, she followed a towering, muscular black man, glorious in tight pink skirt, feathered boa, and sequined platform shoes. He disappeared into an anonymous doorway between strip clubs, leaving her wondering at the mystery of his life.

Continuing up the street, taking her time, she bought a Jell-O shot, just to see what they were like: They were said to be lethal, but though it didn't taste too bad in a cloyingly sweet sort of way, it didn't affect her as much as she'd been led to expect. She bought a dozen strings of beads and a mask made of sequins and brilliant scarlet feathers that covered just her eyes and forehead. She stuffed the mask into the outer pocket of her shoulder bag, but she put the beads around her neck immediately. They sparkled and spangled with every step she took and made her feel good;men gave her appreciative once-overs and even a couple of double-takes. She stopped at a sidewalk concession and bought one of the infamous Hurricanes in a to-go cup. It was about a quart of icy liquid and it froze her palate; she made it only halfway through before she got too full and too chilled and had to drop the remainder in a trash basket. She was feeling a little looped anyway, as much from the whirl of the street as from the booze.

From windows and doors, attics and courtyards, she could hear the whispers of the ghosts of the living and the dead, forever and ever. In the night air, she could smell the big, slow Mississippi, just to the south, hugging the city in its big bend, and below it the miles of flat, wet land stretching away to the Gulf.

New Orleans.

Halfway down Bourbon Street she chose a club at random and went into the dancing throng. The band was playing Zydeco, raucous accordions and bass and piano and a pair of washboards whose rhythms put an itch into Cree's bones and made them move. She danced by herself for a time, then floated through the crowd, taking an occasional partner for a number or two. She wondered if she were stalling or just having a good time, but the music was so loud she couldn't really think about it.

Not thinking wasn't too bad. She resolved to try it more often.

After a while she'd had enough noise and body odor and cigarette smoke. She left the place and cut south two blocks to Charters Street, which was tranquil by comparison to Bourbon. A few more blocks east and she could feel the glowering, festering aura of LaLaurie House, one block north on Royal, but she stifled the tremor it gave her. She passed into the quieter parts of the French Quarter.

Better. But her anxiety mounted as she drew closer.

She had deliberately not thought about this. She'd just made the decision. But when she got to Paul's place, she realized didn't know what she'd intended. The windows of the first two floors were dark, but Paul's lights were on. He was probably at home. But there was no way to get to the courtyard and his stairs without ringing the bell. He'd answer through the intercom and she'd have to say something, and she didn't know what. She'd have preferred just to appear at his door.

She pressed the button and waited. Nothing. She tried again, longer, and waited again as a falling sensation swooned in her chest. If he didn't answer now, she wasn't sure she'd have the brass to do this again. But after another long moment the buzzer went and she opened the door and walked through the pitch-black
porte-cochiere
to the courtyard. Suddenly afraid, she took out the feathered mask and put it on as she climbed the stairs. The statue of Psyche seemed to watch her from the dark garden.

When she saw him at the kitchen door, Cree recoiled slightly. He was shirtless, and his face and shoulders and chest and arms were uniformly filmed with white dust, cut through with runnels of sweat. The white emphasized the shadows made by the cut of his pectorals and his corrugated stomach muscles, and he looked like some pagan tribesman, interrupted at some wild ritual. His forehead and hair were white, too, but the skin around his mouth and nose was clear, vividly flesh-colored, as if he'd painted himself with skin tones there. When he opened the door and saw her, his frosted brows rose, but with his odd whiteface it was hard to tell what his expression was. He stood back and let her come inside.

"You," he managed.

"Probably," she said. She'd meant to say,
Of course.

They stared at each other for another heartbeat or two. Cree knew that the eyes Paul saw in her mask's eyeholes were wide and disturbed. She couldn't resist another glance at his torso.

Paul glanced down at his own chest, put his hands to his powdered cheeks. "Oh. You're wondering why I look like this. I was just doing some renovation work — knocking down plaster in the bedroom. Hot and dusty in there. My downstairs neighbors are gone this week, so I can bang away at night if I need to. I seem to need to. It's. . . cathartic. Sorry i f - "

"No, you look good," she said. And he did. God, yes. Another man dusted with white might look ghostly, but Paul looked like Nijinsky in
L'apres-midi d'unfaune:
wild, intense, and very physical. She could picture him, raging at the walls with his sledgehammer, angry at the new disarray of his once orderly world, chunks of plaster falling in clouds of dust.

He dipped his head, acknowledging the compliment. He stepped to the kitchen table, cleared away a dirty plate and a paper dust mask, gestured to a chair. At the counter, he grabbed a bottle of wine and a glass and turned back.

Cree stayed standing.

"No apologies, though, either way. Right?" he asked.

"Right." However they'd upset each other's worlds, whatever they owed each other, it evened out. He was pretty perceptive.

"How're you doing?" he asked.

"Mixed, I think. You?"

"You know. Why mixed?"

"You know why."

That caught him, pleased him. He put bottle and glass aside without looking at them and came straight to her. When he put his hands on her hipbones, the touch took her breath away.

"I made a bet with myself," he told her. "That you'd come back."

"Oh? How'd you know?"
Given what a shit I was.

"I figured that if you were at all the person I thought you were, you'd come back." He hesitated, cleared his throat. "Well. Actually, that wasn't the whole bet."

"What was the rest?"

He smiled. "That either you'd come back here and find me, or I'd go to Seattle and find you. I couldn't lose." He watched her eyes, and the smile became a frown. "Why're you wearing a mask?"

"Just trying to fit in on Bourbon Street," she lied.

He kept looking at her.

"Hiding," she admitted, scared again.

"Take it off, Cree."

She mustered some false bravado: "I will if you go take a shower."

He nodded. When he let her go, she could still feel where his hands had pressed. His white back disappeared down the hall. Cree waited in the kitchen, listening to the water running and feeling her pulse thud in her throat. She debated tossing back a slug of wine to steady her shaking hands and then decided not to. After a few moments, she went out to the rear gallery and leaned against the railing.
Better,
she thought; it was cooler out here. The mask was hot and it pressed too hard against the bridge of her nose, but she left it on as she looked over the dark courtyard and the surrounding roofs and walls and hidden gardens of the French Quarter.

When Paul came back, he was wearing only a Balinese sarong, a bolt of batik wrapped snugly around his waist and falling like a skirt almost to his knees. Above it, his skin was clean now, tan and warm looking, shower scented. As she'd imagined, his legs were carved with the corded sinews of a runner.

They stood side by side at the railing, looking out at the night. They had both come a long way to get here. Paul looked at her expectantly, and then Cree remembered her part of the bargain. She slipped the elastic band over her head, took off the mask. After a hesitation, she flipped it over the railing, and it fluttered down into the darkness like some night bird.

Much better,
she decided.