City of Masks (49 page)
Authors: Daniel Hecht
First and foremost, sincere thanks to the good people of New Orleans, for making me feel so welcome in their wonderful city.
Special thanks go to my friends Margaret and Eric Rothchild for being such superb companions, hosts, co-conspirators, and tour guides to Seattle.
I owe thanks also to my readers and advisors in matters great and small, Amie Hecht, Willow Hecht, Stella Hovis, and Verbena Pastor; and to my "experimental subjects" at the Seattle Women's University Club, particularly Marjorie Reynolds, Joan Shirley, Isabel Falck, Cherry Jarvis, Deborah Lewis, and Margaret Rothchild, whose suggestions greatly improved this book.
Sincere thanks are due to Dr. Lucinda Mitchell, for helping me untangle matters of psychology with such insight and broad-mindedness.
A number of New Orleans institutions deserve particular recognition. Chief among them are the Williams Research Center for providing such an excellent historical resource; Deanie's Seafood for providing sumptuous feasts to hungry writers; and the New Orleans Police Department for open-minded help and advice. Any errors or omissions in this book are the fault of my own license or ignorance, not the fault of the many fine people who did their best to set me straight.
Thank you Karen Rinaldi, Lara Carrigan, Greg Villepique, and everyone at Bloomsbury; and thanks and xoxx to Nicole Aragi.
Turn the page for a sneak peek at Daniel Hecht's electrifying new thriller,
Cree Black is back, investigating a fascinating case unfolding in the vast high desert of New Mexico. When Tommy Keeday, a talented student at a boarding school for gifted Navajo teens, is suddenly seized by a bizarre and violent illness, his family believes he is possessed by the hostile spirit of a dead ancestor. In desperation, principal Julieta McCarty calls on Cree Black for help.
Is Tommy Keeday just a sensitive teenager, or is he suffering from an exotic brain disorder? Or is there truth in the terrifying Navajo legends? As Cree and her associates struggle to find the answer, it becomes apparent Tommy's fate can be decided only by exposing the secrets of the past.
The gripping second adventure in the Cree Black series.
On sale February 2004
LAND OF ECHOES
Hardcover $24.95
Bloomsbury
Available wherever books are sold
A
LVIN YAZZIE
, the boys'-dorm night supervisor, was in his room reading when he heard an odd sound from the far end of the building. He put down his book and tipped his head to listen.
For a few seconds, there was nothing but the noise of wind in the eaves. Then he heard it again: a forced vocalization of some distress. He tried to tell himself it sounded like one of the kids having a stomach problem, heaving up cafeteria food in the bathroom, but he knew better.
It was the same sort of noise Tommy Keeday had made that awful night just a week ago.
He laid the book aside, went into the hall, and stopped again to listen. The building was long and narrow, divided by a single corridor that stretched its whole length. On the right was the room that served as his office and residence, along with the storage and utility rooms, the two bathrooms, and two six-boy dorms; on the left, the day supervisor's office and four dorm rooms. Yazzie's impression was that the sounds had come from the far end.
As usual, the corridor lights were off, but night-lights glowed at regular intervals, and the doors to the bathrooms were open and spilling enough light to illuminate the hall. He walked quietly down to the first door and into the tiled, fluorescent-lit room. Nobody: no feet visible under the four stall doors, nobody in the showers, nobody tossing it up at the sinks. The ceiling fluorescents blinked irritatingly, and he made a mental note to ask the maintenance staff to replace the tubes.
When he paused in the hall to listen again, everything was quiet, and his tension eased a little. Maybe it was something outside, not a kid after all. Maybe the wind, which was high tonight, bearing in from the north and bringing a chill. More likely a coyote or fox. The two dorms stood apart from the classroom and admin buildings, and the whole school was just a dot in an endless expanse of rolling sagebrush desert. It was big country, sparsely populated, with plenty of wildlife. A couple of times a year, little bands of coyotes raided the cafeteria trash bins and made a ruckus. Maybe
The sound came again, a muffled scream and some garbled words, definitely human. It choked off and left only the midnight silence. A chill crept over Alvin's skin as he began to stride down the hall.
It had to be Tommy again. The first time, he'd recovered within half an hour or so, and Julieta and Dr. Tsosie had written it off: bad dream, exhaustion, stress. After the second episode, they'd sent him for a four-day stay at the Indian Hospital in Gallup, a comprehensive diagnostic workup that ended with the doctors pronouncing him perfectly healthy.
Now he'd been back for only two days. If this was Tommy getting sick again, it didn't bode well for the poor kid. And it would break Julieta's heart to know her prize new student had some chronic or recurring condition.
Whatever it was. There was something strange about the way Julieta and Joe Tsosie were handling this.
Approaching the north end of the building, he stopped at the door to the room Tommy shared with five of his fellow sophomores. Even in the dim light, he could see six beds and six motionless lumps wrapped in blankets, including Tommy, who looked dead asleep with mouth wide open, one arm up above his head on the pillow. None of them moved, and the only sounds they made were the faint wheezes and sights of their breathing.
Then the stifled cry came again, and the lump that was Tommy moved. It seemed to swell and inflate, swarming with bumps that must be knees or elbows but that didn't look right. Alvin didn't move. Part of his mind noticed that the lights were fluttering in the second bathroom, too. Tommy's blankets humped and shook, and it occurred to Alvin that maybe there were two people in the bed, maybe he'd been mistaken when he'd first come in and there was some British-boys'-school-style hanky-panky going on. But then the mound deflated and he could see it was only Tommy, tangled alone in his blanket, lying on his back. One side of the boy's face was drawn up as if a string was pulling a corner of his mouth toward his ear, and as Alvin stood, still unable to move, Tommy's body twisted and convulsed. The whole bed shook with the force of it.
Alvin's paralysis broke and he stepped quickly toward the bed. But before he could reach it, Tommy's body went slack again.
He stepped back, confused. Tommy now lay fast asleep or unconscious, motionless but for the fast, shallow pumping of his chest. For the first time, Alvin noticed that the other boys weren't asleep - how could they be, with the awful noises Tommy made? - but were lying immobile also. The boy in the bed next to Tommy's, David Blanco, lay with his eyes just open, glistening pale slits. In the deeper shadow at the far end of the room, Jim Wauneka was sitting up, rigid, motionless. Alvin almost spoke to him, but then realized his eyes weren't really open, either -just pale slits, like someone anesthetized or dead.
Tommy's chest and stomach and legs began rising and falling, rippling in a series of convulsions. The movements were smooth at first, gentle and rhythmic as ripples undulating in a pond, but they quickly grew faster and more vehement until it looked as if the scrawny body would wrench itself apart. The sheer violence of the movement seemed to knock Alvin another step backward. He felt torn between wanting to flee the room and his duty to his charges, between terror and a hideous fascination.
This wasn't right, he knew. This wasn't natural. Nothing he'd encountered in the army or as an orderly in the crisis ward in Phoenix had prepared him for this. Abruptly he became aware of the great, dark sagebrush plains all around the building, the infinite night sky above hundreds of thousands of square miles of bare red-brown earth, stark rocks, lonely mesas, and shadowed canyons. He remembered the feeling from his childhood, from the times he'd be herding his family's sheep in the evening as the stars pricked through one by one and the sun bleached only the very western edge of night and he could feel in the lonely empty hollow in his gut just how big and incomprehensible the world was He'd almost forgotten. Now he realized with a sense of calamity that the world he'd disciplined himself to accept, that he'd spent his adult life buying into and working to master, wasn't real after all: The world of white America and science and school and jobs and sports and TVs didn't have an explanation for this. This was something ancient, something come out of the world's hidden places, from the old world of the Bible or his grandfather's stories or the dark legends of witches and ghosts that had been whispered from person to person long before human beings knew how to write them down.
Tommy made a quiet, awful sound, as if a full-bellied scream had been throttled by a throat too constricted to allow it to pass. Alvin bolted forward, but just as he caught the arching shoulders, the awful tension went out of the boy. One moment Tommy's right arm had started to push forward and then Alvin felt something like a shock through his hands and arms, a vortex of sensation that buzzed quickly through his stomach, and the boy's arm snapped back and lay limp on his chest. All Alvin held in his arms was a slack, sleeping fifteen-year-old.
Alvin felt only an instant of relief as he lowered Tommy back to his pillow. His movements felt as if they were resisted by a powerful force, some warped gravity or a form of magnetism that influenced flesh and bone. The light bleeding in from the corridor was really going crazy now. It strobed as if a string of flashbulbs were going off in the bathroom as Tommy began to shudder and twitch and another wave of convulsions took him.
Julieta McCarty stared across her desk at Alvin and tried to assimilate what he'd just told her. He insisted that there was no other way to look at it. It wasn't a prank or even an ordinary seizure. Some kind of disturbance or force radiated from the Keeday boy: The other boys had lain or sat unmoving throughout his battle with Tommy, despite the awful noises he'd made and the thrashing and wrestling. Alvin had felt it himself. Now Tommy was in the infirmary, Alvin informed her, doing that thing again like last time. The nurse had called Dr. Tsosie, who said he'd get here as soon as he could.
As an afterthought, Alvin informed her that he was quitting, effective immediately.
He didn't have to explain why. Alvin was forty years old, a reliable staffer who had served two stints in the army, where he'd been trained as a paramedic, and he'd earned a bachelor's degree in social work from the University of Arizona; though he'd been born on the reservation he'd lived a good part of his life elsewhere. But like most Navajos of his generation, he hung uncertainly between the old beliefs and the view of the world he'd absorbed from white America. In Julieta's experience, even the most culturally assimilated Navajo believed that some truth lay beneath the traditional fears of skin walkers, Navajo wolves, spirits of the dead, and the consequences of violating old taboos.
"Alvin. You know I'll never be able to replace you." Julieta tried to keep the pleading out of her voice, tried to keep it from becoming too personal.
"I've had six hours to think about it. I talked to my wife. It scares her for me to be here anymore." He knew what his leaving meant and was clearly feeling bad about his decision, but he left her office with a resolute stride.
Only eight-fifteen in the morning, and she was already confronted with two pieces of very bad news. It was bad enough that she'd just lost a linchpin of her residential staff, a man whom both she and the students admired - a loss that didn't bode well for the school. But equally disturbing - no, worse, a sick, strangling fear that clotted in her chest was that Tommy Keeday had been back only two days and already his troubles had resumed. Why Tommy, of all of them? The first time his bizarre symptoms had cropped up, they had passed quickly, and she and Dr. Tsosie had decided to let it go as some flu symptom, maybe, or a touch of food poisoning. But the second time, the attack had lingered and intensified, and Dr. Tsosie had referred Tommy to the Indian Hospital. The problem was that the symptoms had passed before they'd even completed the hour-long drive to Gallup, and after four days of testing that had included CT scans, electroencephalograms, comprehen- sive blood work, and a battery of psychological tests, the doctors had given Tommy a clean bill of health. He'd shown no cranial abnormalities, no detectable seizure activity, no sign of any illegal drugs in his system. In fact, he'd shown no symptoms of physical illness at all.
"Probably just dehydration," one smug intern had told her. "Sometimes its effects can mimic seizure activity. It's only temporary. Make sure he drinks lots of Gatorade."
Remembering his condescension infuriated Julieta - as if a lifelong resident of the area and principal of a boarding school wouldn't know the effects of the hot, dry climate of western New Mexico on teenagers! - and she mastered her anger with the hard pragmatism her position required of her. She had to think clearly, couldn't let her emotions get in the way.
That Tommy's troubles had resumed meant that he was a child seriously at risk. But how? The hospital couldn't find anything wrong with him. And what was she to make of Alvin's claim that the . . disturbance . . . had affected the other boys?
Two lights on her phone had begun blinking demandingly, and abruptly she realized she couldn't be bothered with whatever it was, she needed to get away from distractions and think this through. She left her desk, stopped briefly to tell the secretary that she was going for a walk, and hurried out of the administration building.
Outside, it was a perfect mid-September day. The strong north winds that had battered the school last night had died out. The sun was halfway up the eastern sky, its heat already a smart slap on her face even though a layer of cool air still hovered above the ground. Arms crossed, chin on her chest, she scuffed across the rear access road to the partial shade of a trellis she'd had set up as a place for staff to take lunch. A sunning lizard darted away as she sat on the picnic table.
It was a good vantage from which to look at the school. With everyone in class now, the complex was quiet: a little cluster of one-story buildings, a gravel-surfaced parking lot, a row of five stubby yellow school buses, a white water tower. The admin, classroom, and dorm buildings were new, built of concrete and surfaced to resemble adobe in gray and pink tones. A large hogan, eight-sided and built of logs, occupied a central spot between dorms and classroom buildings. Farther back amid some cottonwood trees stood the little adobe bell tower and her own sandstone-block house, which now served as the infirmary until they could raise the money to build another unit.
Like everything human here, the school stood alone and diminished by the vastness of its surroundings. To the north and south stretched sagebrush desert, rolling swells of bare soil and rocks in gray-green and red-brown mosaic only rarely varied by the dark green of a pinon tree; to the west, the land rose into humps and hills near Black Creek. Beyond the school buildings to the east, the view was cut short by a mesa that bounded the campus. Its cliffs and slopes made a meandering wall that eventually curved out of sight. Far to the north, the horizon was capped with the rugged line of the southernmost end of the Chuska Mountains. Above, the vault of clean blue sky, streaked today with thin, high clouds.
Not another human thing in sight. Beautiful.
And that's it,
she thought desperately.
My life. The one good thing I've ever
done. The only thing I've ever done right.
Julieta looked at the place and loved it painfully, and it seemed the sun stung her eyes and brought tears. Starting this school had not only been a way to give something to the people of the region, it had been a personal crusade — redemption for a life of stupid mistakes, wasted years, squandered self. It was a line she'd drawn in the sand, the demarcation between past and future. Whatever neurotic hopes or submerged longings might have shaped her motivations, it had turned into a good thing.