Paula Morris (27 page)

"Phoenix rising from the ashes," Shirley said, before
anyone could stop her.
So Aurelia was right!
"And that's what Miss
Marianne is, the ashes."

"And Rebecca will be the flames!" said Miss Karen,
frowning at Shirley. Rebecca got the feeling that Miss Karen had planned on
revealing this allegedly top-secret information but --judging from the number
of times Shirley checked the fob watch hanging from her pocket -- the
dressmaker hadn't wanted to waste any more time. "You lucky girl! I'm sure
half of Temple Mead would cut off their right hands to get an invitation like
this."

Rebecca thought of Jessica and felt a little bad. It would mean so
much more to her. Maybe Rebecca should decline the honor and suggest Jessica
instead.

"But it's been so hard to find someone exactly Helena's
height and size," Miss Karen was saying, and Rebecca realized that
Jessica, who was much shorter and stockier than Helena, would never fit into
the costume.

There were two other maids, according to Marianne, and their
costumes would represent water and wind. They'd ride on another float, with
their own stewards to hand them beads. Rebecca would be standing on a
pedestal-like platform at the back of her float, with Marianne on another
pedestal at the front.

"Just move from side to side a little." Miss Karen acted
it out. She looked like some kind of mechanical Barbie doll. "Waving and
smiling, waving and smiling. Shirley,

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help Miss Rebecca climb into this thing. Do we need the
stepladder?"

Rebecca had long enough legs to render the ladder unnecessary,
though she did have to take off her school skirt and blouse -- that was why
Miss Karen had hoped she wasn't shy, she realized, clambering into the costume
wearing nothing but her underwear, and half wishing that she wasn't wearing the
camisole set Ling had bought her as a joke at Christmas: the words NYC CHICK
were plastered, in red letters, across her backside.

Shirley draped the scratchy, heavy folds of the top over her,
pinning and grunting and darting away to make notes on a small pad of paper. It
wouldn't itch, Marianne assured her, when they had their leotards on; Miss
Karen had them on order. Rebecca couldn't feel the skirt at all: It was so wide
and sprawling that it missed her legs altogether. She loved the vibrant colors
of her gown and the way it glittered when the sun hit it.

"We'll try the headdresses next week," declared Miss
Karen, flicking open her cell phone and closing it again. "I have to go
pick up Toby. Can you come back on Monday after school, honey?"

Rebecca walked home as fast as she could; it was already growing
dark, and the first drops of rain were splattering onto the sidewalk. She
couldn't wait to see the look on Aunt Claudia's face when she told her all
this. Sure, she wasn't supposed to hang out with the Bowmans and the Suttons et
al, but this had to be an exception. The chance to ride in a Mardi Gras parade,
especially one as exclusive and prestigious as

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this, in such a glamorous costume, with no cost involved whatsoever
... her aunt had to say yes.

But Aunt Claudia didn't look shocked at all when Rebecca found her
sitting in the semidarkness of the front parlor, a book lying open and facedown
in her lap. Maybe she'd been napping, Rebecca wondered, because at first she
didn't seem to react to Rebecca's announcement at all.

She simply reached for her reading glasses, which were lying on
top of a brass dish etched with Arabic letters.

"What night is the parade?" she asked slowly, her face
grave.

"February twentieth," Rebecca told her.

"I'll just have to ..." Aunt Claudia began, heaving
herself up from the low-slung armchair. She padded out of the room and down the
hallway, Rebecca following her. She wanted to get a definite answer on the
parade now, and not let her aunt dither about it for days. There wasn't time
for that. She'd already been fitted for that amazing glitter-flame costume. And
secretly, she couldn't wait for the near-hysteria sure to break out at school
when word of her maid-of-Septimus status got out. Legions of Debs would be
fainting in the hallways, overwhelmed by jealousy and outrage. Mean Amy would
be struck dumb. That, at the very least, made the whole thing worth it.

Her aunt walked into the kitchen and straight to consult --
surprise, surprise -- her ad hoc oracle, the wall of odd calendar pages.
Carefully she peeled one day off, fingering its corners. This was the first
time Rebecca had ever seen Aunt Claudia actually remove a page from its spot on
the wall.

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"What's wrong?" she asked, leaning in from the doorway,
trying not to sound impatient.

"I'm ... I'm not sure if the parade is a good idea." Her
aunt's voice was creaky and strained. "I mean ... well, I just don't
know."

"Don't know what?" This was beyond ridiculous. Rebecca
could see the page in her aunt's hands, and sure enough, it was February
twentieth. What, was her entire life going to be controlled by these stupid
pages stuck on the wall? Just because that date happened to be ripped out of a
calendar at random didn't mean Rebecca should suffer. This was her one chance
to take part in a big carnival parade. Other girls would fight tooth and nail
to be in her spot! Why her aunt was such a killjoy, Rebecca didn't know.

"We'll talk about it later." Aunt Claudia slithered past
her, walking back up the hallway to the parlor. Enraged, Rebecca stared at what
was left on the Wall of Nonsense. She wanted nothing more than to rip every
stupid white date off and throw it in the trash. It was just coincidence that
the date of the Septimus parade matched one of the pages. It didn't mean
anything.

Rebecca grabbed the closest page at hand. October twenty-fifth ...
OK, that wasn't random. It was the day she arrived in New Orleans. And the next
October page: Wasn't that the first night she slipped into the cemetery to spy
on Anton and Helena, the night she fell over and saw Lisette for the first
time?

She clutched at another page, ripping it as it pulled free from
the grease-stained, peeling wall. The Saturday after Thanksgiving: That was the
day she'd walked to Tremé with

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Lisette. The date in December was the night of the Bowmans' party
-- the real date, not the one she'd told Aunt Claudia. The other day in
February was Helena's birthday, the day after the Septimus parade. The only
date Rebecca couldn't account for was the one in March. She tore it from the
wall and, grasping her damp pile of pages, marched along the hallway to find
her aunt. She wanted answers -- straight answers -- and she wanted them
now.

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***

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

***

In the parlor, her aunt was sitting down again, but she wasn't
reading. Her glasses were folded and set aside on a cluttered table. Her book
was lying open and upside down on the frayed Turkish rug. The only thing in
Aunt Claudia's hands was the calendar page for February twentieth, and this she
was absentmindedly turning, rubbing its edges between her thumbs. In the
twilight of the room, it was hard to make out the expression on her face.

"What do these mean?" Rebecca demanded, brandishing her
handful of calendar pages. "I know about some of these days but ... what
is this date in March about? Why did you stick all these dates up on the
wall?"

Aunt Claudia looked up at her, and now Rebecca could see how weary
she looked, how strained. She wasn't even wearing any jewelry today, just a
floaty caftan of nebulous ethnicity.

"I just knew they meant
something,"
she said,
motioning to Rebecca to sit down on the chaise longue. "But when I first

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pulled them out of the calendar ... well, baby, I knew what some
of them related to. Some of them were a mystery. They just spoke to me, that's
all. I know you don't think much of my psychic powers, but there are some
things I can see, even if I don't understand them altogether."

"So that's the Septimus parade." Rebecca wriggled
forward on the silky chaise longue, and pointed to the sole page in Aunt
Claudia's hands. "And this one is the Bowmans' Christmas party. And this
one is the day I arrived."

"And what about the other dates?" Aunt Claudia squinted
at the pages Rebecca was clutching. Rebecca opened her mouth to reply and then
closed it again. So far she'd never said a word to her aunt about Lisette.
Actually, she'd lied, saying she'd never seen a ghost. She wasn't sure if this
was the right time to admit her secrets and lies: Aunt Claudia might get
annoyed, arid clam up about everything else.

"Baby, you have to tell me everything you know." Her
aunt sat forward in the collapsing armchair so her knees were almost touching
Rebecca's. "You have to tell me everything that happened on the days I
don't know about. And then I'll tell you everything I know, and we'll see where
it all leads. I want to be straight with you, but you have to be straight with
me, OK?"

"OK." Rebecca was still reluctant. She was going to have
to own up to a lot of things. But this mystery, she sensed, would be solved
only if she and her aunt worked together. "That one day in October ...
well, it was the night, really."

"The night?" Aunt Claudia looked startled. "You
were home that night."

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"I went out," Rebecca said in a small voice. "To
the cemetery."

"To the cemetery at night?" Rebecca nodded, trying not
to be deterred by her aunt's horrified tone.

"I went in to see what Anton and all his friends were doing,
but on the way out, I bumped into ... I met ... I saw, for the first time,
without knowing ..."

She trailed off, gazing down at the clump of pages in her hands,
unable to look Aunt Claudia in the eyes.

"You saw the ghost?" Her aunt sounded surprisingly calm.
But when Rebecca glanced up, she realized Aunt Claudia wasn't calm at all: She
was white as a sheet.

"I didn't know she was a ghost until later," Rebecca
stumbled on. "And then, after Thanksgiving, we went for a walk together.
Through the city, to her house in Tremé."

"I see." Her aunt didn't sound angry--just terribly,
terribly sad. It was almost as though she had known or suspected it all along.
Since she was telling the truth at last, Rebecca decided she may as well tell
her aunt everything.

"After the Bowmans' party, when I told you I'd never seen the
ghost ... I had. I'm really sorry I lied. But then I didn't know what it all
meant. Actually, I still don't. I don't understand what's going on, or why
Helena and I can see something nobody else can see."

"Of course you don't understand." Her aunt spoke softly.

"And that date you have there -- the Septimus parade,"
Rebecca went on. "Why is that a special day? Why did you say I shouldn't
take part in the parade?"

Aunt Claudia crumpled the piece of paper in her bony hand.

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"Because that," she said, "is the day the curse
will be lifted. Or so I think."

"Really?" Rebecca tossed her stack of pages onto the
chaise longue. "What makes you think that? Wasn't the curse in ... in
perpetuity?"

She thought of Aurelia telling her that when she first arrived in
New Orleans.

"People think that," said Aunt Claudia. "At least,
those people who know a little about the curse, and there are too many of them
around, as you've gathered, I'm sure. But long ago, the Bowmans found someone
who could tell them more about the curse, and the story's a little
different."

"Really?" Rebecca's mind was swimming. "Who? When?
What did ..."

Aunt Claudia held up her hand.

"Over a hundred years ago," she said. "Let me go
back a little, so you'll understand. After the curse was placed on the family,
it was some years before another Bowman daughter reached her teens. She was
about to turn seventeen, sometime in the l880s, when she contracted pneumonia
and died. This girl was the granddaughter of the original residents of the
house, the Mr. Bowman who died of yellow fever and his wife."

"The woman who murdered Lisette," breathed Rebecca. Aunt
Claudia nodded.

"Their son had inherited the house after the Civil War, when
his mother died. This girl was his only daughter. But he scoffed at the idea of
a curse, and he and his wife wouldn't believe it had anything to do with their
daughter's death. His two sons grew up "and married and had many sons of
their

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own, but one of the sons had a daughter. Just before her
seventeenth birthday, she was up in St. Francisville visiting friends, when she
was killed in a riding accident."

"And that's when they started taking the curse
seriously?"

"It could have been coincidence, but the family began to get
very, very nervous. There'd been just two girls born into the Bowman family
since that terrible day in 1853, and both had died suddenly, practically on the
eve of their seventeenth birthdays. The new mistress of the house didn't want
to take any chances. She wanted the curse to be lifted."