Paula Morris (28 page)

"But Lisette's mother was dead by then," Rebecca told
her aunt. "She dropped dead in the street a few months after Lisette was
murdered. And anyway, she would have died of old age by then, right?"

"Probably, if she wasn't dead already-- 1905 was the year
they tried to take the curse off the house. The new Mrs. Bowman invited anyone
she could think of to help them -- all sorts of self-proclaimed voodoo queens
and mystics. Someone who called himself the High Priest of Hoodoo. A priest was
even asked to perform an exorcism, I hear."

"Did any of this work?"

"Not a thing. But one day someone came to visit them, someone
they hadn't invited. She was an old Creole woman who lived down by the river on
the other side of town -- Miss Celia, everyone called her. She'd been born in
Haiti early in the previous century, people said, during the revolution there,
the daughter of free people of color. Her family had fled to New Orleans in
1809, escaping the bloodshed and political turbulence on that ravaged island.
So the day she came to call on the Bowmans, she was a very old lady, over a

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hundred years old, and half blind. But still famous, in certain
parts of the city, for her powers of second sight."

"Did she know Lisette and her mother?"

"Oh, yes. She'd known Rose Villieux very well. She'd lived in
Tremé for fifty years after she arrived in New Orleans, and she knew both Marie
Laveaus ..."

"I didn't know there was more than one." Rebecca had
only a vague idea about the famous voodoo priestess.

"She knew Marie Laveau and her daughter, the one who
mysteriously disappeared. She'd known Dr. Jim Alexander, and Eliza Nicaud, who
were famous in voodoo circles here for years. And, of course, she knew all
about the curse on the Bowman house. The very day Lisette's mother came to the
house, she'd returned home to Tremé and summoned her closest friends, Miss
Celia included. These were women who knew about these things, because many of
them were refugees from Saint-Domingue, or the daughters of these refugees.
That night, they came together in her house on St. Philip Street and prepared
an altar. They carved the name "Bowman" onto seven black candles, and
Rose repeated the curse she'd made. She wanted to make sure the family would
suffer, the way she was suffering."

"And Miss Celia was there?" Rebecca asked, even though
her aunt had already told her this.

"She was." Aunt Claudia nodded. "So the Bowmans
were very interested in what she had to say. The curse had taken its first
victim almost immediately, she told them...."

"But wait a minute," Rebecca interrupted. "Didn't
you say that the first Bowman daughter didn't die until after the Civil War?
Like, in the l880s?"

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"That girl wasn't the first victim," said Aunt Claudia
quietly. She looked warily at Rebecca. "The first person the curse killed
was Lisette's mother. To make a curse so strong and so brutal ... well, there's
a price to be paid. Karma, if you like, if you don't mind mixing religious
traditions. As you know, I'm not a stickler about these things."

Her aunt cast a wry glance around the living room, with its
mixture of Buddhist statuettes, African masks, pictures of saints, and brass
Indian gods.

"Rose knew she wouldn't survive long after inflicting so
cruel a curse," she continued, "but she had nothing left to live for,
Miss Celia said. The man she loved was dead. Their daughter, Lisette, had been
killed, without any consequences for the murderer. And things were starting to
get very bad in the city for her community. They were seen as a subversive
presence, fueling the discontent of the slave population. Rose must have
decided that she had nothing to lose but her life, and that it was worth it, to
take revenge for her daughter's death."

"Who
told
you all this? About what Miss Celia said, I
mean?" Aunt Claudia looked old, but she couldn't be more than fifty, at
most, Rebecca decided: There was no way she could have been alive the same time
as this strange old crone, Miss Celia. She seemed totally averse to having
anything to do with the Bowmans. So where did she get all this inside
information?

Her aunt seemed in no hurry to answer. She picked up one of the
carved wooden elephants from the side table and scratched at some dust gathered
in the thick folds of one of its ears. Then she put it down again, wheezing out
a tired sigh.

244.

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"I never met Miss Celia," she said. "But I feel as
though I know her well. My grandmother was her great-granddaughter and a
favorite of the old lady's. Miss Celia was so close to her that she told her
the whole story when my grandmother was just a child. Frightened my poor
Maw-Maw half to death. And when she died, Miss Celia left every penny of her
savings to my grandmother, including the money the Bowmans gave her for telling
them more about the curse. And with that money, my grandmother eventually bought
this house. During the war, like I told you. She left it to me when she died.
We needed to keep an eye on things, she always said. One day, she told me, we'd
be of service again."

Rebecca could not believe her ears. Aunt Claudia was a descendant
of one of the Haitian refugees? This strange little house was part of the
Bowmans' story? All those months when her aunt wouldn't tell her a thing ...
when she knew more than anyone, practically, in the neighborhood.

"So you're ... you're ..." She wasn't even sure what she
was trying to ask. "You really
are
a descendant of a voodoo
priestess?"

"A spiritual advisor," Aunt Claudia corrected her.
"That's how she preferred to be known. I haven't inherited many of her
powers, I'm ashamed to admit. Miss Celia had second sight, as they say. She was
the one who said it would all end the day of the Septimus parade."

"So she came to the house and just said that to them?"
Rebecca asked. This strange old Miss Celia sounded as secretive and eccentric
as Aunt Claudia. "I don't get why she waited so long to tell them, if she
was prepared to just turn up and blab all the details."

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"I don't think she knew in advance." Aunt Claudia got up
and walked to the window, twitching the heavy lace curtain as though it was out
of place. She peered out into the street, in the direction of the cemetery.
"It was only when she went to the Bowman house that she started seeing
things."

"Like what?" Rebecca prompted, because her aunt seemed
more interested in looking out at the street than finishing her story.

"My grandmother told me she walked into that house, and went
straight to the staircase, bending down to touch it." "That's where
Lisette was killed!" Aunt Claudia nodded.

"And then she walked out of the house and across the street
to the cemetery, with the Bowmans trotting along behind her. She headed
straight for their family vault, like she knew exactly where it was located,
even though later she swore she'd never been there before in her life."

"Weird."

"And it was when she stood on the steps of the tomb that Miss
Celia could really see things.
Flames coming down,
she said."

"The house on fire!" Rebecca said, thinking of the
curse.

"Darkness and light." Aunt Claudia turned sharply to
stare at Rebecca. She looked nervous, as though she was afraid of something.
"People in masks and colorful costumes, shivering in the cold -- that's
why she thought it was the night of the Septimus parade. A flame tumbling from
the sky. A girl falling to the ground. The seventh Bowman girl to die, and the
last. Once she fell, the curse would be complete."

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"And Helena ... is she the seventh girl to die?"
Rebecca's stomach lurched when her aunt nodded. For the first time, she really
felt sorry for Helena. "It's so awful."

And so unfair, she thought, that more than a hundred and fifty
years after Lisette's murder, a girl still had to pay with her life. However
odious Helena Bowman acted most of the time, it wasn't her fault that Lisette
had been killed.

"And another girl." Her aunt's voice, shrill all of a
sudden, cut through the dead air of the parlor. "Miss Celia saw another
girl, high above. She pointed up to the stone angel on top of the tomb, and at
first the Bowmans thought
that
was the second girl, that Miss Celia must
be talking about the angel. But she told them there'd be another Bowman
daughter, of the same age. That night the two girls would come face-to-face,
lit by torchlight. One girl would live, and the other would die. And the curse
would die with her."

"But Helena doesn't have any sisters," Rebecca
protested. This didn't make sense at all. "And even if she did, they
wouldn't be the same age. Are you sure Miss Celia wasn't talking about the
angel?"

Aunt Claudia shook her head, clutching at pieces of furniture as
she made her way back to her seat. The room was very dark now; they needed to
turn on some lights, Rebecca thought. But she didn't want to break the spell of
the story.

"Maybe she meant Lisette?" Rebecca suggested. After all,
Lisette was a Bowman daughter -- the only other Bowman girl Rebecca had ever
met -- and she was sixteen, just like Helena. In a permanent state of sixteen,
in fact.

"Lisette is already dead," her aunt pointed out, her
voice

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soft again. "And you're right, Helena doesn't have a sister.
But she does have a first cousin, born just a few weeks after she was."

"Really?" Rebecca sat up straight. "Who? Does she
live in New Orleans, too?"

Aunt Claudia looked at Rebecca, green eyes blurring with the
beginning of tears.

"Baby," she said, starting to say something and then
swallowing it back.

"What?" Rebecca's skin was tingling with anticipation.
This story was getting more and more strange. Who was Helena Bowman's mystery
cousin? And why was talking about this making her aunt so upset?

"I have something to tell you," she said, reaching out a
hand to stroke Rebecca's arm. "Helena's cousin, the other girl ... oh,
Rebecca. It's you."

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***

CHAPTER THIRTY

***

Rebecca couldn't see straight. she stared into space, the room's
furniture and clusters of tired knickknacks disappearing into the gloom. She
could be in the cemetery now, so mysterious were the dark shapes of the parlor,
so oppressive its claustrophobic atmosphere. Aunt Claudia was talking on and
on, but nothing she said made sense.

Helena Bowman had a first cousin; their birthdays were just a few
weeks apart. This girl was the daughter of Helena's uncle, Paul Bowman. Paul
had left New Orleans as a young man and never returned; he'd married a girl
named Sarah in some other city. Very few people in New Orleans knew where he'd
gone or that he was married; very few knew this daughter even existed, because
Paul and Sarah had raised her elsewhere. They'd hoped somehow to defy the
Bowman curse by leaving behind the city and the mansion and the family's
terrible history -- even though it meant Paul, the older of the two Bowman
brothers, was turning his back on

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his considerable inheritance and all the advantages of being part
of one of New Orleans's most powerful families.

Rebecca shook her head: Her ears felt clogged, as though she'd
been bowled over by a wave while swimming in the ocean.

"But I don't know anything about this Paul and Sarah!"
she protested. "And I wasn't born just a few weeks after Helena -- I'm
almost a year younger than she is!"

Aunt Claudia reached over to the lamp on the side table and
clicked it on: A sickly pool of light illuminated their corner of the parlor.

"Paul and Sarah moved all around," she said, her voice
quiet but very firm. "They were determined to lose all contact with the
Bowmans, all connection with the past. Paul grew a beard, so he'd be harder to
recognize, and before their daughter was born they changed their names as well.
To Michael and Millie Brown."

Rebecca wanted to cry out, but she couldn't make a sound.
Everything she knew about her life and her parents and her family -- could it
really be a lie?

"And," Aunt Claudia continued, reaching out to grasp
Rebecca's hand, "through a friend in the CIA, they even managed to change
their daughter's birth certificate, taking more than a year off her age. She
was given the birthday of June twenty-eighth, 1993- But actually, she was born
in 1992, on March twelfth. That's your real birthday, Rebecca. You're almost
... you're about to turn seventeen."

Rebecca drew her hand away from her aunt, and shuffled through the
calendar pages lying on the chaise longue. There it was: March twelfth. The day
she was born. Her

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parents had lied to her. All these years, her father had kept the
truth from her. She felt sick to her stomach, unable to speak. A fat, hot tear
rolled down her face, and Rebecca wiped it away with the back of her hand.

"They were trying to protect you, Rebecca." Aunt Claudia
could read her mind. "If Miss Celia was right, then this terrible curse
still has one victim to claim. That's why your father's done all he could to
keep your very existence a secret."