by Paula Morris
“Look, do you want me to believe you or not?” demanded Ling. She put her feet on the bed and slouched in her chair. Rebecca nodded. “All right, then. Let’s review. There’s a ghost named Frank who wants you to rescue a locket he hid under the floorboards of a house in Tremé sometime in the 1870s.”
“Eighteen-seventy-three.”
“And not only do you have to retrieve it, you have to return it to the descendants of the person to whom it rightfully belongs. And that person is …”
“Was.”
“… someone named Desirée Musson, and she is — was — the cousin of an artist. And, as we learned this morning, that artist is probably Edgar Freakin’ Degas.”
“Right.” Rebecca slumped down again. Thunder crashed overhead, shaking the roof. Both she and Ling looked up.
“Eek,” said Ling. “That sounds angry. Speaking of which, there’s a second ghost. Gideon Mason? He murdered Frank to steal the locket, and when he couldn’t find it, got murdered himself. So now he’s all bitter and twisted, and trying to get in the way.”
“Pretty much.”
“Hmmm.” Ling crossed her ankles, then uncrossed them. Rain drove against the windows, almost drowning out the buzz of Rebecca’s phone. She pulled it out from under her pillow.
“Text from my father,” she reported. “He’s on his way home. He says we should get ready for dinner.”
“You know, if you don’t feel up to going out tonight …”
“No, I’ll be OK. Just hearing you talk all this through makes me feel better. Everything was getting so mixed-up in my head. Anyway, I need to talk to Aurelia tonight, which is a whole different complication — but whatever. Go on.”
“Where were we? Two ghosts. One seems good, one seems bad. As far as we know.”
“As far as we know,” Rebecca repeated. “And then there’s the third ghost. The girl up on the gallery. Delphine.”
“And her deal is …?”
Rebecca shrugged. “She’s a friend of Frank’s. I think they may … like each other or something.” Rebecca felt her cheeks warm up and she shook her head; she didn’t want Ling thinking Rebecca had feelings for Frank, too. Not that she did. Right? “She wants to help him in some way, but she’s stuck up on that gallery all the time, from what I can see. Tonight she was trying to help. She was warning me about Gideon Mason.”
“But she could be dangerous herself, right?”
“I guess,” Rebecca admitted. “But I don’t think so. She was friends with … this other ghost. One I knew last year. That’s another story.”
Ling raised her eyebrows.
“Who knew your life was this complicated? This is like The Sixth Sense on steroids. Anyway, the inevitable conclusion is: We need to help Frank. Don’t you think?”
Rebecca liked the sound of that “we.” Things would be much easier now that Ling was in on all this. At least Rebecca wouldn’t have to sneak around quite so much.
“Yes,” she said, trying to get her thinking straight. “Because if we don’t find the locket, it may be destroyed. And something that belonged to Degas, something possibly incredibly rare and valuable, may get crushed to pieces.”
Ling’s eyes widened.
“And,” Rebecca continued, “because Frank needs someone living to help him. Until the locket is found and handed over to its rightful owners, he’s stuck being a ghost. If the house gets demolished next week, and the locket disappears, Frank is, basically, doomed to be a ghost forever.”
“Oy.” Ling slid even further down in her chair until she was almost parallel with the ground. “And the house in question is that one by the schoolyard?” Rebecca nodded forlornly. “And it’s all boarded up, and not exactly in the world’s safest neighborhood, so we can’t just pop in anytime to look around. Not to mention it’s guarded by Caspar the Unfriendly Ghost.”
“Exactly.”
“So,” said Ling, in the kind of voice that suggested she was a detective who’d just solved the case. “I know what we have to do.”
“What?” Rebecca sat up.
“Tomorrow you need to introduce me to Frank. Then we can grill him until he’s, like, toasted on both sides.”
Rebecca laughed. She was feeling so much better now.
“Then we need to talk to Raf.”
“Raf? Really?”
“If anyone can help us, he can.”
Rebecca wasn’t so sure. They might not get a chance to talk to Raf tomorrow. He might not believe them, or want anything to do with this. But she didn’t have any better ideas, and at least Ling seemed to be approaching this whole nightmare with gusto and determination. Rebecca was all out of gusto.
“We should get ready.” Ling checked her watch. She was the only person under forty Rebecca knew who actually wore a watch. “I’m starving. But one last thing. Who else knows about any of this?”
“Anton,” Rebecca told her. “Well, he knows a little piece of it. I tried to talk to him about Frank on Monday, but he doesn’t want to know. So he won’t help us, I don’t think.”
“Whatever! We might need him for an alibi or decoy at some point, though. You don’t think he said anything to Phil?”
“I doubt it. He’s not going to start talking about ghosts if he doesn’t even really believe it himself.”
“OK — so the only people in on all this are you, me, Anton, and various crazed ghosts.”
“And Aurelia.” Rebecca wanted to hide behind her pillow.
“WHAT?”
“It’s a long story….”
“They always are, with you.”
“And the thing is, she doesn’t really know anything. Just that there’s a ghost, and that he’s looking for a locket. She really, really wants to help. But I don’t think that’s a good idea. It would be like bringing … I don’t know, a pirate as a date to the Spring Dance. Chaos would ensue.”
“Rebecca! Ling!” Her dad was out on the gallery, tapping at the door. The noise of the rain had drowned out his footsteps on the usually creaky stairs.
“Almost ready!” Rebecca called, tugging the towel off her hair and throwing it onto the ground.
“Ten minutes, OK?” he shouted, and then he was gone.
“This session of ghost court is adjourned,” said Ling, already out of her chair. “Second session when we get back tonight. Agreed?”
Rebecca nodded. Things were not any easier now, but they felt easier. She’d been stupid to hide all this from Ling. She wouldn’t dread waking up tomorrow, now that Ling was on her side.
Rebecca was glad she hadn’t opted out of the dinner at Commander’s Palace. She’d seen the distinctive turquoise-and-white striped awning many, many times when she was living in the Garden District, and observed the young valet parkers sprinting up and down Washington Avenue in the rain, but she’d never been inside.
Anton lived just on the other side of the cemetery, and part of Rebecca hoped he would walk in at some point with his parents: The Greys were certainly rich enough to eat here every night of the week. Maybe she should have even told him they were all coming here tonight. Her father wouldn’t have minded Anton joining them. But right now her head was too full of Frank — even though he was a ghost, as Rebecca had to keep reminding herself.
Ghosts had complicated problems, as she’d learned, but even so, things seemed less complicated with them, in a way, than with real flesh-and-blood relationships. Frank was always pleased to see her. And when he held her hand it didn’t mean anything — apart from instant invisibility. If only she could be invisible tomorrow night at the Spring Dance. The closer it got to the night, the more nervous Rebecca grew. Sure, lording her presence over Amy and Jessica would be gratifying. But she wasn’t looking forward to walking through a sea of hostile faces. No one from Temple Mead would be very happy to see her again. Would it just be the social freeze of the Bowmans’ Christmas party all over again?
“It’s like a floor show,” Ling was saying. They’d been seated at a round table upstairs in
the busy Garden Room, and a swarm of waiters was delivering the first course, lifting silver covers off each plate at exactly the same time in one choreographed swoop.
“I feel kind of bad eating turtles,” Ling said, studying her soup bowl.
“If you’ve already tried alligator, you’ll be fine,” Aunt Claudia said. She had dressed for the occasion in an almost normal outfit: a long black dress with a draped paisley scarf, which she called her “Arabian stole.” Aurelia was gussied up, too, in an expensive-looking polka-dot halter dress. It made quite a change from her usual after-school wear of castoffs.
“It’s from Ballin’s in the Riverbend,” she told an admiring Ling. “It’s Claire’s sister’s. Claire lent it to me.”
“Does Claire’s sister know?” Rebecca asked. Aurelia ignored this question. She was still giving Rebecca the cold shoulder.
“She lent me these shoes as well,” she told Ling, pushing back the tablecloth so they could see her gold strappy sandals.
“Your feet are soaking,” sympathized Ling. She’d had the same bad luck on the way in, climbing straight out of the taxi into a giant puddle.
“Why don’t you invite Claire to come along to Jazz Fest with you on Friday?” Rebecca’s dad suggested. But Aurelia told him Claire was leaving right after school that day, to visit her grandparents in Jackson.
Rebecca had forgotten all about Jazz Fest. She’d been excited when she first heard they were going: Now it was just another complication. Time was running out. When exactly would they get the opportunity to find a way into that boarded-up house and rescue the locket? For the hundredth time she considered telling her father everything, and for the hundredth time decided it wasn’t a good idea. Sure, he knew about Lisette and believed in her, but that didn’t mean he’d believe all Rebecca’s stories about Frank and Delphine and Gideon Mason, let alone a lost Degas hidden beneath the floorboards of a house in Tremé. Like Anton said, Lisette was a family ghost. Frank was just some unknown guy from another century with a sob story and a stab wound.
Ling must have had the locket on her mind, too, because she kept bringing up the subject of derelict houses on the verge of collapse.
“That town house on the corner of our street, for example,” she said, slurping the last of her soup. “It’s such a beautiful building, with all that ironwork on the galleries. But nobody’s living there.”
“I wouldn’t live on Rampart Street,” Aunt Claudia said firmly. “It’s bad enough using the parking garage there.”
“But gentrification will keep pushing its way out of the Quarter, don’t you think?” Rebecca’s father asked her. “When we were in Tremé on Tuesday, I couldn’t believe how much money people are spending fixing up historic houses there now. In some streets you’d think you were in the Quarter.”
“Except mostly black people live there,” Aurelia said. “What? Why are you all looking at me like that? I’m just saying the truth.”
“Those houses by Basin Street High are coming down next week,” said Ling, with a significant glance at Rebecca.
“I guess you have to weigh what’s more important to a neighborhood — the people who live there now, or the people who used to live there,” said Rebecca’s dad. “And much as I love the craftsmanship and history of some of those houses, a neighborhood isn’t just about pieces of wood. As we saw after Katrina, those things can get swept away by floodwaters, or blown to pieces by the wind. A neighborhood, a community — it’s about the people.”
Rebecca thought about the burned-down Bowman mansion, a landmark for more than one hundred fifty years in the Garden District, but now gone forever. Just thinking of that night last year reminded her of Toby lurking in the city again, chasing Aurelia through the streets. What was he planning this time? Another fire? Given how much he apparently loved New Orleans, he didn’t seem averse to burning half of it down. It was bad enough dealing with ghosts without Toby entering the fray.
“But I do see your point, Ling,” Rebecca’s father was saying, “about the importance of legacy in a neighborhood. You’re absolutely right. How much of it can you remove or replace without destroying it altogether? Like Storyville, the place that witnessed the birth of jazz. Places where Louis Armstrong and Joe Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton lived and played — all gone.”
“Do you remember Storyville, Mama?” Aurelia asked, her mouth full.
“Baby, I’m not that old,” said Aunt Claudia. “Storyville was knocked down when my grandmamma was a tiny little girl.”
“So that’s what I’m saying.” Ling waggled her fork in the air to help make her point. “When you take away the buildings, you take away the history of a place.”
“But history lives in people as well as buildings,” Rebecca’s father pointed out. “In traditions and customs.”
“Red beans and rice,” said Aunt Claudia, smiling.
“Gumbo,” said Aurelia, her mouth still full.
“So when we’re talking about Tremé,” said Rebecca’s father, “a much bigger concern is the one Rafael’s grandmother was talking about the other day. Prices going up may be a bigger threat to the history of the neighborhood, and to the history of the city, than houses coming down. If you take the people out of Tremé — the social clubs, the musicians, the Mardi Gras Indians — then you disperse that living, breathing culture. Maybe you even kill it off. So you’ll be left with pretty streets lined with pretty houses, but those streets’ll be empty. Or else it’ll be like the Quarter, filling the void with tourists. And the story the neighborhood is telling, its own particular history that draws on tradition and invents new ones, like jazz, will go quiet. The soul will be gone.”
Rebecca sighed.
“This is a very depressing conversation,” declared Aunt Claudia.
“Miss Viola says her family mask as Indians,” Rebecca told her father. “She said we should ask Raf about it. Ask to see his dad’s house.”
“You don’t need to go to anyone’s daddy’s house to see Indians,” said Aunt Claudia. “You can see Indians on Friday at Jazz Fest. I don’t know — you girls, running around in Tremé!”
She raised an eyebrow at Rebecca’s father, and he nodded, as if they’d agreed something in advance.
“You know, I’ve been hearing stories at City Hall today,” he said, cutting a piece of flaky white fish piled high with buttery crabmeat. “About some things going down in Tremé at the moment. I’m wondering if you girls really need to go back tomorrow.”
“Oh, but we have to!” Rebecca exclaimed. They really, really had to go back to Tremé. Her father had no idea. Aurelia, on the other hand, was watching Rebecca intently, her pretty face screwed up into a frown.
“We promised we would,” added Ling. “Just one more day.”
“I’m sure they won’t miss you,” said Aunt Claudia. “They seemed to have a lot of helpers this afternoon.”
“And it’s just not a good place for you two to be wandering around,” Rebecca’s father said.
“We’re not really wandering around,” Ling pointed out. “We’re on school property and completely supervised the whole time by Mr. Boyd.”
“And he is really mean,” said Aurelia. “Every single girl on my litter squad was a victim of Mr. Boyd’s unfair detention policies. They said it was practically a violation of their human rights.”
“So really, we’re more safe there, if you think about it.” Ling was on a roll. Rebecca could only sit back and marvel at her ingenuity. “Anyone engaging in crime within two hundred yards of a public school — well, that’s a federal offense.”
“I should have insisted on driving you home today!” Aunt Claudia said. “I wouldn’t have forgiven myself if something had happened after I left.”
Rebecca didn’t look at Ling in case a guilty expression gave them away.
“Maybe I’ll come over in a cab and get you tomorrow,” Rebecca’s father said. “I can finish up early.”
Rebecca stared down at her napkin, wishing everyone would
stop freaking out. She and Ling had a lot to accomplish tomorrow, and adult interference would only make things more complicated.
Her phone buzzed in her jacket pocket, and Rebecca surreptitiously pulled it free. Maybe it was Anton. Maybe he’d seen them walking into Commander’s, though — she had to admit — he’d need to be sitting on the roof of his house with a telescope to manage that.
Her dad had a strict no-texts-at-dinner policy back in New York, but everyone was preoccupied right now with the orange juice Aurelia had just spilled all over the table. Rebecca glanced at her cell phone screen and frowned: It wasn’t Anton. It was a number she didn’t recognize.
enjoying commanders?
Rebecca was puzzled. Who was this? The phone buzzed again. Caller ID unknown.
looking for a locket?
Rebecca stifled a gasp. Her blood was roaring in her ears. Could this be from Amy or Jessica? But the menacing tone of the texts didn’t seem to fit.
Her phone buzzed a third time; another message was blinking.
how bout looking on st philip, stupid girl????
Stupid girl. The exact thing Toby had said to Aurelia.
Toby Sutton. This had to be Toby Sutton. Rebecca glanced around in terror. How did he know they were at the restaurant: Was he watching them? Following them? How did he get ahold of her number?
And how could anyone possibly know about the house on St. Philip Street?
The rain had stopped, but the streets were still drenched. They walked back to Aunt Claudia’s the long way around the cemetery because, Rebecca suspected, her father and aunt didn’t want her to have to pass the Coliseum Street gate. Bad stuff from the past, Rebecca thought. They had no idea of all this bad stuff in the present.
Everyone moved at a glacial pace along Prytania, wind rustling the oak trees and showering them with a spittle of raindrops. Aurelia was walking with Ling, jabbering away a mile a minute, and Aunt Claudia and Rebecca’s father were deep in conversation. Rebecca’s heart was pounding. Was Toby somewhere nearby, hiding, waiting to pounce? Why was everyone walking so slowly? Her head was jerking in every direction, following every shadow, every rustle, every passing car.