by Paula Morris
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CHAPTER SIX
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AS SHE STEPPED THROUGH THE UNLOCKED CEMetery gates, Rebecca swallowed hard. She'd come this far -- she had to go on. The cemetery was pitch-black and eerie. The huge tombs with their towering urns and crosses -- visible from the Verniers' house in daylight, just indistinct menacing shapes in the darkness -- loomed over her. The place seemed like a scaled-down city in a blackout, with too many confusing alleys. Its pathways were dark tunnels, leading in every direction. She couldn't see or hear the group she'd followed: They'd left the central path and disappeared down one of the alleys. It was almost as though the cemetery had swallowed them up.
A sudden movement near her feet startled her, and it was all Rebecca could do not to shriek. Marilyn brushed against Rebecca's leg, giving her usual plaintive meow. When the cat trotted away down one of the overgrown pathways, Rebecca decided to keep following her. Marilyn was one of the cemetery's daily denizens: Maybe she knew where Helena and Co.
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were hiding out. Anything was better than just standing at the entrance, not knowing what to do next.
Marilyn didn't stick to the path, so neither did Rebecca, tripping over stairs, raised edges, and cracked paving stones, doing her best not to fall down or cry out. Before long her eyes started focusing a little, so she stopped banging into things so much, and soon she could hear something more than the whispering breeze -- the affected, tinkly laugh of one of the girls. Rebecca slowed her pace, gingerly making her way closer to the source of the sound. As she got closer, she heard the clink of bottles and one of the boys talking in a loud voice. When Rebecca was close enough to glimpse the top of someone's head, she ducked behind a giant boxlike grave. They mustn't see her: That would be the worst possible thing.
Rebecca crawled around in the shadows until she found a vantage point, squeezed between two tombs, that seemed relatively safe. The group was sprawled around the steps of a particularly imposing vault, one with intricate decorations -- carved wreaths of ivy, as far as Rebecca could make out -- and the name GREY etched into its central arch. Flickering candles stuck in empty wine bottles, rivulets of wax running down the glass, gave the scene a ghostly glow.
Three of the girls sat encircling the shortest of the boys; his face was animated, and he was speaking very quickly, despite the girls' constant interruptions and questions, about plans for something ... maybe the next Septimus parade. Rebecca could only catch snatches of the conversation, talk of new "throws" and costumes. Carnival was three months away, she thought: Didn't these kids have anything else to
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think about? A second boy, beefy and redheaded, was trying to juggle two empty beer bottles. Helena sat a short distance from the rest, a flirtatious smirk on her face, fingering a silver cigarette lighter that the tall, dark-haired boy had handed to her.
Rebecca couldn't help staring at the dark-haired boy. His face was angular, and though he was tall, he didn't seem gawky or clumsy. Even in the semidarkness, she could tell he was better looking than the other two boys, and there wasn't any arrogance in his expression. In fact, he seemed quite preoccupied, leaning back against the neighboring tomb, staring off into space. Every few minutes he took a swig from a bottle of beer. She wondered if this was the famous Anton Grey, the one Claire was in love with: This had to be his family's tomb. It was a weird place to hang out, Rebecca thought, but then, these were weird kids.
"Yo, check this out!" The beefy kid threw the two empty beer bottles high into the air and managed to catch just one; the other smashed into pieces on the concrete ground.
"God, Toby!" hissed Marianne. "You're so immature."
Rebecca grinned. The wannabe juggler was Toby, Marianne's brother. Amy and Jessica were right: He was ugly and mean.
"Let me try with this," he said, grabbing at the silver cigarette lighter in Helena's hand. Rebecca, crouching low in her hiding place, couldn't see what happened next, but she could tell that Toby and Anton were having some kind of scuffle. No wonder, she thought: If Toby was ready to burn down the school library, he wouldn't think twice about setting fire to the bushes in a cemetery.
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"Don't touch it again," Anton snapped.
"I know, I know," said Toby, his voice mocking. "It's a. family heirloom. Chill out!"
"Hey, look!" said one of the girls -- her name was Julie Casworth Young, Rebecca remembered. Amy had said that all the younger girls at school who idolized her, copying her hairstyle and buying the same bag, always referred to her as J.C. "It's that cute kitty again."
Marilyn had materialized out of the darkness, brushing against Anton's legs. Rebecca held her breath, hoping that Marilyn didn't bound over and reveal her hiding place. But before Marilyn could wander off again, Toby reached down and grabbed the cat. He raised her aloft, laughing maniacally, and then dangled her over one of the lit candles. Marilyn wriggled and meowed, her eyes glinting in the dark. Julie and Marianne were protesting, telling Toby to leave the cat alone, but Toby kept swinging Marilyn's writhing little body over the naked flame. Rebecca was so enraged she wanted to jump to her feet and smack Toby in the mouth. She didn't want these idiots to know she was spying on them, but Marilyn's snowy paws were dipping closer and closer to the flame: What was Rebecca going to do? Just watch?
"Cut it out," said Anton, and he shoved Toby so hard the redheaded boy staggered backward, dropping Marilyn. The scared cat shot away, speeding straight toward Rebecca's hiding place and managing, somehow, despite the tight space, to zoom past. Rebecca lost her balance, falling from her wobbly crouch onto the soft ground. Inadvertently, she gasped and then held her breath again, worried that she'd be found out.
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"What was that?" This was Helena's voice, edgy and high-pitched. "Did anyone else hear that?"
"Did you lock the gate behind us?" Marianne asked.
"I thought so, but maybe not," Anton replied. "I'll go check."
He sloped away along the cracked concrete path. A wave of red-hot panic swept through Rebecca: She had to get back to the gate before Anton, otherwise she'd be locked in. The walls were too high to climb and -- unlike Marilyn -- she wasn't tiny enough to squeeze through the bars of the gate. But how would she find her way back through this maze of tombs?
She scrambled away as quietly as she could and as quickly as she dared, trying to remember the circuitous route she'd taken on the way in. Nothing seemed familiar in this confusing forest of stone; every one of these grand tombs looked and felt the same. Rebecca kept running, stumbling over broken slates, stubbing her toes on tree roots, but somehow managing to keep her balance. Yet there was no escaping the fact that she was lost. She had no idea if she was running in the right direction.
The cemetery's main path was shaped like a cross, each branch leading to a gate: What if she got completely disoriented and ended up at the wrong one? Anton was following the path, and he'd been here before. He was sure to reach the right gate before her. Rebecca would have to spend a miserable night alone in the cemetery and wait for the caretaker to unlock it in the morning. By then her aunt would have discovered she was missing, called the police, called her father ... she would be in so much trouble.
Rounding a corner, Rebecca tripped on the protruding
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edge of a paving stone and fell to the ground with a thump. She had fallen onto a path, she realized: Her hands stung where the concrete had scraped them, and she could hear the soft sound of approaching footsteps. Then the footsteps stopped. It had to be Anton, looking at her sprawled on the ground, and for a moment Rebecca was too scared, too annoyed with herself, to look up. The person standing right by her said nothing, and she felt even more nervous. What if this wasn't Anton at all, but one of the dangerous men her aunt said loitered in the cemetery?
Rebecca slowly raised her head. The clouds obscuring the moon moved, and a strange silvery light brought the tombs around her into focus.
The person stan
ding over her wasn't Anton or any other guy. It was a black girl, about her age, looking down at Rebecca with curious interest. Her hair was long, hanging to one side in a loose braid. Her white blouse was ripped at one shoulder, and she was fingering her dark skirt, twitching it back and forth as though she was shooing flies.
The girl and Rebecca stared at each other without speaking; she looked about as startled as Rebecca felt.
"Do you ... do you know the way out of here?" Rebecca asked, pulling herself to her feet and dusting herself off. Her voice was breathy: She was almost hyperventilating with anxiety. "The Sixth Street gate?"
The girl said nothing for a moment, gazing at Rebecca. She had a sweet, pretty face, her skin a flawless bronze; her dark eyes looked uncertain, as though she was a little afraid. She wasn't wearing shoes, Rebecca noticed, and her shabby
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blouse was thin: She had to be cold on a breezy November night like this.
"That way," she said at last, pointing. She gave Rebecca a slow, hesitant smile.
"Thanks," said Rebecca, backing away. It seemed rude to run off, but she had to get out of here before Anton locked her in or saw her making her escape. The girl was standing still, just gazing at her. Rebecca gave her a grateful wave and started running.
When she skidded through the gate and bolted down the sidewalk toward home, Rebecca wasn't sure what was pounding the loudest -- her feet or her heart. Back on the front porch, she fumbled for the key and slipped inside without daring to look back. She closed the door, wincing when it clicked, and then tiptoed into the front parlor, to peek through the gap in the curtains.
The mysterious girl was nowhere to be seen. But there, standing at the cemetery gates, was Anton, tossing the key from one hand to the other. It was too dark to make out the expression on his face, but of one thing Rebecca was quite certain: He was staring straight at Aunt Claudia's house.
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***
CHAPTER SEVEN
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ON SATURDAY MORNING, REBECCA COULDN'T stop thinking about the girl in the cemetery. What was she doing there so late at night? Maybe, like Rebecca, she'd wandered in through the open gate. Maybe the storm had made her homeless, and she had nowhere else to go. But three years was a long time to sleep in a cemetery, and the gates were locked every night, Aunt Claudia had explained, to keep the homeless out. The girl was lucky, Rebecca thought, remembering the bundled-up men who slept in doorways near her apartment back home, that it hardly ever snowed in New Orleans.
As soon as Aunt Claudia drove off to the French Quarter with her folding card table and striped deck chair, and Aurelia skipped over to a friend's house for a playdate, Rebecca decided to visit the cemetery again. The girl in the torn white blouse had done her a favor, helping her escape last night; maybe Rebecca could do something in return. The girl might be hungry or want something clean to wear.
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For a minute, Rebecca wondered if the girl might be crazy or dangerous in some way, but this didn't seem likely. She had looked as frightened and surprised as Rebecca. Perhaps she was hiding from something -- or someone -- possibly the person who'd ripped her shirt. Whoever this girl was, Rebecca decided that she'd rather talk to her than to any of the snobby, self-involved girls at Temple Mead.
Rebecca walked to the open gates of the cemetery, and tried to retrace her footsteps from the night before. During the day, the cemetery felt like an entirely different place. It was an unseasonably warm day, the humidity almost thick enough to taste. Enclosed within its pale walls, the cemetery was a sun trap, its white tombs bright in the glare. It didn't feel like a looming forest of stone anymore, partly because of the little things Rebecca hadn't been able to see in the dark, like bunches of plastic flowers left in jars or pretty fleur-de-lis points on fences. A tour group meandered along the central pathway that linked the Sixth Street gate with its counterpart on Washington Avenue, everyone fluttering "Save Our Cemeteries" fans to try to keep cool.
The pathways she'd scrambled along last night -- concrete giving way to grass, grass worn away to dirt in the cemetery's shadiest corners -- were dusty and benign, though there were still too many of them, and some of the less-traveled routes were clumped with weeds and woven with knobbed tree roots. Rebecca couldn't even find her way back to the Grey family tomb, let alone remember her late-night path out.
Another tour group, all middle-aged people in ugly shorts and tragic sun visors, were stumping around after a woman in
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a yellow sundress,- she was holding an umbrella aloft. Rebecca did her best to keep away from them. She couldn't see the girl in the torn blouse anywhere. In fact, the only other person she stumbled across was a drunken man asleep on one of the graves, one of his shoes -- a bright green croc -- lying nearby and an empty bottle encased in a paper bag drooping from his right hand. This freaked Rebecca out so much she sprinted away in the direction of the dreaded tour group again. They might dress like morons -- a number of them were wearing purple, green, and gold plastic beads, she noticed, as though today was Mardi Gras -- but at least they weren't scary.
Rebecca was lingering near the group, trying to catch her breath and deciding where to wander next, when she realized that the guide was talking about the Bowman tomb.
"That's the mansion, over there," the guide was saying, pointing to the gables of a tall charcoal gray house on Prytania Street, its upper floor visible through the trees. "Hard to believe there's a curse on it, right?"
People in the group were chuckling and shaking their heads.
"Looks like it survived the curse of Katrina!" one man shouted, and the tour guide gave a pained smile.
"It took a lot of storm damage," she said. "And work seems to be going on there all the time. But no, it wasn't destroyed. There wasn't any water in this neighborhood. And, according to the legend, it'll be fire, not wind, that brings the house down."
Rebecca stood on her tiptoes, straining to hear whatever else the guide had to say about this curse, but it was too late.
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The group was moving on, ambling slowly in the searing afternoon heat toward the shade of a line of magnolia trees. Rebecca waited until they were out of the way before she walked up to the Bowman tomb.
It was fancy, just as she'd expected -- big, like the Grey family's stone vault and topped with an ostentatious stone angel. The side of the tomb was etched with names dating back to 1850. Helena's name would be etched here one day, she mused, thinking how strange an idea that was. And then she corrected herself: Helena would get married one day and probably change her name. She'd marry someone like Anton Grey and end up etched on his family's tomb instead. Wasn't that the way things worked around here -- all these rich families sticking together?
After another thirty minutes of walking around, Rebecca gave up. If the girl slept in the cemetery, she was nowhere to be found here during the day -- or maybe she was just really good at hiding.
At school the next week, Rebecca decided to corner Amy and Jessica and see what information she could get out of them. At lunchtime, she slid her tray onto their table, noticing the way the girls exchanged unhappy glances when she sat down. Ever since she'd had that conversation on the stairs with Helena and Marianne, a lot of the Plebs had been kind of aloof to Rebecca. Helena and her friends must have spread the word that Rebecca was a lowborn outsider with a bad attitude, and nobody would dare contradict "Them," she
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suspected. Amy and Jessica were still friendly to her, more or less, but they weren't exactly inviting her to sit with them or inviting her to hang out after school.
"I wondered," Rebecca began, pausing to suck from her juice carton. "Have you guys ever heard anything about a curse on the Bowman mansion?"
Jessica nodded eagerly and then checked herself; Amy was giving her a disapproving stare.
"Well, sort of," she faltered, giving her usual nervous giggle. "I mean, you know. There's some old story."
"What kind of sto
ry?"
"An old voodoo curse," said Jessica. "Some old woman, like, a hundred years ago -- she put a curse ..."
"Supposedly put a curse," interjected Amy.
"Why?" Rebecca asked. She picked at her sandwich, trying not to look too interested.
"Someone was murdered there." Jessica lowered her voice. "And this old lady put a terrible curse on the family."
"The house," whispered Amy, jiggling in her seat. She seemed impatient with Jessica's version of the story. "It's the house that has a curse."
Jessica looked puzzled.
"But I thought there was something about ..." She stopped talking abruptly, and bit into her sandwich, as though she couldn't trust herself to say another word.
"It's just some dumb old story," Amy told Rebecca. "Everyone makes up things like that about New Orleans and about the Garden District, especially. My father says they do it so there's a reason for tourists to come here. You shouldn't believe all the stories you hear."