City of Masks

by Daniel Hecht

  He resumed driving. The city flowed past and Cree was thinking and then she realized she must have dozed because suddenly the lights were bright and they were pulling up at the hotel. She stirred, momentarily disoriented.

  Fitzpatrick turned to her. "I know you're kaput. But can I ask one more personal question?"

  "I think so."

  He hesitated, then reached out and with his thumb swept her hair up off her forehead, out of her eyes, and tucked it behind her ear. His touch was gentle, yet the contact startled her with what seemed an electrical charge. He looked at her, considered, then shook his head, smiling. "I changed my mind. No questions. Just, thanks for dinner, Dr. Black. This has been really fine. A real surprise. That's all."

  Cree found her purse. She gave him a tired smile, opened the door, and got out without saying anything. She'd made it all the way through the glass doors and the BMW had pulled away before she realized she had leaned over and kissed him, quickly, good night.

  18

  MONDAY MORNING, CREE AWOKE disoriented, momentarily not sure where she was. When she looked over at the clock she saw it was nine-thirty; she'd been down so deep that even the jackhammers on Canal Street hadn't penetrated her sleep.

  She'd been exhausted when she'd gotten back to the hotel, but she'd felt an irresistible desire to check in with home. She had called both Deirdre and Mom and had nice but somewhat stilted talks, as if they'd both been waiting for the other shoe to drop, for Cree to confess some catastrophe. Cree had compensated by forcing cheerfulness. It wasn't until she'd talked to Dee for a few minutes, unable to tell much about why she'd called, that she'd realized she wanted to talk about Paul. She wanted an excuse to say his name to someone close to her, not make a big thing of it, but just touch that connection ever so lightly. But she didn't. Too soon. Instead, she talked about the way the city looked, about the food. She told Dee New Orleans was great and so far not too scary. Dee told her the twins missed her and that she should take care.

  Mom was different. Cree had been thinking about her anyway, and then meeting Charmian had begun a cascade of thoughts. What was it between Lila and Charmian - the love, the distance, the distrust?

  Janet sounded tired when she answered, reminding Cree that even on the West Coast it was getting late. Cree told her she was dealing with a mother-and-daughter relationship. "I guess I want you to be my oracle after all."

  "Great," Janet said unenthusiastically.

  "About mothers," Cree clarified. "This woman, she seems so . . .hard. About her kids. Mom, what do mothers really want for their kids? What's the most important thing?"

  "I can't speak for anyone else, Cree. I want my kids to be happy and healthy and live good lives."

  "Could a mother not love a daughter? Just want her to, I don't know . . . make her proud, or keep up the family image? Could it really be that simple?"

  "Aren't you the one with the Ph. D. in psychology?" Janet blew out a breath. "My answer is, maybe that's possible, but I've lived sixty-four years and I've never yet met a mother whose first motivation wasn't to protect and nurture her kids. Every mother chooses different strategies, that's all. And each kid needs a different approach."

  Cree thought about that. "Do all mothers keep secrets from their kids?"

  "Of course!"

  "You?" Teasing.

  "I sure as heck hope so! If you don't have anything you want to keep private, you must not have lived much of a life."

  Cree and Deirdre had often surmised, from a variety of small clues, that Pop had had an affair around the time Dee was born. They'd always wanted to know what went down, how their parents patched it together afterward, but had never figured a way to open the subject. Janet had certainly never given them the slightest chance to do so.

  They talked about other things, Cree keeping it light, determined not to give her anything to worry about. She'd been about to say good night when Janet returned to the topic: "Of course everyone has secrets, Cree, and they're by God entitled to them. It's only when you keep them from yourself that you're in trouble."

  Leave it to Mom to hit you with something profound on the backswing. Cree had chewed on that until she fell asleep.

  A blast of multiple jackhammers reminded her again that there was a lot to do. She showered and dressed, made coffee with the hotel kit, and got to work.

  First, a call to Delisha Brown, the Times-Picayune reporter who had written most of the articles on the Chase murder. She got Brown's voice mail and left a short message.

  Next, the School of Architecture Library at Tulane University. The librarian told her she could look at the plans for Beauforte House, but it would take a day or two to process the request and retrieve them from the archives. Cree wouldn't be able to remove the drawings from the library, she said, but she could make duplicates on the library's big blueprint copier. Cree left her number and requested that she be called as soon as the drawings were available.

  She set down the phone with the realization that she'd unconsciously started with the easy calls and was stalling on the harder ones. With some trepidation, she made herself dial the Warrens' number, half expecting to hear the answering machine pick up. But Lila answered with a bone-weary voice.

  "How're you doing today?" Cree asked.

  "As well as can be expected. Given that Paul Fitzpatrick is here, explaining that he'd basically like to have me commit myself."

  "For observation, Lila!" Paul's voice said in the background. "For diagnostics."

  "I think you should do as he suggests," Cree put in. "It's — "

  "I'm sorry for yesterday," Lila went on. "And I wanted to thank you. Did I thank you? You probably saved my life. But I'm very, very sorry you had to get dragged into my - "

  "Lila. There's nothing to be sorry for! Will you listen to me for a moment?"

  "I'm listening to everybody." Lila's tone flattened. "I'm just listening away. I'm listening to my mother. I'm listening to my husband, and my brother, and — "

  "We just want to eliminate medical possibilities."

  "Oh." The single word conveyed Lila's feeling of betrayal.

  Cree couldn't let it pass unchallenged. "You're taking it the wrong way! Lila, I saw his shoes. I felt him! I smelled him, damn it, I know what you're up against!" There was no way to tell her the full extent of her empathic connection.

  "I'm sure," The flattened affect again.

  "Please do as Paul suggests. I need to do some other research anyway.

  I'd feel better if I knew you were safe and were looking into the . . . the other possibilities."

  "Oh, yes. The other possibilities." Lila's tone was a tired, diminished version of her mother's caustic irony. "Well. I will certainly consider what you say. Thank you for your concern."

  The line went dead, and Cree hung up, feeling frustrated. While they'd huddled on the hall floor, gathering the will and energy to get up and out of Beauforte House, she'd stroked Lila's drowsing head and felt an almost overwhelming compassion for her, an inexplicably powerful sense of shared predicament. Hadn't Lila felt it, too? Cree almost hit the redial button, but then decided that with Paul and probably Jack there, the poor woman had enough advice, pressure, and persuasion going already. She'd check in with Paul later to see what clinic Lila had gone to, maybe stop in and see her.

  She had two more calls to make, and she realized that these were harder still.

  After the events of the last two days, her instincts were telling her to begin the full-scale investigation immediately. She'd seen the entity, she'd probed the outermost edge of its affective complex, and it was clear that this case had several important elements urgently worth pursuing. First was the degree of the ghost's interactivity: the hiding and chasing, his waiting, his purposefulness. This was no simple perseveration, but a much rarer phenomenon, an entity that had retained at least some level of awareness of its own existence, the environment, and living people —of Lila, anyway. Second, there were the many anomalies: besides the pig head, there we
re the wolf, the snake, the table, and the other changelings. Some of that could be psychological, or even just medical, but Cree was beginning to think neither fully explained what Lila had experienced.

  And finally, there was the boar-headed man's mysterious lack of a perimortem dimension. Even in extreme cases, where the dying person's primary manifestation was the reliving of intense memories, Cree could sense an "umbilicus" of connection to the death experience. But this one didn't seem to be reliving his dying, didn't seem to have a conscience. She hoped she would locate it as she got nearer to him, probably it was the vague affective locus she'd sensed in the library, that melancholy keening. But it was too soon to be sure.

  Ultimately, it was Lila's state of mind that made it most urgent to commence a full investigation and remediation. After yesterday, Cree had no doubt that her life, let alone her sanity, was in danger. If Cree hadn't arrived when she did, Lila could easily have fled in panic through one of the second-floor windows. Or she could have been literally scared to death as the hormonal chemistry of mortal panic drove her heart rate to intolerable extremes. And there had to be a suicide risk.

  It was good that Lila was going to spend some time under observation, but sooner or later she had to come out. If she were to be truly safe, somebody had to solve the mystery, provide her with some answers that made emotional sense, and eliminate the source of the haunting. And that meant calling Edgar and Joyce, getting them down here.

  Ordinarily, calling them on a priority situation wouldn't be a big problem. In the case of Joyce, it still wasn't a problem.

  The problem was Edgar.

  Cree got up from the desk and paced a circle, limping only slightly now, approaching the thought warily.

  Edgar. Good, wise, kind Edgar. Handsome in his stringy way, funny, smart, protective, supportive. Wouldn't think it to look at him, but he was a terrific dancer who when he took his shirt off revealed a tanned, hard abdomen cut with muscle that turned women's heads. She imagined that he was a fine lover, tender yet passionate. Certainly devoted to Cree.

  It was stupid. One walk along the levee, pleasant conversation in the light of the setting sun. One night at a restaurant with that buzz of magnetism, partly fueled by exhaustion and booze. That brief, startling touch in the car, a quick kiss. She didn't know anything about Paul Fitzpatrick - for all she knew, he was married and had ten kids, and the feelings she'd experienced were not reciprocal at all.

  Nah, an inner voice told her.

  Okay, but this was a professional trip - business. Social involvements would only get in the way, destroy Cree's focus when someone else's life was at stake. She wasn't here to hunt for true love. She wasn't looking for romance. She didn't walk around with her heart on her sleeve, accessible to any single male who showed an interest. And she wasn't really available: She was a goddamned nun, married and still loyal to a man long dead.

  Very much a widow, she thought again, hating Charmian.

  And then the other blade cut at her again: Mustn't waste the bloom. Why not look for true love, singular love, lifetime love? Why shouldn't she actively seek something so beautiful and fine? Why should there be the slightest shame or reluctance? But if she admitted that's what she believed in and wanted, then she had to face that she'd already found that love, married that man - and lost him, nine years ago. So to believe in the one true love was to effectively deny it to herself for the rest of her life. Leaving the alternative: staying hard and skeptical, denying that such love could exist, killing daily her own romantic, lyrical yearnings.

  Neither was a tolerable choice.

  But Edgar. Whatever might or might not be possible with Paul, Edgar's presence would compound her already abundant confusions of loyalty. What was their relationship? How did she feel?

  The phone rang and jolted her out of her uselessly spiraling thoughts.

  "Hey, darlin', it's little ol' me." Male voice, an unfamiliar Southern accent. "And have Ah got some news fuh ya'll!"

  "I'm sorry, who - ?"

  "Y'all don't rec'nize mah voice?"

  Suddenly it clicked: "Edgar! Jesus. What a god-awful lousy accent!Nobody really talks that way here."

  "Shoot. All that practice for nothing!" Edgar laughed. "How're you doing, Cree?"

  "I was - I was just going to call you, actually." Cree felt some relief: Ed's calling had solved her dilemma for her. Fate intervening, saving her from making a fool of herself.

  "That's nice. How come?" There was a suppressed smile in his voice, as if he had something important to say but was saving it: Edgar with a bouquet held behind his back.

  "We need to get on this case. Full research and remediation. How soon can you get down here?"

  "Uh, Cree, listen - the reason I called, I have just had the most amazing day and night of my life!" Once he let himself go, Edgar sounded almost breathless with excitement.

  "Tell me."

  "Guess what happened to me!" he practically sang.

  "No shit, Ed! Really?"

  "Yeah, me! Mr. Empiricism himself! I heard footsteps, Cree! I did! Clear footsteps coming through the whole house, somebody with a bit of a limp. Broad daylight, right, I turn around, expecting to see one of my witnesses, and — nobody! The hair rose on my arms, man, I got the chills."

  Cree felt good for him. She could feel his pleasure in at last being able to share at least some small part of her experiences. "So what was it like? Did you experience a particular mood, a feeling — "

  "Yeah, I felt I wanted to call you up and tell you! But Cree, that's not all! I'm onto something really major here. Listen, the cycles of manifestation, right? Why do people only see or hear this thing when they do? I come out here with my geomagnetic theory, which suggests sightings should occur at the same time of day or night, but the times of sightings just don't match the solar day. This one's been seen many times, by several people, so today I talk to all my witnesses and chart the times of the last dozen sightings, including my own? At first glance they look like they're scattered around the clock. But then I saw the pattern. Tides, Cree! Tides aren't on a twenty-four-hour cycle, it's about twelve and a half hours between high tides, which means they progress through the solar day! Tides mean a lot to the commercial fishermen here, so all the times are published in the papers? So I happened to spot the tidal tables and got thinking and then went and found almanacs for the last two years, and bingo, man - hundred percent correlation between tidal cycles and sighting times! I mean, this is seriously large."

  Ed used "man," "big," and "large" like that only when he was really, really into something, as if in his excitement he regressed to his teenage years in Santa Barbara.

  "I guess I don't know much about tides," Cree admitted. "Would it . . . does it affect places inland, too?"

  "Absolutely! Tides are a harmonic, a metavibration of the planet's matter, liquid and solid alike. The pull of lunar gravity meets the rotational dynamics of Earth, which has a fluid core, mostly nickel. The core bulges, so you get measurable fluctuations in gravity and geomagnetics." Edgar paused to take a breath and then went on intensely: "Cree, you get this, right? This could be the big one. This could verify the whole geomagnetic connection!"

  It was impossible not to share his enthusiasm. His excitement came palpably through the phone, irradiating Cree, kicking her pulse up a notch. "Wow, Ed. This is fabulous!"

  "Yeah. So I'm going over there again tonight, only now I know just when I should be there! I've got this guy Dickerson, from Harvard's geophysics department, coming tomorrow to take some readings. Give us five or six nights in a row, we should be able to verify the pattern." He paused and seemed to put on the brakes, as if just now remembering what she'd said earlier. "But you said you wanted me down there. What's going on? You didn't seem to be in such a hurry yesterday."

  Cree gave him a summary of events. Ed grudgingly supposed he could call off Dickerson and drop the Massachusetts case for the time being. But she heard his reluctance: He had grabbed his own tiger by the tail and
wanted very much to hang on for the ride.

  "Can it wait until Saturday?" he asked finally. "Or maybe Sunday - I might be able to get there by Sunday night."

  Cree hesitated. When he'd wanted to come, she'd stalled him; now that she had asked him to come, he was stalling.

  At last she answered, "Sure, Ed. I'll see if Joyce can come down. But you stay there and keep after that. I'm good here." And for the second time in ten minutes, she thought, Fate intervening.

  By the time Cree hung up, she was becoming very aware that it was nearly lunchtime and she hadn't eaten breakfast yet. Still, she dialed the PPJV office in Seattle.

  Joyce picked up on the first ring. "Psi Research Associates."

  "Got time for a trip to the birthplace of jazz?"

  "I am out of here," Joyce returned. "Bye-byeee!"

  19

  CREE STEPPED QUICKLY INTO the dim cool of Beauforte House, closed the door behind her, and shut down the security system. This time she went immediately into the front parlor and tugged apart the heavy drapes. Dust sifted down in the window light as she hooked the fabric back. She repeated the process at the four windows, and when she was done turned to look it over.

  Oh my, she thought.

  It was a lovely room. In natural light, the colors of the wallpapers and fabrics turned rich and vivid, the old woods took on a warm luster. The gloomy canopy of the ceiling became an airy height, the room's stately proportions were more evident, even the faces in the various Beauforte portraits seemed to take on more pleasant expressions. The window views of blossoming greenery and other houses nicely complemented the interior vistas.

  So this is what Lila remembers, Cree thought. What she wants.

  She went into the back parlor and did the same, opening the room to daylight that shifted and mottled as a breeze rocked the magnolias outside. From the back of the second parlor, she gazed through the length of the two rooms, a grand sixty feet or more, and had a second realization. She had wondered why Lila, or anyone, would want to live in a house that was virtually a museum. But though you might see this elegance in museums, separated from it by velvet ropes, it was another thing entirely to stand fully within it, have it all to yourself. Seen in old lithographs, stiff portraits, darkening landscapes, or fading grainy photos, the past seemed rigid and colorless. But that was due only to the failings of the media. The reality was rich, fully dimensional, and beautiful.