by Daniel Hecht
From windows and doors, attics and courtyards, she could hear the whispers of the ghosts of the living and the dead, forever and ever. In the night air, she could smell the big, slow Mississippi, just to the south, hugging the city in its big bend, and below it the miles of flat, wet land stretching away to the Gulf.
New Orleans.
Halfway down Bourbon Street she chose a club at random and went into the dancing throng. The band was playing Zydeco, raucous accordions and bass and piano and a pair of washboards whose rhythms put an itch into Cree's bones and made them move. She danced by herself for a time, then floated through the crowd, taking an occasional partner for a number or two. She wondered if she were stalling or just having a good time, but the music was so loud she couldn't really think about it.
Not thinking wasn't too bad. She resolved to try it more often.
After a while she'd had enough noise and body odor and cigarette smoke. She left the place and cut south two blocks to Charters Street, which was tranquil by comparison to Bourbon. A few more blocks east and she could feel the glowering, festering aura of LaLaurie House, one block north on Royal, but she stifled the tremor it gave her. She passed into the quieter parts of the French Quarter.
Better. But her anxiety mounted as she drew closer.
She had deliberately not thought about this. She'd just made the decision. But when she got to Paul's place, she realized didn't know what she'd intended. The windows of the first two floors were dark, but Paul's lights were on. He was probably at home. But there was no way to get to the courtyard and his stairs without ringing the bell. He'd answer through the intercom and she'd have to say something, and she didn't know what. She'd have preferred just to appear at his door.
She pressed the button and waited. Nothing. She tried again, longer, and waited again as a falling sensation swooned in her chest. If he didn't answer now, she wasn't sure she'd have the brass to do this again. But after another long moment the buzzer went and she opened the door and walked through the pitch-black porte-cochiere to the courtyard. Suddenly afraid, she took out the feathered mask and put it on as she climbed the stairs. The statue of Psyche seemed to watch her from the dark garden.
When she saw him at the kitchen door, Cree recoiled slightly. He was shirtless, and his face and shoulders and chest and arms were uniformly filmed with white dust, cut through with runnels of sweat. The white emphasized the shadows made by the cut of his pectorals and his corrugated stomach muscles, and he looked like some pagan tribesman, interrupted at some wild ritual. His forehead and hair were white, too, but the skin around his mouth and nose was clear, vividly flesh-colored, as if he'd painted himself with skin tones there. When he opened the door and saw her, his frosted brows rose, but with his odd whiteface it was hard to tell what his expression was. He stood back and let her come inside.
"You," he managed.
"Probably," she said. She'd meant to say, Of course.
They stared at each other for another heartbeat or two. Cree knew that the eyes Paul saw in her mask's eyeholes were wide and disturbed. She couldn't resist another glance at his torso.
Paul glanced down at his own chest, put his hands to his powdered cheeks. "Oh. You're wondering why I look like this. I was just doing some renovation work — knocking down plaster in the bedroom. Hot and dusty in there. My downstairs neighbors are gone this week, so I can bang away at night if I need to. I seem to need to. It's. . . cathartic. Sorry i f - "
"No, you look good," she said. And he did. God, yes. Another man dusted with white might look ghostly, but Paul looked like Nijinsky in L'apres-midi d'unfaune: wild, intense, and very physical. She could picture him, raging at the walls with his sledgehammer, angry at the new disarray of his once orderly world, chunks of plaster falling in clouds of dust.
He dipped his head, acknowledging the compliment. He stepped to the kitchen table, cleared away a dirty plate and a paper dust mask, gestured to a chair. At the counter, he grabbed a bottle of wine and a glass and turned back.
Cree stayed standing.
"No apologies, though, either way. Right?" he asked.
"Right." However they'd upset each other's worlds, whatever they owed each other, it evened out. He was pretty perceptive.
"How're you doing?" he asked.
"Mixed, I think. You?"
"You know. Why mixed?"
"You know why."
That caught him, pleased him. He put bottle and glass aside without looking at them and came straight to her. When he put his hands on her hipbones, the touch took her breath away.
"I made a bet with myself," he told her. "That you'd come back."
"Oh? How'd you know?" Given what a shit I was.
"I figured that if you were at all the person I thought you were, you'd come back." He hesitated, cleared his throat. "Well. Actually, that wasn't the whole bet."
"What was the rest?"
He smiled. "That either you'd come back here and find me, or I'd go to Seattle and find you. I couldn't lose." He watched her eyes, and the smile became a frown. "Why're you wearing a mask?"
"Just trying to fit in on Bourbon Street," she lied.
He kept looking at her.
"Hiding," she admitted, scared again.
"Take it off, Cree."
She mustered some false bravado: "I will if you go take a shower."
He nodded. When he let her go, she could still feel where his hands had pressed. His white back disappeared down the hall. Cree waited in the kitchen, listening to the water running and feeling her pulse thud in her throat. She debated tossing back a slug of wine to steady her shaking hands and then decided not to. After a few moments, she went out to the rear gallery and leaned against the railing. Better, she thought; it was cooler out here. The mask was hot and it pressed too hard against the bridge of her nose, but she left it on as she looked over the dark courtyard and the surrounding roofs and walls and hidden gardens of the French Quarter.
When Paul came back, he was wearing only a Balinese sarong, a bolt of batik wrapped snugly around his waist and falling like a skirt almost to his knees. Above it, his skin was clean now, tan and warm looking, shower scented. As she'd imagined, his legs were carved with the corded sinews of a runner.
They stood side by side at the railing, looking out at the night. They had both come a long way to get here. Paul looked at her expectantly, and then Cree remembered her part of the bargain. She slipped the elastic band over her head, took off the mask. After a hesitation, she flipped it over the railing, and it fluttered down into the darkness like some night bird.
Much better, she decided.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost, sincere thanks to the good people of New Orleans, for making me feel so welcome in their wonderful city.
Special thanks go to my friends Margaret and Eric Rothchild for being such superb companions, hosts, co-conspirators, and tour guides to Seattle.
I owe thanks also to my readers and advisors in matters great and small, Amie Hecht, Willow Hecht, Stella Hovis, and Verbena Pastor; and to my "experimental subjects" at the Seattle Women's University Club, particularly Marjorie Reynolds, Joan Shirley, Isabel Falck, Cherry Jarvis, Deborah Lewis, and Margaret Rothchild, whose suggestions greatly improved this book.
Sincere thanks are due to Dr. Lucinda Mitchell, for helping me untangle matters of psychology with such insight and broad-mindedness.
A number of New Orleans institutions deserve particular recognition. Chief among them are the Williams Research Center for providing such an excellent historical resource; Deanie's Seafood for providing sumptuous feasts to hungry writers; and the New Orleans Police Department for open-minded help and advice. Any errors or omissions in this book are the fault of my own license or ignorance, not the fault of the many fine people who did their best to set me straight.
Thank you Karen Rinaldi, Lara Carrigan, Greg Villepique, and everyone at Bloomsbury; and thanks and xoxx to Nicole Aragi.
KEEP READING!
> Turn the page for a sneak peek at Daniel Hecht's electrifying new thriller,
LAND OF ECHOES
Cree Black is back, investigating a fascinating case unfolding in the vast high desert of New Mexico. When Tommy Keeday, a talented student at a boarding school for gifted Navajo teens, is suddenly seized by a bizarre and violent illness, his family believes he is possessed by the hostile spirit of a dead ancestor. In desperation, principal Julieta McCarty calls on Cree Black for help.
Is Tommy Keeday just a sensitive teenager, or is he suffering from an exotic brain disorder? Or is there truth in the terrifying Navajo legends? As Cree and her associates struggle to find the answer, it becomes apparent Tommy's fate can be decided only by exposing the secrets of the past.
The gripping second adventure in the Cree Black series.
On sale February 2004
LAND OF ECHOES
Hardcover $24.95
Bloomsbury
Available wherever books are sold
ALVIN YAZZIE, the boys'-dorm night supervisor, was in his room reading when he heard an odd sound from the far end of the building. He put down his book and tipped his head to listen.
For a few seconds, there was nothing but the noise of wind in the eaves. Then he heard it again: a forced vocalization of some distress. He tried to tell himself it sounded like one of the kids having a stomach problem, heaving up cafeteria food in the bathroom, but he knew better.
It was the same sort of noise Tommy Keeday had made that awful night just a week ago.
He laid the book aside, went into the hall, and stopped again to listen. The building was long and narrow, divided by a single corridor that stretched its whole length. On the right was the room that served as his office and residence, along with the storage and utility rooms, the two bathrooms, and two six-boy dorms; on the left, the day supervisor's office and four dorm rooms. Yazzie's impression was that the sounds had come from the far end.
As usual, the corridor lights were off, but night-lights glowed at regular intervals, and the doors to the bathrooms were open and spilling enough light to illuminate the hall. He walked quietly down to the first door and into the tiled, fluorescent-lit room. Nobody: no feet visible under the four stall doors, nobody in the showers, nobody tossing it up at the sinks. The ceiling fluorescents blinked irritatingly, and he made a mental note to ask the maintenance staff to replace the tubes.
When he paused in the hall to listen again, everything was quiet, and his tension eased a little. Maybe it was something outside, not a kid after all. Maybe the wind, which was high tonight, bearing in from the north and bringing a chill. More likely a coyote or fox. The two dorms stood apart from the classroom and admin buildings, and the whole school was just a dot in an endless expanse of rolling sagebrush desert. It was big country, sparsely populated, with plenty of wildlife. A couple of times a year, little bands of coyotes raided the cafeteria trash bins and made a ruckus. Maybe
The sound came again, a muffled scream and some garbled words, definitely human. It choked off and left only the midnight silence. A chill crept over Alvin's skin as he began to stride down the hall.
It had to be Tommy again. The first time, he'd recovered within half an hour or so, and Julieta and Dr. Tsosie had written it off: bad dream, exhaustion, stress. After the second episode, they'd sent him for a four-day stay at the Indian Hospital in Gallup, a comprehensive diagnostic workup that ended with the doctors pronouncing him perfectly healthy.
Now he'd been back for only two days. If this was Tommy getting sick again, it didn't bode well for the poor kid. And it would break Julieta's heart to know her prize new student had some chronic or recurring condition.
Whatever it was. There was something strange about the way Julieta and Joe Tsosie were handling this.
Approaching the north end of the building, he stopped at the door to the room Tommy shared with five of his fellow sophomores. Even in the dim light, he could see six beds and six motionless lumps wrapped in blankets, including Tommy, who looked dead asleep with mouth wide open, one arm up above his head on the pillow. None of them moved, and the only sounds they made were the faint wheezes and sights of their breathing.
Then the stifled cry came again, and the lump that was Tommy moved. It seemed to swell and inflate, swarming with bumps that must be knees or elbows but that didn't look right. Alvin didn't move. Part of his mind noticed that the lights were fluttering in the second bathroom, too. Tommy's blankets humped and shook, and it occurred to Alvin that maybe there were two people in the bed, maybe he'd been mistaken when he'd first come in and there was some British-boys'-school-style hanky-panky going on. But then the mound deflated and he could see it was only Tommy, tangled alone in his blanket, lying on his back. One side of the boy's face was drawn up as if a string was pulling a corner of his mouth toward his ear, and as Alvin stood, still unable to move, Tommy's body twisted and convulsed. The whole bed shook with the force of it.
Alvin's paralysis broke and he stepped quickly toward the bed. But before he could reach it, Tommy's body went slack again.
He stepped back, confused. Tommy now lay fast asleep or unconscious, motionless but for the fast, shallow pumping of his chest. For the first time, Alvin noticed that the other boys weren't asleep - how could they be, with the awful noises Tommy made? - but were lying immobile also. The boy in the bed next to Tommy's, David Blanco, lay with his eyes just open, glistening pale slits. In the deeper shadow at the far end of the room, Jim Wauneka was sitting up, rigid, motionless. Alvin almost spoke to him, but then realized his eyes weren't really open, either -just pale slits, like someone anesthetized or dead.
Tommy's chest and stomach and legs began rising and falling, rippling in a series of convulsions. The movements were smooth at first, gentle and rhythmic as ripples undulating in a pond, but they quickly grew faster and more vehement until it looked as if the scrawny body would wrench itself apart. The sheer violence of the movement seemed to knock Alvin another step backward. He felt torn between wanting to flee the room and his duty to his charges, between terror and a hideous fascination.
This wasn't right, he knew. This wasn't natural. Nothing he'd encountered in the army or as an orderly in the crisis ward in Phoenix had prepared him for this. Abruptly he became aware of the great, dark sagebrush plains all around the building, the infinite night sky above hundreds of thousands of square miles of bare red-brown earth, stark rocks, lonely mesas, and shadowed canyons. He remembered the feeling from his childhood, from the times he'd be herding his family's sheep in the evening as the stars pricked through one by one and the sun bleached only the very western edge of night and he could feel in the lonely empty hollow in his gut just how big and incomprehensible the world was He'd almost forgotten. Now he realized with a sense of calamity that the world he'd disciplined himself to accept, that he'd spent his adult life buying into and working to master, wasn't real after all: The world of white America and science and school and jobs and sports and TVs didn't have an explanation for this. This was something ancient, something come out of the world's hidden places, from the old world of the Bible or his grandfather's stories or the dark legends of witches and ghosts that had been whispered from person to person long before human beings knew how to write them down.
Tommy made a quiet, awful sound, as if a full-bellied scream had been throttled by a throat too constricted to allow it to pass. Alvin bolted forward, but just as he caught the arching shoulders, the awful tension went out of the boy. One moment Tommy's right arm had started to push forward and then Alvin felt something like a shock through his hands and arms, a vortex of sensation that buzzed quickly through his stomach, and the boy's arm snapped back and lay limp on his chest. All Alvin held in his arms was a slack, sleeping fifteen-year-old.
Alvin felt only an instant of relief as he lowered Tommy back to his pillow. His movements felt as if they were resisted by a powerful force, some warped gravity or a form of magnetism that influenced flesh and bone. The light bleed
ing in from the corridor was really going crazy now. It strobed as if a string of flashbulbs were going off in the bathroom as Tommy began to shudder and twitch and another wave of convulsions took him.
Julieta McCarty stared across her desk at Alvin and tried to assimilate what he'd just told her. He insisted that there was no other way to look at it. It wasn't a prank or even an ordinary seizure. Some kind of disturbance or force radiated from the Keeday boy: The other boys had lain or sat unmoving throughout his battle with Tommy, despite the awful noises he'd made and the thrashing and wrestling. Alvin had felt it himself. Now Tommy was in the infirmary, Alvin informed her, doing that thing again like last time. The nurse had called Dr. Tsosie, who said he'd get here as soon as he could.
As an afterthought, Alvin informed her that he was quitting, effective immediately.
He didn't have to explain why. Alvin was forty years old, a reliable staffer who had served two stints in the army, where he'd been trained as a paramedic, and he'd earned a bachelor's degree in social work from the University of Arizona; though he'd been born on the reservation he'd lived a good part of his life elsewhere. But like most Navajos of his generation, he hung uncertainly between the old beliefs and the view of the world he'd absorbed from white America. In Julieta's experience, even the most culturally assimilated Navajo believed that some truth lay beneath the traditional fears of skin walkers, Navajo wolves, spirits of the dead, and the consequences of violating old taboos.
"Alvin. You know I'll never be able to replace you." Julieta tried to keep the pleading out of her voice, tried to keep it from becoming too personal.