City of Masks cb-1

by Daniel Hecht

  These things happened when you were really haunted, Cree had said. She had a term for it: "epiphenomenal manifestations." Your mind was triggered and generated other scary things, cobbled together from memories and imaginings. The proximity of the unknown could awaken a lifetime's worth of fears.

  Lila shivered, remembering the nightmare of the snake's visit, the wolf, the table. But as Cree had predicted, once they'd taken a place in the architecture of her waking, normal world, their power had begun to ebb. She had some control of them.

  Cree was very smart, Lila thought again.

  But still there was no sign of Daddy's ghost. Cree had told her nothing about what the ghost did, what it felt or needed, only to say that Lila would emerge from the encounter strengthened and freed.

  Lila's back ached from sitting on the hard rosewood bench, and a tension pain sank talons into her shoulders. She got up, stretched, took a few steps in the dark, turned to survey the room. The darkness was ordinary darkness, as far as she could tell. It wasn't about to explode at her, or strike at her like some snake. It was just a quiet room where her father had spent many hours of his life. Until that awful table had come alive, she'd always felt a nice feeling in here, safe and calm, and she felt a bit of it now. Did that feeling count as a ghost? She wasn't sure. Daddy used to read in here, smoking his cigar, and he often did his business at the big desk. Sometimes she'd come in here to be with him. Sometimes he'd let her pester him, sometimes he'd shoo her away so he could attend to his affairs.

  She repressed the urge to look at her watch. Instead, she recited Cree's parting advice like a chant, a prayer: Don't worry about mechanical time. Take all the time you need. Just let your mind roam. Remember things, if they come to you. Feel what you feel, cherish each feeling, and then let it pass if it will. Keep your eyes moving in the dark, scanning, but remember it could start with a mood, an emotion, or even a smell.

  You might get afraid, but just remember this was someone who loved you. His ghost still does, very much. You'll see.

  But he wasn't coming. It made her very sad.

  "I'm sorry," she said out loud. "We all went kind of crazy. No one knew what to do, did they?" The room just absorbed her words. "I'm sorry I poisoned you. I wasn't really sure it would even work. I didn't know about Brad. I didn't mean to betray you. I love you so much."

  There didn't seem to be anyone listening.

  She went back to the piano bench and settled herself on it. Her hands started kneading each other, kneading the opposite wrists, but she made them stop.

  Right now Cree would be sitting in the dark entry hall with Paul. They wouldn't be saying much; they'd both be listening hard for sounds of trouble from back in the house. Cree would have her weird, empathic radar going. Those two were so drawn to each other, you could feel it in the air between them. But Cree was angry with him for some reason, probably because for all her insights and courage, she was afraid of the things he showed her about herself. Everyone had things inside they couldn't easily face. Paul, too. Right now, he was reeling inwardly, feeling sick and uncertain about everything after what he'd experienced at the Lambert crypt. Lila knew just how it felt.

  What would happen to the two of them? Cree would go back to Seattle tomorrow or the next day. Paul — who knew? She hoped they wouldn't give up, wouldn't waste the good thing between them. It was too rare in life to waste.

  More time passed.

  She worried about Jack. He'd be sitting at home, still awake and sick with anxiety, or fallen asleep on the couch. He hadn't wanted to let her go without him tonight, but she had insisted. She was determined to be a new person, to break out of her old roles, but she wasn't sure what that really meant. It was all so new, and she needed time to decide just what she'd do differently. Jackie had never met this new person — would he love her? She kind of hoped he would; for all that he was not high class or exceptionally intelligent, he was a sweet man, earnest, funny. He had sure stuck through some tough spots.

  Again, she recalled Cree's advice: Don't worry about Jack. Just trust that where you lead, he'll follow.

  She felt her back grow tired of sitting. The fear abated, replaced by exhaustion. She struggled not to drowse. Her mood drifted toward a sweet sort of nostalgic melancholy. The past looked and felt different now. Cree said everyone did this — that important events, even just of the normal world, changed your view of yourself and your history and your family. You were always revising them.

  Lila found herself returning to a memory she'd long ignored or forgotten, an afternoon from when she must have been six or seven. It wasn't anything particularly special, just her and Daddy wandering in the yard. He was always so sweet but so seldom had the time. He'd gone out to look at the eaves or something, and she'd hijacked him. She had led him around by the hand, Daddy in his suit pants and business shoes and shirt with suspenders and tie, Lila wearing her favorite dress, a frilly sort of thing that made her feel pretty. She showed off by naming every flower and then swore him to secrecy and brought him to the elf house she'd made under the bushy, arching branches of one of the hydrangeas. It was really little more than a collection of sticks, but Daddy seemed very impressed. After a while they went to the swing he'd hung from one of the big live oaks, and when Lila sat in it he began to push her. It felt so nice. She couldn't stop laughing, not because anything was funny, just because she was happy. She felt like she could go up into the green, right through the leaves and on into the sky. At the same time, it was nice knowing Daddy was there to catch her if she needed him to. The sun came through the branches and made everything so green and intricate and mysterious. You could easily believe in fairies. Daddy seemed very happy, too. She remembered feeling good that he was having as much fun as she was.

  She savored the recollection for a little while. When she came away from it, she could swear there was more light coming in around the curtains. It startled her, and she wondered at the source of the glow. She got up, went to one of the windows, cracked the curtain, and was astonished to see that it was the sky, paling toward dawn.

  She had been in here all night.

  Immediately, she felt sorry for Cree and Paul, who must have gotten very uncomfortable, waiting for her in the hallway for, what, seven hours! She had asked enough of everybody. It was time to go. She had failed to make contact with her father's ghost. If she wanted that strength and freedom Cree had promised, she'd have to find it without him.

  She stood up, every muscle and joint stiff. At the doorway she turned and faced the empty room once more. The memory of that time on the swing, the green aerial mansions above and having Daddy all to herself, was ebbing; she was sad to see it fade.

  "Daddy, if you're there and I just can't see you? I just want you to know I turned out all right. So you don't have to worry." She listened and got no answer, and then corrected herself: "There was a bad time," she said quietly, "but now I'm all right."

  Then she turned back to the door and went out to make it true.

  46

  Deirdre's house was chaos. The girls had hatched a scheme and had answered a flyer they'd spotted on a neighborhood telephone pole. The dog they'd come home with was a small, scruffy, miniature terrier mix, no puppy but a middle-aged dog they were calling Arthur for the time being. Now he skittered and biffed around the living room, kicking up throw rugs and terrorizing the cats, who watched him with loathing from the top of the piano.

  "Tell me the other half of the plan," Cree insisted. Deirdre rolled her eyes.

  Zoe took the lead: "It's the only way, Aunt Cree. If you don't want to do it, leave it to Hy and me. Who'd suspect two innocent kids of a scam like this? We go to where that old woman lives, right? And we give her Arthur somehow."

  "Somehow like how?"

  "That's kind of the hard part," Hyacinth told her. "Maybe we wait until she goes shopping and then we casually come up and ask her if she'd mind holding his leash for a minute while we go into a store or something. And then we never come back."


  "Or maybe we just tie him to the fence in front of her house, and she sees him there and after a while figures he's been abandoned. And she'll take him in."

  "Or we go up to her and say, like, 'Excuse me, ma'am, our dog is just drawn to you, like he knows you or something. Gee, it's almost supernatural, the way he keeps pulling us back over here. It's like he belongs with you — maybe you better take him.' Something like that."

  Cree nodded doubtfully, trying to picture Mrs. Wilson's reaction.

  "Well," Deirdre told them, "we're going to have to do something with him. He's a charming little guy, but he's awfully macho, and he's not meshing with the cats. He's also very set in his ways — he's a fussy eater, and he insists on sleeping only on the couch or on our bed. Don and I shoo him off, but — "

  The dog yapped piercingly at the cats, who didn't move except to tick their ears back a notch. To distract him, Zoe began teasing him with a chewed-up leather belt, making him run in circles.

  Deirdre gave Cree an accusing glare: You got me into this, you get me out.

  "It's a terrific plan. We'll figure out something," Cree said. Actually, she thought, depending on the details, it might just work. And the habits that made Arthur less than appealing for Deirdre would probably be the very ones that melted Mrs. Wilson's heart.

  " 'Innocent' kids?" Cree asked.

  "Well, Hy is," Zoe clarified. "And I'm innocent looking."

  Deirdre clapped her hands to get things moving toward the door; they were running late. Cree had just stopped to pick them up and had already distributed the beads, voodoo dolls, alligator teeth, and hot sauces she'd brought from New Orleans. The plan was to meet Mom at the gym, take her out to dinner. It was something of a ritual: Whenever she came back from a ghost-hunting trip, she needed to reconnect, nestle up against the family, touch every base, reaffirm every contact. She was trying to remember where she was in life, who she was. This time it was particularly hard. She had to reclaim herself.

  Not everything, though, Cree reminded herself. Some things were best left behind.

  There was no league play tonight, which meant that Janet could leave her assistant to oversee the casual hoop shooters or pickup game. While she did a few last-minute errands in the building, Zoe and Hyacinth shed their street shoes and skated out into the yellow floor. They found a ball and began tossing it around. Cree and Deirdre watched them from the sidelines. Zoe had more zip on the boards, but Hyacinth had a better eye for shooting.

  "This was a tough one, huh?" Deirdre asked quietly.

  "It shows?"

  "Let's see. You called me three times, usually at around midnight. You're ten pounds skinnier. Finger's in a splint." Deirdre eyes narrowed as she appraised Cree's face. "Bruises and scratches. Eyes are different."

  "I'm good, Dee. I learned a lot." She returned Deirdre's close scrutiny, afraid for just an instant. You had to check each connection when you came back, see if it was the same, or if maybe the way you'd been changed had put your loved ones out of reach. But no, she saw with relief, not with Dee. Not this time. "It put me through some changes," she admitted, "but a lot of them are really good. Things I've needed to look at for a long time."

  Deirdre nodded skeptically. "Well, you'd better have some believable and reassuring explanation for Mom. She'll worry. And she's got enough to worry about right now."

  It was eight days until her procedure, and Deirdre was getting nervous.

  Zoe got a basket and aped the prancing, self-congratulatory dance the professionals did, hand over head, limp wrist, chest convulsing. "Sha- quille O-Neeeal!" she cheered.

  Janet appeared at the back of the gym, pulling a windbreaker over her uniform shirt. She caught a pass from Hy, dribbled, and flipped it to Zoe. They came across the floor like that, triangulating.

  "Okay. I'm a free woman," Janet told them. She bowled the ball back into the gym. "Lordy, it's so nice to see all my girls! How are you, Creester?" Her voice was cheerful, but her eyes looked old and concerned. Behind her, Dee gave Cree a glare.

  "I'm great. I'm better than I've been in a long time." Cree hoped she heard the truth in that. "New Orleans was terrific. I ate a lot of great food, and I got drunk on Bourbon Street, Mom. I didn't whore my way down the other side, though." She grinned.

  "What's that about?" Deirdre asked.

  "Later," Janet commanded. Zoe and Hyacinth walked ahead of them and gave no indication they'd heard. "And, what, you got into a catfight with some drag queen? Good God, Cree!" She meant the splinted finger and fading bruises.

  They came through the double front doors. The girls skipped down the steps ahead of them. Deirdre and Janet kept an expectant silence.

  "I met a guy," Cree blurted, surprising herself. It was the only easy explanation or excuse she could come up with. Inwardly, she corrected herself: Met him and unmet him. And he turned out to be a bastard. But it was a truthful explanation for many of the changes, and truly they were not all injurious. Too bad it ended with Paul's deception. Just one of many in the city of masks.

  The twins stopped dead, their pretense of obliviousness dropped.

  Janet just snorted. "What, and that's supposed to make us feel better? Who is this bruiser?" She kept the facade of disapproval, but Cree knew she was just playing the role. Her curiosity had been aroused.

  "Actually, he's a psychiatrist."

  "Worse and worse," Janet growled.

  Deirdre tugged their mother's arm. "C'mon, Mom. This isn't the McCarthy hearings, it's 'welcome home, Cree.' Cree will tell us about it if she wants to. We'll never get a table if we don't get going."

  Cree tried to make Friday a regular day. She went to the office early, typed up some notes from the Beauforte investigation. Personal stuff aside, this had been an enormously instructive case, and she wanted to record her observations and impressions while they were still fresh. Also, Ed would be coming in later, and she wanted to be able to put it in some kind of order for the mutual debriefing they always conducted after doing solo work.

  The thought of seeing Ed made her nervous.

  At ten, Joyce came into Cree's office and they sat in the easy chairs facing the windows as they went through two weeks' worth of mail together.

  One manila envelope bore a New Orleans postmark, and Cree opened it hurriedly to find that, as she'd hoped, it was from Deelie. The reporter's affectionate note was accompanied by several clippings of front-page articles she'd written about Channian's arrest and confessions. Apparently, scooping the story hadn't been too bad for Deelie's career: Her byline now included her photo and carried the tag, "award-winning investigative journalist." Just the sight of that good face brought a smile to Cree.

  One letter informed Cree that a monograph she'd written had been accepted by a prestigious scholarly journal, and another turned out to be an invitation to speak at the University of New Mexico's "Horizons in Psychology" conference. Very gratifying, a nice welcome home.

  Several promising inquiries had come in, too. In Wyoming, a group of ranchers had asked VKA to look into persistent hauntings in a ghost town. In Nauvoo, Illinois, a Methodist minister solicited their perspective on what he believed might be ghosts of Mormons killed there during the persecutions in 1845; all over town, children were having dreams of hangings and burning men. In New York City, a police investigator wanted help with an unexplained seepage in the apartment of an unnamed celebrity; the fluid tested as human blood, but when they'd taken down the stained ceiling they'd found no source for it, and as soon as they'd rebuilt the ceiling, the seep returned.

  In other words, the world went on as it always had, its seen and unseen dimensions maintaining their uneasy coexistence.

  Sunlight came and went as an endless flotilla of little clouds moved across the sky: The Sound and the Olympics were dappled with cloud shadows that slid down the near slopes and skated across the blue-green water. The Emerald City, Cree reflected. It was good to be back.

  They'd been going over the finances for half an hour befor
e Cree really noticed Joyce's excess of professionalism. She was dressed in a snappy pants suit and was being businesslike to the point of brusqueness, and though Joyce could be very efficient this wasn't like her.

  Cree put down her pencil. "Joyce. What?"

  Joyce looked caught out. "Nothing. What do you mean?"

  "What'd I do now?"

  Joyce let her shoulders slump. She stared longingly out the windows as if wishing she could escape to the open spaces. "You asked me. So don't blame me when I tell you, okay? The same thing I've been saying, Cree."

  "We've been over this!" Cree moaned. Joyce had been in Cree's room when Paul had called the hotel, the day before they left. When Cree had refused to speak to him.

  "Yeah. Let's see… first you couldn't be with him because of the Mike thing. Then you told him about Mike, and he understood, and it was good for you to get it off your chest. Okay, so then you couldn't be with him because he didn't believe in ghosts and thought you were nuts because you did. But then he had a doozie of a convincing experience at the crypt, and he's a believer now. So what's the latest excuse?"

  "He was a… double agent, Joyce! A hypocrite, a… a liar! The whole time, he was spying on my investigation and talking to Charmian! He nearly got Josephine and me killed! Jesus, he — "

  "Stop. Cree, you wouldn't listen to him when he tried to explain! You told him to shut up. But after you hung up on him, he called me in my room and explained everything. Look at it from his perspective. He's recruited by old friends of his family to help Lila. He's a highly regarded psychiatrist in New Orleans, he stands by old family loyalties, so he says, 'Sure.'"