'Makes perfect sense even to me, and I'm a gypsy, myself- we'd lived in five or six different places by the time I got out of high school. What does your husband think about going to live in the house?'
'Oh, Jackie. Well, he would like nothing more. Different reasons, I'm sorry to say. Jack is in real estate himself, you know, and he's very… how shall I say this? He's status conscious. Jack comes from an upriver suburb, and though he's done very well for himself, even married a Beauforte, I don't think he's ever felt he's really arrived in New Orleans. Living in one of the finest, most historic houses in the Garden District would do wonders for his… position.' The uneven brows dipped disapprovingly: Lila clearly found this motivation rather crass.
Cree nodded, sipped her tea. 'Still, this seems to have upset you a great deal – '
'So why fight it, is that what you're saying?' Lila's hands shook so her cup and saucer chattered, and she put them down. But she straightened in her chair and drew her shoulders up. 'Because you can't just take things! You can't just… run away with your tail between your legs! I think I've done enough of that already in my life. Sometimes you have to just tough it out. I guess I got my back up.' It all came out in a rush, and afterward Lila looked rather surprised at herself.
Cree admired the blaze in her eyes. It was good there was this much fight left in the outwardly docile, fragile Mrs. Warren: She'd need every bit of it if there was an entity at Beauforte House.
'So in that spirit – no pun intended – ' Cree prompted. The moment was probably as good as it was going to get for what came next. She turned on her cassette recorder and placed it on the table between them.
'Just hang on to that feeling, okay? And tell me what happened.'
Lila began haltingly at first, finding her way into it with difficulty.
She had avoided the house after the murder, letting Ron take charge of cleaning up and remodeling the kitchen where the shooting had occurred. She couldn't bear to think about it. She had gone along with the idea of renting the house out again, but when that didn't work it became clear they had to do something with the place – as Jack pointed out, an empty house goes to ruin.
In September, she and Jack drove over to take a look, feel it out. A beautiful day, the house cool inside despite the hot weather, so spacious and fine. The kitchen – well, yes, that was difficult. Just thinking about what had happened. But they were churchgoers, didn't believe in ghosts.
And Ron had done a good j ob with the remodeling, making the kitchen extra bright and cheerful.
They began the move in November and were settled in time for Thanksgiving. All three kids came home, Momma was there, some friends of the family, Ron and his girlfriend du jour. A wonderful homecoming to Beauforte House, a renewed sense of family.
'And I didn't even last a month!' Lila said. 'I was uneasy from the start, and it just got worse and worse, and then there was that, that last episode. After which I couldn't set foot in the house again. Didn't even make it to Christmas. Fortunately, we hadn't sold this house yet, so we could move back in here.'
'But the effects of the experience are still with you.'
Lila's small, plump hands were clasped close against her stomach, fingers massaging the opposite wrists as if they ached. 'I've – did Ron tell you? – I've been seeing a psychiatrist.'
Cree nodded. 'Has it helped?'
'He tells me I should have a CT scan, look for something wrong with my brain! He says we have to start with me accepting that what I experienced was some kind of hallucination or delusion or whatever.
And I can't do that, because / know what I saw!' The anger gave way to doubt again. 'But damnation, between him and Jack and Ron – I mean, I'm not sure, maybe I am having a nervous breakdown! Maybe I am going crazy!'
'Have you ever had a breakdown before? Any history of mental illness in your family?'
'Nothing in the family. I had a little tough spot when I first went off to boarding school, but that was thirty years ago! I may be unassertive or whatever you want to call it, but I have enough damned spine to not break down. I come from a proud family. I raised three children. But I've never had… anything like this.' Lila winced back tears of frustration.
Again, Cree was touched by her. A woman oscillating between the poles of fear and dismay on one hand, and that fierce resistance on the other – not unlike Cree herself, it occurred to her, bouncing between her almost overwhelming 'susceptibility' and the need to confront it, master it. No, you couldn't run away with your tail between your legs.
Cree poured herself a second cup of tea. 'You've had a very unusual experience, and it isn't easy to communicate those feelings. And I know that while seeing a ghost is frightening, what's more upsetting and confusing is the way it challenges your view of the world. Changes how you think of life, death, your place in the scheme of things. That in itself can be devastating.'
Lila looked grateful that someone understood. 'We always went to church! The ghost stuff, that was for voodoo people, or for the tourists – 1 always felt superior to it. And now look at me!' Starting to falter again.
'Just remember that feeling you talked about earlier. Get your back up. Please, tell me about it. Just tell it as you experienced it. Help me understand.'
Lila rallied and began again.
She was uneasy the first day they spent there. It was one thing when the movers and painters and cleaners were coming in and out, but once everybody left it felt different. It was a bigger house than two people needed, twenty rooms plus the former slave quarters and carriage house, so she and Jack had really set up to live in about half the house, leaving the rest unused but mostly still furnished with the period furniture her father had installed. How Momma had lived there all those years with just a housekeeper, she didn't know.
The sense of unease grew until by the time she woke up in the middle of that first night and had to go to the bathroom, she couldn't bear to get out of bed. They had left the lights on in the hall, turned down on the dimmer switch, but it didn't help. There was this feeling of expectation, the sense that something was just about to happen. And it didn't help to have the murder to think about. But after a while she had to get up, leaving Jack asleep in the bed – always a deep sleeper, Jackie. She went out of the bedroom, and just as she turned into the hall she saw something move, slightly, right where the hall opened into the big room at the top of the front stairs. Something small, down near the floor. Beyond it, the darkness of the big central room loomed, the doorways of the front rooms just visible as rectangles of shadow on the far wall. She froze, choked with fear, and squinted at the thing from twenty feet away, trying to make out what it was in the dim light. She could see only a couple inches of it, flat on the floor and just emerging around the corner – brown, rounded, smooth, a little shiny. Oddly familiar, but incomprehensible.
Then it shifted again, tucking itself a little farther back out of view, and suddenly she made sense of what she was seeing. The toe of a shoe! Someone was standing just back of the corner, in the darkness of the big room. Waiting.
Telling it to Cree, her eyes got wide, a twitch tugged at her right cheek, her uneven brows danced out of control. Her chest was pumping in shallow, uneven breaths.
It was the most terrifying thing she had ever seen. She felt like she was going to be sick. Afraid to make a sound, unable to take her eyes off the shoe, she backed up. She made it to the bedroom doorway and went quickly to rouse Jack. He seemed to take forever to make sense of what she was whispering, Lila glancing over her shoulder and expecting to see whoever it was coming into the bedroom. But at last Jack got up, put on his robe, got his shotgun out of the armoire.
When they got out to the hall, the shoe wasn't there any more. Jack called out; no one answered. He noisily jacked a shell into the chamber and warned whoever that he was coming after him with a gun. Still no answer, no sound. And when they went around the corner, no one was there. No shoe, either. Jack gave her a skeptical scowl but dutifully went through the whole house with her.
They found nothing. All the doors and windows were locked. The security system was armed and in order. Everything was just as they'd left it when they'd gone to bed.
'Jack thought I'd imagined it. But, honestly – a shoe!' Lila's lips worked in frustration. 'Who would imagine they saw the toe of a shoe?'
Cree just nodded. 'What sort of shoe was it?'
Lila looked brought up short by the question, but she thought about it for a moment. 'Well. A man's shoe. Brown leather, a dressy sort of shoe, I think. But I could only see the toe.'
'A modern shoe? As opposed to, say, a shoe from the nineteenth century?'
'I really couldn't say. I… just don't know.'
