She was only making things worse for everyone. Show some spine! Manage your house, manage your family, manage your mind. Don't call attention. Look at the state Jackie is in. Think of the kids! Consider the others. Consider the Beauforte name. Consider your own self-respect! If you can't change it, and can't master your feelings, then ignore it. What choice do you have? You just do what you have to do. Get on with it. You have to take hold of your problems and fears and willy-nilly emotions and hysteria and confusion and stuff them back inside where they belong. Where they don't show.
After another moment of staring at the blank canvas, hating herself for her weakness, she put it away and took a smaller one from the shelf. This was scarcely larger than her hand, one of the boards she'd had the frame shop make up specially. 'I paint miniatures,' she'd explained to the man.'Oh, yes, I know just what you want,' he'd told her. 'Many of our housewife artists want the same.'
She stared at the little rectangle of white and then decided that it was too big, that what she really needed was a matchbook-sized one. No, a postage-stamp-sized one.
No, a dot. A nothing.
12
In the darkness, the house seemed bigger, more formidable and somehow more distant, tucked back into the foliage. All the nearby houses had warm lights in their windows, and many had gas lamps flickering on their porches, but Beauforte House struck Cree as hollow and forlorn, lost in the leafy shadows thrown by streetlights. She wondered if it had been wise to turn down the cheerful, if distracting, companionship of Paul Fitzpatrick.
She shivered involuntarily as she opened the iron gate and shut it behind her. It wasn't just the darkness and the empty windows; reading Joyce's materials on the Chase murder had filled her mind with bad images that were hard to dispel.
Joyce had e-mailed a note chastising Cree for not telling her earlier that this case might involve an unsolved murder, which they'd all agreed added unacceptable dimensions of risk and complication to a case. But as Cree had hoped, she'd done the work anyway and had attached a good collection of news stories about the incident: a cluster of articles from two years ago and then increasingly sporadic items from the following months.
The basic facts were simple. After his eleven o'clock show one night, Temp Chase had come home, sat down for a snack, and been shot dead by somebody who came into the house. His wife had been gone, visiting her parents just north of New Orleans, and had returned to find the body. Later articles revealed that Temp Chase's outwardly perfect life had some serious flaws. He had a drinking problem; he had recently lost money in bad investments. Even his prestigious job at WNOW, New Orleans's largest TV station, was in jeopardy; he'd been news anchor there for twelve years, but station management had been talking about replacing him with someone younger. There were rumors he'd been consorting with organized crime elements in New Orleans and Baton Rouge.
People died by all kinds of means, but murder victims made for bad ghosts. Not in the same league as suicides, but they were the psychic residuals of people torn suddenly from life, unwilling to let go, dying in an explosion of pain and fear and agonized clinging. Hard for an empath to endure.
So why come here at ten o'clock at night, alone, vulnerable? Cree asked herself. She almost chuckled when she realized the mental voice she'd used was Fitzpatrick's continuing his game of twenty questions. She answered in her own voice: Because while it scares the crap out of me, and my partner thinks it'll kill me one day, I love this. Being at the edge of the ultimate mystery.
Of course, she knew it wasn't that simple. Edgar knew, too, Deirdre and Mom knew. There was a lot more, the Mike stuff, probably a death wish thing, too, but that was all too sad and complex and this wasn't the time to get mired in it.
She turned on her little flashlight, casting a tight spot of light on the door handle, then used the key Lila had given her to unlock it. She pushed it open. The house exhaled its stale breath. She stepped inside, shut the door behind her, and disarmed the security system as Jack had instructed her. She turned off the flashlight.
Darkness.
It would be easy enough to turn on the lights, but she left it as it was. She took a few steps into the hall, the dark absolute and cottony quiet.
Fitzpatrick would not understand what had to come next. It was not rationally explicable or defensible. It was unpredictable and took many forms. Cree could imagine him asking more of his 'childish' and completely reasonable questions: Why do people almost always see ghosts at night? Aren't they wandering around all the time?
Because, Cree answered, in the dark our other senses come more alive. Because at night our neurochemistry changes. Because the competing sounds and sights of human activities quiet down, and we can see and hear subtler things. Because the bright mental beacons of the living are quenched in sleep all around, and we can sense fainter, more fitful glimmers. Because in the disorientation of dark we become aware of our own unconscious activity. Because we let go of the ordinary and are no longer bound or protected by it.
Serious ghost hunters did their work in the dark.
Her eyes adapting, she began to make out slivers of mercury vapor light around the curtains in the big room to the right, and she walked toward the silvery outlines. It was at the far end of this room that Lila's signs had shown that first anomalous reading. Cree walked slowly back there and stopped.
The dim faces of Beauforte relatives and ancestors stared back at her, and she felt the flutter, a dark moth beating softly, relentlessly, at an invisible window. But that was all. Something staying just beyond reach, nameless.
After a time, she moved on into the rear parlor, where her vague reflection in the broken mirror startled her, and then felt her way into the hallway and the kitchen. It was a little brighter there, with its light yellow walls and windows that opened to the yard. At the far end a black rectangle loomed, the door to the hallway that led into the north wing.
She turned to the right, toward the breakfast nook where Temp Chase's head had exploded.
All around her, the old house seemed to inhale and hold its breath. Then she felt a wave rock her, a pressure front of compressed images and feelings, striking and passing too quickly to understand.
'That you, Temp?' she whispered.
There was no answer, just a fading aftertaste of fear, confusion, and surprise. She gave it several minutes, but nothing else happened and the feeling waned. After a time her heartbeat stopped shaking her, and she realized she felt oddly impatient, preoccupied, wanting to move on. As if some other part of the house were calling her.
She let it guide her. Through the back hall to the library. She walked silently with the flashlight in her pocket, her hands out to either side, palms forward, the still air moving through her outspread fingers, cool.
The library was pitch black. She found her way inside, located the piano bench with her thigh, and sat. From experience, she knew if anything came to her it would begin with the mood, the psychic weather, of the other presence. Vague at first, then defining itself as she probed its elements, it could happen fast or take weeks. If she were lucky and didn't recoil in panic and didn't get distracted, she could begin to see or hear it, tuning in to its experience of itself. If it preserved any interactivity at all, she could insinuate herself into its experience. Commune and, if possible, converse. Find its core impulse, its psychological engine. Free it from the bondage of its obsession. Break its tape loop.
A psychotherapist for ghosts?
Yes and no. A psychotherapist had to preserve objectivity, but the empathic ghost hunter had to abandon it to a large degree. To experience the ghost, she had to do more than identify with Lila, take on her attributes, feel what she felt – in a way, she had to virtually become her. And the same was true of the ghost: Before she could alleviate the haunting, she had to share the ghost's experience and learn what moved it, what obsessed it, why it lingered.
The crucial thing in either case was to preserve a strong sense of your own identity and local reality. In the case of the ghost, especially, you could resonate so completely you became absorbed into it and came undone. That was the danger: that the ghost would break apart your obsession, your own illusion of life and self, and free you from your corporeal bondage. Everyone who had ever witnessed a ghost instinctively knew that, feared it. It was the fear that underlay all fears of the unknown, and it was a very real danger – especially for a synesthesic empath
