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 were 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
