confining shoes.
Cree sat up to look at her.
'I don't mean the ghost,' Lila said. 'I mean a long time ago.'
'What was it?'
'I don't know. But I know it changed me. Most of the time I run away, or I shut it off in me. But sometimes I want to run right at it – chase it away, or… or know it and take away its power. And you help me do that. You're the only one who's ever helped.'
Cree felt her face flush, trying to find the way to tell her, I can't! I want to run, too!
'You act like… something happened to you, too,' Lila went on.
'Yeah. But I know what it was.'
'What?'
'Oh, I don't usually talk about it. Just something I have to get over.' Lila nodded at that. Sitting there side by side, gravity drew them slightly down the slope, their skirts rising unavoidably higher on their legs. Lila's plump, dimpled thighs looked unaccustomed to daylight, a blue-white now marbled with awful purple bmises from yesterday's violence. She stared perplexedly down at her legs, as if they were strange to her.
'Cree, could a ghost be the, what did you call it – perseveration? – of more than one emotion? More than one experience?'
'Yes. As a matter of fact, I count on that. It's always mixed. It's one of the ways you release them – you find the part that's willing to let go. Why?'
Lila tore up a tuft of grass and inspected it disinterestedly. 'Because this one isn't all bad. It's hard to explain.'
Cree thought about the affective locus in the library, which she hoped was a perseveration of the boar- headed man's dying moments. 'Nobody's all bad or all good.'
Lila nodded, accepting that. 'Why can't you tell people what happened to you?'
'You know, Lila, I'm… I'm kind of unbalanced myself right now. I haven't been through what you have, but the last few days've been very draining for me, too, and – '
'I mean, maybe that's how you find the part that's willing to let go. In yourself. Does that make sense?'
They just looked at each other. For the first time, Lila held her gaze for a long moment, shy but not permitting of evasion, imploring yet somehow… what? Determined.
Cree felt a gust in her chest, a welling toward release. Maybe, she thought. She realized suddenly that on some level, Lila was bargaining. Seeking an equal exchange: You try it, I'll try it. You dare, maybe lean dare. But it was too big. The consequences of opening that repository of feeling could ruin Cree for this case. Right now, it felt as if it would rip her apart.
Again Lila startled her. 'Do you know what Jackie did last night? He took away all the kitchen knives, right out of the house.'
'What! Why?'
'And his shotgun, and most of the pills in the medicine cabinet. Even the single-edged razor blades in the hardware drawer.' Lila paused to observe Cree's expression. 'Because after I came home from the doctor, I had… thoughts. I told him I had thoughts.'
That sent a chill through Cree. She had known all along that suicide was a real danger. A bad experience with a ghost could be like terminal disease, settling in along the nerves and synapses, gripping the psyche, killing the will to live. Cree could feel the impulse in Lila, brooding like a bruise-colored cloud at her center. Besides all the damage they wrought among the living, suicides made for the very worst kind of ghosts: an enduring echo of self- and life- hatred that poisoned the place where it happened, hard to banish.
'But I told him,' Lila went on determinedly, 'I told him I wouldn't. I told him there was a way through this. That the answer was, There's a ghost in that house, and we've got to understand why it's there and get rid of it. That you had seen it, too, it couldn't be just me going crazy. That you'd been through this before and you knew what to do about it. That no way was I going to give up before we'd given this all a try. So he shouldn't… worry.'
Cree felt a sudden admiration for her – her concern for those around her despite her own predicament. And it dawned on her that, as if she' dintuited Cree's faltering resolve, Lila was consciously or unconsciously asking her to persevere, to see this process through. Again, she had challenged Cree and had proposed something like a pact: You have to stick this out. If you don't, how can I?
Cree was trying to frame an answer when the back door of the house opened, and there was Jack Warren, coming out onto the gallery, loosening his tie.
'Darlin'?' he called.
He looked toward them in bafflement, and for a moment Cree saw the scene through his eyes: two women sitting at the base of the levee with their legs awkwardly straight out in front, skirts bunched around bare thighs, looking at each other like frightened, battle-weary comrades-inarms who had just forged a pact to charge out of the foxhole and face enemy fire together one more time.
22
It was evening by the time Cree made it to the house. The air was cooling fast, and the darkening sky above the Garden District was lined with tendrils of high cloud that presaged a change in weather. She let herself in the front door, set her equipment case down to tap in the security code, and paused to allow her eyes to adjust. She faced the black hallway and the hush of the big house with a mix of reluctance and anticipation. She felt dangerously off balance and vulnerable, but the desperate thought occurred to her that maybe that was exactly the state this case required.
Yeah, she thought, the way beating a steak with a tenderizing hammer prepares it for cooking.
Whether or not Lila had intended to shore up Cree's resolve, she'd succeeded in doing so. It occurred to her that her sudden, intense desire to quit, her doubt of her own process, was just another way she'd taken on Lila's state of mind – another proof she'd taken her empathic process to an unusual extreme.
That was a cause for concern because in the rarified world of empathic parapsychology, the risks of extreme projective identification were well documented. Her process had always depended on balance. The way into the world of the ghost was through the mind of the witness, and to enter either one she had to surrender her own identity to a considerable degree. If taken too far, the process could lead to madness, but it worked for her and she'd proved she could survive it. The key was to retain a core sense of self during even the most poignant, consuming encounter. Only by keeping a sure through-line could she set either the haunt or the haunted free. On this case, that had evaded her from the start. Why? Her appropriation of Lila's ambivalences – that oscillation between fear and retreat on one hand, and defiance and determination on the other – was only one explanation. The other was Paul Fitzpatrick: Their unexpected encounter had awakened a dormant part of her. And with that unavoidably came Mike and all the emotional pain and rational confusion that had never been resolved.
After leaving Lila's house, she'd called Paul's office to report, but only the machine answered. Same at his house. The message she'd left at both places was curt and professional: 'Lila agreed to go in for diagnostics tomorrow, on an outpatient basis. Best I could do. I hope it helps.'
She hadn't asked for a follow-up meeting. It all left a sad ache of disappointment. But it was best to start getting over those yearnings, abort them early.
Cree sighed and picked up the equipment case again. If the vulnerability was extreme, she told herself, it would have to be matched by an equally extreme degree of determination, some equally forceful way to anchor her identity, to find a foundation of stability. It would mean, she knew, facing a lot of things she'd dodged for a long time. A daunting prospect.
She had decided earlier that the library would be her chief concern tonight, and anyway, as she'd feared, the upstairs was still too forbidding, the boar-headed man too near to nascence. Hoping again that he was indeed limited to the second floor, she passed the stairway and headed into the depths of the house. The curtains were still open in some rooms, letting in enough of the evening light to navigate by, and the kitchen was brighter still, especially the alcove where Temp Chase had died. For a moment she paused there, feeling a faint reprise of that
