Edgar would be furious if she had a good contact but missed an opportunity to record some empirical evidence of it. But the devices always demanded some share of her attention, and right now she didn't need any more distractions. She groped in near-total dark back to the study, feeling desperate for progress in this case. Identify the ghost or ghosts, release them before somebody got hurt. Go home, get a life.
Beyond the ubiquitous rush and hiss of rain, the house was full of little noises as the wind probed and bullied it: ticks and taps, groans and scraping noises. The windows of the kitchen were vague, mist-opaqued rectangles, the back hall doorway just a black rectangle. The library itself was a cave of darkness.
Cree knocked her thigh painfully against the arm of her chair before she knew it was there but otherwise managed to get seated without making a ruckus. She sat and tried to muster her professional discipline. Calm the breath, the mind will follow.
Much later, the darkness seemed to have a mist in it. It was turgid with feeling: rage and regret, a soul- wrenching confusion. A keening sense of betrayal and loss, replaced by outrage and wrath. The hazy phantom materialized again, stuff of mind and darkness, the outrage burst like a boil, the beating motion began. A paroxysm, a convulsion. There seemed to be a disturbance in the wind of darkness near the door: another figure?
Then she penetrated the beating, and she saw it was only the edge, the outer layer, of something more urgent. What was really happening was the sharp smell of almonds and that pain in the abdomen. This time Cree felt it, low in her gut, doubling her over, felt herself fall and become the writhing puddle on the floor. Then came the calling out, the seeking, as some part of the ghost's psyche homed toward what was most important to it. The arrow of yearning lofted toward the dying person's heart's desire: the girl on the swing, the house with patches of sunlight on its walls, the green canopy of leaves with blue sky behind, and a feeling of things being right and in their place.
Paradoxically, though she was better able to sustain the violence of the beating this time, she pulled away from that last part. It felt as if that arrow of poignancy could kill her.
Dismayed at her inability to overcome her own fears and self protective reflexes, she pulled back from it, left the library, and returned to the front of the house. She considered trying to brave the upstairs, to challenge the boar-headed ghost in his domain. For a time she stood looking up the stairway into the patchwork light and dark, straining to hear through the white noise of the rain. All it took was a vague sense of his presence, a faint reprise of the dark lust and self-hatred, to make her realize she couldn't do it. She was still too afraid, exhausted and in turmoil and defenseless. She was being crazy and desperate and everything Edgar had warned her about.
She left the house hurriedly, returning to the hotel after two in the morning, feeling bruised and ragged.
And of course Charmian was sure to see her state and exploit it in some sadistic way.
'I've been thinking about you,' Charmian said. She walked straight-backed ahead of Cree to the living room, mastering her limp almost completely. Today she wore a tailored beige pants suit, a yellow silk scarf knotted stylishly at her wizened throat, pearl earrings, a tasteful blush of makeup.
'I'm flattered. Why?'
'Paul Fitzpatrick tells me that you saved my daughter's life. I'm grateful.'
'Really, I just happened to go to the house while she was there. I was lucky.'
'And did you see the ghost?' Charmian sat herself in a wingback chair, poised and regal, crossing her good leg over the other at the knee. The tightening of her face gave way to a hard little smile that flickered at the corners of her lips, showing that she intended the question rhetorically, condescendingly.
'As a matter of fact, I did.'
'Did it reveal its terrible secrets?'
Cree tossed her purse onto the couch and threw herself beside it. 'You know what I think? I think you're the one with the secrets, Charmian. I can't make you tell me, but I'm not going to sit here and play straight man for your sarcastic wit. If you want entertainment, go watch another slide show with your geriatric buddies. I've got a job to do. Are you going to help me or not?'
'Why are you so out of sorts?' Charmian countered. 'I hope this doesn't mean your budding romance with Dr. Fitzpatrick is going awry?'
Cree gaped.
'It doesn't take extrasensory perception to notice the way you two speak of each other. Your excessive 'professional' respect and consideration, the way your voices modulate when you pronounce each other's names. I'm pleased for you, really I am.'
'Tell me what happened to Lila when she was fourteen. What changed her.'
Charmian didn't gape; Cree thought she was probably incapable of it. But her lower eyelids ticced before her face stiffened into its inscrutable mask. 'Her father died. They'd been very close. She went off to school. It was a very difficult time for – '
'Worse than that.'
'She had something of a nervous breakdown during her first term. A battle with depression and anxiety. It was completely understandable. Two family deaths within one year, going away from home… I was a wreck and had nothing to offer her. Her world was coming apart.'
' Before she went to school. Something that made her hate herself so much that now she breaks mirrors so she won't have to look at herself!'
Charmian held herself absolutely motionless. 'I haven't any earthly idea. Why don't you ask your ghost?'
Cree returned the implacable stare. Then the telephone on the table next to Charmian rang, startling both women and breaking their locked gazes. Charmian answered it, spoke briefly, and hung up.
'I am going on an outing today,' Charmian said drily, 'a jaunt with some of my 'geriatric buddies' of the Garden Society. The van will be here in fifteen minutes.'
'Why did you schedule – '
'I'm so sorry. We had planned a garden tour in Baton Rouge, but I'd assumed it would be canceled due to the weather. Now they say the rain is letting up and it's on again. I'm sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused you.' Charmian stood, limped into the kitchen. Cree followed her. With her back to Cree, she began packing a large leather handbag: a pill bottle, a pack of facial tissues, an apple, a pair of fine calfskin gloves.
Cree spoke to her back. 'Do you have any idea where Josephine Dupree went after she left your employ?'
'None.'
'Have you any idea who would put hoodoo hexes at Beauforte House? Or why?'
That seemed to bring a stiffening to the squared shoulders, but Charmian just said, 'Of course not.'
Charmian had clearly decided not to give anything, and Cree's frustration spiked. 'There's something you should know, Charmian. Bad ghosts kill and maim people. Some do it directly, most do it by driving people to suicide. Or to incurable psychosis. Are you aware that this situation could kill your daughter? That information you give me could save her life? Do you even care?'
That brought Charmian around fast. 'Don't you ever impugn my concern for my children! Don't you dare presume to educate me about my familial responsibilities! You know nothing about my feelings toward my children!'
The old woman was breathing hard now, and with the tendons on her corded neck standing forward, her brows arched and eyes blazing, she was physically intimidating despite her age and size. Cree felt the radiation of her emotion, a fierce, enormous, invisible energy like heat from a smelter.
'I think there are two ghosts,' Cree persisted. 'Do you know who they are?'
A flicker of the eyelids, something hitting the target, but no other response.
'A little girl in a swing,' Cree blurted desperately. 'A sunny day. One of the ghosts, that's his… his homing impulse, that's what he yearns for, that's the big unresolved thing for him.'
Charmian's shoulders hunched suddenly as if Cree had punched her in the stomach, and she lurched forward a half step to keep her balance. It lasted only an instant; she drew herself back up with implacable will. Still she said nothing.
'Who are they, Charmian?' Cree asked, trying to tame her urgency. 'Could the girl be Lila? Could the ghost be Richard?'
That didn't completely make sense, not with the beating motion, the other figure there, the affect of wrath and regret, but it was the only possibility Cree could think of. Two ghosts – one being Richard, dying of his heart attack and overcome with love for his daughter, and the other one the boar-headed man? But no, the figure dying
