'And you're right that Ro-Ro has something of a grudge against me right now. I have a feeling he'll be… more responsive to you.'
In fact, Joyce had put on a short, form-fitting cotton knit dress and shoes with heels higher than one would normally consider helpful for fieldwork. Her hair was loose, a smooth fall of burnished ebony around her shoulders and over one eye, and she looked stunning.
Yes, Ro-Ro was likely to be very helpful tonight. Cree almost commented further, then thought better of it.
' 'Ro-Ro'?'
'Nickname. Some fraternity or Mardi Gras thing, I don't know.'
When they looked over the plans, Cree felt a moment's dismay. As far as she could tell, the original builder's drawings seemed to accord perfectly with the current floor plan. The absence of architectural discrepancies would make it much harder to narrow down a ghost's time frame, to name the individuals and identify their predicaments. But you couldn't always tell at first; it could come down to a matter of inches, and for Joyce's benefit she carefully diagrammed Lila's sightings and her own. Downstairs, the library would be their primary focus. Upstairs, Cree was particularly interested in the central room, the hallway down the left wing, and the doorways to the bedrooms along that hall – the boar-headed ghost's preferred hiding places and hunting grounds.
Joyce took notes and asked the right questions, all business despite her outfit. It wasn't until after she'd gone that Cree felt some misgivings about letting her go alone. The more she thought about it, the more she realized that the hex at the Warrens' house implied a solid connection between the Chase murder and the Beaufortes. Couldn't be a coincidence. But what was the connection? Did it mean that Lila and Jack had been targets of the killer, too? Were they still?
But in any case, that the murder was still unsolved, as Joyce had pointed out earlier, meant that there was a murderer on the loose. For all they knew, the killer would decide that Joyce and Cree needed some murdering, too, if they started turning up facts that implicated him or her.
For all they knew, it was Ronald himself.
The thought gave Cree a jolt. Joyce walking around in the big dark house, alone with Ro-Ro. Was he capable of murder? She thought not -he was at bottom too cowardly, too lazy. But again it was hard to say: The propensity seemed intrinsic to human nature, lurking inside everyone, waiting for the right trigger. When Mike died, Cree had discovered it in herself as she lay awake at night and imagined revenge on the drunken bastard who had killed him.
She showered long and hot, scrubbed her skin until it was red, as if scouring her outside could cleanse the inside. When she came out she spread a couple of towels on the floor and sat in lotus position. Back straight, hands in the dhyana mudra. Breathe. Clear the mind.
But it didn't help. Frantically her thoughts scurried in search of some place of comfort and gravitated toward Mike. She fought back by reminding herself sternly that she was alone in a hotel room in New Orleans, that Mike was just a tiny memory circuit in her brain, glimmering and now going dark again. And that was no help, either.
Enough of this, she told herself. She hadn't been this bad in years.
She dressed quickly and fled the room. Maybe there'd be surcease in the streets.
This time she let the flow of Canal Street carry her past the narrow streets of the French Quarter, toward the Mississippi. It was after sunset now, but the many bright windows, streetlights, and illuminated signs made a cheerful false daylight. Every view promised excitement and diversion. She was briefly tempted by the mindless glitter and bustle of Harrah's huge casino complex but got only as far as the door, where the cacophony of thousands of electronic slot machine chimes felt as if it would burst her eardrums. Instead, she went another block down and made her way through to the riverfront. The scent of muddy water and diesel exhaust surrounded her as she mounted the levee steps. Riverfront promenades stretched to both sides; on the right, the docked paddle wheelers were alight with life and music, but to the left she could see heavy freighters forging slowly along or berthed under lighted loading gantries. Tourists strolled Moon Walk, couples hand in hand. Beneath a street lamp, an elderly black man sat on a bench playing a tenor sax, sweet, melancholy slow blues that wove seamlessly into the river-scented breeze.
Better, Cree decided.
She walked the length of the lighted section of the walk, turned back, sat briefly, then decided to keep moving. Sitting still invited memories she didn't want; walking seemed to give her energy. She needed to stay in the present.
Two ghosts. A woman with a locked-up life and something buried in her memory. An overbearing, aristocratic mother with secrets. A playboy brother who wouldn't mind some liquid capital. The beating motion in the library, the man dying and yearning toward the girl on the swing. The Chase murder. Hexes at Beauforte House and at Lila Warren's. It was all a whirling constellation of unconnected dots, suggesting but never revealing a pattern. Dizzying.
And that was without trying to figure in the imponderable: the wolf, the snake, the living table claws! Most of all, the predatory upstairs ghost with his hateful affect and the double anomalies of his boar's head and his complete lack of a perimortem dimension.
After a while, the teeming streets of the Quarter seemed to call to her. She left the riverbank, crossed the streetcar tracks, and came to the terraced park just below Jackson Square. On the other side, she descended to the street through a crowd gathered around a trio playing something that sounded like bayou bluegrass.
Decatur Street, she discovered, was a more family-oriented version of Bourbon Street, a broader avenue that separated the narrow streets of the Quarter from the river. New high-rise apartment buildings and hotels dominated the south side, but on the north side it was lined with fine historic buildings that housed shops and restaurants, in better repair than elsewhere in the Quarter. Unlike Bourbon Street, there were no strip clubs or body-piercing parlors, and only a couple of the low-budget, black-painted voodoo shops. Most stores maintained cheerful windows and catered to the impulses of middle-class consumers, offering strings of beads, packages of Cajun and Creole spices, postcards, dried and varnished alligator heads and other bayou kitsch, bogus gris-gris bags, crawfish- and jazz-themed artwork, illustrated T-shirts and billed caps. The sidewalks were crowded, the restaurants and bars wide open to the evening, the cars bumper to bumper.
Better, Cree thought. Flux. All the appetites of the living. It did help.
Drifting, she window-shopped. She lingered for a few moments in front of a store that specialized in hot sauces. Its window featured hundreds of bottles with luridly illustrated labels and hyperbolic names: Ass in Hell, Thermonuclear Holocaust, Liquid Lucifer, Mother-in-Law's Revenge, Pain amp; Suffering, Bayou Butt Burner.
She drifted to the next window and was admiring its contents when abruptly she felt as though she'd stepped through a hole and fallen and hit hard.
The store was crammed with Mardi Gras supplies: overflowing racks of beads of every description in sizzling colors, racks of gaudy gowns and capes and boas. Armies of manikins strutting in full-body costumes. Wigs and hats of every kind on Styrofoam heads.
And masks. Hundreds of them: faces grimacing, leering, snarling, laughing, conniving, drunken, murderous, seductive, imperious, pathetic, dead. Dainty eye masks, feathered face masks, and whole-head, pullover rubber masks of Nixons, werewolves, aliens, clowns, corpses, witches, Satans, queens and kings, kindly grannies, chubby babies, drag queens, vampires.
Bird heads, frog heads, dog heads, alligator heads.
No boar heads, true. And the idea didn't solve the mystery of the wolf, the snake, the table and other changelings. But here at last was a possible explanation for at least one of the anomalous aspects of Lila's experience. Of course that's how he would clothe himself in his thoughts. Of course that's how she would see him – half memory, half spectral being. She was appalled that the possibility hadn't occurred to her sooner, in this of all places. City of masks.
With the realization came another, meshing with the first like pieces of a puzzle fitting seamlessly. She'd spent hours pouring over the Beauforte family archives, and they had revealed almost nothing of value. But now she realized that what the material had to tell her lay not in what it contained but in what it omitted.
There were no photos or clippings relating to the family's Mardi Gras activities.
The Beaufortes had been involved in all kinds of civic activities, and from everything she'd read or heard from Paul, Mardi Gras was the ultimate civic function in New Orleans. It had been a family tradition for both Lamberts
