'Fight with your man? Or just 'fall down the stairs'?'
'Stairs.'
'Oh, uh-huh, right.' Deelie shared her skeptical look with Joyce. 'So, what we got today? You need my help on a ghost hunt, you're talking my language, grist for the proverbial mill. What you need?'
Cree gave her an overview of why they wanted to locate Josephine, and she and Joyce told her the little they knew. The address Joyce had found from 1974, Deelie told them, was in Treme, like St. Bernard Development a low-income housing project. 'What you all out east call a black ghetto,' Deelie said. At first, Deelie had looked a little disappointed to hear that she was needed to help find a living person, but when Cree explained Josephine's hoodoo connection, the possibility of a link to the Chase murder, she brightened.
'Money in the bank for me, it ties in with Temp.' Deelie's eyes showed that her wheels were turning. 'Yeah, see, now you're thinkin' straight. Out-of-town white girl and a Chinese not going to make a lot of headway doing a missing persons gig in black N'Orleans. You look like TV lady cops or welfare fraud investigators or something, people going to shut their faces they see you two coming. This Josephine got any connection at all to other voodoo and hoodoo people, I know where to look for her. If not, it'll be slower, but I got ways.'
'There's one more problem, though,' Cree said. 'We… it's important that we find her as soon as possible. There's a certain amount of risk for several of the parties involved, and – '
'You mean like 'falling down the stairs.' ' Deelie gave her a shrewd look and clearly saw the desperation in her face. 'Don't want another 'accident' anytime soon? Yo, trust me, I'm on it already.'
37
Cree sat for an hour in the relative calm of her hotel room. Joyce had ordered her to bed and then had gone off to her own room to call every Dupree and Tricou in the current phone book. For the first hour or two, she also called Cree every now and again, ostensibly to share some thought, but really, they both knew, to make sure she was staying put.
Paul's comments about remediating Mike gnawed at Cree's stomach. Now her memory conjured only their occasional fights, the miffs and tiffs and little hurts. Mike looked at her with reproach in his eyes. She knew it was true, and she couldn't live with her betrayal. Damn Paul, she thought. Another undoing.
She couldn't go on like this much longer. In her thoughts, she repeated a mantra she had cobbled together from bits of Zen and Taoist and yoga philosophy: Out of weakness grows strength, she chanted inwardly. From confusion emerges resolve. In yielding is the root of resistance.
These were the paradoxes, it increasingly seemed, by which she lived.
To be brave enough to face the boar-headed ghost and knowledgeable enough to understand its demented worldview, she had to become vulnerable enough to see it, to know it. To be strong enough to combat Lila's weakness, she had to know Lila's weakness in herself. To possess a strong enough sense of self to survive the encounters, she had to endure absolute uncertainty as to who she was. She had to find her husband so she could let him go forever.
And she had done these things, except the last. Surprisingly, out of all the confusion, all the wounds physical and emotional, she did feel a curious strength and resolve. It was as if the events of the last few days and nights had stripped away everything superfluous, leaving only this single, hard grain of defiance at her very center. It was tiny but durable – a starting place.
But there was a problem, an irritant to which her thoughts increasingly gravitated. It jangled in her mind like a discordant musical tone, a warning buzzer in the distance. The more she pondered, the more inconsistencies she found in her theory of events.
Richard Beauforte had raped Lila, that much was certain: the boar mask had borne it out, and it was perfectly consistent with Lila's psychological state and Charmian's attitude. But there was a clear divide between these normal-world facts and what Cree had experienced at Beauforte House. Something didn't fit. The simplest question was: If the boar-headed ghost was Richard, who was the ghost in the library? Who was the man who lay dying and sending his thoughts to that little girl on the swing? And what of the beating motion, the rage and accusation that went with it? There were a thousand shadings of feeling accompanying each manifestation, and they just didn't jibe.
And what of the other phenomena that Lila had described – the snake, that wolf? After finding that the boar-headed man was not an epiphenomenal manifestation brewed from Lila's subconscious, Cree had less confidence that the others could be so easily dismissed.
Obviously, the boar-headed man was not a perimortem experience, but rather a vivid, crucial memory replaying itself. But she'd never come near his dying experience. Could there be any truth to Joyce's suggestion, the idea that the ghost was a manifestation of Ron's subconscious? The idea didn't explain the boar mask, but at this point, disturbingly, she couldn't totally discard the theory. Anything seemed possible.
But Cree rebelled against the idea. Though she couldn't say why, she could swear the manifestation originated from a dying man. Maybe it was her sense of Ron, the lack of the psychic 'buzz' she'd expect from a person with the capacity to project such a powerful psi phenomenon.
So maybe she should reconsider the ghost in the library. Could one dying man's mental processes manifest as two such clearly different entities – his death experience being played out only in the library, his paradoxical, self- punishing memories playing out only upstairs?
It was vaguely possible, but again her instincts rebelled. The two ghosts felt so different. The dying man in the library just didn't seem to be the sort of person who could do what the boar-headed man did. But more important was the dimensional difference between them, as clear as that between a video and a living person. The revenant replaying his death in the library was as emotionally rich and complex as he was physically insubstantial, and was rigidly locked into a very limited repertoire of acts, thoughts, and feelings. By contrast, the boar-headed man was narrow, one-dimensional, yet very solid and physical. He was also one of the most intentional, most adaptive ghosts Cree had ever encountered.
She puzzled over it for several hours, playing theories through to their ramifications. Only one stood up at all: that maybe there were indeed two ghosts but only one dying man. Maybe Richard Beauforte had been a Jekyll and Hyde personality, literally and clinically suffering from multiple personality disorder. One personality – internally consistent, probably not even aware of his alter ego – was the decent man, good citizen, loving father, who had died of a heart attack on the library floor. The other was the sadistic, lust-charged creature, in life always concealing itself from its benevolent twin and only occasionally set free to act on its own. And at Richard's death, that part of him had taken on an independent mental existence of a totally different order: physically substantial, kinetic, highly adaptive yet still locked into reliving the searingly intense act that had defined, distilled, its nature.
A multiple personality revenant: Cree suffered a sudden reprise of fear at the thought. How could you untangle such a sick and double being? At first glance, she thought that if you let the dying man in the library go free, let him finish dying, the ghost upstairs would vanish as well. But maybe not. Maybe it would continue on, so divorced from its origins as a living being and from its dying experience that it had no death left to accomplish.
The scenario also left the beating motion to figure in. Another dying memory? Or maybe the beating man was yet another entity, the much older ghost of John Frederick murdering Lionel.
Too many possibilities. None of them quite right, none quite wrong enough to dismiss. She stewed about it until she decided there was only one way to find out. Just the thought made her stomach clench.
But there didn't seem to be a choice. You had to fight back. Push the envelope. Couldn't run away with your tail between your legs.
She waited until almost midnight, when she was sure Joyce wouldn't try to call her. Then she dressed and quietly slipped out of the room and down the somnolent midnight corridors of the hotel. She felt scared to the edge of hysteria, but on another level she had never in her life felt more thoroughly ready.
She entered the now familiar hush of the house with an out-of-control pulse: The memories of the pursuit and the fall were too fresh to overcome. Leaving the lights off, she reset the security panel and headed back into the house, groping her way toward the library.
The silence screamed in her ears.
