46
Deirdre's house was chaos. The girls had hatched a scheme and had answered a flyer they'd spotted on a neighborhood telephone pole. The dog they'd come home with was a small, scruffy, miniature terrier mix, no puppy but a middle-aged dog they were calling Arthur for the time being. Now he skittered and biffed around the living room, kicking up throw rugs and terrorizing the cats, who watched him with loathing from the top of the piano.
'Tell me the other half of the plan,' Cree insisted. Deirdre rolled her eyes.
Zoe took the lead: 'It's the only way, Aunt Cree. If you don't want to do it, leave it to Hy and me. Who'd suspect two innocent kids of a scam like this? We go to where that old woman lives, right? And we give her Arthur somehow.'
'Somehow like how?'
'That's kind of the hard part,' Hyacinth told her. 'Maybe we wait until she goes shopping and then we casually come up and ask her if she'd mind holding his leash for a minute while we go into a store or something. And then we never come back.'
'Or maybe we just tie him to the fence in front of her house, and she sees him there and after a while figures he's been abandoned. And she'll take him in.'
'Or we go up to her and say, like, 'Excuse me, ma'am, our dog is just drawn to you, like he knows you or something. Gee, it's almost supernatural, the way he keeps pulling us back over here. It's like he belongs with you – maybe you better take him.' Something like that.'
Cree nodded doubtfully, trying to picture Mrs. Wilson's reaction.
'Well,' Deirdre told them, 'we're going to have to do something with him. He's a charming little guy, but he's awfully macho, and he's not meshing with the cats. He's also very set in his ways – he's a fussy eater, and he insists on sleeping only on the couch or on our bed. Don and I shoo him off, but – '
The dog yapped piercingly at the cats, who didn't move except to tick their ears back a notch. To distract him, Zoe began teasing him with a chewed-up leather belt, making him run in circles.
Deirdre gave Cree an accusing glare: You got me into this, you get me out.
'It's a terrific plan. We'll figure out something,' Cree said. Actually, she thought, depending on the details, it might just work. And the habits that made Arthur less than appealing for Deirdre would probably be the very ones that melted Mrs. Wilson's heart.
' 'Innocent' kids?' Cree asked.
'Well, Hy is,' Zoe clarified. 'And I'm innocent looking.'
Deirdre clapped her hands to get things moving toward the door; they were running late. Cree had just stopped to pick them up and had already distributed the beads, voodoo dolls, alligator teeth, and hot sauces she'd brought from New Orleans. The plan was to meet Mom at the gym, take her out to dinner. It was something of a ritual: Whenever she came back from a ghost-hunting trip, she needed to reconnect, nestle up against the family, touch every base, reaffirm every contact. She was trying to remember where she was in life, who she was. This time it was particularly hard. She had to reclaim herself.
Not everything, though, Cree reminded herself. Some things were best left behind.
There was no league play tonight, which meant that Janet could leave her assistant to oversee the casual hoop shooters or pickup game. While she did a few last-minute errands in the building, Zoe and Hyacinth shed their street shoes and skated out into the yellow floor. They found a ball and began tossing it around. Cree and Deirdre watched them from the sidelines. Zoe had more zip on the boards, but Hyacinth had a better eye for shooting.
'This was a tough one, huh?' Deirdre asked quietly.
'It shows?'
'Let's see. You called me three times, usually at around midnight. You're ten pounds skinnier. Finger's in a splint.' Deirdre eyes narrowed as she appraised Cree's face. 'Bruises and scratches. Eyes are different.'
'I'm good, Dee. I learned a lot.' She returned Deirdre's close scrutiny, afraid for just an instant. You had to check each connection when you came back, see if it was the same, or if maybe the way you'd been changed had put your loved ones out of reach. But no, she saw with relief, not with Dee. Not this time. 'It put me through some changes,' she admitted, 'but a lot of them are really good. Things I've needed to look at for a long time.'
Deirdre nodded skeptically. 'Well, you'd better have some believable and reassuring explanation for Mom. She'll worry. And she's got enough to worry about right now.'
It was eight days until her procedure, and Deirdre was getting nervous.
Zoe got a basket and aped the prancing, self-congratulatory dance the professionals did, hand over head, limp wrist, chest convulsing. 'Sha- quille O-Neeeal!' she cheered.
Janet appeared at the back of the gym, pulling a windbreaker over her uniform shirt. She caught a pass from Hy, dribbled, and flipped it to Zoe. They came across the floor like that, triangulating.
'Okay. I'm a free woman,' Janet told them. She bowled the ball back into the gym. 'Lordy, it's so nice to see all my girls! How are you, Creester?' Her voice was cheerful, but her eyes looked old and concerned. Behind her, Dee gave Cree a glare.
'I'm great. I'm better than I've been in a long time.' Cree hoped she heard the truth in that. 'New Orleans was terrific. I ate a lot of great food, and I got drunk on Bourbon Street, Mom. I didn't whore my way down the other side, though.' She grinned.
'What's that about?' Deirdre asked.
'Later,' Janet commanded. Zoe and Hyacinth walked ahead of them and gave no indication they'd heard. 'And, what, you got into a catfight with some drag queen? Good God, Cree!' She meant the splinted finger and fading bruises.
They came through the double front doors. The girls skipped down the steps ahead of them. Deirdre and Janet kept an expectant silence.
'I met a guy,' Cree blurted, surprising herself. It was the only easy explanation or excuse she could come up with. Inwardly, she corrected herself: Met him and unmet him. And he turned out to be a bastard. But it was a truthful explanation for many of the changes, and truly they were not all injurious. Too bad it ended with Paul's deception. Just one of many in the city of masks.
The twins stopped dead, their pretense of obliviousness dropped.
Janet just snorted. 'What, and that's supposed to make us feel better? Who is this bruiser?' She kept the facade of disapproval, but Cree knew she was just playing the role. Her curiosity had been aroused.
'Actually, he's a psychiatrist.'
'Worse and worse,' Janet growled.
Deirdre tugged their mother's arm. 'C'mon, Mom. This isn't the McCarthy hearings, it's 'welcome home, Cree.' Cree will tell us about it if she wants to. We'll never get a table if we don't get going.'
Cree tried to make Friday a regular day. She went to the office early, typed up some notes from the Beauforte investigation. Personal stuff aside, this had been an enormously instructive case, and she wanted to record her observations and impressions while they were still fresh. Also, Ed would be coming in later, and she wanted to be able to put it in some kind of order for the mutual debriefing they always conducted after doing solo work.
The thought of seeing Ed made her nervous.
At ten, Joyce came into Cree's office and they sat in the easy chairs facing the windows as they went through two weeks' worth of mail together.
One manila envelope bore a New Orleans postmark, and Cree opened it hurriedly to find that, as she'd hoped, it was from Deelie. The reporter's affectionate note was accompanied by several clippings of front-page articles she'd written about Channian's arrest and confessions. Apparently, scooping the story hadn't been too bad for Deelie's career: Her byline now included her photo and carried the tag, 'award-winning investigative journalist.' Just the sight of that good face brought a smile to Cree.
One letter informed Cree that a monograph she'd written had been accepted by a prestigious scholarly journal, and another turned out to be an invitation to speak at the University of New Mexico's 'Horizons in Psychology' conference. Very gratifying, a nice welcome home.
Several promising inquiries had come in, too. In Wyoming, a group of ranchers had asked VKA to look into persistent hauntings in a ghost town. In Nauvoo, Illinois, a Methodist minister solicited their perspective on what he believed might be ghosts of Mormons killed there during the persecutions in 1845; all over town, children were
