"All that with a half pint of grapes?"
"Right. The hell with the grapes. Who needs grapes?" He gave her a lusty, wild-eyed look.
They had laughed and pitched grapes at each other. Laughed until his eyes changed, suddenly got very serious with a penetrating realization that she intuited instantly: fesus, I really love this woman. She really loves me. It took her breath away.
Cree slammed on the brakes barely in time to avoid hitting the car in front of her. Mike's face vanished, leaving an aching void. This was dangerous, she decided. You couldn't get sidetracked like that.
Stick to the plan, she reminded herself. She stopped at a hardware store to pick up some gardening gloves. When she returned to the car, she turned on the radio, a country and western station, too loud, and got lucky: not a soupy ballad but a clever, upbeat ditty about lovin' your pickup truck.
After a big rain, New Orleans started up with a sputter and a catch before it regained its momentum. The winds had spread leaves and trash on the pavement, and boughs lay on the residential streets. Where storm drains had clogged, puddles made moats at the curbs. The weather reports announced that the front had swerved farther east then originally expected, and the sky was expected to continue clearing. Still, people paused often to gaze upward, as if skeptical that the weather had passed.
As she'd expected, the Warrens' yard looked battered, its shrubs stooped and blossoms blown. Leaves and twigs littered the front yard, and scatters of petals dotted the grass and stuck, rain plastered, to the pillars.
Again the house was full of the muted din of the remodelers. When Lila led her into the dining room, Cree showed her the gardening gloves she'd bought. "Let's skip the photos and stuff today - I don't think either of us is up for that. Your yard is a mess. We should go outside and try to spruce things up, don't you think?"
Lila was dressed in a pretty, prim housedress and pumps, and at first she looked dumbfounded by the suggestion. But after a moment she nodded.
"I have to change my clothes," she said.
Lila led Cree out to the garage, and they brought rakes, pruning shears, a little kneeling bench, and a two-wheeled garden cart out into the lawn. Though the sky was clearing rapidly, the grass was still wet and a pattering of drops fell from the leaves of the live oaks. Lila had put on jeans and canvas tennis shoes and gloves, but now she stood in her own backyard and looked around as if she were dazed.
"I feel like a stranger here," she said. "A stranger to my own life."
"I know the feeling." Cree took one of the wire rakes and began sweeping the grass.
"This is deliberate, isn't it? Getting me out here? You're thinking this might have some therapeutic value."
"Yeah. But not just for you, believe me. I am in serious need of some grounding myself."
Lila nodded. She picked up one of the pruning shears and studied it as she opened and closed it a few times. "You probably want to know what happened yesterday, at the hospital."
"Of course."
"They did all kinds of tests - 1 felt like a lab rat. They don't have all the results yet, but the brain scans were normal. There's still some blood work to come in, but they don't expect anything from it."
"Are you relieved or disappointed?"
"A little of both." A wry flicker of a smile moved at the corners of her mouth. "I think Dr. Fitzpatrick felt the same. He said you'd told him to expect it, though."
Cree resisted the urge to ask about Paul. Instead, she disengaged a fallen branch from one of the shrubs and put it into the cart, then began sweeping some more leaves together.
After a tentative start, Lila began to work more confidently. Her hands moved deftly among the bent leaves and ragged blossoms, testing, snipping. When given a task to do, Cree thought, they were competent hands whose skillful movements seemed at odds with Lila's habitual uncertainty.
"I had an interesting meeting with your mother this morning," Cree said after a while.
"Oh?"
"A remarkable woman. Also a hard nut to crack."
"Yes. She's always been a . . . forceful personality. But she got more that way after Daddy died. Harder, I mean. Distant. That's how she coped with it."
Cree nodded. "Sounds like they loved each other a lot."
"Oh, for sure. It was something of a famous courtship. Two old families, all that. Very romantic." Lila smiled at the memory, but then her hands hesitated among the leaves and the smile eroded.
"What was that thought?"
"Oh. Just that it's sad - the year before he died, they were having some problems. I remember her starting to sleep in the other bedroom, and wondering about it. Finally I realized it was because when Uncle Brad died, she was so close to him, she needed to be alone more to deal with her grief. But then when Daddy died, I knew she felt guilty about having been so distant. About letting something come between them during his last days and all."
"That's pretty perceptive for a girl of, what - fourteen?"
Lila's hands went back to work. "Once upon a time," she said, both bitter and wistful. "But I suppose everybody looks back at some golden era of their lives and wonders where it went."
Cree stopped raking, startled. "I used those same words just last night! Talking about my own 'golden era.'"
"To Paul?" Lila glanced sideways, caught Cree's expression, and again her smile flickered weakly. "Don't be surprised. You two - it makes sense you'd be attracted to each other. You . . . seem to have a lot in common. And he is easy to confide in." She worked for another moment with determination, then stopped and gave Cree a direct look. "Are you going to tell me your story?"
"If you'd like me to."
Lila thought about that briefly, and her confidence faded abruptly"Does it have a happy ending?"
For a moment, Cree thought of contriving what Lila must have needed very badly, a compassionate lie: Sure, I dealt with what happened to me and came through it just fine and so will you. But it wasn't true. It wasn't that easy, couldn't be.
"I don't know what kind of ending it has," Cree admitted.
They kept working, removing damaged branches and exploded blossoms, raking leaves, picking up twigs. The sun came through more strongly now, drying the foliage and drawing forth the muggy humidity. An occasional jogger went by on the levee path. Cree told her about Mike's death and reappearance, and the way it had changed her. If she couldn't promise a happy ending, she thought, there might at least be some affirmation in hearing someone else's ghost story.
She had hoped it would be easier the second time, but it wasn't. Again she felt things breaking inside, jarring and grinding and rearranging.
They finished up the large, central flower bed and then went to the east side of the lawn to attend to the beds along the fence. Lila didn't say anything for several minutes after Cree finished telling her saga. She was working in a dense azalea, kneeling on her little padded bench with her head bent forward like a penitent.
"Thank you," Lila said quietly. "I know it can't be easy. To tell all that."
"It fucking kills me. Sorry for my language. But I keep thinking it's important. To talk about it. It was you who helped make that clear to me."
"If you're looking for me to reciprocate, I can't. I've already told you everything that happened."
"It doesn't have to be about the hauntings. Lila, today your mother told me you'd had a nervous breakdown when you went off to boarding school. An episode of depression. What was that about?"
"There's nothing to tell. I hated the school, my family was falling apart, my uncle had died not long before. And then my daddy died during my first year. I missed him horribly. My mother was broken up and drinking too much, and even Josephine had left, so I had no one to talk to. I got . . . unglued."
"That's a lot for anyone to deal with."
Lila nodded. "Ron, it wrecked him up, too, just in a different way. He's two years older than me, but he was still living at home — he went to the public high school here. You wouldn't think it now, but b
efore all that he was a . . . a sweet person. He used to be my confidant, my protector. But it scarred him terribly. The lesson he learned was that loving your family too much can hurt you. If you take anything seriously, it'll hurt you. So he's never married, never settled down, never taken anything seriously. He's never let himself care about anyone but Ron Beauforte — that's how he protected himself. Now it's just . . . who he is."
Cree thought that was a fair appraisal. "So, you . . . did you get any kind of help back then?"
"Oh, I left school for a couple of weeks. I came home and Momma had me see Dr. Fitzpatrick - Paul's father, an old family friend. She wasn't going to let someone outside our immediate circle see a LambertBeauforte in the shape I was in, God, no! She told me to show some spine, and he did what doctors did back then: gave me all kinds of pills. Anxiety pills, depression pills, pills to help me sleep - it's a wonder I didn't become an addict. After a while they sent me back to school."
"When did it end? Your . . . breakdown?"
Lila tipped awkwardly back on her haunches, a plump woman unused to sitting on the ground. "End? It never ended. I put my problems and my feelings and my past into a . . . a Mason jar, sealed it up tight. And did my best to keep them there. I became this." She sat back into the wet grass, gesturing at her body, her house, and her yard, and her expression turned sad and hollow. "I didn't rock the boat or draw attention. That's what you were supposed to do."
Cree's breath went out of her as she was buffeted by an aching sympathy. She felt that self-containment in Lila, that holding back, that clinging to a safe, predictable life, that rigid rule of doing what was expected. It was Lila's way of protecting herself, not so different from Ron's - except that in her case it was reinforced by all the traditional, safe, domestic women's roles, and by Jack Warren's good-ol'-boy, chubby-hubby expectations, and Charmian's tyranny, and it all fit together. No one had protested when Lila had locked herself away and that bright, sparkling girl disappeared.
"Is that what you meant the other day? When you said something had happened to you?"
"Oh, hell, I don't know. I can't remember my past, Cree. What I remember, it's all from those clippings and photos. It's a movie of a life, not a life. Paul said you were thinking about repressed memory. Maybe that's what it is. But I don't know - it just feels like there was the life then, and there's the life now, and they don't have a hell of a lot to do with each other."
"Lila, there are two ghosts. I don't know what to make of the wolf or the snake or the table, but there are two more . . . human . . . ghosts.
One is the boar-headed man who chases you and hurts you. The other manifests mainly in the library. He goes through some act of violent beating and then later dies and feels a sad, beautiful longing. They're not the same person. Do you know who they are?"
"No!" Lila's eyes had widened at the idea. "I thought there's only one! How can you be sure?"
"It's more than the difference in their moods or their affects. They spring from different impulses. They're completely different kinds of manifestation. Different . . . levels."
"I don't understand anything you're saying! I only know what happens to me!" Lila's hand were working busily among the leaves and stems, but she was clipping anything, hacking away at healthy branches and tops full of unopened buds. Cree put her hand on her arm and was alarmed at the tension she felt there.
"We don't have to go into that now. Lila, I . . . I've been taking on your susceptibility to these ghosts - you understand that, right? But if I'm going to survive, I've got to take on your strength, too. I've got to absorb your determination and your persistence and your stubbornness. I've got to know your desire to . . . fix what's wrong with your life. You've got to show me how you survive." Cree hoped any of that made sense to her.
Lila's arm seemed to shiver beneath Cree's fingers. "I know why you told me about you and your husband," she said in a darkly hollow voice. "And I'm grateful. But see, your story, it's . . . beautiful. Sad, but beautiful. Mine - it's not. And there's nothing either of us can do about that."
Cree didn't know what to say.
"And as for how I survive," Lila went on, looking more like her mother now, "I survive by doing the next thing that needs doing. And the thing after that. Which right now probably means working on the yard here. You're very right — it is a mess."
The plumbers had left by the time they went back inside, but the tilers were still at work and the house was filled with the sharp chemical smell of adhesive. As Lila conferred with the men upstairs, Cree spent a few more minutes leafing through the Beauforte photos. Nothing new caught her eye. When Lila came back down, they hugged good-bye wordlessly and Cree left.
She wondered whether she had accomplished anything at all. Her attempts to build upon their earlier spirit of companionship had failed. Lila had closed down, especially when Cree had told her there were two ghosts. The idea had upset her greatly; the image of her hands rooting and clipping blindly, indiscriminately, seemed to bode ill.
The only ray of hope Cree could find was a subtle one. It had to do with why Lila had chosen to move back to Beauforte House in the first place. Yes, Lila was in a box, a jar, constructed equally by herself, her family, her society. But her original desire to move back to Beauforte House was a proactive effort to break out of her boxed-in life. She had sought to reclaim that depth, that richness of texture. To reclaim the past, too. Lila's determination to move back there had to have an unconscious element of wanting to come to grips with her sealed-away past. On some level she understood her fundamental predicament and was willing to face it. That motivation was the essential foundation of any therapeutic process.
Cree turned left at the street and walked along the front of the Warrens' yard. They hadn't gotten this far in their cleanup effort, and leaves and twigs still littered the shmbs and flower beds. She walked toward the Taurus, absentmindedly picking fallen twigs from the front plantings. At the corner of the Warrens' lot, where the growth met the side fence, a larger branch had fallen, crimping the shrubs beneath, and reflexively she stopped to disengage it. When she pulled aside the surrounding foliage to lift it free, she saw something that turned the world suddenly upside down.
Behind the leaves, lashed against the rail of the fence at the corner: a finger-sized stick. It was tied with long blades of grass, or maybe the thin fronds of a palmetto. It had one notch carved crudely into it.
A hoodoo hex, just like the ones Deelie Brown had found at Beauforte House.
29
JOYCE WAS IN A GOOD MOOD when Cree got back to the hotel. "Mr. Beauforte agreed to meet us at the house at seven. But he sounded prickly. What'd you do to get him so bent out of shape?"
"My job."
Joyce nodded without conviction. Then she looked Cree up and down, noticing the wet grass stains on the knees of her jeans, the many faint scratches on her forearms. "What happened to you?"
"Gardening. The storm kind of wrecked up Lila's yard, so - "
"I mean what's got you so upset?"
Cree debated telling her about the hex but thought she'd wait, try to fit it into the pattern that teased at the edge of her thoughts. "Listen, Joyce . . . I don't know if I'm up for going to the house tonight. I've got some thinking to do. You don't really need me for this, anyway, you're better at it than I am. You go without me."
Joyce nodded, suspicious but apparently not too dismayed at the prospect of spending an evening alone with a guy who looked like Clark Gable with some meat on him.
"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 o
f 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.