City of Masks

2

After he left, Cree jotted a few more notes, started a file on the case, and brought the retainer check out to Joyce. The outer office was smaller but had enough room for a row of file cabinets, a big bookcase, Joyce's desk, and a couch and coffee table. A small counter held cups, napkins, and a coffee brewer that filled the suite with a tempting smell.

Joyce looked up. "Good-lookin' guy, huh? Clark Gable with a little more meat on his bones."

"If you like the type." Cree handed her the check.

"Which I take it you don't?" Joyce looked at the check and whistled.

"Hallelujah. We'll get paid for at least another couple of weeks."

"He wants us to provide the placebo effect," Cree said dryly. "For his sister."

"A skeptic, huh?"

"Also a model of probity and integrity, from a family without a smudge upon its name. But the site is historic, and the case has other interesting features. It might be a productive one for us to investigate. I was thinking I might try to get down there for a preliminary before – "

"Cree." Joyce's face showed concern, and she reached out to take Cree's hand. "You're speaking with a Southern accent."

"Shit."

Cree shut her eyes and let Joyce rub her hand, feeling the stabilizing effect of physical human contact. Thank God for Joyce, who took seriously the job of keeping Cree anchored in herself, in her own body and identity, in the here and now.

It was so easy to drift. Before she knew it, she was resonating with another person, the way an old piano will sing ghost notes from the vibration of your footsteps as you walk by. The tendency even had physical manifestations: She often took on clients' limps and gestures, felt their aches and itches. When her sister had delivered the twins, Cree had been doubled up with sympathetic labor pains.

You had to keep the empathic connection manageable, or you'd lose yourself. In their work, it was a useful talent that allowed her to perceive things beyond the ordinarily inviolate walls of individual identity. But in daily life, it was more like a disability, some exotic disease. It required constant vigilance. If you weren't careful, the sheer mass of human presence in the world could crash over you, a tidal wave of emotion that would drown you in the hungers and hopes and fears that were all around, everywhere, always. Or, as had just started to happen, it could subtly, stealthily erode you. Without her even noticing it, her borders had blurred and she'd absorbed some of Ronald Beauforte, becoming him to a tiny degree, picking up his accent and who knew what else. And she didn't even like the guy!

Cree hated imposing her penchant on her friends and colleagues. It made her feel fragile, dependent – a sickly child. And yet it was essential to their work.

"Sorry. Thanks." Cree took a deep breath and blew herself a Bronx cheer, retrieved her hand, and briskly slapped her own cheeks as if putting on aftershave. One of Pop's gestures, she remembered. "'The rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain.' Better?"

"Much." Joyce's almond eyes checked her face critically and then looked back to her desk, apparently reassured. "Listen, Ed called while Clark Gable was here, I figured you didn't want to be disturbed. But he'd like you to call him back ASAP. Also your sister called, wants a return buzz." Joyce handed her the phone slips. "But don't forget there's Mrs. Wilson coming in ten minutes."

Right. Cree had forgotten Mrs. Wilson. Ronald Beauforte's visit had put her off balance, and anyway it was seldom that two clients came to the office on the same day. She took the slips, gave Joyce a kiss of gratitude, headed back to the office.

Joyce didn't get involved with the supernatural end of the work, but she kept Cree and Edgar on track, managed the business end of things, archived their files, and did the lion's share of historical and forensic detective work. Like Cree, she was an East Coast transplant to Seattle. Her accent gave away that she'd grown up on Long Island – talking to her on the phone, people assumed she was a New Yorker, probably Jewish, and, given her deep contralto, probably large. They were always surprised to come to the office to hear the same voice coming from the small, delicate Chinese woman behind the desk. But Joyce Wu was a person of contradictions, and her appearance was misleading, too. She looked to be in her early thirties but was in fact forty-two, four years older than Cree, possessing some enviable longevity gene that kept her skin smooth and hair glossy. And though she was small and slim, she was as strong as any man Cree knew, something of a fitness freak. The first time they'd gone jogging together, Cree had done four miles with her, working hard to keep up with Joyce's lithe stride, before letting her go on for another three.

Mrs. Wilson. Right. The woman who had called for an appointment last week and who had refused to reveal any aspect of her situation, about which she seemed very uncomfortable.

When she came in, she looked very much as Cree had imagined her: an elderly woman, portly, expensively dressed, and nervous. She had a large, lugubrious, kind face beneath a well-coiffed cloud of gray hair, and an endearing humility. Cree invited her to sit and offered her some coffee, which she declined.

Mrs. Wilson's spotted hands fidgeted with the strap of her purse. "I do hope you can help me," she said.

"I will certainly do my best. Please tell me how."

"It's a little… awkward."

"I understand. Many of our clients feel the same way at first – your situation may not be as unusual or awkward as you think."

"Our discussion is confidential?"

"Absolutely."

Mrs. Wilson's watery hazel eyes caught Cree's and retreated. Another quick glance and retreat. "Not so long ago, I lost someone dear to me. Very dear." Pause.

"I'm so sorry – "

"I don't know anything about the 'afterlife.' I'm not religious, never have been."

Cree nodded.

"And I'm seventy-three years old!" Mrs. Wilson looked at Cree searchingly, the glistening eyes finding the courage to linger this time, as if trying to convey what her words did not.

Cree put it together: My loved one has died and left an emptiness that hurts and frightens me. I am old and don't know what I believe. I am old and thinking about my own ending, facing big questions.

Cree waited. But so did Mrs. Wilson, who apparently expected Cree to take the lead. After another moment, Cree came around the desk and took the chair next to her. Mrs. Wilson was now clenching her purse hard against her buxom front, and Cree put a hand on one tense forearm."Why don't you tell me about the person you lost."

"My splendid prince. He died two weeks ago." Mrs. Wilson faltered, and the big face crumpled. Cree's heart went out to her: "splendid prince." Such a romantic term coming from this powder-smelling, proper-looking, fireplug-shaped old woman. She fumbled in her purse, took out a laminated color photo, and gave it to Cree with a trembling hand. "My companion for eighteen years. My splendid prince."

It was a dog.

Cree was no expert in dog breeds, but the scruffy little brown dog in the photo looked anything but splendid or princely.

"You're surprised, I can see you are. Yes, he's just a mutt. I first called him Splendid Prince to be funny, to tease him. As if he were some noble pedigree, you see. But that is exactly what he became to me."

Cree was speechless. This was very touching. Absolutely no words came for a full five heartbeats. Finally she managed, "It must be a terrible loss. I'm very sorry."

"That's why I hoped that you might be able to… put me in touch with him, wherever he is?"

Oh my, Cree thought.

It took another half hour to soothe Mrs. Wilson and convince her that she and Ed weren't mediums, they couldn't go looking for the souls of the departed. She left the dog issue out of it, just stressed that PRA got involved only when there was reliable evidence the departed had already chosen to return. No, sorry, Cree couldn't refer her to someone else. She urged her to be cautious if she continued her quest, wary of unscrupulous people who might take advantage of her grief and desperation.

As she was leaving, Cree felt a sweet-sad chord in her chest and spontaneously bent to give her a hug and a kiss on one doughy cheek. Mrs. Wilson looked grateful for the contact.

Cree forestalled Joyce's questioning look with a raised finger and went to call Edgar. It was only four o'clock, but it would be seven back east, and she wanted to catch him before he went to do any night fieldwork. She went to his room so she could use the videophone and get a look at his face, which she missed whenever they worked independently.

Edgar's room was three times the size of Cree's, with naked brick walls and a pair of tall windows facing the building across the alley. His desk and file cabinets occupied only one corner of the room; the middle was taken up by the counters, computers, and rack-mounted electronics of the lab he used for processing physical evidence gathered at field sites. The remainder of the room served as storage for the equipment Edgar used for his end of their work. He had taken the minimal kit needed for a preliminary review to the Massachusetts job, leaving the bulky stuff behind, a mix of off-the-shelf, high-end high-tech and Edgar's own adaptations of various technologies: infrared cameras, radar motion detectors, ambient-light night-vision photographic equipment, sound recorders, visible-light video and film cameras, air-pressure- and temperature-monitoring equipment, seismic vibration sensors, ion counters, electromagnetic-field-measuring devices, a forensic gas chromatograph, microscopes, skin galvanometers, voice-stress analyzers, the electroencephalographs, tripods, toolboxes, and bulky aluminum travel cases.

Edgar's playground. More than three hundred thousand dollars' worth of equipment. They'd gotten some of it used from various donors, received some grants from the Society for Psychical Research and the odd eccentric millionaire, including Ed's uncle, but the outlay had left them with some hefty debts. One big reason for Ed's concern for revenue.

And so far, it had produced very little in the way of empirical evidence.

But you had to try. Credibility ultimately rested on scientific evidence,-some hard physical proof. Something that all of Cree's emphatic talents couldn't provide.

Cree sat at Edgar's desk and used his videophone to dial the number Joyce had given her. Within seconds, the screen bleeped and there was Ed's familiar face. Cree looked into the little ball-shaped camera on top of the monitor and waved.

"I thought it might be you," he said. "Hey – you look different. You got your hair cut."

"Just a trim. I'm surprised you noticed."

"Are you kidding? It looks terrific." Edgar smiled, a grin that crept up the right side of his face. Cree had always liked that smile, the touch of irony in it.

Ed was into technology, but he was not at all the proverbial nerd. He was too handsome, in a long-faced way, and his intelligence was by no means confined to machines. The tilt of his smile gave it away: the streak of sadness or resignation that came with knowing the human condition only too well. His lanky body, long face, and sandy hair gave him the look of a minor member of the British royal family, which he exploited to do an outrageous impersonation of Prince Charles.

"How did the meeting with Beauforte go?"

"He's sort of a smug son of a bitch. But I think there might be something for us there. I agreed to do a preliminary, got a retainer check. Full fee, you'll be happy to hear."

"Great! Well, I should be done here in a week. I can go down there if you'd like, or we could both go – "

"I thought maybe I'd get down there later this week," Cree said."Maybe before you return. I can clear the time." Edgar looked disappointed, so she explained: "He says his sister – she's the main witness – is very disturbed. I got the sense the family's only coming to us because they'll do anything to calm her down, she's really going pieces. Plus, I was thinking, here's the paying customer you said we needed, so it would be good to follow up right away…"

Edgar nodded, unconvinced.

"Okay," Cree admitted, "I got a feeling that we should move on this. A buzz. I don't know why." Still Ed said nothing, but a little ripple of concern passed over his forehead, and Cree decided to change the subject. "How about your end? What're you getting?"

His face brightened, sheer enthusiasm for the hunt replacing his doubtfulness. "Multiple occurrences, multiple witnesses with excellent credibility. The entity appears to be a perseverating fragmentary, displaying both visual and auditory. A couple of reports of tactile, but those're from my least reliable witnesses."

Cree nodded, and Edgar went on, using a shorthand vocabulary that in all the world only Cree would understand. A perseverating fragmentary was an entity with a limited repertoire of activities, an apparition appearing in the same place and doing the same motions again and again. They called it fragmentary because the entity was not a complete human personality, but a lingering, very limited mental construct. Such a manifestation was almost more the experience itself than a being – a disconnected mental and emotional matrix that somehow repetitively played out independently of a corporeal body or much of a self-aware consciousness. What people referred to as "ghosts" could range from merest shards, no more than a roaming impulse or hunger, to virtually complete personalities.

That Ed's entity had been seen, heard, and maybe felt on several occasions by more than one person did suggest it would be a promising study. If it were perceivable by several senses, and was robust enough to be witnessed by several people, it would give Cree more to work with and possibly allow Edgar's equipment to register verifiable physical phenomena.

"So what's on for tonight?" Cree asked.

"Well, I'm going back to the site. I'll do some infrared and visible-light work. One of the witnesses has agreed to come with me and wear the polygraph setup, too."

"She good-looking?"

Edgar rolled his eyes, and the grin appeared. "She is, very definitely. But she's also thirty years older than me and happily married." Then his smile evaporated. "Actually, I'm not looking forward to it. The place bugs me. Creeps me out."

"Any reason in particular?"

Edgar's eyes moved to one side. "Just the feeling of the house. I'm not in your league, Cree, but I do have a couple of functional nerve endings."

"I've noticed. I rely on it daily, Ed. Tell me about the feeling."

A kink of trouble had formed between his eyebrows, and Edgar rubbed at it with both big hands as he tried to put words to the feeling."This… loneliness, I guess. Something very… stark there."

Oh, yes, Cree thought. That.

When she'd first started spending time in haunted places, she'd been as frightened as anyone else by the fear of scary things, the dark, the unknown – grisly deaths, nightmarish visions, awful secrets, moving shadows. That unrelenting sense of imminent danger. But you got a grip on that after a while. What you didn't get used to was the existential stuff: The scary things might spring out and hurt you or make you crazy, but the maw of loneliness Ed spoke of, that abyss of emptiness, could swallow your soul.

They both came back from that. They talked some more about the Massachusetts entity and then about the equipment she'd need to take with her to New Orleans. Cree got on the radiophone and Ed walked her back into the storage area, showing her where to find everything. But he seemed increasingly reluctant, and at last she pointed it out to him.

"You're not too happy with me going down there on my own, are you?"

"I'm just thinking… why don't you come out here first? Help me finish this preliminary. I could use your insight. Maybe we could take an extra day to see the sights of Boston, then both go to New Orleans – "

"I don't think the client can wait. Anyway, we'll have plenty of time to work on these together if we end up taking either case."

She didn't mean it to, but that sounded cold, and Ed didn't answer right away. She was glad they weren't on the videophone now and couldn't see each other's faces. Edgar's desire for her company was sweet but poignant and difficult. Though he never imposed his feelings on her, he didn't try to hide them, either. He was a terrific person, and she gave him most of the credit for their ability to navigate daily through the complex of emotions, working as friends and business partners despite what amounted to a very unequal relationship.

"I'm also a little worried about New Orleans," he admitted hesitantly.

You in New Orleans."

"Why's that?" Knowing why. She got defensive and angry when this stuff got stirred up.

"I've been there. Great town – 'The Big Easy.' Fun party town. Rich and colorful history, a great mix of cultural traditions. But it's got some places you should probably avoid. More than most cities, Cree."

He wasn't talking about bad neighborhoods. New Orleans was well known among legitimate parapsychologists and sensationalist amateurs alike as a place where some particularly grisly things had taken place. The horror of LaLaurie House, where Madame LaLaurie tortured and butchered dozens of her slaves in an attic room, was only one of many examples.

"I'm fine. I'm strong now, Ed," Cree said. Then it caught up with her and she bristled at his concern. "I think I can probably handle it."

Now he coughed, cleared his throat, feeling awkward. "Of course! It's just – you've been a little, you know, susceptible recently, more than usual… Shit, Cree, I can't always figure out how I'm supposed to – "

"Yeah."

She said it gruffly, and they both fell silent. On one level, she was doing great. But, yes, she had been more "susceptible" recently. Why? Maybe something to do with Mike, this time of year, she wasn't sure. And yes, she could imagine that it would be tough for Ed, tiptoeing around her vulnerability, trying to protect her without treating her like an invalid. Still, it pissed her off. Not at Ed, he was doing his best. At herself. At the complexities of life. At the reminder that she was fragile, thirty-eight and single, a perpetual widow with a lot of unresolved crap. Why did she get so tough on Ed when he brought it up? Maybe because neither he nor Joyce fully understood that, yes, she had to be careful, but she also had to resist, had to fight back. You had to push the boundaries and hope you got tougher as time went on.

"Where'd you go, Cree?"

"I'm here."

Which was so obviously not true that he had no choice but to roll with it. "Right," he said, with more resignation than sarcasm.

Cree had drifted back toward his office, and though she was out of range of the videophone camera she could see his earnest face in the monitor. He looked downcast and worried. He clicked a ballpoint pen in and out, inspecting the tip, then looked hopefully up at his own monitor. Still not seeing Cree, he looked away and rubbed his forehead again.

"You take care of yourself, though, okay?" Edgar had pivoted his chair, and there was something touching about seeing him in profile. Like watching him talking to himself. "You'll keep in close touch with Joyce and me, right? Call in the cavalry if you need us?"

"Yeah," Cree said again.

And then she hurried over to the videophone, wanting to make things better between them, but by the time she got there he'd hung up, and now it was her turn to look at the bland gray-blue of an empty screen.