City of Masks

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 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 and Beaufortes: Lila had spoken of her father's involve ment in one of the krewes, what was it? Epicurus. The Krewe of Epicurus. Uncle Brad had been a member. Ro-Ro was a member. Even Paul Fitzpatrick was a member, as his father had been. Yet Cree had looked at all the family records, and they showed no indication that the Beaufortes participated in Mardi Gras in any way.

No, she hadn't looked at all of them. She'd looked at the ones Lila had. But Lila had said her mother had kept some at the old house, that they'd stayed over there when Charmian had moved on to Lakeside Manor and they'd rented to the Chases. No doubt in the locked storage room she'd sat in briefly, pondering her own cracked image in the mirror: those two oak file cabinets against the far wall of the room.

She checked her watch as she hurried through the teeming crowds back toward the hotel to get the car. It had been more than three hours since Joyce had gone to the house to meet Ronald. She wondered if they were still there. She hoped not. Ro-Ro would not approve of what she was going to do. If Charmian heard about it, she'd have apoplexy.

She was relieved to find the house dark when she pulled up in front: Joyce and Ro-Ro must have finished the architectural comparison.

Inside, she locked the door behind her, reset the security system, and headed immediately through the black central hall to the back of the house. The hush wrapped around her, filling her ears with a ringing silence that seemed composed of a chorus of faint whispers and mutters.

Hoping the boar-headed man was indeed confined to the upstairs, she turned from the kitchen to the back hall, found the storage room door largely by feel, and used her penlight to sort among the keys on the ring Lila had given her. When she went inside, she flipped the light switch: This was a night for nonnal-world processes.

The central chandelier gave the room a depressing yellow cast but shed enough light to see the humped dust cloths, the mirror with its face to the wall, the big file cabinets against the far wall. The leaves reaching between the window bars seemed to press against the glass like desperate hands.

Cree crossed the room and yanked on one of the drawer pulls. Locked, of course. She tried a drawer in the second cabinet with the same result. She fished in her jacket pocket and tried several keys from the key ring. None worked.

Who would have the keys? Definitely not Lila; that had been the whole point of separating these files and keeping them here. Ron, maybe; Charmian, definitely. But Cree couldn't ask her for them, couldn't reveal where her thoughts were leading her. Not until she knew more. Charmian would figure out some new level of obstruction, some new complication.

Her father's voice spoke to her from memory, another one of his humorous philosophical axioms: Hey, it's nothin' that brute force and ignorance won't fix. A comment on the human penchant for crude, stupid solutions, as well as an admission that you could outsubtle yourself and were sometimes better off keeping things straightforward.

Cree took a turn through the room, looking for a tool, something like a crowbar. The best she could do was the rack of fireplace tools beside the old coal grate. The poker was by far the strongest, but its head was too thick to insert between drawer and case, so she started with the ash shovel, wedging the blade into the gap and prying until it opened enough to receive the point of the poker. It was a murderous implement, with a thumb-thick steel shaft and heavy, elephant-goad head – for all she knew, the very weapon that had been used to beat Lionel to death. The long shaft gave her excellent leverage, and though her first two heaves just broke away the edge of the drawer, the third made something snap loudly inside the cabinet. All three drawers had been freed.

She slid open the first drawer, aware that she had truly started down a one-way street. The drawer she'd levered was gashed and broken, bristling with splinters of oak. Sooner or later, Ronald or Charmian would come in here and see that the cabinet had been broken into. There was no going back now, no way to hide the fact that she knew enough to go this far. She had better find what she needed here.

She used both hands to sort through the files crammed into the top drawer. The first few were not what she had expected: folder after folder about Charmian's tennis activities, photos and clippings from a fairly successful amateur career. Bradford, too. One newspaper clipping featured photos of both of them in their whites, winning some minor event: "Teen Tennis Twins Terrorize Tournament Foes," the headline ran. There were more Lambert family materials toward the back of the drawer, featuring Charmian's mother and father and particularly her brother Bradford. Brad had indeed been a handsome devil, Cree admitted. He grinned from the backs of thoroughbred horses, frowned studiously as he worked on a tennis stroke. Here was Brad at some high school ball or prom, teeth as white as his starched collar, with some dark-haired teen lovely wearing the wretched Mamie Eisenhower hairstyle of the 1950s. Brad with fishing gear, sometimes with Richard, showing off the fish they'd caught. Brad with Lila and Ronald at some Christmas gone by.

She came to the end of the drawer without finding any Mardi Gras materials.

But the second drawer was different, and it drew a drumbeat from Cree's pulse. "Epicurus 1954," one file tab read. These were miscellaneous materials indeed: photos of parties, of floats being prepared, of parades. Notes of minutes of krewe meetings, financial statements. Invitation lists for Carnival balls. Glossy eight-by-tens and photos clipped from newspapers, showing costumed partyers, some with masks and some without. A newspaper photo of Brad atop a streetlight post in the Quarter, shirtless, strings of beads around his neck, arms raised exultantly to the sky. Another showed Charmian as Marie Antoinette raising a glass high to toast her masked Louis, presumably Richard.

Greek themes were prominent in Epicurus costuming, no doubt in observance of its namesake, the philosopher. Aside from the identification of his name with the pursuit of pleasure and the refinement of taste, Cree didn't know anything about Epicurus, and she suspected that most krewe members didn't either. But it gave license for lots of togas, beards, and dusty wigs. Here was a photo of Bradford wearing a toga and a crown of laurel, looking more Roman than Greek as he tipped his head to drink lustily from a flagon.

She moved on to the next file, "Epicurus 1955." This held more of the same and even included a small, sequined face mask pressed flat among the papers. Her fingers skipped through, piece by piece, impatient for the revelation that had to be here.

For the parades, all participants wore costumes appropriate to whatever theme had been chosen for the year, but for the private parties and balls leading up to Fat Tuesday, individuals wore widely diverse costumes. In the early sixties, the styles of Epicurus seemed to evolve: 1962 showed a preference for decadent movement figures like Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. Later still, maybe as sixties trends caught up with the krewe, the costumes became more widely varied. There were a few hedonistic-looking psychedelic rock stars. Brad settled into a few years as a pirate, maybe Jean Laffite. Ron entered the scene as a ghastly child Nero, with toga and fiddle. Richard spent two years in the early sixties as some fat chef: a face mask with ballooning red cheeks, a towering mushroom hat, white clothes stuffed with pillows – presumably some icon of the pleasure principle.

From the materials here, she could see it was just as Paul had explained: A krewe was little more than a party club. You got together every year at Carnival to have parties and balls and parades, culminating in the extravagances of Fat Tuesday. Each year the krewe's activities were presided over by a king, chosen by the membership; from the records, Cree could see that Richard had been king of Epicurus several times. To be chosen krewe king was a mixed blessing, apparently, because along with the honor came the obligation to pay for everything: The files for years when Richard had been king included ledgers for the money he spent on lavish feasts, the best booze, exotic entertainments, and ostentatious decorations. One newspaper article suggested that though Rex and Comus were still the most prestigious krewes, Epicurus was the most expensive to belong to – due, apparently to the obligations of providing a truly epicurean standard of feasting and entertainment.

Cree came to the end of the second drawer and went on to the third. She leafed through 1967 and 1968, and then came up short. The back of the drawer was empty. The files from 1969 onward were missing.

Of course! she realized. Charmian would have taken them away before Lila moved back into the house. Cree knuckled her head, furious at her own stupidity. This had all been a waste of time. Of course Charmian would have been several steps ahead.

On the off chance there was something more to discover here, she retrieved the fireplace tools and went to work on the second cabinet. The locking mechanism of this one was more stubborn, and eventually she just broke away half of the top drawer. She ripped away the oak slab and shined her flashlight inside. It was empty. Knowing it was pointless, she reached inside anyway and managed to release the lower drawers. They were empty, too.

That the crucial years were missing half proved her guess, but half wasn't good enough.

In frustration, she almost pitched the poker across the room. Clearly she wasn't going to find records for the year she was really interested in. It would have been 1971, maybe 1972, she figured, when Lila had been raped by someone wearing a boar-head mask.