City of Masks

39

Highway 23 ran straight southeast from New Orleans, following the Mississippi almost to the point where it divided into multiple channels and petered out in the Gulf of Mexico. It was a flat, wet country. The shapes of land and water on Cree's road map told the story: Depositing its silt over millions of years, the patient river had extended the coastline by two hundred miles, leaving a lacework of low-lying Delta soil, brackish bayous, and meandering channels.

Just south of New Orleans, the road ran through a seemingly endless series of commercial strips separated by areas dominated by heavy industry and shipping. From the relative height of highway overpasses, Cree could see horizons defined only by rearing loading gantries, the superstructures of gigantic freighters, and tall chimneys spilling smoke.

Farther south, the countryside became less cluttered. On the right, the land was empty, scrubby fields; on the left, when the levee didn't block the view, Cree could see a dense, snarled low-growth forest. Chemical plants rose out of the landscape every few miles, industrial necropolises of towers, pipelines, vents, rail tank cars, and razor-wire-topped fences. For two miles on either side of the Oronite plant, the air stank so badly of chemicals that she had to breathe through her handkerchief, yet just beyond it she passed orange groves and strawberry plantations, complete with cheery roadside stands. Road-kill armadillos broiled on hot highway asphalt.

From the map, Cree figured that Port Sulphur was about fifty miles southeast of New Orleans. One long, long hour from Canal Street.

Deelie had done what only a black woman, smart and personable and persistent and skilled at interviewing, could do: She'd gone back to Treme, Josephine's last known address, and, starting with friends and relatives and acquaintances, had identified the oldest residents of the project. From there, it was a matter of going door to door, talking to old people who might have been around in the 1970s. At last she found a grandmother who remembered Josephine, describing her as a tall, serious woman who had a worked for some rich white family for many years. She vaguely recalled that Josephine had lived next door only a few years, until her own mother died; then she'd moved back down to where she'd been born, some no-count town 'way deep Delta.

It took a few hours more to find another old woman who had attended Josephine's church back then. She even remembered the minister's name. Josephine had been a true believer, a good Christian woman, and this Reverend Washington had won her lasting loyalty with his fiery piety and commitment. Deelie then called the church offices until she found someone who could tell her where Reverend Washington was; the answer was that he was dead. But looking through their records, the church secretary found Josephine: She'd moved down to Port Sulphur, where she attended an affiliated splinter church, Mount of Olives Sunrise Congregation. Deelie called and spoke to the minister, Rev. Bernard Huggins, who told her that, yes, Josephine Dupree was still a devout member of the congregation, a mainstay of the church community.

No, Josephine didn't have a phone. But she did have an address.

"Piece of proverbial cake," Deelie crowed. Then her voice darkened. "Gotta warn you about one thing, though. Couple people said there'd been some white guys asking about this same Josephine, like two years back? They went around saying she'd inherited some money, could anybody help them find her so they could give it to her? I don't have to tell you how well that flew in Treme. You black in New Orleans, you know when to open your mouth and when to keep it shut. Rule one is you keep it shut when a white guy in a suit comes asking."

"So who were these guys?"

"Nobody knew. Not cops exactly, maybe like private dicks. What ever, it suggests that this Josephine's messed up in something, and you're not the only one trying to find her. I don't know what this is all about, but, you – watch yourself. You know?"

Deelie had let Cree off the line only after she'd sworn a blood oath to give her first access to the story. If indeed there was any story.

Cree's curiosity grew as she drove, and she had to make a conscious effort to keep her foot light on the accelerator. Josephine was deeply connected to this; she was the key that could unlock the whole case. But would she tell Cree anything? Cree had debated asking Deelie to come with her, but the reporter had other obligations, and besides, this had to be a very, very confidential meeting.

Beyond the basic distrust between black and white Deelie had pointed out, Josephine would certainly not want to talk about her murder of Richard Beauforte. And then there was the apparent tie-in, whatever it was, to the Chase murder and the fact that others were looking for her. Josephine would probably feel too at risk to say anything at all to anyone – black, white, or green.

Here and there along the road, Cree saw the remains of old plantations: sagging, magnificent pillared houses deep at the end of tunnels of massive live oaks. In their weary-looking, moss-stained roofs and hollow windows, their overgrown grounds, Cree could still feel the history that saturated this place. There was the public history of Southern chivalry, decorous soirees, and great events, and there was the hidden, very different tale of intimate lives lived in the long days and steamy Delta nights.

In both cases, time had moved on, and the old mansions were few and far between. Now most of the houses were small and poor, desperately ramshackle, sharing their lots with buckling sheds, dusty truck gardens, and abandoned vehicles. Every fifteen miles or so she encountered new enclaves of gigantically ostentatious, upscale new mansions in pseudoTudor or Creole-modern style, safely isolated by perimeter walls and guardhouses.

And always, just over the levee, the marine terminals: gantries, mountains of coal, huge conveyors, fuel tanks. And a chemical stink the car's air-conditioner couldn't hide. Cree mistook the first cemetery she saw for a self-storage place: neat rows of little white buildings with gabled roofs.

When she'd told Cree how to get to Port Sulphur, Deelie had called this "Religion Alley," and faith did run strong here, Cree saw. For miles, every telephone pole wore a blue-and-white plastic sign that said simply JESUS. The same sign appeared on lawns, in storefronts and living room windows, something like an election sign. The declarations of faith brought up another question: If Josephine believed in that return from the dead, would she accept that other ways were possible, too? What if Josephine refused to talk to her on the basis of her beliefs?

It struck Cree that there were a lot of reasons for Josephine to say nothing, and only one reason for her to talk.

Port Sulphur wasn't much: the Tennessee Gas pipeline, a dead opossum in the road, Fremin's Foodliner and a few other stores, lower-middle-class and poorer houses. Residential streets branched to the left and right of the highway, lined with trailers, aluminum-sided ranch houses, or ragtag shacks. The streets all ended at the levee, a sloped wall of green at the end of each tree-shaded corridor. It took only a minute to find the Mount of Olives Sunrise church, a one-story wooden building with scaling white clapboard siding and a squat, humble steeple no bigger than a camping tent. From there, she followed Reverend Huggins's instructions to Josephine's house on the last cross street, out at the edge of town. Beyond it, the tangled forest and scrub fields began again.

There were no numbers on the houses, but Reverend Huggins had been clear that Josephine's was the last one on the right, an old place up against the levee. Cree cruised slowly past dilapidated one-story houses, drawing the attention of residents who paused at their tasks or came to screen doors to give her suspicious stares.

Josephine's house was an old wooden building in an overgrown lot, windows dark behind shrubs and vines, porch roof sagging under the weight of leaf detritus, screens patched or rusted through. Cree pulled into the driveway behind an old Ford and got out into heat that hit like a body blow. The smell of the bayou just over the levee was humid, rich with the smell of rot and carrying just a hint of some exotic spice, and it brought to her forcefully just how far from home she was.

Josephine had not visibly aged much from the photos Cree had seen: tall, straight-backed, her corded neck emerging from a floral-patterned dress, flat chest and sinewy arms, long dark face with a sober expression carved into its lines and folds. Coming close to the screen, she regarded Cree in silence for a moment. Her eyes were steady, deep brown irises in rheumy yellow sclera. Cree could feel her presence, a deep gravitas, somber, dark.

Josephine pushed the screen door out and half turned to make way for Cree. "You can come in. I been waitin'." Her voice was deep, almost a man's voice.

"You know who I am?"

"No, don't know who you are. Just know what you after. Been expectin'."

Cree followed her into the dark interior. The floorboards were uneven but were mostly covered with fine rag rugs Josephine had no doubt made herself. Josephine led Cree through a dark living room of sagging furniture covered in patch quilts and handmade white lace. It was clearly the room of a person who made the best of very little income, clean and well ordered. A television took up most of one small table, but it didn't have the altarlike status of most living rooms. No – in one corner stood a real altar, dominated by a large Bible surrounded by candles and a collection of crosses of different sizes; above hung a portrait of a chestnut-haired, Anglo-Saxon Jesus framed in a wreath of thorns. Near the door to the back hallway stood a small bookshelf, topped with half a dozen photos propped in plastic frames.

One white face stood out from the dark faces, and when Cree recognized it her breath caught in her throat: Lila Beauforte, aged twelve or thirteen. When she still gave forth that glow.

The old woman led Cree through a hallway and past a couple of dark bedrooms to a kitchen that was a little brighter. The tired yellow linoleum had worn through in paths of brown. A vinyl-topped tube table and four chairs stood in the center, and clean-scrubbed wooden counters lined two walls, along with a deep zinc-plated sink, an electric stove, and a round-topped refrigerator from the 1940s. Another portrait of Jesus hung above the sink. Above the counter, open shelves held a few dishes, some canned goods, and jars of preserved vegetables and plants. Dried herbs and roots hung in bunches tacked along the shelves. Cree spotted a little gris-gris bag nailed above the back door.

Josephine gestured to the window, where through the screen of the back porch Cree saw a powerful, shirtless man working a garden bed with a mattock.

"My grandnephew help in' me with the garden today," Josephine explained. She went to the stove to poke a spoon into ajar of steaming dark fluid. "Just makin' tea when you knock," she said. "Offer you some, but it a remedy for my joints, taste like the devil." She stirred it, sniffed the steam, and turned back to Cree. "How'd ol' Miz Beauforte find me? Huh! Real question is, What she gone do now she find me?"

"You mean Charmian? She doesn't know I'm here. Nobody knows I'm here."

That surprised Josephine, and she looked at Cree with heightened interest. "Then who are you? What you want here?"

"I need your help. I have to learn more about what happened at Beauforte House in 1971 and '72."

Josephine considered that, eyes dubious. "What make you think I know anything at all about anything? Can't remember anyhow."

"You do know. You do remember. You came back two years ago and put those hexes at the house. You – "

"I don't gotta tell you nothin'. I don't know nothin'. You wastin' your time here." She turned back to the counter, brought down a smaller jar, and began pouring the tea into it through a patch of cheesecloth. Her movements were clumsy: The gnarled hands were stiff, Cree saw, with tension or arthritis.

"I don't believe you. You would never forget. I think you're just afraid of me."

"Oh, and why I be 'fraid of you?"

"Because you killed a man. And you're afraid you'll get in trouble for it."

The board-straight back didn't flinch. "Don't know what you talkin' 'bout. You sounding like a crazy. I'se eighty-one years old. Can't kill nobody!"

It was going as Cree feared. Josephine wasn't going to tell her anything.

There was only one solution, only one way to break through her resistance. Cree walked back into the living room, found the little oval photo of Lila, and returned with it to the kitchen. Josephine had turned and watched her, distrusting and disapproving.

"I'm sorry," Cree told her. "Let me start over. Josephine, I'm trying to help Lila, and I can't do it without you. I know how much you cared for her, and I think you still do. I don't care that you killed him. I just need you to help me find a way to let Lila go free of what happened."

Cree held the photo in front of her like a talisman, and Josephine stared at it for a moment before returning her eyes to Cree's face. "You some kind of doctor? Some kind of psychology doctor? Lila got so sick now she need a psychology doctor?" Then the yellow eyes narrowed as she seemed to see something in Cree's face. "No. No, you different. You a… healin' woman. You a seein' woman."

"Are you a seeing woman, Josephine? Is that how you know what I am?

"Don't got no sight. Don't want no sight – all it ever bring is grief, I know that much. I know 'cause my mama was a healin' woman, you got some her look 'bout you."

The relentless gaze probed deep, and Cree felt a growing discomfort. "I'm a parapsychologist. A ghost hunter." Josephine's eyes widened slightly, and Cree felt she had to hurry on or she would lose the old woman again. "Lila tried to move back into Beauforte House. She was… troubled… by a ghost there. It attacked her. Lila asked me to investigate. I've seen the ghost, I know who it is. But Lila has been badly shaken up. She tried to kill herself yesterday, Josephine! If I can't figure out exactly what happened back then, if I can't help her be rid of the ghost, she'll just try again and again until she succeeds. Charmian won't tell me anything. You're the only one who can tell me. Please, Josephine!"

Josephine's rigid stance didn't change as she considered that, but the news of Lila's suicide attempt clearly hurt her, and suddenly she looked very old and brittle. " 'The truth shall set ye free'?" she rasped.

"Yes. Exactly." Cree allowed herself a tiny welling of relief: Josephine had not resisted the idea of ghosts or hauntings in the slightest.

"And you gone help Lila 'cause you know the truth. You help her see the truth what happened, she gone get all better."

Cree nodded, feeling the relief spread. Josephine understood and would cooperate. "I hope so."

Josephine took the photo from Cree's hand, stared at it with that ancient look for a moment. Then the creased lips turned down, the wooden face moved on its bones, pain and sorrow and love all worked together. Leaving the tea on the counter, she turned and walked stiffly to the door to the screened back porch. Cree felt the disturbance in her: The old woman was burning up inside.

The man hacking at the soil paused to look over at them, his sweat-sheened forehead creasing when he saw Cree. "You okay, Auntie?" he called across the yard.

"You just go on workin', Hiram. I'se talkin' to this lady."

Hiram hesitated, doubtful, then dutifully went back to his mattock work, his powerful back and shoulder muscles banding with each stroke.

"You can sit, you want to," Josephine told Cree. Three wired-together wooden chairs stood on the canted deck, facing the backyard. Cree sat, but the old woman stood looking out at the expanse of weedy grass, the garden plots where Hiram worked, and trees that stretched away into the scrubby forest beyond. One of her stiff hands knotted and kinked in jerky, painful motions.

" 'The truth shall set ye free,' " Josephine intoned again, shaking her grizzled head slowly. "You just a baby, ghost lady. You like me, way I was. Got the same idea. But what if you wrong? What's left o' your faith, you wrong? What you do with your faith? How you live, after that?"

"I'm not sure what – "

"You want to know why I killed that man."

"I know why. I need to know the details of what he did to Lila and what Charmian did when she found out about it. I need to know more about him, what kind of person he really was, so I can figure out how to set his ghost free." And why you left the hexes. And how it connects with the murder of Temp Chase. And… But that would come later, if the old woman seemed willing to go that far.

Josephine digested that for a moment, her eyes losing their immediate focus as some internal view took precedence. When she spoke again, it was with a quiet, impassioned urgency: "You gotta understand how I loved that girl. She was a… like a star, so bright, even when she a baby." Josephine put a hand to her hard, hollow stomach. "I had a sickness when I was a chil', couldn't have no chil'ren my own. Maybe she was that for me, closest I could have to my own daughter. But that not all of it. She every shinin', pretty thing you could ever think of. Strong, determined, she take on the whole worl', she got to! Biggest heart there could be. I love that girl, do anything for her. Oh, Charmian, she love her chil'ren, too, don't ever doubt that! But a different way, more like a lady lion love her cubs, teach 'em be strong hunters, be kings an' queens. She never see inside Lila like me. Lila, she knew that. We close."

"Lila has told me that many times. How important you were to her."

"An' what happen to her was so bad. What he do to her."

"It was the worst thing that could happen. That's why Lila has hidden it from herself. But it isn't staying down, it isn't staying forgotten. His ghost chases her and rapes her again. It's all coming back, and it's killing her now."

Josephine looked at Cree with an unfathomable grief in her eyes, and something else – a look directed at Cree herself, something like pity. "That the worst, huh? That what you think? That the worst?"

It was clearly a rhetorical question, and the way Josephine asked it gave Cree a chill. What could possibly be worse?

But Josephine had opened the screen door and was beckoning Cree to follow her. Hiram paused again, shaded his eyes to look Cree over, then wiped his brow and went back to work. By the side of the steps, the old woman found a gnarled stick that she used to help her hobble over the uneven ground.

"Hiram, this here lady's a healin' woman. You don't mind if I's soundin' upset, you just keep workin'. We got stuff to talk about, you hear?"

"Yes'm," Hiram said.

Closer, Cree could see that he was a huge man and was older than he looked from a distance, in his forties. The look he gave Cree contained a clear warning: You on notice – you don't do nothin' to hurt my old aunt.

"This my family house," Josephine said as they walked on. "I's born here in 1920. When Mama moved to N'Orleans, I went with her, but one my brothers stay on here – he Hiram's gran'daddy, Hiram get the place when I's gone. When I lef the Beaufortes, an' then Mama died, I moved back. She a root doctor, Mama. People call her a conjo woman. Had a little shop on St. Philip Street, made her livin' at it. Knew all the ol' medicines, cures, charms. Learned from her momma and aunts. Some these plots here, still the same one she made when I's a girl."

"I read about her in a newspaper. You must have learned a lot from her."

Josephine tipped her head ambiguously as she walked on to the end of the grassy area, where several dirt paths led into the scrub. The view to the left was closed by the wall of the levee, overgrown with bushes and vines; above, the tree canopy cast a mottled shade. The smell of the bayou was stronger here and mixed with a sharp smell like insecticide the ubiquitous stink of chemical factories.

Josephine started down one of the paths, stiff and slow. "You know how he wore that pig mask? How he chase her an' let her go and chase her again? How he torture her?"

"Yes."

"I's out that night. Should have been home, never would have happened. Some the other colored servants in the distric', they go their own party, I go along." Josephine's voice was bone weary with self-condemnation, sepulchral. "Lila come home, she feelin' a little sick and besides she never like seein' her folks so drunk."

"Did she tell you? Is that how you found out?"

Josephine stopped beneath one of the windy, scaly-barked trees. Her eyes were beyond sad and beyond angry now, more like the eyes of a dead person. "No. Not the first way I know. Come home, there's things knocked over. I figure it's party night, maybe some Beauforte friend extra drunk and cuttin' loose, I straighten things up before Charmian gets in. But when I see Lila in the mornin', she's walkin' wrong an' her eyes are wrong! Her fire, see, her fire was different! Mos'ly it was out, but then it burn too hot. Then it out again. An' she scared – scared to talk to me, even look at me! An' later I'm doin' my job, I'm changin' her sheets an' I see the blood. After that I ask her an' she tell me."

Josephine was vibrating slightly, a shiver that shook every inch of her gaunt frame. The habitual control had vanished as the ancient pain and rage took over again, and now her voice was just a rasp, coming out under great pressure: "I's a Christian woman. I knowed to kill's a sin. But I knowed he had to be punished. Couldn't do anything right away, seemed to take forever, havin' to wait. Even then, didn't mean to kill him. Didn't go into the lib'ary thinkin' to kill him. But when the time come, Lord Jesus, I did it, I took that iron an' I hit him. He layin' there, movin' around like a snake with its back broke, an' that exactly what he was, a snake, an' Lord forgive, I took that poker an' hit him in his head. Hard as I could. Did it again! Didn't hardly know I's doin' it. An' after that, that snake didn't move no more. No he didn't. No he didn't. God Jesus, help me an' forgive me!"

Josephine had gotten breathless and unsteady, and now she sort of swooned as her eyes rolled up and the tall straight body toppled into the bushes. Cree rushed to her and held her, lifted her out of the tangle. They limped together to a fallen log and Cree helped her sit, folding her body in long rigid sections like a hinged thing.

A terrible sense of alarm shrilled in Cree's nerves, the awareness that something was very wrong.

"Josephine, I don't understand. Richard Beauforte died of poison. You poisoned his drink. Something in his amaretto."

Josephine looked up at her with those frighteningly dead eyes, eyes that had looked for answers and had found none. "Not Richard. Talkin' 'bout Bradford. Bradford the one chased Lila, raped her. Bradford the one I killed. Richard, he help me. Richard beat him till he down, mos'ly dead. I just finish it."

Cree felt suddenly dizzy herself, and she caught at a nearby branch to stabilize herself as she sat down on the ground. "No, Josephine, I saw the photos! Richard wore the boar mask! Brad, he was a pirate, he – "

A pair of military jets roared by overhead, deafening, making the foliage shiver and startling a flock of blackbirds from the bushes thirty feet away. The birds scattered like buckshot but then swarmed together again as the thunder diminished.

And Josephine explained: Yes, Richard had worn the boar head and the tattered swamp rat clothes for three or four years, and Bradford had worn the pirate getup, the patched and bearded face mask, the wig and low-slung three-cornered hat. But of course everybody knew who everybody was, so that year the two of them had worked out a prank to play on the other Epicurus partyers, even on Charmian and Ron and Lila. They switched costumes. Only Josephine, who had helped Richard get done up, knew about the joke. For the whole evening, they played not only their masked parts, but they played each other, a disguise within the disguise. They avoided talking, but when they did their voices were muffled by the masks and camouflaged by the outlandish accents they each put on. It was a big success, and later in the evening it took everybody by surprise when they unmasked. But Lila had gone home before then. And it had been Bradford, wearing the boar mask, who had slipped away after her, so drunk, so abandoned, so angry inside, that night.

There was no question that Josephine told the truth: She was implacable, beyond doubting. More, it made sense at last of the differences between the two ghosts, two ghosts after all, and the beating motion in the library.

It was a horrifying story, but as Cree thought it through, she began to realize it was in many ways the best possible discovery. This alone made coming down here worthwhile. The fact that she could now identify both ghosts and their issues was the least of it. Knowing the truth brought a huge gust of relief and hope: It wasn't Lila's beloved father who had raped her! Richard was, after all, the good man he seemed. Lila could recover memory of the night and cope with it, and, crucially, live on with a sure knowledge of her father's love. She could love him in return without the nagging ambivalence, subconsciously blaming him for the long-forgotten violation. She would learn that far from being her attacker himself, Richard in outrage had helped kill her real violator, her real betrayer. And if Cree could bring her to share his dying moment, to receive into her heart the arrow of love Richard lofted her way, she would be strengthened enormously.

Cree played through therapeutic scenarios, feeling hugely relieved, grateful for the truth.

But then a lingering problem occurred to her. Josephine had fallen silent as she let Cree sort through the ramifications, just watching her, clearly anticipating where it would take her.

"But… but Richard was poisoned!" Cree cried. "If you didn't kill him, who did? Charmian?"

Josephine looked at her with that implacable sympathy. "You poor baby. You poor girl. Now you got to grow into a ol' lady. Now you gon' know what's worse'n Lila got raped by her daddy."

"Nothing's worse!"

"Worse is, Lila killed her daddy! Lila burnt hot, she thought it was him had raped her, she stood up for herself, she put that poison in his drink. And she'd be right to! 'Cept Richard di'n't do it. He love her like I did! He the one beat Bradford near to death for it! But Lila didn't know. She killed her own daddy for somethin' he di'n't do. An' now you know why she got to forget."