City of Masks

41

The man who picked up Charmian wasn't from Crescent City Confidential Services. His two gold teeth, the checked shirt, those too-small oval sunglasses, and the posture of deliberate negligence showed him for what he was. As variously described by Ronald and the people he'd referred her to find him, he was a "fixer," a "hitter," a "handyman" – someone willing to do dirty work for pay. Just how dirty, Charmian wasn't sure, but the way he looked, slouched behind the wheel of his beat-up Cadillac, driving with one wrist, she wouldn't put much past him. He was a scrawny, chain-smoking, hatchet-faced Cajun swamp rat who leered when he told her his name was Pierre Lapin Peter Rabbit. When he'd first taken the driver's seat and tugged his jeans up, Charmian saw the end of a switchblade over the top of his pointy, ankle-high, bayou lounge-lizard boots.

She wasn't sure how you went about asking his type if murder was part of his resume. She wasn't sure she could bring it to that in any case. Three people had died already, her daughter had almost died yesterday – the swath of pain cut by that long-ago act was more than broad enough. But it was an outcome she was willing to accept if it proved necessary, and they'd have to discuss it before they got to Port Sulphur.

The Crescent City Confidential man she'd hired to watch Cree, after Charmian's last conversation with Paul Fitzpatrick, had phoned from Port Sulphur to say that Miss Black had located Josephine. As Paul had predicted. It infuriated her that in ten days this out of towner, a woman, a parapsychologist, a Yankee, could find a person the region's supposed top detective firm hadn't been able to. She let him hear her fury for a moment before telling him to wait there, that she would be there in just over one hour, that he was to follow Cree if she left Josephine's house and report in on the cell phone if she did.

Cree's finding Josephine meant that she would know the truth – most of it, anyway. There was only one fallback position now. If Cree didn't go for it, if she didn't agree on the solution, Pierre would be given an opportunity to become one very rich swamp rat.

It was bad enough that she had to spend over an hour with Pierre Lapin in his cigarette-reeking Cadillac. But the real problem was that there was nothing to say to such a lowlife, even if she did have need of his services, and the silence left time for her thoughts to whirl. The image of Lila, pathetically asleep in the hospital bed, her arms at her sides and bound to the bed, interposed itself between images of the past.

That night, and the following days, chiseled into her memory, replayed itself as it had so often in the past few months. It was becoming an obsession: searching every detail, every word said and every assumption made, in a hopeless quest to find ways she might have done it differently, done it better. With the wisdom of hindsight, she found many. But no amount of second-guessing or soul-searching could change what had happened.

It had been a particularly good party at the Hardings' that year, and the revelation of the ruse pulled by Richard and Brad had topped it off perfectly. Charmian had danced several times with her own brother, not knowing who it was, thinking only that Richard was affecting a different style of movement. She had watched the ostensible "Brad" stealing caresses from women old and young – only to shock them later by revealing himself as the ordinarily staid Richard! The only flaw in the otherwise perfect evening had been the way Brad looked, after they had taken off their masks: so sweaty and uneasy, his skin pasty. At the time, thinking she knew the reason for his poorly concealed misery, she'd felt a pang of sympathy for him. Susan Lattimore, Brad's most recent flame, had been noticeably absent from the party. Earlier, he'd confessed to Charmian that he was considering proposing to Susan, getting serious at last. Her absence, and Brad's appearance when he unmasked, suggested what her response had been.

And of course he'd been drinking heavily all night, lifting his boar's-head mask just enough to tuck tumblers of whiskey to his lips. They'd all had too much to drink. Excess was de rigueur at the Hardings'.

And then the nightmare of that morning: Josephine, storming into her bedroom study with a basket of laundry, her grave countenance afire with righteous anger. She was panting, so worked up that her voice came out more a scraping sound than a whisper: "Bradford come home crazy, he rape Lila when you's all still at Hardings'. He hurt that girl worse than any thin'."

"What are you talking about?" Charmian's headache pounded, and all she felt was irritation at the nanny's irrational outburst.

"He rape her! He chase her and rape her and scare her half to death and now you got to do somethin'!" Josephine threw the laundry at her feet, and Charmian saw the sheets, the blood on them. "You look here and see what he done!" There too were Lila's pajamas and underpants, ripped, spotted with blood.

Charmian's world rocked in something like an earthquake; the room seemed literally to tilt and shake as shock after shock hit her. First and foremost, concern for Lila – an agony of sympathy and fear for her future. But immediately after came fear and pity for Bradford, her beloved, charming, ne'er-do-well baby brother who had now truly become a lost soul. And then a thousand other shocks: a shrieking sense of failure, for having failed to protect her daughter. For having failed to help Brad become something better. For not having seen how far Brad had fallen. For having failed to protect her family, now gouged with a deep wound that could never knit. And then the shame of it! And the shame of knowing this servant knew of it. And fear of Richard, what he'd do when he found out, and

And in that moment she knew that she had to take control. It was up to her to repair this, to manage it. Josephine was never again going to act as Lila's mother, that had gone on long enough. She, Charmian, and she alone, was going to do that now. And she'd never fail again.

Charmian groaned out loud, causing Pierre Lapin to turn his buglike sunglassed gaze to her. Charmian inched away from him, up against the door, turning her head to look out at the disgusting commercial strip that had sprung up along Highway 23 in the last twenty years.

Another wave of pain came, but this time she weathered it silently: yes, she'd vowed never to fail Lila again. But only five minutes later, she had done so, maybe the worst way.

She found Lila in her room, sitting on the floor, cocooned in private misery, her body rocking slightly. One look told Charmian that, yes, her light had changed; that was the most awful thing, worse by far than the bruises on her face. She didn't return Charmian's hugs and caresses, but sat with arms at her sides, closing herself in hard. Charmian saw herself in the reaction: the strength of it, the determination. The anger and shame that fired her resolve to yield nothing to no one, to trust no one. And clearly, Lila blamed her mother for some share of her pain. She was right to. Charmian damned herself to the lowest level of hell.

Charmian knelt two paces away, as close as Lila would allow her. "Lila, tell me what happened."

Delayed response, an accusatory look: "You already know. Josephine told you."

"I want to hear it from you."

Delayed answer, eyes not looking at Charmian, or anything. "He chased me. I wasn't sure at first."

Charmian waited. "Sure o f -?"

"Sure what he wanted! I thought he was playing! The way we used to. But then he really hurt me and wouldn't stop when I told him to." Lila's lower lip was trembling so that it shook her whole, soft, child-round face. Her rocking intensified, growing desperate as determination warred with defeat in her features. When Charmian came to her again, Lila pushed her away. It was a short, hard push, the small hand flat on Charmian's chest. It left a brand she felt there for months.

Lila began to sob and moan but would not let Charmian touch her. So Charmian decided the only course was to provide an example of mastering bad things. She had to tell her daughter, show her that her pride could endure, her sense of self could endure. That if she sought it and asserted it hard enough, she'd still have some control.

"Lila, listen to me. There are times when you have to be strong. At some point, every woman has to deal with something that hurts her, very badly, very deeply. Every woman! Sometimes the only way through is to act like nothing happened! If you act it hard enough, it will become true, because you'll show yourself it can be done."

Crying, crying, crying, and still not letting Charmian near her. Crying, crying, crying, as her mother spouted more useless homilies on strength and self-control and stiff upper lip and time healing all wounds, crying and crying until Charmian grew too frustrated, too frustrated with herself for having let her relationship with her daughter turn into this, where in the poor girl's moment of greatest need she couldn't turn to her own mother. Frustrated with Lila for keeping her away. Crying, crying, until Charmian hissed at her, "Lila! Stop crying. Right this minute! You have to stop crying. If you can do it now, you'll prove to yourself you can do it anytime you choose to. Show yourself that. This is not the end of the world! Show some spine! You are a Beauforte! You can be strong. No one can take away the strength inside you unless you let them!"

She must have groaned again, because Pierre Lapin turned to her once more, throwing his left wrist over the wheel as he used his right hand to take off his sunglasses. He peered at her with small, bloodshot eyes. "You sick or somet'ing? Don't go t'rowing up in my car, just had the interior done."

"I'll bear that in mind, thank you," Charmian told him witheringly. "Frankly, it would help if you didn't smoke so much."

He put the glasses back on and kept driving. After a moment, he used his free hand to tap another cigarette out of its pack, then flicked it expertly so that it spun up and into his lips. He made sure she'd caught the move before he lit it with the dashboard lighter. Charmian bristled at his impudence but admired his reflexes. Small, but wiry and quick, that was good.

They were past the strips now and into the open country, the downriver land of po' white trash and po' black trash and nouveau riche trash in their taseteless, ostentatious houses. The flat, scrubby fields drifted endlessly past, dusted with pollution from chemical plant chimneys. This area had always been Charmian's idea of hell.

"Can't you drive any faster?" Charmian complained. "At this rate, it'll take us two hours."

The sunglasses only half turned. "Tell you what. I don't tell you how to be a rich bitch, you don't tell me how to do my job."

And she realized he was right. You drive the speed limit or under so that you never, ever, elicit the notice of the police. It was another slight demonstration of professionalism that reassured her. But, still, it wouldn't pay to let the help get uppity. It was time to take control of Mr. Lapin.

She didn't raise her voice, but she put an edge into her tone that would etch glass. "Don't you ever talk to me that way again." He swiveled his head to look at her and would have come up with some other insolent wisecrack, but she cut him off: "You don't know who you're dealing with," she hissed. "You see an old lady with a limp. But this old lady has more money than you could imagine. This old lady has more resources, more friends in high places, more clout than trash like you ever dreamed about. And Pierre Lapin is cute, but I really much prefer Loup Garou, your nickname at the Bayou Cane bars you frequent. I know which trailer you live in. You think I'd get in a car with garbage like you if I didn't know I could bag you up and discard you anytime I choose?" That begat some resistance, so she opened her purse to show him the glint of stainless steel there. She put her hand on it and through her teeth continued, "I am also an old lady with a Smith amp; Wesson CS9 automatic in my purse and I will kill you with it. Act right, and you end your day with more money than you usually make in a year. Talk to me like that again, or do anything other than exactly as I tell you, you are dead. Your place in the scheme of things is four classes lower than my yard boy. Know your place, Loup."

He had sobered up when she mentioned his local nickname, Werewolf, and the other information she'd paid her Crescent City Confidential man to obtain. Now he didn't answer, just turned his attention back to the highway. It took a while for his grin to sneak back. It looked a little forced, she thought, but not entirely: There was some grudging admiration there.

"Okay, Gran'mere, you the boss for sure," he said at last. "Make my own gran'mere look sweet, you."

She smiled, glad he had taken it in stride, thinking that maybe he was indeed worth his pay.

Putting him in his place gave her a moment's satisfaction, but actually, she did feel sick. And it wasn't caused by his cigarettes or even the chemical air down here. It was what she'd said. How it must have sounded to Lila.

Charmian had been on the verge of crying herself, that choking ache that grew and you tried to swallow and it wouldn't go down. But she had to set the example. Lila looked as if she'd go truly to pieces, turn into a puddle of tears and quaking flesh. Charmian had to prove you could stave off complete collapse if you just kept your back straight. So she did. She did not let herself appear overly emotional. Not ever during that whole awful time.

She didn't become aware of Lila's misperception until another week had gone by. Pdchard had been out of town on business for several days. Charmian had tried many times to reach Brad, had driven over to his apartment, but he never answered his phone or the doorbell. She hung in an agonizing indecisiveness. No, paralysis. Bradford had to be punished, that was clear. But Charmian couldn't decide what to do, how to begin. Call a doctor to look at Lila's injuries? Old Andre Fitzpatrick was loyal, they could count on him to be discreet. Call a psychiatrist to deal with the emotional aftermath? Call the police? She could probably prevail upon Commissioner Deelay to keep it out of the press.

But every choice had ramifications, and all the ramifications were bad. A family's reputation was a valuable thing, and not just from the standpoint of appearances. Recovering from this would require recovering some small share of family identity and coherence and pride. True, for something this unsavory to get out would hurt Richard's business relationships, and it would sully the Lambert name forever. But what mattered was that if there was any hope Lila could get past it, she couldn't have everyone she met knowing all about it, she couldn't see the knowledge in the eyes of her friends, her teachers at school, all their family friends. And Lila had to get past it.

She and Lila were having another talk. Lila had alternated between a slumping, spiritless despondency and a bristling rage that let no one near. Charmian was trying again, trying to reach out to her, trying to help her find a way of coping.

Lila had started out hard but had caved in again, crying, crying, crying. "Why did he do that to me? How could Daddy do that to me? How could you forgive him!"

Charmian was confused. "Do what? What did Daddy do?"

Lila's eyes were outraged when they turned to her. "What he did! What he did! When he hurt me!"

"No, baby, Daddy didn't hurt you – "

"He did! He chased me all over, he threw me down! He ripped my – "

"No, Lila, wait – " The revelation shook Charmian to her marrow. The enormity of the oversight. The enormity of how poorly they'd communicated. The enormity of the pain and sense of betrayal Lila's misperception must have caused her.

"He didn't even take off the mask! He kept making the pig noise! It was like he wanted me to feel like – "

"Lila!" Charmian shouted. "Stop! Stop saying that!"

"And you act like you forgive him! You act like it doesn't matter!"

"Your father would never hurt you! You were so upset, you were so scared, it makes sense that you'd see things the wrong way, or think that – "

"So I imagined everything?"

"Your father never raped you!"

Lila was backing away, her mouth agape, seeing only utter betrayal in Charmian.

And the moment came, the moment to set it straight, to make it perfectly clear. And Charmian failed it. She couldn't say the words. She couldn't say Bradford's name. She couldn't make her mouth say, It wasn't your father, it was your uncle Brad. My baby brother.

As she hesitated, choking on it, Lila grabbed a book from her desk and pitched it at her. It hit Charmian on the cheek and shocked her, and she shouted, "You get a grip on yourself, young lady!"

Lila fled past her and out of the room.

It wasn't until the next day that Charmian cornered her again and told it straight out: "It was Bradford, not Daddy." She explained the mask switch. But by then Lila was a sort of demented creature, hollow eyed, sleeping on the floor because she couldn't bear to touch the bed where the first of the rapes had happened. She had become torpid and depressed, unresponsive, with only flashes of rage. A veil had come over her eyes, hard to see through. She nodded her head, but skepticism and accusation were the only emotions Charmian could read in her face. There were many questions Lila could have asked, such as, Then why don't you tell someone about Brad? How can you protect him? But she didn't. And Charmian was grateful, because she had not yet figured out the answers.

"You understand now, right?" Charmian persisted.

"Yes, Momma, I understand," Lila had said in a monotone. She was telling the truth. What she understood was betrayal.

Then Richard returned from his business trip, and they discussed it and agreed that before they went to the police or anything else that would come to public attention, he'd confront Bradford. After a time, he managed to make contact with Brad, and they supposedly went on their regular fishing trip, and Bradford didn't come back. And later, when Richard told her what he'd done, that he'd killed Bradford in the library and lied to the police about his drowning, Charmian understood why he'd done it. Of course she did. She even knew how it hurt him to have done it.

But she hated him for it, too. She couldn't bring herself to sleep with the man who had beaten her brother to death, couldn't bear to be touched by the hands that had swung that poker.

And so yet another crack formed in the family, another piece of it broke away. Another kind of distance intruded.

Charmian couldn't do anything about that, either. What – go to the police and tell them her husband had murdered her brother? They'd ask why, they'd find out why.

And the converse was also true: Now they really would have to keep the rape secret. There was no longer any choice about that. The police would put the rape and Brad's disappearance together, and Richard would go to jail for murder. The family would be destroyed. Ironically, Brad's death was what really sealed the secret of the rape – it cemented the family's complicity in the lie that it never happened.

So she hammered the lesson into Lila: Sometimes a woman just has to be strong. To move on. To act like everything is all right until the act is so habitual that it's just like real. To try to forget the bad things that happened. To remember that the family is more important than any one member's pain.

And she took her own advice. Drinking helped the forgetting.

In there somewhere, poor Ronald had come to her in his own misery. Not yet sixteen years old, very much an innocent boy, troubled by seeing so many inexplicable, bad things happening in the family. He missed Uncle Brad terribly. But he'd felt the changes even before the "drowning," he'd heard the hushed conversations and hard voices, felt the dissonances and distances. And yesterday Lila had said something that scared him. She'd said that sometimes she thought about killing herself. She even told him how she'd do it: She'd use one of the poisons Josephine had told them about, long ago when she used to tell them stories about her mother's voodoo magic. There was a recipe you made with the seeds and flowers from the wild black cherry tree, it tasted like almonds – like amaretto, Daddy's favorite drink. Why would you do that? Ro-Ro asked. His sister had been frightening him for weeks now, with her hollow eyes, her numb lassitude alternating with that disjointed, crazy, sudden heat. Because of what he did, she told him. Who did? he asked. You mean Dad? What did he do? Nothing, Lila said. He did nothing. Ask Momma, he did nothing.

So he'd asked Josephine, and Josephine had told him to pray to our Lord Jesus Christ and to strive to emulate His life through acts of compassion and charity.

Hearing this, Charmian concealed her bitterness that not just Lila but also R o – R o would go to Josephine before he came to his own mother. She did her best to calm and reassure Ronald. She fired Josephine, telling her if she valued her life she'd never come back or attempt to contact any of them again. She made arrangements for Lila to go off to boarding school. She talked to Lila again and again, and made her promise she'd never do anything like suicide.

And she drank like a fish, trying to drown her sorrows, Charmian thought feverishly. She pretended to have self-control while inside she wallowed in confusion and self-pity. She missed all the crucial signs and signals.

For a time she thought her efforts were succeeding. With Josephine gone, with time passing, Lila began walling up her knowledge in a secret vault in her memory. She stopped speaking of the event. Then she went to school, fell apart, and came back home toward the end of the first semester. Charmian brought in old Dr. Fitzpatrick to treat her, and she did seem to improve through semester break. The holidays were dismal, but Charmian felt a glimmer of hope that they were beginning to recover, that you could survive even something this extreme. Brad had paid in full. Lila could recover.

And the very day Lila was supposed to return to school, she poisoned her father for an atrocity he would never have been capable of.

Charmian had been upstairs, trying to get everything ready for Lila's departure. She went downstairs and into the library, and there he was, dead on the rug, curled like a baby, a thin foam of vomit trailing from his mouth. The room reeked of almonds. And though she'd so recently been through two heartbreaks that she had thought to be unsurpassable, this was far worse. This broke her. She found herself on the floor. She moved up behind Richard's body and pressed herself against his curled back, tucked her knees in behind his, and lay with him the way they slept together, one arm around his chest, her face against the back of his neck.

That's how Lila found them when she came looking.

"Hey, Gran'mere, wake up," Loup Garou said. "Wake up now."

"I am awake, trust me," Charmian told him drily. "I'm just thinking."

"Yeh? I'm stoppin' for gas. You need to pee or somet'ing, this is it. Port Sulphur's ten minutes down." He swung the car over into a gas station, stopped at the self-service pumps. He reached down to pull the lever that opened the gas-fill cover, then stayed hunched as he dug under his seat. Charmian looked down to see two license plates slide out, facedown, and then a big black automatic pistol that Loup held between his knees and did something to before he slipped it back out of view.

He caught her look and returned it with a little grin. "Listen, this's your trip, gotta pay travel. Need some cash for the gas."

Charmian acted as if she did this every day. She opened her purse again and handed him a twenty, chiding herself for her reaction. Of course he'd have stolen somebody's license plates and replaced his own with them before starting this trip. Of course he wouldn't rely only on the switchblade in his boot. Good.

The Werewolf went to the back of the car to lean jauntily against the fender as he filled the tank. Then they were on their way again.

Ten more minutes, Charmian thought.

Richard was dead. In the worst possible way. And again, there was nothing Charmian could say or do except to manage it, minimize the damage. When she'd recovered to the point where she could physically let go of Richard's body, she had called Dr. Fitzpatrick, New Orleans coroner and trusted friend, and, swearing him to secrecy, told him the many reasons why he must misrepresent the cause of death. Old Fitz had come through and had presumably taken the secrets with him to his own grave.

One image burned in Charmian's memory from that day on: the sight of Lila's face as she saw them on the floor, the mix of feelings there. It would be at the center of everything she did for years to come. It would wake her from the deepest sleep. It would startle her when she was working in the garden, come between her and any rose. It would motivate her to anything at all. She knew she owed a lifetime of atonement for having allowed her daughter ever to wear that expression, feel those feelings.

And then they went their own ways. Ronald was suspicious of the death of his father, and she'd had to tell him, only him, the whole story. He understood completely why he must never, ever speak to his sister of her rape and the death of their father. If she ever found out she'd wrongly blamed him, wrongly avenged the rape, it would destroy her. It would be a cruelty heaped upon a cruelty. Another irony: The concealment was the only way through, but it also served as something of a collective, tacit admission that Richard was the guilty one. That the family, what remained of it, agreed he'd deserved it.

Ronald did his best. He remained devoted to his sister even as he deformed inside and became what he now was. Lila went off to school, having killed her father, half strengthened by this victory over her presumed attacker and half dying with guilt and grief. Between the drugs Andre had prescribed, and the distance, and the inconceivable enormity of it, she stayed numb. Something like a scar thickened over that part of her mind, that part of her past. The first few times she came home from school, Charmian thought she was faking forgetfulness, putting on the act as her mother had instructed and punishing her with how dutifully she did so. But after a time, as she became by degrees softer, weaker, sadder, Charmian began to believe the forgetting was real. Some of her sweetness returned, and she talked with sincere fondness about her childhood – about Daddy, about Uncle Brad. She became a good, dutiful, emotionally distant adult daughter. She managed to concoct a semblance of a normal life. Jack Warren was no great catch, but they did seem to care for each other, and Charmian deemed it best not to try to derail the relationship. Lila got pregnant, had kids. The past faded. Sometimes at night, Charmian lay and mourned them, all three: her beloved insouciant brother, her dear, good husband, and the splendid, brilliant daughter who was also gone for good. But Lila had survived, more or less. All three of them had, more or less. No one had ever found out. With the passage of years, Charmian let herself think it was done with.

And then, twenty-seven years after she'd disappeared from their lives, Josephine returned to ruin everything. The messy Temp Chase business happened. And then Lila's ghosts entered the picture, and that horrible Cree Black with her relentless prying, that frightening supernatural instinct that allowed her to discover exactly that which must be kept hidden.

Rage gripped Charmian. Josephine, again, still, forever! Always trying to take her children away from her, win away their affections! And then coming back after all those years wrapped in her smug virtue to confess everything to Temp Chase and open up the whole thing again. It was her fault this had all happened. When would she ever be free of that disapproving, accusing, pious face? And Cree Black! At the thought of the ghost hunter, Charmian's hands curled into scratching claws, and it seemed a red filter came across her vision, rage and contempt and fear. She mastered it with difficulty, willing her fingers to unclench.

Pierre's voice startled her: "Time we talk about how this goes down." He jutted his chin toward the sign that said they were entering Port Sulphur.