City of Masks

5

Lila Warren's eyes widened. "Oh, I don't think so. I can't go back. No, I really don't think I can go into that house again."

"Even in the middle of the day? Even if I'm with you?"

"You have to understand, I'm… i t has upset me badly. Very badly. It's been over three months now, I thought maybe I'd be getting over it, but I'm not. It's only getting… worse." Lila's speech carried only a moderate accent of the Deep South, the stretched and rounded vowels.

They were talking across a low table and a pot of tea in the second-floor sitting room of Lila Beauforte Warren's house, on the northern end of New Orleans. From the windows, Cree could see over the grassy slope of the levee to the scattered trees of a shoreline park, and then to the vast flat blue of Lake Ponchartrain. The border between water and sky was straight as a ruled line and completely empty.

Lila's house was not one of the lavishly ostentatious piles Cree had passed as she drove here in her rental car, but rather a contemporary, somewhat smaller copy of a Greek-revival plantation house. And that described Lila herself, Cree thought: a contemporary, miniaturized version of a Southern businessman's wife. The sense was reinforced by the minute watercolors hung here and there, neatly framed, that Lila admitted were her own. The hand-sized floral still lifes were tiny and unobtrusive, yet their rich hues and slightly ominous darker tints suggested that a great deal of feeling had been compressed to fit within those little frames.

Perhaps Lila's diminution came from her current uneasiness. She was clearly struggling to cope with some recent, troubling experience. But there was also something habitual there, more deeply rooted. She had obviously lived with some kind of uncertainty and diminished sense of herself for a long time. Cree could see it in the rounded hunch of her plump shoulders, her small, uncertain hands, the tentative way she set the tray on the table and then rearranged the teapot and cups as if unsure she had put them in just the right places. Her eyebrows were uneven: One of them tilted up slightly at the center, enough to suggest a hint of alarm or doubtfulness.

And yet she was still rather pretty, Cree thought. She had shoulder-length, graying-blond hair that seemed to rebel against the controlled hairdo she'd chosen, a face with full lips and a generous but nicely upturned nose. Her knee-length blue knit dress, her makeup, the simple pearl necklace and earrings – all were good matches for her natural coloring. From the photos on the mantel, Cree could see that though she'd always tended toward the plump, she was one of those women who carry their weight mainly in bust and hips, retaining an enviably narrow waist.

The tea had had time to steep, and now Lila Warren poured a wavering stream into two fine china cups.

"Mrs. Warren – "

"Please call me Lila. I hate formalities. If we're going to get to know each other as well as you say we'll have to, we might as well start with that. Lemon? Sugar? I can get some milk if you'd prefer – how thoughtless of me not to have – "

"Lemon is fine, thank you. Lila, this is a lovely house. If your experience has been so upsetting, why do you still want to move back into Beauforte House?"

Lila sat with her cup hovering, saucer held beneath it. "That's a very good question. And it's one my brother has asked. He would be quite happy to sell the house. Before this all happened, I just thought it would be good to keep it as the family center, our historic home. My children all have the Beauforte middle name, there's a lot of family pride there.

My youngest son just went off to college last fall, my last baby out of the nest, and I began to think, you know? About what a family is. About what it means to have a place where you all know it's home? Where everyone comes back to? I would very much like to provide my children and grandchildren with… that. It's not easy to explain if you don't share the sentiment."

"Makes perfect sense even to me, and I'm a gypsy, myself- we'd lived in five or six different places by the time I got out of high school. What does your husband think about going to live in the house?"

"Oh, Jackie. Well, he would like nothing more. Different reasons, I'm sorry to say. Jack is in real estate himself, you know, and he's very… how shall I say this? He's status conscious. Jack comes from an upriver suburb, and though he's done very well for himself, even married a Beauforte, I don't think he's ever felt he's really arrived in New Orleans. Living in one of the finest, most historic houses in the Garden District would do wonders for his… position." The uneven brows dipped disapprovingly: Lila clearly found this motivation rather crass.

Cree nodded, sipped her tea. "Still, this seems to have upset you a great deal – "

"So why fight it, is that what you're saying?" Lila's hands shook so her cup and saucer chattered, and she put them down. But she straightened in her chair and drew her shoulders up. "Because you can't just take things! You can't just… run away with your tail between your legs! I think I've done enough of that already in my life. Sometimes you have to just tough it out. I guess I got my back up." It all came out in a rush, and afterward Lila looked rather surprised at herself.

Cree admired the blaze in her eyes. It was good there was this much fight left in the outwardly docile, fragile Mrs. Warren: She'd need every bit of it if there was an entity at Beauforte House.

"So in that spirit – no pun intended – " Cree prompted. The moment was probably as good as it was going to get for what came next. She turned on her cassette recorder and placed it on the table between them.

"Just hang on to that feeling, okay? And tell me what happened."

Lila began haltingly at first, finding her way into it with difficulty.

She had avoided the house after the murder, letting Ron take charge of cleaning up and remodeling the kitchen where the shooting had occurred. She couldn't bear to think about it. She had gone along with the idea of renting the house out again, but when that didn't work it became clear they had to do something with the place – as Jack pointed out, an empty house goes to ruin.

In September, she and Jack drove over to take a look, feel it out. A beautiful day, the house cool inside despite the hot weather, so spacious and fine. The kitchen – well, yes, that was difficult. Just thinking about what had happened. But they were churchgoers, didn't believe in ghosts.

And Ron had done a good j ob with the remodeling, making the kitchen extra bright and cheerful.

They began the move in November and were settled in time for Thanksgiving. All three kids came home, Momma was there, some friends of the family, Ron and his girlfriend du jour. A wonderful homecoming to Beauforte House, a renewed sense of family.

"And I didn't even last a month!" Lila said. "I was uneasy from the start, and it just got worse and worse, and then there was that, that last episode. After which I couldn't set foot in the house again. Didn't even make it to Christmas. Fortunately, we hadn't sold this house yet, so we could move back in here."

"But the effects of the experience are still with you."

Lila's small, plump hands were clasped close against her stomach, fingers massaging the opposite wrists as if they ached. "I've – did Ron tell you? – I've been seeing a psychiatrist."

Cree nodded. "Has it helped?"

"He tells me I should have a CT scan, look for something wrong with my brain! He says we have to start with me accepting that what I experienced was some kind of hallucination or delusion or whatever.

And I can't do that, because / know what I saw!" The anger gave way to doubt again. "But damnation, between him and Jack and Ron – I mean, I'm not sure, maybe I am having a nervous breakdown! Maybe I am going crazy!"

"Have you ever had a breakdown before? Any history of mental illness in your family?"

"Nothing in the family. I had a little tough spot when I first went off to boarding school, but that was thirty years ago! I may be unassertive or whatever you want to call it, but I have enough damned spine to not break down. I come from a proud family. I raised three children. But I've never had… anything like this." Lila winced back tears of frustration.

Again, Cree was touched by her. A woman oscillating between the poles of fear and dismay on one hand, and that fierce resistance on the other – not unlike Cree herself, it occurred to her, bouncing between her almost overwhelming "susceptibility" and the need to confront it, master it. No, you couldn't run away with your tail between your legs.

Cree poured herself a second cup of tea. "You've had a very unusual experience, and it isn't easy to communicate those feelings. And I know that while seeing a ghost is frightening, what's more upsetting and confusing is the way it challenges your view of the world. Changes how you think of life, death, your place in the scheme of things. That in itself can be devastating."

Lila looked grateful that someone understood. "We always went to church! The ghost stuff, that was for voodoo people, or for the tourists – 1 always felt superior to it. And now look at me!" Starting to falter again.

"Just remember that feeling you talked about earlier. Get your back up. Please, tell me about it. Just tell it as you experienced it. Help me understand."

Lila rallied and began again.

She was uneasy the first day they spent there. It was one thing when the movers and painters and cleaners were coming in and out, but once everybody left it felt different. It was a bigger house than two people needed, twenty rooms plus the former slave quarters and carriage house, so she and Jack had really set up to live in about half the house, leaving the rest unused but mostly still furnished with the period furniture her father had installed. How Momma had lived there all those years with just a housekeeper, she didn't know.

The sense of unease grew until by the time she woke up in the middle of that first night and had to go to the bathroom, she couldn't bear to get out of bed. They had left the lights on in the hall, turned down on the dimmer switch, but it didn't help. There was this feeling of expectation, the sense that something was just about to happen. And it didn't help to have the murder to think about. But after a while she had to get up, leaving Jack asleep in the bed – always a deep sleeper, Jackie. She went out of the bedroom, and just as she turned into the hall she saw something move, slightly, right where the hall opened into the big room at the top of the front stairs. Something small, down near the floor. Beyond it, the darkness of the big central room loomed, the doorways of the front rooms just visible as rectangles of shadow on the far wall. She froze, choked with fear, and squinted at the thing from twenty feet away, trying to make out what it was in the dim light. She could see only a couple inches of it, flat on the floor and just emerging around the corner – brown, rounded, smooth, a little shiny. Oddly familiar, but incomprehensible.

Then it shifted again, tucking itself a little farther back out of view, and suddenly she made sense of what she was seeing. The toe of a shoe! Someone was standing just back of the corner, in the darkness of the big room. Waiting.

Telling it to Cree, her eyes got wide, a twitch tugged at her right cheek, her uneven brows danced out of control. Her chest was pumping in shallow, uneven breaths.

It was the most terrifying thing she had ever seen. She felt like she was going to be sick. Afraid to make a sound, unable to take her eyes off the shoe, she backed up. She made it to the bedroom doorway and went quickly to rouse Jack. He seemed to take forever to make sense of what she was whispering, Lila glancing over her shoulder and expecting to see whoever it was coming into the bedroom. But at last Jack got up, put on his robe, got his shotgun out of the armoire.

When they got out to the hall, the shoe wasn't there any more. Jack called out; no one answered. He noisily jacked a shell into the chamber and warned whoever that he was coming after him with a gun. Still no answer, no sound. And when they went around the corner, no one was there. No shoe, either. Jack gave her a skeptical scowl but dutifully went through the whole house with her.

They found nothing. All the doors and windows were locked. The security system was armed and in order. Everything was just as they'd left it when they'd gone to bed.

"Jack thought I'd imagined it. But, honestly – a shoe!" Lila's lips worked in frustration. "Who would imagine they saw the toe of a shoe?"

Cree just nodded. "What sort of shoe was it?"

Lila looked brought up short by the question, but she thought about it for a moment. "Well. A man's shoe. Brown leather, a dressy sort of shoe, I think. But I could only see the toe."

"A modern shoe? As opposed to, say, a shoe from the nineteenth century?"

"I really couldn't say. I… just don't know."

She made it through that night, persuaded she had imagined the shoe. But the next day Jack went to his office, leaving her alone at the house. There was still moving-in work to be done, putting things away, hanging a few paintings. A couple of friends called; she had nice chats with them. She turned on the kitchen TV, just for some noise. But the sense of unease grew again. There was a sense of something fluttering, some movement somewhere, but every time she darted her eyes to a doorway, window, or mirror, she saw nothing. It ate at her, nibbled at her calm, very nerve-wracking. Still, she managed to get the kitchen squared away, then went to the library to finish putting books onto the shelves. She also wanted to wax Daddy's old square grand piano, make the rosewood shine the way she remembered it.

She was working in the library when she heard a curious creaking sound. Not like wood, not like a floorboard, more like something under great pressure. A grating screech. It seemed a familiar sort of sound, but it wasn't until she'd listened to it come and go for a half an hour that she realized what it reminded her of. When her daughter Janine had been a teenager, she'd had a tooth-grinding problem, had to be fitted with a guard – some hormonal or peer-stress thing, the dentist said. Lila would hear it at night, a horrible sound, the sense of enormous pressure brought to bear in that poor girl's mouth. Skreeeeeeeak. That's what this sound was like: two hard surfaces grating together with tremendous force.

It seemed to be coming from the other end of the library, where two leather reading chairs bracketed her father's fine claw-foot table. She went over there to hear it better, worried that maybe it had to do with some structural problem in the old house, subsiding or something. Or termites – did termites make noise in the wood? When she got closer, she could tell it seemed to be coming from near the floor, but it stopped as soon as she bent to listen.

She waited, but it didn't start again until she resumed working. She made a mental note to talk to Ron about it and tried to put it out of her mind. It seemed to intensify, nagging like the fluttering motion, eating at her.

Jack came home, she cooked some dinner. Jack was in good spirits; he took a satisfied turn through the house to survey his new domain. Afterward they went to watch TV in the former music room, at the end of the east wing, which they'd set up as a den.

Sitting now in the bright, lake-facing sitting room, Lila was getting shakier, to the point where Cree almost interrupted her. Her empty teacup still hovered in front of her, wavering wildly. But obviously she was getting to something crucial, best to let her continue. Cree's empathic radar was going crazy, too, as some big terror moved into Lila like a gathering storm.

Much later, Jack asleep in front of the TV, Lila got up to go to the kitchen. When she passed the library, she heard the creak, louder now, and went to investigate. Down there near the claw-foot table. She bent down, hearing it so clearly she expected to see the damned termite, or whatever, right there. And then she saw what was making the noise.

The claws! Four carved legs of the table ending in eagle talons, each gripping a solid glass globe a little smaller than a tennis ball. The claws were alive. Lila saw the horny wooden fingers move, working their grip, clenching the glass with tremendous pressure, releasing, clenching. All four feet. The sound like teeth grinding. The table crouched like a horrible living animal suddenly transported into her house.

A sharp clack! made Cree jump. Lila's teacup fell to her lap, the slender porcelain handle still ringing her index finger. The tension in Lila's hands, just trying to tell this, had broken the little ear off the cup.

"Oh, God!" Lila whispered. She hastily retrieved the cup, set it clattering back on the tray. There was a spot of blood on her finger, and she dabbed distractedly at it with her napkin.

This was too much. Cree knelt beside her, took her shoulders, kneaded them, rocked her gently. "You okay? Let's back away from it now. Maybe we can try again tomorrow, or whenever you're up for it We don't have to do this now."

But Lila was still in that moment, staring sightlessly across the sitting room. She whispered, "So of course I ran to get Jack. And I made it all the way to the TV room door before I realized I couldn't tell him. Because what I'd seen was crazy. That's what he'd say. That's what anyone would say – I couldn't tell anyone! And that was the moment I realized I was alone with this. This whole… problem."

This close to her, Cree was feeling it all herself. Lila Warren's experience played in her chest, painfully poignant and terrifying. She could feel the curve of Lila's hopeless shoulders in her own spine, feel the woman's tremors twitch her own cheeks and brow.

One thing she knew for certain: This woman was as fragile as the teacup and starting to go to pieces.

Lila took Cree's hands in her two trembling hands. She looked desperately into her eyes and whispered, "What do you think? Do you think I'm crazy?"

And to Cree's great relief at that moment there came a thump and clatter from below, and a man's voice calling upstairs: "Peaches? Lila, darlin', I'm home. That ghost buster gal show up yet?"

So instead of having to answer, Cree settled for a look of sympathy and complicity.

"We're upstairs, Jackie," Lila called shakily.

Still kneeling at her side, Cree quickly smoothed Lila's hair, then took a napkin and patted the tears from her cheeks, wiped away a smear of lipstick from the corner of her mouth. Got her in order as Jack's feet thumped up the stairs. And by the time he came in, a business-suited, ruddy-faced, chunky man just under middle height, they were standing on opposite sides of the coffee table and Lila was mustering a housewifely smile that almost worked.

"Hello, Mr. Warren, I'm Cree Black," Cree said, offering her hand. I'm very pleased to meet you. But I'm embarrassed to admit that I've been kind of a bull in a china shop here – I've broken one of your teacups!" And she showed him the little porcelain ring.