City of Masks (19 page)

17

B
Y THE TIME CREE RETURNED
to her hotel room, it was fivethirty. She dropped her purse, kicked off her shoes, and fell over onto the bed. Only after she'd lain there palming her eyes for a few minutes did she remember that she'd missed her four o'clock appointment with Dr. Fitzpatrick. The message light blinking on the phone was probably him, wondering where she was.

Too bad. Tomorrow maybe.
She had a lot to discuss with him, but she was too drained to deal with it now.

She had sat with Lila in the hall for as long as she could bear to, fearing that the boar-headed ghost would return. Eventually Lila had stirred and opened her red eyes to look at Cree. The eyes were neither hopeful nor grateful nor even fearful. They were just desolately empty:
This is how it
is. This is what I am.
It was a state of hopeless stasis Cree knew too well. She saw that same hollow resignation in the mirror, in her own eyes, after something had awakened her grief for Mike and the knowledge of how little she could do about his absence. How little the wound had healed despite the passage of years.

When Lila finally sat up, Cree retrieved her shoes, helped Lila get them on, and made her stand.

Downstairs, they picked up Lila's purse. Cree urged her out the door and down the gallery steps, and they went to sit in Cree's car, two utterly emptied women side by side in the heat. Cree's ankle throbbed, and she discovered that her elbows and thighs were bruised from the tussle in the hall. It was still bright daylight, the repair crew down the block was still at work. A few more tourists strolled the sidewalks, gazing around appreciatively and pausing to snap photos. Gradually, reality had reassembled around these ordinary things, and Lila had begun to talk.

The hotel phone wheedled, and Cree's hand reflexively snatched the receiver.

"Cree? Paul Fitzpatrick. What's going on? I missed you at four, called your room, couldn't find you. Now I just got through to Jack Warren, who said — "

"She went over to the house. Alone. I came by while she was there. She was . . . it was bad."

"Oh, Christ! Why'd she go there?"

"To fight back. Confront it all. Show she was tough. Didn't quite work out that way."

"So she talked to you?"

"Yeah."

Fitzpatrick chewed on that for a moment. "Are you up for meeting with me tonight?"

"I don't think . . . I mean, we do need to talk, as soon as possible. But frankly, I'm . . . it was . . . grueling. I'm really tired."

"You sound like someone who could use a good dinner and a glass of wine. We could kind of combine our psychiatric conference with some R and R. I know the restaurants around here pretty well - I could introduce you to some regional cuisine."

Somehow, it didn't seem like a come-on. Fitzpatrick sounded straightforward, as always, concerned and reasonable. It had been an overwhelming day, and part of Cree felt that the last thing she needed was one more intense interaction. But it really was urgent that they compare notes on Lila. And Cree did need to eat something.

And, yes, Fitzpatrick was okay to be around.

"All right. As long as you know I'm more than a little out of it. I really am" - Cree groped for the right word - "kaput. Seriously."

"Kaput is just fine. Kaput is eminently doable. I'll pick you up in an hour."

The silver BMW swooped up to the hotel canopy only a moment after Cree made it downstairs. Paul Fitzpatrick waved, but to Cree's relief he didn't jump out and open the door for her or otherwise conduct any ceremonies that might make this seem more like a date. Determined to conceal her newly acquired hobble, she walked to the car, opened her own door, and slid into the leather interior.

Fitzpatrick gave her a small grin. "You look like hell," he said. "You look kaput."

Cree returned the smile. She had showered and changed, but she still felt like crap, and somehow it was just the right thing to say. "Thanks."

"Seafood okay?"

"Perfect."

"You want fancy, folksy, um - "

"Right now I want normal. I want simple."

He looked at her appraisingly for a moment, stroking his chin, then nodded and put the car into gear. "There are a lot of choices, but I think I know the right place for tonight."

Cree was grateful to have someone else decide things. She leaned back, accepting the easy pressure of the BMW's acceleration. Fitzpatrick swung the car north on Canal Street, away from the French Quarter. The sky was dark, leaving the boulevard lit only by street lamps, signs, windows, headlights. She laid her head against the headrest and looked out at the big, strange city she was just coming to know, and Fitzpatrick had the good sense not to say anything at all.

Deanie's Seafood turned out to be a casual place half a block from the lake, not too far from the park where she and Fitzpatrick had walked. Aside from the brightly lit fast-food place across the street, the neighborhood was composed of seafood distributors and light industrial buildings.

"Antoine's this is
not,"
Fitzpatrick told her as they crossed the parking lot. "It's where you go when you're hungry and want very fresh fish and clams and crabs and lots of 'em. I like it because it doesn't go for the overdone Cajun or old-timey New Orleans themes you see too much of, and it's cheap. I thought you probably wouldn't be in the mood for anything too elaborate." He stopped, suddenly uncertain. "But if you are, we could - "

"This is just right."

The restaurant was an unpretentious place, just the kind of grounded, homey environment she needed: middle-class, mom and pop, guaranteed to keep existential anxiety at bay. The air outside was full of the smell of deep frying, reminding Cree how hollow her stomach felt. When they went inside and she saw people being served mountainous platters of golden-brown, battered sea things, her knees went weak.

They took a table at the far end of the back room, near the lobster tank. Cree dropped into her seat and watched the green-black creatures bumbling around the perimeter of their glass cage, claws held shut by rubber bands.

"I need you to tell me what you know about Lila," Cree said immediately.

"Don't you want to relax a bit? I thought you wanted to - "

"It's probably best just to get to it. I can't think about anything else right now. Dr. Fitzpatrick, if she were my patient, I'd be considering immediate intervention."

That brought his eyebrows up. "Not to digress, but could I ask you to call me something other than Dr. Fitzpatrick?"

"I'm not going to call anyone Fitz, I'll tell you that. How about Paul?"

"Paul will do." His weak smile faded quickly. "So Lila's really at risk."

"She spent the afternoon literally bouncing off the walls of Beauforte House, knocking over furniture." Cree glanced around to make sure no one was near enough to overhear, and then went on in a quieter voice: She was in a state of absolute panic. Her clothes were torn and she had bruises and scratches all over. She was being chased by a pig- or boar-headed man who took sadistic pleasure in the pursuit, who drew it out, hiding, popping out at her, chasing her, and then hiding again."

Fitzpatrick looked aghast. After a moment, he spread his hands helplessly. "I have to admit, even from a psychiatric perspective, this is a little beyond my experience. More than a little. This is - "

He stopped when a waitress appeared, a harried-looking middle-aged woman who set down a bowl of boiled potatoes and then stood, one pencil behind her ear and another poised over her order pad. "Can I get you something to drink? Wine? Cocktail?" she asked.

"I'd like a whiskey," Cree said. "Bourbon, whatever's cheap. And a beer to knock it down with. Anything on tap, you choose for me."

Fitzpatrick ordered a glass of Chablis. When the waitress left, he looked at Cree with a mix of concern and amusement in his eyes.

"A family remedy," Cree explained. "My father wasn't a regular drinker, but he believed that extreme circumstances demanded extreme measures."

Fitzpatrick pursed his lips and nodded.

Cree leaned forward across the table. "It's beyond my experience, too, Paul. I can't explain the boar head, and I can't find any of the . . . 'handles' I usually look for. I can't find his dying experience in him, he's very one-dimensional. I've never even
read
of anything like it. Nothing legitimate, anyway. You'll think this sounds strange, coming from me, but this is almost like a — a fable, or a horror story. Something teenagers tell each other around a carnpfire. But it's very real to Lila."

"That's all it did? The . . . pig-headed ghost? It chased her?"

"It raped her, Paul. That's what it does when it finally catches her. That's what happened back in December. It scares her to death, and when she can't run any more, it rapes her. And it does it again and again." It was the first time Cree had said it out loud, and the enormity of it struck her. Cree believed Lila's account, but in one sense it made little difference whether this was a real manifestation or purely the savage hallucination of a tormented mind: Both were equally, deeply frightening.

Fitzpatrick was looking shaky, as if suddenly he'd lost confidence in his ability to cope with Lila's condition. He picked up his fork and played with it for several seconds, then dropped it with a clang as if he were disgusted with it.

"Hospitalization," he said. "I'll get her admitted tomorrow. Cranial diagnostics, sedation. A complete blood workup. I know a neurologist with an excellent reputation, we'll get him on it."

They both were quiet for another moment, and then the waitress came back with their drinks. "You ready to order, or do you need another few minutes?"

They hadn't even noticed their menus yet.

"Another few minutes, thanks," Fitzpatrick said.

Cree lifted her whiskey glass, sighted quickly through the amber fluid, and raised it toward Fitzpatrick.
"Skoal,"
she said automatically. Before he could raise his glass, she tossed hers back. The unaccustomed burn brought tears to her eyes, but she swallowed it down and quickly followed with a draft of beer that replaced the fire with ice. Her eyes popped wide.

Fitzpatrick watched with interest. When she set down her half-empty stein, he tipped his stemmed glass and took a moderate sip. "You drink like a . . .Jeez, I don't know who drinks like that. My mother used to tell me, 'You burp like a stevedore.' Nowadays, people don't even know what a stevedore is, but - "

"I drink like a plumber. My father taught me."

"Does it help?"

Cree pondered the warmth growing in her midsection, the tentacles of anesthetic already reaching out to the nerves in her hands and feet. The ball of icy jitter in the center of her chest remained unthawed.

"No," she admitted.

"So what does a ghost buster with a Ph. D. in clinical psychology make of Lila's situation?"

"I saw the shoe tips. I didn't see the boar face. But I did see the shoes."

"Oh, man." Fitzpatrick moaned. He tasted his wine, made a face of disapproval, shook his head. "I don't know what to do with this. What the hell am I supposed to do with this?"

"Think back to your sessions with Lila. Before you knew what I've told you, what would you have said? Preliminary diagnosis?"

He gave it a moment's thought. "Well. So far, I've tagged chronic depressive tendencies, as indicated by low self-esteem, morbidity, indecisiveness, preoccupation with smaller problems. She told me she'd had a previous bout of depression around the time she went off to boarding school. My father was the one who treated her, actually - he was Richard's friend and physician back then."

"Did you know her when you were younger?"

Fitzpatrick shook his head. "Oh God, no. Lila's six years older than me. I was barely getting into baseball cards by the time she was getting into boys. We never played with the Beauforte kids. After my father died, about fifteen years ago, our contact with the family kind of fell off."His eyes narrowed and he looked at Cree with a touch of accusation. "If you're wondering if they came to me because of the old family connection, I like to think I have enough of a reputation in this town, on my own - that they came to me because I am
good.
Even if I didn't win the Christ-forsaken Haverford."

Cree grinned. "Never crossed my mind. I can tell you're good."

"In any case, I'm not surprised she got the blues back then - that's a tough time for any kid. But in Lila's case it was a particularly lousy period. Apparently her uncle had died in a fishing accident the year before, and just before she went off to school her father died of a heart attack."Fitzpatrick stared out into the bustling restaurant, drumming his fingers."Beyond that, I'd have said I've got a patient in some kind of denial. A lot of repression, especially in her feelings toward her birth family, focused on ambivalences — pride and resentment, love and dislike. A yearning to live up to expectations and a desire to be free of them. Has a domineering mother who probably found her kids a bother and a disappointment and didn't mind letting them know it. Loved her father, his loss hurt her probably more than she admits, doesn't want to get too close to that. Poor self-esteem, probably based on a sense of failure. Guilt for those supposed failures." He thought about it some more. "But she's a patient who's hard to probe, reluctant to reveal too much. One minute she's defiant, her pride won't let her open up, the next her guilt and shame take over and she's too ashamed to talk about it. It's hard for her to let anyone near her."