Unbroken (4 page)

“You came,” he said, and then he smiled — a slow, shy smile. “I knew you were a good person, that day I saw you with Lisette. I knew you’d help me.”

“Help you with what?” Rebecca asked, trying to keep her voice low. She wasn’t scared of him anymore, the way she had been outside the restaurant in New York. There was something so sweet and gentle about him. His stare wasn’t brazen; she’d been wrong about that. His eyes were pleading with her. Maybe he really
did
need her help.

“Rebecca!” Her father was calling her. “Where are you, honey?”

“Just closing the gate!” she called back. She fingered the straps of her bag, wondering how to handle all this. There was nowhere for them to have a private conversation, and anyway, her father would come out looking for her any second. The boy was still gazing at her, his eyes inky, as though he was about to cry.

“Can you wait?” Rebecca whispered to him. “I’ll come back out when I can, OK? It may be a while….”

She tried to think of possible excuses for her to wander off alone this afternoon, and not a single one came to mind. Even if she could shake off her father, Ling would want to come out to explore the Quarter.

“I usually haunt the corner,” the boy told her, pointing toward Rampart Street. “I’m there most of the time.”

“The corner.” Rebecca nodded, and the boy smiled at her again.

“My name is Frank O’Connor,” he said.

“Rebecca Brown,” she said in reply, but before the words were out of her mouth, he was gone — just vanished, in that weird abrupt way ghosts had. Rebecca could have sworn that his smile, broad and sweet, was the last thing to disappear.

T
he house they were renting wasn’t really just one house. Behind the main house lay a secluded courtyard, which led to yet another building, two stories high, its only staircase outside. This building was the old slave quarters, Rebecca’s dad explained. When the main house was built in the 1840s, he said, the kitchen would have taken up much of the ground floor of the slave quarters. Upstairs were rooms for the “help,” as Aunt Claudia put it: slaves before the Civil War, and servants afterward.

These days the kitchen was in the main house, along with the master bedroom, where Rebecca’s dad was sleeping. The slave quarters were a warren of small rooms, the lower story mainly used for storage, as far as Rebecca could tell. Upstairs, opening onto a narrow gallery shaded by banana trees, there were two small bedrooms and a bathroom for Rebecca and Ling.

Right now this was really, really good news, because it made it much easier for Rebecca to slip away.

It was early in the evening, and they’d all spent the last hour or so strolling the still-busy streets of the Quarter — around Jackson Square and down to the river levee, stopping every few steps so Ling could take more pictures. Soon they’d be heading out again to eat, but in the meantime, Rebecca had a chance to go outside unseen. Ling was taking what she called “a nice long shower,” and Rebecca’s dad was lolling inside the main house, with its closed shutters, watching golf on TV and checking his e-mail.

Rebecca crept down the wooden steps, across the courtyard, and along the narrow alley that led to the street. She didn’t have long, but she really
had
to know what the ghost boy — Frank — was looking for so desperately. Maybe he was like Lisette, trapped in ghostdom by some terrible curse. How did he die — and why did he die so young? Ling was right: She
was
too nosy about other people’s business.

It was dusk, but still warm and hazy. Rebecca scampered up to the corner of Rampart Street and paced up and down, trying to make herself as obvious as possible. On the far side of Rampart Street a tour group emerged from Armstrong Park and climbed into a waiting minibus, but otherwise the broad street was pretty deserted. Where was Frank? Wasn’t this the place he told her to wait?

“Come on, Frank,” she said aloud, tapping the curb with her foot as though the noise might summon him. “Show yourself!”

“I’m right here,” said a voice behind her, and an icy breeze shivered through Rebecca, cold as winter in New York.

Frank was standing by the doorway of the boarded-up house, looking like a smudge of dirt. Rebecca retreated into the shadows of the house as well, leaning against one of the rough boards. She had to keep an eye out for anyone walking past: They’d think she was crazy, talking to herself. Standing this close to Frank, shaded by the building’s rusted iron galleries, it was all Rebecca could do not to shiver. All the warmth seemed to have been sucked out of the day.

“I can’t stay long,” Rebecca whispered. “Tell me what this is about.”

“A locket,” said Frank, his eyes fixed on hers. “A locket that someone tried to steal from me the day I was murdered.”

“And … when
was
that?” Rebecca asked, trying not to sound too freaked out.

“It was March of 1873,” Frank told her.

“In New York?”

“Here, in New Orleans. Not far from here.” Frank nodded toward the other side of Rampart Street, where the streets of Tremé began.

“So … why did I see you in New York? I don’t really understand. Are you
from
New York?”

“I lived there,” Frank explained. “But I’m from Liverpool, originally. Liverpool in England.”

“Like The Beatles!”

Frank looked mystified.

“I came to New York with my family when I was twelve,” he said. “I took whatever work I could on the docks there, and sometimes I’d get work on a ship sailing down here. Spring was high season for cotton.”

“So you worked loading ships?”

Frank shook his head. “The colored men, they unloaded cotton from the steamboats. Lads like me, sometimes we’d be paid to guard the bales on the levees. People were always thieving from them, pulling cotton from a bale and running off. Times were hard after the war — that’s what everyone said. Too many people of all colors looking for work. So I went back and forth to New York and worked up there as well. That’s why he remembered me.”

“Your murderer?”

“No, the artist. The artist who gave me the locket. I carried his bags for him and his brother in New York, and then he saw me again down here, a few months later. I was running messages to one of the cotton offices on Carondelet Street, and when he saw me there he remembered me.”

“What’s a cotton office?” Rebecca didn’t want to seem stupid, but she really had no idea.

“Where cotton is bought and sold,” Frank said, frowning. She guessed that this
was
a stupid question as far as he was
concerned. She must have still looked uncertain, because he explained some more: Men in these cotton offices would buy picked, raw cotton from planters all over Louisiana and Mississippi, and then sell it, so it could be shipped to the big mills in England and woven into material.

“I get it,” said Rebecca. She’d never thought once, in her whole life, how her cotton T-shirts made it from fluffy stuff on a plant to an item of clothing sold on Broadway. “So, this man — the artist — he gave you the locket in this cotton office place?”

“No, no. Sometime later — a month, maybe. He was boarding a ship to Havana. I was down on the docks that day, looking for work. I saw him say good-bye to his brother and the old man from the cotton office, and then they left. Not long after, he came walking down the gangplank. That’s when he saw me.”

“And you said he remembered you?”

“Yes. He handed me the locket and told me to take it straight away to his uncle’s house on Esplanade Avenue. He said he wished his cousin to have it. I promised I would do as he asked.”

“What was this man’s name?”

“I don’t know. He never told me.”

Rebecca bit her lip, feeling increasingly intrigued and confused at the same time. “And how do you know he was an artist?”

“I remembered his brother joking when I carried their bags in New York. There was one bag I was to be extra careful with,
because there were paints and brushes in it, and a sketchbook. His brother said the gentleman was a
Grande Artiste
. They were foreign, you see.”

Frank was foreign, as far as Rebecca was concerned, but she didn’t point this out.

“And I looked inside,” he continued. “Just a little peek, you know.”

“Inside what?”

“The locket. There was a little picture, a tiny painting. It was a lady, and I thought it might be his cousin.”

“And what was this cousin’s name?” she asked.

“Desirée,” Frank said.

“Sounds French,” said Rebecca, and Frank nodded. “What was her last name?’

“It sounded like
moo-son
,” Frank said. “I think her father was one of the partners at the cotton office. The old man I saw at the dock here. I’d heard that name before.”

Rebecca thought for a second. “If he was one of the partners, his name would be on the sign outside the office, right?”

“Yes,” Frank agreed. “But I never learned my letters.”

“Oh.” Rebecca felt herself blushing, though Frank didn’t seem embarrassed.

“And even if I could read,” he went on, “that particular cotton office had closed. Places were always going out of business then. One day you’d carry a message somewhere, the next day the place would be empty.”

“How did you know where to deliver things, if you couldn’t read names or the numbers on buildings?” Rebecca asked, hoping this wasn’t too rude a question. “And how would you know which house on Esplanade you were looking for? How would you even know which street you were on?”

This question seemed to surprise Frank.

“All of us lads who took messages, we had to learn which was Canal Street, and which was Rampart, and so on,” he said. “It wouldn’t take long if you had half a mind to learn it, and we never had to venture far from the river. To find a house or an office, you would ask people. Servants, porters, laundresses, oyster-sellers. The men sweeping the road. Once you’d run an errand somewhere, you remembered it.” He paused a beat, studying her, and Rebecca willed herself not to blush again. “So you can read, then?” Frank asked her.

“Yes.” Rebecca tried to imagine what it would be like if she couldn’t read, if street signs and house numbers were mysterious marks that made no sense. It would be like living in a foreign country, one with a different alphabet, for your entire life.

“You’re lucky,” said Frank, and Rebecca realized that this was true.

“So what happened after he gave you the locket?” she asked, and glanced nervously over her shoulder. Time was racing by; Ling might have wandered over to the main house, looking for her. “Someone stole it from you, right?”

“It wasn’t stolen,” Frank said quickly. “Someone
tried
to steal it. He beat me, and dragged me into a house. Then he robbed me of my money. The artist had given me a dollar as payment for delivering the locket to his cousin.”

A dollar in 1873 was probably a lot of money, Rebecca thought, especially for someone who earned money carrying bags and running errands.

“He took the dollar, and he would have taken the locket as well, if he’d managed to find it. He killed me before he could find it.”

“So it’s in your pocket?” Rebecca didn’t understand. Frank shook his head.

“I hid it,” he said. “I dropped it between the floorboards of a house — the house where he murdered me. It’s still there now. I swear to you, it’s still there now.”

“But wouldn’t it fall right through to the ground?” Rebecca knew that a lot of the old houses in New Orleans sat on piles, so air could flow underneath.

“Not in this house,” Frank said. “It’s lying on a plank of wood, two inches below the floor.”

“You’re sure nobody has found it in all these years?” she asked. Frank shook his head.

“It’s still there,” Frank assured her. “I go over there to check it all the time. The house is empty — half falling over, to tell you the truth of it.”

“Why can’t you just go and get it?”

“We can’t pick things up and carry them around.” Frank sounded sad, defeated. “Believe me, if we could, I would have done it a century ago. We need someone from the world of the living to help.”

Rebecca thought about how long the locket was hidden in that house. The building might be empty now, but for years it must have been someone’s home. “Couldn’t someone living there at some point have helped you?”

Frank frowned. “Most people don’t want to have anything to do with ghosts. They scream, or call in exorcists, or move out because the house is haunted. That’s why, when I first saw you — you know, with Lisette — I thought you might be different. You might not be a person who was terrified of ghosts.”

Rebecca thought back to that day a year ago when she’d seen all the ghosts of New Orleans. And Frank had been among them, somewhere. “How did you know I wasn’t a ghost myself?” she asked.

Frank smiled, as though this was the silliest question he’d ever heard.

“You were holding Lisette’s hand. You never see two ghosts doing that. You only see it when we’re escorting someone from the world of the living. And that is very unusual.”