There was no league play tonight, which meant that Janet could leave her assistant to oversee the casual hoop shooters or pickup game. While she did a few last-minute errands in the building, Zoe and Hyacinth shed their street shoes and skated out into the yellow floor. They found a ball and began tossing it around. Cree and Deirdre watched them from the sidelines. Zoe had more zip on the boards, but Hyacinth had a better eye for shooting.
"This was a tough one, huh?" Deirdre asked quietly.
"It shows?"
"Let's see. You called me three times, usually at around midnight. You're ten pounds skinnier. Finger's in a splint." Deirdre eyes narrowed as she appraised Cree's face. "Bruises and scratches. Eyes are different."
"I'm good, Dee. I learned a lot." She returned Deirdre's close scrutiny, afraid for just an instant. You had to check each connection when you came back, see if it was the same, or if maybe the way you'd been changed had put your loved ones out of reach. But no, she saw with relief, not with Dee. Not this time. "It put me through some changes," she admitted, "but a lot of them are really good. Things I've needed to look at for a long time."
Deirdre nodded skeptically. "Well, you'd better have some believable and reassuring explanation for Mom. She'll worry. And she's got enough to worry about right now."
It was eight days until her procedure, and Deirdre was getting nervous.
Zoe got a basket and aped the prancing, self-congratulatory dance the professionals did, hand over head, limp wrist, chest convulsing. "Sha- quille O-Neeeal!" she cheered.
Janet appeared at the back of the gym, pulling a windbreaker over her uniform shirt. She caught a pass from Hy, dribbled, and flipped it to Zoe. They came across the floor like that, triangulating.
"Okay. I'm a free woman," Janet told them. She bowled the ball back into the gym. "Lordy, it's so nice to see all my girls! How are you, Creester?" Her voice was cheerful, but her eyes looked old and concerned. Behind her, Dee gave Cree a glare.
"I'm great. I'm better than I've been in a long time." Cree hoped she heard the truth in that. "New Orleans was terrific. I ate a lot of great food, and I got drunk on Bourbon Street, Mom. I didn't whore my way down the other side, though." She grinned.
"What's that about?" Deirdre asked.
"Later," Janet commanded. Zoe and Hyacinth walked ahead of them and gave no indication they'd heard. "And, what, you got into a catfight with some drag queen? Good God, Cree!" She meant the splinted finger and fading bruises.
They came through the double front doors. The girls skipped down the steps ahead of them. Deirdre and Janet kept an expectant silence.
"I met a guy," Cree blurted, surprising herself. It was the only easy explanation or excuse she could come up with. Inwardly, she corrected herself: Met him and unmet him. And he turned out to be a bastard. But it was a truthful explanation for many of the changes, and truly they were not all injurious. Too bad it ended with Paul's deception. Just one of many in the city of masks.
The twins stopped dead, their pretense of obliviousness dropped.
Janet just snorted. "What, and that's supposed to make us feel better? Who is this bruiser?" She kept the facade of disapproval, but Cree knew she was just playing the role. Her curiosity had been aroused.
"Actually, he's a psychiatrist."
"Worse and worse," Janet growled.
Deirdre tugged their mother's arm. "C'mon, Mom. This isn't the McCarthy hearings, it's 'welcome home, Cree.' Cree will tell us about it if she wants to. We'll never get a table if we don't get going."
Cree tried to make Friday a regular day. She went to the office early, typed up some notes from the Beauforte investigation. Personal stuff aside, this had been an enormously instructive case, and she wanted to record her observations and impressions while they were still fresh. Also, Ed would be coming in later, and she wanted to be able to put it in some kind of order for the mutual debriefing they always conducted after doing solo work.
The thought of seeing Ed made her nervous.
At ten, Joyce came into Cree's office and they sat in the easy chairs facing the windows as they went through two weeks' worth of mail together.
One manila envelope bore a New Orleans postmark, and Cree opened it hurriedly to find that, as she'd hoped, it was from Deelie. The reporter's affectionate note was accompanied by several clippings of front-page articles she'd written about Channian's arrest and confessions. Apparently, scooping the story hadn't been too bad for Deelie's career: Her byline now included her photo and carried the tag, "award-winning investigative journalist." Just the sight of that good face brought a smile to Cree.
One letter informed Cree that a monograph she'd written had been accepted by a prestigious scholarly journal, and another turned out to be an invitation to speak at the University of New Mexico's "Horizons in Psychology" conference. Very gratifying, a nice welcome home.
Several promising inquiries had come in, too. In Wyoming, a group of ranchers had asked VKA to look into persistent hauntings in a ghost town. In Nauvoo, Illinois, a Methodist minister solicited their perspective on what he believed might be ghosts of Mormons killed there during the persecutions in 1845; all over town, children were having dreams of hangings and burning men. In New York City, a police investigator wanted help with an unexplained seepage in the apartment of an unnamed celebrity; the fluid tested as human blood, but when they'd taken down the stained ceiling they'd found no source for it, and as soon as they'd rebuilt the ceiling, the seep returned.
In other words, the world went on as it always had, its seen and unseen dimensions maintaining their uneasy coexistence.
Sunlight came and went as an endless flotilla of little clouds moved across the sky: The Sound and the Olympics were dappled with cloud shadows that slid down the near slopes and skated across the blue-green water. The Emerald City, Cree reflected. It was good to be back.
They'd been going over the finances for half an hour before Cree really noticed Joyce's excess of professionalism. She was dressed in a snappy pants suit and was being businesslike to the point of brusqueness, and though Joyce could be very efficient this wasn't like her.
Cree put down her pencil. "Joyce. What?"
Joyce looked caught out. "Nothing. What do you mean?"
"What'd I do now?"
Joyce let her shoulders slump. She stared longingly out the windows as if wishing she could escape to the open spaces. "You asked me. So don't blame me when I tell you, okay? The same thing I've been saying, Cree."
"We've been over this!" Cree moaned. Joyce had been in Cree's room when Paul had called the hotel, the day before they left. When Cree had refused to speak to him.
"Yeah. Let's see… first you couldn't be with him because of the Mike thing. Then you told him about Mike, and he understood, and it was good for you to get it off your chest. Okay, so then you couldn't be with him because he didn't believe in ghosts and thought you were nuts because you did. But then he had a doozie of a convincing experience at the crypt, and he's a believer now. So what's the latest excuse?"
"He was a… double agent, Joyce! A hypocrite, a… a liar! The whole time, he was spying on my investigation and talking to Charmian! He nearly got Josephine and me killed! Jesus, he – "
"Stop. Cree, you wouldn't listen to him when he tried to explain! You told him to shut up. But after you hung up on him, he called me in my room and explained everything. Look at it from his perspective. He's recruited by old friends of his family to help Lila. He's a highly regarded psychiatrist in New Orleans, he stands by old family loyalties, so he says, 'Sure.'"
"He knew everything right from the start! He could have – "
"He didn't know anything except he's got a patient who thinks she's seen a ghost! He starts therapy, but before he gets very far, this ghost buster comes to town and starts shaking things up." Cree started to speak, but Joyce raised a hand to cut her off, eyes savage. "Before long, you find Lila bashing around the house, and he's very concerned – she's at risk, he may need to have the family's cooperation to get her into appropriate treatment. Naturally, he talks to Charmian – "