"He had no business talking to Charmian, to anyone outside the confidential relationship with his patient!"
"His patient was in crisis! He thought there was a good chance he'd need the family's help! Anyway, Cree, hey, talk about the pot calling the kettle black? You do it all the time! You're Cree Black, the mystic maverick shrink who has some special dispensation to take every kind of license with the therapeutic process, remember?" Joyce waited until Cree gave one small nod of contrition. "Charmian's realizing she underestimated you, you're onto something. She tells Paul his father once helped the family in a time of crisis and asks if he'd do the same. 'Of course,' he says. 'What sort of crisis?' 'Nothing that bears upon Lila's situation,' she assures him, 'but something that if it turns up in Cree Black's prying, it'll damage the family name. And that wouldn't be good for Lila, would it? Given how shaky she is?' 'No,' he agrees. All she asks is that he keep her generally informed of where your investigation is heading. He thinks that's not unreasonable."
"Bastard."
"He believed Charmian to be an upstanding community member, as her husband had been. Anyway, however screwed up her efforts may have been, she was trying to protect her daughter."
"He deliberately steered me toward Richard. He brought me over, had me look just at the Epicurus photos from 1969!"
"He thought that was the truth, Cree. Charmian had told him what you'd find if you looked in the 1969 files. He thought he was showing you the real story at last. Charmian set him up! Paul didn't know it, but it was her last line of defense – you were finding out everything. Suppose the ghosts revealed to Lila or you that Lila killed Richard? The only way to mitigate her guilt was if he had raped her, if he did deserve it. But Paul didn't know about Brad, or Richard's murder. He brought you to the archives because he really wanted your help to deal with what he believed was Lila's rape by her beloved father."
Joyce went on, methodically, logically, remorselessly. Cree was feeling her carefully nurtured, righteous anger unraveling, and it scared her. It had been sustaining her for a week.
"Joyce. The fact remains, he cut a deal with Charmian. They concocted these half-truths, they deceived Lila!"
Joyce gave her the dead eye. "Unlike you, of course. Who didn't cut a deal with Charmian. Who didn't agree to any half-truths to protect Lila."
Cree's resistance suddenly ran out of gas. She turned her own eyes to the window. Somehow she hadn't seen it quite that way. It really was simple, wasn't it? Joyce was right. Joyce was always right.
The problem with accepting any of it was that it left her with only one grievance with Pauclass="underline" his terrifying, penetrating insight. The hard truths he'd told her about Mike. And she couldn't think of a good excuse to flee that.
Joyce knew she'd scored a direct hit and was smart enough to know when to leave it. She gathered her papers and went to the door.
"So what do you recommend I do about it?" Cree called softly."Given that it's a little too late."
"No way, Cree. No more advice to the lovelorn, it's not in my job description. You're the one with ESP or whatever it is, you figure it out."
Ed got into the office around noon. Cree heard him bumping through the outer office door with his equipment cases, heard him greet Joyce, heard the big kiss he gave her even through the partially closed door. Cree decided she needed one of those, too.
They hugged in the outer office, a solid, thorough hug, as Joyce busied herself with paperwork. The familiar length of his body felt good against her, but the kiss felt rather measured, deliberately administered. She realized she had been worried about him. They made small talk as she helped carry some of the cases back into his office, then helped him put things back on the shelves.
Ed had thrown himself slouching into his desk chair. He was looking around his big room, looking vaguely dissatisfied and drumrning his fingers on the desk. "You want to take a walk? I haven't eaten lunch. We could take a stroll and then find a bite."
"You don't want to debrief?"
He hesitated. "Sure. Yeah. But let's do it as we walk."
They turned south on First Avenue, ambling toward Pioneer Square. The weather was cool and changeable, and at cross streets where the long views broke through, they could see the clouds roiling in from the west, sending shadows down the piebald slopes of the mountains. After a few blocks they turned downhill toward Alaskan Way, with the assumption they'd talk for a while and then grab lunch at Pike Place Market. They hadn't even discussed it, but of course Ed would know Cree needed the ambience of flux: The energy and flow made a safe haven for an empath. Both were new enough to Seattle to enjoy the bustle and color of the market's stalls, the endless variety of fresh fish and fruit and vegetables and breads, displayed so beautifully and temptingly.
Cree told him about her last days in New Orleans. They agreed that Richard's ghost had had a very typical double aspect – his memory of the beating, and of Lila in the swing, had been clearly linked with his experience of the moments of dying. But Bradford's doubleness was a different matter. The boar-headed phantom had been a remote generation. Its lack of an apparent link to its origin as a memory of a dying man, coupled with its high degree of independence, troubled them both.
Cree talked about the red herrings she'd considered: the idea of Richard as a multiple personality, and Joyce's all-too-plausible idea of a specter generated by a living person. Though those hadn't proved true, the boar-headed man still gave them a whole new category of manifestation to fit into their respective schemes of things.
Of course, the remote generation idea was only one of many troubling aspects of Bradford's second ghost. His solidity was one of them: Cree lifted her shirt to show Ed the faintly lingering scratches his hand had made on her stomach. In some ways more disturbing was his adaptability: He could perceive and interact with living beings in the current time.
Both features were as frightening for the fieldworking ghost hunter as they were challenging for the paranormal theorist. Together, these two aspects of the boar-headed man affirmed what many witnesses and parapsychologists had long claimed: that ghosts were capable of inflicting more than psychological injury upon a living person, and that ghosts could pursue something like an intentional, interactive agenda with the living, adapting to circumstances. It gave strength to the premise of folk legends all over the world, that ghosts sometimes pursued vendettas on those who had wronged them.
As they continued along Alaskan Way, Ed began to look increasingly troubled. Part of his dismay, Cree knew, was his concern for her, knowing that ghosts could hurt or kill a ghost hunter. The other part was theoretical. His lovingly constructed geomagnetic theory, now buttressed by the tidal-cycle evidence he'd brought back from Gloucester, might explain very limited perseverations, but it would never explain the phenomenon of the boar-headed man.
Nor, she knew, of Mike, that day in Philly.
"So," Ed asked, "how did she come out of it? Lila."
"She wouldn't tell me much about how it went with her father's ghost. She was exhausted. But she definitely emerged much stronger. She'd always had a core of strength, really, it was just a matter of putting her parts together, you know? She's a very different woman now. There's a calm in her now. A resolve. Hard to describe."
"Weren't you worried she'd learn the truth when she met him – that she'd killed him?"