"Stay for dinner?" Deirdre's light tone sounded a little forced. "Don will be home soon – "
"I don't know…"
"Cree – "
"Really, Dee, it only hurts when I laugh. Just a little stitch, right here."
Cree grimaced and put her hand on her heart. Pushing it all one level deeper in an effort to let Deirdre off the hook. "Okay?"
"Okay," Deirdre said, smiling again. "But it would still be nice if you stayed for dinner."
When the salad was washed, the rice on to boil, and the fish ready for the oven, Deirdre poured them each a glass of chardonnay. They sat on the tall kitchen stools, relaxing. Deirdre looked as though she deserved a moment to let her shoulders down.
"So when's Mom supposed to go in for the angioplasty?" Cree asked.
"Three weeks."
"Good – I'll be back by then." At Deirdre's questioning look, Cree explained. "I'm going to New Orleans, flying out later this week. Just got a fat retainer for a preliminary investigation, probably only take four or five days. I'm looking forward to it – I've always wanted to go there."
"You know Don and I went once," Deirdre said. "Back before the girls were born. Our wild youth – we thought it would be fun to go for Mardi Gras."
"Right, I remember. How was it?"
"Hmm. Strange, actually." Deirdre's pretty forehead drew into a small frown.
"How so?"
"It was really… well, wild. We went down there to party, but this was more than we'd bargained for. It's like the whole city goes crazy. Everybody's in costume. Everybody's wearing a mask. It's got a lot of morbid overtones, and it's very… pagan. And it's amazingly uninhibited – I mean, literally, people screwing in the streets and on the balconies. Seriously, in full view!"
"That's the whole point of masks – license. If your identity's hidden, nobody can hold you accountable for your behavior – you can act the way you'd really like to." Cree swigged her wine and chuckled. "I didn't know you had such a prudish streak, Dee!"
"No, really, Cree. We found it a little, I don't know… sinister. The city has this doubleness. Don started calling it 'the city of masks.' I don't mean just the parades. The whole town puts on a show, a welcoming facade, but it has another face: poverty, resentment, crime, corruption. Race issues. Nothing is quite what it seems. Even the woman who ran our b-and-b – charming, matronly Southern hostess, we got to know her pretty well, even went out for drinks with her? We were there for three days before I came into the bathroom and saw her with her wig off, shaving her chest. She was a man!"
"So?"
Dee snorted. "So nothing. Except that he took the opportunity to make a pass at me! And I'm standing there, still trying to put it together, and I just blurt the first thing that comes to my mind? I tell him, 'No, thanks so much, but I'm not a lesbian!'"
They both laughed, and then the phone rang.
Deirdre answered it, listened. "Sure, just a moment." She went to the hallway and called, "Hy – telephone!" She covered the mouthpiece with one hand and whispered to Cree, "Boyfriend!" She listened until Hyacinth picked up. Sober again, she told Cree, "I don't mean to rain on your parade. It's a fascinating place. You just have to, you know. .. watch yourself, that's all."
4
Tuesday was a scattershot day. Cree felt like a dragonfly, darting and flitting as she prepared for the trip: getting airline tickets and hotel and rental car reservations, checking wardrobe, juggling appointments, and making phone calls to carve out the time away.
Aside from the routine travel preparations, there were those specific to her trade. She reviewed the psi literature to learn more about past cases in New Orleans. She asked Joyce to buy a few books on Louisiana history and culture. She selected some equipment from the metal shelves of Edgar's room, checked it, and packed it carefully in a big foam-padded aluminum case.
Even that was fairly routine.
Another dimension of preparation underlay all the bustle. For the empath there was always a quiet taking stock, a taking of one's own measure and readiness, and a grappling with the resulting ambiguities. Then there were the contacts made with loved ones and colleagues, all freighted with an unspoken burden – hellos with contingent good-byes hidden in them because the person who leaves for a ghost hunting expedition, the way Cree did it, might well not return. Not as the same person, anyway.
It was almost eight o'clock before she had time to stop in and see her mother. She was still undecided whether to bring up the handsome cardiologist thing, but it would be good to see Mom, especially at work. She drove to the little civic rec center Janet Black managed, parked, went up the broad steps and into the invigorating stink of sweat and floor varnish, the rubbery smell of basketballs and athletic shoes.
The racket in the entry hall told her that she'd guessed right: One of the teen league games was in full swing. The building echoed with the drub of balls, the squeak of shoes, the whistles of referees, the cheers of a small crowd. A girls' game, she saw as she paused at the gym door. The players milled for a moment and took positions for a foul shot, arms out, legs braced, eyes wildly alert. The shot hit the rim and bounced away, and then everyone was moving again, blue shirts and red shirts skirmishing, refs sidling and jogging. The numerals of the scoreboard clock counted down.
Mom sat at the scoring table. She looked joyful and suitably officious, very much in her element here: a woman in her early sixties, wearing the tan uniform shirt and slacks of the rec department, gray-shot hair tied back and out of the way. She lifted her reading glasses to make a notation, then let them fall against her chest on their red sports band. Her eyes went back to the game for a moment before she spotted Cree at the door. They exchanged smiles.
Cree made her way around the wall of the gym and slid into a folding chair next to her mother. This was Janet's preferred view of her domain: dead center in the big room with its high, trussed ceiling and glistening yellow floor. Fold-out bleachers lined one side, half full with the small but enthusiastic crowd; the teams hunched on low benches along the sidelines.
"Good game?"
Janet nodded. The crowd cheered for a scoring attempt, and she had to lean close to Cree's ear to be heard. "For sheer drama, nothing beats a middle school girls' basketball game. Not the NBA, not the WBA, nothing. This is something of a grudge match. The reds lost last time, and they've been building this up – the big rematch, right? But then their star player got hurt a couple of days ago. Fell off the stage during a play rehearsal at school and broke her foot. That's her over there."
At the red team bench, a tall girl slumped miserably, her foot in a cast, crutches against her shoulders.
"So now the poor reds are out there trying to 'win it for Jen,' Lord help us. And they're getting pounded."
The clock showed two minutes to play, and the reds were getting desperate and frustrated, hustling too hard. Several looked as if they were biting back tears. They were behind 42 to 30.
The battle veered close to the scoring table. The ball bounded over the line but was swatted back by a lunging red, and the crowd screamed. The reds recovered, charged the basket, shot, missed. A blue grabbed the rebound. Cree could feel the collective burning of flushed cheeks, the swelling of knots in throats.
Blue scored twice in a row, red managed to pick up a basket, and then a foul stalled the inevitable. Janet had to attend to her record keeping. When the buzzer sounded, the careening players went slack suddenly like marionettes whose strings had been cut. The blues hugged each other in the middle of the court as the reds slumped toward their bench. The bleachers began to empty as people stood, stretched, massaged sore buttocks; mothers hustled younger sibs to the bathroom. Smokers hurried for the front steps.