In any case, rule one with Mason was you couldn't let him get under your skin. The only way to get by was to stay yourself. Show him you were above his provocations, which, she had to believe, were nothing more than oblique affirmations of affection and intimacy.
She touched his hand. "That you're easily disarmed by candor and affection. It suggests you have a human streak in you somewhere. That you're not the monster you think you are."
Lupe snorted at that, and Mason joined her with a chortle, chin hard against his chest. When he recovered, his big face hardened quickly.
"Lupe, I will need a moment to speak with Cree in confidence."
Lupe's mahogany eyes locked accusingly on Cree's before she took her hands from the wheelchair grips and removed herself to the railing.
"If you wouldn't mind, Cree-" Mason gestured toward the far corner of the platform, an acute angle jutting well out over the cliff face.
Cree rolled him away from Lupe, feeling the woman's incomprehensible resentment. At the corner, she stopped the chair and came around to face Mason, leaving him oriented toward the vast space. Far below, another tramcar was inching up past the giant blue gantry.
"Do you know I can still stand?" he asked conversationally. He didn't look at her, just stared out at the bigness.
"No. I-"
"I could grab the railing and pull myself up right now. Not for long, of course." His voice was flat, almost disinterested, and Cree wondered why he was telling her this. "I could even throw myself over. In fact, I come here whenever I'm in Albuquerque just to savor that knowledge."
She gave him an exasperated smile. "Mason, how about skipping the high drama? Just tell me why we're here."
"Do you know why I might want to do that?"
"I can think of a lot of reasons why someone might-"
" No-why would I, Mason Ambrose, choose to fling myself over and stain the rocks down there with my brain matter?" Now his eyes were on her, and they seemed very deep, like holes to some subterranean pit. Whatever he wanted from her, his intensity was disturbing. Forty feet away, Lupe stood at the rail, watching them from the side of her eyes. Beyond her, the tramcar slid silently up the cable.
"You're trying to upset me. But it won't happen. Sorry."
He shook his head. "Come along, Lucretia! You're the most talented empath I've ever encountered. You know emotions and longings. You see them. What do you see in your old mentor?"
She appraised him. There were so many possibilities: that living as a toad in a wheelchair had become intolerable, or that by throwing himself over the edge he'd have some control over himself, otherwise denied him in so many ways. That his noble and good parts wanted to be free of the awful things in him. That his disease was progressing and promised a life of unbearable pain.
Possible, she decided, but too obvious, not what he wanted from her now.
"I don't know," she said finally. "Maybe that you want to know what happens after-what's on the other side. That your curiosity is that strong."
Mason looked flattered and proud of her in a proprietary way, the folds around his mouth puckering. "Oh, you unabashed romantic. You poor naive idealist." He turned his head to frown across the deck at his assistant, and his voice turned into a snarclass="underline" "What makes you think I wouldn't do it just to get away from Lupe? Or to punish her? Look at her! My grandfather's old cowhide razor strop had more give than that woman!"
Cree knew she couldn't hope to fathom the awful twists and coils of their relationship. She'd always suspected they were lovers, and Mason's treatment of Lupe was among the things that offended her the most about him. And he knew it.
She let her voice get hard: "Okay, now we've done the courtesies, let's cut to the chase. What do you want?"
"There's a situation that will interest you, here in New Mexico. One that I believe requires your talents."
"Mason, I'm due to fly back to Seattle tomorrow. I can't just-"
"Of course you can."
"Sure. And you can cancel your flight to Switzerland and attend to it yourself."
"It's not a matter of travel itinerary, it's a matter of expertise. I was consulted as a neuropsychiatrist. In that capacity, I have determined that there is no neurological or immediately evident psychological cause for the patient's extreme behavioral aberrations. This is a matter for a different set of talents."
" Mason-"
"And it involves a child, Lucretia. Obviously, I am not the best confidant for a child already suffering from a surfeit of terror." His hand made a disgusted gesture at his sagging face and squat body.
"Look, I appreciate your thinking of me. But I… I got very stressed out this spring. I've had some difficult cases recently, and I made a pact with myself to take some personal time."
"You?" He puffed air out of his lips skeptically. "What could Cree Black do for 'personal time'?"
She stared at him. "Maybe I was wrong about you not being a monster."
But he wasn't baiting her this time, she saw. His voice was sepulchral and his stare without pretense. "How would you ever grant yourself a respite? There is no respite. Not for people like you and me."
She almost argued that, no thanks, she was not like him. But his gaze permitted no escape or deflection. And she knew what he meant.
He looked away to look up at the tram station, where a new flock of visitors was disembarking and fanning out at the railings. "I had another reason for bringing you up here this evening, beyond showing you a majestic view. I wanted to tell you that I've already arranged a meeting between you and the client." Cree started to protest, but he overrode her: "Her name is Julieta McCarty, and she's the founder, president of the board, and principal of a little boarding school for Navajo kids. You'll like her-a woman on a mission, just like you. No, don't bristle at me! All you have to do is talk with her, Lucretia. Afterward, you can tell her why your taking some personal time is more important than her whole life and the futures of sixty-odd bright and talented teenagers and the survival of one very special boy in particular."
Cree crossed her arms against the chill wind and looked away from him. "You're laying it on pretty thick here, Mason. The Dickensian sentimentality."
He dropped his voice to an urgent whisper: "You were right that I'd die to know. Just as you would. This situation at the school-it could be the breakthrough we both want, the one that brings us as close to the other side as we can get without dying ourselves. I'd love nothing more than to take it on. But I am simply not the right one for the job! It requires your talents. Beyond the empathic elements needed, this will take someone physically robust and mobile. Don't pass this up, Lucretia! Don't."
His intensity gave her pause. If Mason Ambrose said it might be a breakthrough case, he had good reason. She felt the familiar kindling of her senses, the awakening of that ravening curiosity.
But there was no way to communicate how important it was to take the time she needed. Time for life. How last spring in New Orleans she'd realized the full extent to which she'd slipped into obsession, into an emotional world so narrow that she'd become little more than a ghost herself. Preoccupied with death and haunts, with the past. Always looking through but never at the sunlit world of daily, physical life, always straining to see into the twilight that lay beyond. How she was, as Mason said, married to a dead man, unable to live as a flesh-and-blood woman. That she'd been turning into a kind of ghost herself.
It had nearly killed her, but out of the Beauforte House investigation and her unexpected attraction to Paul Fitzpatrick had come a hard-won determination to live. For the first time in the nine years since Mike's death, she had admitted to herself the need to get over him. To shed the confusion and guilt she felt whenever she felt drawn to another, living, man. Taking this case now would mean that once again she was putting life on hold in favor of the afterlife.