Daniel Hecht - City of Masks

Janet tugged her toward the steps. "Okay. So I'm full of shit for the cardiologist caper. So take me home and let's eat something. If you promise to be a good girl, I'll tell you some other scandalous tales about your father. Deal?"

Cree wondered what it cost her to treat of him so easily, so cheerfully. Maybe not much — everyone was constituted differently in those matters. She promised to be good.

Lila Warren's eyes widened. "Oh, I don't think so. I can't go back. No, I really don't think I can go into that house again."

"Even in the middle of the day? Even if I'm with you?"

"You have to understand, I'm… i t has upset me badly. Very badly. It's been over three months now, I thought maybe I'd be getting over it, but I'm not. It's only getting… worse." Lila's speech carried only a moderate accent of the Deep South, the stretched and rounded vowels.

They were talking across a low table and a pot of tea in the second-floor sitting room of Lila Beauforte Warren's house, on the northern end of New Orleans. From the windows, Cree could see over the grassy slope of the levee to the scattered trees of a shoreline park, and then to the vast flat blue of Lake Ponchartrain. The border between water and sky was straight as a ruled line and completely empty.

Lila's house was not one of the lavishly ostentatious piles Cree had passed as she drove here in her rental car, but rather a contemporary, somewhat smaller copy of a Greek-revival plantation house. And that described Lila herself, Cree thought: a contemporary, miniaturized version of a Southern businessman's wife. The sense was reinforced by the minute watercolors hung here and there, neatly framed, that Lila admitted were her own. The hand-sized floral still lifes were tiny and unobtrusive, yet their rich hues and slightly ominous darker tints suggested that a great deal of feeling had been compressed to fit within those little frames.

Perhaps Lila's diminution came from her current uneasiness. She was clearly struggling to cope with some recent, troubling experience. But there was also something habitual there, more deeply rooted. She had obviously lived with some kind of uncertainty and diminished sense of herself for a long time. Cree could see it in the rounded hunch of her plump shoulders, her small, uncertain hands, the tentative way she set the tray on the table and then rearranged the teapot and cups as if unsure she had put them in just the right places. Her eyebrows were uneven: One of them tilted up slightly at the center, enough to suggest a hint of alarm or doubtfulness.

And yet she was still rather pretty, Cree thought. She had shoulder-length, graying-blond hair that seemed to rebel against the controlled hairdo she'd chosen, a face with full lips and a generous but nicely upturned nose. Her knee-length blue knit dress, her makeup, the simple pearl necklace and earrings — all were good matches for her natural coloring. From the photos on the mantel, Cree could see that though she'd always tended toward the plump, she was one of those women who carry their weight mainly in bust and hips, retaining an enviably narrow waist.

The tea had had time to steep, and now Lila Warren poured a wavering stream into two fine china cups.

"Mrs. Warren — "

"Please call me Lila. I hate formalities. If we're going to get to know each other as well as you say we'll have to, we might as well start with that. Lemon? Sugar? I can get some milk if you'd prefer — how thoughtless of me not to have — "

"Lemon is fine, thank you. Lila, this is a lovely house. If your experience has been so upsetting, why do you still want to move back into Beauforte House?"

Lila sat with her cup hovering, saucer held beneath it. "That's a very good question. And it's one my brother has asked. He would be quite happy to sell the house. Before this all happened, I just thought it would be good to keep it as the family center, our historic home. My children all have the Beauforte middle name, there's a lot of family pride there.

My youngest son just went off to college last fall, my last baby out of the nest, and I began to think, you know? About what a family is. About what it means to have a place where you all know it's home? Where everyone comes back to? I would very much like to provide my children and grandchildren with… that. It's not easy to explain if you don't share the sentiment."

"Makes perfect sense even to me, and I'm a gypsy, myself- we'd lived in five or six different places by the time I got out of high school. What does your husband think about going to live in the house?"

"Oh, Jackie. Well, he would like nothing more. Different reasons, I'm sorry to say. Jack is in real estate himself, you know, and he's very… how shall I say this? He's status conscious. Jack comes from an upriver suburb, and though he's done very well for himself, even married a Beauforte, I don't think he's ever felt he's really arrived in New Orleans. Living in one of the finest, most historic houses in the Garden District would do wonders for his… position." The uneven brows dipped disapprovingly: Lila clearly found this motivation rather crass.

Cree nodded, sipped her tea. "Still, this seems to have upset you a great deal — "

"So why fight it, is that what you're saying?" Lila's hands shook so her cup and saucer chattered, and she put them down. But she straightened in her chair and drew her shoulders up. "Because you can't just take things! You can't just… run away with your tail between your legs! I think I've done enough of that already in my life. Sometimes you have to just tough it out. I guess I got my back up." It all came out in a rush, and afterward Lila looked rather surprised at herself.

Cree admired the blaze in her eyes. It was good there was this much fight left in the outwardly docile, fragile Mrs. Warren: She'd need every bit of it if there was an entity at Beauforte House.

"So in that spirit — no pun intended — " Cree prompted. The moment was probably as good as it was going to get for what came next. She turned on her cassette recorder and placed it on the table between them.

"Just hang on to that feeling, okay? And tell me what happened."

Lila began haltingly at first, finding her way into it with difficulty.

She had avoided the house after the murder, letting Ron take charge of cleaning up and remodeling the kitchen where the shooting had occurred. She couldn't bear to think about it. She had gone along with the idea of renting the house out again, but when that didn't work it became clear they had to do something with the place — as Jack pointed out, an empty house goes to ruin.

In September, she and Jack drove over to take a look, feel it out. A beautiful day, the house cool inside despite the hot weather, so spacious and fine. The kitchen — well, yes, that was difficult. Just thinking about what had happened. But they were churchgoers, didn't believe in ghosts.

And Ron had done a good j ob with the remodeling, making the kitchen extra bright and cheerful.

They began the move in November and were settled in time for Thanksgiving. All three kids came home, Momma was there, some friends of the family, Ron and his girlfriend du jour. A wonderful homecoming to Beauforte House, a renewed sense of family.

"And I didn't even last a month!" Lila said. "I was uneasy from the start, and it just got worse and worse, and then there was that, that last episode. After which I couldn't set foot in the house again. Didn't even make it to Christmas. Fortunately, we hadn't sold this house yet, so we could move back in here."

"But the effects of the experience are still with you."

Lila's small, plump hands were clasped close against her stomach, fingers massaging the opposite wrists as if they ached. "I've — did Ron tell you? — I've been seeing a psychiatrist."