Oh my, she thought.
It was a lovely room. In natural light, the colors of the wallpapers and fabrics turned rich and vivid, the old woods took on a warm luster. The gloomy canopy of the ceiling became an airy height, the room's stately proportions were more evident, even the faces in the various Beauforte portraits seemed to take on more pleasant expressions. The window views of blossoming greenery and other houses nicely complemented the interior vistas.
So this is what Lila remembers, Cree thought. What she wants.
She went into the back parlor and did the same, opening the room to daylight that shifted and mottled as a breeze rocked the magnolias outside. From the back of the second parlor, she gazed through the length of the two rooms, a grand sixty feet or more, and had a second realization. She had wondered why Lila, or anyone, would want to live in a house that was virtually a museum. But though you might see this elegance in museums, separated from it by velvet ropes, it was another thing entirely to stand fully within it, have it all to yourself. Seen in old lithographs, stiff portraits, darkening landscapes, or fading grainy photos, the past seemed rigid and colorless. But that was due only to the failings of the media. The reality was rich, fully dimensional, and beautiful.
And very much alive.
She went through the rest of the downstairs and pulled aside every drape and curtain, then threw open every interior door so that light moved between the rooms and the house was full of long vistas. When she was done she dusted her hands together, savoring the look of the place.
Where to begin? It had to be just the right place.
Somewhere inside, a familiar shift had begun with the decision to bring Joyce and Edgar in. You are something of a medium, after all, Paul had observed, and it was true. Once Joyce got here, tomorrow, and Edgar presumably this weekend, Cree's best contribution to this case would be the internal process she undertook. All the other elements hinged upon that highly subjective, delicate progression toward the ghost and its mental world.
But the upstairs of the main house scared her. She couldn't banish the memory of yesterday's events: the sight of Lila careening madly away, the bruising impact of their fight in the hall, the sudden appearance of the malevolent ghost with his knotted, turbulent affect. Just thinking about it sent jolts of electricity down her nerves. Though she was tired from the events of the last few days, she felt hyperalert and ready to run. She had to massage away a tic that began hitching her shoulder up and down, and her hands kneaded her wrists like a pair of small, frightened animals trying to comfort each other.
No, she couldn't manage that halhvay or the master bedroom. Not yet. It would have to be somewhere the boar-headed ghost was not likely to manifest. As she and Lila had regrouped in the car yesterday, Cree had painstakingly questioned Lila about every moment of her ordeal and had verified that she'd encountered him only on the second floor of the main block and east wing; he appeared to be spatially restricted. Some relief there.
Of course, with this ghost, you couldn't be sure of anything.
She went to the library, opened its curtains, and sat for a time, hoping she'd find a reprise of the keening feeling she'd felt before and hoping it would prove to be the strangely absent perimortem side of the upstairs ghost. But aside from the same mood, maybe the faint smell of almonds, she didn't come up with anything. The library wasn't the right place today.
What, then? There was still the lingering question of Lila's anomalous vital signs; she'd be wise to explore every point in the house where those had occurred.
She headed to the back of the house and went up the rear stairs, a shorter flight leading to the former slave quarters that occupied the north wing. After a moment of claustrophobia in the darkness of the narrow stairwell, she emerged onto a landing and then went out onto the long balcony that fronted the three second-floor rooms. In town, it had been a convention of the era to provide slaves with quarters on the second floor, each room accessed only by the narrow, outside gallery, like the balcony that served second-floor motel rooms.
This was the only part of the house where the sun came directly into the windows, and though the rooms were far smaller here, Cree found them very pleasant. Richard Beauforte had done a good job of remodeling back in 1948. The rooms retained much of their rustic simplicity, with homey furnishings and details: rough, white plaster walls and dark, wide-board floors; an antique cast-iron woodstove for heat, a wooden chest of drawers, patchwork quilts on the beds. Hand-tinted lithographs of nineteenth-century plantation scenes and anonymous portraits decorated the walls, and each bureau held a bone-china washbasin and water pitcher. But Richard had wired the rooms for electricity and converted a storage room along the row to a bathroom, making the whole wing a functional, comfortable dormitory for servants or guests.
Cree sat on the bed in the first room, leaving the door wide to the sunshine. When they'd toured the house that first time, Lila had said only that this had been the bedroom of Josephine, the housemaid and nanny the Beaufortes had retained throughout her childhood. Why had her vital signs shown so much subconscious agitation here? She spoke of Josephine with great affection. And it was a wonderful room. Two squares of sunlight on the floor gave it a homey feel; through the open door, beyond the balcony rail, Cree could see the lawn and some bright flower beds, and then the hedge and the wall of the next house. To the left, the partially sunlit rear facade of Beauforte House seemed to glow.
In the pleasant room and buttery sunlight, Cree felt safely removed from the malevolent presence in the main house. She was increasingly sure he was spatially contained. Lulled by the serenity here, she found the fatigue of the past week stealing over her. She let it come.
Back here, surrounded by the yard and trees, there was no visible clue to what century this was. No phone lines, streetlights, or parked cars. She savored the feeling. It occurred to her that this feeling was more the norm of human experience: For most of human history, really, past and present hadn't been so different, the past was more evident. In the era before farms and neighborhoods were so quickly replaced with malls and highways, they often stayed more or less the same for centuries. People awoke in the rooms they'd been born in, walked past their ancestors'graves as they went to work, ate supper off the same plates their grandparents had eaten from. When things did change, they tended to do so gradually and incrementally, their essence enduring despite physical changes. Cree knew she'd absorbed some Eastern thinking in that regard, but it was by no means only an Asian philosophy. Even back in New Hampshire, she had found the same basic idea in a telling bit of Yankee folk humor: "Ayuh," the old timer says, "that there's a fine ax, had that same one all my life. Changed the handle four times, changed the head twicet, always been a good ax."
Funny, but so true: Things changed utterly yet continued perpetually.
Cree's thoughts spiraled and looped, and she let them lead where they might. The gentle whisper and buzz grew, not so much a sound or even a thought but a sensation around her heart and stomach. Buzzle buzz zuzz. The quiet, breathy, subliminal voices of times and people past, fascinating, lulling. No sign of the boar-headed man.
Nearly drowsing and a little sun dazzled, she stared out the open door into the yard. In a minute, she really should get up and go back to the library, get back to work. But this was so nice.
Really, she had always been fascinated with the Deep South, had intuitively felt it in some mysterious way all her life – had known it, known the rhythms of life and the cadence of Southern voices. The humid blossom scent, the heat of the days, fanning yourself as you sat in the shade of the gallery. The way an ankle-length skirt buoyed by layers of petticoats felt, broad and sweeping, the way you moved with it and tucked the folds when you sat.