Better, Cree thought. Flux. All the appetites of the living. It did help.
Drifting, she window-shopped. She lingered for a few moments in front of a store that specialized in hot sauces. Its window featured hundreds of bottles with luridly illustrated labels and hyperbolic names: Ass in Hell, Thermonuclear Holocaust, Liquid Lucifer, Mother-in-Law's Revenge, Pain amp; Suffering, Bayou Butt Burner.
She drifted to the next window and was admiring its contents when abruptly she felt as though she'd stepped through a hole and fallen and hit hard.
The store was crammed with Mardi Gras supplies: overflowing racks of beads of every description in sizzling colors, racks of gaudy gowns and capes and boas. Armies of manikins strutting in full-body costumes. Wigs and hats of every kind on Styrofoam heads.
And masks. Hundreds of them: faces grimacing, leering, snarling, laughing, conniving, drunken, murderous, seductive, imperious, pathetic, dead. Dainty eye masks, feathered face masks, and whole-head, pullover rubber masks of Nixons, werewolves, aliens, clowns, corpses, witches, Satans, queens and kings, kindly grannies, chubby babies, drag queens, vampires.
Bird heads, frog heads, dog heads, alligator heads.
No boar heads, true. And the idea didn't solve the mystery of the wolf, the snake, the table and other changelings. But here at last was a possible explanation for at least one of the anomalous aspects of Lila's experience. Of course that's how he would clothe himself in his thoughts. Of course that's how she would see him – half memory, half spectral being. She was appalled that the possibility hadn't occurred to her sooner, in this of all places. City of masks.
With the realization came another, meshing with the first like pieces of a puzzle fitting seamlessly. She'd spent hours pouring over the Beauforte family archives, and they had revealed almost nothing of value. But now she realized that what the material had to tell her lay not in what it contained but in what it omitted.
There were no photos or clippings relating to the family's Mardi Gras activities.
The Beaufortes had been involved in all kinds of civic activities, and from everything she'd read or heard from Paul, Mardi Gras was the ultimate civic function in New Orleans. It had been a family tradition for both Lamberts and Beaufortes: Lila had spoken of her father's involve ment in one of the krewes, what was it? Epicurus. The Krewe of Epicurus. Uncle Brad had been a member. Ro-Ro was a member. Even Paul Fitzpatrick was a member, as his father had been. Yet Cree had looked at all the family records, and they showed no indication that the Beaufortes participated in Mardi Gras in any way.
No, she hadn't looked at all of them. She'd looked at the ones Lila had. But Lila had said her mother had kept some at the old house, that they'd stayed over there when Charmian had moved on to Lakeside Manor and they'd rented to the Chases. No doubt in the locked storage room she'd sat in briefly, pondering her own cracked image in the mirror: those two oak file cabinets against the far wall of the room.
She checked her watch as she hurried through the teeming crowds back toward the hotel to get the car. It had been more than three hours since Joyce had gone to the house to meet Ronald. She wondered if they were still there. She hoped not. Ro-Ro would not approve of what she was going to do. If Charmian heard about it, she'd have apoplexy.
She was relieved to find the house dark when she pulled up in front: Joyce and Ro-Ro must have finished the architectural comparison.
Inside, she locked the door behind her, reset the security system, and headed immediately through the black central hall to the back of the house. The hush wrapped around her, filling her ears with a ringing silence that seemed composed of a chorus of faint whispers and mutters.
Hoping the boar-headed man was indeed confined to the upstairs, she turned from the kitchen to the back hall, found the storage room door largely by feel, and used her penlight to sort among the keys on the ring Lila had given her. When she went inside, she flipped the light switch: This was a night for nonnal-world processes.
The central chandelier gave the room a depressing yellow cast but shed enough light to see the humped dust cloths, the mirror with its face to the wall, the big file cabinets against the far wall. The leaves reaching between the window bars seemed to press against the glass like desperate hands.
Cree crossed the room and yanked on one of the drawer pulls. Locked, of course. She tried a drawer in the second cabinet with the same result. She fished in her jacket pocket and tried several keys from the key ring. None worked.
Who would have the keys? Definitely not Lila; that had been the whole point of separating these files and keeping them here. Ron, maybe; Charmian, definitely. But Cree couldn't ask her for them, couldn't reveal where her thoughts were leading her. Not until she knew more. Charmian would figure out some new level of obstruction, some new complication.
Her father's voice spoke to her from memory, another one of his humorous philosophical axioms: Hey, it's nothin' that brute force and ignorance won't fix. A comment on the human penchant for crude, stupid solutions, as well as an admission that you could outsubtle yourself and were sometimes better off keeping things straightforward.
Cree took a turn through the room, looking for a tool, something like a crowbar. The best she could do was the rack of fireplace tools beside the old coal grate. The poker was by far the strongest, but its head was too thick to insert between drawer and case, so she started with the ash shovel, wedging the blade into the gap and prying until it opened enough to receive the point of the poker. It was a murderous implement, with a thumb-thick steel shaft and heavy, elephant-goad head – for all she knew, the very weapon that had been used to beat Lionel to death. The long shaft gave her excellent leverage, and though her first two heaves just broke away the edge of the drawer, the third made something snap loudly inside the cabinet. All three drawers had been freed.
She slid open the first drawer, aware that she had truly started down a one-way street. The drawer she'd levered was gashed and broken, bristling with splinters of oak. Sooner or later, Ronald or Charmian would come in here and see that the cabinet had been broken into. There was no going back now, no way to hide the fact that she knew enough to go this far. She had better find what she needed here.
She used both hands to sort through the files crammed into the top drawer. The first few were not what she had expected: folder after folder about Charmian's tennis activities, photos and clippings from a fairly successful amateur career. Bradford, too. One newspaper clipping featured photos of both of them in their whites, winning some minor event: "Teen Tennis Twins Terrorize Tournament Foes," the headline ran. There were more Lambert family materials toward the back of the drawer, featuring Charmian's mother and father and particularly her brother Bradford. Brad had indeed been a handsome devil, Cree admitted. He grinned from the backs of thoroughbred horses, frowned studiously as he worked on a tennis stroke. Here was Brad at some high school ball or prom, teeth as white as his starched collar, with some dark-haired teen lovely wearing the wretched Mamie Eisenhower hairstyle of the 1950s. Brad with fishing gear, sometimes with Richard, showing off the fish they'd caught. Brad with Lila and Ronald at some Christmas gone by.
She came to the end of the drawer without finding any Mardi Gras materials.
But the second drawer was different, and it drew a drumbeat from Cree's pulse. "Epicurus 1954," one file tab read. These were miscellaneous materials indeed: photos of parties, of floats being prepared, of parades. Notes of minutes of krewe meetings, financial statements. Invitation lists for Carnival balls. Glossy eight-by-tens and photos clipped from newspapers, showing costumed partyers, some with masks and some without. A newspaper photo of Brad atop a streetlight post in the Quarter, shirtless, strings of beads around his neck, arms raised exultantly to the sky. Another showed Charmian as Marie Antoinette raising a glass high to toast her masked Louis, presumably Richard.