Fear seared her. She broke and ran down the hallway toward the back stairs. Her body fled instinctively, by simple animal reflex, but her thoughts persisted, trying to find reasons, explanations, precedent, anything that would give her the slightest control. But she'd never experienced anything like this: the intentionality, the malevolent interactivity. His physical solidity. His one-dimensionality: no conscience, no dying man's regrets to appeal to. She heard heavy footsteps charging behind her as she plunged into the smaller back stairwell and flung herself down into the pitch dark. But before she reached the landing, he was there, in front of her, boiling up out of the stairwell. His shape congealed out of darkness: two legs, two arms, a man's torso with a boar's humped, muscular shoulders, an impossibly thick neck, bristled jowls, and pointed ears.
"Lila?" he sneered.
Cree stumbled and grabbed the bannister, almost pitching onto him as she stopped her downward tumble. He lunged at her, and she could smell the rank stink of him, male sweat and something chemical.
She hurtled up the stairs again, tripped, heard him right behind her, felt his hands flail at her heels as she got her footing and leapt upward. She broke out into the upstairs hall, dimly realized that the lights had gone out here, too, and began to run down the dark hallway, to the front stairs and down. But just ahead of her, at the doorway to the master bedroom, she saw his shoulder and snout emerge, his arms reach to grapple her. She twisted as she burst past him, felt his clawing fingers scrape her stomach and rip her jacket.
Into the central room. He was so close behind her she couldn't slow down to turn into the stairway. But through the doorways ahead, the windows of the front rooms were rectangles of streetlight glow and foliage shadow, and they struck her as beautiful, salvation, proof there was an outer world, a normal world, and she wanted to fling herself at them and through them, anything to get away from the tangled evil of the boar-headed man. But a shape broke from the shadows of the room on the left, the mirror-tunnel room, and darted at her, and without thinking she shied the other way, a reflexive action so strong it was as if some force field had repelled her. The thick-necked silhouette lunged and her legs kicked her backward. Her thigh hit the railing at the top of the stairs, and she pitched out into the open black chasm of the stairwell.
Something broke loudly, and her arms flailed in midair, hands grasping at nothing. In the instant of fear and vertigo she felt a tiny explosion of gladness, that she'd fall and die and not have to endure what the shadowed thing rushing to the railing intended for her.
31
Joyce called Cree's room again and got the voice mail for the third time. Where was she? Maybe she'd gotten her priorities straight for once and had gone to see the psychiatrist.
Joyce was feeling edgy after the day's events, almost enough to call the guy, Fitzpatrick, just to check up on Cree. But then she realized, no way, if that was where Cree had taken off to, no interruptions would be desirable. Ten o'clock was not late.
It would have been nice to go out for some drinks and some music, but no, here she was sitting on the hotel bed with the television exploding in bursts of canned laughter for jokes she was too distracted to appreciate. Surely Cree would return at any moment. She was eager to tell her the results of her architectural comparison, but she also couldn't wait to unburden herself about what had happened with Ronald Beauforte.
She had driven over to Beauforte House to find him pacing in the foyer, dressed in charcoal slacks and matching turtleneck. Definitely a good-looking guy, who definitely gave her a bit of the appreciative once-over and probably caught her doing the same.
She apologized for Cree's absence – unnecessarily, because he was obviously glad she wasn't there – and then told him, "We really appreciate your making time for this. Your knowledge about the history of the house will really help us out."
"How else was I gonna keep an eye on what you all're doing?" he grumped. "Let's just see the damn plans." She got the sense that his surliness was mostly an act, just doing what was expected of him.
He led her into a huge room to the right, the front parlor, where she got her first real sense of the house. The place was big as a barn, about half furnished, all of it old stuff that was no doubt valuable but struck her as a little ragtag, especially the carpets – apparently the ambience of faded splendor was the thing in New Orleans. And the closed-in, musty smell and the dim light from the chandelier didn't exactly help matters.
They made space on a table and unrolled the plans, holding the corners down with an antique inkpot and paperweights.
"There's nothing different. I didn't change a thing," Ron told her, tracing the kitchen floor plan with a well-manicured finger. "Had the walls painted and new tile put on the floor, but I wasn't gonna change the layout of the whole damn kitchen."
Joyce explained that they were not particularly interested in the kitchen, and that so far they had no reason to think Lila's ghosts had any connection to the Chase murder. She thought he looked surprised and maybe a little pleased at first, then a little disappointed. Cree would read his responses better, she knew, and wondered again what she was doing tonight.
They started with the library. Ronald switched on the light, and Joyce set up her tools and spread the plans on a table near the door. It was a big room furnished in antiques and lined with bookshelves, its dark woods and prehistoric carpets and book spines soaking up the insufficient light from the ceiling chandelier. Joyce tried to sense whatever it was that Cree felt here, and couldn't. It was just a mildew-scented, deluxe-type old-fashioned library room that looked like it could use a makeover.
Still, she felt obligated to flatter the place. "Such a nice room. Very… um, masculine decor." Somehow, being alone in the big house with a man she didn't know at all, that sounded more flirtatious than she'd intended, one of those door openers you had to be careful with. Especially since there did seem to be a little buzz going.
"Yeah. Mainly it was my daddy's room. Used the desk there as his home office. Also where he and his gentlemen friends would repair after dinner for brandy and cigars. To discuss politics, business, and women in the time-honored fashion." He looked around as if remembering, and then his face made that sourpuss grin again.
"Looks like you've got a few memories here," she prodded. "What was that one?" She had the sonic measure, but under the circumstances her instincts told her it would be good to keep Ron's hands occupied. So she gave him one end of the hundred-foot tape and with a gesture commanded him to take it to the far wall.
The long steel band sang as Ron started across the room with it. "Something I don't usually tell with ladies present."
"Relax. It'd be a bit of a stretch to consider me a lady," Joyce reassured him. And then realized how that sounded.
Ronald turned to face her appreciatively. "My daddy and Uncle Brad and me. They took me in here, shut the door, and told me about the birds and bees. Kind of tag-teamed me. Daddy soberly gave me the biological facts and lectured me about the sacred responsibilities of marriage while Uncle Brad enthusiastically filled in the more explicitly, shall I say, 'romantic' side of it. Needless to say, the latter was vastly more appealing. They also gave me my first drink of whiskey to acknowledge my initiation into the secret knowledge of manhood. I was eleven. They must have done a good job all the way around, because I've had an enduring appreciation for both subjects ever since."