"Sit down!" Joyce ordered. "Tell me exactly what happened. I need to check you out."
That's right, Cree thought appreciatively, Joyce had been an EMT in one of her previous careers. Amazing Joyce.
Loving her enormously, Cree said, "I'm so very glad to see you." It struck her as sounding formal and funny.
She told the story of being pursued by the boar-headed ghost as Joyce felt her limbs and tested her joints, inspected her abrasions, palpated her abdomen, found Cree's flashlight and checked the pupils of her eyes. At last Joyce made her get up, walk a bit, and balance on one foot.
"The finger's badly sprained, but otherwise I think you're all right," Joyce said incredulously. She looked up at the long flight of stairs, shaking her head. "You could have been killed! You're in shock, Cree. We've got to get you to a hospital."
"Nah. I'm great."
"Bullshit!" Joyce probably would have gone on more of a tirade, but another realization struck her: "Cree… you've never run away from a ghost before!" She sounded frightened.
"Not so good, huh? Not a good trend, no."
"Listen to yourself] Your being flippant just proves you're in shock."
Cree kept pacing, trying to flex out kinks, trying to get her thoughts together. At the rear of the entry hall, she caught sight of herself in the big, gilt-framed mirror there. Her hair was snarled, her jaw marred with a red swelling, her lips and teeth rimmed with blood. Both armpits of her jacket had sprung, and one pocket had become an upside-down flap of fabric. Her blouse was untucked and had lost buttons at top and bottom, and her knees had burst through the denim of her jeans. She'd been feeling almost giddy, opiated by shock and her unexpected rescue from the boar-headed man, but the image in the mirror threw cold water on that fast.
She looked like Lila.
Things were getting out of hand, she realized. There was work to be done, and there was a lot to tell Joyce. She whirled to face her just as a jarring buzz echoed from the dark hallway near the kitchen. Cree startled and retreated several steps before she realized it was the doorbell.
Joyce didn't seem as surprised. She opened the door to let Paul Fitzpatrick in.
The three of them sat on a bench in the emergency ward admitting room, waiting for someone to treat Cree's finger. In the nightly triage of New Orleans, Paul warned them, it might be a longish wait: the Big Easy had the highest violent crime rate in the country, and sprained fingers and contusions didn't rate against bullet and knife wounds. The finger throbbed and swelled to an obscene size despite the ice pack an orderly had given her.
Cree hated emergency wards. They were jagged, scary psychic spaces where a lot of pain and anxiety had been concentrated and where many deaths had taken place. The unending energy and determination of generations of medical staff were also here, a strong, bright river that cleansed and renewed, but nothing could wash away all the sorrows.
Cree concentrated on the welcome distraction of physical pain.
And on the growing excitement she felt. She knew it was partly the irrational euphoria of shock, but part of it was real, too: the thrill of the chase and the close encounter. Every new insight was costing her a lot, but she had grabbed a thread. It was more than the mask idea and the missing Mardi Gras files; she had learned something crucial from the ghost. This mystery was starting to unravel.
Back at the house, Cree's first thought upon seeing Paul was that she was not looking her best at the moment. But he came to her and warily held her shoulders, searching her face with concern. He looked good, Cree thought, in a frowsy, unshaven, hastily dressed sort of way.
But for all that, he struck her as diffident, too. Holding back. As they'd driven to the hospital in Paul's car, she'd told them the story of her realizations: the boar head as mask, the absence of Mardi Gras materials among Lila's family archives, the years missing from the Epicurus files at the house. Throughout, Paul had said next to nothing. When she'd asked him what he thought, he said only, "Right now, I'm just concerned about your health and your safety. We can worry about all that tomorrow." She got the sense he was stalling, giving himself time to appraise the situation from a psychiatrist's perspective.
Probably, she realized, he saw this as a psychological breakdown of grave consequence. Hysteria. Incipient schizophrenia.
That got her mad. Sitting here in the bright fluorescents of the waiting room, in that inimitable one A.M. emergency ward ambience, she knew she was emotionally labile from shock and exhaustion, and the best course would be to stay calm. But she couldn't let his skepticism be. Not after what she'd been through. The world owed her some credence.
"You're sitting there thinking I've flipped my friggin' gourd," she told him, "and that really pisses me off."
He shot a glance at Joyce, who just blinked expressionlessly. "I admit I'm trying to retain some objectivity here, Cree, but – "
" 'Objectivity'? How often has that been used as a euphemism for an unwillingness to face the obvious? How long did 'objectivity' keep multiple personality disorder, or Tourette's syndrome, from being properly diagnosed and adequately researched?"
"Only as long as it took for credible clinical evidence to accumulate," he said quietly.
His levelheadedness infuriated her further. "You want to see some friggin' 'credible evidence'? Lemme show you something!" And she lifted her shirt to show the four painful red stripes across her stomach, just above the waistband of her jeans. "That thing grabbed me, and I ripped myself out his grip, and he left some evidence right here!"
There were a dozen other people in the lounge, other triaged patients biding their time or tired family members waiting for news, and heads turned. Paul gently took her hands and made her lower her blouse. Cree felt suddenly ashamed of herself.
Joyce looked at the two of them, blinked again, then stood up and brushed her skirt smooth. "Well," she said briskly, "I think I'll go powder my nose." She gathered her purse and walked away.
Her absence changed everything as if someone had flipped a switch.
Cree got control of her breathing. "I'm sorry, Paul. I'm – I'm upset, I'm in shock. I'm all over the place."
"I've been wanting to call you."
The anger flared again, different this time: "Then why the hell didn't you?
"I wasn't retreating. I wasn't hiding. I just had some things of my own to sort out, and I needed to think about what you told me. I thought you deserved that. I wasn't sure what I'd say when I saw you again."
"So did you figure it out?" Still angry.
"Some, anyway. But I don't want to talk now. Not here. I'd rather wait for… happier circumstances. One thing at a time."
Part of her wanted to rage at him again, part of her wanted to give up and cry and put her face against his chest and surrender everything and be comforted. But old reflexes kicked in, holding her back: Mike, and, yes, Edgar, who had sacrificed so many shirts to Cree's tears. Suddenly she missed Ed terribly. If he'd been here, Cree would have let it all go, it would be simple. He'd seen it all, she didn't need to impress him or pretend anything. It was too complex with Paul.
He was right, though: one thing at a time. She nodded, but still he was looking at her warily, as if he were the one needing some reassurance. He did look stubbly and funky.
After a while she reached over and began unbuttoning his shirt. It was tricky with the sore finger. He didn't pull away or try to stop her, though he gave her a questioning eyebrow.
"You've got your shirt buttoned wrong," she explained.
He let her continue, and the moment felt very intimate.
By general consent a drink was called for, and of course Paul knew a bar for the occasion, even at two A.M. It was a battered-looking place in a charmingly decrepit district on Magazine Street. Even at this hour, there were at least a dozen other customers, making a soothing mutter of conversation. They took a table near the windows in front, and Cree and Paul ordered bottles of Jax beer; Joyce couldn't resist ordering a gaudy, oversized, New Orleans tourist drink. Cree's splinted finger stuck out awkwardly as she gripped her bottle.