Cree looked over the papers as Joyce tried to compose herself. She was right: For every little item that suggested a dark side, there were ten that showed Richard to be a pillar of the community, a good citizen, a dedicated family man.
At last she handed them back, beginning to feel defeated. "What about Josephine Dupree? Any luck at all?"
"Next to nothing. Her name does show up in the phone records for 1973 and 1974 – I have the service address here. Looks to me she moved there for a couple of years after she left the Beaufortes, but after that, nothing. The only other thing, I found in the Times-Picayune records exactly one, small hit for Josephine Dupree." Joyce rummaged in her briefcase again and extracted a single page.
It was a photocopy of an obituary-page article about the death of one Souline Dupree, who had died in 1975 at the age of eighty-two. "Queen Souline" had been a moderately well-known root doctor and conjure woman in New Orleans for forty years. The article described her as the last of her generation, having learned her hoodoo charms and remedies from practitioners who had once been slaves. As such, she was a repository of knowledge of Afro-Caribbean folkcures, quasi-mystical traditions, and oral histories; her loss meant the end of an era. She had once been a fixture in a tiny shop on the northern edge of the French Quarter, selling herbs and lore and advice. A lifelong smoker, she'd died of lung cancer, survived by only two of her seven children – daughters Jasmine Tricou, sixty, and Josephine Dupree, fifty-four.
The blurry photo showed an old woman with frizzed gray hair and pouched eyes, wearing a small crucifix on a chain around her neck and holding a cigarette in a V of gnarled fingers. She bore an unmistakable resemblance to the photos Cree had seen of Josephine – that long face with its strong jaw, downturned lips, and resolute expression.
"So of course I looked for the sister, Jasmine Tricou, everywhere, too," Joyce said. "Nothing. Nada. I think they're both probably dead."
"No," Cree assured her. "Josephine is alive. And we have to find her."
The hexes, she was thinking. Here at last was a possible connection between the hexes and the Beaufortes. By all accounts, Josephine was a devout churchgoer, but as Deelie had pointed out, voodoo and hoodoo often coexisted with Christian beliefs. And Josephine must have learned something of the old arts, growing up with a mother who was a serious practitioner. Josephine had put the notched sticks at Beauforte House, Cree was sure, and had placed the one at the Warrens', with the goal of inducing "confusion of mind" in the residents there. If she knew about the rape, it made sense she'd want Lila to forget. But why the Chases? With everything she and Joyce learned, and with every new puzzle that presented itself, Josephine seemed to hold the keys.
"Okay. But, Cree – it hurts my professional pride to admit this, but I'm kind of running out of magic here? I can't think of a lot more we can do to locate her. We could collect every phone book in Louisiana and call every Dupree to see if any of them know a Josephine. But for all we know, if she is alive, she moved to Chicago, or – "
"I know someone who might be able to help us," Cree said.
Deelie Brown said she had another appointment, but if they could get across town fast she'd be happy to hear them out. When they got to the Times-Picayune building, they found her waiting in the little park in front of the main entrance, sitting on a bench and pulling yards of magnetic tape from a cassette that was apparently stuck in a small recorder. Her face was folded in that glowering frown she'd first greeted Cree with, but when she saw them the smile came back, sun from behind the clouds. Cree felt a rush of affection for the solid, chunky woman, her mismatched clothes, the congruence between what she claimed to be and what Cree sensed she really was.
"Yo, my ghost hunter sister," she said. She tossed the mess aside and stood with a rattle of hair beads.
The highway ramps all around roared steadily as Cree kissed her cheek, introduced Joyce, and thanked her for making time to meet them.
Deelie's frown had returned. "You know, you don't look so good, Miz Black."
"I've been hearing that a lot lately, yeah." Cree tried to grin.
"Fight with your man? Or just 'fall down the stairs'?"
"Stairs."
"Oh, uh-huh, right." Deelie shared her skeptical look with Joyce. "So, what we got today? You need my help on a ghost hunt, you're talking my language, grist for the proverbial mill. What you need?"
Cree gave her an overview of why they wanted to locate Josephine, and she and Joyce told her the little they knew. The address Joyce had found from 1974, Deelie told them, was in Treme, like St. Bernard Development a low-income housing project. "What you all out east call a black ghetto," Deelie said. At first, Deelie had looked a little disappointed to hear that she was needed to help find a living person, but when Cree explained Josephine's hoodoo connection, the possibility of a link to the Chase murder, she brightened.
"Money in the bank for me, it ties in with Temp." Deelie's eyes showed that her wheels were turning. "Yeah, see, now you're thinkin' straight. Out-of-town white girl and a Chinese not going to make a lot of headway doing a missing persons gig in black N'Orleans. You look like TV lady cops or welfare fraud investigators or something, people going to shut their faces they see you two coming. This Josephine got any connection at all to other voodoo and hoodoo people, I know where to look for her. If not, it'll be slower, but I got ways."
"There's one more problem, though," Cree said. "We… it's important that we find her as soon as possible. There's a certain amount of risk for several of the parties involved, and – "
"You mean like 'falling down the stairs.' " Deelie gave her a shrewd look and clearly saw the desperation in her face. "Don't want another 'accident' anytime soon? Yo, trust me, I'm on it already."
37
Cree sat for an hour in the relative calm of her hotel room. Joyce had ordered her to bed and then had gone off to her own room to call every Dupree and Tricou in the current phone book. For the first hour or two, she also called Cree every now and again, ostensibly to share some thought, but really, they both knew, to make sure she was staying put.
Paul's comments about remediating Mike gnawed at Cree's stomach. Now her memory conjured only their occasional fights, the miffs and tiffs and little hurts. Mike looked at her with reproach in his eyes. She knew it was true, and she couldn't live with her betrayal. Damn Paul, she thought. Another undoing.
She couldn't go on like this much longer. In her thoughts, she repeated a mantra she had cobbled together from bits of Zen and Taoist and yoga philosophy: Out of weakness grows strength, she chanted inwardly. From confusion emerges resolve. In yielding is the root of resistance.
These were the paradoxes, it increasingly seemed, by which she lived.
To be brave enough to face the boar-headed ghost and knowledgeable enough to understand its demented worldview, she had to become vulnerable enough to see it, to know it. To be strong enough to combat Lila's weakness, she had to know Lila's weakness in herself. To possess a strong enough sense of self to survive the encounters, she had to endure absolute uncertainty as to who she was. She had to find her husband so she could let him go forever.
And she had done these things, except the last. Surprisingly, out of all the confusion, all the wounds physical and emotional, she did feel a curious strength and resolve. It was as if the events of the last few days and nights had stripped away everything superfluous, leaving only this single, hard grain of defiance at her very center. It was tiny but durable – a starting place.