Paula Morris (20 page)

A terrible scream pierced through the party noise. The band
stopped playing and the chatter dwindled to a low excited hum, like the sound
of insects in a garden.

"It's her!" Helena screamed. She was almost hysterical,
standing in front of the French doors and pointing out at the gallery with a
trembling, accusing finger. "Mama! Mama, I can see her! The black girl --
she's here! I can see her!"

Helena's mother, thin and dark like her daughter, rushed to her
side, clutching Helena around her bony shoulders.

"Where, darling -- where?" she cried. Someone rattled at
the doors, shaking them open.

"Out there! She's
right out there!"
Helena was
shrieking, her body quaking with sobs. "Someone DO something! Someone grab
her!"

"Are you sure, darling-- are you sure?" Helena's mother
grabbed her, rocking her back and forth. Whatever else they were saying was
lost in the uproar: Men poured onto the back gallery, shouting and running.
Anton jumped up, spinning around in confusion.

"There's nobody out here," he said, turning to Rebecca.
"Is
there?"

Male guests rushed all over the yard, searching in the hedges,
leaping over the wrought-iron fence, tearing back

171

the lumber stack's canvas covering, shining flashlights hastily
supplied by the elderly butler into every corner of the lush garden. If they
were looking for Lisette, Rebecca thought, they wouldn't find her: Not a single
one of them would be able to see her. Rebecca couldn't even see her now. In the
midst of the melee, the ghost disappeared from the porch. Maybe she was inside
the house, or perhaps she'd drifted back to the cemetery after Helena spotted
her. And how had Helena seen her? Wasn't Rebecca the only one who could see
Lisette?

Rebecca stood up and backed against the wall, pulling Anton's
jacket around her shoulders. People rushed past her, running to the gallery
railings: One woman told another that it was a mugging; someone else shouted
that Helena had been shot. Glasses were dropped, crashing onto the gallery's
wooden boards. Rebecca wriggled inside, not sure what she should do next. The
musicians were packing away their instruments, probably worried they'd get
trampled. Someone knocked a whole row of tea lights off the mantel; they
shattered on the floor, unnerving one old man so much that he struck out wildly
with his cane.

Rebecca stood by the fireplace, trying to make sense of the chaos.
Why was Lisette visible to two such very different girls? Did Lisette
know
that
Helena would be able to see her? And why did the sight of Lisette make Helena
freak out in such an extreme way?

"I think we should go." Anton was back, reaching for her
hand; he looked strained and unhappy. "Come on. I have to get you
home."

Rebecca nodded, following him through the parlors to the hallway,
out the front door, and through the chaos in the

172

yard and the street. Back at his car, he pulled Rebecca's bag out
of the trunk, and then stopped, as though he couldn't go any farther or do another
thing. He looked as though he was about to be sick.

"What was going on there?" Rebecca asked him. "Why
was Helena so upset?"

Anton shook his head, glancing up and down the street. In the
moonlight, his face looked more pale and gaunt than usual, sinister in the dark
shadows cast by the oak branches stretching above them. He seemed to be
struggling, as though he was trying to say something but couldn't. What did he
know that he didn't want to tell her? Rebecca knew what
she
was trying
to hide from Anton -- the fact that she could see a ghost. But what was Anton
trying to hide from her?

"What happened tonight ... it's too hard to explain," he
said.

"Please tell me," Rebecca begged. She reached down into
the bag, now resting at her feet, and pulled out the sweatshirt she'd packed.
She handed back Anton's jacket and pulled the soft fabric over her head. Her
teeth were chattering now, a combination of cold and nerves.

"It's just ... it's just a weird thing to do with the Bowman
family," Anton said, leaning back against the tree trunk.

"What weird thing?" she prompted.

"Well, I shouldn't be telling you this." He took his
blazer and draped it around her shoulders, even though she had her sweatshirt
on. "I really shouldn't. It's something that's only known to ... well,
certain families. Some of the old-line families around here."

"You know I won't say a word to anyone else," Rebecca
told

173

him. This was true: Who was she going to tell? She had no friends
here apart from Lisette, and Lisette appeared to be implicated, in some strange
way, with the events of the evening.

"I know you won't. The thing is, it just sounds completely
insane. You'll probably think I'm crazy when I tell you ...'

"Tell me what?" she whispered. The shouts from around
the corner were dying down. Perhaps the search party had given up their quest.

"That there's some sort of curse on the Bowman family."
Anton looked at her, as though he was daring her to laugh. "I know it
sounds crazy, but ... it's just that bad things happen to girls in the family.
And it's been going on for, like, a hundred years. Longer, even. And before
these ... before these bad things happen, the girls all see this ... this
ghost, I guess."

A tide of panic swept through Rebecca. Lisette was a harbinger of
bad things? An evil spirit, there to play tricks on generations of Bowmans?
Something terrible had happened to Lisette, but Rebecca couldn't believe she
was evil herself. How could Lisette hurt anyone?

None of this she could say to Anton, of course: Now was really
not
the time to announce she could see this ghost, too. And maybe she was
jumping to conclusions.

"What does this ghost look like?" Rebecca asked him.
"Do you have any idea?"

Anton nodded, his face disappearing into the tree's velvety
shadow. He picked at the bark with one finger.

"She's a black girl," he murmured. "She's sixteen
years old and her name is Lisette."

174

Rebecca's heart sank with a thud, like an anchor hitting the ocean
floor.

"The story goes ..." Anton was saying. "Well, in
the Bowman family, they believe that whenever one of the girls sees her, it
means she only has a few months left."

"What do you mean, a few months?" Rebecca's chest was
tight; she felt as though she could barely breathe.

Anton looked up, his eyes boring into her. He took a deep breath
before replying.

"A few months to live," he said slowly. "It means
... it means Helena only has a few months to live."

Rebecca stared at him. Helena was going to die? And somehow
Lisette was involved -- her friend, Lisette?

But I can see Lisette, too.
Did that mean
she
only had
a few months to live? No, she said to herself: This was a Bowman family thing,
a New Orleans thing. It had nothing to do with Rebecca.

175

***

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

***

Rebecca!" aurelia was leaning out an upstairs window, waving
frantically at her. She and Anton were standing outside Claire's house, Rebecca
realized. "What's all the noise about?" "Nothing -- go to
bed!"

"You
go to bed," Aurelia retorted. Claire's
round face appeared next to hers in the window. "You're the one who's out
late!"

Rebecca pulled her cell phone out of her bag, dislodging her
socks, which tumbled onto the ground. She glanced at the time: They had about
three minutes before Aunt Claudia would be out pacing the porch and calling the
police.

"I have to go," she told Anton.

He swept back his hair with one trembling hand, frowning down at
the ground. Rebecca hated just leaving him on the street this way.

"Sure" was all he could say, his voice cracking. He
seemed completely traumatized by what just happened at the

176

Bowmans' house. Rebecca took a step away: She had to go now if she
wanted to avoid getting into trouble. She still had to finish getting changed,
something she'd planned to do in the bushes in Claire's garden. But now the
thought of an angry Aunt Claudia didn't seem all that frightening. Not compared
with the story Anton had just told her.

Whenever one of the girls sees her, it means she only has a few
months left to live.

"Walk me home," she said to Anton. There were times when
you just had to get into trouble, Rebecca decided, and tonight was one of them.
"I want you to tell me more."

But as it turned out, Anton didn't have that much more to reveal.
Everything he knew about the curse and the ghost, he'd spilled out on that
sidewalk on Fourth Street.

It was Aunt Claudia who knew.

Rebecca was still fumbling for her key when her aunt jerked open
the front door, so upset she didn't even notice Anton at first.

"What is all this terrible noise in the cemetery?" Aunt
Claudia asked, a paisley shawl slipping off her narrow shoulders. "And
Rebecca, why are you ... Anton? Is that you? What are you ... Good God, child,
where are your pants?"

Although Rebecca was wearing her sweatshirt, she was still in her
short party dress and sandals, her bare legs prickling in the cold.

"I'll explain everything inside." Rebecca turned to
Anton; he was a picture of gloom. "Will you be OK? Without anyone at home,
I mean?"

"Don't worry about me," he told her. "I'm sorry,
Miss Claudia."

177

"I don't know what you're sorry for," her aunt said
sharply, "but I intend to find out. Rebecca?"

She held the door open and Rebecca trudged in, glancing back at
Anton with a rueful smile. She'd rather face the inquisition from Aunt Claudia
than go home to an empty house right now.

The inquisition -- held at the kitchen table, without even the
offer of tea -- didn't last long, because Rebecca confessed all of the
evening's events: the fake trip to the movies, attending the party, Helena's
hysteria, Anton's story. Of course, it wasn't an entirely true confession. To
save Aurelia's skin, Rebecca told Aunt Claudia that her little cousin had taken
no part in the subterfuge. And she didn't mention a thing about seeing the ghost
herself. First she needed to find out what her aunt knew.

"So what is this curse that Anton's talking about?"
Rebecca asked. A pensive Aunt Claudia sat stroking her pack of tarot cards, not
meeting Rebecca's eye. "Do you know anything about it?"

"No," her aunt replied, but the answer came too quickly,
and Rebecca could tell this wasn't the truth.

"I don't believe you," she said. Aunt Claudia kept on
stroking the pack of cards. "Anton said some of the families around here
know about it. He said it had been going on for a hundred years."

"One hundred and fifty-five," her aunt said softly,
looking up at Rebecca at last. No more shouts drifted over from the cemetery,
and they sat in silence, gazing at each other. The house was so quiet that a
sudden wheeze from the aging fridge made them both jump.

178

"What happened?" Rebecca whispered, her throat suddenly
croaky. Aunt Claudia gave a long sigh, picking her bracelets off one by one and
laying them on the table.

"A servant girl was murdered in that house," she said.
With one hand, she fanned the bracelets out as though they were cards.
"The Bowman house. They told her mother that the girl died from yellow
fever, but her mother wouldn't believe it. She knew the girl had already had
the fever and recovered. So she came to the house to demand answers, and when
she was turned away ... well, it's said she put a curse on the family."

"Her mother?" This was the first Rebecca had heard about
Lisette's mother doing something after her daughter died; Anton hadn't
mentioned her at all. And all Lisette had said was that her mother had died not
long after that terrible day in August.

"She was from Haiti," Aunt Claudia said. "Well, she
was born in New Orleans, but her parents had come from Haiti when they were
young, after the revolution. It was called Saint-Domingue in those days, and
her family were free people of color. There were things this woman knew --
things she'd learned from her own grandmother, I've heard. She said that
because her own daughter had died at sixteen, no daughter of the Bowman house
would ever see her seventeenth birthday."

"And that was the curse," Rebecca said, thinking of
Helena. Her seventeenth birthday was coming up in February -- the day after the
Septimus parade. Amy and Jessica had told her that, in one of their exhaustive,
minutely

179

detailed accounts of the highlights of carnival season. No wonder
Helena was terrified.

"A curse, a prophecy." Aunt Claudia got up, scraping her
chair back. "Whatever it was, it's come true. In one hundred and fifty five
years, not a single Bowman daughter has survived. The sons grow up and marry
and have children, but no daughter ever survives her teens."