Paula Morris (22 page)

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exciting, apparently, than dancing with boys who went to St.
Simeon's.

"Does anyone here ever do anything
useful
on the
weekend?" Rebecca asked Jessica, who was sitting behind her, admiring
Amy's new school supplies. "You know, like helping clear out flooded
houses?"

Amy wrinkled her nose like a rabbit, tapping her desk with a
purple, green, and gold pen.

"I think so," said Jessica, giggling nervously. She
wasn't wearing glasses anymore, and her eyes were an unnaturally bright shade
of blue. She lowered her voice, leaning forward across her desk. "I saw
Miss Hagar once, picking up trash in City Park. We thought maybe she'd
committed some crime and was being forced to do community service. But maybe
she was just, like, helping."

"Jessica, are you interested in this notebook or not?"
demanded Amy. Jessica sat back at once, without another word to Rebecca. And
then Miss Hagar herself-- dark-haired, stocky, and wearing her usual stained
houndstooth blazer -- swept into the room, scattering loose papers from the
stack of manila folders in her hands. She was one of the toughest teachers at
Temple Mead, and Rebecca thought it was extremely unlikely she was a criminal
in her spare time.

"Miss Hagar!" Rebecca's hand shot up. "Do you know
about any volunteering opportunities -- to help rebuild houses and stuff like
that?"

Behind her, she heard Amy's low groan.

"Suddenly she's all Miss Community Spirit," Amy said in
a stage whisper, clearly intending Rebecca to hear.

"Volunteering in the community, absolutely!" Miss Hagar

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gave them a brisk smile. She slapped the stack of folders onto her
desk. "I'm glad to hear there's some interest at last. There are a number
of organizations in the city who need our help. There are still neighborhoods
where many houses need gutting or repairs."

"Like, which ones?" Jessica asked; this question was
followed by a pained "ow!" Amy must have kicked her under the desk.

"Well -- there are so many ... Central City, Hollygrove, Gert
Town, Lakeview, parts of Broadmoor, Gentilly, the Upper and Lower Ninth, Holy
Cross, Mid City, Tremé ..."

Rebecca felt a flash of recognition. "We could help in
Tremé?" she interrupted.

"You can help wherever you want to help," Miss Hagar
told her. "Every weekend, organizations like ACORN need volunteers. In
fact, we could make it a class project if there's so much interest...."

"Miss Hagar?" Rebecca turned to see one of the Debs
waving her hand in the air: Her name was Madison Sherwood, and she was a major
Julie Casworth Young wannabe. "My father says that ACORN is a dangerous socialist
organization."

"And we're way too busy on the weekends until after Mardi
Gras," said another Deb -- Rebecca still couldn't remember her name
exactly; it was either Katy Lee or Kathy Lee. The initials KL were inscribed in
gold on her notebooks, schoolbag, and fountain pen, and this reminded Rebecca
of a postcard her father had sent her once from the capital of Malaysia: She
always thought of Katy Lee as Kuala Lumpur.

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Miss Hagar gave a long sigh, drumming her fingertips against the
folders on her desk.

"Maybe we can revisit this topic after Mardi Gras," she
said, her voice straining with impatience. Clearly, Miss Hagar wasn't spending
her weekends at teas and balls and intimate theme luncheons for forty.
"And now, ladies -- algebra!"

On her way to the lunchroom that day, Rebecca stopped in the
second-floor restroom, in no hurry to do the usual find-a-seat lunchtime
shuffle. She could sneak a sandwich into the library, she decided, and spend
the break researching ACORN on the Internet.

But before Rebecca could do anything but fix her regulation
ponytail, Jessica slid through the door and hurried over.

"Have you heard?" she asked in a half whisper.
"About Helena Bowman?"

Rebecca shook her head, combing her long hair with her fingers.

"She's not. Coming. To school. Anymore."

"She's dropped out?" Rebecca found that hard to believe.

"As if!" Jessica's fake-blue eyes widened. The door
banged, other girls coming and going. Jessica wriggled closer, lowering her
voice to an emphatic hiss. "She's way too sick to come to school. They've
stopped all the renovations on her house, because she can't stand any noise.
She has to have complete quiet."

"What ... what's wrong with her?" Rebecca tried to sound
nonchalant, but her head was buzzing with the story

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Anton had told her before Christmas:
Helena only has a few
months to live.

"Nobody knows. Or nobody's saying. But it must be something
really, really bad. Marianne looks like she's about to burst into tears any
second. Look, I have to go."

"Thanks for ... telling me," Rebecca said to Jessica's
disappearing back, because she felt as though she had to say
something.
She
pulled the tie from her ponytail and started playing with her hair again, just
for something to do. What Jessica was saying ... could it be true? Was Anton
right about Lisette being some kind of evil spirit who brought bad things to
girls in the Bowman family? Even if Helena wasn't actually sick, she had to be
too terrified to leave her own house anymore, even to come to school. Rebecca
didn't want Lisette to be evil: She couldn't believe that was true. The Bowman
family were the ones who'd done bad things, not Lisette.

On the way, at last, to the lunchroom, Rebecca passed Marianne,
though the older girl didn't seem to register her presence at all. Jessica was
right: Marianne looked wan and preoccupied, trudging along the hallway alone,
her eyes red as though she'd been crying. Part of Rebecca felt vindictively
glad that Helena and Marianne were no longer sashaying along the halls of
Temple Mead, looking down their noses at everyone else, the self-appointed
rulers of the school.

But however rude and stuck-up Helena had acted toward her, she
didn't deserve so extreme a fate -- either an illness too serious for her to
attend school for an entire semester, or a fear so overpowering that her family
wouldn't let her

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leave the house. Rebecca wouldn't be able to stand being locked
inside all day, and she certainly wouldn't want to wake up each morning fearing
for her life.

The thought of Lisette as a harbinger of death kept nagging at
Rebecca all week. The Debs and Plebs might be too busy on Saturdays getting
updos and manicures to volunteer with a community organization, but they
weren't the only ones with urgent weekend plans. Unless sometime this week she
was lucky enough to bump into Lisette, wandering the streets encircling the
cemetery, Rebecca had plans of her own for the very next Saturday morning. She
needed to track down her friendly neighborhood ghost and ask her some questions.

It was time to hear Lisette's side of the story -- about the
curse, and all those generations of Bowman daughters. Rebecca knew that
whatever Lisette told her, it would be the truth.

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***

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

***

Aunt claudia seemed in no hurry at all to get to work on Saturday
morning. "Aren't there lots of conventions in town?" Rebecca asked,
trying not to sound too desperate. It was almost eleven, and her aunt seemed
more interested in dusting the menagerie of weird carved animals in the front
parlor than driving off to the Quarter to set up her card table. "Doesn't
it get busy in the weeks before Mardi Gras? Isn't Saturday your really busy
day?"

"There's no hurry," said Aunt Claudia breezily. She
wafted the molting feather duster over the clutter on the mantel: a gilt clock
that didn't work, some carved African statuettes, a slumped Pierrot doll with a
broken china foot, and a pile of old green hymnbooks that smelled of must.

There was nothing to do but to try and speed the housekeeping
process along. Rebecca vacuumed the hallway and the bedrooms, cajoling a
reluctant Aurelia into scooping Marilyn out of the laundry basket and sorting
out the no-longer-very-clean laundry. But by the time her aunt decided that

194

the house was more or less tidy and drifted out to her car with
her pack of cards and a new, tie-dyed tablecloth, it was almost closing time at
the cemetery. Rebecca had never understood why it shut so early in the
afternoon, or why it was closed on Sundays -- something to do with the city
running it, she'd heard her aunt say. It was just another strange thing about
this place, she decided, scampering along the street as soon as her aunt's car
had disappeared around the corner.

The day was warm but overcast, and in the cemetery Rebecca felt
that claustrophobic, short-of-breath feeling she'd come to associate with New
Orleans. There was a dampness to the place that Aunt Claudia always referred to
as "close" -- as in, "it's very close today," usually said
while fanning herself with a section of the
Times-Picayune
newspaper.
Sometimes Rebecca felt as though the sky was closing in on them, as gray and
soggy as the city's other boundaries: the lake and the river and the swamps.

A few people were still wandering the cemetery, cleaning up family
graves or taking pictures of the more ornate tombs. The Bowman grave was a
favorite with tourists, Rebecca knew, so she wasn't surprised to see a Japanese
couple wandering ahead of her down the sandy alley. There was no way Rebecca
could talk to Lisette with other people around, unless she wanted to appear
completely insane, so she dawdled under a tree, idly scratching her nails
against its rough, chunky bark. She'd never seen the Sutton vault, she
realized, wondering how close it was to the Bowman tomb. To her frustration,
Rebecca noticed that the Japanese couple -- both of whom had cameras they were
clearly eager to

195

use as much as possible -- had been joined by another two
tomb-gawkers. Were they trying to walk off the jazz brunch they'd just eaten at
Commander's Palace? Didn't they know the cemetery was closing in twenty
minutes?

Tired of waiting, Rebecca wandered off in the direction of the
Grey family vault. It was so weird to think of Anton getting buried there one
day. Or rather, getting
entombed:
You weren't really buried if your
remains were stowed aboveground. She wondered if Anton ever thought about it,
if it was comforting to know exactly where he'd be ending up or if it freaked
him out. But then, so much of his life seemed circumscribed. Maybe it didn't
bother him at all.

Out of the corner of her eye, Rebecca saw something: a flicker of
dark skirt as someone darted behind a tomb.

"Lisette!" she called, squeezing down the narrow lane
between two of the tombs. The ground underfoot was damp and nubby with moss,
perhaps because it rarely saw the sun. And sure enough, there was Lisette,
leaning her head against the chalky plaster of the vault, her face as gloomy as
the shadowy back alley.

"Too many people here today," Lisette complained. Her
eyes were red, as though she'd been crying. "All over the Bowman tomb like
ants. I'm tired of getting stepped on."

"Does it hurt when they step on you?" Rebecca asked, and
Lisette shook her head.

"Some days you just want some peace and quiet," she
said. "Though maybe that's not such a good thing, either. I'm thinking
about my mama a lot right now. It always seems to happen just before ..."

"Just before what?" Rebecca shivered, because it was
cold

196

and damp back here, shaded by the dense overhanging branches of a
gnarled oak tree. Again Lisette shook her head.

"It's the worst part about being a ghost," she told
Rebecca. "You have too much time to think."

"I wanted to ask you about your mother," Rebecca began,
but she didn't know how to go on. Lisette looked so sad today, so drawn. How
could she begin to ask Lisette about her mother putting a curse on the Bowmans?
"My aunt ... my aunt said your mother went to the Bowman house once."

Lisette shifted her weight from one foot to the other, rubbing her
head against the side of the tomb the way Marilyn sometimes rubbed against the
table leg.

"Just once," she said softly, not meeting Rebecca's eye.
"They let her in. I followed her into the parlor, hoping she could feel
me, even if she couldn't see me. But I don't think she could. She never once
saw me, the way you can see me."

Lisette looked as though she was about to start crying again.

"This was just after ... just after you were murdered?"
Rebecca said quickly, torn between not wanting to upset Lisette and wanting
answers about the so-called curse.

"After she got the message I'd died from the fever. I was
surprised they even let her in the house. It must have been the first time a
person of color was allowed to sit down on a piece of furniture in that parlor
-- not that my mother waited for permission. She didn't think of them as her
social superiors. Not Mrs. Bowman, not the lawyer man, Mr. Sutton. She was
free, just like them."