Paula Morris (24 page)

"Whatever!" Rebecca retorted. They had
no idea
what
she could and couldn't see. Irritation surged through her body like a boiling
wave of molten lava, and before she could stop herself, Rebecca was snapping
back at Anton. "Helena's not the only one who can see things, you know. I
can see the ghost, too!"

Instantly she knew it was the wrong thing to say. Anton was
staring at her, his mouth open, his face pale as the tomb she was leaning
against. This wasn't the time or the place to

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reveal her secret, Rebecca knew, especially to someone like Anton.
Whatever had happened between them, she couldn't trust him anymore. Why hadn't
she kept her mouth shut?

"I don't believe you." Anton's voice was firm, but the
look on his face told a different story -- it was something between horrified
and suspicious. Rebecca didn't know what to say. If she said he was right, that
she was just making it all up, she'd seem like an immature idiot. But if she
stood here arguing, insisting that she could see Lisette as clearly as Helena
could ... well, it would serve no purpose at all. Anton would go racing off to
the Bowmans', probably, with this hot-off-the-presses information. And though
Rebecca wasn't sure what the Bowmans would do with the news exactly, she
certainly didn't want to be a topic of discussion -- or derision -- in that
particular household.

Now the bell was ringing incessantly, its clangs echoing in
Rebecca's head.

"We should ... we should get out of here," she said, but
then she remembered Anton had a key for the Sixth Street gate. Unlike Rebecca,
he didn't have to play by the rules. And right now, he obviously wasn't in a
hurry to go anywhere. He was standing there, staring at Rebecca as though the
longer and harder he looked at her, the more likely he was to get out the
truth.

Now that the hot tide of anger had subsided, all Rebecca felt was
confusion. Part of her wanted to continue this standoff with Anton: She'd said
more than she'd meant to, but there wasn't any going back. If she ran away now,
Rebecca would look like a wimp and a coward. Anton would write her

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off as a silly girl and congratulate himself for dumping her so
unceremoniously after the Bowmans' Christmas party.

But part of her knew there was nothing else to say. Rebecca wasn't
about to confide all the details of her friendship with Lisette to Anton,
especially now that he seemed so hostile. Her head was pounding. The shrill
ringing bell, the clammy atmosphere, the feeling she had of being surrounded by
tombs and trees and high walls ... everything was oppressing her. If she didn't
leave now, she'd be trapped in the cemetery, reliant on Anton's goodwill to get
out. And goodwill wasn't quite the way to describe his mood today.

"So that's it?" He sounded incredulous. "You make
this insane claim, and then you've got nothing else to say?"

One of the big gates was closing with a creak: Rebecca listened
for the slam, for the rattling of the padlock's chain. She felt hot again, but
not with anger this time. Just panic, sweeping through her, urging her to
escape before the last of those gates was locked for the rest of the weekend.
She had to get away from here. She had to get away from Anton.

"I'm ... I'm sorry," she gasped, sidling toward the gap
between the tombs. Once she felt the emptiness of the narrow alley, Rebecca
bolted; as she hurried away, her elbows banged against the unforgiving marble
walls hemming her in. Anton was calling her name, but she didn't turn around.
The Sixth Street gate was already locked, so she ran toward Washington Avenue,
where the caretaker, in his khaki uniform, stood jangling a set of keys.

"Just in time," he said in a mock-stern voice, and
Rebecca nodded, jogging into the street. She ran all the way home,

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past the valet parkers outside Commander's Palace, and along the
broken sidewalk of Coliseum Street. Her heart thudded with every step, because
she knew the Lafayette Cemetery caretaker was right. She'd gotten away from
Anton just in time.

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***

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

***

Although it was still too early for parades, Rebecca soon realized
that carnival season was already underway. Everyone at Temple Mead was obsessed
with the fancy balls they or their parents were attending, chattering in the
hallways and the lunchroom about which parades were taking place this year and
what the Krewe of Septimus had chosen as its theme.

Septimus was held in particularly high regard in this neighborhood,
Rebecca kept hearing, not least because of its unique parade route. Unlike all
the other parades, which rumbled through the city downtown to Canal Street,
Septimus curled back at Lee Circle and looped its way back along Magazine
Street, finishing on Jackson. But those in-the-know, according to Jessica,
often ran up to Prytania at the end of the parade, because the floats of the
"royal" court kept going, all along Prytania to Louisiana Avenue.

"You get to see them up close, without anyone else around,
pretty much," Jessica gushed at the beginning of English: Amy had a
dentist's appointment, so Jessica could talk to

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Rebecca without getting into trouble. She pulled a recycled paper
napkin out of her bag and drew a shaky map of this apparently peculiar route.

"Do you see what I mean now?"

"Kind of," Rebecca said, squinting at the squiggles
Jessica had drawn, complete with arrows and scrawled street names. She seemed
to forget that Rebecca had never been to a single Mardi Gras parade and had
only the vaguest idea about their traditional route -- from Napoleon and along
St. Charles Avenue, she remembered, thinking of the beads she'd seen dangling
from oak trees the day she and Anton took their walk. But Jessica, like
everyone else at Temple Mead, obviously thought that the royal progress of a
parade was general knowledge throughout the rest of the country.

However out of the loop she was, one thing was soon clear to
Rebecca. Because no other parades had this special route, Septimus required
dedicated police and barricades and ambulance services and fire trucks and
cleanup for stretches of streets unused by any other krewes. And this meant
that the people who controlled Septimus obviously had a lot of money, as well
as a lot of sway in New Orleans.
That
was no surprise at all.

At lunchtime, nobody seemed to object when Rebecca slid her tray
onto the end of the sophomore table -- possibly because Amy wasn't there,
possibly because they were all deep in conversation.

"I've heard there's no way Helena Bowman can ride this
year," someone at the other end of the table announced.

"She's way too sick. Nobody's seen her for weeks and weeks,
not even Marianne or Julie."

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"Maybe she's got leprosy!"

"Duh --
nobody
gets that anymore. It's probably
cancer."

"Maybe she's been bitten by a vampire. What? It's just as
likely as her having leprosy."

"Well, I've heard she's mentally unstable. No, really! She
went all hysterical at the Bowmans' Christmas party."

"I heard her mother had to slap her."

"I heard that when the ambulance came to take her away, they
put her in a straitjacket."

"How do you know? You weren't there."

"Please. I wasn't at, like, the Gettysburg Address, but I
know about that."

"Rebecca was there," Jessica piped up. She smiled at
Rebecca, as though she was glad -- for once -- to claim the association.

"What happened
exactly?"
The entire sophomore
cabal turned their attention to Rebecca.

"Um ... not much." Rebecca had no appetite for this
conversation -- about as much as she had for the sticky grilled cheese. She was
too worried about giving anything away. One thing Rebecca had learned from her
last encounter with Anton: She had to keep her mouth shut.

"You must have seen something." Jessica was practically
pleading with her.

"I saw the band," Rebecca said, wiping her hands on a
paper napkin. "They were really good. And I saw a whole lot of champagne
and barbecue shrimp. Yum, yum."

Her classmates were not impressed.

The next day, Amy was back, and Rebecca decided to smuggle her
homemade sandwich into the library. Nobody

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else was around yet, so Rebecca checked her e-mail -- there was
one from her father, who didn't have anything interesting to say about work,
and one from Ling, who didn't have anything interesting to say about school --
and then spent some time paging through the old map book left open on the big
oak table. She liked looking at the maps of Louisiana and the Caribbean, back
when France and Spain and Britain were fighting over territory and power. It
made her think of pirates and buccaneers, of plantation ladies and dashing
explorers -- though, she knew, this was a naive and romantic view.

Back in the days when Haiti was called Saint-Domingue, it was
known as the "Pearl of the Antilles," a place of incredible riches
where the French produced sugar and coffee and rum for their entire empire. But
this was only possible because of the work of hundreds of thousands of slaves.
And the brutal treatment of these people led to the slave rebellion and Haitian
revolution, which was incredibly bloody and terrible: Rebecca's class had been
studying it in history. Anyone with the means to escape Haiti fled the
fighting, and thousands of these refugees came to New Orleans -- like Lisette's
grandparents. With them they'd brought their music and their food and their
religion, voodoo. According to her teacher, they changed the culture of New
Orleans forever.

And now, since the hurricane, people had moved to the city from
Mexico and Central America, to work on rebuilding houses; the city would change
again. People like the Bowmans and the Suttons might want everything to stay
the same -- with them rich and in charge of everything, of course -- but that
wasn't the way history worked, Rebecca was learning. Anton had told her she
didn't understand "their"

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history, but one thing she was sure of: Cities couldn't, wouldn't
stay the same. They moved with the times, whether they were New York or New
Orleans.

A strange noise caught Rebecca's attention -- a muffled, strangled
little yelp. It sounded as though a stray kitten had wandered into the library
and was mewing for attention. Rebecca looked around to see if the librarian had
noticed, but she couldn't see her anywhere at all. The noise erupted again,
from deep in the stacks, a sort of hiccup. Or maybe, Rebecca thought, walking
slowly toward the source of the sound, like a sob.

Pacing the length of the towering wooden bookshelves, Rebecca
peered down each aisle, looking for the creature making this plaintive little
noise. But there were no stray kittens in the library--none that she could see,
anyway. There was just a girl, slumped on the floor, wedged between two
shelves. Her face was buried in her hands, but Rebecca knew instantly who it
was.

Marianne Sutton.

Rebecca stood at the end of the row, not sure what to do.
Marianne's shoulders were shaking, and it was obvious that she was crying quite
piteously.

'Are you ... are you OK?" she asked, even though she knew
this was a stupid question. Of course Marianne wasn't OK -- she was sitting on
the floor of the library, sobbing her heart out. She didn't even look up when
Rebecca spoke; maybe she hadn't heard her. Maybe the polite thing to do now was
walk away before Marianne noticed she had unwelcome company.

"What?" Too late. Marianne had lifted her head; she was

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staring at Rebecca as though she couldn't see her clearly. Her
chalk-pale face was streaked with tears, and her eyes looked watery and red.
Rebecca almost felt sorry for her.

"I just wanted to know if ... if you were OK. If there was
anything I could do." Rebecca took a step toward her, stopping when
Marianne flinched.

"No." She shook her head. Her fair hair was a mess, half
pulled out of its ponytail.

"OK -- well, then ... see you." Obviously she didn't
want Rebecca around, so the only thing to do was back away, leaving Marianne to
wallow in her private misery.

"I'm just worried about Helena, that's all," Marianne
said. This was surprising -- not that Helena's condition was making Marianne
anxious and upset, but that she would share the information with an outsider
like Rebecca. Her tone was much softer than usual, maybe because Helena wasn't
around and Marianne didn't have to act all snooty and rude. Maybe this was the
real Marianne, someone who wouldn't be half so objectionable if she were out of
Helena Bowman's sphere of influence.

"Do you want me to go get someone?" Rebecca asked her.
Marianne would prefer it, no doubt, if she had one of Them to confide in.
"Should I try to find Julie?"

She didn't have much idea of where to start looking, but Rebecca
was sure one of the J.C. acolytes among the Plebs could help track Julie down.
Marianne shook her head, almost dislodging the slipping elastic band.