Paula Morris (7 page)

Rounding a corner, Rebecca tripped on the protruding

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edge of a paving stone and fell to the ground with a thump. She
had fallen onto a path, she realized: Her hands stung where the concrete had
scraped them, and she could hear the soft sound of approaching footsteps. Then
the footsteps stopped. It had to be Anton, looking at her sprawled on the
ground, and for a moment Rebecca was too scared, too annoyed with herself, to
look up. The person standing right by her said nothing, and she felt even more
nervous. What if this wasn't Anton at all, but one of the dangerous men her
aunt said loitered in the cemetery?

Rebecca slowly raised her head. The clouds obscuring the moon
moved, and a strange silvery light brought the tombs around her into focus.

The person standing over her wasn't Anton or any other guy. It was
a black girl, about her age, looking down at Rebecca with curious interest. Her
hair was long, hanging to one side in a loose braid. Her white blouse was
ripped at one shoulder, and she was fingering her dark skirt, twitching it back
and forth as though she was shooing flies.

The girl and Rebecca stared at each other without speaking; she
looked about as startled as Rebecca felt.

"Do you ... do you know the way out of here?" Rebecca
asked, pulling herself to her feet and dusting herself off. Her voice was
breathy: She was almost hyperventilating with anxiety. "The Sixth Street
gate?"

The girl said nothing for a moment, gazing at Rebecca. She had a
sweet, pretty face, her skin a flawless bronze; her dark eyes looked uncertain,
as though she was a little afraid. She wasn't wearing shoes, Rebecca noticed,
and her shabby

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blouse was thin: She had to be cold on a breezy November night
like this.

"That way," she said at last, pointing. She gave Rebecca
a slow, hesitant smile.

"Thanks," said Rebecca, backing away. It seemed rude to
run off, but she had to get out of here before Anton locked her in or saw her
making her escape. The girl was standing still, just gazing at her. Rebecca
gave her a grateful wave and started running.

When she skidded through the gate and bolted down the sidewalk
toward home, Rebecca wasn't sure what was pounding the loudest -- her feet or
her heart. Back on the front porch, she fumbled for the key and slipped inside
without daring to look back. She closed the door, wincing when it clicked, and
then tiptoed into the front parlor, to peek through the gap in the curtains.

The mysterious girl was nowhere to be seen. But there, standing at
the cemetery gates, was Anton, tossing the key from one hand to the other. It
was too dark to make out the expression on his face, but of one thing Rebecca
was quite certain: He was staring straight at Aunt Claudia's house.

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***

CHAPTER SEVEN

***

ON SATURDAY MORNING, REBECCA COULDN'T stop thinking about the girl
in the cemetery. What was she doing there so late at night? Maybe, like
Rebecca, she'd wandered in through the open gate. Maybe the storm had made her
homeless, and she had nowhere else to go. But three years was a long time to
sleep in a cemetery, and the gates were locked every night, Aunt Claudia had
explained, to keep the homeless out. The girl was lucky, Rebecca thought,
remembering the bundled-up men who slept in doorways near her apartment back
home, that it hardly ever snowed in New Orleans.

As soon as Aunt Claudia drove off to the French Quarter with her
folding card table and striped deck chair, and Aurelia skipped over to a
friend's house for a playdate, Rebecca decided to visit the cemetery again. The
girl in the torn white blouse had done her a favor, helping her escape last
night; maybe Rebecca could do something in return. The girl might be hungry or
want something clean to wear.

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For a minute, Rebecca wondered if the girl might be crazy or
dangerous in some way, but this didn't seem likely. She had looked as
frightened and surprised as Rebecca. Perhaps she was hiding from something --
or someone -- possibly the person who'd ripped her shirt. Whoever this girl
was, Rebecca decided that she'd rather talk to her than to any of the snobby,
self-involved girls at Temple Mead.

Rebecca walked to the open gates of the cemetery, and tried to
retrace her footsteps from the night before. During the day, the cemetery felt
like an entirely different place. It was an unseasonably warm day, the humidity
almost thick enough to taste. Enclosed within its pale walls, the cemetery was
a sun trap, its white tombs bright in the glare. It didn't feel like a looming
forest of stone anymore, partly because of the little things Rebecca hadn't
been able to see in the dark, like bunches of plastic flowers left in jars or
pretty fleur-de-lis points on fences. A tour group meandered along the central
pathway that linked the Sixth Street gate with its counterpart on Washington
Avenue, everyone fluttering "Save Our Cemeteries" fans to try to keep
cool.

The pathways she'd scrambled along last night -- concrete giving
way to grass, grass worn away to dirt in the cemetery's shadiest corners --
were dusty and benign, though there were still too many of them, and some of the
less-traveled routes were clumped with weeds and woven with knobbed tree roots.
Rebecca couldn't even find her way back to the Grey family tomb, let alone
remember her late-night path out.

Another tour group, all middle-aged people in ugly shorts and tragic
sun visors, were stumping around after a woman in

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a yellow sundress,- she was holding an umbrella aloft. Rebecca did
her best to keep away from them. She couldn't see the girl in the torn blouse
anywhere. In fact, the only other person she stumbled across was a drunken man
asleep on one of the graves, one of his shoes -- a bright green croc -- lying
nearby and an empty bottle encased in a paper bag drooping from his right hand.
This freaked Rebecca out so much she sprinted away in the direction of the
dreaded tour group again. They might dress like morons -- a number of them were
wearing purple, green, and gold plastic beads, she noticed, as though today was
Mardi Gras -- but at least they weren't scary.

Rebecca was lingering near the group, trying to catch her breath
and deciding where to wander next, when she realized that the guide was talking
about the Bowman tomb.

"That's the mansion, over there," the guide was saying,
pointing to the gables of a tall charcoal gray house on Prytania Street, its
upper floor visible through the trees. "Hard to believe there's a curse on
it, right?"

People in the group were chuckling and shaking their heads.

"Looks like it survived the curse of Katrina!" one man
shouted, and the tour guide gave a pained smile.

"It took a lot of storm damage," she said. "And
work seems to be going on there all the time. But no, it wasn't destroyed.
There wasn't any water in this neighborhood. And, according to the legend,
it'll be fire, not wind, that brings the house down."

Rebecca stood on her tiptoes, straining to hear whatever else the
guide had to say about this curse, but it was too late.

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The group was moving on, ambling slowly in the searing afternoon
heat toward the shade of a line of magnolia trees. Rebecca waited until they
were out of the way before she walked up to the Bowman tomb.

It was fancy, just as she'd expected -- big, like the Grey
family's stone vault and topped with an ostentatious stone angel. The side of
the tomb was etched with names dating back to 1850. Helena's name would be
etched here one day, she mused, thinking how strange an idea that was. And then
she corrected herself: Helena would get married one day and probably change her
name. She'd marry someone like Anton Grey and end up etched on his family's
tomb instead. Wasn't that the way things worked around here -- all these rich
families sticking together?

After another thirty minutes of walking around, Rebecca gave up.
If the girl slept in the cemetery, she was nowhere to be found here during the
day -- or maybe she was just really good at hiding.

At school the next week, Rebecca decided to corner Amy and Jessica
and see what information she could get out of them. At lunchtime, she slid her
tray onto their table, noticing the way the girls exchanged unhappy glances
when she sat down. Ever since she'd had that conversation on the stairs with
Helena and Marianne, a lot of the Plebs had been kind of aloof to Rebecca.
Helena and her friends must have spread the word that Rebecca was a lowborn
outsider with a bad attitude, and nobody would dare contradict "Them,"
she

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suspected. Amy and Jessica were still friendly to her, more or
less, but they weren't exactly inviting her to sit with them or inviting her to
hang out after school.

"I wondered," Rebecca began, pausing to suck from her
juice carton. "Have you guys ever heard anything about a curse on the
Bowman mansion?"

Jessica nodded eagerly and then checked herself; Amy was giving
her a disapproving stare.

"Well, sort of," she faltered, giving her usual nervous
giggle. "I mean, you know. There's some old story."

"What kind of story?"

"An old voodoo curse," said Jessica. "Some old
woman, like, a hundred years ago -- she put a curse ..."

"Supposedly
put a curse," interjected Amy.

"Why?" Rebecca asked. She picked at her sandwich, trying
not to look
too
interested.

"Someone was murdered there." Jessica lowered her voice.
"And this old lady put a terrible curse on the family."

"The house," whispered Amy, jiggling in her seat. She
seemed impatient with Jessica's version of the story. "It's the house that
has a curse."

Jessica looked puzzled.

"But I thought there was something about ..." She
stopped talking abruptly, and bit into her sandwich, as though she couldn't
trust herself to say another word.

"It's just some dumb old story," Amy told Rebecca.
"Everyone makes up things like that about New Orleans and about the Garden
District, especially. My father says they do it so there's a reason for
tourists to come here. You shouldn't believe all the stories you hear."

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Rebecca decided to try a different approach. "Do people sleep
in the cemetery?" she asked. Jessica, her mouth full of sandwich, wrinkled
her nose. "Alive people, you mean?" she asked, and Amy pursed her
lips.

"It's only open in the mornings," Amy replied. "And
off-duty police patrol it. You could get locked in there, I guess. Nobody goes
in that cemetery much but tourists and criminals, anyway."

The look she gave Rebecca suggested that one, or possibly both, of
these labels applied to Rebecca herself.

But Rebecca didn't really need any help from the Plebs after all.
That afternoon, walking home with Aurelia, she found her little cousin had
plenty to say about the Bowman curse.

"They did some really bad things a long time ago," said
Aurelia, dangling her almost-empty bag from one hand and jumping along the
sidewalk to avoid the cracks. They were passing the long line of SUVs --
Mercedes, Lexus, Porsche -- that were parked outside the school every day,
driven by the glossy blonde mothers of Temple Mead girls who lived farther
uptown. "And they were cursed in perp ... in perp ..."

"In perpetuity?"

"Does that mean forever? Then, yes. And their house will burn
down, and they'll all die, all seven of them."

"There are seven of them? But I thought Helena just had an older
brother?"

Aurelia looked confused.

"I'm not sure about that part," she confessed.
"Will your mother know?" Rebecca asked, and Aurelia looked horrified.

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"Don't ask Mama about this," she said, clutching
Rebecca's sleeve. "We're not allowed to talk about the Bowmans,
ever." "Why not?"

"We have to ... to keep away from them." Aurelia sounded
less than certain. "Because they're not our kind of people."

"Well, I believe that," Rebecca said, "if you mean
they're rich and snobby and --"

She stopped midsentence and came to a dead stop: There across the
street, standing by the Prytania gate of the cemetery, was the girl she'd been
looking for. In the daylight, her clothes looked even shabbier. She was dressed
in the same waitresslike gear of white shirt and black skirt, and her feet were
still bare.

"What is it?" asked Aurelia, who was still walking, but
Rebecca didn't reply.

"Hey!" she called, waving frantically. The girl across
the street glanced toward Rebecca, looking just as startled as she had on
Friday night. Rebecca began crossing the street, walking toward her, but she
had to wait for a moving truck to lumber by. By the time the truck had passed,
and Rebecca could scamper to safety, the girl had disappeared.

For an instant, Rebecca thought she'd gone into the cemetery, but
then she remembered that the gates were locked by this time every day. Could
the girl have climbed over, somehow? She was nowhere to be seen along Prytania.
Strange. Rebecca stood at the cemetery gate, peering through the bars, but the
mystery girl was nowhere in sight.