Cree arrived at the house a few minutes before four to find a black Jaguar parked carelessly and nearly blocking the end of the Warrens' driveway. She was just parking on the street when another car approached and also paused in front of the house, an older BMW with a vanity plate that read SHRINK. It didn't take much to deduce that the driver was Dr. Fitzpatrick. They both parked, got out, and approached each other warily.
Fitzpatrick was a long-limbed man around Cree's age, with thick brown hair and a congenial face that reminded her faintly of Alan Alda. He wore white linen pants, a white shirt with its sleeves turned back on his forearms, and an unruly blue tie.
They met at the end of the driveway and stopped to look each other over.
"Dr. Fitzpatrick, I presume," Cree said.
"Hello, Doctor Black." He smiled at her surprise and explained "After we talked on the phone, I took the liberty of doing a bit of on-line detective work on you. I'm very impressed with your credentials. And relieved."
He extended a hand, and Cree shook it, thinking that his doing research in advance was better than their getting inside, going territorial, and having to lay out their resumes side by side to see who had the longer list of honors and degrees.
"Relieved?"
"Yes. That you have sufficient background to understand why multiple approaches – conflicting approaches – to therapy can be injurious to the patient."
The unspoken conclusion being, and will therefore back out of this without an embarrassing tussle. Still, Fitzpatrick's tone was amiable and respectful. It was hard to take much offense.
They started walking up the drive. "How much has Lila told you about what happened to her at Beauforte House?" Cree asked.
"Not much. We've only just begun, really. And she's a… a reluctant patient."
"I brought a cassette of what she told me when we were over there this morning. If she's willing, I'll lend it to you."
Fitzpatrick bobbed his head unenthusiastically. As they skirted the black Jaguar, he rapped the sleek hood with his knuckles. "This is R o Ro's car: Looks like Jack has decided to gang up on you, Dr. Black. Got the whole posse here."
" 'Ro-Ro'?"
Fitzpatrick laughed at himself. "Ronald Beauforte. The nicknames are something of a convention in certain socioeconomic circles hereabouts. I'd guess his being here means Jack has enlisted him to help chase you off, too."
Cree was just thinking that the impending session was looking less and less like the one she'd intended for this afternoon. And then the door opened and Ro-Ro stood there with his supercilious good looks, beckoning them inside.
"I'm flattered that you think I deserve such a big production," Cree told them. They were in the living room, Cree seated on the couch with Jack and Dr. Fitzpatrick ranged on a pair of facing chairs, Ronald standing at his ease to one side of the room. Cree had been a little disconcerted to hear Ronald greet Dr. Fitzpatrick as "Fitz," as if they were good buddies.
"But isn't there someone missing?"
"We thought it might be better if we talked without Lila here," Jack said. "You saw what she was like. She can't take any more of this ghost business. We were wrong to bring you here."
"Your wife is stronger than you think, Jack," Cree told him. "She's going to surprise you."
"You can keep the retainer," Ronald put in, "if that's what – "
"She's never been all that strong," Jack said. "She's always been easily upset."
"I can vouch for that," Ron agreed. "There's some history here." He turned to the credenza behind him and began fixing himself a drink from one of a number of liquor bottles on a tray there.
Cree watched him, thinking, Ro-Ro. Once you'd heard the nickname, it was hard not to think of him that way: an aging Southern bon vivant clinging to upper-class frat-boy mannerisms.
"I have no problem with returning the retainer or discontinuing my research," Cree said, "provided I hear from Lila that that's what she wants."
Jack and Ronald turned to look at Fitzpatrick, as if that was his cue to respond. But before he could, Lila appeared in the doorway. She was still wearing the same gray skirt and white blouse, rumpled now as if she'd been sleeping in them. She did look like hell, Cree saw, haggard and red-eyed, a wisp of hair hanging down over one eye and giving her a demented look. And yet the back that had looked so broken at Beauforte House was ramrod straight again.
Jack stood up, instantly solicitous. "Darlin' – "
"Sit down, Jackie." Lila glanced over at Ronald, who was looking on with a sardonic grin and swirling whiskey around his glass. "Ro-Ro. Of course you're here. Do make yourself at home, won't you? Care for a drink?"
"Maybe I will, thanks." Ronald blinked languidly and took a sip.
"I am not a cripple," Lila said. "I won't be discussed in my absence by some… cabal, however well meaning. I am the one who will decide what I need to do for my own mental health."
Jack and Ronald frowned briefly, different kinds of frowns, but Fitzpatrick's expression was one of both interest and, what – pleasure, maybe, at Lila's assertiveness.
"And what do you think, Lila?" he asked mildly. "You've had a harrowing experience today. What's the best way to get you to feel better?"
"I want to figure out what the hell these ghosts are. And why they're bothering me. And how to get rid of them for good."
Jack shook his head. "Lila… Peaches, the things you told us today, those can't be real. They may be scary as hell but they aren't real, they ain't even regular ghosts. They're – "
"They're all in my head, right? Hallucinations, because I'm going crazy. That's what I've been thinking, too. But after we got home today I remembered something. Jackie, I want you to think back to that night I woke you up, back in December. When I was so upset and said I had a bad dream? I told you and Cree about it today?"
"Yeah, the snake."
"Yes. Now Jackie, can you remember what happened? Can you admit what happened?"
Jack looked puzzled, glancing quickly from Ronald to Dr. Fitzpatrick as if seeking support. "What happened? I heard you scream, I woke up. I didn't know what the hell was going on, you snapped on the light and said you'd – "
And then Jack stopped abruptly. His eyes went thoughtful and then a little alarmed.
"No," Lila insisted. "Yow said -?"
Jack looked at her with dismay. Lila waited him out, and at last he dropped his eyes. "I said… I asked somethin' like, 'Is that smoke?'"
Lila stared at him, then Cree, a look of desperate triumph or vindication: She had described her giant water moccasin as oozing like smoke.
"I – I was still practically asleep, the light blinded me! Doesn't mean – "
"You saw the snake! Just for a second. You saw it, too. If there'd really been smoke, we would have smelled it! It would have lingered in the room. There's no reason there'd be smoke, that old coal heater hasn't been used in fifty years. You saw it, Jackie!"
Cree felt a pang in her chest. Lila's plea for verification was a cry for someone to share her experience, for proof she was not really as alone as she felt.
Jack couldn't look at her, but he couldn't back down, either. "Baby, if there'd really been a big damn snake, wouldn't it have still been in the room?"
"Can I ask a question?" Cree interrupted. "Lila, have you seen or felt any of those things here, at this house?"
"Never." She gave Cree a grateful look.
"Jack, has Lila acted… that way… here at this house or anywhere else? At any time?"
Jack thought about it, pouted. "Can't say she has," he admitted. "I mean, she's been upset since we moved back in, after that business over there, but… no."
"Why would that be, do you suppose? Why would she encounter her hallucinations only in Beauforte House?"
Ron sipped his whiskey, thoughtful now. Jack threw out his hands, palms up, at a loss, then looked to Fitzpatrick. "Help me out here, Fitz."
Fitzpatrick shrugged. "I think these are issues we can iron out later. The real point is, Lila, if I'm hearing you right, you still think your best course is to explore the supernatural, um, possibility? Even though there's a good chance you have a brain disorder, and even though the process upsets you, you feel that it would be a beneficial therapeutic approach?"
Lila nodded.
"And you'd like to continue working with Dr. Black?"
"Now hold on a minute here," Ronald said. He frowned as he set his glass down and stepped closer to the circle of chairs. "Not half an hour ago, we all agreed – "
"Ronald," Lila said, "you agreed, not me. I'll tell you what I agree to. I want to get to the bottom of this. I want to do whatever I have to with Cree. And if you want cooperation from me about the house or anything else, you'll damn well cooperate with me and with Cree's research on this! Jackie, same goes for you. If you want me to continue with Dr. Fitzpatrick, it's conditional on me working with Cree until such time as I say it's not the right thing." Lila's decisiveness was clearly a major effort that was fatiguing for her. But she rallied one more time to glare at her brother and her husband. "Am I making myself clear?"
Ronald shook his head, disgusted, and shot an accusatory glance at Cree as he went to pour himself another drink. Jack just sat for a moment, hands on knees, puffing out his cheeks as he blew air through pursed lips. And then he meekly got up and went over to the credenza himself, muttering, "I think maybe I'll join you, there, Ro-Ro."
Lila hovered, still defiant but looking suddenly uncertain again, her power ebbing.
There was a long moment of strained silence, and then Fitzpatrick loudly smacked his hands on his thighs and stood up. "Well. That settles that, then, doesn't it?" And he grinned widely to no one in particular.
Cree and Dr. Fitzpatrick left the house fifteen minutes later. Outside, the lowering sun had stretched the shadows of houses and trees into long diagonals, and the air had cooled nicely. They paused at the end of the driveway, and Cree was about to shake Fitzpatrick's hand when he unexpectedly tipped his head toward the green slope of the levee and asked, "Ever been up there?"
"No. This is my first visit to New Orleans."
"You want to take a walk? I was just thinking, you and I have a few things to talk about. No time like the present. Good weather, grab it while you've got it."
Cree looked up at the sunlight on the grass, the blue sky, the tops of trees just visible on the other side. Lila had ended her bravura performance by asking Cree to begin a full investigation and handing her a retainer check for another five grand – a convincing statement to Ron and Jack about who was in charge. She had also given Cree and Fitzpatrick permission to discuss her case with each other.
Cree was tired, but the lakeshore did look inviting, and the sooner she began a dialogue with Fitzpatrick the better. "Just let me get my other shoes from the car," she said.
She changed into her walking shoes and met him at the end of the street, and they climbed up the steep embankment. At the top, she was rewarded with a vast view of water, bordered by a wide strip of green parkland that stretched out of view to the left and right. The flat top of the levee was almost level with the second-floor windows of the houses in the neighborhoods behind it. Here and there along its zigzagging length, people came and went, suggesting that beyond keeping floodwater out of the city it doubled as a walking and bicycling path. On the lakeside, the lawns were thronged with people picnicking, playing catch, lounging, wrestling with dogs, flying kites. The breeze that bustled off the lake carried the scent of smoke from portable grills as it tugged at Cree's skirt and hair.
"This is nice," she admitted. It was a relief to be surrounded by lots of space, free of close interiors so congested with emotions and history. To let the wind and sun sweep it all away for a moment.
Fitzpatrick stood with his hands deep in his trouser pockets, eyes shut, face turned to the sun. Yes, a little like Alan Alda, Cree decided, but more edgy. More dash or darkness – an attractive combination. The wind made his hair crazy and pulled his tie fluttering over his shoulder.
"I come running here a couple of times a week," he told her. He still hadn't opened his eyes. "When it gets hot, which is basically from here on in, this is the coolest place in town. The wind helps. You jog?"
"Pretty regularly."
"Thought so," Fitzpatrick said.
Cree heard the oblique flattery in his comment. He was low-key and unselfconscious about it, and left it alone afterward. To her surprise, she liked the way it made her feel. They began to walk along the levee into the lowering sun.
"I expected you'd be part of the lynch mob, Dr. Fitzpatrick. Why weren't you?"
"Might as well call me Fitz. Everybody else does."
"I noticed. I take it you have social contact with the Beaufortes?"
"Some. I'm not real close – friend of the family, I guess you could say. My father was a lifelong friend of Richard, that's Lila's father, and Charmian. But we're all in the same krewe, travel in some of the same circles – old families, you know. When this all blew up and they were looking for some… advice… on Lila, they came to me. She was amenable."
" 'The same crew'?"
"Krewe, spelled with a k and an extra e at the end. It's a club, or maybe you could call it a fraternal organization. All we really do is plan our Mardi Gras parade and festivities. Probably sounds silly to an out of towner, but around here it's a pretty big thing." He grinned as he looked at her to gauge her reaction, but after they'd walked on a few more steps, he sobered. "I didn't join the mob because it became obvious to me that you have Lila's best interests at heart, and because she seems to trust you She has a hard time talking to me – there's a lot of denial there, and a lot of shame. She's a damned Beauforte, and Beaufortes don't have weaknesses or breakdowns. But I could see you two had established good rapport. And she needs an ally now, very badly."
Cree nodded. Rapport was hardly a sufficient term, though; rather, an inexplicably deep sympathetic resonance. At its core was the feeling that they had something crucial in common. Both were deeply shaken by an unexpected, undesired, undecipherable revelation that necessitated reinterpreting the laws of nature and reassessing the meaning of personhood. Caught between an absolutely convincing experience that was utterly at odds with normal life and the beliefs of a skeptical world. Prone to shattering vulnerability, yet determined to find the strength to confront it and master it.
They passed a couple of kids playing on the lake side of the levee, two boys about the same age as Zoe and Hyacinth, the low sun burnishing their black skin with gold highlights. Wide grins and lots of fidget and goofus, a dog barking at them from below. They each had a square of cardboard ripped from some box, and were sliding on it down the grass of the embankment – sledding, Cree realized, in a land that had never known snow. It took a lot of paddling and kicking get to the bottom. Their cheerful abandon felt sparkling to Cree, effervescent.
"I was also too curious to lynch you outright," Fitzpatrick went on. "I looked you up in the American Psychological Association roster. Ph. D. from Duke, master's from Harvard, won the prestigious Haverford Fellowship. Which, I have to tell you, turned me green – I applied for that bastard but was deemed unworthy. Fact is, I'm dying to know how you got into parapsychology. From your resume, I wouldn't think you were the type."
"I don't think there is a 'type.' I had a paranormal experience nine years ago that changed my outlook dramatically. My life has been something of a… a n ongoing field study to understand it ever since."Cree stopped, surprised at herself. Ordinarily, she didn't go anywhere near her own upheaval. Fitzpatrick must be a great psychoanalyst, she decided, his sincerity and unjudgmental interest easily drawing out his patients.
"You going to tell me what it was?"
"It's complex," Cree said lightly. "Maybe some other time."
Fitzpatrick nodded, the good shrink knowing when not to push further.
They had come to a street that cut through the levee. The grassy mound was capped by a cement wall of the same height, mounted with two massive steel doors that were open now but could obviously be slid shut on their steel tracks. Fitzpatrick led her down the slope to the flat lawn, then along the street to a road that ran close to the shore. A steady stream of cars and pickups rolled by, people driving with windows open, music racketing.
"Saturday evening, good weather," Fitzpatrick told her, "this is the place to see and be seen. Cruise along here, go back around Robert E. Lee Boulevard, and do it again."
They turned left to continue along the shore road and soon came to a bridge over a little river. All along the bridge, people of all ages and colors stood trailing strings into the water, lounging against the railing, laughing and chatting, listening to music from boom boxes.
Fitzpatrick saw her curious look. "Mudbug season," he explained."Crawfish. Regional delicacy. Just tie a turkey neck to a piece of string. Crawfish latches on, you just pull him up and toss him in your bucket. Or you can put down a little wire cage. After a couple of hours, you've got enough o f ' em to go over there and steam up a pile and eat 'em fresh."He gestured to the wide sward of grass ahead, where several families sat around grills mounted with big pots. Cree caught a whiff of swampy smell in the charcoal scent.
Once they had crossed the bridge, Fitzpatrick led her right to the water's edge, where a seemingly endless concrete breakwater went down in steps to the waves six feet below. Scattered along it, people sat with their lines in the water. Down close to the waves and mostly out of view of the general melee, lovers cuddled discreetly in the slanted sunlight.
Fitzpatrick had dug his hands deep into his pockets again. "So you want to tell me about Lila's experience?"
Cree told him the story, starting with the shoe tip and ending with the attack by the boar-headed man. She didn't interject any of her own opinions.
"Holy shit." Fitzpatrick looked shaken. "Damn! That poor woman."
"That wasn't all of it. Lila ended her narrative very abruptly. She's still keeping something to herself."
"Do you have any idea what?"
Cree did – Lila's body language and her sudden compassion for Jack suggested what came next. But she'd wait until she heard it from Lila before jumping to conclusions or sharing assumptions. Cree just shook her head. Instead, she told him about the polygraph scroll and how it corroborated Lila's trauma.
Fitzpatrick was staring at the lake's western horizon, his forehead troubled, his hands still in his pockets. "Got to get those brain scans," he said. "Soon." He shot a sideways glance at Cree. "So -don't take this the wrong way – how do you explain ghosts that are seen by just one person and no one else? Without explaining it as a psychopathology?"
"Most ghosts are seen by just one person. It's just a matter of variations in sensitivity. Not so different from other senses – any audiologist will tell you that some people hear higher sound frequencies than others. Wine tasters have verifiably more acute senses of taste and smell."
"But, I mean… a boar-headed man, a talking wolf? Are those typical denizens of the otherworld?"
"There's only one world – this one. It's just bigger and stranger than we know."
Fitzpatrick nodded, accepting the point.
"And the answer to your question is, I've never encountered creatures like Lila's. I'm not sure what to think. Except that, as I'm sure you know, reality and psychology mix and recombine in an endless number of ways." Cree went on to explain the idea of epiphenomenal manifestations.
Again Fitzpatrick nodded, but his brows knit in doubt or puzzlement."I don't have any background in your field. Zero. I've never had a paranormal experience. I haven't any idea what your diagnostic methodology is, or what your models of psychology are. I'm coming at this from a strictly psychiatric paradigm, and from here the whole thing of ghosts doesn't make sense."
"What exactly doesn't make sense?"
Fitzpatrick took his hands out of his pockets long enough to grapple the air as if trying to wring the right words from it. "Any of it! I mean, what is a ghost?"
"It's a loose and imprecise term for a set of phenomena we don't understand well. There are many forms of ghost, and they probably manifest through many different mechanisms. But most are not so much beings as they are experiences. Essentially, you might say, most ghosts are mental constructs."
"Mental constructs! So, really, you're saying that ghosts are psychological in origin." Fitzpatrick sounded relieved at being back on more familiar turf. "Meaning you're basically a… a practicing psychiatrist who specializes in patients who think they're seeing ghosts!"
"Not at all! Ghosts are completely and objectively real. I mean that in the sense that life and self and the world are also mental constructs. There's a hidden link between material reality and consciousness, a link between mind and world. And that's what I'm most motivated to explore."
He looked at her with keen appreciation. " 'A hidden link between material reality and consciousness' – God, I love it!" Then sobered and turned thoughtful. "That's really the… crux, isn't it? The place where philosophy, psychology, medicine, and religion converge. Even physics, nowadays…"
Cree nodded. Fitzpatrick caught on fast.
"Okay," Fitzpatrick went on, "so ghosts do have an independent existence outside the minds of those who perceive them – "
"Yes and no." Cree smiled at his confounded expression. "Most ghosts appear to be residual, fragmentary elements of human consciousness – intense memories, traumas, feelings, or just drives – that continue to manifest independently of a living body. They may require a living human consciousness to manifest themselves."
"But not all ghosts?"
"Some are more fully integrated personalities, more complete beings. And I suspect there are other entities as well, I'm not sure what to call them. There's a possibility that some ghosts are rare forms of geomagnetic phenomena. Some might be manifestations of nonhuman entities -most cultures have at one time or another believed there were spirits of the earth, or of animals, or local gods of one kind or another. But I don't know."
"But you've… experienced… ghosts. The more human variety -you've met them?"
"Often."
"Oh, man." Fitzpatrick shook his head, frustrated but grinning. "So what's it like?"
"Different every time. It takes a while for me to get there. Usually, it starts with moods or vague feelings. I'm highly synesthetic, so the… impressions or sensations come across to me as sounds of a particular color, or tactile feelings of a specific odor, or, I don't know, maybe vertigo that's like citrus mixed with sadness – not easy to translate. Further along, I experience their specific thoughts, sensations, and emotions. In some cases, it can be just like a conversation."
That was it for Fitzpatrick. Abruptly he turned aside and threw himself down on a bench that faced the rippling expanse of water. At a picnic table forty feet behind him, a family was busy with a big pile of steamed orange crawfish, breaking the little lobsters apart and bickering noisily. Sprawling at one end of the bench, Fitzpatrick gestured for Cree to sit also, and then laughed at himself. "Okay. I'm out of my depth. I've run out of academic terminology. I have to go back to when I was a kid. Question: If ghosts are just these… pieces of a personality, sort of floating loose, how come they wear clothes? How come they even look like human beings?"
Cree chuckled with him. A childish question, and a good one. "They don't always. But if they do, it goes back to their being mental constructs. And for better or worse, our sense of ourselves is that we have human forms and wear clothes. How do you picture your mother – the way she looked when you were a kid?"
Fitzpatrick thought about it. "Yeah. I sure don't picture her without clothes."
"Now take it a step further – picture yourself back then."
"Yup. I'm a little freckly guy wearing blue corduroy overalls. Damn!" Fitzpatrick thought for a moment. "Okay, another question. How come they hang out in particular places? Why do they haunt particular houses? Why don't they just, I don't know… drift off into space?"
Again Cree laughed. Fitzpatrick had set this up nicely – being honest about his skepticism but truly trying to understand, easing it with good-natured self-deprecation. He'd set this up as a game of twenty questions, not an interrogation.
"Well, maybe a lot of them do just dissipate. But most ghosts are highly localized, haunting a specific place such as a house, or even just a specific room of a house, and nowhere else. My colleague Edgar Mayfield has a theory that localized haunts happen because the ghost came into existence in a particular geomagnetic field, a particular locale. He thinks an intense human experience can make an electromagnetic imprint on a local field, like a recording that can be played back only in that environment."
"You sound a little dubious about such a mechanistic explanation."
He was perceptive. "Yeah. I tend to think of it in existential terms. As a mental construct, especially one reenacting a specific experience, a ghost thinks of itself not only in terms of a body image – male or female, with a specific face and wearing specific clothes, for example – but also in terms of a particular physical environment. Usually it's the perimortem environment – the place the person was in at the moment of death, which is a very poignant moment. But often crucial memories replay at that moment, too, so it can be confusing for me. If you had died suddenly back at the Wan-ens' house, and your consciousness perseverated in some way, you would most likely manifest elements of their living room along with your own body image. A ghost is just an echo of a whole being's experience at a crucial moment, complete with an environment, smells, sounds, objects, thoughts, feelings. I experience the ghost's world as much as the ghost itself. That's because 'world' is in fact equally an artifact of consciousness."
Fitzpatrick was nodding thoughtfully, and Cree got the sense he had not only followed the line of reasoning but also appreciated its ramifications. "So this is really a very… metaphysical field. And that's the part that attracts you, isn't it? You're after the big truths."
Cree smiled, pleased to be understood.
"And you tune in, um, you sort of commune with the ghost. You share its experience?"
"The ghost and the people who perceive it. They reveal a lot about each other. It's not so different from standard psychoanalysis. People who come to you for treatment have unresolved issues that trouble them, right? As a psychiatrist, you're a detective of the subconscious – you go and try to figure out what's unresolved or dissonant between their emotional world and their situational world, what's missing, what's longed for and refused, and so on. And when you identify that issue, you help patients resolve it in a way that lets them get on with their lives."
He chewed on that for a moment. "If you're that sensitive, don't you also pick up on the experiences of living people? Doesn't a living person generate a powerful field?"
"Oh, yeah." Ruefully.
That troubled him, "So… what's the difference between a ghost and a living person?"
Cree felt suddenly jarred. She glanced up to see that the landscape had dimmed around them, the sun now partly eclipsed by distant buildings and trees, the light beginning to drain out of the sky. She looked at her hands and found them knotted on her lap.
"I'm still working on that one," she said.
"Seems like a kind of lonesome perspective," he said quietly. Very serious now, he watched her closely. "And all this connects back to your own, personal paranormal experience, doesn't it?"
Cree bit her lips and nodded.
"I read in one of your bios on the Internet that your husband died some years ago… Did that influence your – "
"It's not something I'd like to discuss right now." Strangely, though the pain was there, she didn't recoil that hard from his probing.
He nodded, aware that he'd pushed it too far. But he didn't labor through apologies, just let it go easily, gracefully. And Cree had to admit he must be a damned good shrink. Maybe even a decent human being. Throughout their conversation, his presence had seemed to her as open and clear as the breezy day. Now, appropriately, it became somber, the same hue as the band of blue-black deepening at the horizon.
They sat for a while longer, watching darkness infiltrate water and sky. Cree felt her melancholy grow, but it was a serene moment, and she let it take her. She thought it spoke well of Fitzpatrick that he could sit and share silence with a virtual stranger, as if they'd both found the same state of mind. The sense was reaffirmed when, without either saying anything, they got up simultaneously and started back the way they'd come. The park was quieter now, the crawfishers mostly gone from the bridge.
"You've given me an enormous amount to think about," Fitzpatrick said. "But there's a lot we haven't discussed, and we should meet again to compare notes on Lila. And to figure out where this goes from here. For my part, I'd like to hear your tape of her narrative, and then tomorrow I've got to see if I can move up the schedule for her cranial diagnostics. How about you – what's your next step?"
"I'm going to spend some time at the house. Probably go over there at around ten tonight."
"Huh," he grunted. "Want company?"
That surprised her, and it took her a moment to sort through it. "Dr. Fitzpatrick, I can't rationally defend everything I do or think or experience. My job requires just as much method, and just as much empathy, intuition, and guesswork as yours does. What I'm saying is, I don't mind company, but I have no need of distracting or dogmatically skeptical company."
He mulled that over as they climbed the levee again and headed back along its top toward the Warrens' house. The breeze was chilly now, and lights had come on in most of the houses. Cree wondered what Lila was doing. Talking to Jack? Cooking dinner for the two of them? Washing the dishes? How would she be girding herself to face another night in a world turned so deceptive and uncertain?
They shuffled down the landward slope onto the street, where Fitzpatrick stopped to find his key ring and beep his car doors open. Cree went to her car, found the audiotape of Lila's narrative, and came back to where he stood flipping his keys into the air and catching them.
"How about relatively open-minded, very curious company?" he asked.
Cree looked at him as he waited for her reply. In the mixed streetlight and sunset glow, he looked amiable, gently irrepressible, and, yes, relatively open-minded. Face it, a cute guy.
But she shook her head. "Some other time, I think. Tonight, I'd better go alone." She tossed the tape to him and he caught it easily. She started to walk away and then found herself turning back toward him. "Hey," she called, "thanks for showing me the lake and the levee. It really is lovely."
He nodded, waved, and dipped into his car. When he drove past her, he gave her a little good-bye beep on his horn.