Unbroken Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Epilogue

  Postscript

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Paula Morris

  Copyright

  New Orleans, March 1873. The Civil War is over, but the spirit of the city has been broken. New Orleans is dirty and disease-ridden, a place of political and racial violence, looting, and unsolved murders. The city is on edge, ready to explode.

  The docks are still busy, loading and unloading heavy cargoes of cotton, sugar, and coffee every day. The river is crowded with steamers, its levee piled high with cotton bales. When the wind blows, pinches of cotton drift through the air like snow.

  New arrivals flock to the city, hoping to make their fortune. Many end up starving and poverty-stricken. Many succumb to yellow fever, the mysterious and feared disease ravaging the city. Some are robbed — or worse — in one of the many dark alleys or hidden courtyards of the old town.

  One damp spring day, as a misty evening begins to settle on the city, a teenage boy hurries away from the dock. He wends his way through the streets of the Quarter, speaking to nobody. His face is pale and sunken; his trousers — ragged at the hems — are flecked with cotton dust. More than one of the city’s legions of pickpockets notice the way he pats his jacket every few steps. With every nervous pat, he gives himself away: They can tell that he’s carrying something precious, something unfamiliar in his pocket. Perhaps it’s money; perhaps it’s something valuable he can sell or trade. Perhaps it’s something he’s stolen himself.

  He crosses the broad, muddy expanse of Rampart Street, dodging carts and carriages, soldiers on horseback, washer-women balancing bundles of laundry on their heads. A dark-haired, burly man follows him, taking care to keep up.

  On the far side of Rampart, they both disappear into Tremé, the old neighborhood built decades earlier for New Orleans’s free people of color. They’ll both end up in a small house on St. Philip Street, fighting over the tiny piece of hidden treasure in the boy’s pocket.

  Neither will make it out alive.

  The first time she saw the boy with blue eyes staring at her, Rebecca didn’t think much of it. This was New York. The city was full of boys with big attitudes and no manners.

  Rebecca was waiting for her best friend, Ling, at the Fulton Street Fish Market. She’d just plodded through thirty endless minutes of a piano lesson. Rebecca hadn’t practiced enough this week, she knew, and her fingers had felt cold and leaden.

  “Uninspiring,” her teacher had said, handing Rebecca the sheets of music at the end of the lesson. “I hope to see some improvement next week. Otherwise you’re just wasting my time and yours.”

  Now Rebecca was wasting even more time, standing around like a lost tourist just so she and Ling could go eat what Ling called “yummy chowder in a bowl made of bread” at some nearby restaurant. Rebecca lingered near a big sign that described the fish market and docks back in the nineteenth century. She wished the wind weren’t so icy and willed Ling to hurry up.

  Rebecca wasn’t sure how long the boy with blue eyes had been standing there — just a few feet away, leaning against a cast-iron lamppost. But once she realized he was staring, Rebecca felt incredibly self-conscious. His eyes seemed to bore into her in the most brazen way.

  She tried staring back at him, to shame him into looking away, but that didn’t work. When she caught his eye, the boy just smiled. He was good-looking, she thought, in a gaunt, emo-ish way, and his eyes were as intensely blue as the East River on a sunny day. But Rebecca had no intention of getting into a conversation with some random stranger.

  He’d probably come there trying to scam tourists, or maybe he was planning on asking her for money. He didn’t look any older than seventeen or eighteen. In his scruffy dark jacket and trousers, he looked much more ragged and unwashed than the stockbroker types marching by en route to their waterfront lofts, ties flapping in the wind. There was something desperate about him, something pathetic, even as he continued to smile at her.

  She was relieved to spot Ling clattering toward her across the cobblestones.

  When she glanced back to look at the boy again, he’d disappeared.

  “Did you see that guy who was standing over there?” she asked Ling. “He was staring his eyes out at me.”

  “Was he cute?” Ling wanted to know. “If he’s cute, you can take it as a compliment.”

  “And if he isn’t cute?” Rebecca linked her arm through Ling’s, shivering as the wind from the river cut through her thin jacket.

  “Then he’s a freak or a pervert, of course!” Ling laughed.

  Ling was short and athletic, her glossy black hair cut into a sharp bob, and her explosive laugh was infectious. Rebecca had been friends with her since elementary school, when Ling was the smallest girl in their second-grade class and Rebecca was tall and awkward, all sticking-out knees and elbows. These days they weren’t so freakishly different in height, but Rebecca’s long brown hair was as wayward and wavy as Ling’s was smooth and straight.

  Ling wanted to be an architect, and Rebecca wasn’t sure at all about what she was going to do with her life — though clearly, becoming a concert pianist was not an option. She’d been thinking about studying art history in college, even though she was only taking the subject for the first time in school this year. Rebecca had always loved going to the Impressionist rooms at the Met, and listening to her father’s stories about the lives of the artists: wild Van Gogh in the sunflower-filled fields of Provence; Gauguin in barefoot exile in the South Pacific; Degas, with his fading eyesight, sketching ballerinas in dusty Parisian rehearsal rooms. Ling didn’t share this fascination; she said Rebecca was just way too nosy about other people’s lives.

  “This chowder in a bread bowl better be good,” Rebecca warned her friend now as they scuttled off together, buffeted by gusts of wind. “I’m freezing.”

  “OK, OK — it’s just over there! We’ve walked past it a hundred times.”

  They both went to Stuyvesant High School, way downtown. They knew this part of the city pretty well, though Rebecca had lived all her life in the same apartment on the Upper West Side, overlooking the trees of Central Park.

  Well, she’d lived practically all her life in New York. This time last year Rebecca had been living in New Orleans with her aunt Claudia and cousin Aurelia, in their falling-down little house across the street from Lafayette Cemetery in the Garden District. She’d even attended school at the snooty Temple Mead Academy, where a girl named Helena Bowman and her clique ruled the roost. Rebecca hadn’t really made any friends at that school. But she had befriended someone she’d met at the cemetery: a girl named Lisette.

  Who happened to be a ghost.

  There was no way Rebecca could explain Lisette to her friends in New York, not even Ling. Who would believe her? Who would believe the story about a terrible curse on girls in the Bowman family, because one of the Bowmans had murdered Lisette back in 1853? Who would belie
ve that the curse could only come to an end when a seventh Bowman girl died on the eve of her seventeenth birthday?

  And how could Rebecca ever begin to explain the shocking secret she’d learned in New Orleans: that her real name was Bowman, not Brown. That she and the awful Helena were actually cousins, and that either she or Helena would have to die for the curse to end?

  Now that Rebecca was back in New York, she sometimes wondered if the whole thing had been a dream — or a nightmare. She tried not to think too much about the night the curse ended, when she had almost died on the steps of the Bowman tomb. But it was impossible to forget. Lisette had helped her run away, and a boy named Anton Grey — the other person Rebecca had connected with in New Orleans — had helped her escape from the cemetery. But there’d been no escape for Helena. The stone angel that loomed over the Bowman tomb had crashed to the ground, killing Helena instantly.

  That meant the curse was over, and Lisette could finally rest in peace. But Rebecca still felt guilty and sad and confused about everything that had happened in New Orleans. She was still in touch with Anton, and really wanted to see him again. But Rebecca wasn’t sure she wanted to return to that haunted city any time soon. And she was a hundred percent positive she didn’t want to deal with anything involving ghosts and curses ever again.

  Rebecca’s dad was waiting for them in the tiny restaurant, at the end of a row of brick houses in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. He’d been in the area anyway for work, so Ling had suggested Rebecca invite him along. Rebecca appreciated how well her dad got along with her friends — he never seemed stuffy or unapproachable like some other parents she knew.

  The three of them sat by the window, at a scrubbed wooden table, and they each ordered chowder as an appetizer. But later, whenever Rebecca thought about this particular evening, she could barely remember what else they ate. One minute she was unfolding her napkin, and the next she was looking straight into the piercing blue eyes of that strange boy.

  Through the steamed-up window she could see his pale face, out there in the cold street, gazing in at her. Rebecca let out an involuntary squeak and almost knocked her water glass to the floor.

  “Are you OK, honey?” her father asked. All Rebecca could do was shake her head and stare at the window. One moment the boy was there, his angular face bright as the moon, and then he was gone.

  “What is it?” Ling peered at the steamy window, following Rebecca’s gaze.

  “I thought … I thought I saw someone,” she stammered. There was no point in trying to explain it all now. Her father would just get worried if he thought some creepy guy was stalking her. “It’s nothing. Just my imagination.”

  Throughout dinner Rebecca kept glancing up at the window in case the boy came back. She was so preoccupied wondering who he was, and why he seemed to be following her, Rebecca didn’t realize that her father was asking her a question.

  “Rebecca?” Ling looked excited. “What do you think?”

  “About what?”

  “About us renting a place in the Quarter during your spring break,” said her father, pushing his plate away. “Ling could come with us.”

  “The Quarter?” Rebecca’s brain was struggling to catch up. “You mean, the French Quarter? In New Orleans?”

  Her father gave her a concerned look. “Too soon?” he asked quietly.

  Ling frowned at her. “But it’s, like, almost a year since you left,” she said. “Don’t you think it would be fun?”

  Rebecca nodded. She didn’t trust herself to speak. Fun wasn’t quite the word that sprang to mind.

  “My company has just signed a tech contract with the city council,” her father was saying, “so I need to go down there soon anyway for meetings. And I thought maybe you might want to meet up with your friends.”

  “I don’t really have so many friends there,” Rebecca mumbled. Ling looked at her as though she was crazy.

  “Hello? What about Anton? Tall, cute, rich, texts you all the time? The one who helped you with that house-rebuilding project in — where was it again?”

  “Tremé,” Rebecca’s father told Ling. Rebecca was glad he was doing the talking, because just the mention of Anton’s name suddenly rendered her tongue-tied.

  “Why the Quarter?” Rebecca asked. Her father was looking at her so expectantly, she had to say something, even though her head was reeling — New Orleans, Anton, the boy outside the window …

  “Your Aunt Claudia knows a place we can rent there. Tremé is just a short walk away, Ling, if you want to see the house Rebecca and Anton helped fix up. Maybe there are some other projects you girls could help with. There’s still plenty of rebuilding work to do.”

  “It would be my absolute dream spring break,” Ling enthused.

  “I think it would be good for us as well.” Her father shot Rebecca one of his trademark Meaningful Looks. “Starting over again with the city, in a way. A fresh start. Able to come and go without … without fear of anything.”

  “I guess,” said Rebecca, and she tried to smile when he squeezed her arm. However hard she tried to forget, her father was also a member of the Bowman family, born and raised in New Orleans. He’d lived in self-imposed exile for years, but Rebecca knew that he missed it — the way she would miss New York if someone told her she could never come home again.

  “Fear … hmm, that’s a good point,” Ling said, ripping a bread roll apart. “My parents will probably say there’s way too much crime down there.”

  “We’ll watch out for you.” Rebecca’s dad stared down at the tablecloth. Rebecca wondered if he was thinking about the other kinds of dangers she’d had to confront in New Orleans last year, ones Ling could never imagine.

  But that was all in the past now. Maybe her father was right. A fresh start, in a different neighborhood, with Ling by her side for support — that might be the best possible thing. And going back to New Orleans meant seeing Anton again. Just thinking of him washed another wave of nerves through Rebecca’s body. She’d never met any guy in New York who was anywhere near as smart and interesting and — she had to admit — as handsome as Anton Grey.

  When her father stood up to pay the bill, and Ling went to the bathroom, Rebecca tapped a quick text to Anton into her phone: going 2 NOLA 4 spring break with dad + my friend Ling. But the message failed; the reception in the restaurant was terrible. She’d have to go outside.

  Rebecca wriggled into her coat and darted out the red front door. It was drizzling, so she huddled under the small awning, shoulders hunched, resending her text. When she looked up, the boy with blue eyes was standing right in front of her, close enough to touch.

  “Please,” he said. His eyes were the deep blue of the Chagal painting her father liked so much in the Met: They were intense, almost unnatural. The boy was tall, like Anton, but his face was as white as chiseled marble, and he sounded foreign — British or Irish or something.

  “What do you want?” Rebecca hissed, edging toward the restaurant door. Just because he was good-looking didn’t mean this guy wasn’t dangerous.

  “You don’t know me,” he said, still staring at her, “but I … I’ve seen you before.”

  “Are you following me?”

  “No — please!” the boy pleaded, and he stepped forward, one hand outstretched as though he was going to grab her. “I’m not talking about last week. I mean last year, or even longer ago. You were down in New Orleans. I saw you with Lisette.”

  Lisette. The name hit Rebecca harder than the cold wind. The trees that lined the street, budding their spring leaves, whispered the name over and over: Lisette, Lisette, Lisette.

  Nobody in New York — apart from Rebecca’s dad — knew about Lisette. It had been ages since anyone had said her name out loud. Rebecca’s stomach twisted; she felt short of breath.

  Something surged through her — a sickening dread, charged with the electric tingle of excitement. This boy knew Lisette. He knew her name, at any rate, and he was saying that he’d seen Reb
ecca with Lisette. So did this mean he was a ghost, too? No, that was ridiculous. It was impossible.

  “I saw you with her on St. Philip Street, in Faubourg Tremé,” the boy went on, his eyes huge in his face. “It was November. Not the November just passed. The year before.”

  “Uh-uh.” Rebecca shook her head, averting her own eyes to avoid the boy’s intense gaze. She could barely speak. How could he possibly know all this?

  Every November, on the anniversary of her mother’s death, Lisette had made the long pilgrimage on foot from Lafayette Cemetery in the Garden District to the streets she’d known as a child in Tremé.

  “You were with her that day,” the boy was telling her, and Rebecca’s feet felt frozen to the spot. Every word he said clanged in her ears, loud as cathedral bells. “I saw you with her, holding her hand.”

  Rebecca bit her lip, still saying nothing. She’d had to hang on tight to Lisette’s hand that day, because that was the only way she could see the other ghosts of New Orleans. If she’d dropped Lisette’s hand, the ghost world around her, thronged with the dead of many centuries, would have disappeared from sight.

  “I saw you with her,” the boy said again, a desperate edge to his voice. Rebecca’s heart thudded. Nobody could have seen her that day on St. Philip Street, because when Rebecca held Lisette’s hand, she disappeared from view. She was invisible, just as Lisette was invisible to other people. They could walk through the crowded streets of the city, unseen and undetected by anyone. Anyone, that is, except other ghosts.

  As though he understood what she was looking for, the boy inched back his jacket. His white shirt was stained with a huge dark splotch of what might have been ink, or was more likely blood.

  Rebecca gasped. The day she had walked through the streets of New Orleans with Lisette, she’d seen dozens of people with similar stains sullying their clothing, or clotted and mashed on their skin. They were wounds, Lisette had explained — from knives, gunshots, chains, blunt instruments. If someone was murdered, they kept walking the earth as a ghost. The signs of violent deaths were visible everywhere in the ghost world. This boy looked as though he’d taken some mortal blow to the stomach.