Free Belinda by Anne Rice

Saint Charles Avenue with all the dark olive green shutters bolted, and the picket fence just holding back the oleanders so they don't fall right down on the front pavements. It took two of us just to push in that front gate."
    "No place like home," I said.
    '"And then I enter this dark cold hallway with the grim bronze pirate's head on the yule post, and a big shadowy oil painting of what was it, Robert E. Lee-?"
    "Lafayette," I said.
    "-Those ceilings must have been fifteen feet high, Jeremy, and those old cypress floorboards, enormous. I went up and up that Scarlet O'Hara staircase. The old gas light fixtures were still in the walls!"
    "They didn't work."
    "-And just a tiny little chandelier dangling in the upstairs corridor-"
    "It was murder changing the light bulbs."
    "-And there she was, the Cynthia Walker, in that cavern of a front bedroom. That wallpaper, Jeremy, that old gold-leaf wallpaper! A set designer would have given anything to get his hands on that old paper. Yet even so, it was like being in a tree house when you stood there and looked through the open slats of all those blinds. Nothing but the oak branches and the green leaves. If you peeped out the front, you could barely see the traffic moving down there, just little specks of color and that old wooden streetcar rocking past. It gave off a roar, like the sound m a sea shell."
    "Write another book, Alex, a ghost story."
    "And there she was in her big old-fashioned bed with the oxygen tanks beside it, the oxygen tanks right in the middle of all this gold wallpaper and mahogany furniture. Big highboy-wasn't it?-with the curly Queen Anne legs, and one of those old French armoires with the mirrored doors ?"
    "Full of moth balls."
    "You can't imagine how it looked to me, that room. And the book jackets and photographs and the mementos everywhere, and those tinkling wind chimes, those dreary brass wind chimes-"
    "They were glass, actually-"
    "-And this tiny little woman, this mite of a woman, sitting up against all these embroidered pillows."
    "Silk."
    "Yeah, silk. And she was wearing a lavender silk negligee, Jeremy, beautiful thing, and cameos. She had cameos on her neck and on her fingers, and on her bracelets. I never forgot those cameos. Said they came from Italy."
    "Naples."
    "And a wig, a gray wig-I thought she had a lot of class to have a wig like that made, natural gray and with a long braid of hair, nothing modern or false for her. And she was so gaunt, I mean, there was nothing left of her."
    "Eighty pounds."
    "Yet she was so lively, Jeremy, so sharp, and you know she was still pretty!"
    "Yes, still pretty."
    "She had me sit down and drink a glass of champagne with her. She had the silver ice bucket right there. And she told me how on Mardi Gras days the king of the Rex parade would stop at every house along Saint Charles Avenue in which a former king lived, and the former king would climb up a ladder to the new king's throne on the float, and they would drink a glass of champagne together while the entire parade waited."
    "Yeah, they did that."
    "Well, she said that it was like having the king of the Rex parade come to drink champagne with her to have me come to New Orleans to see her. And, of course, I told her what a great writer she was, and what a privilege it had been to play Christopher Prescott in Crimson Mardi Gras and how well the premiere had gone and all. She laughed and she said right out that you'd written every word of it. She didn't even know who Christopher Prescott was! Oh, how she laughed. She said she hoped he was a gentleman, this Christopher Prescott, and that he drank champagne with the king of Rex during the Crimson Mardi Gras. She said you'd done the last two books under her name and you'd be doing others, lots of others. Cynthia Walker was alive and well in your hands. Cynthia Walker would never die. She was even leaving you her name in her will. You'd be doing Cynthia Walker books forever, saying you'd found the manuscripts