Chapter 10
Chapter
Ten
Jewish funerals took place within twenty-four hours of death, so I couldn’t wallow for long, no matter how much I wanted to.
Mordechai’s funeral sucked.
Everyone said the right words, but all I heard was the silence where he should have been.
The prayers, the platitudes, the murmured condolences—they slid off me like rain on concrete.
I kept my arms wrapped tightly around myself, gripping my elbows as if I could hold in everything that was threatening to spill out.
I knew what I wanted to do next—the only thing I wanted—though I hated myself for it.
I wanted to read Mordechai’s newest case file.
The one that discussed the big house with the flat roof.
There were six incidents of possession in that file.
Six. A family that seemed to haunt its own photographs.
What had happened there to make demons feel so welcome?
And why did it matter to me?
Mordechai had been the exorcist, not me.
He was the one God worked through. I was a stunt double at best, a fraud at worst, sneering at victims like Iris even as I tried to save them.
The memory of my own voice in Mrs. Klein’s house still made my stomach turn.
But that file, this case that wasn’t even my case, was all that I could hold onto, with Mordechai gone.
It was the only thing that gave structure and form to the world.
It was all I had left.
The street to Mordechai’s place was already crowded when I turned down it. Cars lined the driveway under the heavy trees. Sad faces going in, sad faces coming out. I didn’t want to see any of them. I didn’t want another ceremony where I didn’t belong.
Head down, lost in my thoughts, I swung around the corner and collided with someone—a tall man in a long black coat. Not an old man, I thought. Not a boy. Too close. Usually, I was more careful.
“Sorry,” I muttered.
“No, no, my fault,” he said easily.
I looked up, and up a little more—and froze. For the first time in days, the thing inside me went silent as the world snapped into razor-sharp focus. A face from a grainy photograph stood in front of me, suddenly real.
“It’s you,” I whispered.
I was super subtle like that.
“Sorry?” the guy asked with a mild smile, sounding exactly like I expected he would. His voice was high and clear, as open as his expression, and hinted at education and wisdom and more than a little weariness, despite his hope.
I…he was kind of cute, actually.
With that traitorous thought, something inside me woke up. Something with claws and teeth and rage, sending bolts of jagged pain punching through my lungs, my stomach, burning bile climbing up my throat. What the fuck is this?
My mouth twitched despite the pain. The voice inside me was asking what this was…not who.
Because we both recognized the boy-man from Mordechai’s case file.
The pain finally escalated strong enough to make me gasp, and I lurched away from the guy and hurried up the driveway, now forced to act like I was actually going inside to sit shiva.
What was he doing here though?
I’d called in advance to find out if attending Mordechai’s funeral was even allowed for someone who wasn’t Jewish, and some kind-voiced person had assured me that, of course it was, had even explained how to show my respects in full without looking like a complete moron.
But I’d never intended to do any of it. All those clumps of dirt raining down on Mordechai’s casket had been more than enough. I suppressed a full-body shiver.
“Hey, I’m sorry,” the guy piped up behind me, startled and hopeful. Too loud. Too hopeful. “Are you Delia Thompson?”
My traitorous feet stopped moving, rooting me to the ground as the guy came back up to me. This time, I looked at him with nothing but clinical interest, and the pain winked out.
He wasn’t a college kid anymore, Mordechai was right. He was a straight-up adult—hell, maybe he was older than me. Or maybe grief had aged him beyond his calendar years—
Who gives a fuck? Answer the question.
“Oh,” I said, trying for a smile as I shoved down my still-fuming inner voice. “That’s who I am, yes. I—I don’t think we’ve met?”
“Gosh, no. I’m sorry.”
Gosh?
The guy held out a hand, and despite his sophisticated haircut, expensive clothes, and intelligent eyes, he seemed adorably awkward. His eyes were blue—startlingly blue, like open skies and cool waters and…and something I didn’t think I’d ever find my way back to again.
My gut tightened sharply with a warning jab of irritation, so I forced my focus down to his hand, anything but his eyes.
The hand was long and sturdy and tanned, with slender fingers.
A good hand. A strong hand. Warming mine on this suddenly far colder day.
His hand was too warm, actually, too steady.
And there it was again—that flicker of story I shouldn’t know, shouldn’t want to know, waiting under his skin.
“I’m Maxwell Graham,” he said as we shook. “Max, really.”
I blinked up at him and pulled my hand away. From the way he’d said it, clearly, Maxwell here had thought I would recognize his name, but I didn’t. I didn’t know anything about him or his disappearing family in the giant house with the flat roof and the horses all around.
“Um,” I said, going for innocent. “Were you a friend of Mordechai’s?”
“What? Oh.” Max blushed, and finally, I did allow myself to focus on his face. He was as cute as he’d been in Mordechai’s photos—tall and lean, his angular features cut with sharp cheekbones and softened by a slightly full mouth.
That mouth tightened as he spoke again. “Sorry, no. I—well, I’ve been trying to meet with him. I looked him up on the internet, found him, I mean, from articles he’d written. Stories about him.”
I nodded. I wasn’t really into the whole body of work about Mordechai available online.
He’d always been super careful not to mention me, and besides that, he’d been around for a lot longer than my decade and change with him.
Any of his articles I’d found online I’d already read in his office at one point or another.
“We talked once, on the phone, after I contacted him,” Max continued. “He seemed interested. I sent an entire package…” He looked at me expectantly. “Anyway, I hadn’t heard from him, and then I read online yesterday that he died.”
He sure did.
“Yes!” I said quickly, startled by the smugness of the voice inside my head. “Yes, that caught us all by surprise.”
Max glanced sharply at me. “They’re sitting shiva or whatever in there. I’ve never felt more lost in my life.”
That made me smile, despite everything. “It can be a little overwhelming. They’re very nice to people who aren’t Jewish, though, or at least they have been to me.” Suddenly, that anomaly struck me. “You’re not Jewish?”
His smile was self-deprecating. “Like I said, I’ve never felt more lost.”
“But then—why a rabbi?” It really was none of my business, but curiosity shot through me. “Catholics kind of corner the market on, ah, Mordechai’s specialty. And he wasn’t even a rabbi anymore.”
“Yeah, well. Let’s just say good help is hard to find.” Max’s words were light, but there was no mistaking the pain in his eyes. Pain and fatigue.
I recognized it, of course, the curious mix of defeat, bewilderment, fear, and horror, tempered with the faintest twist of hope.
Hope was always the most pathetic.
And it wasn’t surprising that Max hadn’t found anyone to help him in the Catholic church.
Demon possession was seriously old-school stuff, and not many of the current crop of Roman Catholic priests thought enough of it anymore to go through the training to become exorcists.
They also had so many rules. Mordechai hated rules even more than he hated demons, I sometimes thought.
He didn’t care who he helped. It was just what he did.
I cleared my throat. “I’m sorry he didn’t get back to you in time. He was a good man.”
“He was.” Max stared at me hard, seemed to come to some decision. “So, I was given your name by one of the ladies inside. She whispered it.”
I grimaced. “Whispered?”
He nodded, studying me with his clear light eyes, like I was some mystery he was supposed to solve.
My stomach clenched again. Good luck with that.
“I was standing there, not sure of whether I should sit or stand,” he continued. “She came up to me and asked me how I knew the rabbi. I said I’d contacted him for help—nothing more than that—and she patted my hand and smiled, and told me to find, well, you.”
“She’s got the wrong idea. Sorry.” I turned away as Max reached out for me, his hand connecting with my arm.
Once again, a jolt of awareness moved through me at the touch of his fingers, half dangerous, half reassuring.
I didn’t know this Max or his electrical current, but a part of me definitely wanted to find out more about him.
The other part, the darker, twisting part, wanted him to disappear into a hole. And the two kept changing sides.
“No, I’m the one who should apologize,” he said quickly. “I don’t mean to be rude, but my family’s in pretty desperate straits. Based on everything I read, I was convinced that Rabbi Mordechai could help.”
I sighed. “He probably could have helped. He was really good at…what he did.”
Max ducked his head, clearly grateful for my discretion, but I could sense his deep, overwhelming need as well.
His need for someone—anyone—to believe him.
How many times had Mordechai lectured me on this, on how the affliction of possession affected not only the individual possessed, but everyone around him or her?
That just as much care and grace was needed for the supporters as for the sufferer?
I sighed, trying to channel my inner Mordechai. “There are other people who do that work,” I said gently. “I’m sure if you go to Rockdale Temple and ask, they can help.”
“No.” His mouth tightened, and his expression turned sour.
“I’m tired of the search. Really tired. Half the ‘experts’ I’ve contacted think I’m making it up somehow.
And I’m convinced half of them are stringers for Paranormal Investigators.
We’re not a sideshow, we’re people. Good people.
And what’s happening to us is real.” He looked at me fiercely, as if I was going to disagree with him.
When I didn’t, he glanced away. “I—I don’t want to search anymore. ”
I bit my lip, nodded. “I totally get that.”
“But you can help.” Maxwell turned back, newly urgent. “That lady said you helped Rabbi Mordechai. That he’d chosen you or whatever to be his assistant, and that you actually went to her house on your own, and you helped. Can you come out and, I don’t know—take a look? At the…at what’s going on?”
“No,” I said firmly, never mind the thrill that leapt within me.
“No, really. I just helped Mordechai out on occasion. I didn’t do anything, not really.
” I shoved down my own objections to my false modesty.
Now was not the time for me to show off.
This guy needed help. Serious, authenticated, consecrated help.
“But that woman and her sister—”
“That was a mistake. I shouldn’t have done that.”
Max didn’t seem to be listening to me anymore, though.
The hope was burning stronger in his eyes, and I knew I’d been the one to fan it.
“Look—I just need someone to come out. To look at it. If you can tell me the right words to say, I can at least have a leg to stand on when I go find whoever Mordechai’s replacement is going to be. ”
He scowled up at the rabbi’s tidy house.
He probably had no idea about the office in the back, all of Mordechai’s binders.
A lifetime’s work in a clapboard shack with a rickety air conditioner and threadbare chairs.
“Assuming he’s going to get a replacement, that is. I’m going to have to start over.”
He looked back at me, panic rabbiting behind his eyes. “Do you know how hard it is to try to explain this to people? To tell them what’s going on?”
“Look, I’m sorry.” I made my words as gentle as I could, but the more I saw Max’s hope, his desperation, the more nervous I got. “I’m not your girl. I can’t help you with this.”
“Ten thousand dollars.”
The words were so unexpected, so bald and unvarnished in the soft morning air, that I could only blink at him. “What?”
“Ten thousand dollars.” He said it flatly, dismissively. “Just to come out and take a look at the house. Give your unprofessional, unauthorized opinion, but maybe write up something official-looking that I can take to a new…to someone who can help. That’s all I’m asking for.”
I couldn’t keep from staring. Ten grand. Rent for months. Gas. Food other than ramen and frozen peas, for at least a little while. The weight of it dragged on me harder than Max’s stare. “You’d pay me ten thousand dollars—”
“Yes. I’ve got the money, don’t think I don’t. I already explained that to Mordechai.”
“He didn’t take money for his work.”
“Well, he should have.”
Take the job.
The voice had stopped clawing at me, punching in fury. Maybe it had realized that Max wasn’t the enemy—he was a guy with demons to exorcise.
Take the job, it hissed again.
I shoved the inner voice down as deep as I could push it while Max’s smile veered a little more toward confidence.
“Think about it, okay?” he pressed. “I’ll be in town for another day or so anyway, trying to figure out what the hell to do.
I don’t even know where to go at this point, who to talk to.
Call me.” He handed me a slip of paper—an actual honest-to-God business card—that had his name and telephone number imprinted in gleaming raised letters.
I stared at it, dumbfounded. What was up with all the business cards this week? “You have your own card?” I managed.
“I also have ten thousand dollars. So please. Call me.”