Chapter 29
Chapter
Twenty-Nine
“You okay?”
Max was eyeing me over a breakfast of something that looked like a yellow cake made out of corn. He’d taken two pieces off the griddle and put them on a plate, a plate he was now handing to me. I took it and sniffed experimentally. Yup, corn.
“Why wouldn’t I be okay?”
“You were crying.”
The voice who answered wasn’t Max, but Sam, who sat at the kitchen table with his own plate of corn cake things. Sam had added about fifteen thousand calories of syrup and butter to the concoction, but he was staring at me. My face, anyway. Still didn’t want to meet my eyes.
Clever boy, Sam.
“You heard me crying all the way from your room?” To tell the truth, I felt lighter than I had in days.
Weeks, actually. I was pretty much the scum of the universe, after all.
I might not have killed my mentor and very best friend in the whole world directly, but I sure as hell hadn’t done anything to save him.
That made me at worst, a murderer. And at best, a murderer.
I put the plate down on the table, sliding into my seat.
“You cry really loud.”
“Sorry about that.”
Max came to the table with his own plate, but I knew he could sense that something was different as well. I wasn’t just keyed up, I was furious. Furious and ready to go blast something to hell. “What is it I’m missing?”
“She cried.”
“I got that, Sam.” Max’s gaze never left mine. “I didn’t hear you.”
“God doesn’t trouble the sleep of the blessed. No offense intended, Sam.” I offered the boy a hard smile, and he dropped his gaze to his corn cakes.
I turned to Max. “I think we should get started today with something easy, don’t you? Something that needs to be done anyway. It’d be a help to your folks.”
“Okay.”
I didn’t say anything more, and he glanced toward Sam.
Understanding flickered across his face, understanding and a sort of queasy awareness that things had just taken a very decided turn.
Fortunately, we got through the rest of the meal like three normal people having a typical breakfast. Max’s parents were already gone, their car missing from the lot.
Grandma was out on the back porch. There’d been yelling, I remembered.
A lot of yelling. I’d heard all of it distantly, after I’d awoken in the middle of the night.
I wondered if Max had heard any of that, too.
We left after we cleared the dishes. “Where to first?” Max asked, and I held up a couple of water bottles I’d pulled out of the cabinet.
“Church. We should probably call the Bells too.”
It was another two hours before we got to the lake cottage.
Because we’d driven to the Episcopalian church in town first, we had Max’s car, so we approached the house the more direct way.
Took longer, but that was just as well. Max was already freaked out.
He’d stayed quiet until now, but the words couldn’t keep from bubbling out, a bottle stoppered too full.
“This is seriously the way you did things with Rabbi Mordechai?” he demanded, his tone patently disbelieving. “You walked into churches and stole their holy water?”
“We didn’t need to steal it.” I should have been more freaked out with the whole theft thing, too, frankly, but I had too much anger built up inside me.
If a minister had come out and interrupted us while we were dunking our bottles in the fonts, I think I might have thrown something heavy and holy at him just to work off my nervous energy.
“Mordechai was a rabbi. You don’t really retire from that.
That gave him instant access to every sort of religious tool he needed.
” I wasn’t going to use the word ‘prop’ anymore.
“And he wrote out those house blessing things?”
“Mezuzahs, yeah. But I don’t have any of those. And plus, I’m not a rabbi. So that wouldn’t work so well coming from me.”
“Well, what are you then?”
I looked up at Joe’s little cottage, squatting on the hillside, for once in accord with my innermost thoughts. “Pissed.”
We slammed the car doors perhaps a little too loudly, as if we were both eager to announce our presence.
Max strode ahead. The house was unnaturally still, and he must have been thinking the same thing I was, because he looked over his shoulder and smiled at me.
“I think I’d be just fine if we walked into this place and it was completely empty. ”
He opened the door, and of course, we weren’t that lucky. In fact, a terrible funk came out of the kitchen, and he groaned, heading that way. “That’s not evil specters. That’s milk. Goddamned Emily.”
I stood in the middle of the front room without him, looking out over Joe Bell’s domain. I knew what we had to do, but it would take hours. Still, might as well get started. When Max walked out of the kitchen toward the front door, I called back to him. “Prop it open.”
The lake cottage wasn’t a large place—three bedrooms on the edges with three central rooms besides—kitchen, dining room, living room.
All the bedrooms but Joe’s had been stuffed completely full of catalogs and cardboard boxes and crap.
The kitchen, living room, and his bedroom were partially clear, but I wasn’t worried so much about the cardboard. I was worried about the ducks.
“Get rid of anything paper to start, unless you want to throw out all his carvings.”
“You think we should?”
Yes. I shrugged. It wouldn’t be as easy as that, though. “Some of them seem pretty. Are they any good?”
“Oh, merciful heavens.” The sound of a woman’s voice turned us both around, and I squinted. I’d never met Mrs. Bell, but she almost looked like her picture. A little more worn, a little more frazzled. Like all of us. “Oh, Max, your family’s beautiful cottage—”
“We can clean it all later.” I startled everyone with the cold command in my voice. “Right now, focus on this room. It’s the main problem.”
Max made his introductions, and I smiled as he upgraded me from “friend” to “someone who does house clearings.” Mrs. Bell’s eyes widened, but she didn’t object.
Meanwhile, I pointed to the piles of ducks, barely viewable past the mountain of catalogs and old cardboard boxes. “Any idea if those are any good?”
“Well, I…I just don’t know.”
Mrs. Bell examined the pile, and her expression turned reluctant. “Some of these are actually quite well done, once you get them away from the trash.”
I was afraid of that. “Right. Well, take all the best ones outside. Kitchen, living room, bathroom, bedroom—anywhere Joe actually lived. Leave the crappy ones.”
Max rubbed his jaw. “Should we clear out all the rooms in the house?”
“Not like these. The other bedrooms? Opening the doors should be enough. Show Mrs. Bell.”
They both nodded, comforted by my certainty, the tasks I was setting them. That was good. Props, Rabbi had said. Well, maybe props had their purposes after all.
I picked up another box of paper, and Mrs. Bell scrambled to her feet, following Max into the back of the lake cottage.
The first door he tried was a closet, the second apparently another bathroom—one Emily hadn’t been taking baths in.
“Oh, my God!” was all I heard. A rapid succession of doors opening and closing followed.
They came back looking a little stunned.
“Well, be glad there wasn’t an attic or a basement,” Max said.
“But where did he get all the paper?” Mrs. Bell protested. “Some of that—I mean, that had to take years to collect.”
I shrugged. “Is there a distribution center or Walmart anywhere close? He had to go somewhere to get his duck supplies. Wouldn’t take a man too long, if he was committed. And Joe was definitely committed.”
“I had no idea.” Her voice was hollow.
“C’mon. Let’s keep moving— Paper first, then any ducks we can find except the very best of them. Again, those you can put outside. The rest can just go in a pile.”
In the end, it took us four hours to clear the paper out of the main rooms of the house. I didn’t care about it being clean; I cared about it being more or less empty. By the end of it, I was satisfied.
And I hadn’t even done anything significant yet.
“You, um, want us inside the house or outside of it?” Max asked. I could tell he and Mrs. Bell had pow-wowed a little more closely over the past few hours. She looked at me the same way I’d seen too many people look at Rabbi Mordechai over the years: with hope, doubt, and desperation.
But I could feel the stirring inside of me, and what was more, the house could feel it.
Joe’s pile of suckier-than-average carved ducks sat in a jumble in the center of the room, so much less malevolent now without the stacks of crap everywhere around them.
The whole place had an air of overhanging murk, the windows cloudy with dust and grime.
Now that the walls had been cleared, I could see why Joe had blocked his view of them.
It was like my own room—Sam’s too—but a million times worse, because from the looks of things, Joe had never even tried to clean off the layers of swear words, occult symbols, crude drawings, the bubbling wallpaper and paint, or the bodily fluids.
Every exposed surface of the place seemed to pulsate with violence and outrage.
And it stank as if it had all been drawn on yesterday, not probably years ago.
“Poor, poor Joe,” Mrs. Bell whispered.
“The walls can be cleaned and painted. I’m a fan of Kilz,” I said.
Max looked at me oddly, but I powered on.
“As to what’s next, you can watch if you want to.
It’s not really that dramatic.” I blew out a short breath, pitching my smile to deliberately bright, almost manic. Fooling Max and Mrs. Bell, I hoped.
But they weren’t the only ones I wanted to deceive.
“I don’t know.” Max looked around. “This already feels kind of dramatic.”
I picked up the second item I’d stolen from the church.
I knew Grandma Kate back at the house had a bible.
Hell, she probably had six of them. But I didn’t feel right stealing one of hers.
And given how messed up she clearly already was, I didn’t want to think about what she’d done to the insides of those bibles.
“So, what are you going to do now?” Max asked.
I shrugged, hefting the bible, feeling its heat in my hands. “Use my props. That’s why I brought them.”
“But Joe wasn’t a practicing…anything, so far as I can tell. He wasn’t a believer.”
“Yeah, well. You see where that got him.”
I picked up the bottle of water, then splashed some on myself, savoring the burn. I wasn’t wholly good, but I was still in control of this situation. Holding the bible in one hand, I walked around the edge of the room, sprinkling holy water and reciting the rabbi’s benediction for a blessed house.
The windows started to creak a little. I smiled, ignoring how my fingers stung. I opened the bible and began reciting the psalm Rabbi Mordechai most often used for this purpose, Psalm 91.
Everything started happening pretty quickly after that.