Mrs. C. sniffled. “They love me?”
“Yes.” She wrapped her arms around Mrs. C. and rested her head on Mrs. C.’s shoulder, hoping Mrs. C. wouldn’t start hollering for her to leave. She continued sending Mrs. C. vibrations of love. “They love you very, very much.”
Mrs. C. laughed and then sniffled. “I believe they do. I feel it.”
“Here, Mom. Here’s a tissue,” Jason said.
“Thank you.” She blew her nose.
“I’m sorry I yelled at you,” Mrs. C. said to her. “I don’t know why I did. I was just crazy.”
Mrs. C. stood up. Jason gave her a huge bear hug. Mr. C. got up from the recliner and joined his family, wrapping his arms around Mrs. C. and Jason.
This was good. Their love would strengthen the positive energy in the room.
Jason looked at Jackie and motioned for her to join the group hug.
She may as well. No use adding any negative thoughts to the room.
She gave Jason a quick side hug.
“Thank you, Jackie,” Jason said.
She couldn’t believe she did it. The whole situation had been so surreal. She never would have imagined that this was what she’d be doing with her so-called talent. It was kind of cool, though, being able to help a friend. She smiled at Jason and hugged him once more.
Chapter 42
Saturday, Jackie worked from nine in the morning to two in the afternoon at Photo Junction. Since she had learned how to zip herself up from negative emotions by thinking of Babu, dealing with customers wasn’t that bad. Only once in a while would a newbie come in, and she’d have to show them how to take the memory card out of their camera and use the photo selection machine. She typically picked up their insecurities about using technology and found herself anxiety-ridden. But today, she was able to block that out. And she was still glowing with the thought that Jason’s home life was back to normal—well, as normal as it could be. She was happy she had been able to help.
She closed out the cash register and handed the afternoon shift over to the next capitalist slave. Then she headed to the coffee house where all was well in the universe.
Walking down the sidewalk, she scanned the area for Sandra and her team of hooligans, but then she remembered that Sandra was wheelchair bound and no longer a threat to her. Not that this made her feel any better. It made her feel worse. Her hospital visit hadn’t helped. Everyone still thought she had put a curse on Sandra. They avoided her and whispered behind her back.
Inside the coffee house, the smell of espresso beans and the rich caramel and cranberry colors on the walls soothed her soul.
She ordered a mocha frappé—low-cal of course—but she still had the barista add the whipped cream, her all-time favorite soul food. Heading toward the couch by the window, she spotted David, dressed in blue jeans and a T-shirt. He was sitting at the back table by the paintings from local artists, a backpack at his feet.
Her stomach tightened. New plan.
Before she could turn for the door, David glanced up from his paper.
Doh!
He stood up. “Jackie, how are you? Come, sit down. You have time, yes?”
“Uh, no. Actually, I was just going to mosey on home.” Her heart was pounding as if to a heavy-metal drumbeat. Get a hold of yourself.
“How are Russian lessons going?” he asked.
“Good, good. Although, I’m speaking Russian like a two-year old. ‘Jackie want soup. Soup is hot.’” Dork!
His upper lip slightly curled as he smiled. Another attractive feature, damn him. “At least you are communicating,” he said.
“Yeah, but not enough to really talk to Babu.”
“Sadis, pozhaluysta.”
The Russian flowing from his lips mesmerized her, and she stood there with her mouth open, like a dope.
“Sit, please,” he said.
“I… I know what you said. You kind of caught me off guard.” She slid the rickety wooden chair from the table and sat across from David.
“How have you been? Staying out of the hospital? Yes?”
“I’m trying. I was only there to visit a… friend.” She looked away from him.
“A very kind gesture.”
“Yeah.” If only it were taken that way. If David knew what people thought of her, he wouldn’t be talking to her. He would have avoided her when she walked in the door.
“Have you thought about what I said? About using your gift for good?”
“You’re wanting me to come back to church, aren’t you? How’s that going anyway?”
“Our prayers and exorcisms still have not helped. I believe God is waiting for you.”
She shook her head.
“Have you asked Him to help you with your gift?”
“Uh, no.” She assumed asking Madam Sophie for help didn’t count. “I have used my gift to help Jason.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Jason?”
“My friend. Best friend, actually.”
“Oh,” David diverted his eyes to the table. “Does he wear dark clothing like you?”
“Well, yeah. So do my friends Zeta and Trish.”
He nodded and was silent for a bit. “Do you still believe in God, Jackie?”
She swallowed. “Yeah, I guess do. I just don’t think He wants anything to do with me.”
“He does.”
“Seriously, He doesn’t.”
David tapped her black fingernail. “So, you have chosen the dark side?”
She curled her fingers, hiding her fingernails in her palms, leaving only her thumbnails exposed. “I’m not on any side. I’m, like, in the middle.”
“A fence-sitter?”
“No. I…”
“Perhaps if you chose a side, God’s side, your life would be easier. I would love to see you every week at church.”
“Believe me. I don’t belong there.”
David laid his hand on top of hers. Her stomach did a double flip. His energy was strong—positive and powerful. “Never believe you are an evil person,” he said. “You have good heart. I feel it.”
She slipped her hand from his and wrapped her fingers around her icy mocha. The cold, sweaty cup cooled her hands—and her insides.
Feeling someone’s gaze on her, she turned to see Jason staring at them. He was standing at the counter by the cream and sugars. From the hurt look on his face and the tension in the room, she sensed he’d been standing there a long time. “Jas,” she said nervously. “Join us.” Great. She just made it sound like she and David were a couple.
Jason sauntered over to their table, never taking his eyes off David. Of all the days for David to wear jeans and a T-shirt.
“Jason. This is David Davidovich. He’s the seminarian I told you about.”
David reached out, but by the look on Jason’s face, he didn’t want to be friendly at all. Instead of shaking David’s hand, he snatched a chair from a neighboring table and sat on it backward, resting his folded arms on the back of the chair.
“Don’t let me interrupt.” Jason looked at David and then at her.
She moved her lips to explain, but nothing came out.
“I was just telling Jackie, that she needs to choose a side,” David said.
“Oh?” Jason said.
“Good or evil.” David met Jason eye-to-eye.
“Jackie’s fine the way she is,” Jason said. “She has special powers, you know.”
She dropped her forehead into her hands and closed her eyes. “Please don’t go there,” she mumbled.
“Did you tell him how you used your powers to heal my house?” Jason asked.
She took in a deep breath and then sighed. “I kind of mentioned it.”
“She said something about using her gift to help you,” David said.
“She used her power to—”
“Stop,” she said. “All I did was touch the recliner and the fireplace and neutralized the traumatic energy.”
David’s brow wrinkled.
; “Jason’s family had a problem in their house. It was caused by a traumatic event. That solar storm we had a few weeks ago made the energy from the event stronger. I simply neutralized the negative energy by sending it energy of the opposite polarity.”
David fiddled with his coffee spoon. “And you learned this from?”
She squinted. “Madam Sophie.”
David shook his head. “I am worried about you. She is probably not helping you out of the goodness of her heart. She wants you to be like her.”
“And I’m worried about you. You’re beating yourself up because your prayers aren’t working, when all you have to do is…”
“What?”
She reluctantly finished her sentence. “All I would have to do is touch the iconostasis and neutralize the energy.”
“And this power you have comes from where?”
“From… me. Honest, there’s no hoodoo involved. It’s just the manipulation of energy.”
“So you are just going to touch the iconostasis and fix it all by yourself—without the help of God or Satan?” David asked her.
She nodded. “That day I had my first vision, I thought I heard the candlesticks cry. I think it’s related. Besides the fire, has there been any other traumatic event in church?”
“I would not know. At least not in the past two months, the time I have been there. We would have to ask Father Dmitriev.”
“That’s out of the question.”
David scraped the coffee cup handle with his thumbnail. “Perhaps you are right.”
“I’ll prove to you that what I do isn’t evil. That it’s all scientific. But you absolutely have to promise that, if I come to the church, Father Dmitriev won’t be there.”
“I don’t know how you are going to prove it, but I will give you the benefit of the doubt. I believe that God has a purpose for you and that is why the iconostasis is charred. I will make sure Father Dmitriev is busy elsewhere.”
“Good. Oh, and since you like to bargain, if you could do one more thing for me. Visit a friend of mine, the one in the hospital, and tell her what you think of me. The good stuff.”
“Fair enough,” David said, “but if your science project doesn’t work in church, which I do not believe it will, could you do something for me?”
“What?”
“Return to church.”
Ugh, that backfired. “Sure,” she said, reluctantly. It was going to work. It had to.
“Then, I will ask Father Dmitriev to take my rounds at the hospital. It will have to be on Thursday.”
“Okay. Jason and I will do some research. I’ll call you to confirm we’re ready.”
“You mean I get to go too?” Jason asked.
“Of course, Jas. We’re friends. Remember?”
“Yeah, that’s right. Good-ol’ friends. Chums for life.” He patted her arm like she was his football buddy.
“All right, Jas. Knock it off.”
Jason unstraddled the chair and stood up. “So we get to play Ghostbusters, huh?”
“Yeah, except there aren’t any ghosts, just stray energies,” she said, just to make sure David understood they weren’t doing witchcraft.
“Jackie,” David said, “there are lost souls, the unbaptized, who have not made their way to heaven. There are also demons loose on earth. You should not be so dismissive of these possibilities.”
She sighed. “Sure. Just let Jason and I do some investigating. I’ll call you when we know something.”
Outside the coffee house, Jason said, “You’ll call him? You have his number?”
“I have his business card. That’s typically how professional people advertise their services.”
“A seminarian?”
“Yeah. He visits the elderly, translates like he did for Babu, serves as a mentor to the neighborhood youth—you know, stuff like that.”
Jason didn’t hold the truck door for her, and he was sulking when they climbed inside.
“Come on. Get real. This guy’s going to be a priest. He’s the last kind of guy I’d ever fall in love with.” Her stomach churned.
“Yeah, I guess you two are just friends—like you and me.”
“Yeah, I guess we are. Besides, he’s too old for me. I think he’s like twenty-four or something. I’m only seventeen.”
“Almost eighteen.”
“Yeah, but not until spring. He’s, like, old.” Which made him even more attractive to her, but she didn’t tell Jason that.
“So how are you going to prove it’s all scientific?”
“Well, David believes that Satan has no power in the church. Therefore, if I do heal the iconostasis, he’ll have to believe the energy to heal came from me.”
Chapter 43
In the library, at the research computers, Jason rolled his chair close to Jackie. “So where do we start?” he asked, his sad, puppy-dog eyes begging for her love.
Maybe if he didn’t act so pitiful, it would work out between us. What happened to the friendship they used to have? They definitely needed a break from each other. Maybe that would bring him back to his senses.
She rolled her chair closer to the desk and placed her fingers on the keyboard. “Well, I was thinking we could search the news archive on the Ravenwood Gazette website for Holy Resurrection. Maybe something significant will pop up.”
Jason rested his elbow on the desk and leaned his head against his hand. He pinned his gaze on her. She wanted to tell him to knock it off, but then he’d get hurt, and he’d be doubly broody all day.
She entered “Holy Resurrection Russian Orthodox Church” into the search text box and then pressed enter. A long list of archived articles appeared on the screen. She scrolled through them and read the headlines. Most of the articles were reports on church events: bake sales, benefits, special masses, marriages, and baptisms. The only article about an unusual event was of the fire. She clicked the headline and skimmed the article. All the information in the article was everything she already knew: Stephanie Yarrow caught her sleeve on an altar candle while cleaning the church, and the candle tipped over, catching the iconostasis on fire.
“What I can’t figure out is, how… well, what I felt when I touched the candlestick, how it relates to the charred iconostasis.”
Jason rolled his chair even closer to hers. Their knees touched. “What’d you feel?”
“It’s not important.”
“Obviously it is, if you’re researching where it came from.”
She swallowed. “It was like, desperation. Like a hunger for someone.” She lowered her eyes.
“For David?”
She threw her hands up. “For I don’t know. The feelings were just there, and I picked them up.”
“I can tell you where those feelings came from.”
“It came from the candlestick.”
“Sure. And you just happened to be at the church with David?”
“He set me up. He refused to convince Babu to stay in the hospital unless I promised to come to the church.”
“He knows Babu?”
“No. Well, now he does. He was translating for her. He was on the translator’s call list at the hospital.”
“What else went on while we weren’t talking?”
“Enough! It’ll teach you not to get pissed at me and run to Trish.”
Jason wrinkled his mouth. His silence allowed her to think.
“I wonder if Stephanie’s grandparents still live in town. They raised her. I don’t remember her mom and dad. I remember Stephanie spent a lot of time in the church, and she wasn’t quite stable mentally. Grandma used to talk about how Stephanie was thirty-something and still living with her grandparents. I hope that doesn’t define mentally unstable, because it’ll probably happen to me.”
“You think we should talk to them?”
“Actually, I was thinking of talking to the house.”
Jason looked at her like she’d totally lost it.
“As in, pick up emotions and images.”<
br />
“Yeah, right. Do you know where her grandparents live?”
“I haven’t a clue. Maybe my mom would know.” She noticed the research librarian at the desk across the room paging through a huge book, a pair of square-framed glasses resting on the bridge of her nose. “Or, we could ask the research librarian. Put our parents’ tax dollars to work.”
At the research librarian’s desk, she asked, “Can you tell us how to find someone’s address?”
The research librarian inserted a bookmarker into the open book and then closed it. “We can search the Yellow pages database.” She poked the bridge of her reading glasses to push them closer to her eyes, and then she positioned her fingers on the keyboard. “What’s the name of the person you’re looking for?”
“Stephanie Yarrow,” Jackie said.
The librarian’s eyes grew wide behind the lenses of her glasses. “She’s dead. She died in that church fire.”
“Yeah. We know.”
“So why do you want to know where she lives? She obviously doesn’t live there anymore.”
“I wanted to talk with her grandparents. I remember she used to live with them. Me and my friend Jason are doing a report for our journalism class.”
“Well, I guess I can just tell you. We don’t have to look it up. They live at 9416 Orchard Street. I remembered their address from staring at it so many times when I was your age. I used to fantasize about living there.”
The librarian jotted the address down on a piece of paper and then handed it to Jackie.
“Thanks.” That was too easy.
***
The house on Orchard Street was a huge, cobalt blue Victorian with a yellow front porch. Definitely a looker. Jackie rang the doorbell. She hadn’t planned what she was going to ask. She really just wanted to get inside the house. Mosey around. Pick up some of Stephanie’s emotions. See if they matched what she had sensed in the church.
Possessed (Pagan Light Book 1) Page 18
