by Bryn Donovan
“I’ll need at least few days,” the psychic said. “These things take it out of you. I need to be operating at full strength to get rid of that bastard.”
“Plus you’ve been bashed in the head,” Andi said. “We know you need time to recover.”
“I just don’t understand it,” David said. “Don’t you follow the Catholic thing? The power of Christ compels you, all that?”
“What, you learned that from The Exorcist?” Morty asked.
“Yeah, obviously.”
“Well, there’s a little more to it than that. But you should also know from the movie that whoever does these things, they’re running the risk of getting hurt or killed.” Morty grunted. “Or worse.”
“Worse?” Andi echoed.
“All I’m saying is, you’ve got to bring your A game.”
“But you’re willing to do it,” David said.
“It’s what I do.”
David found himself admiring this guy more all the time. “Thank you. So, you take some time to recuperate. What else do you need?”
Morty cast a sideways glance at Andi before replying. “I’m going to need backup.”
“No,” David said flatly. He’d been horrified to see Andi come completely unglued. This was the smart, tough woman who’d ignored his initial refusal to hire her…God. He’d been right to refuse; he should have stuck to it. What had he dragged her into?
She was the best thing that had ever happened to him, but the reverse could hardly be true. And what if this asshole demon architect decided to drop heavy objects on her head?
He realized both Andi and Morty were staring at him. “No way,” he clarified. “Andi’s done with this.”
“David!” she said, incensed. “You don’t get to decide things for me!”
“I get to decide who goes in and out of my house, don’t I?”
“You gave me a key,” she shot back.
“Andi, don’t do this. You scared the hell out of me back there.”
“Well, you’ve been scaring the hell out of me, remember?”
David hung his head. As if I could forget.
“I know it’s not really you, it’s the house,” she said. “But it’s there. It’s in you. You’ve got to let me help get rid of it. Because I want to keep being with you. And I can’t if it’s like this.”
He took her hand. It was cold; he wrapped his other hand around it. “Andi, I want to be with you too. I want that more than anything. But can we let Morty get someone different for backup? Can we just keep you out of harm’s way?” He looked over at the psychic. “There are other people you can call, right?”
Morty looked dubious. “I know one guy, but he’s in Utah.”
“I’ll pay him for travel and whatever. I’ll make it worth his while. Can you call him?”
The older man shook his head. “Actually, no. He’s sort of off the grid. It’ll take me some time to track him down.”
“Gloria’s going to love this,” David grumbled. “For all the time and delays, I probably should have just bulldozed the place.” He snapped his fingers. “That’s what I should do!”
Morty raised his eyebrows. “Expensive. But probably effective.”
“Crap, but I can’t.” He sagged back on the sofa. “The place is a historically registered landmark. You don’t just get to bulldoze one if you want to.”
“Oh, yeah, great,” Morty said. “Thank God someone’s trying to preserve these bastions of evil.”
“Sometimes they un-register a historic place,” Andi pointed out.
David frowned. “Really?”
“Yeah.” She smothered a yawn. “My dad did a bunch of work on this old Catholic church. But four years later, the place got condemned for asbestos and they tore it down.”
“I may as well look into it, as a backup plan,” David said. “I mean, what the hell, right? But in the meantime, you’ll try to get hold of your friend in Utah?”
“Like I say, it’s iffy.” Morty turned his attention to Andi. “You know, the second time around, it would be easier. You’d know what to expect, you’d be prepared—”
“I said no.” David’s voice was quiet, deadly serious.
Morty held up his hands and said, “All right, we’ll leave it. For now.”
David had something else to ask the man. He didn’t like to do it. It felt like an admission of failure. “Morty, listen. Is there anything else I can do to…you know, to keep from being—”
“Possessed? I can give you some of that vervain oil. Wouldn’t hurt to wear a pentagram.”
“What, like Wicca people wear?” Next to him, Andi laid her cheek against the back of the couch. He needed to get her home.
“Early Christians wore them first,” Morty said, “to ward off demons.”
Andi drew out the red beaded necklace David had noticed the other day. “My grandma left me this rosary for protection. Do you think it really helps?”
Morty drew closer to look at it. “It might. It’s a sacred object. And the more she used it, the more power it would have.”
“She was really religious. She went to Mass every day.” Andi turned to David. “Maybe you should wear it.”
“You keep it.” He liked the idea of her having some extra protection. “I’ll get a pentagram.”
Morty set his mouth in a grim line. “But it isn’t a fail safe. Not even close. Don’t let your mind drift. And if you feel anything pulling at you at all, you’ve got to fight it like hell.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
“Personal papers for Edgar Girard.” The woman at the historical society handed David a large box. “Sorry it took so long to dig them up. They sort of got misplaced.”
David nodded. He’d called about them a little while back, but apparently the cataloging system at the society was somewhat less than perfect.
He sat down at the table and set the box in front of him, then paused for a moment. Edgar Girard the man had left these papers behind, but now he was a malevolent spirit—a demon who got stronger with every person he sucked into the abyss of violence and madness. Back then, Edgar had inhabited a body. Now he inhabited a house like a black hole that wanted to swallow David whole.
A musty smell emanated from the box when David lifted the lid. He expected that, as with other research sessions, he would find trivial papers, receipts and account-books, reminders that life had always been and always would be composed mostly of the mundane, reminders that could be depressing or comforting, depending on one’s point of view.
A book with a dull black leather cover lay on top of the stack of the papers inside the box. David carefully lifted it out. When he opened it, the split spine crackled.
He scanned the first page full of tiny, angular handwriting in fading blue ink. He remembered telling Andi before that he was used to fine print, and it was true, but this would still be a challenge.
On the inside cover, letters spelled out, “Edgar Girard, 1877.” David’s glance shot back over to the dense text of the first page and he saw dates written in.
It was the architect’s journal.
David looked back at his notes on Edgar. Eighteen eighty-seven: three years after he murdered his friend Clarence Boyd.
Several entries discussed the house in great detail. The odes to the slope of the roof, the carving on the mantel that echoed a detail in the Palace of Versailles and the Pythagorean proportions of the dining room all confirmed David’s impressions of the architect. The man had been completely and utterly obsessed with his masterpiece.
Even the entry about the birth of his son focused on the mansion. My heir, George Edward Girard, entered the world today. Perhaps he shall inherit my genius, but only time will tell. At the very least, he shall inherit my masterpiece. No word about his wife.
What an asshole.
Another entry consisted of three short lines:
This house is ours.
This house is ours.
This house is ours.
* * *
The chairman at the Commission for Chicago Landmarks, a plump woman in her fifties with a spiky shock of blond hair, gestured for Andi and David to take the seats opposite her desk.
“So, you’ve inherited the Girard Mansion,” she said to David. “I’ve pulled up our file on it.” She gestured at her computer screen. “It’s a beautiful property. Let me guess. You want to make it into a bed and breakfast.”
“I want to demolish it,” David informed her.
The woman’s smile disappeared.
Andi jumped in. “The house is structurally unsound.”
After a lot of research on how it was possible to get a registered landmark destroyed, they had come with this excuse. It wasn’t really a lie: until they put at least a beam in the living room, the first floor posed a hazard.
David seemed fairly sure that, given enough incentive, they could find an engineer who would attest to greater flaws than that…and by incentive, he meant money. As David had pointed out to her, this was Chicago, after all.
The chairman turned her false-eyelash-fringed eyes on Andi. “And who are you exactly again?” she asked in a sweet voice.
“I’m a contractor. I’ve been working on the house.”
“Oh, I see.” Her tone of voice made it clear to Andi that she didn’t think Andi really had any business there. The woman turned back to David. “So the house failed the structural inspection?”
“Yes. And it would cost a fortune for me to repair it.”
“That doesn’t give you the right to tear it down, Mr. Girard.” She looked back at the image of the house on the screen. “Really, why are you in such a hurry?”
“I’m a lawyer.” David was dressed like one today, in a blue dress shirt and tie. “I do personal injury stuff all the time. Right now, any neighborhood kid could wander into that house and have it collapse on him and I’d be sued for everything I’ve got.”
“I can understand why you would be especially concerned, given your profession. But there’s no record of structural concerns on this property.”
David rolled his eyes. “It hadn’t been inspected for twenty years. The place is a death trap.”
The woman pursed her lips. “Ordinarily I would say that maybe the commission could purchase the property from you. But the truth is, we’re in the red. Just like everyone else in this town these days.”
“I know it’s possible to get permission to demolish a property like this. You allowed the Bryce-Fellows House to be demolished not so long ago.”
“Which was a tragedy,” she snapped. “The Bryce-Fellows House had serious tornado damage. One wall collapsed.”
“I have a wall that will collapse. Look. All I need to know is where to start.”
She squinted at him. “All right. I’ll walk you through it.”
“Thank you.”
She turned to her computer and clicked through a few pages, then pulled up a file, printed it out and handed it to David. “This is the initial form you fill out to begin a request for demolition. You attach any pertinent data—in this case, it’ll be your structural engineer report—and get it back to us. After that, we schedule one of our people to come out and do an initial assessment.”
“How long is that going to take?” Andi asked.
“She’s gone to part-time because of budget cuts. I’d say maybe six weeks.”
“Okay.” David sounded as though he were gritting his teeth. “Then what?”
“Well, if your initial request for demolishment is denied—and I’ll tell you honestly, I can almost guarantee it will be—then that’s that.”
Andi’s spirits plummeted.
The woman went on to say, “If it’s accepted, we then have a public hearing, which gets announced well in advance, to see if there’s any local opposition to the demolishment. If there is, then sometimes the decision is reversed. But if you somehow get through all that, then you submit a demolishment plan to this commission, which now includes a plan for salvaging and re-using building materials—”
“Okay,” David interrupted, holding up a hand. “Start to finish, about when do you think I can get this done?”
She folded her hands on the desk and gave him a smug look. “I’d say about fourteen months to never. And I’d bet on never.”
David spread his hands in a gesture of disbelief. “This is stupid. It’s my property.”
“You’re a lawyer. You know how these things work. And in case you haven’t figured it out, Mr. Girard, it’s our job to keep these places from being demolished. These properties bring history alive.”
He glared at her. “Yeah, well, history isn’t supposed to be alive. I want history dead.”
Andi needed to intervene. “Now, David,” she said in a cheerful tone, “I think maybe she’s right. Maybe you’re worrying too much about this place.”
He stared at her. “What?”
“You know, I just think because you’re a lawyer, you imagine the worst-case scenario,” she went on to say. “Now that I think about it, it might not cost that much to fix that first floor.” She turned to the chairman and said in a chatty way, “The downstairs parlor needs some support. But you know, I think maybe we could put a beam in there that would do the trick.”
The woman smiled at Andi’s apparent change of heart. “It’s worth it to explore all the options. People today just want to tear things down, and sometimes fixing them isn’t as hard as they think.”
David cocked his head, apparently trying to figure out what she was up to.
“Think about it,” Andi said to him. “If we just do that, I bet it would make, like, a cute bed and breakfast or something. That is such a good idea.”
“Right,” he said.
“Come on, David, let’s go,” Andi said, grabbing his arm and almost hauling him out of his chair. “It was really nice to meet you,” she said to the commission lady. “I think you’re right—we have to preserve history. You’ve really put that in perspective.”
“Well, that’s what we’re here for,” she said.
Once the elevator doors closed, David turned to Andi. “What are you thinking?”
“David, it’s hopeless. They’re never going to let you demolish it.”
“I guess you’re right.” David rubbed his forehead. “What now?”
“I think we should burn it down.”
“We can’t burn it down!” David protested as the elevator doors opened.
The woman standing in the lobby looked alarmed.
“Let’s talk outside,” he muttered. Once in the car, he told Andi, “First of all, burning things down without permission? That’s against the law.”
“We can be sneaky about it.”
He laughed, without humor. “No. You don’t understand. They have experts who can tell if something’s been burned down on purpose, okay? People try it all the time to collect the insurance money. They always get caught!”
Andi nodded, feeling stupid now. Of course she’d heard of that kind of fraud. “I forgot the house was insured.”
David got a strange look on his face. After a moment he said, “You know what, actually? It’s not.”
“What?”
“The insurance was only through the end of October. At first, I thought maybe I could get the house sold by then. I figured I’d extend it later if I needed to.” He shook his head. “With all that’s been going on, I just forgot.”
“So it wouldn’t be insurance fraud,” she said.
“It doesn’t matter, though,” David said as he turned the keys in the ignition. “You can’t just set houses on fire. It’s still illegal. I mean, how would we do it without getting caught?”
“I don’t know,” she said as he backed out of the parking space. “I guess it was a stupid idea.” She had been so excited about it, and now she felt dejected.
“Let’s just hope Morty’s friend from Utah comes through,” David said. “Hey, in the meantime, we’ve got a wedding to go to.”
* * *
&nb
sp; As the sun set over the nearby Applebee’s, David and Andi drove into the parking lot of the chain hotel, where Andi’s family was hosting the reception.
The wedding itself hadn’t been so bad. True, David had been the only non-Catholic there, so he’d been stranded alone in the pew when everyone else filed up to take Communion, but that wasn’t such a big deal. Andi’s parents had been pleasant to him, if a little guarded. Andi seemed so happy to have him there that he wished he’d never balked in the first place.
“Okay if I take off my tie?” he asked as he shut off the engine. “I’ll leave the jacket on.”
“I don’t think it matters.”
He pulled off the tie and tossed it in the backseat. “Thanks. You looked great up there, by the way,” he added.
“I look like a piece of pumpkin pie.”
“Well, you do look delicious,” he said, and was happy to see her grin. He knew she didn’t exactly love the strapless, floor-length burnt-orange taffeta number. But she’d spent the day at the salon, getting manicured and pedicured and having her hair done up, and to David she looked red-carpet ready.
They stepped out onto a gravelly parking lot. David extended his arm to her so she wouldn’t turn an ankle in her dyed satin heels.
“We don’t have to stay forever,” she told him as they went inside. “Just until they cut the cake.” In the half-full banquet room, Andi looked across the tables and said, “Let’s see if we can figure out where you’re supposed to sit.”
“Oh, yeah.” David recalled he would be sitting with strangers. “You’re at the big table in the front, huh?”
“As soon as dinner is over I’ll escape and come sit by you.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Hey, David.” She lowered her voice. “I just want to tell you something.”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t say Jesus.”
“What?”
“You know how you say ‘Jesus’ all the time? Just remember, a lot of my family’s religious.”
“Oh.” He nodded. This was a pretty good tip. “I’ll watch it.”
Andi circled an empty table, looking at the name tags, then moved on to another one where a middle-aged couple sat. “Oh, here you are, David!” she said, pointing to a name tag in front of an empty chair. “This is my Aunt Carol, my mom’s sister and Uncle Phil. They’re from Cleveland.” She introduced David simply as “her date,” and David shook both of their hands.
