“My nose was not snotty!”
“Everything all right,” Juanita gingerly asked, snooping through the kitchen doors. Behind her, Patricia’s mother was bobbing like a cork, straining to peek around Juanita.
“Just peachy,” Patricia said, exasperated. It occurred to her then that maybe everyone had left her and the girl alone like an affianced couple on their first date, hoping that they might warm to one another.
Everyone else was sold on the idea that this little girl was her daughter. Even Rachel, who had given birth to her. So why wasn’t she convinced?
As Juanita let the kitchen doors swivel back into place, Patricia said, “I just can’t. Not right now.” Her eyes misted over, and an old ache flared in her heart. Suddenly, it was hard to breathe. “I...I’m just scared. I...I don’t think I could survive losing you again.”
“I understand,” said the girl, standing now. “And I’m sorry I was disrespectful.”
At that moment, Patricia wanted so badly to open her arms wide and hug the girl, who, upon review, did look just like her own daughter, was just as beautiful as she remembered her. Was just as pretty as her pictures.
But she couldn’t. Not yet. “Honey, it’s been a crazy day for all of us. No need to apologize—”
A loud knock on the window.
Patricia turned and saw Chris’s horror-stricken face pressed against the glass. His mouth was open wide, his nose askew and mashed bloodless, and his tongue groped wetly like the foot of some desperate mollusk seeking purchase along an aquarium wall.
It was quite a hilarious sight. But she didn’t know whether to laugh or be terrified. This was Chris, after all.
The girl had now joined Patricia and was giggling at Chris’s antics.
“You’re streaking my window, surfer dude,” Patricia hollered.
“Just ignore him,” the face called down from the other window. “He’s an ignoramus.”
Chris was now holding the flashlight beneath his chin, an obvious attempt to appear more sinister. His mouth chewed at the glass, his words unintelligible.
“What?” Patricia said, a hand to her ear.
Chris answered with another flatulent round of words.
“What?”
Perturbed, Chris backed away from the window and yelled, “They’re almost here!”
“Hey, knock it off, wolf-boy,” yelled the face. “You’re scaring the ladies.”
Patricia looked down at the girl. “Who’s almost here?”
Although her eyes appeared quite concerned, she shrugged indifferently. “Monsters, probably.”
13.
Earlier that morning, Eli had developed the rolls of film he’d so far taken of his seventh angel. Now that they were dry, he began artfully cutting and pasting them to the Wall of Faces. After applying the last one, he stepped back and regarded the montage with pride, if not downright pomposity.
Melanie Sands was just as beautiful in black-and-white as she was in color.
Now his wings were almost complete. The next—and last—series of photographs would be taken of Melanie in the throes of agony, just before her short trip into the wide blue yonder. He’d tried every time to capture each girl’s terrified expression as they plummeted toward the surf and rocks, but had yet to pluck even one pose worthy of the Wall. Hell, he’d been lucky just to catch blurry glimpses of their little faces. He would click off a few of Melanie as she was falling, of course, but he wasn’t going to hold his breath. Still, he couldn’t help but feel that just one of those images—a portrait of consummate, mouth-wrenching, eye-bulging terror—would be worth more than all the other pictures combined.
He turned and stared at the second window. He’d finally gone ahead and dispatched another courier to assist in finding the Bently girl. And if he had to, he’d dispatch a whole gaggle.
He felt like a child on Christmas Eve night, one unable to keep his eyes from the fireplace, expecting at any moment to see the trickle of chimney ash.
His hands trembled, mostly the residual jitters from his earlier hours of meticulous sewing. But some of it was adrenaline. And before the day was over, he was confident that his circulatory system would be clogged with the stuff.
Who was this Bently girl? What had she become? And how did she manage to win a brawl with one of the couriers? Not even good old Arnold could best a courier. No mortal man could. Gamble had assured him of that. So, did that mean she wasn’t mortal? Well, his mentor had so far elected not to divulge Katherine Bently’s more intimate secrets. So, he would just let the questions be…for now.
Finally tearing his eyes from the window, he stepped inside the room where Melanie Sands lay prostrate, naked and bleeding. She was still unconscious, had passed out from the pain. Her mouth was taped shut. He studied her trunk for signs of breathing. Nothing. He peered closer, squinting. Still nothing. Instantly horrified, he knelt down and crimped her nostrils shut. Within seconds, her eyes flew open as her body jerked in response. He released her nose, recaptured his own stolen breath, then stood, his knees burning and a little wobbly.
“Christ,” he muttered.
A few hours earlier, with the help of his mother, Eli had finished sewing the wings into Melanie’s back. She had fought hard before succumbing to the torture, so much so that Eli had to employ Jacob to help hold her.
He stared down at her body and was struck with queer wonderment. Now, he thought, just what kind of sick pervert would sexually molest a child? He’d never so much as entertained the idea, and it turned his stomach to even imagine someone taking those kinds of prurient liberties.
Help the dwindling frog population, he thought, and instead put a pedophile in every biology class for dissection. Yes, that would do very nicely.
He reached down, grabbed a handful of hair, pulled her head up, and with one swift yank removed the tape from her mouth. “I have some wonderful news,” he said, releasing her. “In just a few hours, you’ll be crab bait.”
Wide-eyed and panting, she tried to roll onto her back. The pressure exerted on the wings tore at her sutures, and she squealed in pain.
“Hey, easy on those,” he said, thumping her ear with a knuckle.
She winced, but did not cry out.
“It takes us a long time to make these wings just right,” he lectured, “and I don’t need you thrashing about like some harpooned seal.”
Quietly crying now, she said, “Sir, where’s my mommy?”
“I know where she isn’t.” He winked.
“Am I going to die?”
He nodded. “Yes. Horribly so.”
“But why?” she beseeched. “Why?”
Eli turned to the window once again. “So that I won’t.”
14.
Behind the priest’s seven windows, Amy stood naked in her adult, angel form. She was on the outside looking in upon a cold, gray basement that was much more inviting than the unremitting crypt she’d just entered. The one this side of those equally macabre panes.
Halloween country.
Graffiti was literally strewn across a pumpkin sky, carved out by the willful hand of a demigod. Everything from toilet habits to incestuous affinities were remarked upon, as well as some things even she had difficulty translating. An army of scarecrows hung crucified along the hilly landscape, their black-button eyes fixed repentantly toward heaven.
The ground here was crawling with thick, twisted vines, from which sprouted millions of large gourds, their rinds a pearly translucence. And within each of those knobby hulls the shadow of something rat-sized and spider-like skittered like a lightning ball.
Gamble’s answer to a coyote trap.
That was okay. She could chew off her leg and instantly grow a million in its place. But she wasn’t going to let it come to that. She didn’t have to let it come to that, as illustrated by the two-winged creatures beside her, Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum, skewered upon her sword, both frozen in mid-leap, teeth bared, talons protracted, eyes blazing a hateful vermillion.
/> Katherine’s would-be kidnappers weren’t dead, just arrested in place.
An unsavory shish-kabob.
But it would make a great swizzle stick, she thought. Another Christmas gift idea.
Then she smiled at herself. She really did have Duncan’s warped sense of humor. And, with all due respect, some of his spirit. His gall.
Unlike a few of her predecessors, Amy could, to a much greater extent, fight back.
She regarded the window with droll concern. To convince Eli that she was Katherine Bently would be easy enough, and it might keep Gamble from becoming alerted to her presence just long enough to cleanse Melanie. But that meant she would have to allow Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum to resume their questing duties and take her to the fallen priest.
Yuck!
She sighed, the sound knelling across the gourds like wind through fluted cymbals. Then she changed her form back into that of her ten-year-old self.
“Okay,” she ordered, repossessing her sword then hurling it to a safe, distant place. “Sic me.”
15.
Eli had taken his mother’s phone off the hook, as it had been chirping incessantly since the six o’clock news. Most of the callers had been her fellow fussbudgets wanting to get the scoop on the fire. He’d also instructed his mother not to answer the door for anyone, that going double for the media.
Just as he was ready to break ground with the trowel, his mother hollered from the window. “Package just arrived for you, your highness. I think it’s that one you sent away for with all them Count Chocula box-tops.”
Eli looked up at the kitchen window, his mother’s withered face ghostly behind the screen. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Just get your ass in here and sign for it?” she yelled. “Christ, do I have to do everything?”
Cursing under his breath, he threw down the shovel and headed for the house.
As he opened the sliding back door, his mother said, “It’s down in the basement, choir boy.”
It took him a moment to realize what his mother was saying. Then, a jubilant smile sprang across his face.
As Eli descended the stairs, he could faintly hear their voices; impetuous whispers, actually.
He sneaked to the edge of the doorway and listened. The words were still too hushed to understand, but the voices were definitely planning something.
It was time to take a peek.
Standing now in the dimly lit doorway, he saw both couriers, seemingly free of injuries, squatting just inside and to his right, grooming one another. Beyond them, sitting beside Melanie Sands, was his second angel.
Both girls looked up, shocked.
“Well, well, well,” Eli said, his voice euphoric. “If it isn’t Katherine Bently.”
Then Eli discovered the most criminal, most unconscionable thing he could imagine. Melanie’s wings had been removed from her back and tossed into the corner like a pair of old shoes.
“What have you done?” he roared at Katherine. He looked over at the couriers, horrified. “How could you let this happen?”
Disconcerted, the couriers stared up at him.
“Melanie won’t be flying today,” Katherine said.
Currents of rage began to steadily build until they were rippling through his body. Teeth gnashing, fists clenched, he started for Katherine. “You little bitch! I’ll gut you like a—” Then he stopped, suddenly struck with a wonderful idea. A smile returned to his lips; more sinister than the one he’d worn just moments ago, but stretching just as wide.
The more he thought about it, the more relaxed he became. It would save him the two hours of traveling time and another hour of preparation. And that meant he could be into his own wings a hell of a lot sooner.
He clasped his hands together. “Are either of you familiar with the expression, ‘To kill two birds with one stone?’”
Neither girl answered.
“No? Hmmm. Then tell me this—do either of you have an aversion to slimy things?”
16.
Eli resumed his digging with renewed purpose.
He tossed a shovelful of dirt over his shoulder, then went for another. He didn’t plan on striking any fortune cookies this evening; was just going deep enough to favor two small bodies, and a box of very hungry worms.
“Evening, Father,” Jack Singletary warbled over the fence—a flimsy, truncated old thing not nearly high enough. The fence, not Jack.
Eli moaned. Living alongside the Singletarys was like getting free cable television. One of Eli’s inconsistent parishioners of some years, Jack looked remarkably like Roy Thinnes, the actor from the old TV series, The Invaders. As the quintessential guy next door, it was unclear whether Jack was being harassed by bug-eyed extraterrestrials, but one thing was certain: if he wasn’t, it was no doubt the fault of his unbearably sweet wife Janet, whose enduring impersonation of Donna Reed could keep even the most determined Martians, favorite or not, at arm’s length.
But Eli knew better.
According to Janet Singletary’s most recent visit to the confessional, she was continuing to bang her husband’s best friend with whom she shared an expensive cocaine habit. She was also suspecting that her husband Jack was dancing the infidelity hustle himself, most likely with someone at his work, but she couldn’t be sure. And at last check didn’t really care.
Then there was Jack. Jack, who had indeed been tripping the light fantastic with a female coworker, among others, had once bragged during confession that he’d notched the proverbial bedpost more times than Wilt Chamberlain. Which still wouldn’t come close, numbers wise, to matching the thousands upon thousands he’d embezzled from his employer of fifteen years. But Eli did not think less of Jack. He hated everyone equally. He learned long ago that abstention did not exist; everyone was a criminal, a drug addict, a fornicator.
For Eli, the confessional offered about as much surprise as finding the Indigo Girls in a new age coffee shop. Of course, that all went to the wind when he shared it with Gamble.
“Jack,” Eli replied stiffly. He took a moment to retrieve the handkerchief from his back pocket and dabbed his forehead. Jack had obviously not heard about the firestorm once known as St. Patrick’s Church or that topic would have already been broached with delirious remorse. “And how’s Mrs. Singletary?”
“Ah, Janet’s busy in the kitchen whipping up some kind of soufflé or casserole,” he said, wrinkling his nose. “What’cha digging?”
“A grave,” Eli confessed.
Jack folded his arms atop the fence, then laughed. “Did you finally go and snuff ol’ Deacon Flannery, Father?”
It came as no surprise that Jack knew of Eli’s contempt for Samuel Flannery, as did most of the congregation, he suspected. After all, he’d never tried keeping it a secret.
“No,” Eli said, “Samuel’s demise was accomplished by someone else.” Taking a breather, he leaned against his shovel. “As I understand it, Samuel died a horrible death this afternoon and was cremated immediately.”
Jack was now tittering like an infatuated schoolgirl. It had been Eli’s vocational experience that people like Jack were impelled to giddy states while in the self-conscious presence of a priest, as if their sins stuck out like mortified thumbs in the pious glow of the cloth. They made small talk while keeping a safe distance, and avoided religious topics at all costs.
Then there were those who nuzzled up to the holy man like a warm fire and blathered on endlessly about the church, the state of religion, and themselves, their sad and only motive to sponge absolution, as if that were possible.
Atonement by proximity. But then, wasn’t that the intention of the church? It was all so obsolete. Amnesty, Eli was sure, did not exist in this or any other world. And that was the cold hard truth of it all.
From the raised cedar deck came two loud knocks. “Here’s that batch of tea you ordered, your highness,” yelled Josephine, pitcher in one hand, cane in the other. “We’re all out of those decorative mint leaves and
fancy lemon slices, so if that insults your sense of etiquette then you and Ms. Manners can both kiss my ass.”
“Cantankerous old bitch,” Eli mumbled, slicing through the soil with renewed vigor.
Josephine sat the pitcher on the table, leaned herself against the railing, then began fanning her face with a round pink Tupperware lid she’d pulled from her smock pocket. “Hotter’n hellfire.”
“Step Two would be a glass with lots of ice,” Eli prodded her.
Without looking his way, she nonchalantly flipped him the bird.
With only his eyes and upper head visible above the fence, Jack lifted a hand and waved to Josephine. “Howdy-doody, neighbor.”
Josephine glanced in Jack’s direction, her middle finger extended once again.
Jack straightened himself and, with a more serious approach, said to Eli, “I think we’re in for an earthquake, Father. Real soon. And I mean a big one.”
“And what’s drawn you to that conclusion, pray tell?”
Jack shook his head. “Sasha, you know, our dog, has been acting very strange lately. She won’t eat and refuses to come out from under our bed. She just shakes and whimpers.” He tossed a thumb over his shoulder. “And the Petersons’ two Shih Tzus went at it last night like you wouldn’t believe. Tore each other up so bad that they had to have them both put to sleep at that twenty-four hour vet clinic over on Lakeview.”
“And this means buildings are going to topple?”
“Well, they say animals start behaving funny right before an earthquake. I understand some people at the San Diego Zoo are experts at knowing just what to look for.”
“If I see any Mountain Gorillas or hippopotami acting suspiciously, I’ll let them know.”
“Good one, Father.” Jack laughed, then rubbed his chin pensively. “Anyhow, something’s going to hit the fan. I kinda have that, you know, weird feeling myself that something terrible is about to happen.”
“It is,” Eli said, finally exhausted with Jack Singletary. He turned to Josephine. “Excuse me, Mother, but would you please bring Jacob out here. I would like you to introduce him to our paranoid neighbor, Jack. Oh, and Mother,” he added, “don’t bother with the leash.”
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