by Jane Heller
“It’s incredible, all right,” said Jeremy, his hot breath on my cheek.
In my zeal, I had completely forgotten that I was still holding on to him, that I was still in his embrace. I lingered there for just another instant and then felt the muscles in his arms stiffen.
“Oh. Sorry,” I said and pulled away.
We quickly let go of each other, as if we each had a contagious disease.
“No problem,” he said.
There was an awkward silence. And then Pete began to bark.
Jeremy and I turned to look at him.
“We’re still only guessin’ about these clues Pete’s given us,” he said. “Why don’t you ask the dog straight out if it’s Frances? See what happens.”
“Good idea.”
I knelt down in front of Pete and brought my face close to his once more.
“Pete,” I said, gazing into his soulful hazel eyes. “Is the devil camping out in Frances Lutz’s body?”
Pete’s response was astonishing and miraculous, even more so than all his previous displays.
He lifted his right front paw, like a maestro about to conduct an orchestra, and set it back down on the ground. Then he began to move it along the carpet in such a way that his paw marks created a little design, a pattern of some sort.
“Look,” I said to Jeremy and pointed to the carpet.
The two of us watched, openmouthed, as Pete completed his task. What he had drawn wasn’t a design or a pattern, we discovered, but a word:
Yes.
Chapter 23
The next morning, I called Frances at home and asked her if she would be coming into the office.
“No,” she said. “I’m working out of the River Princess sales office today. Why?”
Because I want to free you from the devil, I was tempted to say. But why bother? According to David, Frances had no idea she was possessed.
“Because I want to talk to you about the Nowak house,” I lied. “And a couple of other things.”
“Oh. Well, we could talk later. Would you like to come for dinner?” she asked. “I made lasagna last night and I’ve got plenty of leftovers.”
“Enough for me and a friend?” I said. Jeremy and I had come up with a plan. We were going to find a way to get Frances alone, ply her with liquor, and then perform an exorcism on her. Jeremy had gone to Blockbuster Video and rented The Exorcist, and we’d spent half the night watching it, taking notes. The movie gave us ideas and now we were going to put them into action, along with a few of our own.
“A friend? Who?” asked Frances.
“You’re not going to like this,” I said. “It’s Jeremy Cook.”
“Barbara! You call that man a friend?” she said. “He’s cost us thousands of dollars in commissions. I haven’t sold one condo in the River Princess since he destroyed those fountains.”
“He didn’t destroy them, Frances. He only dirtied them a little. Besides, he’d like to apologize to you, since you’re the listing agent on the building. He feels guilty about what he did. He wants to make amends.”
“I bet.”
“It’s true. Look, he’s my brother’s best friend and I’ve known him since we were kids. He would never do anything to hurt anybody. Anybody who didn’t deserve it, that is. So what do you say? Can I bring him tonight?”
She hesitated, then said, “Does he like lasagna?”
“I’m sure he does, but his table manners aren’t the greatest,” I said. “I seem to remember that you’ve got white carpet in your dining room, Frances. If I were you, I’d put plastic down before we get there.”
The devil was not happy about the dinner date with Frances. I could tell because he made me growl six times while I was waiting for Jeremy to pick me up. But there were other, much more serious, manifestations of his displeasure. Two people in Banyan Beach had been shot to death overnight. Four others were injured in car accidents. What’s more, it still hadn’t rained, and several brushfires had broken out across town. Everything had a parched, brittle look about it—the lawns, the trees, the people. We needed relief. And it was up to Jeremy and me to provide it.
He came for me at six-thirty. I met him at the front door, armed with a shopping bag full of the items we had agreed that I would bring to Frances’s house—items that were supposed to drive the devil out of a person’s body.
“Did you have any trouble getting the things on your list?” I asked, peeking inside the bag he was carrying.
“Yeah, I struck out on the holy water,” he said. “I went to four different churches, but nobody would sell me any.”
“Never mind,” I said. “I’ll bring a couple of bottles of Evian. We can say a prayer over them on the way over.”
I was about to run off to the kitchen when Jeremy tapped me on the shoulder.
“What?” I asked.
“How about a hello?” he said.
“Hello,” I said.
He smiled. “Remember when we were in Mr. Garvey’s math class together?”
“Mr. Garvey’s math class? Why on earth would you think of that at a time like this?”
“Because you just reminded me of the way you were back then. You’d come into that classroom, sit down next to me, and stick your head in a book, and I’d have to tap you on the shoulder and say, ‘How about a hello?’ Just like I did now.”
“I told you last night. I was scared of you when we were in high school.”
“What about now? Still scared?”
I met his eyes and felt my stomach do another one of those stupid flips.
“No,” I said, my mouth a little dry. “There’s only one person I’m scared of, and if we don’t get moving, we’ll never get him out of town.”
“Fine. Go get the designer water.”
I nodded and went off to the kitchen. When I came back a minute later, Pete was sniffing around Jeremy’s bag of goodies.
“Something in there appeals to him,” I said.
“It must be the Perdue Oven-Stuffer Roaster,” said Jeremy. “Dogs love raw meat.”
“Raw meat? You’ve got an uncooked chicken in there?”
He nodded.
“But Frances made lasagna,” I said. “What’s she going to do with a chicken?”
“She’s not gonna do anything with it,” said Jeremy. “We are. I’ve got a fishing buddy named Roland. He’s Haitian. He told me, ‘If you wanna get rid of the devil, lay a dead chicken at his feet.’ Well, I didn’t have time to go out and shoot a chicken, so I bought one at the supermarket.”
“Brilliant,” I smiled.
“Thanks,” he said, then checked his watch. “Better get goin’, huh?”
“Right.”
We took Jeremy’s pickup truck. About halfway over to Frances’s house, he pulled the truck over to the side of the road.
“What’d you do that for?” I said, knowing we were already late.
“I smell something,” he said. “Something really foul.”
“It’s just me,” I said. “I forgot my BreathAssure.”
“No, it smells like something’s burnin’.” He leaned over the steering wheel and peered at the dashboard. “The temperature gauge is lit up. We must’ve overheated.”
Great, I thought. The devil’s not even going to let us near Frances.
“Can’t you fix it?” I asked impatiently.
“No, Your Highness. I can’t fix it,” said Jeremy. “But you can.”
“Oh, right. I know as much about trucks as I do about exorcisms.”
“What about that power of yours? If there ever was a time to use it, it’s now.”
“Sorry. My power only works when I want to do something mean and nasty to someone,” I said.
“How do you know? Just try it. Say, ‘I want the water temperature in this truck to cool down to 170 degrees.’”
I shrugged. “I suppose there’s nothing to lose.” I cleared my throat. “I want the water temperature in this truck to cool down to 170 degrees,” I announced
.
We waited. Nothing happened.
“I told you,” I said. “The devil doesn’t give darksiders the power so we can fix things. He gives it to us so we can cause pain and suffering.”
“Then we’ll have to find another way to get to Frances’s house,” said Jeremy.
I reached into my purse for my cell phone. I called a towing company for the truck and a taxicab for us. Shopping bags in hand, we finally made it to Frances’s by seven-thirty, just in time for “Jeopardy.”
“You both must need a drink,” she said when we told her of our travails. From the way she was wobbling, it looked as if she’d given herself a head start in the drink department. Her lipstick was smudged, too. Otherwise, she seemed completely normal. She was wearing one of her caftans—a lemon-yellow one—and matching yellow sandals. People often say about fat women, “But she has such a pretty face,” and in Frances’s case it was true. She was pretty in a boyish sort of way. From her pudgy, baby-soft skin to her short, close-cropped haircut, she was youthful looking in spite of her heft. Still, youthful or not, I couldn’t help feel sorry for her as I watched her waddle around her living room, cheering the “Jeopardy” contestants on. She had no idea what was going on inside her own body, no clue that she was being used as a receptacle, a vessel, a temporary shelter for the force of darkness.
Dinner was uneventful. Jeremy made nice to Frances, apologizing profusely for his gesture of protest against the River Princess. I knew he didn’t mean a single word of it, that he was just sucking it up and taking one for the team, and I shot him a look of gratitude when Frances wasn’t looking. He responded by blowing me a kiss.
Getting Frances drunk proved to be a no-brainer, given that she was halfway there before we arrived. Every time she got up to go to kitchen for another helping of lasagna (the woman’s idea of “leftovers” was my idea of a Roman orgy), Jeremy poured more wine into her glass and she returned to the table and drank it. By nine-thirty, she had passed out in her chair.
“Oh, great,” I said. “How are we going to move her? She weighs more than my car.”
“We’re not,” said Jeremy. “We’re gonna have to do the exorcism right here.”
“In her dining room?”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. I kind of pictured us doing it in her bedroom. With her lying on the bed. The way Linda Blair was lying on the bed in the movie.”
“That was just a movie, BS. This is real life and we can do whatever we want.”
“I suppose.”
“Let’s go outside and get the bags.”
Jeremy and I tiptoed out of the house to retrieve the bags of props, which we had hidden behind some shrubs. When we came back inside, we dumped the contents of the bags onto the dining room table and took a quick inventory.
“Gee, I don’t know about this,” I said, suddenly coming down with a bad case of second thoughts. “We are doing the right thing, aren’t we?”
“’Course we are. We’re savin’ you from bein’ a darksider for the rest of your life and the town from bein’ the devil’s playground.”
“True. It’s just that I’ve never been involved in an exorcism.” I shuddered. “What if something goes wrong?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Frances is an innocent victim here. It wasn’t her fault that the devil chose her for possession. What if we chant the wrong thing over her body and accidentally turn her into a rabbit?”
“She’ll be no worse off than she is now, believe me.”
“Maybe not, but what about us? What if we start doing the exorcism and the devil goes berserk and turns us into rabbits?”
He grinned lasciviously. “You know what they say about rabbits.”
I sighed again. “I guess we’d better get started. What should we do first?”
Jeremy thought for a minute. “Let’s kick things off with the holy water.”
“Why not.”
I handed him a one-liter bottle of Evian and watched him unscrew the cap. He was about to pour it over Frances’s head when I stopped him. “Wait!” I hissed. “You saw the movie. You’re supposed to sprinkle it over her, not dump it on her! She’ll wake up in two seconds if you throw cold water in her face.”
“All right, all right.”
He poured some of the water into Frances’s empty wineglass, stuck his fingers into it, and then flicked the Evian across her body, repeating the process several times.
“Much better,” I complimented him. “Now what?”
“The religious symbols,” he said.
“Yes, Father.” I reached for the shiny gold objects on the dining room table: a cross and a Jewish star. “I bet this is the world’s first multi-denominational exorcism,” I said and placed both the cross and the star on Frances’s ample bosom.
“Now let’s go with the cayenne pepper,” said Jeremy.
I scanned the table for the cayenne pepper but couldn’t find it.
“The cayenne pepper was on your list,” I scolded Jeremy. “You forgot to bring it.”
“No, I didn’t. The supermarket was out of it so I got paprika instead. Same color.”
Men. They can be so dense sometimes.
I shook the tin of paprika over Frances’s body, careful not to get any up her nose. God forbid she should sneeze.
“Next?” I said.
“How about lighting the candles?” Jeremy suggested.
“Good idea.” I gathered the four white votive candles I’d brought, formed them into a little circle on the table, in front of Frances’s chair, and lit them. Then I said, “I might as well go ahead and light the incense while I’m at it, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, go for it.”
I put the match to the incense and the room began to smell like my college dorm.
“Nicely done,” said Jeremy. “Now, do you know if she’s got a tape deck?”
“I’ll go look.”
I left the dining room and went in search of some stereo equipment.
Frances’s house (a ranch, of course) was a three-bedroom/two-and-a-half-bath home, vintage 1970s—a rather undistinguished era in home decorating, when brown was considered a hot color. Consequently, everything about Frances’s house was brown—from its chocolate-colored exterior to its clunky maple furniture. The only bright spot was the dining room carpet, which used to be white but was now white with red dots, thanks to Jeremy’s inability to successfully maneuver even one forkful of lasagna into his mouth.
It was in Frances’s brown living room that I found a stereo system. Well, it was actually a boom box, one of those portable tape decks that kids take to the beach. I lifted its handle and carried it into the dining room, setting it down on the table.
“You think the music might wake her up?” I asked Jeremy, who was deeply involved in trying to free the Perdue Oven-Stuffer Roaster from its thick plastic wrapping.
“Our talking hasn’t woken her up. Why should the soundtrack from The Exorcist?”
I guessed Jeremy was right and popped the audiotape into the tape player. Seconds later, “Tubular Bells” filled the room.
“Okay, here’s the chicken,” said Jeremy, who was dangling the roaster by its legs.
“Aren’t you going to cut it up?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Roland didn’t say anything about chicken parts. He just said a chicken. A dead chicken.”
“Fine. So we’ll use it whole, giblets and all. It’s not as if we’re going to eat it afterward.”
Jeremy nodded and placed the chicken on the floor, near Frances.
“I wish I had a camera,” I said as I looked at her. She was quite a sight, let me tell you. Picture a three-hundred-pound woman, passed out cold in a chair, mouth open, hair damp with Evian water, skin and clothes dusted with paprika, a dead bird at her feet. And let’s not forget the cross and the star.
“I wish I had the garlic clove,” said Jeremy.
“You mean you didn’t bring it?” I said. G
arlic had been on the list. His list.
“Nope.”
“Don’t tell me the supermarket didn’t have that either.”
“They might have. I just forgot it.”
“Well, don’t worry. Now that I think about it, garlic is supposed to keep vampires away. I don’t think it works on the devil.”
“Then we’re almost ready. All except the travel brochures.”
“Oh. They’re in my purse.”
I dug into my handbag for the brochures I’d swiped from the travel agency next door to Home Sweet Home. There was one on Mexico, one on Costa Rica, and one on the island of Grenada. I had nothing against those countries, you understand, but the idea was to coax the devil into relocating and I knew he preferred places with warm climates.
“What should I do with them?” I asked.
“Fan ’em out on her lap,” Jeremy suggested.
I laid them gently across Frances’s lap, careful not to wake her, although how she could still have been out, given all the noise we were making, was beyond me.
“I guess that’s it,” I said. “I think we’re ready for the important stuff.”
Jeremy handed me one of the two Bibles we’d brought and kept the other for himself. We arranged our chairs so that we were flanking Frances but could also see each other.
“I’m not exactly a Biblical scholar,” I said, leaning over her body to talk to Jeremy. “What page should we turn to?”
“Beats me,” he said. “I can sing you the lyrics of any rock ’n’ roll song written since 1950, but I don’t know the words of the Good Book.”
“Maybe there’s an index and all we have to do is look under ‘Exorcism,’” I said, flipping to the back of the Bible.
“It’s not a goddamn encyclopedia, BS,” Jeremy said.
“All right. Then maybe everything’s alphabetical and we should check under ‘E.’”
