by J. S. Bailey
“Also,” Phil was quick to add, “it’s very likely that the war would have eventually begun anyway. However, we doubt that it would have been so catastrophic if Hans had lived. His death caused some kind of disruption that led to unspeakable violence that continued even after the eighteen years were up.”
“What kind of disruption?”
“Well…instead of focusing much of their energy on destroying the Servant, the demons focused it elsewhere since the Servant was dead. This is why we can’t lose you.”
“But what if I get hit by a car or something?”
“Stay out of the street.”
Bobby wished Phil hadn’t brought any of this up. His duties would place enough pressure on him. He didn’t need the rest of the world’s weight piled on top of that. “So how did the Servants get out of that mess? One of you said something about the first male child born after the fact…”
“Yes. In the same moment Hans died, a baby named Frank Jovingo was born in a cabin near Eugene, Oregon.”
“You mean the old guy I met at your house the other day?” Phil had gathered together the remaining former Servants—Bobby’s new support group—and together all of them went over what Bobby would have to do in preparation of his first exorcism. The aforementioned Frank, grandfather of Frankie and great-grandfather of Carly, had sat in an armchair off to one side and slept through half the meeting.
“I’m sure he’d be thrilled to hear you refer to him that way. Hans Mueller’s surviving predecessors had to find Frank so he could become the Servant when he turned eighteen.”
“How’d they do that?”
“They let the Spirit guide them, of course. The predecessors were led west over the ocean, came to America, and crossed the whole continent before they found him.”
“And the rest is history,” Randy said.
The three of them fell into silence. Phil’s dour expression did not lighten. “I hate to be the bringer of bad news,” he finally said, “but that was Kimberly on the phone.”
Bobby tensed. Graham had a daughter named Kimberly, though he had never met her.
“What happened?” Randy asked, his eyes wide.
Phil drew in a deep breath. “Graham had a brain aneurysm a few nights ago. Kimberly is friends with the warden’s wife, and she just found out from them this morning.”
Bobby felt cold. “Graham’s dead?”
“Not quite. All Kimberly knows is that he’s in a hospital somewhere, that he’s guarded round the clock, and that he’s not allowed any visitors. She said she’ll keep me posted when she learns anything more.”
The Spirit stirred within him. He is in my hands now. Do not worry about him.
“And while we’re on the topic of Graham,” Phil said, “I learned something unfortunate about him, myself.” He reached for his black zippered tote bag, which sat on the floor by the chair. As he unzipped it and pulled out a sheaf of papers, he said, “Randy, I don’t know if anyone told you this or not, but Lupe swiped a notebook out of Graham’s basement. Before we handed it over to the police, I took pictures of all the pages and printed them out a few days ago.” He waved the papers in the air for emphasis. Bobby could see handwriting on them but wasn’t close enough to make out the words.
Randy’s mouth drew into a straight line. “What kind of notebook?”
“One where he recorded information about all the people he’s killed—or so I thought. This morning my curiosity got the better of me and I did a search for every name in the book.” A shadow passed over Phil’s eyes. “I just wanted to see how many of those people had been listed as missing. Call it morbid curiosity. And imagine my surprise when for the first nine years of entries, every single name appeared in the obituary section of the Cascade Chronicle.”
Bobby looked at Randy, who was staring at Phil with wide eyes. “I don’t get it,” Bobby said.
“It’s simple. Those people died of natural causes, their loved ones posted obituaries in the paper, Graham read the paper, and decided to claim their deaths as his own kills. Only in 2009 did the names in here—” Phil shook the stack of papers again— “start matching up with missing persons reports.”
Phil fell silent, but Bobby had the sense that he wasn’t finished.
Apparently so did Randy. “What else?” he asked.
Phil pulled a few sheets from the bottom of the stack and held them up. “I did a real estate search for that David Upton alias he was using. He bought four houses under that name all in the same year.”
“Let me guess,” Bobby said. “2009?”
“Yes.”
“That’s the year I became the Servant,” Randy said, his face ashen.
“I noticed that, too.”
More silence. Randy broke it by saying, “He used to hang out with Bill Trautmann and Orville Hunley all the time. I wonder if they’d know anything about this.”
Bobby gaped at him. “Did you say Bill Trautmann?”
“Sure did. He and Graham go way back. You’ve probably seen some of Bill’s vans around town. He must have about a thousand of them.”
“That must be where I’ve heard of him, then.” Bobby hadn’t mentioned the clip he saw on the news or the fact that the kidnapping van bore the Trautmann logo. “I’m really sorry about Graham. Is there anything I can do?”
“Pray for his soul,” Randy said. “Before it’s too late.”
PHIL WALKED Bobby out to his car. “So what’s on today’s agenda?” Phil asked, making a poor attempt at sounding cheerful.
“I figured an afternoon trip to Hillsdale might be nice. You know, get out, get some fresh air, see the sights, that kind of thing.”
“Have you been keeping your eyes peeled?”
“Yeah. If I’ve run into anyone who’s possessed, they’ve hidden it well.”
Phil gave him a faint smile. “It isn’t something one can hide. Your first encounter with one of the fallen won’t come easy for you.”
“So you’ve said. No pressure, right?”
“You have to keep your head. Pray at all times. If you trust in God, they will not hurt you.”
“They killed Hans what’s-his-name.”
“We don’t know what was going through the man’s head when he was killed.” Phil put a hand on Bobby’s shoulder and squeezed it, an unexpected gesture from one generally so irritable. “Please be careful about this woman you want to find. You may not believe it, but I really don’t mind having such a bad penny lying around now that I know he isn’t out to do us in.”
Phil retreated to the house, and Bobby had the sudden mental image of Phil embracing Mystery Woman in a long, passionate kiss.
Quit that. There was no way Phil could have been the man who met Mystery Woman at the state park. The man who’d seen her said the blond man was of average build, a description Phil might achieve if he happened to be wearing platform shoes.
Bobby shook his head. He had no time to entertain sick fantasies. He had work to do.
FOR LUNCH Carly fixed a bowl of ramen noodles and took it and a glass bottle of Mexican Coke out to the back patio.
Janet, her mother, designed the patio herself. She’d selected the sand-colored stones from the hardware store, hauled them here in the back of the pickup truck, leveled out the ground, and arranged the stones in a pattern flowing out into the backyard and around the old maples. Here and there Janet built raised beds from a grayer stone that rose out of the patio like islands, and in these she had planted blood red roses, bright impatiens, ferns, and lilies that made the property explode with color.
A ten-foot-tall privacy fence surrounded their yard like a wooden fortress. The only way a neighbor would be able to see the Jovingos’ lovingly-tended domain was if they leaned a ladder against the other side of the fence and climbed it.
Janet loved it that way, and Carly supposed she liked it too, though it made her feel somewhat like she was sitting in a lidless box whenever she went outside.
Carly planted her rear on a stone bench
sitting six feet back from a gray angel statue and set the Coke down beside her.
The statue and the rest of the patio had been installed eight years before. The whole project had been Janet’s personal form of therapy, and even now Carly took some comfort in sitting here among the flowers and the trees.
She’d considered bringing a book outside with her to pass the time while she ate. Since she’d become one of the counselors at the safe house, she’d read through her parents’ entire collection of books and had recently begun what she dubbed The Conquest of the Stacks at the Autumn Ridge Public Library.
Being the counselor gave Carly a great deal of free time—perhaps too much of it since she had exactly zero people to counsel at the moment. If she’d been in a better mood she’d have continued reading Dante’s Inferno, but she couldn’t get a certain woman’s face out of her head.
Dark curls. Pale skin. Cold, wicked eyes: the face of Cassandra, the monster.
She twirled her fork around and around in the noodles and stuffed it into her mouth. When she finished chewing, she said, “I need to just let it go, don’t I?”
The concrete angel didn’t respond.
Carly thought she had let it go. It happened so long ago, and yes, the pain had been terrible, but eventually it grew duller until finally it became nothing more than a faint heartache over what was lost and what might have been.
As a child Carly hadn’t known that her father once drove demons out of the possessed. All she knew was that he had a close group of friends from church who helped counsel troubled souls. When she turned eighteen she told her parents that she wanted to help people just as members of their church had helped her heal from her pain, and the rest was history.
Those who’d been possessed had lost something of their innocence just as Carly had lost hers thanks to Cassandra, whose life choices had turned Carly into an only child. They were often shell-shocked and somewhat doubtful that life would be the same again.
It wouldn’t be the same, she told them. It would be different but better because now they had the tools they needed to protect themselves against future attack. Their triumph over evil had strengthened them like metal forged in a blacksmith’s fire.
And Carly herself had felt just fine about her life until she saw Cassandra in the grocery store buying a bottle of wine the size of a propane tank. Cassandra had seen her. Somehow recognized her after so many years, and smiled.
Carly nearly lost it then. She thought she’d forgiven the woman, but the sight of her triggered so many flashbacks of that terrible day that Carly left her shopping basket on a random shelf and fled the store before she broke down in front of all the other shoppers.
She was grateful for the current break in her duties. Joanna, the safe house’s most recent resident, had gone home, and Bobby wouldn’t be sending anyone over for her to counsel for a while yet. She felt so distraught that she didn’t think she would have been able to successfully help anyone. After all, who in their right mind would follow the advice of a counselor who couldn’t stop crying over a tragedy from almost a decade ago?
The fact that she felt like this at all meant that Carly had some serious mental issues to address.
She took a swig of Coke. “I’m fine,” she said to the statue. “I’m really fine. She can only hurt me if I let her.”
Some undefined anomaly in her surroundings made her jerk her head up. She scanned the yard beyond the patio trying to figure out what had caught her attention and gave a start when she laid her eyes upon a human face peering over the top of the privacy fence at the back of the yard.
She remained immobile while she ran a mental assessment of the face. Male. Mid to late thirties. Reddish-brown hair about the same color as hers. A beaming smile.
Carly could say with all honesty she had never seen him before.
Irritated that someone would be so rude, she stood up and crossed the yard. “Hey! Get down from there!”
The man winked but didn’t budge.
Her mother would freak if she knew some guy was spying on her.
He ducked below the top of the fence as soon as Carly reached its base. “What do you think you’re doing? They call it a privacy fence for a reason.”
No response. Carly rapped on the wood with her bony fist. “Are you going to answer me or not?”
No sound came from beyond the fence, not even retreating footsteps. That meant he was still standing on the other side, just feet away from her.
“If you look over the fence again,” she growled, “I’ll report you to the police.”
She turned to go back to her lunch and nearly lost control of her bladder when she saw the same smiling face peering over the back of the bench she had so recently vacated. The man winked at her again and grinned.
Then he disappeared.
She approached the bench with caution and peered around the back to see if he’d just hunched down at a superhuman speed.
He wasn’t there.
Feeling prickles on the back of her neck, she turned and found him staring over the top of the fence again.
Without thinking, Carly grabbed up her bowl and her Coke and took them inside the house, then checked all the doors to make sure they were locked.
She half-expected to find Peeping Tom in the house but she appeared to be alone.
Her parents had left town the day before for a reason they wouldn’t disclose to her and didn’t expect to be home for another day or two. Carly figured that her father had gotten another one of his flights of fancy and dragged her mother off to Portland or Salem or someplace to start preaching to the masses again.
If she called and told them about the teleporting face, they would think she’d lost her mind—and maybe she had.
She dialed her father’s cell phone number anyway and prayed he would answer.
FRANKIE JOVINGO kept his hands on the wheel precisely at ten o’clock and two o’clock, his eyes locked on the interstate spread before him like an unfurling gray ribbon. The glimmering Snake River came into view again on the left. To the right were some low hills dotted with bushes and not much else.
There weren’t any trees. Frankie was starting to think they couldn’t grow here. If he didn’t know any better, he would have thought he’d gone back in time to the days before settlers colonized this half of the continent. It was barren out here. Why anyone would choose to live in this part of the country was beyond him.
“Kevin certainly picked a desolate place to hide from us,” he said as they passed a buzzard picking through what used to be an animal on the shoulder of the road.
Even though he wasn’t looking at her, he knew Janet was rolling her eyes. “Frankie, I’ve told you a thousand times. He isn’t hiding. He just wants to have his own space.”
“What reason should he have for that? I never did him wrong.” He glanced to the side and saw his wife pursing her lips. “You’re thinking about what I said to him before he left.”
“You called him a coward, Frankie.”
“Because he was.” Frankie tilted his head from side to side to work out a kink in his neck and stopped when he felt a satisfying click. Kevin Lyle, Frankie’s successor, had been a thin man of twenty-two when Frankie passed the mantle of Servitude on to him. He’d seemed ready enough for the job in the beginning—but then things changed.
“He did his part,” Janet said. “And that’s all that should matter.”
The river veered away from the road and was replaced by a patchy expanse of vegetation that looked dead—or maybe grass out here was supposed to be that lifeless brown color. For as far as Frankie could see in each direction, the only sign of civilization was the road on which they traveled. Having spent his entire life within a hundred-odd miles of the Pacific Coast, he’d had no idea that any part of the United States could be this empty of humanity.
Yet somewhere out here was Kevin Lyle, whom the remaining former Servants desperately needed.
Frankie’s cell phone rang in the cup holder b
etween the seats. “You answer that,” he said.
Janet checked the screen. “It’s Carly.” She held the phone to her ear. “Hey, sweetie. Is everything okay?” A long pause. “We haven’t quite gotten to where we’re going yet. No, we haven’t decided to drive to Timbuktu. We only drove six hours yesterday. That’s right.” Another pause. “Well…I suppose we can make the return trip all at once if your father’s willing. Yes, I’ll tell him. Love you too, Carly. Goodbye.”
A weight settled in the pit of Frankie’s stomach. “Did something happen?”
Janet’s shoulders slumped. “She said she’s just feeling lonely and hopes we come home soon. I don’t think it was fair to keep her in the dark.”
Frankie felt a slight pang of regret. “If I’d told her, then she would have told everyone else and then they’d all question my judgment. Again.” He sighed. “She can’t hang out with her friends until we get back?”
Janet pursed her lips again. “Amber got a job in Seattle a couple of months ago. Remember? And Julia and Carmen are in Costa Rica for a summer mission trip.”
Part of Frankie hated the thought of Carly sitting in their home all by herself. She may have been a grown woman now, but she would always be his little girl. Any time Carly was sad or upset, Frankie wished she was still of an age where he could set her in his lap and sing her songs or read her silly stories until her tears changed to laughter.
But those days were gone. Like smoke blown away by the wind.
Interstate 86 ended miles later at the edge of a town called Pocatello, and they sped into the northbound lanes of Interstate 15. “We’re almost there.”
“I hope so,” she murmured.
You asked for this, he thought. It hadn’t been Frankie’s intention to bring Janet with him, but she’d persisted, saying she needed to make sure he stayed safe.
Frankie hadn’t let the arrest in Portland bother him, but she’d never gotten over the ordeal. Being arrested was just one of those unpleasant things that happened from time to time, like flat tires and root canals. When you just went with the flow and remembered that your troubles were tiny blips in the grand scheme of things, you were a much happier person.