Redeemer

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Redeemer Page 23

by C. E. Murphy


  "Never mind that," Jean said. "We're not going to kill you unless you come after one of us, which you're not going to do. Why didn't you know she was here?" She pushed a toe toward the body, making sure not to actually touch it.

  Hank shook his head. "I don't know. I should have. Rosie was faster, but I should have known. I wish you hadn't killed her. She could have told us something."

  "She has told us something," Rosie said shortly. "She made you tell us the truth. That's worth something. What if Ex Libris does know, Hank? You said you think they're hanging you out to dry. What if they know you've got power and they sent you here because only a … what do they call people who do what you do?"

  "An empath."

  "Okay, so what if they sent you here because only an empath could find the demon king they think is roosting here? If you can't find him, maybe they've got the wrong city."

  "Or maybe they're protecting him."

  "But why would they do that?"

  "Even secret organizations need money." Jean edged away from Montgomery's body and went to get a drink of Hank's alcohol straight from the bottle. She made a face, wiped her mouth, and said, "There's an industrialist involved, right? Somebody making money off the war. Maybe they're letting your, uh, your demon king, have some free rein so they can skim off the top or get a kickback. But I don't know why they'd send an empath to hunt demons here if that's what they're doing."

  "So they can look like they're on the up-and-up. Or maybe it's just that the left hand isn't talking to the right. It's more likely the left hand is obscuring what it's doing from the right. Ex Libris isn't big, but it's big enough to have factions. I told you," Hank said to Rosie. "Sometimes we bargain or let smaller demons go to get to bigger ones. Some of us think we shouldn't do even that. If some of the bargaining types cut a deal with a daemon rex …"

  "If they can bargain and deal with demons I don't see how they can think you're a monster who should just be killed," Rosie muttered. "Anyways. Let's stop guessing and do something. How did she find us? You're pretty well hidden here."

  "You can sense her. I'm guessing she could sense you."

  "And jumped through a window to kill me?"

  "That other one thought she'd get a lot of brownie points with the king if she took you down, Ro," Jean pointed out. "Maybe you're just such a tempting target they get stupid."

  "Great. Maybe all I have to do is go stand in Times Square and shout, ‘Come on, demons, I'm a Redeemer, come get me!' and we'll just see who turns up. It's kind of what Joan did, isn't it?"

  "Joan who?"

  "Of Arc."

  "Oh. Sure. Joan of Arc. Of course." Jean stared at Rosie. Rosie looked at Hank, whose mouth turned up at the corner.

  "It is kind of what she did, at Orleans. But the daemon rex didn't come after her. Monsters that powerful are usually smarter than that. I could ask Dad," he said more quietly, and with visible reluctance. "I could ask Dad who Helen knew. Worked with. I don't know. See if we can find a lead."

  Jean pursed her lips, glancing between Rosie and Hank again, and spoke with a soft note Rosie didn't expect. "We don't need to ask him. We just need fifteen minutes and a pay phone We know her name. I bet there's only so many Montgomerys in the phone book. Where's yours?" She went to the shelves and found one, flipping the pages to find the names she wanted. "No need to involve your dad, Hank."

  A surge of gratitude made Rosie smile at the other girl as relief sagged Hank's shoulders. He, Rosie reckoned, didn't want to get his father involved because he believed in Harrison Vaughn's innocence. She preferred not to just in case the older Vaughn turned out to have demonic ties after all, even if Hank's empathic sense ruled him out as the demon king. "Great. It's worth trying, right?" Her face fell as she looked at the body. "What are we going to do with her?"

  Hank sighed and limped to the bookcases, searching them. "I'll take care of it as soon as I find something to wrap her in so she doesn't stain the trunk. You two—do you really think you can learn something, Jean?"

  "Can't hurt to try. There are five Montgomerys in here. We can call them, so we're doing something instead of just worrying about the cops finding her wherever you dump her."

  "Jean," Rosie said, faintly shocked.

  Jean, writing numbers down, shrugged. "It's what he's going to do, Ro. We did it ourselves with that woman at the factory. I didn't know all of this was going to lead me into a life of crime." She didn't sound distressed, though Rosie cringed.

  "I don't want to be a criminal."

  "I don't want to be a wi—" Jean snapped off the word, her jaw tense. "We aren't getting a lot of what we want right now, Rosie. I'm trying to make the best of it instead of hiding under the covers and sobbing, so help me out."

  "Help me out." Hank came back from the shelves with a stretch of canvas. "I've got to get this body into the trunk of the car and I can't do it alone."

  Rosie stared at the canvas even as Jean prodded her into motion, and together the three of them rolled Helen Montgomery's body into it and helped Hank heft the corpse over his shoulder. He limped toward the door, and Rosie said, to his retreating back, "Do you always keep sheets of canvas lying around? Just in case you need to move a body?" Hank shot her a look that answered the question and went out the door, leaving Rosie to whisper, "What's happened to my life," to herself and then gather herself to nod at Jean. "All right. Okay, Jeannie. Let's go do this."

  NINETEEN

  Hank dropped them at a pay phone closer to Rosie's house than his secret library, and drove off to deal with the Redeemed body. Jean stood at the edge of the road like a sentry as Rosie pushed coins into the phone slot. The first number rang without an answer, and the second two came up duds. She shook her head at Jean, who stepped back from the sidewalk's edge as cars went by, and wiped her wrist across her forehead. "He better find somewhere cold to hide that thing, or it's gonna start stinking real fast."

  "Jeez, Jean!" Rosie hissed. "Shush!" Not that Jean had spoken loudly, or that anyone was around to hear, but who knew, the operator might be listening in as the line connected. A man picked up with a gruff "Hello?" and Rosie burst into her best bubble-headed impression of Irene's Brooklyn accent for the fourth time. "Hi, is Helen Montgomery there?

  Her eyes widened and she gestured to Jean as the man's voice cleared, like he'd just woken up. "No, she's working. Supe at Highfield called her in for some extra hours today. What can I do for you?"

  "Oh, good, she's working, I really sort of wanted to talk to you anyways, Mr Montgomery," Rosie babbled, a knot of discomfort tight in her throat. "You're a star. Look, can I ask you something? Has she been acting different lately? I don't know, it just seemed to me she got kind of cool toward me around, I don't know, a while now, maybe around—"

  "Christmas," Mr Montgomery said with a sigh. "Her mother died about this time last year and it seemed to really hit her around Christmas."

  "Yes, that was so awful about her mother." Rosie agreed unhappily, and made a face as Jean's eyebrows rose. "And, gosh, yes, I'd say she seemed to change around Christmas, too. I just wanted to make sure the fella closest to her thought she was doing okay."

  "We'll get by," Montgomery said. "I'll let her know you called. What's your name again?"

  "Oh, don't you worry about it, I'll just give her a call again later. Thanks!" She hung up and slumped against the pay phone, feeling sick to her stomach. "That was awful."

  "Really?" Jean sounded admiring. "You lied like a pro. I didn't think you had it in you."

  "I wish I didn't! That poor man has no idea his wife is—" Rosie couldn't even say the word, half-afraid someone would hear her even though they were alone on the street. "And I just grilled him for information! What kind of monster am I?"

  Jean's eyebrows lifted again. "The kind that fights real ones. Come on, Ro, get over it. Did you learn anything besides whatever that was about her mother and Christmas? You sounded real sincere about that, just like you knew what he was talking about."

 
Rosie sank down to sit on the sidewalk's edge, her knees drawn up and her arms wrapped around them as she stared down the street. "She started acting different around Christmas. And she works at Highfield and got called in today to cover for somebody. Me, maybe. Or Irene. Rene swapped to a late shift so she could go to the party last night." She could hear herself talking to keep her thoughts away, but hardly knew what she'd even said. The street had emptied out, late afternoon turning to dinnertime. Families were gathering around their tables for dinner instead of kids playing while parents headed home. It felt lonely, even if dozens of people weren't more than a stone's throw away. "I don't think I'm cut out for this kind of business. You should have been the Redeemer."

  "Maybe, but I'm not, and you did pretty good there." Jean sat beside her. "Hank can be the brains, you're the muscle, and next time, I'll be the sneak."

  "Our own little holy trinity." Rosie made a face, then rubbed it out with her hands. "We should have asked Hank when his dad knew her, to find out if she was already a demon then. PFC Goode was at the factory, that ochim thing was there, Mrs Montgomery worked there … it all comes back to the factory. I wonder who owns it now. Probably Henry Ford built it, but it could belong to Harrison Vaughn now, for all I know. Only don't let Hank hear me say that."

  "I can't blame him for not wanting it to be his dad." Jean dangled her arms over her knees, fingertips tapping together. "But we should find out who owns it. If Harrison Vaughn does, it's just too much coincidence, him having an affair with Mrs Montgom—"

  "An affair? Jean, you can't go around saying things like that! Oh my gosh! What if Hank heard you?"

  Jean leaned back until her fingers locked around her knees and studied Rosie. "Are you serious, Ro? What did you think he meant when he said his dad knew her? Didn't you see how uncomfortable he was?"

  "I don't know, but he—" Rosie bit down on her protests as she remembered Hank's tension. "Oh, no. No, that just can't be right, Jean. His dad had an affair with a demon? How could he not know?"

  "Which one of them?" Jean asked sourly. "Lots of men think women are crazy anyway, so what's the difference if he's screwing a demon or not? Or do you mean Hank?" She shook her head. "I don't know. Do you think that empathy thing of his is for real?"

  "I don't know. He does." Rosie wet her lips, frowning at the dust on the road. "I'm parched. Let's walk up to the house and get a drink." She stood, offering Jean a hand, and pulled the other girl to her feet. "I guess I want to believe him. It makes me be not the only one, and I have to believe me. But I don't know how you can tell that somebody's a … an empath … for real. I don't even really know what it is, except what he said. How do you tell if somebody really knows what you're feeling?"

  "I guess you run some tests somehow." Jean shoved her hands in her pockets as they walked under trees spaced too far apart to offer any real relief from the heat or shade from the slanting sun. "Maybe you pretend hard to have a feeling, until it gets real, and you see if he can figure it out."

  Rosie laughed. "Yeah, but if you're standing there pretending to get mad until you do, I can just see that, can't I? You getting all red in the face and tight-lipped and all of that."

  "So do it on opposite sides of a wall. That way he can't see you."

  "I don't think he'd like it. Having to prove it, I mean."

  Jean stopped short in a puddle of her own shadow. "Who cares? If he's on the level, it shouldn't be a problem. He's got to know how crazy it sounds, so he should be willing to try and prove it. If he can't, then there's no reason to think he can tell when a demon is nearby, either, which makes him—"

  "Not useless," Rosie disagreed, even if Jean hadn't actually said it. "Come on, we're not getting any less hot standing here. He does know more about demons than we do, and he can read all those research books in all those different languages, and we can't, so he's not useless. He just wouldn't be useful in finding them, so we're no worse off than we are right now." She giggled suddenly. "Listen to us, Jean. Talking about finding demons and empathy and magic like we haven't flipped our wigs."

  "Part of me has." Jean sounded hollow, but she kept her voice steady and her eyes stayed dry. "I'd have to be crazy or dumb to not know I'm hanging on to all this craziness because it gives me something else to do. If I think too much about Ruby, I start flying apart. That's the part of me that's going crazy, Rosie. The part that looks crazy, all this demon stuff, that's all that's holding me together. Her funeral is on Saturday. It'll be a whole week then. More than a week. I don't think I can stand it."

  "I'll be there," Rosie said helplessly. "We'll all be there."

  "I know. I just want every demon in Detroit dead before then." A smile pinched her mouth. "That's not too much to ask, is it?"

  Rosie reached out and took her hand, squeezing it. "We're batting a thousand so far. None of the ones we've met have made it out alive."

  Surprise tweaked Jean's smile into something better than it had been. "There is that." She squeezed Rosie's hand in return, then let it go, looking toward the slowly setting sun "It's already past seven and Hank's probably gonna be busy for a while. Tomorrow we should put him through his paces, but in the meantime, should we go up to the factory and find out who knows what about Helen Montgomery?"

  "I don't think they'll even let me on the grounds. Maybe Irene can find something out."

  "Do you really want to tell her there's another dead body with your name on it?"

  Rosie's eyes popped. "Jeez, put a cork in it, Jean! Keep your voice down! And no, I guess not. I guess if we went up and grabbed coveralls, we could blend in okay, as long as the supe didn't see us coming in." Rosie frowned at patches of changing sunlight through the widely spaced trees. "She worked night shift, so anybody who knew her wouldn't be there yet. Maybe I should get dinner and look at the help wanted ads until Hank turns up again."

  "Rosie …" Jean trailed to a stop, her steps as slow as her words. "You know it's going to be darn near impossible to find work now. Especially—I mean, Rich is home."

  "Oh, not you too. Not that."

  Jean shook her head. "I'm with you, but you know what people are going to say. ‘She's still working? With her soldier home? How does he like her taking his job?'"

  "Well, who am I going to tell that my soldier is home, anyways? My new supe? Why would I do that?"

  "They'll ask if you're getting married."

  "And I'm not." Rosie folded her arms under her breasts and walked away, scowling at the sidewalk. "Not any time soon, anyways. Everything's different now, and who knows if he'll want to marry me, in the end?"

  "Or if you'll want to marry him." Jean caught up, measuring her steps by Rosie's shorter ones. "I'm just wondering if you've got a fallback position."

  "I really am going to college, Jean. I still want to find part-time work, but that's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna go learn how to design the cars all the men will be back to build, or something like that, I don't know yet. But I'm going to college."

  "Holy moly," Jean breathed with a smile. "You said school earlier, didn't you, but I don't think I really heard you. Really? That's what you're going to do? Good for you. Does Rich know yet?"

  "I haven't had time to tell him. I don't know what he'll think."

  "Does it matter?"

  "No. Yes." Rosie sighed. "I was so crazy in love with him when he shipped out, Jean. But it's been years and I don't know anymore. It matters because maybe we're still meant to be, maybe it'll work … but at the same time, it doesn't, because this is what I gotta do for me. So I hope he'll think it's great, but if he doesn't …" She shrugged helplessly. "Then I guess I know how it works out between us."

  "Good." Jean offered a brief smile at Rosie's glance. "You're stuck on having your independence. I'd hate to see that just wash away when the going got tough."

  "Well, I don't know what could be tougher than this." A superstitious thrill ran down Rosie's spine and she muttered, "Probably something," to ward it off. "I'll figure something out and spit in th
eir eye."

  "Atta girl. I'm going to catch a tram home, Rosie. You give Hank a call tonight and tell him that tomorrow we want to test and see if his empathy is real, okay?"

  "I still think he won't like it."

  "None of us like any of this." Jean ducked under the tree at the tram stop, taking what cover from the sun she could, and shooed Rosie along.

  ✪ ✪ ✪

  Lights were on in the kitchen and voices spilled out the open window as Rosie walked up to the house a while later. She hesitated on the porch, listening until she'd identified Barb and Dorothy and Wanda. Marge usually worked a swing shift and Irene had taken that shift today, too, so the three who'd become least friendly to Rosie since Saturday were the ones at home. She might avoid them by going straight to her room, but that would mean not getting any dinner, either. And she'd paid for her fair share of that food, since they all went in together for groceries, spreading their money farther that way. Jaw set, Rosie pushed the door open and marched in to be met with a sudden silence. Dorothy giggled nervously. Wanda elbowed her, but Barb tossed her hair. "Well, what do you want?"

  "Dinner," Rosie said as steadily as she could. "Is that potato salad?"

  "Macaroni," Wanda volunteered. Barb shot her a daggered look and her shoulders hunched, gaze dropping to the table.

  Rosie smiled, even if it felt more like baring her teeth. "Sounds nice. Maybe I'll fry up some wieners. Anybody else want some?"

  "We didn't make enough macaroni salad for everybody." Barb tossed her hair again.

  "Really. I can't ever make more than enough for everybody. I don't think I've ever been able to make just a little macaroni salad in my whole life." Walking across the kitchen under the weight of everybody's gaze made Rosie move stiffly, but she'd be darned if she'd give up now. "Gosh, Barb, there must be eight cups of this stuff besides what you've got on your plates! How much more do you reckon you need tonight? Maybe I could dish it up for you."

 

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