Silver Zombie dspi-4

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Enter,” an imperiously distracted voice commanded before my knuckles hit wood. Nuns had a ninth sense.

  For a moment, I longed to be back in a stinky, darkening pasture with Ric and Quicksilver and Leonard Tall-grass.

  I opened the door, overcome by a scent of lemon oil.

  Through the big old-fashioned sash windows behind the desk, the sun was setting, going for the gold before it turned bloodred and sank pouting into the horizon.

  Sister Regina Caeli wore the same habit as always, the bulky headdress producing a decades-outdated, Matterhorn-peaked silhouette against the dusk. Its profile reminded me of the mythical Minotaur, the horned and bullish beast from ancient Crete. From what I remembered of her seven years ago, by now Sister should be about as ancient as Crete.

  “Delilah Street,” her firm but rasping voice greeted me. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  Whee. Welcome someplace at last. I felt the silver familiar changing into a chain mail necklace that covered my chest and décolletage. Especially any hidden cleavage.

  Ric would so want the details of this. The conversation, that is, not the familiar making an armored nun’s wimple on my chest. Too kinky for a Catholic boy.

  “WE ENJOYED WATCHING your reports on WTCH in the convent recreation room, Delilah,” Sister said when I was seated before her. “They were most informative. And then you recently … disappeared.”

  “Pretty much fired,” I said.

  “Ah. Women still have an uphill fight in the media. So now you are—?”

  “A PI in Las Vegas.”

  “We watch the CSI Las Vegas show religiously.”

  “Did you see … uh, me, as a corpse?”

  “Oh, doing some work as an extra, are you, Delilah? Most interesting experience, I imagine. Sorry, no. We don’t really watch the gruesome parts. You did wear a complete sheet?”

  “Yes, Sister,” I said virtuously.

  I had been clothed during my recently filmed cameo, which certainly couldn’t have aired yet. And all eyes here at the convent had turned away at Lilith’s nude appearance. Why watch a forensics TV show, though, if you shut your eyes at the autopsies?

  “Why have you been waiting for me?” I asked.

  “Our Lady of the Lake was the closest thing you had to a home here in Kansas. Many of our girls do return for class reunions, but you missed yours in oh-eleven.”

  “That was only five years out,” I said quickly. “I’ll make the tenth.”

  Sister’s cumbersomely attired head shook. “It’s not that, is it, Delilah?”

  So, I was going to have to admit to the mother superior and academic dean, scenic campus aside, that my four high school years were mostly forgotten and might have been as unpleasant as my group home sojourn? Naw. Better to shrug it off.

  “Even the pundits can’t decide if the true millennial year is the turn of two thousand,” Sister Ermangarde went on, “or two thousand and one. Graduates from both of those years seem to have made themselves scarce when it comes to school spirit, including donations.”

  “Really?”

  The reporter in me was getting interested. I’d always assumed I was the only disaffected one around as a kid, blaming it on being orphaned.

  “Is the reason the Millennium Revelation or the upheaval of the nine/eleven attack, do you think?” I asked. “They almost coincided.”

  She tented pale white hands, balancing her chin on their prayerful support.

  “What an excellent question, Delilah. You always asked good questions in class. We hadn’t considered, frankly, that the … ah, spiritual upheaval of the Revelation may have affected certain of our graduating students in those two years even more than the unprecedented political assault of mass murder.”

  I stared at Sister Regina. Ermangarde was just not a name I could stomach. Then it hit me. Ermangarde. Irma? Irma who is a guard? Just when did my internal voice show up?

  Please, Irma herself interjected. I am eternal. I don’t punch time cards.

  I brushed her rude comment aside.

  “When you say ‘spiritual,’” I told Sister Ermangarde, “you really mean … ‘supernatural.’”

  Her hands parted and slipped over the large wooden rosary lying atop the broad white wimple. At her gesture, I felt the familiar shape-shift into something smaller and longer again, like the sword. I wondered if she’d spotted my morphing metal accessory in action.

  Luckily, Sister’s faded hazel eyes were fixed on mine. “Spiritual? Supernatural? Aren’t they the same? Unlike your eyes.”

  Rats! I’d forgotten I’d been wearing my gray contact lenses in Wichita to avoid being identified.

  “You always had the most dazzling morning-glory blue eyes, Delilah. I’d hate to think time and travail had faded them, like mine.”

  “No such bad luck. I left town under a cloud.” I guess that description honestly applied to a wildcat tornado. “I’m back here to find out who I really am and don’t want any WTCH-viewer getting distracted by my former persona as a TV reporter.”

  “At least you haven’t lost faith.”

  “Ah, no … but I don’t follow you.”

  Her gaze darted to my chest, which started the heat wave of a blush as I recalled recent activities.

  “What a splendid Celtic cross you’re wearing, Delilah. The garnets are a particularly deep and limpid red, like Our Savior’s blood.”

  I looked down, of course, to see my familiar chain wearing a heavily ornate cross studded with cabochons of the same intense color as—strike me, lightning!—Midnight Cherry Shimmer.

  “No need to blush, Delilah,” the mother superior said. “Always such a modest girl, the ideal Our Lady of the Lake graduate. I’m glad you’re the sole member of your class to pay us a visit.” Her gaze sharpened. “Not that you particularly got along with the more affluent girls.”

  “That’s exactly why I’m here,” I pounced, to distract her from my scarlet-woman-red chest, the damn cross, and the flush heating my cheeks. “I was the only scholarship student, as they constantly reminded me. What scholarship?”

  “Oh. That is awkward. Almost as awkward as when Margaret Mary Rasmussen raised such a fuss about your driving lessons. No need to blush over that entirely innocent incident, on your part. I’m sure you were taught in Ethics the motto of the Order of the Garter, ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense.’ Evil to him … or her … who evil thinks.”

  “My scholarship,” I insisted, not allowing her to distract me.

  “Not exactly a scholarship, dear. That would require the school itself awarding the money, and we had very little for that in those days.”

  “I didn’t have any money in those days. I had to work twenty hours a week as a dorm receptionist, but everything was paid for. Classes, uniform, room, and board. There was even a ‘necessities’ fund at the bursar’s office, which had me putting in requisitions for pens and sanitary pads.”

  “Please, Delilah. Too much information.” Sister’s pale face colored. “You were on a stringent budget, true, but that builds character. Obviously. Look at you now. A poised professional.”

  “If the school didn’t have the academic scholarship money for me, who or what did?”

  “This is awkward, as I said. We were charged to be discreet. Actually, to silence.”

  “I’m long gone, Sister Regina.” I deliberately invoked her name at the time. “Where did I spend summers? I don’t even remember.”

  “We have a camp. In the woods.”

  I recalled the long-sword glimmer of a body of water far larger than the campus pond. Trees. Shadows. Horses and hoot owls.

  “A camp?”

  Sister cleared her throat. “Camp Avalon in the North Woods. Very cool and bracing during the hot and humid Kansas summers.”

  “I was at a f-forest camp and I don’t even remember?”

  “Really, how much do any of us remember of our pasts, Delilah? Most of the girls who come back laugh about the oversized gym suits, the required phy
sical education classes, the—”

  “The May crowning of the Virgin with flowers,” I filled in. “The winter Snow Fest, the SATs, the crummy mixers with the local boys’ high schools.”

  I could have been describing the photos in the high school yearbook, had I ever had the cash to buy any of them. In any Midwestern private girls’ school yearbook. I finally had a generic nonhistory, I realized.

  “So,” I said. “Who was the benefactor?”

  “Not a who, Delilah. A what.”

  “Something supernatural?”

  “Hardly.” Sister chuckled indulgently, which I doubted any Our Lady of the Lake students had ever heard. “Not a yeti from Tibet, I assure you.” She laughed even more unconvincingly.

  The reference had my hackles rising. Achilles, my dog who died in Wichita, was a Tibetan breed, named after the land’s capital city, a Lhasa apso. Yetis, aka the Abominable Snowmen, were the mystical white hairy creatures rumored living in the mountains of Tibet.

  While I rocked back on my pump heels at that link, she trebled on.

  “Not, Delilah, a … a witch doctor from Timbuktu. Merely a nondescript corporation from Corona, California.”

  “Corona, California? It sounds like a Beach Boys song title.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Does the corporation have a name?”

  “The checks were signed La Vida Loca and always went through promptly.”

  That’s what I needed. A paper trail to hack into. I stood, smiling.

  “Thank you, Sister. It’s been wonderful to visit the campus and see you again.”

  “Feel free to wander where you will.”

  Except it was getting into early evening, and I had a date with two guys and a dog.

  OUTSIDE THE ADMINISTRATION building, the twilight was doing a fade to black, as the film direction goes. I’d glanced up to check for any washed-out version of the moon to gauge how far it had passed the half-moon stage … when my sky-gazing self crashed into a hapless pedestrian.

  “Pardon me,” the man’s voice said, for no good reason.

  “Sorry.” I’d been the inattentive one.

  He was a bit shorter than me, which wasn’t hard for rumpled, middle-aged men if I’m wearing a shoe with any kind of heel. I needed a moment for his short-sleeved black shirt and wrinkled forehead exaggerating a receding hair-line to register.

  I’d almost flattened the only person on campus that I remembered vividly and really wanted to see.

  “Father Black,” I said, eyeing the white collar and checking the familiar to see if it retained the cross form. It was now a large shallow vee shape. Traitor!

  Schizo, Irma hissed at it, back on board again. Sister must intimidate her much more than Father Black.

  “Delilah Street,” he echoed back, looking more confused than ever. “Something’s very different.” He gazed blinking into my eyes.

  “New contact lens sunglasses,” I said glibly. “You know, the kind that change shades of gray depending on the light amount? Only now they make them in contacts.”

  “Oh. Well, you look splendid.” He turned to the curb. “Is this your … car?”

  It’s hard to deny it when you’re cozying up to the front fender, keys in hand.

  “Yes. Found her at a farm sale way out near Glen Rose. A steal. I mean, not literally.”

  “Of course not.” He began strolling around Dolly, which was quite a walk. “Perfect condition. Mileage?”

  “Twenty-nine thousand.”

  “Unbelievably low. Not that you’d lie,” he added.

  An awkward silence prevailed as he finished his tour and returned to my side.

  Father Black had been the only person at the high school who’d realized I had no vehicle and no one to teach me to drive so I could get my license. He’d taken me out in his old donated Volvo to the empty church lot and quiet roads around Our Lady of the Lake.

  One of the girls’ mothers complained to Mother Superior that such tutoring was “inappropriate,” and that had been that. Except the mother was instructed to finish teaching me to drive her BMW and use it for the test, which I passed on the first try because I was so mad about the gossip I didn’t want to spend another moment with that witchy woman.

  “You like wheeling this much steel around?” Father Black asked now.

  “Big and safe, and if anybody tries to mess with me on the road, they’ll be sorry.”

  “What about parallel parking?”

  “Maybe hard here, but I don’t need to do that where I live now.”

  “You did … vanish from the airwaves at WTCH rather abruptly. They never said a word. Where are you living now?”

  “Las Vegas.”

  “Las Vegas? Delilah, that’s Sin City!”

  “Not news, Father Black,” I said gently. Such a sincere, mild-mannered man. I’d always felt more protective of him than of myself, even during the “incident.”

  “No, Delilah. I mean … really and truly. I’m very concerned about your safety there.”

  Now was not a good time to mention my pals, the parking valet demons.

  “Las Vegas is not as bad as you think. Frankly, Father, some of the … people on the air at WTCH were not exactly nice and weren’t friendly to me.”

  His usual mild expression hardened. “You mean the ‘New and Now’ supernatural news team members, especially that incompetent weather witch. The chapel on our island has been hit by lightning six times this spring, no warning on the news, out of a clear blue sky, to coin a phrase for Kansas. Fortunately, we have a most effective lightning rod. Steps may have to be taken.”

  “A weather witch wouldn’t … target Our Lady of the Lake.”

  “None with any sense. Watch yourself in town, Delilah,” he told me, his expression softening as he patted my arm farewell.

  “I have friends now, Father, and some of them have big teeth.”

  “You … can’t mean that vampire anchorman?”

  “No, my adopted wolf-mix dog. He runs about your weight.”

  “Oh. Oh. Excellent.” Father Black winked at me, a very lame wink, and walked on into the administration building.

  I hopped into Dolly, revved her up, and majestically drew away from the curb and a big part of my past. On the way back down the meandering drive, I peered at the little lake and the island when I reached the scenic overlook, squinting in the dying light through my “sunglasses” contacts. Sure enough, the spire of a steeple poked through and there was a metal needle protruding from the spire, upon which perched, like a wind vane, a sculpture that looked very much like a … gargoyle.

  Gooo-aa-l! Irma chortled.

  I didn’t echo her cheer. I knew already I was surely going to Hell for lying about my gray contacts to kindly Father Black.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “DON’T COWS SLEEP at night like everything else?” I asked, irritable about being startled by every distant moo.

  “City-raised,” Leonard Tallgrass commented to Ric as we crouched in a cornfield bordering the grazing land we were “watching.”

  What you can “watch” crouching in corn plants in the dark of night is zero.

  “Me too,” Ric said in defense of my city-girl history.

  “You? City-raised? Naw.” Leonard Tallgrass had spoken. “You’ve got an inside-the-Beltway D.C. manner and you’ll never tell me what or why, but you were used to living out-of-doors young.”

  I knew Ric would leave Tallgrass’s pronouncement unanswered, so I broke the lengthening silence.

  “Say, guys. I still don’t get what we’re doing in a cow pasture in the dark of night, or what you’ve been ‘looking into’ on the rural scene. Or why you were so interested in the footage Slo-mo Eddie got of the cow mutilation scene here.”

  I’d returned Dolly to the Thunderbird Inn from Our Lady of the Lake to find Ric, Tallgrass, and Quicksilver waiting, all ravenous. After a fast-food dinner, Tallgrass wanted to eyeball my TV station tape of this very scene, then get the t
wo-footed members of our party appropriately garbed for a nighttime “operation.”

  So here we were two hours later in the dead of night. At least the nighttime temps dipped to a tolerable seventy degrees and the Kansas humidity was low. I couldn’t believe that my quashed TV story on cattle mutilations was of such interest now, although the enlarged clawed tracks I’d noticed at the original scene had looked mighty bear-like on my laptop.

  “Now that we know their route,” Tallgrass told Ric, “I figure the herd will be ambling our way in twenty minutes or less.”

  “Somebody’s driving them hard,” Ric said. “They’ll probably get here in ten to twelve minutes.”

  “Herd?” I asked. “Nobody herds cows overland these days. Aren’t we laying a trap for the rotten teenaged cow mutilators? Probably half-breed vamps who’ve never gone mainstream and are living off livestock.”

  A weed was shifting in the night wind right under my nostrils, so I gave up the knee-creaking crouch and let myself fall back on my rear. Ric’s fingerless workout gloves grabbed my wrists to pull me up again.

  Ric and I had outfitted our designer jeans for unexpected night surveillance with work boots and long-sleeved black cotton shirts from Western Werehouse. My size eight boots weren’t broken in. The stiff leather would chaff my ankles raw if I maintained this classic crouch position any longer.

  “She okay?” Tallgrass asked softly.

  “‘She’ is fine,” I whispered. “I may not be Annie Oakley, but I got you guys back to the same field I’d filmed two months ago.”

  “Yes, you did, scout,” Ric answered. “Any pasture where several cows have been mutilated and some officious Fed shows up to kick out the local media is prime scouting material.”

  “That was weeks and weeks ago,” I objected. “A lot of weather has been over this field since.”

  Tallgrass snorted. “You got that right. Especially lately. Wichita’s been having excessive ‘weather’ for early summer. Doesn’t matter. When blood is shed, the earth remembers.”

  I shivered a little, even though it was a perfectly temperate night. Crickets chorused their approval all around. We could occasionally hear the almost metallic rustle of birds of prey briefly silhouetted by the nearing three-quarter moon, looking like a mottled football, in the dark sky above.