F. Paul Wilson - Reborn

They were filled, all of them, with holy purpose. Eight men and five women, including Grace, all chosen by the Spirit, all ready to die for their God. She needed the men along for their strength in case they had to subdue anyone who might be protecting Carol. And she needed the women to help her with Carol. It would not be right to expose her niece's body to strange men, even if those men were filled with the Spirit. So the women would hold Carol while the men made sure Grace could perform her task undisturbed.

She closed her eyes. This was her salvation. She could feel it. By this one act she would undo all the sins of her previous similar acts. The symmetry of it was perfect.

But of course, why wouldn't it be? Its origin was divine.

8

Carol watched Bill drive the old station wagon through the gate and turn out of sight. Suddenly she felt very alone. She walked back in the house to be with Emma— I must be really desperate !—and tried to help her clean up the kitchen. But Emma shooed her away, telling her to follow doctor's orders and stay off her feet.

Carol tried. She turned on the TV and spun the dial: old movies, G.E. College Bowl , hockey, and pro basketball. She picked up two books and put them down again. She felt restless. She had been cooped up in a tiny hospital room for the past two days. She didn't want just to sit and do nothing, because if she did, she'd start thinking of Jim and about what had happened to him and how she would never see him again…

She wandered into the greenhouse to see if she could busy herself with the plants. It was hot and dry under the glass. Almost everything here needed water. That was what she could do: water the plants.

She was searching for a watering can when she spotted the dead geranium.

For a moment she thought she was going to be sick. Then she told herself that it was a mistake—it wasn't the same plant. Couldn't be.

But it was.

As she drew closer she saw the long stems, green and crisp less than an hour ago, now brown and drooping. The orange petals were scattered on the floor. Amid all its vigorous siblings was one dead, desiccated plant—the one she had touched.

Carol stared at it for a moment, then turned away. She wasn't going to let this spook her. Holding on to Bill's words about buying into other people's paranoia, she walked straight through the house and out the front door. She had to get away from the mansion, away from Emma, away from everyone.

She walked through the gate without looking up at the spikes and headed toward town.

9

"That's settled," Jonah said aloud as he hung up the phone. He was alone in his living room.

He had called his foreman, Bill Evers, at home and told him a story about continuing family problems since his adopted son's death and how he would have to use up some of his back vacation time for the next couple of weeks. Evers had been sympathetic and had given him the okay.

Jonah smiled. He had never realized how useful a death in the family could be.

The sky darkened suddenly. Curious, he hauled his long body out of the chair and went to the window. Ominous clouds were piling high in the west, obscuring the sun. He remembered the weather forecast on the car radio earlier. Sunny and unseasonably warm all day. But then again, a freak thunderstorm wasn't so out of place in light of the heat wave they'd been having.

Still, something about those clouds gave him a bad feeling. On impulse he called the Hanley mansion. Emma answered.

"Where's Carol?" he said.

"She's around somewhere. Did they give you the time off?"

"Yes. Can you see her?"

"Carol? No. When are you coming over?"

"Never mind that! Go find her!"

"Really, Jonah. This is a big place and—"

"Find her!"

Jonah fumed as he waited while Emma looked for Carol. Emma had her uses, but sometimes she was so thick! Finally she came back on the line, sounding out of breath.

"She's not here. I've called and called but she doesn't answer."

"Damn you, woman!" he shouted. "You were supposed to keep a watch on her!"

"I did! I made her sandwiches, but I can't watch her every minute! She's a grown—"

Jonah slammed the receiver down and returned to the window. The clouds were bigger, darker, closer, rushing this way. He knew then that this wasn't a simple out-of-season storm.

He ran to the garage and started the car. He had to find her. Even if he had to drive up and down every street in Monroe, he'd find her and get her to safety.

That storm was aimed at her, and at what she carried.

Twenty-three

1

As she walked along the harborfront, Carol heard the refrain from Otis Redding's "Dock of the Bay" through the open window of a passing car. She remembered how taken Jim had been with the song when he'd first heard it a couple of weeks ago. Now Jim was dead, just like Otis.

She tried to shake off the morbid associations, but everyplace she went reminded her in some way of Jim. And God, how she needed him now.

The heat and humidity were becoming oppressive. What breeze there was off the harbor was like a big dog panting in her face. She heard a faint rumble of thunder and looked up to see a towering mass of clouds sliding across the sky, smothering the sun. Those thunderheads seemed to be in an awful hurry. Flickers of lightning flashed against their dark underbellies. Before she knew it, the bright afternoon was gone, replaced by the still, heavy gloom that precedes a storm.

Just what I need , she thought.

Carol hated thunderstorms. But Jim had always loved them. She would cringe against him with her hands over her ears and her eyes squeezed tightly shut while he stared out a window in rapt fascination at the lightning. The more ferocious the storm, the better for Jim.

But there would be no one to huddle with in this storm, and it looked like it was going to be a whopper. She began to hurry back toward Shore Drive.

Suddenly the storm leapt upon the town. A cold wind beat against the still warm air and drove it off. The lightning narrowed from pale sheets into lancing bolts of crackling blue-white fury, the thunder rose from muttered rumbles to the sound of savage giants wielding monstrous sledgehammers against the tin dome of the sky. Then the rain came. Huge wind-driven drops, scattered at first, left silver-dollar-size splotches on the streets and sidewalks, followed by sheets of icy water that beat the swirling dust into mud and carried it away in eddying rivulets that in no time were running two inches deep along the curbs.

Carol was soaked in an instant. She ran under a tree but remembered how that was supposed to be the worst place to wait out a thunderstorm. Up ahead, half a block away, she saw her old parish church—Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow. It had to be safer than this tree.

As she dashed for the front door, hail began to pound out of the sky, icy white pellets, mostly marble-size but some as big as golf balls, bouncing off the pavement, pelting her head and shoulders, making a terrific racket on the cars parked along the curb. She ran up the stone steps, praying the front door was unlocked. It yielded to her tug and allowed her into the cool, dry silence of the vestibule.

Abruptly the storm seemed far away.

Church. When was the last time she had been in church? Somebody's wedding? A christening? She couldn't remember. She hadn't been much of a churchgoer since her teens. Looking back, she thought she could blame her falling away on a reaction to her parents' deaths. Her careless attitude toward church had caused some friction with Aunt Grace during her college years, but no big scenes. She never became antireligious like Jim; it was just that after a while there simply didn't seem much point in all that kneeling and praying every Sunday to a God who with each passing year seemed increasingly remote and indifferent. But she remembered times between her parents' death and her falling away when coming to Our Lady alone and just sitting here in the quiet had given her a form of solace.