Meg Cabot - Darkest Hour

So this was pretty new for me. I was impressed in spite of myself.

Still, I'm not a dope. Even if I hadn't been in love with somebody else, Paul Slater was from out of town. It's easy for guys who are leaving in a couple of days to give a girl the rush. I mean, come on: they don't have to commit.

"Gosh," I said. "That is just so sweet. But you know what? I really do have other plans." I stepped out from beneath his arm and totally interrupted Dr. Slater's in-depth description of that day's golf score - bogey, bogey, par, par. "Can you give me a lift home, Father D?"

Father Dominic said he could, of course, and we left. I noticed Paul giving me the old hairy eyeball as we said our good-byes, but I figured it was because he was hacked at me for turning down his dinner invitation.

I didn't know it was for entirely different reasons. At least, not then. Although, of course, I should have. I really should have.

Anyway, Father D lectured me all the way home. He was way mad, madder than he'd ever been with me before, and I've done some stuff that's gotten him plenty peeved. I wanted to know how he'd figured out I was at the hotel and not back at the paper helping Cee Cee write her story, like I'd said I'd be, and he said it hadn't been hard: he just remembered that Cee Cee was a straight-A student who surely wouldn't need my help writing anything, and turned his car around. When he found out I'd left ten minutes earlier, he tried to think where he would have gone under similar circumstances, back when he was my age.

"The hotel was the obvious choice," Father Dominic informed me as we pulled up in front of my house. No ambulances this time, I was relieved to note. Just the shady pine trees and the tinny sound of the radio Andy was listening to in the backyard as he worked on the deck. A sleepy summer evening. Not at all the kind of night you'd think of when you heard the word exorcism.

"You are not," Father D went on, "precisely unpredictable, Susannah."

Predictable I may be, but it has apparently worked to my advantage, since right before I got out of the car, Father D went, "I'll return at midnight to bring you down to the Mission."

I looked at him in surprise. "The Mission?"

"If we're going to perform an exorcism," he said, tersely, "we're going to do it correctly, in a house of the Lord. Unfortunately the monsignor, as you know, is sure to frown on such a use of church property, so while I dislike having to resort to subterfuge, I can see that you will not be swayed from this course, and so it will unfortunately be necessary in this case. I want to make certain there's no chance of Sister Ernestine or anyone else discovering us. Therefore, midnight it will have to be."

And midnight, therefore, it was.

I can't really tell you what I did in the meantime. I was too nervous, really, to do much of anything. We had takeout for dinner. I don't know what it was. I hardly tasted it. It was just me and my mom and Andy, since Sleepy had a date with Caitlin, and Dopey was with his latest skank.

The only thing I know for sure is that Cee Cee called with the news that the story on the dysfunctional de Silva/Diego family was going to run in the Sunday edition of the paper.

"It'll reach thirty-five thousand people," Cee Cee assured me. "Way more than our circulation during the week. More people subscribe to the Sunday paper, because of the funnies and all."

The coroner, she informed me, had come through with a tentative confirmation of my story: the skeleton found in my backyard was between one hundred and fifty to one hundred and seventy-five years old, and belonged to a male of twenty to twenty-five years of age.

"Race," Cee Cee went on, "is difficult to determine due to the damage to the skull from Brad's shovel. But they were certain about the cause of death."

I clutched the receiver to my ear, conscious that my mother and Andy, over at the dinner table, could hear every word.

"Oh?" I said, trying to keep my tone light. But I could feel myself getting cold again, just like I had that afternoon in the photocopy cubicle.

"Asphyxiation," Cee Cee said. "There's like some bone in the neck they can tell by."

"So he was ... "

"Strangled," Cee Cee said matter-of-factly. "Hey, what are you doing tonight, anyway? Wanna hang? Adam's got some family thing he has to go to. We could rent a movie - "

"No," I said. "No, I can't. Thanks, Cee Cee. Thanks a lot."

I hung up the phone.

Strangled. Jesse had died from being strangled. By Felix Diego. Funny, I had somehow always figured he'd been shot to death. But strangling made more sense: people would have heard a shot and come to investigate. Then there'd have been no question about what happened to Hector de Silva.

But strangling someone? That was pretty much silent. Felix could easily have strangled Jesse in his sleep, then carried his dead body into the backyard and then buried it, along with his belongings. No one would have been the wiser ...

I guess I must have stood there looking down at the phone for a while, since my mom went, "Suze? Are you all right, honey?"

I jumped and went, "Yeah, Mom. Sure. I'm fine."

But I hadn't been fine then. And I certainly wasn't fine now.

I had only been to the Mission after dark a couple times before, and it was still as creepy now as it had been then . . . long shadows, dark recesses, spooky noises as our footsteps echoed down the aisle between the pews. There was this statue of the Virgin Mary right by the doorway, and Adam had told me once that if you walked by it while thinking an impure thought, the statue would weep blood.

Well, my thoughts as I walked into the basilica weren't exactly impure, but I noticed as I passed the Virgin Mary that she looked more particularly prone to weeping blood than usual. Or maybe it was just the dark.

In any case, I was creeped out. Above my head yawned the huge dome you could see, glowing red in the sun and blue in the moon, from my bedroom window, while before me loomed the chancel in which the altar glowed, swathed in white.

Father Dom had been busy, I saw when I entered the church. Candles had been set up in a wide circle just before the altar rail. Father Dominic, still muttering to himself about my need for adult supervision, stooped down and began lighting the wicks.

"That's where you're - I mean, we're - going to do it?" I asked.

Father Dominic straightened and surveyed his handiwork.

"Yes," he said. Then, misreading my expression, he added dourly, "Don't let the absence of chicken blood fool you, Susannah. I assure you the Catholic exorcism ceremony is highly effective."

"No," I said quickly. "It's just that ... "

I looked at the floor in the middle of the circle of candles. The floor looked very hard - way harder than the bathroom floor back at the hotel. That was tile. This was marble. Remembering what Jack had said, I went, "What if I fall down? I might conk my head again."

"Fortunately, you will be lying down," Father D said.

"Can't I have a pillow or something?" I asked. "I mean, come on. That floor looks cold." I glanced at the altar cloth. "How about that? Can I lie on that?"

Father Dominic looked pretty shocked for a guy who was about to exorcise a girl who was neither possessed nor dead.

"For goodness' sake, Susannah," he said. "That would be sacrilegious."

Instead he went and got some choir robes for me. I made a nice little bed on the floor between all the candles, then lay down on it. It was actually quite comfortable.

Too bad my heart was pounding way too hard for me ever to have been able to doze off.

"All right, Susannah," Father D said. He wasn't happy with me. He hadn't been happy with me, I knew, for some time. But he was bowing to the inevitable.

Still, he seemed to feel one last lecture was necessary.