Brimstone (14 page)

I had seriously underestimated my mother. Not her anger at my getting detention, but her verbosity on the subject. We had gotten through “What were you thinking?” and “Better sense than that,” and moved on to “Follow you for the rest of your life.” She was just bringing Dad into it with “She’s
your
daughter” when the doorbell rang.

Saved by the … well, you know. I jumped off the sofa like I had springs on my butt. “I’ll get it!”

“Sit!” barked Mom.

I sat. Dad went to answer the door, but he raised a fist in solidarity as he passed behind Mom. She snapped without turning around, “I saw that, Michael Quinn!”

Boy, for someone who disavowed belief in the supernatural, Mom could be darned spooky.

With the interruption, she jumped to the closer. “I am seriously disappointed in you, young lady.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“It is ridiculous for you to be making waves this late in the school year. You graduate in a month.”

“I know.”

“So if you could save mocking the establishment for a
time when your class standing will not be affected, I would deeply appreciate that.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

My complacency took the wind out of her sails. She floundered for a moment, then said in a calm voice, “All right, then. You’re only grounded for the weekend.”

“Grounded! You can’t!” How was I supposed to fight the forces of evil if I was grounded?

“I can. You live under this roof, and you don’t turn eighteen for two months—”

“Fifty-two days, Mom!”

“And you’re still in school.”

Dad cleared his throat in the hallway. “Maggie, Justin is here.”

I saw him behind Dad, staring at the ceiling and pretending he was deaf. Mom looked questioningly at me.

“We’re working on a project together. For school.” I figured I wasn’t really lying—keeping the campus safe from ghostly things counted.

“On a Friday night?”

“Mom!” I stretched the word to three syllables and jerked my head to where Justin lurked in Dad’s shadow. She looked the young man up and down—nice frame, broad shoulders, trustworthy face.

“Oh.” It would have been funny under other circumstances. She wanted to be the strict disciplinarian, but she was clearly pleased—and surprised—that I had handsome company on a Friday night. Finally, she gave in. “As long as you don’t go anywhere.”

I jumped up. “We’ll be up in my study.” She looked as if
she might protest, but I didn’t give her a chance, gesturing Justin into the room and introducing him to Mom.

“Good evening, Mrs. Quinn.” He extended his hand and she put hers out automatically, looking pleased at the formality. “You have a lovely home.”

She smiled, finally relaxing. His air of good-natured steadiness had that effect on people. “Thank you, Justin. Maggie, you have enough sodas?”

“We’re good, Mom. Thanks.” I motioned for my guest to follow me up the stairs.

“Your mom seems nice,” said Justin as we reached the landing and my study area.

“She is. A little tightly wound sometimes, but Dad balances her out.” That summed them up pretty well, actually. Mom was conventional and rational. Dad was more like Gran—intuitive and spiritual. And there I was, smack in the middle.

Justin carried a heavy backpack with him; he set it on the hand-me-down loveseat as he looked around the loft. “This is twice the size of my dorm room.”

“Yeah. I’ve got a pretty good thing going.” I casually dropped last night’s Coke cans in the trash. The desk had reverted to its wilderness state pretty quickly, but the rest still looked vaguely civilized.

“Which window was it?” he asked, getting down to business.

I led him to the bedroom half of the room and pulled back the curtain. There was enough daylight to see the dark, greasy film on the center of the three windows that covered the east wall. My skin prickled as he opened the window and
ran his finger through the soot. Rubbing forefinger and thumb together, he gave a tentative sniff.

“It doesn’t smell much when it’s in the open,” I said.

“No. But there’s a whiff of something.” He made a face. “It smells like death.”

“Okay. I definitely don’t want to think about death on my bedroom window.”

“You want me to wash it off?”

“You do windows?”

My mom kept cleaning supplies under the sink in my bathroom, a blatant hint that I usually ignored. Justin and I discovered that soap and water only smeared the soot around, and even Pine-Sol didn’t cut it. I ran downstairs and got some vinegar (and some strange looks from the parents) but that didn’t improve matters, either. The glass was now a mass of black smears and streaks. Adding water was making the smell stronger, too, and the stink of pine-scented rotting garbage turned my stomach.

“Just close the window,” I said. “We’re only making it worse.”

“Hold on.” Justin hung out of the casement, trying to talk while holding his breath. Not an easy thing to do. “I want to try one more thing. Bring my backpack and some fresh water.”

His satchel weighed almost as much as mine did. I brought it over, then dumped the old water and refilled the bucket in the tub.

When I returned with the pail, Justin threw a handful of salt into the water, soaked a clean rag in the solution, then
wiped it over the grimy mess on the glass. In a few passes, the pane shone like a Windex commercial.

“Wow.” I stared, amazed. It had worked like, well, magic. “We should market that. For all your home exorcism needs.”

“Something like that.” He swung his legs out; the roof jutted below. By balancing carefully Justin was able to clean the whole window, and give the other two a rinse for good measure.

“What else have you got in here?” I poked through his bag. No wonder it weighed a ton. In addition to the pound of salt, he had a package of nails, a couple of books, and half a forest of leaves and twigs. “What
is
all this stuff?”

He leaned in the window, setting the bucket carefully on the floor. I thought the water would stink to high heaven, but there was no odor at all. “Since we don’t know what tradition the … whatever … comes from, I’m using a scattershot approach. Give me the nails.”

I knew that one. Iron kept away fairies and bad luck in Celtic traditions, and like a lot of things had been adapted into Western/Christian superstition: nails equals crucifixion equals Christ’s protection.

“What’re these twigs?” They were covered with bright red berries. Kind of pretty, really.

“Rowan.” His voice drifted in while he scattered the nails on the ledge above the window.

“Where did you get rowan twigs? Witch Depot?”

“There’s a New Age herb shop near campus. Would you believe the hardest thing to find was the iron nails? They’re all nickel alloy now.”

“How inconvenient.” I got out of the way as he climbed back in the window. He was filthy from all the window washing. We spread a thin line of salt and placed a rowan twig on every sill, then closed those curtains and went to give the study window a similar treatment.

The whole operation didn’t seem nearly as silly as it should have. Maybe it was the way the saltwater had cleared the window and nothing else had. Maybe my idea of what was “normal” had taken a radical left turn.

I had just closed the window when I heard footsteps on the stairs. We exchanged panicked looks, but didn’t have time to do anything other than hide the nails (Justin) and the salt (me) before Dad’s head appeared at the landing.

“What the blazes are you two doing?” he demanded.

“It’s a … chemistry experiment,” I said, not guiltily at all. “Justin is helping me with a chemistry experiment.”

Dad continued up, giving us the Paternal Eye. Justin actually squirmed. I think if we’d actually been doing anything illicit he might have thrown himself at my father’s feet, begging his forgiveness.

As it was, when Dad held out his hand, Justin meekly gave over the package of iron nails. With resigned chagrin, I took the canister of salt from behind my back.

“Something I should know about?”

I glanced at my partner in crime. He gave a little shrug of his eyebrow as if to say it was up to me. Gran would believe us. Heck, Gran would help. Mom would wig out on so many levels, but Dad was a wild card.

“Actually,” I began, choosing my truths carefully. “It’s Justin’s experiment with different protection superstitions,
and since I’m, you know, sensitive, we’re going to see if I feel more, um, protected.”

The Paternal Eye pinned me with suspicion. “You know your mother would freak out if she knew about this.”

Parents should not say “freak out.” But I’d just been thinking that exact thing, so I simply answered, “Yes, sir.”

Dad handed the nails back to Justin. “Don’t worry about the doors downstairs. My mother did them when we moved in, and checks them every year.” See. I was right about Gran, too. I had no trouble picturing her going around with a ladder, sprinkling iron nails over all the door frames.

“I’m taking your mom out to dinner.” Dad smoothed his tie. “I convinced her that Justin is trustworthy, but she’s not so sure about you.”

“We’re just about done, Dr. Quinn.” Justin started gathering up his things.

“Right. Good to see you, Justin. We’ll be home in a couple of hours, Mags.”

“Don’t hurry on my account.”

Just as he disappeared, my phone rang. Justin gestured for me to go ahead and answer. As soon as I flipped it open, I heard Lisa’s unhappy voice. “Are you coming to this thing or not?”

“The play?” I reordered my thoughts. I had not forgotten about it; I just hadn’t figured out how I was going to get there, being as I was grounded and all.

“Yes, the play. I thought you were coming. I bought you a ticket. I’m out sixteen bucks here.”

“I got kind of held up.” Justin looked at me curiously. I made a face, not sure what it was supposed to convey beyond a general helplessness.

“Well, the damned thing is about to start. If you’re not coming, then I’m not about to endure a lot of singing about chicks and ducks. Not to mention the drama triplets trying to steal Suzie Miller’s limelight.”

“The Jessicas are there?”

“And their Jock counterparts. The full unholy bunch. The Voiceless One is wearing sackcloth and ashes and the others are all telling her how selfless she is to be here to support the rest of the cast. I may hurl.”

“Hang on, Lisa.” I put the phone against my shirt while I asked Justin, “Can you drive me to the school?”

“Uh … I thought you were, um … you know.”

“Yes. But I have a bad feeling.”

My unease must have been obvious. I couldn’t put into words the tight knot in my gut and my certainty that something was going to happen. I was more sure than ever that this was tied to Jessica Prime, maybe all the Jessicas together. If I sat in my room with this dread clawing around my insides, if I could do something and didn’t, then all my fears about Nana and Pop, about Karen’s accident would be real.

Justin hesitated a moment more, then nodded. “All right.”

I told Lisa, “Leave the ticket for me in the front. If they won’t let me in after the show starts, I’ll see you at intermission.”

“You’d better,” she answered. “Do
not
make me suffer this alone, Magdalena Quinn.”

“I’m on my way.”

I grabbed some clean clothes from the closet and went
into the bathroom to change. I came out brushing my hair, thrust my feet into a pair of ballet flats, and searched for a purse.

When I found it, Justin gave me a handful of stuff. There were a few sprigs of the rowan, a couple of nails, and a Ziploc baggie full of salt. “This won’t help against your mother,” he warned me, “so I hope you know what you’re doing.”

I tucked them in my handbag, smoothed my skirt, and nodded. “It’ll be all right,” I said, with a certainty I didn’t quite feel.

m
urphy’s Law for Ghostbusting must go like this: If you risk parental wrath by breaking your grounding and several speed limits to get to somewhere you are certain will be a hotbed of supernatural activity, then suffer through two hours of songs about ducks, not to mention a choreographed hoedown, assuredly
nothing will happen
.

“I can’t believe it.” I stood on the school’s front steps where the “after-theatre” crowd milled peacefully, laughing and congratulating the cast.

“I know. I thought it would suck even worse.” Lisa stood beside me, deeply inhaling the late April air, cooler now that the sun had gone down. “Though I think some of the
laughs were unintentional. Like when Joe Cowboy dropped his partner. Or Stanley Dozer, looking like a seven-foot-tall mutant deer in the headlights when that scenery fell over.” She grinned at the memory.

“No falling chandelier,” I mused. “No plummeting sandbags. Nothing burst into flames.”

“Yeah. I’m disappointed, too.” We paused to watch Thespica swan over to Suzie Miller and graciously give her whispered congratulations. Suzie surprised us by throwing her arms around Thespica in an ingenuous hug. The Prima Donna’s expression of horror and outrage sent Lisa and I into whoops of laughter.

“Hey.”

I turned at the familiar monosyllable, still grinning at the Drama Queen’s expense. “Hey, Brian.”

Brian returned my instinctive smile with a broad one of his own. “Wow!” He put his hand over his heart, reeling back. “She actually smiles. I never thought I’d see it.”

“Stranger things have happened lately.” I could feel Lisa beside me, practically vibrating with displeasure. Had I always noticed those things, and never thought about it before? “Brian, this is my friend Lisa. Lisa, this is …”

“I know who he is.”

Her tone could cut glass. “Geez, Lisa,” I murmured.

Brian pretended not to notice. Maybe that was his conditioned response to unpleasantness. It explained why he did nothing when his friends acted like assholes, but then apologized for them later. Brian did not Make Waves.

“Good luck with the valedictorian thing,” he told Lisa sincerely. “I saw you’re the front-runner.”

“By a hundredth of a point. Thanks for reminding me.”
She turned to me, arms crossed tightly. “I’m going to talk to Emily. Come see me if you still need a ride.”