Possess (17 page)

Twenty-Three

M
ATT IDLED THE TRUCK WHILE
Bridget plodded up the stairs to her front door. Her legs felt like they were made of cement. The staircase was interminable—she might as well have been climbing Everest—and just when she thought she was going to sink down onto a step and crawl her way to the top, her feet met the soft cushy doormat. Phew.

She half turned and waved a lank good-bye at Matt as she fumbled for her keys. She had been dreading this moment, dreading the idea of having to tell her family what had happened in the church that night, dreading the memories of her dad’s murder that would inevitably bubble to the surface.

The door swung open before Bridget got her key in the lock. Her mother stood in the entryway, her eyes red and puffy. Bridget realized she wouldn’t have to explain anything.

“Bridget!”

“Mom.”

Mrs. Liu pulled Bridget to her with a force so desperate in its need, so violent in its panic that it knocked the breath right out of her. “My baby girl. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Bridget let her body sag into the embrace. Once again the release felt so good. She wanted to tell her mom everything, to relinquish control of her life, to let someone else make all her decisions. It would feel so wonderful. . . .

“Annie?” Hugh Darlington’s voice made Bridget’s stomach drop. “Is she all right?”

Her mom broke away. “Yes. Yes, Hugh.” Bridget’s guard was instantly back in place. “She’s just fine.”

“Wonderful.” Hugh Darlington moved languidly out of the darkened living room into the light of the entryway. “We were worried about you, Bridget.”

“Hugh came over to tell me what happened.”

Bridget wanted to hate the big douchebag who always seemed to be in her house at the most inopportune moments, but she couldn’t. One look at her mom’s face told Bridget that the news of Peter’s murder, and the memories of her dad’s, had been broken to her kindly, thoughtfully. There had been tears, but they were gone. Bridget had been spared the worst of it and for that, she was thankful.

“Monsignor Renault called to let me know what happened at St. Michael’s tonight.” Mr. Darlington stood behind her mom and placed a hand on her shoulder. “I came right over. I wanted Annie to hear the news from a friend.”

Mr. Darlington gave Bridget a small smile, and Bridget surprised herself by smiling back. Monsignor must have called before he came and rescued her from the police questioning, which was really very sweet. He was looking out for her, just like Mr. Darlington—as much as she might not always like it—was looking out for her mom. It was a comforting thought, and Bridget felt a twinge of guilt about keeping the secret of Penemuel’s message from her mentor. She was being silly, influenced by the horror of Peter’s murder, and she vowed to call Monsignor in the morning and tell him everything.

Mr. Darlington nodded. “I’ll leave you two alone, then.”

Bridget stuck her hand out to Mr. Darlington. “Thank you. For coming over and all.”

He looked at her outstretched hand for half a second but didn’t take it. Instead he leaned in and gave Mrs. Liu a kiss on the cheek. “Good night, Annie.”

That was rude. Did he hold a grudge because she’d punched his daughter in the face a few years ago?

Mrs. Liu escorted Mr. Darlington to the door. “I appreciate tonight more than you know, Hugh.”

He squeezed her mom’s hand. “I’m always here, whenever you need me.” His eyes shifted to Bridget, and he smiled. “Always.”

Bridget was wide awake when Sammy tapped on her bedroom door.

“Bridge?” He popped his head into her room. “Are you asleep?”

“Yes.”

Apparently Sammy hadn’t gotten the memo. He padded over to the edge of her bed. When Bridget made no move to pull the covers back for him, he yanked the duvet half off the bed.

“Not tonight, Sammy. Please?”

He started to climb in. “Nightmare.”

She couldn’t deal with him tonight. “Can’t you go see Mom?”

“Bridge?” His voice cracked.

“Go back to bed.” Bridget rolled onto her side and pulled the covers up over her head.

But she couldn’t block out the sound of Sammy’s sobs as he fled back to his room.

Bridget squeezed her eyes shut until the little flecks of pink-and-blue lights stopped floating around the dark background of her eyelids and faded almost to nothingness. She shouldn’t feel guilty. She wasn’t going to feel guilty. There was no reason for her to feel guilty.

Dammit.

Bridget slid out of bed and grabbed a sweatshirt off the floor, pulling it on against the chill of the house as she tiptoed down the hall to Sammy’s room.

She didn’t knock, just eased the door open and slipped inside. Even in the darkness of the room, she could see Sammy hitch his Transformers comforter up over his head as she entered.

“Sammy?” she said softly. “Are you asleep?”

He took a breath, then paused. She could picture him trying to figure out this change in their pattern. “No,” he said at last.

“Good.”

As she crossed to his bed, Sammy pulled the comforter down and flattened his body against the wall to make room for her in his twin bed. She climbed in, careful not to touch him, then waited until she felt his toes gently press against the back of her legs.

“I had a nightmare,” she started. Sammy giggled. “Elephants again.”

“No.”

“Not elephants?” Please, please, please don’t say it was the phantom cat.

“Mr. Moppet.”

Kill me.

“Not a nightmare,” Sammy said adamantly. “Not a dream.”

“Of course it was a dream.”

“He’s here.”

Bridget turned halfway around. “You saw him?”

Sammy shook his head. “But he’s here.”

“It was just a dream,” Bridget said as she settled back into the mattress. “Go to sleep.”

Sammy snuggled into his comforter. Suddenly Bridget wanted to wrap her arms tightly around her brother and protect him from the world. It had been building slowly, but with Peter’s death, Bridget couldn’t help but worry about Sammy. Alexa and Father Santos were right: Death followed her around. Could this new power of hers be somehow to blame? And if Father Santos’s theory about her dad was right, could Sammy have inherited the same curse? He could hear the phantom cat, how long before he was hearing voices in the walls too?

She couldn’t let him face that. Her determination to visit Milton Undermeyer doubled. If there was something she could learn that would save Sammy from her fate, she’d find it.

Sammy yawned and rolled onto his stomach. “Mr. Moppet was here, Bridge,” he said. “He was.”

“Okay, Sammy,” she said, trying to appease him. “Whatever you say.”

“He was,” Sammy said through another yawn. “And he wants something in your closet.”

Twenty-Four

I
T WAS A GLORIOUS MORNING
. The November sky was unusually blue, and a layer of thin, wispy clouds streaked across the heavens, so high only the space shuttle would be able to see them up close. The pea-soup fog that had been parked over San Francisco for the better part of two weeks had miraculously evaporated.

As they emerged from a tunnel, Bridget sucked in her breath. The orange-red spires of the Golden Gate Bridge towered above them, silhouetted against a perfect sky. In the almost sixteen years Bridget had lived in San Francisco, she could count on one hand the number of unblemished, picturesque days she’d seen. This one topped them all.

Matt snaked his truck onto the Golden Gate Bridge. Once onto the span, he pulled to the far right lane and slowed down so that the joggers were almost passing them. At that speed Bridget soaked in the view. A navy of white sailboats had invaded the bay, filling the empty spaces on either side of Alcatraz Island. Ferries shuttled tourists around the “must-see” sights of the bay while cargo tankers slowly maneuvered into port. She could even make out a hiker’s neon yellow jacket amid the wilds of Angel Island.

Beyond the bay, the silver-and-glass high-rises of the financial district glittered in the morning sun. They huddled together on their itty-bitty strip of land, reckless and defiant, jutting out into the bay like they were built directly on the water. The Bay Bridge soared out of their heights with no beginning and no end as it stretched toward Treasure Island.

It was just like a postcard.

“Cool, yeah?” Matt said. They were the first words he’d spoken since he picked her up, and she noticed how forced and strange they sounded.

“Yeah.” Good answer. The awkwardness in the truck swamped her. She paused a second, wondering what else she should say to him before the obvious popped into her head. “So it was okay? I mean with baseball practice and all?”

“No worries,” Matt said, moving back into the fast lane as they began to climb the hill on the north side of the bridge. “Sunday’s a pick-up practice. Optional. I usually go, so I figured it would be no big deal to ditch.”

“Thanks.”

They fell into silence again, and Bridget was grateful that Matt didn’t force conversation on her.

She’d only seen Milton Undermeyer once, on the last day of his trial. Her mom had kept her and Sammy away from the proceedings, but Bridget had insisted that she be present when the verdict came down. At that point, the assistant D.A. had prepared her mom for the worst: Undermeyer’s insanity defense would probably be successful.

Even though they’d been warned, Bridget’s mom shook like a leaf when the words “not guilty by reason of insanity” rang out from the jury foreman’s lips. Not that anyone doubted it. The man was clearly a fruit loop. Bridget had followed reports of the trial online, where the daily accounts of Undermeyer’s behavior included speaking in tongues, spitting at the public defender, pulling out chunks of his own hair, banging his head against the defense table after he’d been restrained in a straitjacket, and general prophesies of doom and destruction.

Not that it made much of a difference to Bridget. He had murdered her dad. She didn’t care if he threw himself out of the courthouse window so long as he suffered an agonizing death in the process, and she’d hoped that confinement in the loony bin up in Sonoma would be worse than prison, worse than hell, worse than the gaping, empty hole he’d left her with when he ripped her dad from her life.

The scenery outside changed as Highway 101 wove through the northernmost suburbs of San Francisco. Gas stations and minimalls gave way to rolling hillsides blanketed with the empty, hibernating grapevines of the California wine industry. It was supposed to be one of the most beautiful places in the state, but all Bridget could think was that with every twist in the road she was coming closer to an answer.

“You must find the messenger,”
Penemuel had told her.
“Me-yer. Un-der. Un-der. Me-yer.”
Could it be true? Could her dad have really told her to seek out his murderer?

Bridget’s heart thumped in her chest as the truck slowed down and Matt turned off the highway. The town of Geyserville looked so serene and peaceful, all nineteenth-century storefronts and single-story ranch houses. Then the vineyards, sandwiched between country roads like a patchwork quilt creeping slowly toward the hills to the east. And hidden behind the greenery of the hillside, the glimmering steel-and-stone edifice of the Sonoma State Mental Hospital.

Matt pulled up to the security gate. “We don’t have to do this. I can just take you home.”

Bridget shook her head. She had to go through with it.

A security guard approached the driver’s side window. “You have an appointment?”

“Yes, I should be on the list. Matt Quinn.”

The guard sifted through some papers on his clipboard. “Appointment made by Sergeant Stephen Quinn?”

“Yes, sir.”

Bridget’s jaw dropped. “You told your dad?”

“ID, sir?”

Matt pulled his wallet out of his back pocket and handed his license to the guard, then reached for Bridget’s. The guard walked back into his security hut. “How did you think we were going to get in here? It’s not like visiting hours at S.F. General.”

She hadn’t thought of that. But still the last thing she needed was for Sergeant Quinn to tell her mom where they’d gone.

“He promised he wouldn’t say anything,” Matt said, reading her mind.

Bridget rolled her eyes. “And you believed that?”

“I trust my dad. He asked why you wanted to go, and I told him I didn’t know.” Matt paused as if he expected Bridget to jump in with her reason. She didn’t. “Then I asked him not to say anything to your mom, and he said he wouldn’t.”

“Whatever.”

“He’s not going to say anything,” Matt repeated. “Why would he?”

The words “Because your dad’s in love with my mom” were on the tip of her tongue, but the look on Matt’s face was so completely innocent and confused that Bridget realized he had no idea about his dad’s feelings for Annie Liu. Boys. Typically clueless.

The guard came back to the window with their IDs. “Straight through the gate, up the road to the right. Visitor parking’s in front and there’ll be someone waiting to escort you. Good luck.”

As they rounded the bend from the security gate, Sonoma State Mental Hospital loomed above them. With its gleaming steel and glass, it was out of place, an anachronism, a state-of-the-art, high-security prison in the midst of lazy, rolling hillsides and a quaint old town. From the front entrance, you’d never even know that multimillion-dollar vineyards lay just yards from the main gate. All she could see was the paved parking lot, the sleek façade of the hospital, and the twenty-foot stone walls topped with coils of barbed wire.

A guard waited for them at the front door, and he ushered them to yet another security checkpoint. Again, they showed their IDs, and their names were located on a computer file.

“So you’re the ones here to see Undermeyer?” A beefy nurse-looking guy in light blue scrubs sauntered down a long hallway.

“That’s us,” Matt said. He was trying to sound light and casual but failed utterly.

The nurse shifted his gaze from Matt to Bridget, then shrugged and headed back the way he came. “Follow me.”

Bridget’s boots clunked against brilliantly polished tiles, punctuated by the occasional squeak from Matt’s Converses. She had to hustle to keep up with the nurse, though he seemed to move at an almost leisurely pace.

“You guys look kinda young,” the nurse said. He paused at an elevator and hit the button. “To be visiting one of our inmates.” His eyes kept drifting to Bridget, which made her think he was either a super perv or he had some idea who
she was.

“Weird that you’d be seeing Undermeyer too,” the nurse continued when neither Matt nor Bridget responded to his nonquestion. But this time Bridget was interested.

“Why?”

The door slid open and the nurse gestured for her and Matt to enter. “Well, he doesn’t get many visitors, is all. And by ‘many,’ I mean ‘none.’”

From what she’d seen, Bridget wasn’t surprised. “Oh.”

The nurse hit the button for the fourth floor and the elevator crept upward. “I should warn you guys, though. Whatever you want to talk to Undermeyer about, you probably won’t get very far.”

Bridget crinkled her brow. “Why not?”

The elevator dinged for the fourth floor and the nurse turned to her with a big, cheeky grin. “Oh, you’ll see.”

Bridget shook her head as she followed the nurse out onto the fourth floor. What was she doing? If Undermeyer was even half as crazy as he’d been at his trial, this whole trip was pointless.

Another security door awaited them at the end of the hall, and the nurse pulled a badge from his belt on a little zip line to scan them through. They entered some kind of recreation area for the inmates: tables with checkers and chess, a television showing
Seinfeld
reruns, a few magazines strewn on tables. Only four inmates occupied the room, identifiable by their dark blue jumpsuits. All four sat at solitary tables; all four did nothing but stare off into space. Fun times.

The nurse and/or security guard ratio in the rec room was two to one, and as Matt and Bridget followed their guide across the room and through yet another security door, Bridget couldn’t help but notice the whispers that went up among the staff. Everyone must have known she and Matt were there to see Milton Undermeyer. It was the big thrill of the day.

Bridget was glad when their burly nurse ushered them into what could only be described as the crying room in the back of a church. There were a couple of plastic chairs lined up to face a huge window that opened onto an adjacent room. There, swaddled in a straitjacket and flanked by linebacker-sized orderlies at each shoulder, sat Milton Undermeyer.

It had only been a couple of months since Bridget had last seen him in the courtroom, but Undermeyer had aged twenty years. His hair, which had been a wavy black mane, was now heavily lined with streaks of white. Not gray, but stark white. Deep ravines crisscrossed his face, marring his forehead, his chin, and the sides of his mouth with heavy shadows. The violet bands beneath his eyes extended halfway down his cheeks, and his lips were dry and cracked like a man left to die in the desert.

Undermeyer sat perfectly still in his chair, feet planted firmly on the floor in front of him, his head lowered so he could look out at her from beneath unkempt brows. The eyes were the only part about him that was wholly familiar. Utterly black.

“Mrs. Long,” she whispered.

“What?” the nurse asked.

Bridget shook her head. “Nothing.” But it wasn’t nothing. Those black eyes were the same as the ones Bridget had seen in Mrs. Long. Father Santos was right: Milton Undermeyer was a demoniac.

She felt a hand on her back and turned to see Matt at her side. “Are you okay?” he asked for the bazillionth time.

For the first time since she’d known him, Bridget was glad Matt was an overprotective worrywart.

“I’m good,” she said. And she was. She wasn’t sure how she’d react when she saw Undermeyer again, and her calmness almost surprised her. “I can’t go in there?” she asked the nurse.

“Hell no,” he said.

“Even with the guards?”

“Girlie, seriously. You’re not going in there. Even with the guards.”

Bridget narrowed her eyes. Girlie? Really?

“Can she talk to him?” Matt asked quickly.

“Yep, and he can hear you. But this is as close as you get.”

“Fine,” Bridget said, turning a cold eye on the nurse. “A little privacy, please?”

The nurse looked disappointed. Clearly he’d wanted a firsthand account of their conversation. Too bad, so sad. He lumbered from the room, though Bridget guessed he probably had his ear to the door outside. Whatever. Not like he’d understand a word of what he’d hear.

For a half second she thought about asking Matt to leave as well. The conversation she was about to have would probably scare the hell out of him. Still, there was something comforting in having him there, and after what he’d seen last night, he might as well get the whole freaky picture.

Bridget closed her eyes and took a deep breath to center herself. She reached across her body and gripped the St. Benedict medal tightly in her hand. She needed her dad with her.

It’s now or never, Bridget. She focused her mind on the man on the other side of the glass, just as Monsignor Renault had taught her. She went over the Rules one by one in her mind, reassuring herself that she was the one with the power here, with the means to banish.
Vade retro satana.

When she opened her eyes, she was all business.

“Milton Undermeyer,” she said. Her voice sounded big and boomy, and she saw Matt start. “Milton Undermeyer, I was sent by Penemuel to speak to you. I know you are the messenger and I demand you give your message to me.”