Straight to Heaven (26 page)

“I forgive you,” he said.

I didn’t think I’d heard him correctly. “What?”

He gave me a woozy smile. “I forgive you, Lil.”

It was the drugs. It had to be.

Seeing my confusion, he said, “When I saw God, He told me about you. I mean everything. I understand what happened.”

Maybe he understood, but I didn’t. “How can you forgive me? Tommy! I used you, and then I threw you away.”

He squeezed my hand. “Lil, when the highest power in the universe tells you to forgive someone, you do it. Besides, you did me a favor.”

“You don’t mean that,” I said. What kind of masochist was this man?

His eyelids fluttered, and I thought he was going to sleep, but then he opened them again. “You know, after what happened to Stacy, I was going through a pretty bad time.”

I nodded. Tommy’s sister, Stacy, had died not long before he’d come to live with us. The two of them had been very close, and I’d known how much her death had hurt him.

“I realize that I was talking a lot about the higher power of the universe and everything when we first met, but I had stopped believing in it. Heaven felt like an empty place. The reason that I wanted to go on the pilgrimage so badly was to discover evidence that the higher power still existed.”

“You’ve done a lot of thinking, haven’t you?” I said.

He nodded. “Sitting in an airport for four days will do that to a person. Honestly, of all the parts of my trip, being stranded did me the most good. There were no distractions, and I was forced to think about things I hadn’t wanted to deal with. Anyway, right before I met Jasmine, I’d been praying a lot. Demanding that God show himself to me.” His fingers tightened on mine. “And that’s when I met you.”

I laughed uneasily. “You think
I
showed you the way back to God?” Boy, Miss Spry was going to love
that
.

“I don’t know,” he confessed. “I’m still feeling my way around.”

“Even after your near-death conversation with the Almighty?” I joked.

Tommy absently rubbed his thumb across my knuckles. “The Almighty is a complex being, certainly much larger and more powerful than I’d ever dreamed.” He shivered. “The connection was intense. Beautiful to be sure, but very, very intense.”

“You found your belief again? That thing you’d been missing?”

His smile was saintly. “Yes. I
know
that there’s something worth searching for.”

I sighed, feeling a little better. Still, the guilt was like a headache that refused to go away. “I don’t deserve to be forgiven,” I told him.

“No one does,” he said. “That’s why it’s called grace.”

Speechless, I sat quietly by his side until his eyelids drifted closed. A moment later, his breathing evened out. I kissed his forehead. “You
are
a saint, Tommy, and I do love you very much.”

As I stood up to leave, Jasmine came into the room carrying a large bouquet of flowers. Her eyes traveled from me to Tommy and then back to me.

“It’s okay, Jas,” I said. “I was just leaving.” I hugged her. Her shoulders stiffened, but then she relaxed. “He’s all yours,” I whispered in her ear. “I promise.”

She squeezed me back.

Out in the hallway, an otherworldly signature shivered in the air. William stepped through the doorway and stood next to me. We watched Jasmine hold Tommy’s hand while he slept. Her eyes were wide and lit with an inner fire. My stepsister was always gorgeous, but now she was radiant.

“That’s the look of love, isn’t it?” William asked.

“I certainly hope so.”

He put his hand on the small of my back. “I wish you would look at me like that someday.”

“Really?” I turned to face him. “Is that why you lied to me, and sent assassins after me?”

He flinched. “I let that damned competition get the better of me. I never meant for you to get hurt.”

“Miss Spry got to both of us,” I admitted. On the night I’d finally tempted Craig, I would have thrown William in front of a truck in order to keep him from stealing my prize. “She knew exactly how to make us fight for what we wanted.”

William rubbed my back. “I’m sure she enjoyed every minute of it.”

“What made you concede?” I asked. His prize had been worth fighting for just as mine had.

He looked away. “I finally realized something. My child is dead whereas yours is living. And the woman I married is not the woman I love any more.”

I held perfectly still. Even my heart seemed to stop beating. “William, what are you saying?”

He put his hand under my chin and lifted my face to meet his. He was completely human. Every bit of otherworld shine was gone. Instead of answering my question, however, he kissed me. Then, while my eyes were still closed, he slipped into the otherworld, leaving me behind.

Chapter Eighteen

The next few days were a hellish flashback to the last time my house had been demolished, and I’d had to scramble to find a place to stay. Ted took Grace in, and after I bullied him, reluctantly allowed Ariel to come as well. No matter what I told him, he seemed to think that Ariel had tried to burn down my house again.

After endless phone calls to rental offices, I found an apartment that was considerably nicer than the townhouse I’d squatted in after the fire. This one was in a subdivided mansion in Grosse Pointe. With its plaster ceiling medallions, hardwood floors, and marble sills, the place displayed the kind of elegance that newly-constructed houses could never equal. Not only was it gorgeous, it also had four bedrooms. A necessity since both Tommy and Jasmine were moving in with me and the girls.

That had been Jasmine’s idea. She told me that Tommy couldn’t live with his mother, and he had nowhere else to go. Jasmine had also insisted that she’d move in as well in order to take care of Tommy. I was only too happy to agree.

Once I signed the lease, I called Ted to get the girls back. “I’m having furniture delivered today,” I told him. “So why don’t I pick them up tonight?”

He agreed, but there was a reluctant note in his voice that I chose to ignore.

When I hung up the phone, someone knocked on the door. I was surprised to see Harmony, Craig’s guardian angel, standing there. She handed me a bottle of wine that had been topped with a bow. “Housewarming gift.” She peeked around my shoulder. “Nice looking place.”

I reluctantly let her inside. Harmony wandered around the empty living room and peeked out the window at the garden down below. “I heard about how you saved your daughter
and
Tommy.” She grinned. “Good for you!”

“I wouldn’t have
had
to save him if his guardian angel had been doing his job! How come Heaven sends an angel to help a wacko like Craig, but can’t bother to guard the best man on the planet?”

She looked wounded. “We act on orders, the same as you. If no one was assigned to take care of Tommy, then God had a reason for wanting him injured.”

Her answer infuriated me. “‘God wanted it that way’? That’s Heaven’s excuse for everything, isn’t it?”

She met my glare. “Is it any worse than, ‘The Devil made me do it’?”

Touché.

I glanced at the bottle of wine. To my surprise, it was a very good pinot noir. “Thanks for the gift. Is this because there are no hard feelings that I won?”

“Oh, there are plenty of hard feelings,” she said, “but not about you.”

“Who, then?”

“William Benedict.” Her jaw tightened. “That night you finally tempted Craig, William told me that he was turning himself in. That liar!”

I thought of the wanted posters hanging in Heaven. “What kind of reward do you get for bringing in a demon like William?”

“The satisfaction of saving a damned soul is reward enough,” she said without irony. “Plus, I’d thought that if William was turning himself in, I might have a chance to save Patrick as well.”

“You gave up on Craig in order to help Miss Spry’s secretary?”

“Yeah, I know. And believe me, if it had been anyone else, I wouldn’t have done it.” She sat in the window seat. “But I’ve known Patrick my whole life, and he’s like family.” She smiled fondly. “He’s my dotty old uncle from Hell.”

I’d grown up with a dotty uncle as well: my father’s best friend Glen who’d gone to law school with my dad and then worked for the same law firm. Unfortunately, Glen hadn’t come out of the closet until
after
he’d married. Once he’d gotten divorced, Glen celebrated every Thanksgiving and Christmas at our house since his wife and daughter refused to speak to him.

Harmony sighed. “At least I now understand why Patrick left Heaven. William Benedict
is
very alluring. Patrick must have found him irresistible.” She sighed again. “I certainly did.”

I patted her shoulder to console her, but she shrugged off my hand and went to the door. “I know that Patrick doesn’t want to come back to Heaven, but we’re not giving up on him. And we’re not giving up on you, either, Lilith Straight.” She winked at me and left.

Before I brought the girls home, I had to settle a score with Mr. Clerk.

I found him sitting at his desk with a cup of coffee. Everything in his dreary office had been restored to order. The charts were all neatly arranged in the racks. The scraps of paper had been cleaned up. The wastebasket was perfectly lined up next to the battered desk. Mr. Clerk was also looking much better. His white shirt was ironed, and his white tie was perfectly knotted.

“Hey there,” I said.

I startled him so much that he nearly spilled his coffee over the desk. He scrambled to cover up whatever he’d been looking at. Although, he had nothing to be embarrassed about. As far as I could tell, he’d been studying another chart and transparency, and not the sexy male models in a GQ spread.

“What brings you here?” He moved to the front of his desk, continuing to block my view.

“I have a present for you,” I said. Although I was getting very good at moving about the otherworld passages, I hadn’t mastered the trick of pulling things out of thin air like he could. Plus, my gift was very large. I had to get behind it and use both hands to shove it into the office. Once it was in there, it made the room look twice as small.

“You don’t need to buy me anything, Lilith,” Mr. Clerk said, alarmed. “I have everything I need right here.”

I looked around his dingy office. “Sure you do. Go ahead. Open it!”

Gingerly, he untied the blue bow. Then, carefully, he tore away the white paper. “What is it?”

“It’s a massage chair,” I said. I yanked at the flaps of the box and ripped the cardboard away from the staples. Within minutes, I had pulled the chair free of the packaging and plugged it in. I handed Mr. Clerk the remote. “Go ahead! Try it out.”

He still looked uneasy. “Really, Lilith. This is too much.”

“Sit, sit!” I pushed on his shoulders until he perched on the very edge of the seat. “I promise that once you try this, you’ll be in Heaven. Er… You know what I mean.”

Once again, he made a pained face, but instead of standing up, his hands appreciatively rubbed the padded armrests, and his nostrils flared at the smell of leather. A moment later, he slid back into the chair, and then as if by accident, his thumb found the button on the remote that turned on the massage feature. He closed his eyes and finally smiled.

“So you like it after all?”

He opened one eye. “You’re taking this back. I can’t accept it.” Then he closed his eye again and sighed happily. “I’m not kidding,” he added, then upped the vibrations on the chair.

Seeing that this could go on for a while, I sat behind his desk. I glanced at the chart in front of me. With a jolt, I saw the name LILITH STRAIGHT in the upper, right-hand corner.

Keeping my eye on Mr. Clerk, I carefully slid his top desk drawer open, and took out the magnifying glass for a better look. My life was a mess. Lines and arrows and dashes and swirls covered the page. There were notes and asterisks and dotted circles and even a few notations in what looked like Cyrillic.

The transparency, on the other hand, contained a single, continuous line punctuated by several tiny starbursts. One coincided with my birth. Another one lay right on top of my Date of Death when I had come face-to-grill with the Volvo and ended up in Hell.

I dropped the magnifying glass and grabbed the upper corner of the transparency, trying to figure out whose life I was looking at.

“Lilith Straight!” Mr. Clerk struggled to get out of the chair. “You have no business doing that!”

Ignoring him, I read the name out loud. “Patrick Clerk?” I held him off with one hand while I continued to look at the transparency. “Why does your life intersect with mine?” Besides the birth and death dates, there was a third, very recent, intersection. It coincided with Tommy’s death.

“You’d better explain yourself!” I stood up, my face hot. My hands closed tightly over the edges of the chart. “What’s going on?”

Mr. Clerk shrunk under my glare.

“TELL ME!” My demon was outraged, and my body was changing, straining against my own skin as it threatened to grow.

He held up his hands in front of his face. “Please! Calm down, and I’ll explain.”

Breathing deeply, I ordered my demon to back off. Slowly, I unclenched my hands. Some of the blood left my cheeks. “Go on,” I said.

“I was there on the day you died.”

There had to be more to it than that. Then I remembered. On the day I’d been hit by the car, I had caught a glimpse of a man in dressed in white. “Was that you? The one driving the Volvo?”

He nodded miserably.

“What about this?” I jabbed my finger at the more recent incident.

He wrung his hands. “Helen ordered me to find a berserker and put it in your house. I tried to talk her out of it, believe me, but she wouldn’t hear of it.”

I looked over my chart, seeing it in a new way. Mr. Clerk, one of my only friends in Hell, was also my enemy.

“And here?” I pointed to my birth.

His blue eyes met mine. “I know what you’re thinking, but I’m not your father. I went with Carrie to the hospital on the day she delivered you, but you and I are not related.”

“Even so, I’ll bet that whatever you did that day ruined my life.”