Babunya’s smile disappeared as soon as the car hit the road. “Why you outside?” she asked, and something in the set of her face told him that she suspected what was wrong.
He told her.
He described his strange feeling, the fear he’d felt being alone in the house, the sounds he’d heard, the shadow he thought he’d seen.
She nodded, seemingly unsurprised.
“What are we going to do?” Adam asked. He looked back toward the house, shivered as he saw the open door. “Should we wait for Mom and Dad?”
“No,” she said firmly. “Don’t tell parents. Better they not know for now.”
“But they have to know!”
She shook her head. “I take care of it.”
She grabbed his hand, and he was grateful for her strength, reassured by both her attitude and her apparent conviction.
“I already bless house,” she said. “No evil spirit here. This only minor thing.”
They walked up to the house, and Babunya continued to hold his hand as she stood in the open doorway, bowed her head, and said a quick Russian prayer.
He didn’t know if it was the prayer that did it or if whatever had been in the house had already left, but he felt no trepidation as he looked into the house now. For the first time since his parents had left to go shopping, he was able to breathe easy.
“It gone,” Babunya told him. She smiled at him as she squeezed his hand. “Close door,” she said. “We go inside.”
2
Gregory sorted through the screws and bolts in the metal bin at the rear of the hardware store, feeling better than he had in weeks. He’d just dropped his mother off at Onya Rogoff’s, and while she wasn’t quite her old hardheaded, judgmental, opinionated self, at least she had finally snapped out of her funk and was resuming some semblance of her normal life. She had not yet gone back to church, but she was meeting once again with other Molokan women, planning times to get together to make bread and borscht, and Gregory was grateful that the rather frightening apathy into which she had fallen had somewhat dissipated.
Somewhat.
She was still far more listless and uninvolved than usual.
He wondered what the Molokans were planning to do about Jim Ivanovitch’s murder. His mother had not mentioned the minister since the funeral, but his death had been an unspoken subtext in her words and attitude ever since, and he knew that those old women were discussing a lot more than food preparation when they got together. It was clear that they believed some sort of demon or evil spirit had killed the minister and that his mother, at least, was staying away from the church for that reason. She was not avoiding the building because she did not want to be reminded of Jim—she thought that the building was cursed or haunted, and she would not set foot in it until it was cleansed and she was sure it was free from evil influences.
He was not able to be as sarcastic and skeptical about that as he wished.
Nikolai Michikoff had apparently taken over the reins of the ministry—he had both wanted to do so and Vera Afonin had had a dream that he should, which cemented it—but Gregory was not even sure that he had returned to the church since the funeral. Every time he walked or drove past it, the building looked empty, deserted, and he had to admit that the church looked a little creepy even to him.
The other woman who had been killed last week bothered him as well. The barmaid. Her murder seemed to bother a lot of other people, too, and the concern now was that there was a serial killer in McGuane. The prospect had everyone nervous. In a town where the crime rate was perpetually low and most arrests were for disorderly conduct and drunk driving, violent crime and the potential for repeat violence set everyone on edge.
He just hoped that it was a killer.
Killers could be caught.
But the things his mother worried about…
Gregory pushed the thought out of his mind.
He finally found the size of bolt that he was looking for, put six of them into one of the tiny paper bags provided, and walked up to the front counter to pay for his purchase.
3
Teo sat in the banya and cried.
Today, once again, she’d been pushed down by Mary Kay and Kim at morning recess and this time she’d had to go to the nurse’s office and get a Band-Aid for her scraped elbow. Later, as usual, she’d had to eat lunch all by herself because no one would sit with her. She hadn’t even gone to afternoon recess but had asked Mrs. Collins if she could stay in the classroom and read, and her teacher had let her.
Another typical school day.
She hadn’t said anything to Adam or Sasha about any of this—and definitely not to her parents—but she’d considered talking to Babunya about her troubles. She needed to talk to someone.
She was miserable.
She hated school. All of the kids were dumb and mean, and none of them liked her. She knew her parents wouldn’t understand, though. They would pat her on the head, tell her everything was going to be all right, and suggest that she make an effort to talk to other kids and make friends. Adam and Sasha would just make fun of her.
She wasn’t like the rest of them, though. She didn’t know how to make friends, and no matter what she did, the kids in her class would continue to make fun of her.
Babunya might understand, but Babunya had been acting weird lately, and Teo figured it would be better just to wait and talk to her later.
She rubbed her eyes with a finger, wiped her nose on the back of her sleeve. She’d been forbidden to go to the banya by herself, but she felt like being alone today and the bathhouse was the only place she could be sure of not being bothered. So she told her mom that she was going to play in the backyard and immediately headed over to the far side of their property, to the banya.
Now she sat on one of the broken bench boards and looked up at the stick ceiling. She liked the bathhouse; she enjoyed coming here for some reason. Babunya, she knew, didn’t like it at all, but she felt relaxed in the banya, at home. It was cool inside, and there was an aura of peace and tranquillity that made her feel cozy and comfortable despite the run-down condition of the place.
She wiped away one last tear. She could cry in here and no one would hear, she could talk to herself and no one would know. The banya was a place where she could escape from the problems of the world outside and just be by herself. It was nice to be alone sometimes, and this was the perfect place to do it. No parents around, no brother, no sister, no other kids, no other adults.
Just her.
She looked around the bathhouse—at the rubble strewn all over the floor, at the picture of the Molokan man on the far wall. If this place was fixed up, it could be like a little fort or a playhouse. If she had friends, she could bring them here and they could pretend this was a home or a castle or a secret hideout or… anything. They could clean up this junk and bring in some toys and make this place decent.
If she had friends.
That was the problem.
“Teo.”
She heard the voice, a whisper, coming from somewhere within the bathhouse. The sun was going down, and the room was filled with more shadows than light, but it was still too small to hide another person, even a child, and she was getting ready to dismiss the voice, to assume she’d imagined it, when it came again.