“Well, it looks like she cares.”
“Everyone at the station is probably wondering where I am. How much battery life do you have?”
“Half.”
“Let me have yours.”
“Why?”
He slid open the back of his phone, popped out the battery, set it on the granite countertop.
“Because people can track me to your house if this phone is running.” Paige handed over her phone. “Can you get me that number?” he asked.
She flipped back to the listing for St. James Cathedral and called it out.
An elderly-sounding woman answered on the second ring, “St. James.”
Grant put the phone on speaker and set it face-up on the kitchen island.
“Hi, who am I speaking with please?”
“This is Gertrude. What can I do for you?”
“I was trying to reach the parish priest.”
“Just a moment.”
The hold Muzak was a Gregorian chant.
After thirty seconds, a soft-spoken man answered, “Jim Ward.”
“Hi Jim, my name’s Grant.”
“How can I help you, Grant?”
“My sister and I are dealing with an issue in her house.”
As Grant listened to the long pause on the other end of the line, it occurred to him that he didn’t have the first idea of how to say this.
The priest finally nudged him on. “Could you elaborate?”
“I think we have some kind of—I don’t know—entity.”
“Entity?”
“Yes.” He hoped the priest would take the ball and run with it, spare Grant the humiliation of having to provide a blow-by-blow for something that was sounding more ridiculous every second.
“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand what you mean.”
“There’s something upstairs that is … I don’t really know how to put this ... not of this world.”
An even longer pause.
Grant stared at Paige across the kitchen island.
“I know this sounds weird,” Grant said. “I promise you it’s not a joke. I couldn’t be more serious or more in need of help.”
“Are you a member of St. James?” the priest asked.
“No, sir.”
“Is your sister?”
“No.”
“What exactly is it that you would like for me to do?”
“To be honest, I don’t have the first clue about where to begin with something like this. I was hoping you would.”
“Do you believe this is demonic activity you’re dealing with?”
“I don’t know. I think it might be.”
“We’re really not equipped for this in any of our Seattle parishes, but there is a priest trained in the rite of exorcism in Portland.”
“Could you put us in touch?”
“There’s a protocol for these types of matters. It’s just you and your sister?”
“Yes.”
“And do you suspect possession?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Do you believe this entity has control over you or your sister?”
Grant met eyes with Paige.
“I don’t know.”
“I would be happy to meet with both of you. I’m booked up today, but you could come by my office first thing Monday.”
“What’s this priest’s name? The one in Portland?”
“The better course of action would be to have you meet with me first. Then I could make a referral.”
Grant said, “That won’t work for us. I want you to take down our address. It’s Twenty-two Crocket Street in upper Queen Anne—the freestanding brownstone on the corner. Please communicate to this priest in Portland that we need to see him.”
“If this is a true emergency, I could come by myself after I leave the office tonight.”
“Are you equipped to handle something like this, Father?”
A brief pause and then: “Well, it’s not exactly a science, but I’m not the best suited for this type of thing, no.”
“Then don’t come here alone. Give the address to the other priest or don’t do anything.”
“I’ll see what can be done.”
“Thank you.”
Grant gave him his phone number and hung up.
The water was boiling on the stove.
He walked over and lifted the pot off the gas.
“That guy isn’t sending anybody,” Paige said.
“You’re probably right.”
Grant emptied the silk sock filled with fresh coffee grounds into the hot water. He stirred them in with a wooden spoon and topped the pot with its lid.
“You’re looking pale,” Paige said.
Grant nodded. He felt dizzy too, and his headache was becoming impossible to ignore.
“It was a long night. I just need some coffee,” he said.
“Coffee won’t fix this. Should I run through the list of symptoms? I know them pretty well.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“You’d have to be a pretty bad detective to actually believe that.”
She was right, but he wasn’t ready to give up on the hope that his headache and sour stomach were just the parting gifts from a terrible evening followed by an even worse night’s sleep.
“This is just the beginning. You have no idea how bad it’s about to get.”
Paige walked over to the pot and lifted the lid. Pungent curls of steam made a brief appearance before dissipating. She picked up the wooden spoon and gave the darkening liquid a few stirs.
“I’ve been where you’re at,” she said. “Wanting to hold off. Thinking I could control my own deterioration.”
“I’m not sending another person up there, Paige. If that’s what you’re getting at.”
“But when it was me hurting, that was—”
“Different, yes.” Grant leaned against the counter.
“Because it’s okay as long as I’m the one needing help?” she asked.
“Because my sister was dying.”
She let the spoon clatter to the counter and turned to face him.
“It wants someone else, Grant. Do you think I can’t feel it too? Do you think it won’t bring me to my knees all over again if we hold off? You saw how I looked last night. I’ll be just as bad off, if not worse, in another twelve hours.”
“We can’t keep sending men up there. Who knows where they’re going, what they’re doing, when they leave your brownstone.”
“I don’t like it either. You may not understand, but these men are more than just clients to me.”
“I get that.” More than you know.
“Look, we can put this off now, but there will come a time—I promise you—when you beg me to bring someone over. I don’t want either of us to get to that point.”
Grant circled the island and took a seat on one of the stools. He crossed his arms on the cool tile and let his head fall onto them. Felt like his brain had been submerged in a bucket of ice water. Each thought arrived cut into slices, and as Grant struggled to assemble them, the only thing that surfaced out of his fog was that she was right—he couldn’t hold out forever.
Paige came over to him.
“You know we don’t have a choice,” she said softly. “But there’s a good reason to do it soon.”
“What’s that?” he said without lifting his head.
The room had become thick with the rich aroma of coffee. On any other day, that smell alone would have been sufficient to give Grant a pleasant dopamine pregame in anticipation of the real thing. Now it struck him as flat and unappealing.
“I just thought of it this morning,” she said. “Don’t know why it didn’t occur to me before.” She ran her fingers through his hair. “We have a chance to learn something about that thing that’s living in my room.”
For a brief second, curiosity broke through the mounting pain. Grant heaved his head off the cool comfort of the tile.
“How?”
“It’s kept me a prisoner for two weeks, and I still don’t know anything about it.”
“Because you’re always unconscious when it shows up.”
“And when it’s all over, my client’s gone and I don’t have a clue about what happened. Tonight will be different. We’re going to make a video of the whole thing.”
“With what?”
“My phone. I’ll leave it on the dresser. There’s no reason my client will think to look for it. His mind will be on other things.”
Grant considered this. Concrete visual evidence was exactly what they needed, and not just for themselves, but for any help that eventually showed up. At the very least, it was more of a plan than anything they’d had up until now. But the idea of watching his sister with another man was beyond what he could handle. Listening to them last night had been hard enough.