The voice who answered wasn’t Max, but Sam, who sat at the kitchen table with his own plate of corn cake things. Sam had added about fifteen thousand calories of syrup and butter to the concoction, but he was staring at me. My face, anyway. Still didn’t want to meet my eyes.
Clever boy, Sam.
“You heard me crying all the way from your room?” To tell the truth, I felt lighter than I had in days. Weeks, actually. I was pretty much the scum of the universe, after all. I might not have killed my mentor and very best friend in the whole world directly, but I sure as hell hadn’t done anything to save him. That made me at worst, a murderer. And at best, a murderer.
I put the plate down on the table, sliding into my seat.
“You cry really loud.”
“Sorry about that.”
Max came to the table with his own plate, but I knew he could sense that something was different as well. I wasn’t just keyed up, I was furious. Furious and ready to go blast something to hell. “What is it I’m missing?”
“She cried.”
“I got that, Sam.” Max’s gaze never left mine. “I didn’t hear you.”
“God doesn’t trouble the sleep of the blessed. No offense intended, Sam.” I offered the boy a hard smile, and he dropped his gaze to his corn cakes.
I turned to Max. “I think we should get started today with something easy, don’t you? Something that needs to be done anyway. It’d be a help to your folks.”
“Okay.”
I didn’t say anything more, and he glanced toward Sam. Understanding flickered across his face, understanding and a sort of queasy awareness that things had just taken a very decided turn. Fortunately, we got through the rest of the meal like three normal people having a typical breakfast. Max’s parents were already gone, their car missing from the lot. Grandma was out on the back porch. There’d been yelling, I remembered. A lot of yelling. I’d heard all of it distantly, after I’d awoken in the middle of the night. I wondered if Max had heard any of that, too.
We left after we cleared the dishes. “Where to first?” Max asked, and I held up a couple of water bottles I’d pulled out of the cabinet.
“Church. We should probably call the Bells too.”
It was another two hours before we got to the lake cottage. Because we’d driven to the Episcopalian church in town first, wehad Max’s car, so we approached the house the more direct way. Took longer, but that was just as well. Max was already freaked out. He’d stayed quiet until now, but the words couldn’t keep from bubbling out, a bottle stoppered too full.
“This is seriously the way you did things with Rabbi Mordechai?” he demanded, his tone patently disbelieving. “You walked into churches and stole their holy water?”
“We didn’t need to steal it.” I should have been more freaked out with the whole theft thing, too, frankly, but I had too much anger built up inside me. If a minister had come out and interrupted us while we were dunking our bottles in the fonts, I think I might have thrown something heavy and holy at him just to work off my nervous energy. “Mordechai was a rabbi. You don’t really retire from that. That gave him instant access to every sort of religious tool he needed.” I wasn’t going to use the word ‘prop’ anymore.
“And he wrote out those house blessing things?”
“Mezuzahs, yeah. But I don’t have any of those. And plus, I’m not a rabbi. So that wouldn’t work so well coming from me.”
“Well, what are you then?”
I looked up at Joe’s little cottage, squatting on the hillside, for once in accord with my innermost thoughts. “Pissed.”
We slammed the car doors perhaps a little too loudly, as if we were both eager to announce our presence. Max strode ahead. The house was unnaturally still, and he must have been thinking the same thing I was, because he looked over his shoulder and smiled at me. “I think I’d be just fine if we walked into this place and it was completely empty.”
He opened the door, and of course, we weren’t that lucky. In fact, a terrible funk came out of the kitchen, and he groaned, heading that way. “That’s not evil specters. That’s milk. Goddamned Emily.”
I stood in the middle of the front room without him, looking out over Joe Bell’s domain. I knew what we had to do, but it would take hours. Still, might as well get started. When Max walked out of the kitchen toward the front door, I called back to him. “Prop it open.”
The lake cottage wasn’t a large place—three bedrooms on the edges with three central rooms besides—kitchen, dining room, living room. All the bedrooms but Joe’s had been stuffed completely full of catalogs and cardboard boxes and crap. The kitchen, living room, and his bedroom were partially clear, but I wasn’t worried so much about the cardboard. I was worried about the ducks.
“Get rid of anything paper to start, unless you want to throw out all his carvings.”
“You think we should?”
Yes. I shrugged. It wouldn’t be as easy as that, though. “Some of them seem pretty. Are they any good?”
“Oh, merciful heavens.” The sound of a woman’s voice turned us both around, and I squinted. I’d never met Mrs. Bell, but she almost looked like her picture. A little more worn, a little more frazzled. Like all of us. “Oh,Max, your family’s beautiful cottage?—”
