Two Hours Earlier.
Hester’s beat-up car clattered like a pile of paint cans as it rolled over the parking lot speed bumps and merged with the speeding traffic.
Rae was riding shotgun while Hester drove and was peppering her with questions. “Which hospital is she in? Why was she even up here, anyway? Do they know that it was a heart attack? Did they do an EKG? Did the doctor actually say it was definitely a heart attack? Could it just be indigestion? She’s had problems with her hiatal hernia. All those pregnancies, you know.” Rae rested her palm on her stomach. “Did she drink lemonade? She gets horrible reflux when she drinks lemonade. I’ll bet she drank lemonade.”
“I don’t think that’s it,” Hester said, her watery blue eyes dodging to the rear view mirror.
“Lemonade or some other citrus. Old Mrs. Trout gave us a bag of grapefruit from her trees when I was about twelve, and Mom ate a whole bottle of Tums that week. I’ll bet it’s just indigestion.”
Hester spun the steering wheel, and the car turned a corner into a Best Western Hotel. Five stories of cinderblock blotted out the sun as they drove around the building.
Uh, oh. Rae said, “This isn’t a hospital.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Where’s my mother?”
“She’s at home. She’s fine. Nothing’s wrong with her.”
“Then what the hell, Hester?”
Hester sighed and parked in the back of the hotel, away from the view of the street. “Reagan, we all feel like we need to talk to you about some things.”
“No way. No flipping way.” Rae grabbed the hot door handle, but three of her largest cousins, including Craigh, her usually normal cousin, were already opening the car doors. The handle pulled away from her hands, scraping her fingernails over the metal.
Rae struggled to pull her arms away from their hands, tight around her wrists, but they were much bigger than even she was. “What the hell are you doing, Hester?”
Hester got out of the car and kept her head down. “It’s for the best.”
“I am not going back home. I have a plane flight in five hours!”
Craigh mumbled, “I don’t think you’re going to make that plane. This might take a while.”
“I can’t believe you’d do this, Craigh,” Rae told him.
He nodded and pressed his lips together, hunting through her backpack that he retrieved from the back seat. “I can’t quite believe I’m here, either.”
Craigh found her phone and powered it off.
Wulf and his security guys wouldn’t be able to trace it. “Come on, man!”
He shook his head. “They just want to talk to you for a while. And stuff.”
“They, who? What kind of stuff?” She twisted her arms, trying to break her cousins’ grip, but they hauled her toward the hotel.
Rae was a nice girl, raised to be nice and polite and go along with everybody. Maybe she should have sat down on the asphalt or shrieked, but the tall, brick hotel blocked the line of sight from the cars speeding by on the street out front, and all the hotel’s windows and curtains were shut tight against the June summer heat. Air conditioning units on the roof roared like swarms of hornets, louder than any screaming she could have done.
So she walked in with them, though she jerked her arms, trying to slip out of their bruising fingers.
They jostled her through the back door of the hotel—glass, Rae noticed, not even bulletproof acrylic—and into one of the first rooms on the main floor.
Well, good. When she managed to get away from her crazy family, she could dart straight for the lobby and tell them to call the damn cops. There wasn’t even a stairwell for her to fall down, klutz that she was.
Inside the small conference room, the laminate conference table and chrome-plated dining chairs had been pushed back against the walls, leaving an open space in the center. A pillow and a blanket were crumpled in the center of the room.
Rae’s father, Zachariah Stone, and several of her grizzled uncles flanked Minister Stoppard. Her father stared at his scuffed, Sunday-best shoes. The pastor’s black eyes raged at her, and he held a Bible clenched in his fist.
A bell and a candle lay beside the pillow on the floor.
Bell, book, and candle.
“No freaking way,” Rae said. “Protestants don’t believe in empty rituals, remember? We don’t do exorcisms.”
Minister Stoppard raised his Bible high in the air. The soft cover flopped open, and half the pages drooped. “By the power of Jesus Christ, begone demon!”
“That is so not the way to start an exorcism,” Rae said. One of her psych classes had discussed historical treatments for mental illnesses, and she’d read the Catholic Rite of Exorcism just for fun and had been thoroughly creeped out by it. “You begin with a Litany of the Saints, not by jumping straight in and yelling at the demon. Here, I’ll start. ‘Lord, have mercy.’ Now y’all say that back.”
Her father and uncles recoiled from the Catholicism.
Minister Stoppard shoved the book toward her, even though he was all the way across the room.
Chicken.
He shouted, “I command the demon to begone!”
“Seriously. This is not how you do an exorcism. It has to be in a church with an altar. Minister Stoppard,” Rae pointed at him, “you have to go to confession first. Otherwise, you’re in a state of sin and the demon can jump into you. Why don’t we call Father Manuel over at Our Lady of Perpetual Help and get a consult?”
“Begone demon! Begone demon!” Stoppard screamed, his black hair flopping over his forehead. His black eyes were getting crazier with every shout.
Maybe Rae should just foam at the mouth, spit at them for a while, maybe barf on Minister Stoppard’s pants—yeah, she definitely needed to vomit on him—and declare herself exorcised.
She stole a glance at the clock.
If she managed it right, she could still get to the airport in time to keep the flight schedule for Switzerland to get church-married.
Okay, now she had a plan. That was good.
And yet, she just couldn’t humor them. She had seen too much. She was, indeed, too worldly to even listen to this kind of repressive, angry, frightened, superstitious stuff anymore.
She jerked her arm out of her cousins’ grasp. “This is stupid. This is utterly stupid. I’m leaving.”
Stoppard called out, “Boys, lay her down.”
Rae’s cousins grabbed her again and forced her toward the blanket in the middle of the room. Craigh held her right arm.
“This is kidnapping,” she told him. “If you don’t let me go right this minute, I will press charges. I mean it.”
Stoppard yelled, “That’s what a demon would say! Once she’s exorcised, she won’t want to press charges. She’ll be glad that she’s free of the demonic possession.”
Rae rolled her eyes in her head, exasperated at all of them. “Oh, for crying out loud. What a crock.”
They wrestled Rae down, and Craigh’s shoulder shoved into her stomach, right near the baby.
Rae gasped. If they hurt her, they might kill that fragile bundle inside her. “Okay! I’ll lay down! Don’t push me!”
Craigh backed off. Rae eased herself down to the floor, resting her head on the pillow. She rolled on her side and clenched her arms over her stomach.
New plan: go along with everything so they wouldn’t hurt her or the baby.
Maybe she should just tell them she was preggers. That way, they’d go easy on her stomach.
They all must be pro-life. Stoppard preached on abortion at least once a month, and nodding was mandatory. She was ninety percent sure that no one here was so dead-set against her marriage that they would pull out a coat hanger.
But Stoppard was more than a fanatic. His small amount of societal power and his entire income from tithes were in jeopardy, and Rae’s rebellion was the focus of that danger to him. If he thought her pregnancy would turn these people against him such that they might allow her to escape, he might beat the crap out of her, slamming his hard fists into her belly, a back-woods abortion. He would probably tell them that the demon was lying about the baby and that he was beating the Jesus into her.
She couldn’t tell them, not if she wanted to protect their child.
Rae said, “Just don’t hurt me. I’ll do whatever you want.”