The Second Summoning

Maybe he knows where it’s, he’s, headed. I’ve got another Summons on the way out of town, and since I just closed a cascade, I expect to have a whole string of them all the way to Toronto, so I’ll call you once we’re settled for the night.”

“No need. I’ll e-mail anything I find out.” As her sister started to protest, Diana rolled her eyes. “Claire, let’s make an effort to join the twentieth century before we’re too far into the twenty-first, okay? Later.” Hanging up and heading for her coat and boots, she wondered what it was that made Keepers, herself excluded, of course, so resistant to technology. “Only took them a hundred years to get the hang of the telephone,” she muttered, digging for mittens. “And Austin’s probably more comfortable with it than Claire is. . . .”

“Austin, what are you doing with that phone?”

“Nothing.”

“What do you mean, nothing?” Claire demanded as she slid back into the truck.

“I mean that there isn’t a Chinese food place in the city that’ll deliver to a parking lot.”

After a last-minute discussion concerning the dishes and how they weren’t being done, Diana walked out to the road, flagged down a conveniently passing neighbor, and got a ride into Lucan. Fifteen minutes later, still vehemently apologizing for the results of the sudden stop, she got out at St. Patrick’s and hurried up the shoveled walk to the priest’s house, staying as far from the yellow brick church as possible. Strange things happened when Keepers went into churches and, in an age when Broadway show tunes coming from the mouths of stained-glass apostles weren’t considered so much miraculous as irritating, Diana felt it was safest not to tempt fate, again.

Strangely, Protestant Churches were safer, although locals still talked about the Friendship United bake sale when four-and-twenty blackbirds were found baked into three different pies. Claire, who’d been fifteen and already an adult to Diana’s five-year-old eyes, had been both horrified and embarrassed, but Diana remembered their mother as being rather philosophical about the whole thing. There were, after all, any number of nursery rhymes that would’ve been worse. Although not for the blackbirds, she reflected, carefully stepping over a large crack in the sidewalk.

There were no synagogues or mosques in the immediate area and by the time she started being Summoned away, she was old enough to understand why she had to keep her distance. The incident at that Shinto shrine had been an unfortunate accident.

Okay, two unfortunate accidents, she amended climbing the steps to the front door. Although I still say if you don’t actually want your prayers answered, you shouldn’t . . . “Merry Christmas, Mrs. Verner. Is Father Harris in?” The priest’s housekeeper frowned, as though recognition would be assisted by the knitting of her prominent brows. “Is it important? His Christmas dinner is almost ready.”

“We ate earlier.”

“He didn’t.”

“I only need a few minutes.”

“I don’t think . . .”

A tweak of the possibilities.

“. . . that vill be a problem.” The heels of her sensible shoes clicked together.

“Come in. Vait in his office, I vill go get him. You haf an emergency. You need his help. How can he sit and do nothing vhen he is needed? I vill pull him from his chair if I must. Pull him from his chair and drag him back here to you.” She didn’t quite salute.

A little too much tweak, Diana reflected as the housekeeper turned on one heel and marched away. She made a slight adjustment before Mrs. Verner decided to invade Poland.

The small, dark-paneled, book-lined office came with a claustrophobic feeling that was equally the fault of its size, the faux gothic decorating, and the number of faded leather-bound books. Diana couldn’t decide if the painting over the desk, a three-legged figure standing on multicolored waves against an almost painfully green background, made the room seem smaller or let in the only light. Or both.

“It’s Saint Patrick banishing the snakes from Ireland,” announced a quiet voice behind her. “It was painted by one of my parishioners.”

“Probably one who donated beacoup de cash to the rebuilding fund,” Diana observed as she turned.

Father Harris took an involuntary step back, the sudden memory of St. Jerome belting out “Everything’s Coming up Roses” propelling his feet. He didn’t know why he was thinking about stained-glass and show tunes, but for a great many reasons he couldn’t maintain a grip on, he was quite certain he needed a drink.

Diana smiled at him reassuringly. “Lena Giorno tells me her father brought an angel to you last night.”

“A young man who thought he was an angel,” the priest corrected. He was fairly certain the girl’s smile was supposed to be reassuring, but it was making him a little nervous.

“You don’t think he’s an angel?”

“I very much doubt an angel would appear in such a way in the bedroom of a teenager girl.”

“You mean naked?”