O’Toole House Chapter 20
Madelyn left for Brazil the next morning. Gabriella didn’t blame Madelyn for how anxious she was about it, she would be asking the same questions if this had happened right before she was about to leave the country for a week.
“Yes, you should go,” Amelia had said the day before when Madelyn was wrapping up her shift. “You should have taken today off too. But yes, go.”
“But with everything going on, maybe I should delay it.”
“Madelyn,” Amelia had said with an impressive mixture of compassion and fatigue. “You have to go see your grandmother. Things will always be busy here. Yeah, this month in particular is horrible. But your grandmother is expecting you. And she’s old. So go for her, if you can’t do it for yourself.”
That, more than anything, had seemed to convince Madelyn. But she still looked hesitant. “Do you think I should go see James before I go?” she’d asked Amelia and Gabriella right before she left work.
Amelia didn’t seem to know the answer to that one and honestly, neither did Gabriella. If things went badly, it was a bad start to a trip Madelyn already felt guilty taking. If things went as fine as they had been going, then she’d probably still feel unnecessarily guilty, but at least she’d see him.
“If Graham’s bringing you to the airport, maybe go over a little early?” Gabriella suggested.
“Yeah, there you go,” Amelia said with relief.
Now Gabriella was here alone with Fang, waiting for Graham to get in. He was coming straight from the airport to work the day shift. She was on for about twenty-four hours so she’d be working with him now, Bradley later in the day, and Saskia at night. And Amelia, but she was working such bizarre hours that Gabriella had no idea when she’d see her. Apparently there were meetings, a lot of meetings, both in person and remotely. And Amelia had to sit through every single one of them.
Including today’s meeting she and Bradley had to take in Boston to determine if James was going to be punished for the crime of being injured on a case. Sure, they said it was for obstruction of a case, but even they knew exactly what had happened.
After a couple of nerve-wracking hours, Amelia came in the front door, looking exhausted. “How did it go?” Gabriella asked.
Amelia shrugged. “They aren’t taking action.”
Tension she didn’t even realize had been there amidst the mountain of tension released in Gabriella’s shoulders. James wasn’t going to get in trouble for something horrible that happened to him. “There was no action to take,” Amelia continued, and Gabriella realized why she didn’t look as relieved as Gabriella felt. “They threatened him with all this shit and there was no action to actually take against him. He’s a fucking victim and they’re dragging his name. And they can’t even back it up. Probably because they’re incapable of finding the person who actually did it. Not that they’d be able to do shit anyway.”
“They wrote me up for trespassing when I had permission to be there,” Gabriella said bitterly. “I’m not surprised.”
Amelia laughed. “Yeah, speaking of, I got my copy of it. If they ask, you were disciplined.”
“Got it.”
“And Bradley said something about framing your write up.”
“Asshole.”
But she did have to laugh.
***
“He must have stayed down there and taken all of these while Mr. Harding was writing me up,” Gabriella said an hour later as she flipped through printouts of all the images McGovern had sent them.
Bradley looked up at her from the other side of the coffee table. “Harding?” he repeated.
“Yeah. I’d never met him before, Something Harding. He hated me.”
“Did he have the biggest eyebrows you’ve ever seen in your life?”
“Yes!” Gabriella exclaimed, setting down the picture in her hand. “Oh my God, I almost got too distracted by them to actually listen to him threaten me. How did you know?”
“He ran that bullshit training session me and McManus went to last year,” Bradley said. “He’s the one McManus confronted, so he was obviously part of that whole retaliation campaign after. Watch your back, especially if Harding knows you’re related to him.”
Oh, he definitely knew. Gabriella shivered, her mood darkening a little. But she’d rather be on the Foundation’s shit list than working with them to cover up what happened, or falling for their bullshit again. And besides, Bradley had been on their shit list for at least a decade now and he was still alive, so she was probably safe.
One of the pages of O’Toole’s notebook listed materials he’d gathered at the house, along with their locations in the yard, basement, and root cellar. They all looked legitimate, though generic. There were no unusually sacred or demonic materials listed, just standard herbs and artifacts.
She dragged a photo of a handwritten ritual toward herself, spinning it over so she could read it. “This seems kind of weird,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I don’t know a lot about demon summoning,” Gabriella said. “But I’ve done research on enough cases to know the patterns, right? And this-” she pointed to a Latin phrase underlined twice. “Usually shows up in banishing rituals.”
“The same thing happens in this one,” Bradley said. “It’s kind of a summoning, but it looks like it was translated to Latin from another language and there are some banishing terms in there too.”
He picked up another printout, scanned it, and scoffed before turning it so she could read it. He pointed to a stanza written in O’Toole’s messy handwriting. “That’s a recipe.”
“What?”
“An ancient Roman recipe for honey-candied dates. Not particularly demonic.”
“So O’Toole never got his demons?”
“Unless he had another ritual he didn’t write down in this notebook. But if you look at every single one of these, I bet there’s something off.”
“So the neighbor’s house burned because of kerosene-soaked rags stored in the worst possible place, just like you and the news report said. Not the work of demonic forces,” Gabriella said as Bradley scowled at her. “And O’Toole thought he’d nailed it and fled so no one would blame him. But no one ever would’ve even known if he’d just stayed. Instead, he disappears, the mystery around him grows, and some little dropped details become a new urban legend. The family eventually sends it into the Foundation, the Foundation likes those little morsels, and it becomes a case, ultimately ending with the Father blessing an empty house.”
“Only for a demon-haunted dipshit to show up and make it all real anyway,” Bradley sighed. “Great. Well, I have three more cases to do today, so I’ll send those pictures to Father McEnerney and see what he wants to do.”
***
Agent Forester arrived with Celia’s old couch and desk as Gabriella was taking her lunch break. He told her to finish her sandwich and then he, Amelia, and Gabriella brought Celia’s old couch down into the medbay. Just like the floral monstrosity in James’s office, it was also hideous and extremely comfortable. Once it was in, it was incredible how much more pleasant the tiny, windowless office alcove felt.
“I think there’s just enough room for the desk in here, but I might put it beside the wall just outside of it,” Gabriella said, surveying the space available to them.
There was more of it than she might have expected. Now that most of the garbage was gone, she’s stacked everything she was unsure of by the wall next to the bulkhead. So the old tile floor was exposed and there was space to move around. Even when they got the desk in, there’d be room for whatever mysterious things a doctor would need in their home base when they were also the traveling medic for approximately a thousand square miles of paranormal investigation bases.
But everyone needed a desk and everyone should have a squashy, ugly couch, so at least they were starting Jolene off right. And ten minutes later, the desk and its old office chair were in position too.
“Want a drink?” Amelia asked Forester.
“Yeah, that sounds great, thank you.”
She led him upstairs into the living room and he let out a low whistle as he looked around at the old decorations and investigation materials. “This is a cool setup,” he said. “Almost undercover.”
“Did you ever work at a branch?” Gabriella asked him.
“No, I basically went straight into main office security,” Forester said as they sat down on the couch in the living room. “Started at the main office, moved immediately into security when they realized my investigation skills weren’t up to snuff, and thrived there for about twenty years now.”
“You’re how old?” Gabriella asked.
Amelia rolled her eyes, but Forester laughed. “Forty-seven,” he replied.
She wanted to ask more questions, both about him and Celia and about his work. She knew a little about the other elements of the Foundation beyond the branches, only getting a few intriguing glimpses into things like Forester’s security team, the retirement home in Canton, and other satellite Foundation programs.
How many of them were going to get cut with all this rearranging the Foundation was doing?
Forester took the glass of ice water from Amelia with thanks. “How are things going here?” he asked.
Amelia sighed. “They’re as good as they can be,” she said. “We’ve got help from Hillsborough County and a few others.”
“Good,” Forester said. “I was sorry to hear about your captain.”
Did he know what happened? Considering the other branches seemed to know, the rest of the Foundation had just as much of a chance of getting all the details. No matter how much the administration stressed confidentiality, she knew there were rumors spreading about what had happened. And it made Gabriella so angry she couldn’t even really talk about it.
“Thanks,” she said instead. “He’s recovering, so hopefully he’ll be back in a week or so.”
He would be back. He had to, Gabriella couldn’t imagine not having him here. But at the same time, was it the height of selfishness that she wanted him to come back here like nothing had happened? When the most traumatizing event of his life – and possibly Amelia, Madelyn, and Bradley’s lives too – had happened right in this room?
Gabriella had trouble imagining it. She knew what had happened. They’d all told her their sides of things, sometimes directly or just when she was in the room as they very clearly attempted to process what happened. She could picture bits of it: James shoving the computer off the table in a shower of sparks, Madelyn desperately hitting him with the cane to keep him away from her.
Then the other stuff: Bradley hiding in the doorway with a taser while Amelia tried to talk James into dropping the knife and coming with her. James’s terror when they finally broke through to him. All things they mentioned, either in detail or in passing. She didn’t want to picture them, didn’t want to look at the doorway to the kitchen and imagine James holding a knife there, ready to kill half the team on the bidding of that miserable, whining piece of shit of a person.
That didn’t feel fair to James, but at the same time, it had happened. So they had to move forward from here. And it was easier said than done, she knew, since she hadn’t had to witness it.
“Celia said to tell you if you need anything else, let her know,” Forester said. “I’ll be in and out of town for a few days. Then she and I are going to a Foundation cookout that my supervisor strongly encouraged me to go to.”
There was just enough of a grimace on his face to make Gabriella like him even more. “Is Penny fascinated by the fact that you work for the Foundation?” she asked him.
Forester leaned in closer to her, a suddenly serious look coming across his rugged face. “Gabriella,” he said, looking her dead in the eye. “I have attended hundreds of interrogations involving human murderers and paranormal incidents. This includes both private organizations like the Foundation and government offices.” He counted on his fingers. “FBI, CIA, INTERPOL. Anyone you can think of, they have interrogated me. But I have never been so thoroughly questioned by anyone as I have been by that child since I began dating her mother.”
Gabriella laughed. The image of Penny grilling this man was too perfect, she was going to have to tell James about it. When he felt well enough to talk about these things, of course.
“I also get the feeling she’s been doing a little investigating of her own over at her grandmother’s house,” Forester said. “Nothing I can prove, exactly. But I have a hunch.”
Penny was twelve years old, coming up on thirteen. So they had about five years left until she could apply to join the Foundation and none of the adults in her life could stop her. Gabriella wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not, but it might be unavoidable. Unless maybe they could get her in touch with Jessamyn, or Rosa’s girlfriend, or one of the many freelancers Madelyn talked to online.
Though that might be trading one problem for another. They had five years to figure it out, it was fine. They had plenty of problems to focus on right now, they didn’t need to borrow any from the future.
***
Jolene looked exhausted when she got back to headquarters that evening and Gabriella couldn’t blame her. From what she’d said earlier, there had been multiple planned exams and appointments on her schedule, then at least three new things had popped up. Apparently there was one other doctor working in the region right now, but he was sick so she’d ended up driving an hour out from her appointment at the Hampden County base in Palmer to check on some injuries out in South Berkshire County. Then she drove all the way back to Leominster to wrap up her shift. Gabriella wondered why exactly, but figured it was just that it was her home base and she had reports to write up. And the bleary way Jolene opened her laptop as she sat down on the couch proved that theory correct immediately
“Jolene?” Gabriella said, approaching her.
Jolene looked up at her. Her red hair was down and somewhat tangled around her shoulders and there were dark shadows under her eyes. “What’s up?” she asked.
“When you have a minute, I’ve got something to show you.”
Jolene stood up. “I have a minute,” she said. “I can’t look at a screen right now. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” Gabriella said quickly. “Just come here.”
Gabriella started down the stairs and Jolene followed her. “It’s not finished yet, but I did everything I could without having to check with you. And it wasn’t just me, Bradley and Amelia helped out too. And a couple of my cousins. We-”
She opened the medbay door as she spoke and the gasp that Jolene let out as she did so cut her off midsentence. “Gabriella,” she said. “Oh my God.”
They walked into the room, which was still somewhat of a mess, at least by Gabriella’s standards. But Jolene walked through the space, shock on her face. “I remember how this was,” she said. “This must have taken you hours.”
Gabriella shrugged. “Bradley helped me get the big things out.”
The remaining books and equipment were neatly stacked along the back wall of the medbay. “I didn’t know what you could still use,” Gabriella said. “But anything you can’t use or don’t want, my cousin Reese can come back and get. He’s a hauler, he got rid of all the other stuff.”
Jolene nodded, seemingly still a little stunned. Then she turned and saw the desk, which Gabriella had fitted with a cheap green lamp, and the small alcove with the couch.
“How…”
Gabriella shrugged again. “More cousins.”
“Thank you,” Jolene said. “Thank you so much. But this was so much work and you’ve already got so much going on. Why…”
“James is my cousin too,” Gabriella said, tears pricking her eyes. “He means so much to me and you saved him. Compared to that, this was nothing.”
Now Jolene looked like she was about to cry too. “There’s still more to do,” Gabriella said quickly. “We’ll need a wifi extender and you need so much more office equipment. If the Foundation won’t provide anything, I’m sure I’ve got more family members looking to offload things. Have you seen the couch in James’s office? That was our Auntie Bev’s, isn’t it horrible?”
Jolene laughed, still looking around the small space in awe. “You can get back to what you were doing,” Gabriella said. “I just wanted to show you that it’s yours whenever you want it.”
“He’s thrown up four fucking times,” Dr. Oliver muttered as she stood outside the gray bedroom, her head back against the wall and her eyes closed.
Inside the bedroom, Gabriella could hear James murmuring distressed nonsense. It was just the three of them in the building right now. Amelia was in in about half an hour, but for now Gabriella was in charge of the North County Branch. And that was terrifying.
“We’ve got a few options, I guess,” Dr. Oliver continued as she stood up and straightened her cardigan. “But I need him to stop vomiting every drop of water I give him or he’s going to end up in cardiac arrest and- I’m so sorry.”
“No, it’s fine,” Gabriella insisted.
“No, it’s not. I-”
Gabriella didn’t expect someone who was the physician for at least eight different teams at the moment, along with her other responsibilities, to remember her family history. Or even the fact that James’s health was part of Gabriella’s own family health history.
Dr. Oliver looked like she was close to exhausted tears. Gabriella knew that none of them were looking great at the moment, but she’d been stopping in here between cases even when she wasn’t scheduled to be here. She’d heard her on the phone with someone earlier, likely a child based on Dr. Oliver’s tone while they talked, promising to be somewhere tonight. She wasn’t going to tell someone who was both older than her and a doctor what to do with her health, but Dr. Oliver looked like she was going to collapse if she didn’t get some rest herself before whatever she had planned tonight.
“It’s fine,” Gabriella repeated. “What do we need to do?”
Dr. Oliver sighed. “I could put him on IV fluids if I have to, but at this point I’m not even sure I should keep going with the antidote until he keeps down water. If I do that, I’ll have to go back to St. Hildegard’s for equipment, but that’s only an hour or so from here. So I guess…wait. Do you have any popsicles?”
Gabriella went into the kitchen and pulled open the freezer. There wasn’t much in there, some ice cubes, a freezer-burnt Lean Cuisine, and yes, a half-crushed box with a couple broken popsicles in it.
“Those’ll do,” Dr. Oliver said when Gabriella told her. “When my son was little, sometimes I’d use popsicles to hydrate him when he had the flu. It was better than nothing.”
James hated popsicles. Gabriella never understood it, but he genuinely gagged on them. Still, in an emergency, maybe it would help him feel better.
Dr. Oliver was right, it was better than nothing.
