O’Toole House Chapter 4
The next morning, Gabriella went to see James. Graham was working the day shift like he’d told her the other night, so she texted James to let him know she was coming, then headed over with a couple frozen containers of tomato and parmesan soup. He’d eaten it the other day when she brought it in, so hopefully he’d still trust it.
She knocked on the front door of his apartment and was surprised when it opened. And even more surprised when it was Dr. Oliver who opened it. “Oh,” Gabriella said, stepping back and jostling her soup. “Sorry, I didn’t know you were going to be here.”
“I’m just leaving,” Dr. Oliver said. “James just went back to his room though. I don’t think he wants to see anyone.”
Dr. Oliver was very thin and a few inches shorter than Gabriella, with long red hair. Usually she was confident and professional, but right now she looked apologetic and about as awkward as Gabriella felt. “Is he okay?” Gabriella asked.
She knew that there was only so much information Dr. Oliver could give her. But that wince and slight shrug gave more information than Gabriella probably wanted to know. “It’s a lot,” Dr. Oliver said finally. “He’s okay, I guess. But…”
Gabriella nodded, saving her from trying to finish that thought. “Thank you for everything you’ve done for him, Dr. Oliver,” she said.
“Jolene, please,” Dr. Oliver – Jolene – said. “Will you be at your headquarters today?”
“In about an hour,” Gabriella replied.
Though, if James didn’t want to see her, she couldn’t imagine there was enough that needed to get done here to fill the time she’d scheduled. It wasn’t going to take forty minutes to pop the soup in the fridge, knock on James’s bedroom door, get ignored, and glance around to see if there was anything she could do to help make things easier on him and Graham. So she’d probably be at work much earlier than she’d planned.
“I’ll be there for a little while,” Jolene said. “So I might see you.”
Right, Jolene was being moved out this way. And James had mentioned something about her maybe taking the old medbay space. “I’ll see you there.”
Jolene left and Gabriella closed the apartment door behind herself. “James?” she called as she stopped by his closed bedroom door. “It’s Gabriella. I’m just dropping off some soup.”
His bedroom door creaked open before she could keep walking. The smell of weed coming from behind it was strong as James stepped out and looked at her without smiling. “Hey, Gabs,” he said.
He didn’t look quite as awful as he had the other day. His hair was wet, had he showered while Jolene was here? Gabriella hoped so. She knew he’d been too afraid to go near the shower in headquarters alone, but maybe it was easier here at home. The single accessible case file she’d found in the Foundation’s records about the control compound had involved submerging the victim in salt water as the antidote process started. So she had a pretty good idea of what in the bathroom was scaring him.
God, Gabriella wished she could help him.
“Hey,” she said, hesitating before deciding that a hug was probably not what he wanted right now. “I brought you some of that tomato soup.”
“Thanks.”
“Some of it is thawed, want me to make you a bowl?”
He shook his head and smiled slowly at her, but it didn’t reach his red eyes. “I’m just going to clean the kitchen,” he said.
“I can help.”
He looked away from her and toward the kitchen, which was already pretty clean. “You don’t have to.”
“I want to.”
James blinked hard and her own eyes stung at seeing him like this. She wanted to start a conversation, tell him about Bradley puking in the bushes at the O’Toole House or how she’d heard that a couple of their cousins were planning to move to Texas. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m just going to…”
He looked back toward his room. “That’s fine,” Gabriella said, her throat tight.
She stepped a little closer, just to see, and he flinched and stepped back. “I love you,” Gabriella said.
James’s lip trembled and he looked away again. “Love you,” he said softly, then went into his room, leaving her alone in the living room.
***
Gabriella got to work half an hour early. She’d cleaned what little mess there was in James’s kitchen, then heated a portion of soup and put it into a thermos that was probably Graham’s. Once she’d left it on the counter with a note, there wasn’t anything left to do unless she wanted to disturb James, which she didn’t.
She wasn’t going to just sit in the living room and she knew someone else would be coming by later, so there wasn’t much reason to stay. So she walked from James’s apartment to work, reasoning that picking up her car later was a good excuse to come back and check in on him. Plus, the exercise couldn’t hurt and it was a beautiful day for March.
Everybody else was at work when she got there, including Jolene. “Hey, good news,” Amelia said as Gabriella walked in. “Or, I guess as good as possible when she’s getting kicked out of St. Hildegard’s. The Foundation is assigning Jolene out here and she’s going to be stationed out of the medbay if and when we ever get that thing cleared out.”
They’d called that one. The medbay was a smallish space down in the basement, across the hall from their gym. It was filled with old equipment from a long-ago team medic, as well as a random assortment of other shit that had collected over the years. It was packed and filthy and would need hours of work before it was even close to ready to be used for medical purposes again.
“Does that mean you’re assigned to the team?” Gabriella asked Jolene.
“Technically, no,” she said. “I’m assigned to Worcester, Franklin, and Hampshire Counties as a medic. So I’m based out of here, but working independently.”
Not technically a new team member, but also not a bad thing at all. “We were talking it over and she’ll just kind of work throughout headquarters until we can get that room clear.” Amelia said.
Jolene was going to be working out of the living room forever then. She and Amelia went into James’s office and Gabriella wandered downstairs. She had time before her shift, so she could squeeze in an early workout, or maybe go through her notes for the Bana case. But she found herself turning the knob on the door to the medbay and walking in, closing it quickly to keep Fang from following her.
The dust hit her before anything else. Coughing in the particles dancing in the choppy light, Gabriella tried and failed to wave it out of her eyes. But as she started to get used to it, she looked around the space. It wasn’t huge, about the size of the back bedroom plus half. But it was filled, nearly every inch of space taken up by old equipment and old cardboard boxes.
A lot of it could probably just go straight in the trash, Gabriella realized as she opened a cardboard box to find three more old, moldy cardboard boxes inside it. Sure, there were things that the Foundation would need to make decisions on, but a lot of this was trash. In fact, she could potentially get rid of a trashbag’s worth right now.
She remembered walking into the gray bedroom a few days earlier, after Adele had come back and thrown a temper tantrum to get James to try to kill himself. Jolene had given him another antidote and Gabriella had walked into the gray bedroom a little while later to see if she needed anything. James had been asleep in the first bed, not quite peaceful, but safe. Jolene had sat on the other bed, head back against the headboard with her eyes closed. She’d looked exhausted, but she held his hand in hers between the beds.
Gabriella went up to the kitchen and found the box of trashbags under the sink. Nobody else was in the kitchen or living room right now, but she doubted they’d stop her anyway, especially with twenty-five minutes to go before her shift started. She pulled out three trashbags, reconsidered, and just brought the whole box down with her.
First to go were the old cardboard boxes. She wanted to recycle them, but they were all too old and discolored in ways that made her grateful she’d brought down gloves and a mask as well. So all of them went in the bags, leaving her with three bulging trash bags fifteen minutes later. She tossed them out the bulkhead into the backyard, then came back in and opened another box. Inside was a collection of likely outdated medical texts. Those would probably end up in the trash, but maybe Jolene could get some use out of them, so Gabriella set them aside.
It had actually made a difference. A tiny difference, the room was still overstuffed and Gabriella knew if she tried to squeeze between some of these piles, she’d need help getting out. But it was a start.
She brought the bags out to the trash bins along the side of the house. Collection was in a few days, but they didn’t have a lot of trash in there usually, so she’d have to be more conscientious of the collection schedule than she’d been at home this week. She tossed them and went back in through the bulkhead to lock it, brushing past a handful of protective measures as she did so.
As the shift started, Gabriella decided not to mention anything about cleaning downstairs. All she’d done was throw away a few boxes, she hadn’t worked a miracle. Maybe she’d be able to clear out more later, but she’d wait to say anything until she had to.
***
Gabriella’s phone rang a little while later as she was getting ready to go take some pictures of a supposedly haunted hole in the ground over in Sterling. Amelia was nearby and Jolene was apparently camped out in one of the bedrooms doing work. She looked over at it and saw Father McEnerney’s name.
“Mind if I grab this?” she asked Amelia. “It’s the Father.”
Amelia nodded mid-yawn. “No problem,” she said. “I’ll finish that for you.”
She was about to tell her not to worry about it, then realized that Amelia was probably looking for a reason to not be staring at a computer right now. Bradley was in James’s office, meeting with some administrator. He hadn’t explained, just told Gabriella that he had to do this, then they were going to look at the footage from the Bana house. They were both on for the next twenty-four hours, so she hoped they could make some solid progress on that case in between any other nightmares that popped up.
Gabriella would love to interview the daughter and husband, though she knew that if the husband was against the case, he was probably going to make a point of not allowing their daughter anywhere near her. Still, maybe they could find a time to talk to her, especially if she was being targeted.
Jolene was in the pink bedroom, so she took her call into the back bedroom, realizing as she closed the door that she’d been unconsciously avoiding the gray bedroom for a few days. It was like someone had died there.
No one died there, she told herself firmly, then answered her phone. “Hello?”
“Gabriella, I’m sorry I didn’t call you last night.”
“No, it’s fine,” she said. “We have some other things going on too, I wasn’t concerned.”
“I didn’t get home until midnight and it took me a little while this morning to find my notes on the O’Toole house.”
“It’s fine, really.”
“So, here’s the odd thing,” Father McEnerney said. “I remember that house. There weren’t actually any demons there.”
“Wait, what?”
“Yeah,” Father McEnerney continued. “I mean, maybe I was wrong. But I went in with notes about summoned demons that hadn’t been properly disposed of. And they were well-detailed.”
“Thank you.”
“Oh, no kidding? Nice work. Anyway, when I got there, the house was empty. No presence, no nothing. But you think there’s demons there now?”
“Or something doing an excellent job of pretending to be one,” Gabriella said.
“That’s a possibility,” Father McEnerney said. “I don’t know what happened with Mr. O’Toole, but as of last summer, there was nothing. I was in that house alone.”
“That’s…really weird,” Gabriella said. “Why would there be demons in the 1940s, nothing when you were there, then demons as of five months ago?”
“If I were to offer a suggestion right now, it’d have to be so specific as to be worthless,” Father McEnerney admitted. “Especially because I don’t know the details of your case.”
Gabriella laid out the case so far. “Maybe something was dormant,” Father McEnerney suggested. “That’s all I can think of that would answer that. Can you keep me updated? I can attempt another blessing of the house if it would help.”
It might. Right now they needed all the information they could get, but that might help later on. “They had psychics come through and get rid of the demon,” she said. “Or, sorry, they claimed they did. But the client says it all came back days later.”
“There’s a couple possibilities there,” Father McEnerney said.
“Bradley says they were scammers.”
“That’s certainly one of them.”
Gabriella laughed. “Thank you,” she said. “I’ll be there this afternoon, so I can email you what we get. Just for your records,” she added quickly. “I don’t expect you to be on this case with us.”
“If only I could,” Father McEnerney said. “Oh, before you go, how’s James?”
Gabriella must have hesitated just a little too long. “Oh,” Father McEnerney said softly.
“He’s on leave for a few weeks,” she said. “You could try calling him, but I don’t know if he’ll answer. We’re all watching out for him though.”
“Good,” Father McEnerney said. “Yeah, I’ll…maybe a text, so he can answer on his own time.”
That might actually help. She wasn’t positive, but maybe.
She hung up the phone and walked out, passing by the pink bedroom before she realized she’d left her sweater in there earlier. The door was open and, like everyone else here, Jolene had spread her work out on one of the beds. She smiled up at Gabriella. “Hi.”
“Hi,” Gabriella said, suddenly feeling like an intruder. “Sorry, I just forgot…”
There it was, half-falling off the dresser. She went over and grabbed it. “No problem,” Jolene said. “Sorry, I feel like I’m invading your space here.”
“It’s fine,” Gabriella said. “It’s your home base now too, I guess.”
“Yeah.”
Was it Gabriella’s imagination or did her gaze also dart toward the gray bedroom? “I’ll be leaving in a minute,” Jolene said. “If you need the room.”
“I don’t, so take your time,” Gabriella replied with what she hoped wasn’t a horrifically awkward smile.
There was a knock at the doorway. Bradley was standing there, looking as irritated as ever. “I’m done,” he said to Jolene. “You’re up.”
She looked nervous, but possibly more angry. “How’d yours go?” she asked.
He shrugged. “They blustered about protocol and insubordination. I got a mark, but whatever.”
That meeting had been a disciplinary meeting. Now it made sense. Last week, Bradley, Amelia, and Jolene had been meeting with Foundation representatives in the living room while James lay unconscious in the gray bedroom. Gabriella had been on comms with Graham while they met and both of them had stopped what they were doing when the shouting began. Bradley and Jolene had been correct, of course. Gabriella had been horrified – and somehow still surprised – when she realized the Foundation was considering punishing James rather than taking care of him. But instead of listening to them, the Foundation had sent both of them disciplinary writeups.
A respected Foundation doctor and a branch agent of over a decade. It was absurd. But hopefully the Foundation couldn’t afford to lose them to prove a point.
“I was going to say more to them, but McManus’s meeting is going to be scheduled soon, so I didn’t want to give them anything to use against him.”
“Are they making him go to a meeting while he’s on sick leave?” Gabriella blurted out.
“No,” both Jolene and Bradley said in unison.
“Amelia or I can represent him for whatever bullshit they’re cooking up,” Bradley explained.
Good. That was a slight relief.
“They tried, though.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Gabriella demanded.
“What else do you expect from them?” he snapped. “Obviously they were going to try to drag him in.”
Jolene stood up before Bradley could continue to take his meeting out on Gabriella, joints popping as she did so. “Alright,” she said with a grim smile toward both of them. “Let me go get my mark too.”
