So after only a second’s hesitation, I reached out and took his hand, and neither of us let go.
All right, Ana, I thought to the dead girl who was maybe-probably possessing me. No creepy messages for a few hours, okay? Be cool.
The library wasn’t all that big, but there was a whole room dedicated to local history and genealogy. The librarian helped me and Jamie log in to one of the computers, and we started looking up everything we could find about exorcisms, using an online language translator when necessary. We found a lot of weird stuff, including a hilarious interview Grandma had done for Return to the Asylum that even I’d never read before. After an hour, we hadn’t found anything useful, but we were having too much fun to care.
While I didn’t have the heart to tell Jamie, the more I thought about his theory, the more holes I found. How had I “exorcised” Ana in the first place? With Lidia, the camera flash caused her to have a seizure, which got rid of Red Leer. But nothing like that had happened at the graveyard. I’d been so nervous, not to mention mortified about the whole I wonder what it would be like to have a mom who cared about me thing I’d blurted out. I remembered sitting by Ana’s tombstone and seething; thinking Oscar was trying to move the planchette, thinking about my mom and her wedding, thinking about how much I hated being on camera . . . Jamie always said you had to really focus on a spirit during Ouija, and I hadn’t really been thinking about Ana at all.
Then there were my panic attacks. I desperately wanted to believe that I could blame all that anxiety on my camera, but I couldn’t. The truth was, I’d been freaked out about being on TV since the moment Dad mentioned it on the plane. That was my anxiety, not Ana’s.
What was it Roland had said? Your brain is occupied with your own situation, and it projected your issues onto the idea of her. But even that idea didn’t quite work anymore. Jamie, Oscar, and all the others had felt it at the park yesterday: the presence of something. They’d all been anxious, too. Whatever was happening, it wasn’t entirely inside my head.
“Wait, scroll back up,” Jamie said, breaking me out of my thoughts. I scrolled up until he pointed. “That one. The Four Basic Stages of an Exorcism.”
I clicked the link, and we read silently for a minute.
The process of exorcizing a spirit can be broken down into four basic stages, as follows:
Concealment. The spirit keeps its identity and presence a secret.
Exposure. The spirit reveals its identity, either willingly or through force by the exorcist.
Confrontation. The exorcist confronts the spirit and attempts to force it out of the victim.
Banishment (or Reclamation). Either the exorcist is victorious, or the spirit reclaims the victim.
“That’s how it was with Lidia,” I said slowly. “She started acting strange, but we didn’t know why. Next Red Leer ‘revealed his identity’ at Daems, when he made Lidia release the prisoners. Then I confronted him and banished him with the camera. All four stages.”
“Right now, we’re stuck at stage two,” Jamie replied. “I mean, we know the spirit is Ana, but we haven’t exposed her yet. I guess we’ve got to do that somehow before we can confront her.”
“Yeah.” I glanced at the clock in the corner of the screen. “We should probably start looking up Brunilda if we’re supposed to meet with Oscar and Hailey at one.” Opening the library catalog, I typed in Brunilda Cano and hit the search button.
No results found.
“Nothing?” I said, surprised. “The church did an exorcism on a nun and there’s no record, no newspaper article?”
Jamie wrinkled his nose. “Huh. Maybe try the name of the church? The exorcism was in 1891, try that, too.”
Nodding, I typed Catedral de Nuestra Señora de la Encarnación, convento, 1891. A few results popped up, including a link to a digitized microfilm photo, which I clicked immediately.
“Well, there’s the photo,” Jamie said, leaning closer to the screen. “That’s her, right?”
He pointed to the sharp-faced nun in the first row, and I squinted. “Yeah, she’s the one Guzmán circled. And there’s . . . wait, hang on.” I tapped the grainy, scanned caption clip next to the photo, where the nuns were listed in order from left to right. “Her name’s not on here.”
Jamie’s brow furrowed. “Second from the left, first row . . . María Carmen Romero. Did they skip Brunilda?”
“Nope.” I touched each face with my finger. “Seven nuns, seven names.” I sat back, frowning. “Why does Guzmán think that’s her?”
Neither of us spoke for a few seconds. Then Jamie jumped up and grabbed my hand, pulling me out of my chair. “I have an idea.”
We hurried out of the library and back up the street toward the church. But Jamie veered off into the cemetery, leading me to the first row of headstones behind the church.
“Is there a reason we’re here?” I asked. “Not that cemeteries aren’t excellent first-date venues, too . . .”
He laughed. “I’m looking for Brunilda’s grave. She was a nun at this church, so she’d be buried here, right?”
“I guess, yeah.” We wandered up and down the rows, still holding hands. The tombstones were old and weather-beaten, but the names and dates were still pretty legible. “Look, Sor María Carmen Romero . . . died November 28, 1891. The same day Brunilda Cano died, according to Guzmán.”
Jamie gazed at the tombstone thoughtfully. “Did she change her name or something? Don’t nuns sometimes do that?”
“Maybe,” I said. “But if she was born Brunilda Cano, her name would’ve come up when we searched the library catalog. It would’ve been somewhere in the genealogy section.”
“Good point.”
We continued down the row, checking each grave. After a few minutes, Jamie pulled out his phone and checked the time. “Twenty to one,” he said, making
