"Bonnie?"
"Um-hm?"
"Did I just say what I thought I said?"
"Um-hm."
Elena, with one motion, gathered an armful of pillows and deposited them on her face. "Could you please tell chef that I want another steak and a big glass of milk?" she requested in a muffled voice from under the pillows. "I'm not well."
Matt had a new junk car. He was always able to get his hands on one when he really needed it. And now he was driving, in fits and starts, to Obaasan's house.
Mrs. Saitou's house, he corrected himself hastily. He didn't want to tread on unfamiliar cultural customs, not when he was asking for a favor.
The door at the Saitous' was opened by a woman Matt had never seen before. She was an attractive woman, dressed very dramatically in a wide scarlet skirt - or maybe in very wide scarlet pants - she stood with her feet so far apart that it was hard to tell. She wore a white blouse. Her face was striking: two swaths of straight black hair and a smaller, neater swath of bangs that came to her eyebrows.
But the most striking thing of all about her was that she was holding a long curved sword, pointed directly at Matt.
"H-hi," Matt said, when the door swung open to reveal this apparition.
"This is a good house," the woman replied. "This is not a house of evil spirits."
"I never thought it was," Matt said, retreating as the woman advanced. "Honest."
The woman shut her eyes, seemed to be searching for something in her own mind. Then, abruptly, she lowered the sword. "You speak the truth. You mean no harm. Please come in."
"Thank you," Matt said. He'd never been so happy to have an older woman accept him.
"Orime," came a thin, feeble voice from upstairs. "Is that one of the children?"
"Yes, Hahawe," called the woman that Matt couldn't help thinking of as "the woman with the sword."
"Send him up, why don't you?"
"Of course, Hahawe."
"Ha ha - I mean 'Hahawe'?" Matt said, turning a nervous laugh into a desperate sentence as the sword swung by his midriff again. "Not Obaasan?"
The sword-woman smiled for the first time. "Obaasan means grandmother. Hahawe is one of the ways to say mother. But mother won't mind at all if you call her Obaasan; it's a friendly greeting for a woman of her age."
"Okay," Matt said, trying his best to seem like an all-around friendly guy.
Mrs. Saitou gestured him up the stairs and he peeped into several rooms before he found one with a large futon in the exact middle of a completely bare floor, and in it a woman who seemed so tiny and doll-like as not to be real.
Her hair was just as soft and black as the sword-woman's downstairs. It was put up or arranged somehow so that it lay around her like a halo as she lay on the bed. But the dark lashes on the pale cheeks were shut and Matt wondered if she had fallen into one of the sudden slumbers of the elderly.
But then quite abruptly, the doll-like lady opened her eyes and smiled. "Why, it's Masato-chan!" she said, looking at Matt.
Bad beginning. If she didn't even recognize that a blond guy wasn't her Japanese friend from about sixty years ago...
But then she was laughing, with her small hands in front of her mouth. "I know, I know," she said. "You're not Masato. He became a banker, very rich. Very thick. Especially in the head and the stomach."
She smiled at him again. "Sit down, please. You can call me Obaasan if you want, or Orime. My daughter was named for me. But life has been hard for her, as it was for me. Being a shrine maiden - and a samurai...it takes discipline and much work. And my Orime did so well...until we came here. We were looking for a town that would be peaceful and quiet. Instead, Isobel found...Jim. And Jim was...untrue."
Matt's throat swelled with the desire to defend his friend, but what defense could there be? Jim had spent one night with Caroline - at Caroline's pressing invitation. And he had become possessed and had brought that possession to his girlfriend Isobel, who had pierced her body grotesquely - among other things.
"We've got to get them," Matt found himself saying earnestly. "The kitsune who started it all - who started it with Caroline. Shinichi and his sister Misao."
"Kitsune." Obaasan was nodding her head. "Yes, I said there would be one involved from the very beginning. Let me see; I blessed some charms and amulets for your friends...."
"And some bullets. I just sort of filled my pockets," Matt said, embarrassed, as he spilled out a jumble of different calibers on the edge of her futon cover. "I even found some prayers on the Web about getting rid of them."
"Yes, you've been very thorough. Good." Obaasan looked at the hard copies he'd printed of the prayers. Matt squirmed, knowing that he had only been running down Meredith's To-Do list, and that the credit really belonged to her.
"I'll bless the bullets first and then I'll write out more amulets," she said. "Put the amulets wherever you need protection most. And, well, I suppose you know what to do with the bullets."
"Yes, ma'am!" Matt fumbled in his pockets for the last few, put them into Obaasan's outstretched hands. Then she chanted a long, elaborate prayer holding her tiny hands out over the bullets. Matt didn't find the incantation frightening, but he knew that as a psychic he was a dud, and that Bonnie had probably seen and heard things he couldn't.
"Should I aim for any particular part of them?" Matt asked, watching the old woman and trying to follow along on his own copy of the prayers.
"No, any part of the body or head will do. If you take out a tail, you'll make it weaker, but you'll enrage it, as well." Obaasan paused and coughed, a small dry old-lady cough. Before Matt could offer to run downstairs and get her a drink, Mrs. Saitou entered the room with a tray and three cups of tea in little bowls.