“Hold on. So you’re telling me that this Frater Karras person was a skilled magician, and they hired him like a plumber?”

“Yep.”

“His brother, too?”

“Uh-huh.”

“But was Frater Karras employed by the Hellfire Club in the early eighties when the Snatcher was active? If Bishop wanted to undergo the transmutation spell so badly, what was to stop him from hiring Frater Karras on the side?”

“Good question.”

“Is Frater Karras still alive?”

“Even better question. I don’t know. He disappeared. Not all that uncommon for rogue magicians. They change names, move around. . . .”

“Like me.”

“Like you. But you know how Cindy said the original Snatcher was a short man with mismatched eyes?”

I stared at him. “No way.”

“Yes way. I nearly had a stroke when she said that. Fucking Frater Karras had one blue eye, one brown.”

“Crap! If he was the person who tried to take Cindy, then—”

“Maybe he’s the person taking the kids now.”

The waitress returned briefly to leave our check. Lon always insisted on paying for dinner, so we had a standing agreement that I’d take care of the tip. I glanced at the check and counted out cash, lost in thought. We knew the original Snatcher’s true identity. How were we going to find out if he was still alive? As I unwrinkled dollar bills and shuffled them into a neat stack, another nagging detail almost slid into place inside my head.

“Frater Karras,” I said. “That name . . .”

Lon gave me a strange look. “Yeah?”

“Karras, Karras . . .”

Lon shook his head, not following my line of thought as Jupe bounded up to the table.

“I need dough, yo. Small bills or quarters. They’ve got all kinds of awesome stuff in there. Double Dragon, Altered Beast, Ghosts and Goblins—it’s a freakin’ gold mine!”

“I’m not a piggy bank,” Lon complained. “Forget it.”

“What do you want me to do? I’m too young to get a job working fast food after school. I can’t just make money materialize.” He lowered his head near mine and added in a hushed voice, “Or can I? There’s not a spell for that, is there?”

“No, but I bet there’s one to seal your mouth shut,” Lon said grumpily. “Besides, I thought you were ‘independently wealthy.’ Use your fancy new savings account.”

“I said small bills, Dad. Those games are ancient. I can’t put an ATM card in them.”

“Life is tough.”

Jupe groaned then looked at me. “Why were you guys talking about The Exorcist?”

Lon’s nose wrinkled. “Huh?”

“You were talking about Father Karras. I heard you when I walked up.”

“That’s it! The Exorcist!” My knees banged on the underside of the table in my excitement. “Father Damien Karras from The Exorcist!”

Jupe squatted down in front of the table and rested his chin on top of his folded arms. “Played by Jason Miller,” he confirmed. “The younger Jesuit priest who threw himself down the steps at the end of the movie to get the demon out of his body.”

“So what?” Lon said tersely. “It’s just a name. Magicians don’t use their given names when practicing.” I knew he was referring to me, but as many promises as I’d made to him regarding Jupe, he’d made some to me too. Jupe would never know my real name. Never, never, never.

“That’s right,” I said, ignoring his accusing glare. “Magicians don’t use their real names when practicing. And there’s a crazy old magician who runs a Silent Temple somewhere in Morella. He goes by Frater Merrin.”

“Oh!” Jupe exclaimed, not having any idea what we were actually discussing. “Father Merrin, played by Max von Sydow. He’s the older priest in the movie who dies during the exorcism.”

Lon sat up in his seat. Now he was paying attention. I pressed my hand over his knee and bit my lip in euphoric glee. I could be wrong—had been before. But this was an awfully big coincidence to ignore.

“Tomorrow’s Saturday. Don’t Silent Temples usually celebrate their Sabbath on Saturdays, not Sundays?” Lon asked in a low voice while Jupe continued to chatter with geektastic movie factoids about The Exorcist.

They did, and even if “Frater Merrin” wasn’t working there anymore, maybe someone in the temple could clue us in to his whereabouts.

“What’s a Silent Temple?” Jupe asked, suddenly interested in our discussion.

Mr. and Mrs. Holiday better be up for some Jupe-sitting, because I damn well wasn’t hauling the boy along to a Silent Temple. Magicians in esoteric orders might be loopy, but those people were insane.

I had to make a few calls next morning to find out where it was. Silent Temples don’t advertise, aren’t in the book, and there’s little talk of their locations online. Sure, you could find discussion boards populated with fringe people who post bizarre tales, told to them by a “friend.” Rumors about temples in certain cities, that kind of thing. After surfing for an hour, you were more likely to have picked up some filthy virus from one of the web sites than to have discovered an actual location, which notoriously changes every few months.

That’s when it pays to have friends like Bob. Though he hadn’t quite gotten over the cannery terror, as long as he didn’t have to follow me into dark abandoned buildings, he was willing to help—and did. It took him fifteen minutes to call me back with the current location of the temple in Morella: an old brick high school in the Eastern Foothills district.