When Demons Float. Susan Thistlethwaite
my husband, Dr. J. Richard Thistlethwaite, Jr. for his unfailing support of all my writing, and for his willingness to put up with being asked numerous questions. I would like to thank my sons James Thistlethwaite, Doug Thistlewolf, and Bill Thistlethwaite, and our extended family, for their love and support. I particularly need to thank Bill and his son Rowan for technical advice on how kids can get around parental controls on electronic devices.
I would like to thank Rev. Nathan Dannison for his insight into how white supremacists recruit young, white males online through the chat rooms of violent video games. I have incorporated that idea into the novel with his permission. In addition, Rev. Dannison, and his work to try to prevent the recruitment of young, white males into white supremacy, and get them out, is the inspiration for a pastor character in the novel.
Thanks need to go out to Rev. Jane Fisler Hoffman, retired United Church of Christ Conference Minister and pastor. Jane reads all drafts of my novels and gives me detailed feedback. She is the inspiration for the University Chaplain character. In addition, I would like to thank Cherry Gallagher, an experienced book editor and friend. Cherry, as does Jane, gives me the gift of honest feedback, and that kind of intellectual challenge is truly priceless.
There is now a community of people who read my novels and give me encouragement and comments online and in person. Some of these folks have used my novels in book clubs, and I have therefore, once again, included suggestions for book club discussion questions at the end.
Among these readers is Dr. Mary E. Hunt, liberation theologian and co-founder of W.A.T.E.R., the Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual. Mary wrote an article on how three feminist theologians, myself included, have started writing fiction. I highly recommend all the novels she reviews.3
Dr. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, the Krister Stendahl Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School, asked me for copies of the first two mysteries and she wants to include them in a feminist theology courses. I am very honored by this.
Finally, I would like to acknowledge the courage of those who resist the demonic deformations of white supremacy day in and day out. This is a terrible struggle, and it can even be a struggle to death.
We must call white supremacy by its proper name. It is Evil and we must defeat it.
2. Richard Pérez-Peña, Mitch Smith, and Stephanie Saul, “University of Chicago Strikes Back at Campus Political Correctness,” The New York Times (August 26, 2016).
3. Mary E. Hunt, “Feminist Theologians Bring Wisdom to Fiction,” National Catholic Reporter (May 29, 2019). Accessed July 23, 2019.
https://www.ncronline.org/news/opinion/feminist-theologians-bring-wisdom -fiction.
Prologue
I knocked on the apartment door and it swung open. It was unlatched. I called out once, my words sounding loud in the darkened room, but then I didn’t call again. The smell had hit me.
I saw the feet dangling. I forced myself to look up past the slack arms and stretched neck, all the way to the bloated face. It was grotesquely disfigured, pushed up by the choking rope. It was barely recognizable, but I knew who it was.
I had been afraid something like this would happen. And now it had.
I pulled out my cell to call 911 with one hand, while I tried to support the body’s weight with the other. I was trembling with rage.
This was one of the rare times when I was sorry I wasn’t still a cop. The room looked like the stage set of a suicide, but I doubted it.
I thought it was murder.
Chapter 1
White Pride World Wide
—“Stormfront” logo
Monday of the previous week, 5:30 a.m.
“That’s a noose,” I said.
“Ya think?” growled Officer Alice Matthews, a campus policewoman and my friend, who had called me out here in the frigid mist of dawn to look at this ugly coil of rope hanging from the branch of a tree on the main quadrangle of the campus.
Yeah. Even though I hadn’t had any coffee, I knew a noose when I saw one.
A shadow of the tree branch fell over Alice’s grim face as the sun began to rise behind it. A light breeze swung the noose to and fro as it dangled from the limb. Cheap clothesline, inexpertly tied. But it was doing its terrible job quite well. Behind her professional mask, Alice’s dark skin seemed stretched over her facial bones, the fear ruthlessly suppressed. But it was there.
I felt my own face flush with rage at whoever had chosen to hang this symbol of hate and outright threat that had put that look on my friend’s face. And, I realized, I was also weirdly pissed off at being white. Go figure. Well, I’m as white as white gets, the kind of pale, tall blonde that figures in a lot of guys’ fantasy of a Scandinavian goddess. Well, they can stuff their nasty, white illusions. I am of Scandinavian descent, and I know the dangerous toxicity of whiteness, up close and personal. I’ve known it for quite a while. I had been a Chicago cop before I’d quit the force and decided to escape into what I had thought, incorrectly, would be the low-stress work of being a university faculty member. Because of how I looked, my white cop colleagues had assumed I was as racist as they as they made their vicious remarks and acted on that hate. That, among a lot of other reasons, was why I was no longer a cop, though now I did “consult” part-time for the campus police. And here I was, “consulting” by looking at a noose hanging from a tree at dawn in the middle of the university campus.
“And what’s this mess?” Alice asked, the toe of her sturdy, black, Oxford cop shoe pushing at a leaflet on the ground. Hundreds of them were strewn around under the tree. I looked more carefully, and I could see they made a paper trail across the campus. I picked one up. Bold black lettering on white paper jumped off the page.
“White Men Built America Not Africans! We Will Not be Erased!” it shouted. Black swastikas menaced from either side of the text. At the bottom there was a link to a website called “Stormfront.”
Oh, crap. The reference to “Africans” was a definite tip off. This wasn’t just the general neo-Nazi, Alt-right, “I’m a fascist and I like it” kind of filth that was spreading around American university campuses these days. The wording must mean the hateful rhetoric was directed at my colleague, Dr. Aduba Abubakar, our new hire in Philosophy and Religion, my academic department. As of this semester, he had been appointed as Assistant Professor of African Diaspora and Islamic Studies. He was originally from Nigeria, with a Ph.D. from Oxford and a slew of prominent journal publications. His inaugural lecture, “The African Roots of America,” had just been announced in the campus newspaper.
I started to tell all this to Alice, but I saw she had out her cell phone and was photographing the noose and the leaflets littering the ground. And now I saw they were not just on the ground. As the rising sun burned off more of the mist, I could see that the trees around the paths of the central quad, their leaves yellowed and falling in the freshening breeze, had this garbage stapled to the trunks and more were blowing across the grass. I wondered how many more were spread around the campus in addition to this central area. There would be a lot of clean up necessary. Just then I saw two more campus police cars pulling up just beyond the quad at the parking circle.
Well, since this could reasonably be interpreted as an attack on our new colleague, I thought I’d better call my Department Chairperson, Dr. Adelaide Winters, and get her over here. Adelaide was Professor of Women and Religion. Nearly sixty and solid, both in mind and body, she was normally quite unflappable. I knew that for a fact. We’d had plenty of turmoil in our department in the last two years, the kind of turmoil that would flap anybody, including three deaths. Adelaide had held firm. But this hideous stunt might flap anybody.
I