My mother broke off as I flung both my arms around her neck.
“Thank you!” I cried.
“Oh, honey,” my mom said, hugging me—although a little tentatively, I noticed, since I still smelled like a fish. “You’re welcome. I know how much you miss her. And I know how tough it’s been on you, adjusting to a whole new high school, and a whole new set of friends—and to having stepbrothers. We’re so proud of how well you’re doing.” She pulled away from me. I could tell she’d wanted to go on hugging me, but I was just too gross even for my own mother. “Well, up until now, anyway.”
I looked down at Gina’s letter, which my mom had handed to me. Gina was a terrific letter writer. I couldn’t wait to go upstairs and read it. Only…only something was still bothering me.
I looked back, over my shoulder, at the photo of Andy and his first wife.
“You hung up some new pictures, I see,” I said.
My mom followed my gaze. “Oh, yes. Well, it kept my mind occupied while we were waiting to hear from you. Why don’t you go upstairs and get yourself cleaned up? Andy’s making individual pizzas for dinner.”
“His first wife,” I said, my eyes still glued to the photo. “Dopey’s—I mean, Brad’s—mom. She died, right?”
“Uh-huh,” my mother said. “Several years ago.”
“What of?”
“Ovarian cancer. Honey, be careful where you put those clothes when you take them off. They’re covered with soot. Look, there’s black gunk now all over my new Pottery Barn slipcovers.”
I stared at the photo.
“Did she…” I struggled to formulate the correct question. “Did she go into a coma, or something?”
My mother looked up from the slipcover she’d been yanking from the armchair where I’d been lounging.
“I think so,” she said. “Yes, toward the end. Why?”
“Did Andy have to…” I turned Gina’s letter over and over in my hands. “Did they have to pull the plug?”
“Yes.” My mother had forgotten about the slipcover. Now she was staring at me, obviously concerned. “Yes, as a matter of fact, they had to ask that she be taken off life support at a certain point since Andy believed she wouldn’t have wanted to live like that. Why?”
“I don’t know.” I looked down at the hearts and rainbows on Gina’s envelope. Red. I had been so stupid. You know me, Doc’s mother had insisted. God, I should so have my mediator license revoked. If there were a license, which, of course, there isn’t.
“What was her name?” I asked, nodding my head toward the photo. “Brad’s mom, I mean?”
“Cynthia,” my mother said.
Cynthia. God, what a loser I am.
“Honey, come help me, would you?” My mother was still futzing with the chair I’d been sitting in. “I can’t get this one cushion loose—”
I tucked Gina’s envelope into my pocket and went to help my mother. “Where’s Doc?” I asked. “I mean, David.”
My mother looked at me curiously. “Upstairs in his room, I think, doing his homework. Why?”
“Oh, I just have to tell him something.”
Something I should have told him a long time ago.
Chapter
Twenty-three
“So?” Jesse asked. “How did he take it?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
I was stretched out on my bed, totally without makeup, attired in my oldest jogging clothes. I had a new plan: I had decided I was going to treat Jesse exactly the way I would my stepbrothers. That way, I’d be guaranteed not to fall in love with him.
I was flipping through a copy of Vogue instead of doing my geometry homework like I was supposed to. Jesse was on the window seat—of course—petting Spike.
Jesse shook his head. “Come on,” he said. It always sounded strange to me when Jesse said things like Come on. It seemed so strange coming out of a guy who was wearing a shirt with laces instead of buttons. “Tell me what he said.”
I flipped a page of my magazine. “Tell me what you guys did to Marcus.”
Jesse looked a little too surprised by the question. “We did nothing to him.”
“Baloney. Where’d he go, then?”
Jesse shrugged and scratched Spike beneath the chin. The stupid cat was purring so loud, I could hear it all the way across the room.
“I think he decided to travel for a while.” Jesse’s tone was deceptively innocent.
“Without any money? Without his credit cards?” One of the things the firemen had found in the room was Marcus’s wallet…and his gun.
“There is something to be said”—Jesse gave Spike a playful swat on the back of the head when the cat took a lazy swipe at him—“for seeing this great country of ours on foot. Maybe he will come to have a better appreciation for its natural beauty.”
I snorted, and turned a page of my magazine. “He’ll be back in a week.”
“I think not.”
He said it with such certainty that I instantly became suspicious.
“Why not?”
Jesse hesitated. He didn’t want to tell me, I could tell.
“What?” I said. “Telling me, a mere living being, is going to violate some spectral code?”
“No,” Jesse said with a smile. “He’s not coming back, Susannah, because the souls of the people he killed won’t let him.”
I raised my eyebrows. “What do you mean?”
“In my day, it was called bedevilment. I don’t know what they call it now. But your intervention had a rallying effect on Mrs. Fiske and the three others whose lives Marcus Beaumont took. They have banded together, and will not rest until he has been sufficiently punished for his crimes. He can run from one end of the earth to the other, but he will never escape them. Not until he dies himself. And when that happens”—Jesse’s voice was hard—“he will be a broken man.”
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. As a mediator, I knew I shouldn’t approve of this sort of behavior. I mean, ghosts should not be allowed to take the law into their own hands any more than the living should.
But I had no particular fondness for Marcus, and no way of proving that he’d killed those people anyway. He’d never be punished, I knew, by inhabitants of this world. So was it so wrong that he be punished by those who lived in the next?
I glanced at Jesse out of the corner of my eyes, remembering that, from what I’d read, no one had ever been convicted of his murder, either.
“So,” I said. “I guess you did the same thing, huh, to the, um, people who killed you, right?”
Jesse didn’t fall for this sly question, though. He only smiled, and said, “Tell me what happened with your brother.”
“Stepbrother,” I reminded him.
And I wasn’t going to tell Jesse about my interview with Doc, any more than Jesse was going to tell me diddly about how he’d died. Only in my case, it was because what had happened with Doc was just too excruciatingly embarrassing to go into. Jesse didn’t want to talk about how he’d died because…well, I don’t know. But I doubt it’s because he’s embarrassed about it.
I had found Doc exactly where my mother had told me he’d be, in his room doing his homework, a paper that wasn’t due until the following month. But that was Doc for you: Why put off until tomorrow homework you could be doing today?
His “Come in,” when I’d tapped at the door had been casual. He hadn’t suspected it would be me. I never ventured into my stepbrothers’ rooms if I could avoid it. The odor of dirty socks was simply too overwhelming.
Only since I wasn’t smelling too daisy-fresh myself at that particular moment, I thought I could bear it.
He was shocked to see me, his face turning almost as red as his hair. He jumped up and tried to hide his pile of dirty underwear beneath the comforter of his unmade bed. I told him to relax. And then I sat down on that unmade bed, and said I had something to tell him.
How did he take it? Well, for one thing, he didn’t ask me a lot of stupid
questions like How do you know? He knew how I knew. He knew a little about the mediation thing. Not a lot, but enough to know that I communicate, on a somewhat regular basis, with the undead.
I guess it was the fact that it was his own mother I’d been communicating with this time that brought tears to his blue eyes…which freaked me out a bit. I had never seen Doc cry before.
“Hey,” I said, alarmed. “Hey, it’s okay—”
“What—” Doc was choking back a sob. I could totally tell. “What did she l-look like?”
“What did she look like?” I echoed, not sure I’d heard him right. At his vigorous nod, however, I said, carefully, “Well, she looked…she looked very pretty.”
Doc’s tear-filled eyes widened. “She did?”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “That’s how I recognized her, you know. From the wedding photo of her and your dad, downstairs. She looked like that. Only her hair was shorter.”
Doc said, the effort he was making not to cry causing his voice to shake, “I wish I could…I wish I could see her looking like that. The last time I saw her, she looked terrible. Not like in that picture. You wouldn’t have recognized her. She was in a c-coma. Her eyes were sunken in. And there were all these tubes coming out of her—”
Even though I was sitting like a foot away from him, I felt the shudder that ran through him. I said, gently, “David, what you did, when you guys made the decision to let her go…it was the right thing. It was what she wanted. That’s what she needs to make sure you understand. You know it was the right thing, don’t you?”
His eyes were so deeply pooled in tears, I could hardly see his irises anymore. As I watched, one drop escaped, and trickled down his cheek, followed quickly by another on the opposite side of his face.
“I-intellectually,” he said. “I guess. B-but—”
“It was the right thing,” I repeated, firmly. “You’ve got to believe that. She does. So stop beating yourself up. She loves you very much—”
That did it. Now the tears were coming down in full force.
“She said that?” he asked, in a broken voice that reminded me that he was, after all, still a pretty young kid, and not the superhuman computer he sometimes acts like.
“Of course she did.”
She hadn’t, of course, but I’m sure she would have if she hadn’t been so disgusted by my gross incompetency.
Then Doc did something that completely shocked me: He flung both his arms around my neck.
This kind of impassioned display was so unlike Doc, I didn’t know what to do. I sat there for one awkward moment, not moving, afraid that if I did, I might gouge his face with some of the rivets on my jacket. Finally, however, when he didn’t let go, I reached up and patted him uncertainly on the shoulder.
“It’s okay,” I said, lamely. “Everything is going to be okay.”
He cried for about two minutes. His clinging to me, crying like that, gave me a strange feeling. It was kind of a protective feeling.
Then he finally leaned back, and, embarrassed, wiped his eyes again and said, “Sorry.”
I said, “It’s no big deal,” even though, of course, it was.
“Suze,” he said. “Can I ask you something?”
Expecting more questions about his mother, I said, “Sure.”
“Why do you smell like fish?”
I went back to my room a little while later, shaken not just by Doc’s emotional reaction to the message I’d delivered but by something else, as well. Something I had not told Doc, and which I had no intention of mentioning to Jesse, either.
And it was that while I’d been hugging Doc, his mother had materialized on the opposite side of the bed and looked down at me.
“Thank you,” she said. She was, I saw, crying about as hard as her kid. Only her tears, I was uncomfortably aware, were of gratitude and love.
With all these people crying around me, was it really any wonder that my eyes filled up, too? I mean, come on. I’m only human.
But I really hate it when I cry. I’d much rather bleed or throw up or something. Crying is just…
Well, it’s the worst.
You can see why I couldn’t tell any of this stuff to Jesse. It was just too…personal. It was between Doc and his mom and me, and wild horses—or excessively cute ghosts who happened to live in my bedroom—weren’t going to get it out of me.
Jesse, I saw when I glanced up from the article I’d been staring at unseeingly—How to Tell If He Secretly Loves You. Yeah, right. A problem I so don’t have—was grinning at me.
“Still,” he said. “You must be feeling good. It’s not every mediator who single-handedly stops a murderer.”
I grunted, and flipped over another page. “It’s an honor I could definitely have lived without,” I said. “And I didn’t do it single-handedly. You helped.” Then I remembered that, really, I’d had the situation well in hand by the time Jesse had shown up. So I added, “Well, sort of.”
But that sounded ungracious. So I said, grudgingly, “Thanks for showing up the way you did.”
“How could I not? You called me.” He had found a piece of string somewhere, and now he dragged it in front of Spike, who eyed it with an expression on his face that seemed to say, “Whaddya think, I’m stupid?”
“Um,” I said. “I did not call you, all right? I don’t know where you’re getting this.”
He looked at me, his eyes darker than ever in the rays of the setting sun, which poured unmercifully into my room every night at sundown. “I distinctly heard you, Susannah.”
I frowned. This was all getting a little too weird for me. First Mrs. Fiske had shown up when all I’d been doing was thinking about her. And then Jesse did the same thing. Only I hadn’t, to my knowledge, called either of them. I’d been thinking about them, true.
Jeez. There was way more stuff to this mediating thing than I’d ever even suspected.
“Well, while we’re on the subject,” I said, “how come you didn’t just tell me that Red was Doc’s mom’s nickname for him?”
Jesse threw me a perplexed look. “How would I have known?”
True. I hadn’t thought of that. Andy and my mother had bought the house—Jesse’s house—only last summer. Jesse couldn’t have known who Cynthia was. And yet…
Well, he’d known something about her.
Ghosts. Would I ever figure them out?
“What did the priest say?” Jesse asked me, in an obvious attempt to change the subject. “When you told him about the Beaumonts, I mean?”
“Not a whole lot. He’s pretty peeved at me for not having filled him in right away about Marcus and stuff.” I was careful not to add that Father D. was also still ballistic over the whole Jesse issue. That, he’d promised me, was a topic we were going to discuss at length tomorrow morning at school. I could hardly wait. It was no wonder I wasn’t doing so hot in geometry if you took into account all the time I was spending in the principal’s office.
The phone rang. I snatched up the receiver, grateful for an excuse not to have to go on lying to Jesse.
“Hello?”
Jesse gave me a sour look. The telephone is one modern convenience Jesse insists he could live very happily without. TV is another. He doesn’t seem to mind Madonna, though.
“Sue?”
I blinked. It was Tad.
“Oh, hi,” I said.
“Um,” Tad said. “It’s me. Tad.”
Don’t ask me how this guy, and the guy who’d gotten away with so many murders, could be from the same gene pool. I really don’t get it.
I rolled my eyes, and, throwing the copy of Vogue onto the floor, picked up Gina’s letter and re-read it.
“I know it’s you, Tad,” I said. “How’s your dad?”
“Um,” Tad said. “Much better, actually. It looks as if someone was giving him something—something my dad seems to have thought was medicine—that may actually have been having some kind of hallucinatory effect on him. Turns out the doctors think that might
be what’s making him think he’s…well, what he thinks he is.”
“Really?”
Dude, Gina wrote, in her big, loopy cursive. Looks like I’m headin’ out West to see you! Your mom rocks! So does that new stepdad of yours. Can’t wait to meet the new bros. They can’t possibly be as bad as you say.
Wanna bet?
“Yeah. So they’re going to try to, you know, detox him for a while, and the hope is that once this stuff, whatever it is, is out of his system, he’ll be back to his old self again.”
“Wow, Tad,” I said. “That’s great.”
“Yeah. It’s going to take a while, though, since I guess he’s been taking this stuff since right after my mom died. I think…well, I didn’t tell anyone, but I’m wondering if my uncle Marcus might have been giving this stuff to my dad. Not to hurt him or anything—”
Yeah, right. He hadn’t been trying to hurt him. He’d been trying to gain control of Beaumont Industries, that’s all.
And he’d succeeded.
“I think he really must have thought he was helping my dad. Right after my mom died, Dad was way messed up. Uncle Marcus was only trying to help him, I’m sure.”
Just like he was just trying to help you, Tad, when he pistol-whipped you and swapped your Levi’s for swim trunks. Tad, I realized, had some major denial going on.
“Anyway,” Tad went on. “I just want to say, um, thanks. I mean, for not saying anything to the cops about my uncle. I mean, we probably should have, right? But it seems like he’s gone now, and it would have, you know, looked kind of bad for my dad’s business—”
This conversation was getting way too weird for me. I returned to the comfort of Gina’s letter.
So what should I bring? I mean, to wear. I got this totally hot pair of Miu Miu slacks, marked down to twenty bucks at Filene’s, but isn’t it Baywatch weather there? The slacks are a wool blend. Also, you better get us invited to some rockin’ parties while I’m there because I just got new extensions, and girlfriend, let me tell you, I look GOOD. Shauna did them, and she only charged me a buck per. Of course I have to baby-sit her stinking brother this Saturday, but who cares? It’s so worth it.