“I don’t normally come to the mall,” Michael was saying. He was sticking to me like a leech. “But when I heard you were going to be here, well, I thought I’d come over and see what it’s all about. Do you come here a lot?”
I was trying to head in the general direction of the food court, in the vague hope that I might be able to ditch Michael in the throng in front of Chick-fil-A. It was tough going, though. For one thing, it looked as if just about every kid in the peninsula had decided to go to the mall after school. And for another, the mall had had one of those events, you know, that malls are always having. This one had been some kind of screwed-up mardi gras, with floats and gold masks and necklaces and all. I guess it had been a success, since they’d left a lot of the stuff up, like these big shiny purple and gold puppets. Bigger than life-size, the puppets were suspended from the mall’s glass atrium ceiling. Some of them were fifteen or twenty feet long. Their appendages dangled down in what I suppose was intended to be a whimsical manner, but in some cases made it hard to maneuver through the crowds.
“No,” I said in reply to Michael’s question. “I try never to come here. I hate it.”
Michael brightened. “Really?” he gushed, as a wave of middle schoolers poured around him. “Me, too! Wow, that’s really a coincidence. You know, there aren’t a whole lot of people our age who dislike places like this. Man is a social animal, you know, and as such is usually drawn toward areas of congregation. It’s really an indication of some biological dysfunction that you and I aren’t enjoying ourselves.”
It occurred to me that my youngest stepbrother, Doc, and Michael Meducci had a lot in common.
It also occurred to me that pointing out to a girl that she might be suffering from a biological dysfunction was not exactly the way to win her heart.
“Maybe,” Michael said, as we dodged a large puppet hand dangling down from an insanely grinning puppet head some fifteen feet above us, “you and I could go somewhere a bit quieter. I have my mom’s car. We could go get coffee or something, in town, if you want—”
That’s when I heard it. A familiar giggle.
Don’t ask me how I could have heard it over the chatter of the people all around us, and the piped-in mall Muzak, and the screaming of some kid whose mother wouldn’t let him have any ice cream. I just heard it, is all.
Laughter. The same laughter I’d heard the day before at Jimmy’s, right before I’d spotted the ghosts of those four dead kids.
And then the next thing I knew, there was a loud snap—the kind of sound a rubber band that’s been stretched too tightly makes when it breaks. I yelled, “Look out!” and tackled Michael Meducci, knocking him to the ground.
Good thing I did, too. Because a second later, exactly where we’d been standing, down crashed a giant grinning puppet head.
When the dust settled, I lifted my face from Michael Meducci’s shirt front and stared at the thing. It wasn’t made of papier-mâché, like I’d thought. It was made of plaster. Bits of plaster were everywhere; clouds of it were still floating around, making me cough. Chunks of it had been wrenched from the puppet’s face, so that, while it was still leering at me, it was doing so with only one eye and a toothless smile.
For half a beat, there was no sound whatsoever, except for my coughing and Michael’s unsteady breathing.
Then a woman screamed.
All hell broke loose after that. People fell over themselves in an effort to get out from under the puppets overhead, as if all of them were going to come crashing down at once.
I guess I couldn’t exactly blame them. The thing had to have weighed a couple hundred pounds, at least. If it had landed on Michael, it would have killed, or at least badly hurt, him. There was no doubt in my mind about that.
Just as there was no doubt, even before I spotted him, who owned the jeering voice that drawled a second later, “Well, look what we have here. Isn’t this cozy?”
I looked up and saw that Dopey—along with a breathless Gina, CeeCee, Adam, and Sleepy—had all hurried over.
I didn’t even realize I was still lying on top of Michael until Sleepy reached down and pulled me off.
“Why is it,” my stepbrother asked in a bored voice, “that you can’t be left alone for five minutes without something collapsing on top of you?”
I glared at him as I stumbled to my feet. I have to say, I really can’t wait until Sleepy goes away to college.
“Hey,” Sleepy said, reaching down to give Michael’s cheeks a couple of slaps, I suppose in some misguided attempt to bring him around, though I doubt this is a method espoused by EMS. Michael’s eyes were closed, and even though I could see he was breathing, he didn’t look good.
The slaps worked, though. Michael’s eyelids fluttered open.
“You okay?” I asked him worriedly.
He didn’t see the hand I stretched out toward him. He’d lost his glasses. He fumbled around for them in the plaster dust.
“M-my glasses,” he said.
CeeCee found them and picked them up, brushing them off as best she could before handing them back to him.
“Thanks.” Michael put the glasses on, and his eyes, behind the lenses, got very large as he took in the carnage around us. The puppet had missed him, but it had managed to take out a bench and a steel trash can without any problem whatsoever.
“Oh my God,” Michael said.
“I’ll say,” Adam said. “If it hadn’t been for Suze, you’d have been crushed to death by a giant plaster puppet head. Kind of a sucky way to die, huh?”
Michael continued to stare at the debris. “Oh my God,” he said again.
“Are you all right, Suze?” Gina asked, laying a hand on my arm.
I nodded. “Yeah, I think so. No broken bones, anyway. Michael? How about you? You still in one piece?”
“How would he be able to tell?” Dopey asked with a sneer, but I glared at him, and I guess he remembered how hard I can pull hair, since for once he shut up.
“I’m fine,” Michael said. He shoved away the hands Sleepy had stretched out to help him to his feet. “Leave me alone. I said I was fine.”
Sleepy backed up. “Whoa,” he said. “Excuse me. Just trying to help. Come on, G. Our shakes are melting.”
Wait a minute. I threw a startled glance in the direction of my best friend and eldest stepbrother. G? Who’s G?
CeeCee fished a bag out from underneath the waves of shiny purple and gold material. “Hey,” she said delightedly. “Is this the book you got for my mom?”
Sleepy, I saw, was walking back toward the food court, his arm around Gina. Gina. My best friend! My best friend appeared to be allowing my stepbrother to buy her shakes and put his arm around her! And call her G!
Michael had climbed to his feet. Some mall cops arrived just about then and went, “Hey, there, guy, take it easy. An ambulance is on its way.”
But Michael, with a violent motion, shrugged free of them, and, with a last, inscrutable look at the puppet head, stumbled away, the mall cops trailing after him, obviously concerned about the likelihood of a concussion…or a lawsuit.
“Wow,” CeeCee said, shaking her head. “That’s gratitude for you. You save the guy’s life, and he takes off without even a thank you.”
Adam said, “Yeah. How is it, Suze, that whenever something is about to come crashing down on some guy’s head, you always know it and tackle him? And how can I get something to crash down on my head so that you have to tackle me?”
CeeCee whacked him in the gut. Adam pretended it had hurt, and staggered around comically for a while before nearly tripping over the puppet, and then stopping to stare down at it.
“I wonder what caused it,” Adam said. Some mall employees were there now, wondering the same thing, with many nervous glances in my direction. If they’d known my mom was a television news journalist, they probably would have been falling all over themselves in an attempt to give me free gift certificates to Casual Corner and stuff.
“I mean
, it’s kind of weird if you think about it,” Adam went on. “The thing was up there for weeks, and then all of a sudden Michael Meducci stands underneath it, and—”
“Bam,” CeeCee said. “Kind of like…I don’t know. Someone up there has got it out for him or something.”
Which reminded me. I looked around, thinking I might catch a glimpse of the owner of that giggle I’d heard, just before the puppet had come down on us.
I didn’t see anyone, but that didn’t matter. I knew who’d been behind it.
And it sure hadn’t been any angel.
Chapter
Six
“Well,” Jesse said when I told him about it later that night. “You know what you have to do, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” I said sullenly, my chin on my knees. “I have to tell her about that time I found that nudie magazine under the front seat of the Rambler. That oughta make her change her mind about him real quick.”
The scarred eyebrow went up. “Susannah,” he said. “What are you talking about?”
“Gina,” I said, surprised he didn’t know. “And Sleepy.”
“No,” Jesse said. “I meant about the boy, Susannah.”
“What boy?” Then I remembered. “Oh. You mean Michael?”
“Yes,” Jesse said. “If what you’re telling me is true, he is in a lot of danger, Susannah.”
“I know.” I leaned back on my elbows. The two of us were sitting out on the roof of the front porch, which happened to stick out beneath my bedroom windows. It was kind of nice out there, actually, under the stars. We were high enough up so that no one could see us—not that anyone but me and Father Dom could see Jesse, anyway—and it smelled good because of the giant pine tree to one side of the porch. It was the only place, these days, that we could sit and talk without fear of being interrupted by people. Well, just one person, actually: my houseguest, Gina.
“So, what are you going to do about it?” In the moonlight, Jesse’s white shirt looked blue. So did the highlights in his black hair.
“I have no idea,” I said.
“Don’t you?”
Jesse looked at me. I hate it when he does that. It makes me feel…I don’t know. Like he’s mentally comparing me with someone else. And the only someone else I could think of was Maria de Silva, the girl Jesse was on his way to marry when he died. I had seen a portrait of her once. She was one hot babe, for the 1850s. It’s no fun, let me tell you, being compared to a chick who died before you were even born.
And always had a hoop skirt to hide the size of her butt under.
“You’re going to have to find them,” Jesse said. “The Angels. Because if I’m right, that boy will not be safe until they are persuaded to move on.”
I sighed. Jesse was right. Jesse was always right. It was just that tracking down a bunch of partying ghosts was so not what I wanted to be doing while Gina was in town.
On the other hand, hanging around with me was not exactly proving to be what Gina wanted to do.
I stood up and walked carefully across the roof tiles, then stooped to peer through the bay windows into my bedroom. The daybed was empty. I picked my way back down to where Jesse was sitting, and slumped down beside him again.
“Jeez,” I said. “She’s still in there.”
Jesse looked down at me, the moonlight playing around the little smile on his face. “You cannot blame her,” he said, “for being interested in your brother.”
“Stepbrother,” I reminded him. “And yes, I can. He’s vermin. And he’s got her in his lair.”
Jesse’s smile grew broader. Even his teeth, in the moonlight, looked blue. “They are only playing computer games, Susannah.”
“How do you know?” Then I remembered. He was a ghost. He could go anywhere. “Well, sure. The last time you looked, maybe. Who knows what they’re doing now?”
Jesse sighed. “Do you want me to look again?”
“No.” I was horrified. “I don’t care what she does. If she wants to hang around with a big loser like Sleepy, I can’t stop her.”
“Brad was there, too,” Jesse pointed out. “Last time I looked.”
“Oh, great. So she’s hanging out with two losers.”
“I don’t understand why you are so unhappy about it,” Jesse said. He had stretched out across the tiles, contented as I’d ever seen him. “I like it much better this way.”
“What way?” I groused. I couldn’t get quite as comfortable. I kept finding prickly pine needles beneath my butt.
“Just the two of us,” he said with a shrug. “Like it’s always been.”
Before I had a chance to reply to what—to me, anyway—seemed an extraordinarily heartfelt and perhaps even romantic admission, headlights flashed in the driveway, and Jesse looked past me.
“Who’s that?”
I didn’t look. I didn’t care. I said, “One of Sleepy’s friends, I’m sure. What was that you were saying? About how you like it being just the two of us?”
But Jesse was squinting through the darkness. “This is not a friend of Jake’s,” he said. “Not bringing with him so much…fear. Could this be the boy, Michael, perhaps?”
“What?”
I swung around and, clinging to the edge of the roof, watched as a minivan pulled up the driveway and parked behind my mother’s car.
A second later, Michael Meducci got out from behind the wheel, and with a nervous glance at my front door, began heading toward it, his expression determined.
“Oh my God,” I cried, reeling back from the roof’s edge. “You’re right! It’s him! What do I do?”
Jesse only shook his head at me. “What do you mean, what do you do? You know what to do. You’ve done this hundreds of times before.” When I only continued to stare at him, he leaned forward, until his face was just a couple of inches from mine.
But instead of kissing me like I’d hoped, for one wild heart-pounding moment, he would, he said, enunciating distinctly, “You’re a mediator, Susannah. Go mediate.”
I opened my mouth to inform him that I highly doubted Michael was at my house because he wanted help with his poltergeist problem, considering he couldn’t know I was in the ghostbusting business. It was much more likely that he was here to ask me out. On a date. Something that I was sure had never occurred to Jesse, since they probably didn’t have dates back when he’d been alive, but which happened to girls in the twenty-first century with alarming regularity. Well, not to me, necessarily, but to most girls, anyway.
I was about to point out that this was going to ruin our wonderful opportunity to be alone together when the doorbell rang, and deep inside the house, I heard Doc yell, “I’ll get it!”
“Oh, God,” I said, and dropped my head down into my hands.
“Susannah,” Jesse said. There was concern in his voice. “Are you all right?”
I shook myself. What was I thinking? Michael Meducci was not at my house to ask me out. If he’d wanted to ask me out, he would have called like a normal person. No, he was here for some other reason. I had nothing to worry about. Nothing at all.
“I’m fine,” I said, and got slowly to my feet.
“You don’t sound fine,” Jesse said.
“I’m fine,” I said. I started crawling back into my room, through the open window Spike used.
I had wiggled most of the way in when the inevitable thump on my door occurred. “Enter,” I said from where I lay, collapsed against the window seat, and Doc opened the door and stuck his head into my room.
“Hey, Suze,” he whispered. “There’s a guy here to see you. I think it’s that guy you all were talking about at dinner. You know, the guy from the mall.”
“I know,” I said to the ceiling.
“Well,” Doc said, fidgeting a little. “What should I do? I mean, your mom sent me up here to tell you. Should I say you’re in the shower, or something?” Doc’s voice became a little dry. “That’s what girls always have their brothers say when my friends and I try calling them.”
I turned my head and looked at Doc. If I’d had to choose one Ackerman brother to be stuck with on a desert island, Doc would definitely have been my pick. Red-haired and freckle-faced, he hadn’t quite grown into his enormous ears yet, but at only twelve he was by far the smartest of my stepbrothers.
The thought of any girl making up an excuse to avoid talking to him made my blood boil.
His statement tweaked my conscience. Of course I wasn’t going to make up an excuse. Michael Meducci may be a geek. And he may not have acted with any real class earlier that day at the mall. But he was still a human being.
I guess.
I said, “Tell him I’ll be right down.”
Doc look visibly relieved. He grinned, revealing a mouthful of sparkling braces. “Okay,” he said, and disappeared.
I climbed slowly to my feet, and sauntered over to the mirror above my dressing table. California had greatly improved both my complexion and my hair. My skin—only slightly tanned thanks to SPF 15 sunblock—looked fine without any makeup, and I’d given up trying to straighten my long brown hair, and simply let it curl. A single hit of lip gloss, and I was on my way. I didn’t bother changing out of my cargo pants and T-shirt. I didn’t want to overwhelm the guy, after all.
Michael was waiting for me in the living room, his hands shoved in his pants pockets, looking at the many school portraits of me and my stepbrothers that hung upon the wall. My stepfather was sitting in a chair he never sat in, talking to Michael. When I walked in he dried up, then climbed to his feet.
“Well,” Andy said after a few seconds of silence. “I’ll just leave the two of you alone, then.” Then he left the room, even though I could tell he didn’t want to. Which was kind of strange, since Andy usually takes only the most perfunctory interest in my affairs, except when they happen to involve the police.
“Suze,” Michael said when Andy was gone. I smiled at him encouragingly since he looked like he was about to expire from nervousness.