Good thing people on the West Coast go to bed so early.
The whole way home, I obsessed over what I’d done wrong in my dealings with Heather. I didn’t do it out loud—I figured I’d done enough of that; I didn’t want to sound like a broken record or player piano, or whatever it was they had back in Jesse’s day. But it was all I could think about. Never, not in all my years of mediating, had I ever encountered such a violent, irrational spirit. I simply did not know what to do. And I knew I had to figure it out, and quick; I only had a few hours before school started and Bryce walked straight into what was, for him, a deathtrap.
I don’t know if Jesse figured out why I was so quiet, or if he was thinking about Heather, too, or what. All I know was that suddenly, he broke the silence we’d been walking in and went, “ ‘Heav’n has no rage like love to hatred turn’d, nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.’ ”
I looked at him. “Are you speaking from experience?”
I saw him smile a little in the moonlight. “Actually,” he said, “I am quoting William Congreve.”
“Oh.” I thought about that. “But you know, sometimes the woman scorned has every right to be mad.”
“Are you speaking from experience?” he wanted to know.
I snorted. “Not hardly.” A guy has to like you before he can scorn you. But I didn’t say that out loud. No way would I ever say something like that out loud. I mean, not that I cared what Jesse thought about me. Why should I care what some dead cowboy thought of me?
But I wasn’t about to admit to him that I’d never had a boyfriend. You just don’t go around saying things like that to totally hot guys, even if they’re dead.
“But we don’t know what went on between Heather and Bryce—not really. I mean, she could have every right to feel resentful.”
“Toward him, I suppose she does,” Jesse said, though he sounded grudging about admitting it. “But not toward you. She had no right to try to hurt you.”
He sounded so mad about it that I thought it was probably better to change the subject. I mean, I guess I should have been mad about Heather trying to kill me, but you know, I’m sort of used to dealing with irrational people. Well, okay, not quite as irrational as Heather, but you know what I mean. And one thing I’ve learned is, you can’t take it personally. Yeah, she’d tried to kill me, but I wasn’t really sure she knew any better. Who knew what kind of parents she had, after all? Maybe they went around murdering anybody who made them mad….
Although somehow, after having seen that add-a-pearl necklace, I sort of doubted that.
Thinking about murder made me wonder what had gotten Jesse so hot under the collar about it. Then I realized that he’d probably been murdered. Either that or he’d killed himself. But I didn’t think he was really the suicide type. I supposed he could have died of some sort of wasting disease….
It probably wasn’t very tactful of me—but then, nobody’s ever accused me of tact—but I went ahead and just asked him as we were climbing the long gravel driveway to the house, “Hey. How’d you die, anyway?”
Jesse didn’t say anything right away. I’d probably offended him. Ghosts don’t really like talking about how they died, I’ve noticed. Sometimes they can’t even remember. Car crash victims usually haven’t the slightest clue what happened to them. That’s why I always see them wandering around looking for the other people who were in the car with them. I have to go up and explain to them what happened, and then try to figure out where the people are that they’re looking for. This is a major pain, too, let me tell you. I have to go all the way to the precinct that took the accident report and pretend I’m doing a school report or whatever and record the names of the victims, then follow up on what happened to them.
I tell you, sometimes I feel like my work never ends.
Anyway, Jesse was quiet for a while, and I figured he wasn’t going to tell me. He was looking straight ahead, up at the house—the house where he’d died, the house he was destined to haunt until…well, until he resolved whatever it was that was holding him to this world.
The moon was still out, pretty high in the sky now, and I could see Jesse’s face almost as if it were day. He didn’t look a whole lot different than usual. His mouth, which was on the thin-but-wide side, was kind of frowning, which, as near as I could tell, was what it usually did. And underneath those glossy black eyebrows, his thickly lashed eyes revealed about as much as a mirror—that is, I could probably have seen my reflection in them, but I could read nothing about what he might be thinking.
“Um,” I said. “You know what? Never mind. If you don’t want to tell me, you don’t have to—”
“No,” he said. “It’s all right.”
“I was just kinda curious, that’s all,” I said. “But if it’s too personal…”
“It isn’t too personal.” We had reached the house by then. He wheeled the bike to where it was supposed to go, and leaned it up against the carport wall. He was deep in the shadows when he said, “You know this house wasn’t always a family home.”
I went, “Oh, really?” Like this was the first I’d heard of it.
“Yes. It was once a hotel. Well, more like a boardinghouse, really, than a hotel.”
I asked brightly, “And you were staying here as a guest?”
“Yes.” He came out from the shade of the carport, but he wasn’t looking at me when he spoke next. He was squinting out toward the sea.
“And…” I tried to prompt him. “Something happened while you were staying here?”
“Yes.” He looked at me then. He looked at me for a long time. Then he said, “But it’s a long story, and you must be very tired. Go to bed. In the morning we will decide what to do about Heather.”
Talk about unfair!
“Wait a minute,” I said. “I am not going anywhere until you finish that story.”
He shook his head. “No. It’s too late. I’ll tell you some other time.”
“Jeez!” I sounded like a little kid whose mom had told him to go to bed early, but I didn’t care. I was mad. “You can’t just start a story and then not finish it. You have to—”
Jesse was laughing at me now. “Go to bed, Susannah,” he said, coming up and giving me a gentle push toward the front steps. “You have had enough scaring for one night.”
“But you—”
“Some other time,” he said. He had steered me in the direction of the porch, and now I stood on the lowest step, looking back at him as he laughed at me.
“Do you promise?”
I saw his teeth flash white in the moonlight. “I promise. Good night, querida.”
“I told you,” I grumbled, stomping up the steps, “not to call me that.”
It was nearly 3:00 in the morning, though, and I could only summon up token indignation. I was still on New York time, remember, three hours ahead. It had been hard enough getting up in time for school when I’d had a full eight hours of sleep. How hard was it going to be after only having had four?
I slipped into the house as quietly as I could. Fortunately, everybody except the dog was dead asleep. The dog looked up from the couch on which he was reclining and wagged his tail when he saw it was me. Some watchdog. Plus my mom didn’t want him sleeping on her white couch. But I wasn’t about to make an enemy out of Max by shooing him off. If allowing him to sleep on the couch was all that was necessary to keep him from alerting the household that I’d been out, then it was well worth it.
I slogged up the stairs, wondering the whole time what I was going to do about Heather. I guessed I was going to have to wake up early and call over to the school, and warn Father Dom to meet Bryce the minute he set foot on campus and send him home. Even, I decided, if we had to resort to head lice, I wouldn’t object. All that mattered, in the long run, was that Heather was kept from her goal.
Still, the thought of waking up early to do anything—even save the life of my date for Saturday night—was not very appealing. Now that the adrenaline rush was gone, I realized I was
dead tired. I staggered into the bathroom to change into my pj’s—hey, I was pretty sure Jesse wasn’t spying on me, but he still hadn’t told me how he’d died, so I wasn’t taking any chances. He could have been hanged, you know, for Peeping Tomism, which I believed happened occasionally a hundred and fifty years ago.
It wasn’t until I was changing the bandage on the cut on my wrist that I happened to take a look at the thing he’d wrapped around it.
It was a handkerchief. Everybody carried one in the olden days because there was no such thing as Kleenex. People were pretty fussy about them, too, sewing their initials onto them so they didn’t get mixed up in the wash with other people’s hankies.
Only Jesse’s handkerchief didn’t have his initials on it, I noticed after I’d rinsed it in the sink then wrung out my blood as best I could. It was a big linen square, white—well, kind of pink now—with an edging all around it of this delicate white lace. Kind of femme for a guy. I might have been a little concerned about Jesse’s sexual orientation if I hadn’t noticed the initials sewn in one corner. The stitches were tiny, white thread on white material, but the letters themselves were huge, in flowery script: MDS. That was right. MDS. No J to be found.
Weird. Very weird.
I hung the cloth up to dry. I didn’t have to worry about anybody seeing it. In the first place, nobody used my bathroom but me, and in the second place, nobody would be able to see it anymore than they could see Jesse. It would be there tomorrow. Maybe I wouldn’t give it back to him without demanding some sort of explanation as to those letters. MDS.
It wasn’t until I was falling asleep that I realized MDS must have been a girl. Why else would there have been all that lace? And that curlicue script? Had Jesse died not in a gunfight, as I’d originally assumed, but in some sort of lovers’ quarrel?
I don’t know why the thought disturbed me so much, but it did. It kept me awake for about three whole minutes. Then I rolled over, missed my old bed very briefly, and fell asleep.
Chapter
Thirteen
My intention, of course, had been to wake up early and call Father Dominic to warn him about Heather. But intentions are only as good as the people who hold them, and I guess I must be worthless because I didn’t wake up until my mother shook me awake, and by then it was 7:30, and my ride was leaving without me.
Or so they thought. There was a huge delay when Sleepy discovered he’d lost the keys to the Rambler, so I was able to drag myself out of bed and into some kind of outfit—I had no idea what. I came staggering down the stairs, feeling like somebody had hit me on the head a few times with a bag of rocks just as Doc was telling everybody that Sister Ernestine had warned him if he missed another Assembly, he’d be held back a year.
That’s when I remembered the keys to the Rambler were still in the pocket of my leather jacket where I’d left them the night before.
I slunk back up the stairs and pretended to find the keys on the landing. There was some jubilation over this, but mostly a lot of grumbling, since Sleepy swore he’d left them hanging on the key hook in the kitchen and couldn’t figure out how they’d gotten to the landing. Dopey said, “It was probably Dave’s ghost,” and leered at Doc, who looked embarrassed.
Then we all piled into the car and took off.
We were late, of course. Assembly at the Junipero Serra Mission Academy begins promptly at 8:00. We got there at around two after. What happens at Assembly is, they make everybody stand outside in these lines separated by sex, boys on one side, girls on the other—like we’re Quakers or something—for fifteen minutes before school officially starts, so they can take attendance and read announcements and stuff. By the time we got there, of course, Assembly had already started. I had intended to duck right past and head straight to Father Dominic’s office, but of course, I never got the chance. Sister Ernestine caught us traipsing in late, and gave each of us the evil eye until we slunk into our various lines. I didn’t much care what Sister Ernestine jotted down in her little black book about me, but I could see that getting to the principal’s office was going to be impossible, due to the yellow caution tape strung up across every single archway that led to the courtyard—and, of course, all the cops.
I guess what had happened was, all the priests and nuns and stuff had gotten up for matins, which is what they call the first mass of the morning, and they’d all walked outside and seen the statue of their church’s founder with his head cut off, and the fountain with hardly any water left in it, and the bench where I’d been sitting all twisted and tipped over, and the door to Mr. Walden’s classroom in smithereens.
Understandably, I guess, they freaked out and called the cops. People in uniform were crawling all over the place, taking fingerprints and measuring stuff, like the distance Junipero Serra’s head had traveled from his body, and the velocity it had to have traveled to make that many holes in a door that was made of three-inch-thick wood, and that kind of thing. I saw a guy in a dark blue windbreaker with the letters CBTSPD—Carmel-by-the-Sea Police Department?—on the back, conferring with Father Dominic, who looked really, really tired. I couldn’t catch his eye, and supposed I’d have to wait until after Assembly to sneak away and apologize to him.
At Assembly, Sister Ernestine, the vice principal, told us vandals had done it. Vandals had broken in through Mr. Walden’s classroom, and wreaked havoc all over the school. What was fortunate, we were told, was that the solid gold chalice and salver used for the sacramental wine and hosts had not been stolen, but were left sitting in their little cupboard behind the church altar. The vandals had rudely beheaded our school founder, but left the really valuable stuff alone. We were told that if any of us knew anything about this horrible violation, we were to come forward immediately. And that if we were uncomfortable coming forward personally, we could do it anonymously—Monsignor Constantine would be hearing confessions all morning.
As if! Hey, it hadn’t been my fault Heather had gone berserk. Well, not really, anyway. If anybody should be going to confession, it was her.
As I stood in line—behind CeeCee, who couldn’t hide her delight over what had happened; you could practically see the headline forming in her mind: Father Serra Loses His Head Over Vandals—I craned my neck, trying to see over to the seniors. Was Bryce there? I couldn’t see him. Maybe Father Dom had gotten to him already, and sent him home. He had to have recognized that the mess in the courtyard was the result of spiritual, not human, agitation, and had acted accordingly. I hoped, for Bryce’s sake, that Father Dom hadn’t resorted to the head lice.
Okay, I hoped it for my sake, I admit it. I really wanted our date on Saturday to go well, and not be canceled due to head lice. Is that such a crime? A girl can’t spend all her time battling psychic disturbances. She needs a little romance, too.
But of course, the minute Assembly was over and I tried to ditch homeroom and hightail it to Father Dom’s office, Sister Ernestine caught me and said, just as I was about to duck under some of the yellow caution tape, “Excuse me, Miss Simon. Perhaps back in New York it is perfectly all right to ignore police warnings, but here in California it is considered highly ill-advised.”
I straightened. I had nearly made it, too. I thought some uncharitable things about Sister Ernestine, but managed to say, civilly enough, “Oh, Sister, I’m so sorry. You see, I just need to get to Father Dominic’s office.”
“Father Dominic,” Sister Ernestine said coldly, “is extremely busy this morning. He happens to be consulting with the police over last night’s unfortunate incident. He won’t be available until after lunch at the earliest.”
I know it’s probably wrong to fantasize about giving a nun a karate chop in the neck, but I couldn’t help it. She was making me mad.
“Listen, Sister,” I said. “Father Dominic asked me to come see him this morning. I’ve got some, um, transcripts from my old school that he wanted to see. I had to have them FedExed all the way from New York, and they just got here, so—”
; I thought that was pretty quick thinking on my part, about the transcripts and the FedEx and all, but then Sister Ernestine held out her hand and went, “Give them to me, and I’ll be happy to deliver them to the Father.”
Damn!
“Uh,” I said, backing away. “Never mind. I guess I’ll just…I’ll see him after lunch, then.”
Sister Ernestine gave me a kind of aha-I-thought-so look, then turned her attention to some innocent kid who’d made the mistake of coming to school in a pair of Levi’s, a blatant violation of the dress code. The kid wailed, “They were my only clean pants!” but Sister Ernestine didn’t care. She stood there—unfortunately still guarding the only route to the principal’s office—and wrote the kid up on the spot.
I had no choice but to go to class. I mean, what was there to tell Father Dominic, anyway, that he didn’t already know? I’m sure he knew it was Heather who’d wrecked the school, and me who’d broken Mr. Walden’s window. He probably wasn’t going to be all that happy with me anyway, so why was I even bothering? What I ought to have been doing was trying as much as possible to stay out of his way.
Except…except what about Heather?
As near as I could tell, she was still recuperating from her explosive rage the night before. I saw no sign of her as I made my way to Mr. Walden’s classroom for first period, which was good: It meant Father D. and I would have time to draw up some kind of plan before she struck again.
As I sat there in class trying to convince myself that everything was going to be all right, I couldn’t help feeling kind of bad for poor Mr. Walden. He was taking having the door to his classroom obliterated pretty well. He didn’t even seem to mind the broken window so much. Of course, everybody in school was buzzing about what had happened. People were saying that it had been a prank, the severing of Junipero Serra’s head. A senior prank. One year, CeeCee told me, the seniors had strapped pillows to the clappers of the church bells, so that when they rang, all that came out was a muffled sort of splatting sound. I guess people suspected this was the same sort of thing.