“Would you mind taking me somewhere after school?”
Adam stood up fast, scaring two fat seagulls that had been sitting near the bench he was sharing with CeeCee. “Are you kidding me? Where do you want to go? You name it, Suze, I’ll take you there. Vegas? You want to go to Vegas? No problem. I mean, I’m sixteen, you’re sixteen. We can get married there easy. My parents’ll let us live with them, no problem. You don’t mind sharing my room, do you? I swear I’ll pick up after myself from now on—”
“Adam,” CeeCee said. “Don’t be such a spaz. I highly doubt she wants to marry you.”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea to marry anyone until my divorce from my first husband is finalized,” I said gravely. “What I want to do is go to the hospital and see Bryce.”
Adam’s shoulders slumped. “Oh,” he said. There was no missing the dejection in his voice. “Is that all?”
I realized I’d said the wrong thing. Still, I couldn’t unsay it. Fortunately, CeeCee helped me out by saying thoughtfully, “You know, a story about Bryce and Father Dominic bravely battling back from their wounds wouldn’t be a bad idea for the paper. Would you mind if I tagged along, Suze?”
“Not at all.” A lie, of course. With CeeCee along, it might be difficult to accomplish what I wanted without a lot of explaining….
But what choice did I have? None.
Once I’d secured my ride, I started looking for Sleepy. I found him dozing with his back to the monkey bars. I nudged him awake with the toe of my boot. When he squinted up at me through his sunglasses, I told him not to wait for me after school, that I’d found my own ride. He grunted, and went back to sleep.
Then I went and found a pay phone. It’s weird when you don’t know your own mother’s phone number. I mean, I still knew our number back in Brooklyn, but I didn’t have the slightest idea what my new phone number was. Good thing I’d written it in my date book. I consulted the A’s—for Ackerman—and found my new number, and dialed it. I knew no one was home, but I wanted to cover all my bases. I told the answering machine that I might be late getting back from school since I was going out with a couple of new friends. My mother, I knew, would be delighted when she got back from the station and heard it. She’d always worried, back in Brooklyn, that I was antisocial. She’d always go, “Susie, you’re such a pretty girl. I just don’t understand why no boys ever call you. Maybe if you didn’t look so…well, tough. How about giving the leather jacket a rest?”
She’d probably have died of joy if she could have been in the parking lot after school and heard Adam as I approached his car.
“Oh, Cee, here she is.” Adam flung open the passenger door of his car—which turned out to be one of the new Volkswagen Bugs; I guess Adam’s parents weren’t hurting for money—and shooed CeeCee into the backseat. “Come on, Suze, you sit right up front with me.”
I peered through my sunglasses—as usual, the morning fog had burned away, and now at 3:00 the sun beat down hard from a perfectly clear blue sky—at CeeCee squashed in the backseat. “Um, really,” I said. “CeeCee was here first. I’ll sit in the back. I don’t mind at all.”
“I won’t hear of it.” Adam stood by the door, holding it open for me. “You’re the new girl. The new girl gets to sit in the front.”
“Yeah,” CeeCee said from the depths of the backseat, “until you refuse to sleep with him. Then he’ll relegate you to the backseat, too.”
Adam said, in a Wizard of Oz voice, “Ignore that man behind the curtain.”
I slid into the front seat, and Adam politely closed the door for me.
“Are you serious?” I turned around to ask CeeCee as Adam made his way around the car to the driver’s seat.
CeeCee blinked at me from behind her protective lenses. “Do you really think anybody would sleep with him?”
I digested that. “I take it,” I said, “that’s a no, then.”
“Damned straight,” CeeCee said just as Adam slid behind the wheel.
“Now,” the driver said, flexing his fingers experimentally before switching on the ignition. “I’m thinking this whole thing with the statue and Father Dom and Bryce has really stressed us all out. My parents have a hot tub, you know, which is really ideal for stress like the kind we’ve all been through today, and I suggest that we all go to my place first for a soak….”
“Tell you what,” I said. “Let’s skip the hot tub this time and just go straight to the hospital. Maybe, if there’s time later—”
“Yes.” Adam looked heavenward. “There is a god.”
CeeCee said, from the backseat, “She said maybe, numbskull. God, try to control yourself.”
Adam glanced at me as he eased out of his parking space. “Am I coming on too strong?”
“Uh,” I said. “Maybe…”
“The thing is, it’s been so long since even a remotely interesting girl has shown up around here.” Adam, I saw with some relief, was a very careful driver—not like Sleepy, who seemed to think stop signs actually said PAUSE. “I mean, I’ve been surrounded by Kelly Prescotts and Debbie Mancusos for sixteen years. It’s such a relief to have a Susannah Simon around for a change. You decimated Kelly this morning when you went, ‘Hmm, do angels leave blood stains? I don’t think so.’ ”
Adam went on in this vein for the rest of the trip to the hospital. I wasn’t quite sure how CeeCee could stomach it. Unless I was mistaken, she felt the same way about him that he evidently felt about me. Only I didn’t think his crush on me was very serious—if it had been, he wouldn’t have been able to joke about it. CeeCee’s crush on him, however, looked to me like the real thing. Oh, she was able to tease him and even insult him, but I’d looked into the rearview mirror a couple times and caught her looking at the back of his head in a manner that could only be called besotted.
But just when she was sure he wasn’t looking.
When Adam pulled up in front of the Carmel hospital, I thought he had stopped at a country club or a private house by mistake. Okay, a really big private house, but hey, you should have seen some of the places in the Valley.
But then I saw a discreet little sign that said HOSPITAL. We piled out of the car and wandered through an immaculately kept garden, where the flower beds were bursting with blossoms. Hummingbirds buzzed all around, and I spotted some more of those palm trees I’d been sure I’d never see so far north of the equator.
At the information desk, I asked for Bryce Martinson’s room. I wasn’t sure he’d been admitted actually, but I knew from experience—unfortunately firsthand—that any accident in which a head wound might have occurred generally required an overnight stay for observation—and I was right. Bryce was there, and so was Father Dominic, conveniently situated right across the hall from one another.
We weren’t the only people visiting these particular patients—not by a long shot. Bryce’s room was packed. There wasn’t, apparently, any limit on just how many people could crowd into a patient’s room, and Bryce’s looked as if it contained most of the Junipero Serra Mission Academy’s senior class. In the middle of the sunny, cheerful room—where on every flat surface rested vases filled with flowers—lay Bryce in a shoulder cast, his right arm hanging from a pulley over his bed. He looked a lot better than he had that morning, mostly, I suppose, because he was pumped full of painkillers. When he saw me in the doorway, this big goofy smile broke out over his face, and he went, “Suze!”
Only he pronounced it “Soo-oo-ooze,” so it sounded like it had more than one syllable.
“Uh, hi, Bryce,” I said, suddenly shy. Everybody in the room had turned around to see who Bryce was talking to. Most of them were girls. They all did that thing a lot of girls do—they looked me over from the top of my head—I hadn’t showered that morning because I’d been running so late, so I was not exactly having a good hair day—to the soles of my feet.
Then they smirked.
Not so Bryce would have noticed. But they did.
And even though I could not h
ave cared less what a bunch of girls I had never met before, and would probably never meet again, thought of me, I blushed.
“Everybody,” Bryce said. He sounded drunk, but pleasantly so. “This is Suze. Suze, this is everybody.”
“Uh,” I said. “Hi.”
One of the girls, who was sitting on the end of Bryce’s bed in a very white, wrinkle-free linen dress, went, “Oh, you’re that girl who saved his life yesterday. Jake’s new stepsister.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s me.” There was no way—no way—I was going to be able to ask Bryce what I needed to ask him with all these people in the room. CeeCee had steered Adam off into Father Dom’s room in order to give me some time alone with Bryce, but it looked as if she’d done so in vain. There was no way I was going to get a minute with this guy alone. Not unless…
Well, not unless I asked for it.
“Hey,” I said. “I need to talk to Bryce for a second. Do you guys mind?”
The girl on the end of the bed looked taken aback. “So talk to him. We’re not stopping you.”
I looked her right in the eye and said in my firmest mediation voice, “I need to talk to him alone.”
Somebody whistled low and long. Nobody else moved. At least until Bryce went, “Hey, you guys. You heard her. Get out.”
Thank God for morphine, that’s all I have to say.
Grudgingly, the senior class filed out, everybody casting me dirty looks but Bryce, who lifted a hand connected to what looked like an IV and went, “Hey, Suze. C’mere and look at this.”
I approached the bed. Now that we were the only people in it, I was able to see that Bryce actually had a very large room. It was also very cheerful, painted yellow, with a window that looked out over the garden outside.
“See what I got?” Bryce showed me a palm-sized instrument with a button on top of it. “My own painkiller pump. Anytime I feel pain, I just hit this button, and it releases codeine. Right into my bloodstream. Cool, huh?”
The guy was gone. That was obvious. Suddenly, I didn’t think my mission was going to be so hard, after all.
“That’s great, Bryce,” I said. “I was real sorry to hear about your accident.”
“Yeah.” He giggled fatuously. “Too bad you weren’t there. You might’ve been able to save me like you did yesterday.”
“Yes,” I said, clearing my throat uncomfortably. “You certainly do seem accident-prone these days.”
“Yeah.” His eyelids drifted closed, and for one panicky minute, I thought he’d gone to sleep. Then he opened his eyes and looked at me kind of sadly. “Suze, I don’t think I’m going to be able to make it.”
I stared at him. God, what a baby! “Of course you’re going to make it. You’ve got a busted collarbone, is all. You’ll be better in no time.”
He giggled. “No, no. I mean, I don’t think I’m going to be able to make it to our date on Saturday night.”
“Oh,” I said, blinking. “Oh, no, of course not. I didn’t think so. Listen, Bryce, I need to ask you a favor. You’re going to think it’s weird”—actually, doped up as he was, I doubted he’d think it weird at all—“but I was wondering whether, back when you and Heather were going out, did she ever, um, give you anything?”
He blinked at me groggily. “Give me anything? You mean like a present?”
“Yes.”
“Well, yeah. She got me a cashmere sweater vest for Christmas.”
I nodded. A cashmere sweater vest wasn’t going to do me any good. “Okay. Anything else? Maybe…a picture of herself?”
“Oh,” he said. “Sure, sure. She gave me her school picture.”
“She did?” I tried not to look too excited. “Any chance you’ve got it on you? In your wallet, maybe?” It was a gamble, I knew, but most people only clean out their wallets once a year or so….
He screwed up his face. I guess thinking must have been painful for him since I saw him give himself a couple pumps of painkiller. Then his face relaxed. “Sure,” he said. “I’ve still got her picture. My wallet’s in that drawer there.”
I opened the drawer to the table beside his bed. His wallet was indeed there, a slim black leather deal. I lifted it up and opened it. Heather’s photo was jammed between a gold American Express card and a ski lift ticket. It showed her looking extremely glam, with all her long blonde hair flowing over one shoulder, staring coquettishly into the camera. In my school pictures, I always look like somebody just yelled, “Fire!” I couldn’t believe this guy, who’d been dating a girl who looked like that, would bother asking a girl like me out.
“Can I borrow this picture?” I asked. “I just need it for a little while. I’ll give it right back.” This was a lie, but I didn’t figure he’d give it to me otherwise.
“Sure, sure,” he said, waving a hand.
“Thanks.” I slipped the photo into my backpack just as a tall woman in her forties came striding in wearing a lot of gold jewelry and carrying a box of pastries.
“Bryce, darling,” she said. “Where did all your little friends go? I went all the way to the patisserie to get some snacks.”
“Oh, they’ll be back in a minute, Mom,” Bryce said sleepily. “This is Suze. She saved my life yesterday.”
Mrs. Martinson held out a smooth, tanned right hand. “Lovely to meet you, Susan,” she said, giving my fingers the slightest of squeezes. “Can you believe what happened to poor little Bryce? His father’s furious. As if things hadn’t been going badly enough, what with that wretched girl—well, you know. And now this. I swear, it’s like that academy was cursed, or something.”
I said, “Yes. Well, nice to meet you. I’d better be going.”
Nobody protested against my departure—Mrs. Martinson because she couldn’t have cared less, and Bryce because he’d fallen asleep.
I found Adam and CeeCee standing outside a room across the hall. As I walked up to them, CeeCee put a finger to her lips. “Listen,” she said.
I did as she asked.
“It simply couldn’t have come at a worse time,” a familiar voice—male, older—was saying. “What with the archbishop’s visit not two weeks away—”
“I’m so sorry, Constantine.” Father Dominic’s voice sounded weak. “I know what a strain this must all be to you.”
“And Bryce Martinson, of all people! Do you know who his father is? Only one of the best trial lawyers in Salinas!”
“Father Dom’s getting reamed,” Adam whispered to me. “Poor old guy.”
“I wish he’d tell Monsignor Constantine to just go and jump in a lake.” CeeCee’s purple eyes flashed. “Dried-up, crusty old—”
I whispered, “Let’s see if we can help him out. Maybe you guys could distract the monsignor. Then I’ll just see if Father Dom needs anything. You know. Just real quick before we go.”
CeeCee shrugged. “Fine with me.”
“I’m game,” Adam said.
So I called loudly, “Father Dominic?” and banged into the Father’s hospital room.
The room wasn’t as big as Bryce’s or as cheerful. The walls were beige, not yellow, and there was only one vase with flowers in it. The window looked out, as near as I could tell, over the parking lot. And nobody had hooked Father Dominic up to any self-pumped painkiller machine. I don’t know what kind of insurance priests have, but it was nowhere as good as it should have been.
To say that Father Dominic looked surprised to see me would have been an understatement. His mouth dropped open. He seemed perfectly incapable of saying anything. But that was okay because CeeCee came bustling in after me, and went, “Oh, Monsignor! Great. We’ve been looking all over for you. We’d like to do an exclusive, if that’s okay, on how last night’s act of vandalism is going to affect the upcoming visit of the archbishop. Adversely, right? Do you have any comments? Maybe you could step out here into the hallway where my associate and I can—”
Looking flustered, Monsignor Constantine followed CeeCee out the door with an irritated, “Now see here, yo
ung lady—”
I sauntered over to Father Dominic’s side. I wasn’t exactly excited to see him. I mean, I knew he probably wasn’t too happy with me. I was the one whom Heather had thrown Father Serra’s head at, and I figured he probably knew it and probably wasn’t feeling too warmly toward me.
That’s what I figured, anyway. But of course, I figured wrong. I’m pretty good at figuring out what dead people are thinking, but I haven’t quite gotten the hang of the living yet.
“Susannah,” Father Dominic said in his gentle voice. “What are you doing here? Is everything all right? I’ve been very concerned about you—”
I guess I should have expected it. Father Dominic wasn’t sore at me at all. Just worried, that was all. But he was the one who needed worrying over. Aside from the nasty gash above one eye, his color was off. He looked gray, and much older than he actually was. Only his eyes, blue as the sky outside, looked like they always did, bright and filled with intelligent good humor.
Still, it made me mad all over again, seeing him like that. Heather didn’t know it, but she was in for it, and how.
“Me?” I stared at him. “What are you worried about me for? I’m not the one who got clobbered by a crucifix this morning.”
Father Dom smiled ruefully. “No, but I believe you do have a little explaining to do. Why didn’t you tell me, Susannah? Why didn’t you tell me what you had in mind? If I had known you planned on showing up at the Mission alone in the middle of the night, I never would have allowed it.”
“Exactly why I didn’t tell you,” I said. “Look, Father, I’m sorry about the statue and Mr. Walden’s door and all that. But I had to try talking to her myself, don’t you see? Woman to woman. I didn’t know she was going to go postal on me.”
“What did you expect? Susannah, you saw what she tried to do to that young man yesterday—”