The Mediator #2: Ninth Key

by Jenny Carroll

  I decided, as I walked down the breezeway, that I would have to get Cee Cee on the job. She was a little more adept at surfing the Web than Father Dominic.

  As I approached Mr. Walden's classroom – which last week had unfortunately received the brunt of the damage in what everyone had assumed was a freak earthquake, but which had actually been an exorcism gone awry – I noticed, standing to one side of the pile of rubble that had once been a decorative arch, a little boy.

  It wasn't unusual to see very little kids hanging around the halls of the Mission Academy since the school had classes from kindergarten all the way up to twelfth grade. What was unusual about this kid, however, was that he was glowing a little.

  And also, the construction workers who were swarming around trying to put the breezeway back up occasionally walked right through him.

  He looked up at me as I approached, as if he'd been waiting for me. Which, in fact, he had been.

  "Hey," he said.

  "Hi," I said. The workmen were playing the radio pretty loud, so fortunately none of them noticed the weird girl standing there talking to herself.

  "You the mediator?" the kid wanted to know.

  "One of them," I said.

  "Good. I got a problem."

  I looked down at him. He couldn't have been more than nine or ten years old. Then I remembered that the other day at lunch, the Mission's bells had rung out nine times, and Cee Cee had explained it was because one of the third graders had died after a long bout with cancer. You couldn't tell it to look at the kid – the dead I encounter never wear outward signs of the cause of their death, assuming instead the form in which they'd lived before whatever illness or accident had taken their lives – but this little guy had apparently had a wicked case of leukemia. Timothy, I thought Cee Cee had said his name was.

  "You're Timothy," I said.

  "Tim," he corrected me, making a face.

  "Sorry. What can I do for you?"

  Timothy, all business, said, "It's about my cat."

  I nodded. "Of course. What about your cat?"

  "My mom doesn't want him around," Timothy said. For a dead kid, he was surprisingly straightforward. "Every time she sees him, he reminds her of me so she starts crying."

  "I see," I said. "Would you like me to find your cat another home?"

  "That's the basic idea," Timothy said.

  I was thinking that about the last thing I wanted to deal with right then was finding some mangy cat a new home, but I smiled gamely and said, "No problem."

  "Great," Timothy said. "There's just one catch. . . ."

  Which was how, after school that day, I found myself standing in a field behind the Carmel Valley mall, yelling, "Here, kitty, kitty, kitty!"

  Adam, whose help – and car – I'd enlisted, was the one beating the tall yellow grass since I'd shown him my poison-oaky hands and explained that I could not possibly be expected to venture anywhere near vegetation. He straightened, lifted a hand to wipe the sweat from his forehead – the sun was beaming down hard enough to make me long for the beach with its cool ocean breezes and, more importantly, totally hot lifeguards – and said, "Okay. I get that it's important that we find this dead kid's cat. But why are we looking for it in a field? Wouldn't it be smarter to look for it at the kid's house?"

  "No," I said. "Timothy's father couldn't stand listening to his wife cry every time she saw the cat, so he just packed it up in the car and dumped it out here."

  "Nice of him," Adam said. "A real animal lover. I suppose it would have been too much trouble to take the cat to the animal shelter where someone might have adopted it."

  "Apparently," I said, "there isn't a whole lot of chance of anybody adopting this cat." I cleared my throat. "It might be a good idea for us to call him by his name. Maybe he'd come then."

  "Okay." Adam pulled up his chinos. "What's his name?"

  "Um," I said. "Spike."

  "Spike." Adam looked heavenward. "A cat called Spike. This I can't wait to see. Here, Spike. Here, Spikey, Spikey, Spikey...."

  "Hey, you guys." Cee Cee came toward us waving her laptop in the air.

  I'd enlisted Cee Cee's help as well as Adam's, only with a project of a different nature. All of my new friends, I'd discovered, had different talents and abilities. Adam's lay primarily in the fact that he owned a car, but Cee Cee's strengths lay in her superlative research skills . . . and what's more, in the fact that she actually liked looking stuff up. I'd asked her to look up what she could on Thaddeus Beaumont Senior, and she'd obliged. She'd been sitting in the car cruising the Net with the help of the remote modem she'd gotten for her birthday – have I mentioned that everyone in Carmel, with the exception of myself, is way rich? – while Adam and I looked for Timothy's cat.

  "Hey," Cee Cee said. "Get a load of this." She skimmed something she'd downloaded. "I ran the name Thaddeus Beaumont through a search engine, and came up with dozens of hits. Thaddeus Beaumont is listed as CEO, partner, or investor in over thirty land development projects – most of which, by the way, are commercial ventures, like cineplexes, strip malls, or health clubs – on the Monterey peninsula alone."

  "What does that mean?" Adam asked.

  "It means that if you add up the number of acres owned by companies who list Thaddeus Beaumont as either an investor or a partner, he becomes roughly the largest land owner in northern California."

  "Wow," I said. I was thinking about the prom. I bet a guy who owned that much land could afford to rent his son a stretch limo for the night. Dorky, I know, but I'd always wanted to ride in one.

  "But he doesn't really own all that land," Adam pointed out. "The companies do."

  "Exactly," Cee Cee said.

  "Exactly what do you mean by exactly?"

  "Well," Cee Cee said. "Just that it might explain why it is that the guy hasn't been hauled into court for suspicion of murder."

  "Murder?" Suddenly, I forgot all about prom. "What about a murder?"

  "A murder?" Cee Cee spun her laptop around so that we could see the screen. "We're talking multiple murders. Although technically, the victims have all been listed only as missing."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "Well, after I made a list of all of the companies affiliated with Thaddeus Beaumont, I entered each company name into that same search engine and came up with a couple of pretty disturbing things. Look here." Cee Cee had pulled up a map of the Carmel Valley. She highlighted the areas she was talking about as she mentioned them. "See this property here? Hotel and spa. See how close it is to the water? That was a no-building zone. Too much erosion. But RedCo – that's the name of the corporation that bought the land, RedCo, get it? – used some pull down at city hall and got a permit anyway. Still, this one environmentalist warned RedCo that any building they put up there would not only be dangerously unstable, but would endanger the seal population that hangs out on the beach below it. Well, check this out."

  Cee Cee's fingers flew over her keyboard. A second later, a picture of a weird-looking guy with a goatee filled the screen, along with what looked like a newspaper story. "The environmentalist who was making such a fuss over the seals disappeared four years ago, and no one has seen him since."

  I squinted at the computer screen. It was hard to see in the strong sunlight. "What do you mean, disappeared?" I asked. "Like he died?"

  "Maybe. Nobody knows. His body was never found if he was killed," Cee Cee said. "But check this out." Her fingers did some quick rat-tat-tatting. "Another project, this strip mall here, was endangering the habitat of this rare kind of mouse, found only in this area. And this lady here – " Another photo came up on screen. "She tried to stop it and save the mouse, and poof. She disappeared too."

  "Disappeared," I echoed.

  "Just disappeared?" "Just disappeared. Problem solved for Mount Beau – that was the name of that project's sponsor. Mount Beau. Beaumont. Get it?"

  "We get it," Adam said. "But if all these environmentalists connected with Red Beaumont's
companies are disappearing, how come nobody has looked into it?"

  "Well, for one thing," Cee Cee said, "Beaumont Industries made one of the biggest campaign donations in the state to our recently elected governor. They also made considerable contributions to the guy who was voted sheriff."

  "A cover-up?" Adam made a face. "Come on."

  "You're assuming anyone even suspects anything. These people aren't dead, remember. Just gone. Near as I can tell, the attitude seems to be, well, environmentalists are kind of flighty, anyway, so who's to say these folks didn't just take off for some bigger, more menacing disaster? All except this one." Cee Cee hit another button, and a third photo filled the page. "This lady didn't belong to any kooky save the seals group. She owned some land Beaumont Industries had its eye on. They wanted to expand one of their cineplexes. Only she wouldn't sell."

  "Don't tell me," I said. "She disappeared."

  "Sure did. And seven years later to the day – seven years being the time after which you can legally declare a missing person dead – Beaumont Industries made an offer to her kids, who jumped on it."

  "Finks," I said, meaning the lady's kids. I leaned forward so I could get a better look at her picture.

  And had quite a little shock: I was looking at a picture of the ghost who'd been paying me those charming social calls.

  Okay, well, maybe she didn't look exactly the same. But she was white and skinny and had the same haircut. There was certainly enough of a resemblance to make me go, "That's her!" and point.

  Which was, of course, the worst thing I could have done. Because both Cee Cee and Adam turned to look at me.

  "That's her who?" Adam wanted to know.

  And Cee Cee said, "Suze, you can't possibly know her. She disappeared over seven years ago, and you just moved here last month."

  I am such a loser.

  I couldn't even think of a good excuse, either. I just repeated the one I'd stammered to Tad's father: "Oh, um, I had this dream and she was in it."

  What was wrong with me?

  I had not, of course, explained to Cee Cee the reason why I'd wanted her to look up stuff on Red Beaumont, anymore than I had told Adam how it was that I knew so much about little Timothy Mahern's cat. I had merely mentioned that Mr. Beaumont had said something odd during my brief meeting with him the night before. And that Father Dom had sent me to look for the cat, presumably because Timothy's dad had admitted abandoning it during his weekly confession – only Father Dom, being sworn to secrecy, couldn't actually tell me that. I was only, I assured Adam, surmising....

  "A dream?" Adam echoed. "About some lady who's been dead for seven years? That's weird."

  "It probably wasn't her," I said quickly, backpedaling for all I was worth. "In fact, I'm sure it wasn't her. The woman I saw was much . . . taller." Like I could even tell how tall this woman was by looking at her picture somebody had posted on the Internet.

  Adam said, "You know, Cee Cee has an aunt who dreams about dead people all the time. They visit her, she says."

  I threw Cee Cee a startled glance. Could we, I wondered, be talking about another mediator? What, was there some kind of glut of us in the greater peninsula area? I knew Carmel was a popular retirement spot, but this was getting ridiculous.

  "She doesn't have dreams about them," Cee Cee said, and I didn't think I was imagining the level of disgust in her voice. "Aunt Pru summons the spirits of the dead and she'll tell you what they said. For a small fee."

  "Aunt Pru?" I grinned. "Wow, Cee Cee. I didn't know you had a psychic in the family."

  "She isn't a psychic." Cee Cee's disgust deepened. "She's a complete flake. I'm embarrassed to be related to her. Talk to the dead. Right!"

  "Don't hold back, Cee Cee," I said. "Let us know how you really feel."

  "Well," Cee Cee said. "I'm sorry. But – "

  "Hey," Adam interrupted brightly. "Maybe Aunt Pru could help tell us why" – he bent down for a closer look at the dead woman's photo on Cee Cee's computer screen – "Mrs. Dierdre Fiske here is popping up in Suze's dreams."

  Horrified, I leaned forward and slammed Cee Cee's laptop closed. "No thanks," I said.

  Cee Cee, opening her computer back up again, said irritably, "Nobody fondles the electronics but me, Simon."

  "Aw, come on," Adam said. "It'll be fun. Suze's never met Pru. She'll get a big kick out of her. She's a riot."

  Cee Cee muttered, "Yeah, you know how funny the mentally ill can be."

  I said, hoping to get the subject back on track, "Um, maybe some other time. Anything else, Cee Cee, that you were able to dig up on Mr. Beaumont?"

  "You mean other than the fact that he might possibly be killing anyone who stands in the way of his amassing a fortune by raping our forests and beaches?" Cee Cee, who was wearing a khaki rainhat to protect her sensitive skin from the sun, as well as her violet-lensed sunglasses, looked up at me. "You're not satisfied yet, Simon? Haven't we thoroughly vetted your paramour's closest relations?"

  "Yeah," Adam said. "It must be reassuring to know that last night you hooked up with a guy who comes from such a nice, stable family, Suze."

  "Hey," I said with an indignation I was far from actually feeling. "There's no proof Tad's dad is the one who's responsible for those environmentalists' disappearances. And besides, we just had coffee, okay? We did not hook up."

  Cee Cee blinked at me. "You went out with him, Suze. That's all Adam meant by hooking up."

  "Oh." Where I come from, hooking up means something else entirely. "Sorry. I – "

  At that moment, Adam let out a shout. "Spike!"

  I whirled around, following his pointing finger. There, peering out from the dry underbrush, sat the biggest, meanest-looking cat I'd ever seen. He was the same color yellow as the grass, which was probably how we'd missed him. He had orange stripes, one chewed-off ear, and an extremely nasty look on his face.

  "Spike?" I asked, softly.

  The cat turned his head in my direction and glared at me malevolently.

  "Oh, my God," I said. "No wonder Tim's dad didn't take him to the animal shelter."

  It took some doing – and the ultimate sacrifice of my Kate Spade book bag, which I'd managed to purchase only at great physical risk at a sample sale back in SoHo – but we finally managed to capture Spike. Once he was zipped up inside my bag, he seemed to resign himself to captivity, although throughout the ride to Safeway, where we went to stock up on litter and food for him, I could hear him working industriously on the bag's lining with his claws. Timothy, I decided, owed me big time.

  Especially when Adam, instead of turning up the street to my house, turned in the opposite direction, heading farther up the Carmel hills until the big red dome covering the basilica of the Mission below us was the size of my thumbnail.

  "No," Cee Cee immediately said as firmly as I've ever heard her say anything. "Absolutely not. Turn the car around. Turn the car around now."

  Only Adam, chuckling diabolically, just sped up.

  Holding my Kate Spade bag on my lap, I said, "Uh, Adam. I don't know where, exactly, you think you're going, but I'd really like to at least get rid of this, um, animal first – "

  "Just for a minute," Adam said. "The cat'll be all right. Come on, Cee. Stop being such a spoilsport."

  Cee Cee was madder than I'd ever seen her. "I said no!" she shouted.

  But it was too late. Adam pulled up in front of a little stucco bungalow that had wind chimes hanging all over the place tinkling in the breeze from the bay, and giant hibiscus blossoms turned up toward the late afternoon sun. He put his VW in park and switched off the ignition.

  "We'll just pop in to say hi," he said to Cee Cee. And then he unfastened his seatbelt and hopped out of the car.

  Cee Cee and I didn't move. She was in the backseat. I was in the front with the cat. From my bag came an ominous rumbling.

  "I hesitate to ask," I said, after a while of sitting there listening to the wind chimes and Spike's steady growling. "But where are we?"
<
br />   That question was answered when, a second later, the door to the bungalow burst open and a woman whose hair was the same whitish yellow as Cee Cee's – only so long that she could sit on it – yoo-hooed at us.

  "Come in," Cee Cee's aunt Pru called. "Please come in! I've been expecting you!"

  Cee Cee, not even glancing in her aunt's direction, muttered, "I just bet you have, you psychic freak."

  Remind me never to tell Cee Cee about the whole mediator thing.

  C H A P T E R

  11

  "Oh, goodness," Cee Cee's aunt Pru said. "There it is again. The ninth key. This is just so strange."

  Cee Cee and I exchanged glances. Strange wasn't quite the word for it.

  Not that it was unpleasant. Far from it. At least, in my opinion, anyway. Pru Webb, Cee Cee's aunt, was a little odd. That was certainly true.

  But her house was very aromatic what with all the scented candles she kept lit everywhere. And she'd been quite the attentive hostess, giving us each a glass of homemade lemonade. It was too bad, of course, that she'd forgotten to put sugar in it, but that kind of forgetfulness apparently wasn't unusual for someone so in touch with the spirit world. Aunt Pru had informed us that her mentor, the most powerful psychic on the West Coast, often couldn't remember his own name because he was channeling so many other souls.

  Still, our little visit hadn't been particularly enlightening so far. I had learned, for instance, that according to the lines in my palm, I am going to grow up to have a challenging job in the field of medical research (Yeah! That'll be the day). Cee Cee, meanwhile, is going to be a movie star, and Adam an astronaut.

  Seriously. An astronaut.

  I was, I admit, a little jealous of their future careers, which were clearly a great deal more exciting than my own, but I tried hard to control my envy.

  What I'd given up trying to control – and Cee Cee apparently had as well – was Adam. He had told Aunt Pru, before I could stop him, about my "dream," and now the poor woman was trying – pro bono, mind you – to summon Deirdre Fiske's spirit using tarot cards and a lot of humming.