The Mediator #4: Darkest Hour

by Jenny Carroll

  Weeks? I didn't have weeks. And though Cee Cee didn't know it, she didn't have weeks either.

  I was shaking uncontrollably now. Because I had realized, of course, what I'd just done: put Cee Cee in the same kind of jeapordy I'd put Clive Clemmings in. Clive had been just fine until Maria had overheard him telling his dictaphone what I'd said about Jesse. Then faster than you could say The Haunting, he was suffering from a massive, paranormally induced coronary. Had I just sentenced Cee Cee to the same gruesome end? While I highly doubted Maria was going to ransack the offices of the Carmel Pine Cone the way she had the Carmel historical society, there was still a chance she might find out what I had done.

  I needed that story to run right away. The sooner people found out the truth about Maria and Felix Diego, the better my chances of them not killing me – or the people I cared about.

  "It's got to run tomorrow," I said. "Please, Cee Cee. Can't you call the coroner and get some kind of unofficial statement?"

  Cee Cee did look up from her notebook then. She looked up and said, "Suze. What is the rush? These people have been dead for like forever. What does it matter?"

  "It matters," I said. My teeth were starting to chatter. "It just really matters, okay, Cee Cee? Please, please see what you can do to put a rush on it. And promise you won't talk about it. The story, I mean. Outside these offices. It's really important that you keep it to yourself."

  Cee Cee reached out and laid a hand on my bare shoulder. Her fingers were very warm and soft. "Suze," she said, peering down at me sort of intently. "What did you do to your head? Where'd that giant bruise under your bangs come from?"

  I pushed self-consciously at my hair.

  "Oh," I said. "I tripped. I fell into a hole. The hole they found the body in, isn't that funny?"

  Cee Cee didn't seem to think it was funny at all. She went, "Have you had a doctor look at that? Because it looks pretty bad. You might have a concussion, or something."

  "I'm fine," I said, standing up. "Really. It's nothing. Look, I better go. Remember what I said, will you? About the story, I mean. It's really important that you don't mention it to anyone. And that you get them to run it as soon as possible. I need a lot of people to see it. A lot of people. They need to see the truth. You know. About the Diegos."

  Cee Cee stared at me. "Suze," she said. "Are you sure you're all right? I mean, since when do you care about the local gentry?"

  I stammered, as I backed out of the cubicle, "Well, since meeting Dr. Clemmings, I guess. I mean, it's a real tragedy that people so often overlook their community's historical society, when you know, really, without it, the fabric of the – "

  "You," Cee Cee interrupted, "need to go home and take an Advil."

  "You're right," I said, picking up my purse. It matched my slip dress, pink, with little flowers embroidered on it. I was overcompensating for all the days I'd had to wear those khaki shorts. "I'll go. See you later."

  Then I got the hell out of there before my head exploded in front of everybody.

  But on my way back to Father Dominic's car I realized that the reason I'd been shivering back in the photocopying cubicle hadn't been due to the excessive air-conditioning, the fact that Jesse was gone, or even the fact that two homicidal ghosts were actively trying to kill me.

  No, I was shivering because of what I knew I was about to do.

  When I got to Father Dom's car, I bent down and said through the open passenger window, "Hey."

  Father Dominic started and hurled something out the driver's side window.

  But it was too late. I'd already seen what he'd been up to. Plus I could smell it.

  "Hey," I said again. "Give me one of those."

  "Susannah." Father Dominic looked stern. "Don't be ridiculous. Smoking is an awful habit. Believe me, you do not want to pick it up. How did things go with Miss Wells?"

  "Um," I said. "Fine." I'm pretty sure it's a sin to tell a lie to a priest, even a white lie that can't possibly hurt him. But what was I supposed to do? I know him, see. And I know he's going to be completely rigid on the whole exorcism thing.

  So what else could I do?

  "She wants me to stick around, actually," I said, "and help her write it. The story, I mean."

  Father Dominic's white eyebrows met over his silver frames. "Susannah," he said. "We have a great deal to do this afternoon, you and I – "

  "Yeah," I said. "I know. But this is pretty important. How about I meet you back at your office at the Mission at five?"

  Father Dominic hesitated. I could tell he thought I was up to something. Don't ask me how. I mean, I can be quite the angelic type, when I put my mind to it.

  "Five o'clock," he said, finally. "And not a minute later or, Susannah, I'm telling you right now, I will telephone your parents and tell them everything."

  "Five o'clock," I said. "Promise."

  I waved as he drove away, and then, just in case he was looking in his rearview mirror, made as if to go back into the newspaper building.

  But instead I slipped around the back of it, then headed toward the Pebble Beach Hotel and Golf Resort.

  I had some unfinished business there.

  C H A P T E R

  13

  He wasn't in the pool.

  He wasn't eating burgers at the Pool House.

  He wasn't on the tennis courts, at the stables, or in the pro shop.

  Finally, I decided to check his room, although it didn't make any sense at all that he'd be there. Not on a gloriously sunny day like this one.

  But when the door to his suite swung open to my knock, that's exactly where I found him. He was, Caitlin informed me tersely, taking a nap.

  "Taking a nap?" I stared at her. "Caitlin, he's an eight-year-old, not an eight-month-old."

  "He said he was tired," Caitlin snapped at me. "And what are you doing here, anyway? I thought you were supposed to be sick."

  "I am sick," I said, pushing past her into the suite.

  Caitlin eyed me disapprovingly. You could tell she was jealous of my slip dress and delicate pink sandals, not to mention my bag. I mean, compared to her, in her regulation Oxford T and pleated khakis, I looked like Gwyneth Paltrow. Only with better hair, of course.

  "You don't look very sick to me," Caitlin declared.

  "Oh, yeah?" I lifted up my bangs so she could see my forehead.

  She sucked in her breath and made an oh-that-must-have-hurt face. "My God," she said. "How'd you do that?"

  I thought about saying it was a job-related injury of some kind, so I could milk some disability out of her, but I didn't think it would work. Instead, I just said I'd tripped.

  "So what are you doing here?" Caitlin wanted to know. "I mean, if you're not here to work."

  "Well," I said. "That's the thing. I felt really guilty, you know, saddling you with Jack, so I got my mom to drop me off here after she took me to the doctor. I'll stay with him for the rest of the day, if you want."

  Caitlin looked dubious. "I don't know," she said. "You're not in uniform – "

  "Well, I wasn't going to wear my uniform to the doctor’s office," I squealed. Really, it was amazing how these elaborate lies were tripping off my tongue. I could hardly believe it myself, and I was the one making them up. "I mean, come on. But look, he told me I'm fine, so there's no reason I can't take over for you. We'll just stay here in the suite, if you're that nervous about people seeing me out of uniform. No problem."

  Caitlin glanced at my forehead again. "You're not on any kind of painkiller for that, are you? Because I can't have you baby-sitting all whacked up on Scooby Snacks."

  I held up the first three ringers of my right hand in the international symbol for scouting.

  "On my honor," I said, "I am not whacked up on Scooby Snacks."

  Caitlin glanced at the closed door to Jack's room. "Well," she said, hesitantly.

  "Oh, come on," I said. "I could really use the dough. And don't you and Jake have a date tonight?"

  Her gaze skittered
towards me. "Well," she said, blushing.

  Seriously. She blushed.

  "Yeah," she said. "Actually, we do."

  God. It had only been a guess.

  "Don't you want to cut out a little early," I said, "to make yourself, you know, all glam for him?"

  She giggled. Caitlin actually giggled. I am telling you, my stepbrothers ought to come with government warning labels: Caution, hazardous when mixed with estrogen.

  "Okay," she said, and started heading for the door. "My boss'll kill me, though, if he sees you without your uniform, so you've got to stay in the room. Promise?"

  I had made and broken so many promises in the past twenty-four hours, I didn't think one more could hurt. I went, "Sure thing, Caitlin."

  And then I walked her to the door.

  As soon as she was gone, I put down my purse and went into Jack's room. I did not knock first. There is nothing an eight-year-old boy's got that I haven't seen before. Besides, I was still a bit hacked with the little creep.

  Jack may have been told to take a nap, but he certainly wasn't doing so. When I walked into his room, he thrust whatever it was he'd been playing with under the blankets and lifted his head from the pillow with his face all screwed up like he was sleepy.

  Then he saw it was me, threw the covers back, and revealed that not only was he fully dressed, but that he'd been playing with his Gameboy.

  "Suze!" he shouted, when he saw me. "You came back!"

  "Yeah," I said. It was dark in his room. I went to the French doors and threw open the heavy drapes to let in the sunlight. "I came back."

  "I thought," Jack said, jumping up and down excitedly on the bed, "that you were mad at me."

  "I am mad at you," I said, turning around to look at him. The sight of that sparkling sea had dazzled my eyes, though, so I couldn't see him very well.

  "What do you mean?" Jack stopped jumping. "What do you mean you're mad at me?"

  Look, I wasn't going to screw around with the kid, okay? I just wish everyone had been as straight with me when I was his age. It is possible I wouldn't be so quick with my fists if I didn't have this pent-up inner rage from having been lied to so much as an eight-year-old. Yes, Suze, of course there’s really a Santa Clous, but No, there’s no such thing as ghosts. And then the clincher, No, this shot I’m about to give you isn’t going to hurt a bit.

  "That ghost you exorcised?" I said, facing him with my hands on my hips. "He was my friend. My best friend."

  I wasn't going to say boyfriend, or anything, because that wasn't true. But the hurt I was feeling must have shown in my voice, since Jack's lower lip started to jut out a little.

  "What do you mean?" he wanted to know. "What do you mean, he was your friend? That's not what that lady said. The lady said – "

  "That lady is a liar. That lady," I said, coming swiftly toward the bed and lifting up my bangs, "did this to me last night. See? Or at least, her husband did. All she tried to do was stab me with a knife."

  Jack, standing on the bed, was taller than I was. He looked down at the bruise on my forehead with something like horror, "Oh, Suze," he breathed. "Oh, Suze."

  "You screwed up," I said to him, dropping my hand. "You didn't mean to. I understand that Maria tricked you. But you still screwed up, Jack."

  Now his lower lip was trembling. So was his whole chin, actually. And his eyes had filled up with tears.

  "I'm sorry, Suze," he said. His voice had gone about three pitches higher than usual. "Suze, I'm so sorry!"

  He was trying really hard not to cry. He wasn't succeeding, though. Tears were spilling out of his eyes and rolling down his chubby cheeks . . . the only part of him that was chubby, except maybe for his Albert Einstein hair.

  And even though I didn't want to, I found myself wrapping my arms around him and patting him on the back as he sobbed into my neck, telling him everything was going to be all right.

  Just like, I realized, with something akin to horror, Father Dominic had done to me!

  And just like him, I was completely lying. Because everything was not going to be all right. Not for me, at least. Not ever again. Unless I did something about it, and fast.

  "Look," I said, after a few minutes of letting Jack wail. "Stop crying. We have work to do."

  Jack lifted his head from my shoulder – which he had, by the way, gotten all wet with snot and tears and stuff, since my dress was sleeveless.

  "What … what do you mean?" His eyes were red and squinty from crying. I was lucky nobody walked in right then. I definitely would have been convicted of child abuse or something.

  "I'm going to try to get Jesse back," I explained, swinging Jack down from the bed. "And you're going to help me."

  Jack went, "Who's Jesse?"

  I explained. At least, I tried to. I told him that Jesse was the guy he had exorcised, and that he had been my friend, and that exorcising people was wrong, unless they'd done something very very bad, such as tried to kill you, which was, Jack explained, what Maria had told him Jesse'd tried to do to me.

  So then I told Jack that ghosts are just like people, some of them are okay, but some of them are liars. If he had ever met Jesse, I assured him, he'd have known right away he was no killer.

  Maria de Silva, on the other hand …

  "But she seemed so nice," Jack said. "I mean, she's so pretty and everything."

  Men. I'm serious. Even at the age of eight. It's pathetic.

  "Jack," I said to him. "Have you ever heard the expression, Don't judge a book by its cover?"

  Jack wrinkled his nose. "I don't like to read much."

  "Well," I said. We had gone out into the living room, and now I picked up my purse and opened it. "You're going to have to do some reading if we're going to get Jesse back. I'm going to need you to read this."

  And I passed him an index card on which I'd scrawled some words. Jack squinted down at it.

  "What is this?" he demanded. "This isn't English."

  "No," I said. I started taking other things out of my purse. "It's Portuguese."

  "What's that?" Jack asked.

  "It's a language," I explained, "that they speak in Portugal. Also in Brazil, and a few other places."

  "Oh," Jack said, then pointed at a small Tapperware container I'd taken from my purse. "What's that?"

  "Oh," I said. "Chicken blood."

  Jack made a face. "Eew!"

  "Look," I said. "If we're going to do this exorcism, we're going to do it right. And to do it right, you need chicken blood."

  Jack said, "I didn't use chicken blood when Maria was here."

  "Yeah," I said. "Well, Maria does things her way, and I do things my way. Now let's go into the bathroom to do this. I have to paint stuff on the floor with the chicken blood, and I highly doubt the housekeeping staff will appreciate it if we do it here on the carpet."

  Jack followed me into the bathroom that joined his room to his brother's. In the part of my brain that wasn't concentrating on what I was doing, I kind of wondered where Paul was. It was strange he hadn't called after that whole thing where he'd dropped me off at my house and there'd been all those cop cars and stuff in front of it. I mean, you'd have thought he'd wonder, at least, what that had been all about.

  But I hadn't heard a peep out of him.

  Not that I cared. I had way more important things to worry about. But it was still kind of odd.

  "There," I said, when we had everything set up. It took an hour, but when we were done, we had a fairly decent example of how an exorcism – the Brazilian voodoo variety, anyway – is supposed to look. At least according to a book I'd read on the subject once.

  With the chicken blood I'd procured from the meat counter of one of the gourmet shops downtown, I'd made these special symbols in the middle of the bathroom floor, and around them I'd stuck assorted candles (the votive kind, the only ones I could get at short notice, between the offices of the Carmel Pine Cone and the hotel; they were cinnamon scented, too, so the bathroom smelled sort of li
ke Christmas . . . well, except for the not-so-festive fragrance of chicken blood).

  In spite of the amateurishness with which it had been thrown together, it was, in fact, a working portal to the afterlife – or at least it would be, once Jack did his part with the notecard. I'd gone over the pronunciation of each word, and he seemed to have it down pretty well. The only thing he couldn't seem to get around was the fact that the person we were exorcising was, well, me.

  "But you're alive," he kept saying. "If I exorcise your spirit from you, won't you be dead?"

  Actually, this was a thought that had not really occurred to me. What would happen to my body after my spirit had left it? Would I be dead?

  No, that was impossible. My heart and lungs wouldn't stop working just because my soul was gone. Probably I'd just lie there, like someone in a coma.

  This was not, however, very comforting to Jack.

  "But what if you don't come back?" he wanted to know.

  "I'm going to come back," I said. "I told you. The only reason I can come back is that I do have a living body to return to. I just want to have a look around out there and see if Jesse's okay. If he is, fine. If not . . . well, I'll try to bring him back with me."

  "But you just said the only reason you can come back is because you have a living body to return to. Jesse doesn't. So how can he come back?"

  This was, of course, a good question. That was probably why it put me in such a bad mood.

  "Look," I said, finally. "Nobody has ever tried this before, so far as I know. Maybe you don't have to have a body to come back. I don't know, okay? But I can't not try just because I don't know the answer. Where would we be if Christopher Columbus hadn't tried? Huh?"

  Jack looked thoughtful. "Living in Spain right now?"

  "Very funny," I said. It was at this point that I took the last thing from my bag and tied one end around my waist. I tied the other end to Jack's wrist.

  "What's the rope for?" he asked, looking down at it.

  "So I can find my way back to you," I said.

  Jack looked confused. "But if just your spirit's going, what's the point of tying a rope around your body? You said your body wasn't going anywhere."