Ninth Key (2 page)

But then someone said, “Go take a look for yourself,” and I made the mistake of doing so, tiptoeing up to the small window they’d indicated, and peering through it.

I had never particularly cared to see any of my stepbrothers in the buff. Not that they are bad looking or anything. Sleepy, the oldest one, is actually considered something of a stud by most of the girls at Junipero Serra Mission Academy, where he is a senior and I am a sophomore. But that doesn’t mean I have any desire to see him strutting around the house without his boxers. And of course Doc, the youngest, is only twelve, totally adorable with his red hair and sticky-outy ears, but not what you’d call a babe.

And as for Dopey…well, I
particularly
never wanted to see Dopey in his altogether. In fact, Dopey is just about the
last
person on earth I’d ever wish to see naked.

Fortunately, when I looked through that window I saw that reports of my stepbrother’s state of undress — as well as his sexual prowess — had been greatly exaggerated. He and Debbie were only making out. This is not to say that I wasn’t completely repulsed. I mean, I wasn’t exactly proud that my stepbrother was in there tongue wrestling with the second stupidest person in our class, after himself.

I looked away immediately, of course. I mean, we’ve got Showtime at home, for God’s sake. I’ve seen plenty of French kissing before. I wasn’t about to stand there gawking while my stepbrother engaged in it. And as for Debbie Mancuso, well, all I can say is, she ought to lay off the sauce. She can’t afford to lose any more brain cells than she already has, what with all the hair spray she slathers on in the girls’ room between classes.

It was as I was staggering away in disgust from the pool house window, which was situated above a small gravel path, that I believe I stumbled into some poison oak. I don’t remember coming into contact with plant life at any other time this past weekend, being a generally indoors kind of girl.

And let me tell you, I
really
stumbled into those plants. I was feeling light-headed from the horror of what I’d just seen — you know, the tongues and all — plus I had on my platform mules, and I sort of lost my balance. The plants I grabbed on to were all that saved me from the ignominy of collapsing on Kelly Prescott’s redwood pool deck.

What I told Father Dominic, however, was an abridged version. I said I must have staggered into some poison oak as I was getting out of the Prescotts’ hot tub.

Father Dominic seemed to accept this, and said, “Well, some hydrocortisone ought to clear that up. You should see the nurse after this. Be sure not to scratch it or it will spread.”

“Yeah, thanks. I’ll be sure not to breathe, either. That’ll probably be just about as easy.”

Father Dominic ignored my sarcasm. It’s funny about us two both being mediators. I’ve never met anybody else who happened to be one — in fact, until a couple of weeks ago, I thought I was the only mediator in the whole wide world.

But Father Dom says there are others. He’s not sure how many, or even how, exactly, we precious few happened to be picked for our illustrious — have I mentioned unpaid? — careers. I’m thinking we should maybe start a newsletter or something.
The Mediator News.
And have conferences. I could give a seminar on five easy ways to kick a ghost’s butt and not mess up your hair.

Anyway, about me and Father Dom. For two people who have the same weird ability to talk to the dead, we are about as different as can be. Besides the age thing, Father Dom being sixty and me being sixteen, he’s Mister Nice himself, whereas I’m…

Well, not.

Not that I don’t try to be. It’s just that one thing I’ve learned from all of this is that we don’t have very much time here on Earth. So why waste it putting up with other people’s crap? Particularly people who are already dead, anyway.

“Besides the poison oak,” Father Dominic said. “Is there anything else going on in your life you think I should know about?”

Anything else going on in my life that I thought he should know about. Let me see….

How about the fact that I’m sixteen, and so far, unlike my stepbrother Dopey, I still haven’t been kissed, much less asked out?

Not a major big deal — especially to Father Dom, a guy who took a vow of chastity about thirty years before I was even born — but humiliating, just the same. There’d been a lot of kissing going on at Kelly Prescott’s pool party — and some heavier stuff, even — but no one had tried to lock lips with me.

A boy I didn’t know
did
ask me to slow dance at one point, though. And I said yes, but only because Kelly yelled at me after I turned him down the first time he asked. Apparently this boy was someone she’d had a crush on for a while. How my slow dancing with him was supposed to get him to like Kelly, I don’t know, but after I turned him down the first time, she cornered me in her bedroom, where I’d gone to check my hair, and, with actual tears in her eyes, informed me that I had ruined her party.

“Ruined your party?” I was genuinely astonished. I’d lived in California for all of two weeks by then, so it amazed me that I had managed to make myself a social pariah in such a short period of time. Kelly was already mad at me, I knew, because I had invited my friends CeeCee and Adam, whom she and just about everyone else in the sophomore class at the Mission Academy consider freaks, to her party. Now I had apparently added insult to injury by not agreeing to dance with some boy I didn’t even know.

“Jesus,” Kelly said, when she heard this. “He’s a junior at Robert Louis Stevenson, okay? He’s the star forward on their basketball team. He won last year’s regatta at Pebble Beach, and he’s the hottest guy in the Valley, after Bryce Martinson. Suze, if you don’t dance with him, I swear I’ll never speak to you again.”

I said, “All right already. What is your glitch, anyway?”

“I just,” Kelly said, wiping her eyes with a manicured finger, “want everything to go really well. I’ve had my eye on this guy for a while now, and —”

“Oh, yeah, Kel,” I said. “Getting me to dance with him is sure to make him like you.”

When I pointed out this fallacy in her thought process, however, all she said was,
“Just do it,”
only not the way they say it in Nike ads. She said it the way the Wicked Witch of the West said it to the winged monkeys when she sent them out to kill Dorothy and her little dog, too.

I’m not scared of Kelly or anything, but really, who needs the grief?

So I went back outside and stood there in my Calvin Klein one-piece — with a sarong tied ever - so - casually around my waist — totally not knowing I had just stumbled into a bunch of poison oak, while Kelly went over to her dream date and asked him to ask me to dance again.

As I stood there, I tried not to think that the only reason he wanted to dance with me in the first place was that I was the only girl at the party in a swimsuit. Having never been invited to a pool party before in my life, I had erroneously believed people actually swam at them, and had dressed accordingly.

Not so, apparently. Aside from my stepbrother, who’d apparently become overwarm while in Debbie Mancuso’s impassioned embrace and had stripped off his shirt, I was wearing the least clothes of anybody there.

Including Kelly’s dream date. He sauntered up a few minutes later, wearing a serious expression, a pair of white chinos, and a black silk shirt. Very Jersey, but then, this was the West Coast, so how was he to know?

“Do you want to dance?” he asked me in this really soft voice. I could barely hear him above the strains of Sheryl Crow, booming out from the pool deck’s speakers.

“Look,” I said, putting down my Diet Coke. “I don’t even know your name.”

“It’s Tad,” he said.

And then without another word, he put his arms around my waist, pulled me up to him, and started swaying in time to the music.

With the exception of the time I threw myself at Bryce Martinson in order to knock him out of the way when a ghost was trying to crush his skull with a large chunk of wood, this was as close to the body of a boy — a
live
boy, one who was still breathing — I had ever been.

And let me tell you, black silk shirt notwithstanding, I
liked
it. This guy felt
good.
He was all warm — it was kind of chilly in my bathing suit; being January, of course, it was supposed to be too chilly for bathing suits, but this
was
California, after all — and smelled like some kind of really nice, expensive soap. Plus he was just taller enough than me for his breath to kind of brush against my cheek in this provocative, romance-novel sort of way.

Let me tell you, I closed my eyes, put my arms around this guy’s neck, and swayed with him for two of the longest, most blissful minutes of my life.

Then the song ended.

Tad said, “Thank you,” in the same soft voice he’d used before, and let go of me.

And that was it. He turned around and walked back over to this group of guys who were hanging out by the keg Kelly’s dad had bought for her on the condition she didn’t let anybody drive home drunk, a condition Kelly was sticking strictly to by not drinking herself and carrying around a cell phone with the number of Carmel Cab on redial.

And then for the rest of the party, Tad avoided me. He didn’t dance with anybody else. But he didn’t speak to me again.

Game over, as Dopey would say.

But I didn’t think Father Dominic wanted to hear about my dating travails. So I said, “Nope. Nada. Nothing.”

“Strange,” Father Dominic said, looking thoughtful. “I would have thought there’d be
some
paranormal activity —”

“Oh,” I said. “You mean has any
ghost
stuff been going on?”

Now he didn’t look thoughtful. He looked kind of annoyed. “Well, yes, Susannah,” he said, taking off his glasses, and pinching the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger like he had a headache all of a sudden. “Of course, that’s what I mean.” He put his glasses back on. “Why? Has something happened? Have you encountered anyone? I mean, since that unfortunate incident that resulted in the destruction of the school?”

I said, slowly, “Well…”

The first time she showed up, it was about an hour after I’d come home from the pool party. Around three in the morning, I guess. And what she did was, she stood by my bed and started screaming.

Really
screaming.
Really
loud. She woke me out of a dead sleep. I’d been lying there dreaming about Bryce Martinson. In my dream, he and I were cruising along Seventeen Mile Drive in this red convertible. I don’t know whose convertible it was. His, I guess, since I don’t even have my driver’s license yet. Bryce’s soft sandy-blond hair was blowing in the wind, and the sun was sinking into the sea, making the sky all red and orange and purple. We were going around these curves, you know, on the cliffs above the Pacific, and I wasn’t even carsick or anything. It was one really terrific dream.

And then this woman starts wailing, practically in my ear.

I ask you: Who needs that?

Of course I sat up right away, completely wide awake. Having a walking dead woman show up in your bedroom screaming her head off can do that to you. Wake you up right away, I mean.

I sat there blinking because my room was really dark — well, it was nighttime. You know, nighttime, when normal people are asleep.

But not us mediators. Oh, no.

She was standing in this skinny patch of moonlight coming in from the bay windows on the far side of my room. She had on a gray hooded sweatshirt, hood down, a T-shirt, capri pants, and Keds. Her hair was short, sort of mousy brown. It was hard to tell if she was young or old, what with all the screaming and everything, but I kind of figured her for my mom’s age.

Which was why I didn’t get out of bed and punch her right then and there.

I probably should have. I mean, it wasn’t like I could exactly yell back at her, not without waking the whole house. I was the only one in the house who could hear her.

Well, the only one who was alive, anyway.

After a while, I guess she noticed I was awake because she stopped screaming and reached up to wipe her eyes. She was crying pretty hard.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

I said, “Yeah, well, you got my attention. Now what do you want?”

“I need you,” she said. She was sniffling. “I need you to tell someone something.”

I said, “Okay. What?”

“Tell him…” She wiped her face with her hands. “Tell him it wasn’t his fault. He didn’t kill me.”

This was sort of a new one. I raised my eyebrows. “Tell him he
didn’t
kill you?” I asked, just to be sure I’d heard her right.

She nodded. She was kind of pretty, I guess, in a waifish sort of way. Although it probably wouldn’t have hurt if she’d eaten a muffin or two back when she’d been alive.

“You’ll tell him?” she asked me, eagerly. “Promise?”

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll tell him. Only who am I telling?”

She looked at me funny. “Red, of course.”

Red?
Was she
kidding
?

But it was too late. She was gone.

Just like that.

Red. I turned around and beat on my pillow to get it fluffy again. Red.

Why me? I mean, really. To be interrupted while having a dream about Bryce Martinson just because some woman wants a guy named
Red
to know he
didn’t
kill her…. I swear, sometimes I am convinced my life is just a series of sketches for
America’s Funniest Home Videos,
minus all that pants-dropping business.

Except my life really isn’t all that funny if you think about it.

I especially wasn’t laughing when, the minute I finally found a comfy spot on my pillow and was just about to close my eyes and go back to sleep, somebody else showed up in the sliver of moonlight in the middle of my room.

This time there wasn’t any screaming. That was about the only thing I had to be grateful for.

“What?”
I asked in a pretty rude voice.