Remembrance (The Mediator #7) (10 page)

“I’ll tell her,” I assured her. “And thanks in advance for anything you can do regarding the, uh, dead kid situation.”

CeeCee gave me the finger, which caused more than a few people in the café to raise their eyebrows. You don’t often see an albino in an asymmetrical haircut giving a hot brunette the finger.

I was going to have to do better than a mere thank-you. A generous gift card to CeeCee’s favorite online store was probably going to be in order to placate her for this one.

I stepped outside the café—CeeCee’s aunt Pru doesn’t allow cell phone use inside the Happy Medium since she’s convinced the electromagnetic radiation they give off interferes with her psychic flow and also kills bees—and answered my cell. “Mom?”

“Oh, Suzie.”

My mother is the only person in the world who’s allowed to call me Suzie. When I was a kid, I didn’t like the name Suzie because I was a tomboy who saw dead people, and didn’t think a name ending in a babyish
ee
sound suited me. Then as I got older, it reminded me too much of the old song “Suzie Q,” which my dad liked to sing to me. It’s a perfectly good song, except for the part where my dad was dead, and hearing it always makes me a little sad for what might have been.

“How are you, honey? Listen,” Mom went on, before I could reply. “This isn’t really the best time. We’re at a shoot. But you sounded so frantic in your message. I hope there isn’t anything wrong.”

“Well, there is. I need to—”

“If it’s about Thanksgiving, Andy and I are still planning to be there next week. We’re staying at the Carmel Inn downtown, by the beach. Debbie says she’s making dinner, but God only knows how that’s going to turn out—I’m sure you remember the fight she and Brad had last time—so I managed to get a table for all of us at Mariner’s, just in case. Oh, did Jesse get that grant he applied for?”

“Uh, no,” I said. “Not yet. I didn’t call about Thanksgiving. I’m wondering why you guys didn’t tell me that you sold the old house to Slater Industries?”

“Slater Industries?” Mom sounded confused. “We didn’t sell it to Slater Industries. We sold it to a man named Mitchell Blumenthal. He seems like a wonderful—”

“Mitchell Blumenthal is the president of Slater Properties, a subsidiary of Slater Industries, which is owned by Paul Slater,” I interrupted her. I’d looked it up earlier in the day, after my computer was fixed. “I got an e-mail from Paul today saying his company bought the place. He’s got it scheduled for demo later this month.”

“Oh, honey, that’s terrible.” My mother sounded genuinely upset. “Are you sure? The same Paul Slater from your class? I didn’t think you two kept in touch.”

“Yes, I’m sure, and we don’t.”

Through the phone, I could hear hammering. Last time I’d watched Andy’s home improvement show, he’d been refinishing a Craftsman cottage in Santa Monica, but they don’t show episodes in order so I never know where they really are unless Mom tells me.

“Oh, dear,” my mother said. “That sounds terribly . . . aggressive.”

“Yeah, you think?”

“You know, I always thought Paul had a little bit of a crush on you, Suzie. But you never had eyes for anyone but Jesse. You didn’t even apply to a single out-of-state college, which I still think was a mistake. Not that there’s anything wrong with Jesse; you know Andy and I adore him, but when I was your age—”

“Mom,” I said, in a tired voice. “Paul Slater is a dick hole.”

“Oh, Suzie, really, must you use that kind of language? Sometimes it’s hard to believe we sent you to private school. And I know you and Paul had your rough patches, but I always felt a bit sorry for him.”

“Sorry? For
Paul
?”

“Yes. He was one of those kids who received plenty of money from his family, but no attention or love. He always seemed a bit lost.”

“Lost? He seems to know exactly where he’s going.” And what he wants. Namely me.

“I think he wanted to be part of our family,” Mom said. “Only not exactly your brother, if you know what I mean.”

“Ew,” I said. “Gross. And even if that’s true, it doesn’t explain why he thinks bulldozing our old house to build a
ten-thousand-square-foot
freaking McMansion over it would make us like him.”

“No, you’re right,” my mother said with a sigh. “But I suppose to him, even negative attention from you is better than no attention at all.”

“Huh,” I said, thinking about this. “That could be true.”

My mom was good to come to for advice. I couldn’t tell her everything, of course, because she’d freak out. Things like tears in the fabric of the universe, ghosts, or ancient Egyptian curses were not her milieu.

But she understood people.

“Oh, dear,” she said. “This is going to upset Andy and the boys so much.”

“The boys? What about
me
? It’s upsetting the hell out of me.”

My mother sighed again in a weary way. “Suzie, really, do I have to keep telling you? If you expect to be taken seriously at your job, you have
got
to clean up your language—”

“Sweet crippling Christ, Mom,” I said. “I’m not at work right now. And I keep telling
you
, it’s not a job, it’s an internship. They’re not even paying me.”

“Well, I’m sure there are a lot more paying jobs for school counselors here in LA than there are up there. Forget the house. Why don’t you move down here? You can live with Andy and me. Jesse can join you when he’s done with his residency, and if you two are really set on getting married, you could buy a nice little condo. It would be so much easier for me to visit my future grandbabies if they were right here in town than—”

It was going to be interesting to see what kind of grandbabies she’d have—if any—if I didn’t meet Paul and he really did bulldoze 99 Pine Crest Road.

“Look, Mom,” I interrupted her. “We can talk about all that later. I have to go now.”

“All right, Suzie. I’m sorry about the house. But honestly, we had to sell. Andy and I were never there, and neither were any of you. And that place was too big to maintain as a vacation home. And so drafty. You’re going to laugh, but you know, sometimes I could have sworn it was haunted.”

This almost made me choke on my own saliva.

I never thought I’d be thankful for an interruption from CeeCee’s crazy aunt Pru. “Suze? Is that you?”

“Oh, hi, Pru,” I said to the long-haired woman dressed all in purple who’d wafted up. “Yes, it’s me.”

“Is that CeeCee’s aunt?” my mother asked in my ear, sounding nostalgic. “Please tell her hello from me.”

“Uh, my mom says hi, Prudence,” I said, lamely waving the cell phone in CeeCee’s aunt’s direction so she’d understand my mother was on the phone.

“Wonderful. Do tell your mother how much I enjoyed the latest episode of Andy’s show,” Pru said. As usual, she had on an enormous floppy hat, as well as long silk gloves, in order to protect her skin from damaging UV rays, even though the sun had long since slipped behind the trees. Like CeeCee, Pru, suffered from albinism. Unlike Cee, Pru fancied herself in touch with the psychic world. “He’s really doing wonders with that new house.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll tell her.” CeeCee’s aunt was endlessly kind, but a bit of a whack job. True to form, she had a prediction for me.

“Oh, Suze,” she called from the doorway of the coffee shop.

“Yes?”

“The child,” she said.

I glanced around the outside of the shop, which was as whimsically decorated as the inside, festooned with twinkling fairy lights and wrought-iron café tables and potted shrubs.

“What child?” I asked her. There were no children in sight. It was twilight, and getting a little chilly. Only an extremely bad parent would allow their kids to run around outside the Happy Medium in the semidarkness. “There’s no child here, Prudence.”

“No, not here,” Pru said. “The one you know from school.”

What the hell was she talking about?

“That child is lost, and very frightened, and in so much pain,” she went on. “And lost children in pain can sometimes be very cruel. Like wild animals, you know? They lash out and hurt others, sometimes without meaning to. But sometimes on purpose, too.”

Then she smiled her happy, dazed smile and went inside the shop.

I stared after her, remembering too late that occasionally Aunt Pru’s predictions actually came true.

“What was
that
all about?” my mother asked.

“Nothing.”

I hoped.

ocho

It had grown fully dark by the time I got home, but I told myself I wasn’t worried about Aunt Pru’s warning. Despite the impressive amount of psychic power Lucia had shown back at the mission, she’d seemed primarily concerned with focusing it on Becca, not me.

“Lost children in pain can sometimes be very cruel.” That could easily sum up Paul, and the way he was lashing out at Jesse . . . and at me.

My mother had also used the word lost to refer to him. He was no child, though.

Still, even if Lucia
had
chosen to attack me again, the Carmel Valley Mountain View Apartment Complex—as the management company of the building in which I lived had somewhat misleadingly named it—would have made an unlikely place to do so. The so-called “mountain view” was actually only of the winery-dotted foothills of what eventually turned into the Santa Lucia mountain range, the breathtaking peaks against which the massive waves of the Pacific crashed at Big Sur, much farther down the coastal highway.

How coincidental was it that the place where I lived looked out over the Santa Lucias, and the ghost I was currently trying to mediate was called Lucia? It wasn’t that common of a name.

Feigning a lightheartedness I was far from feeling, I waved to my fellow tenants as I joined them in what had become a daily routine: the after-work trudge from our cars to our apartment doors, which we’d all unlock at the same time to get to our refrigerators and TVs and futons.

Still, I like my place. It’s nothing fancy, just a one bedroom in a thirty-unit building off the G16. Kelly Prescott Walters would probably sneer at the idea of living here instead of some two-bedroom condo over in Pebble Beach with a sea view and a private hot tub (though now she probably lives in a $20 million mansion with her billionaire husband).

But in good traffic my place was a less-than fifteen-minute drive from Carmel Beach (and my classes and place of work). Plus the other tenants—mostly young newlyweds with small children and singles like myself, either divorced or not yet married—were friendly. It was always good to be home, the one place I never had to worry about being attacked by the souls of the dead, because, “Evil spirits cannot enter an inhabited house unless invited.”

That’s what Sir Walter Scott—who’d written
Ivanhoe
and a bunch of other books Father Dominic tried very hard to make me read—said, and it’s (mostly) true. There are tons of ways unwelcome guests (of both the paranormal and human variety) can enter a home.

But there are also tons of precautions you can take to keep them out. I’m not just talking about hanging crucifixes or mezuzahs on the walls or doorways, either (though trust me, I have both. I’ll take all the protection I can get).

Before I’d moved in, I hired my own security experts to replace the unit’s dead bolts (in case any previous tenants—or their exes—had “forgotten” to return their keys).

Then I’d installed metal braces to jam the sliding glass doors to the balcony, even though they were located on the second floor. True, it was unlikely a burglar was going to scale the balcony of the unit below to break in.

But it wasn’t burglars I was worried about.

Then I’d sprinkled a mixture of sea salt and boric acid (the powdered kind you can get in a box at the hardware store) across all the outside doorways and windowsills, as well as the seams in the kitchen counters. The salt was to keep out Non-Compliant Deceased Persons. The boric acid was to keep away roaches. I figured why not kill two unwanted pests in one? Like Paul had said, I’m a modern kind of girl.

Of course, none of that stopped Father Dominic from coming over and doing a house blessing, dousing the place in holy water (which got me worried about the boric acid congealing, but it ended up being fine).

I didn’t mention to him that CeeCee’s aunt Pru had already been over and done a Wiccan cleansing, smudging the place with sage, or that Jesse had lain a shining copper penny, head up, in each outer corner of the unit, sheepishly admitting it was something one of his sisters used to do (of course, back then it had been halfpennies, and they’d been made of solid copper. Today’s pennies are mostly made of zinc), and he didn’t really believe in it, but why not?

Why not indeed? We all have our superstitions. I wasn’t going to begrudge anyone theirs. I have plenty of my own.

As soon as I’d locked the door behind me, I kicked off my wedges, undid my bra, and fed Romeo, the lab rat I’d stolen from my Operant Conditioning class after successfully training him to run a maze, then press a lever to feed himself.

The professor had warned us in advance not to grow too attached to our rats. It doesn’t pay for clinical researchers to become emotionally attached to their lab animals, any more than it does for therapists or physicians to become emotionally attached to their patients. In order for the professional to best serve their client, they need to remain detached.

And virtually every achievement in medical history owes its lifesaving advancements to animal testing. Eventually most lab rats end up getting dissected.

But I only took the class because it was a requirement. I no more planned on going into clinical research than I planned on becoming emotionally attached to my rat (this was becoming an upsetting pattern: as a mediator, I also hadn’t planned on becoming emotionally attached to any of the ghosts I’d attempted to mediate, but look what happened).

As soon as the final was over, I swapped out Romeo for a look-alike I’d found in a pet store.

Rats are a lot cleaner and smarter than people give them credit for. Romeo and I have grown to share a genuine and totally unique personal bond. He’s paper trained, and likes to sleep on my shoulder while I watch TV. No way would I have left my little buddy in that lab for some PhD candidate to experiment on—possibly even kill—over the summer.