Read Remembrance (The Mediator #7) Online

Authors: Meg Cabot

Tags: #Fiction, #Contemporary Women, #Ghost, #Romance, #Paranormal

Remembrance (The Mediator #7) (7 page)

BOOK: Remembrance (The Mediator #7)
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“Stepmother,” Becca quickly corrected her.

“Sorry, dear, of course.” Sister Ernestine gave her the kind of smile I’d never earned once from the nun in all the years I’d known her. “What a day for Father Dominic to be away,” she muttered as she exited the office.

As soon as the nun was gone, I whirled back to my computer, but it was no good. It had fritzed out, and I couldn’t get it to turn back on. Now I was going to have to call IT. Which at the Junípero Serra Mission Academy meant getting Sean Park, the most tech-savvy of the tenth graders, over to look at it, because there was no budget for an IT department.

I guess I must have verbally expressed my disappointment over losing the online auction for my kickass boots, since Becca said, “You sure do swear a lot.”

I shrugged and pointed at the swear jar. “I’m supposed to put a dollar in it every time I curse. But I don’t think I’m that bad.” I didn’t add that at the apartment my roommate, Gina, and I shared, she’d installed a swear jar, too.

“You’re that bad,” Becca said. “You said the F-word, like, five times in a row.”

I tried not to sound indignant. “Swearing is a proven stress reliever. You should try it instead of doing
that
to yourself.” I nodded toward her bandaged arm. “When I’m under a lot of stress, dropping a couple of f-bombs makes me feel a lot better.”

“What have
you
got to feel stressed about?” She looked around the office. “This doesn’t seem like such a hard job.”

“Oh, yeah? You don’t know the half of it.” My job wasn’t the problem. It was my personal life that was currently going down the toilet. “I’m not even getting paid for this.”

“What?” Becca came out of her daze a little, seeming genuinely surprised, but not enough to let go of the horse pendant. “How come?”

“Because there are, like, nine hundred applicants with way more experience than people my age for every job that comes available. We all have to work for free just to get some experience so we can put it on our résumés so we can maybe get a paying job someday, but there’s no guarantee we will. Oh, right. I forgot they don’t mention this in high school. You’re still brimming with hope and joie de vivre.” I looked at her. “Well, maybe not you, particularly.”

She didn’t seem to get my meaning.

“What did Sister mean by ‘the girls’? Do you have kids in this school?”

“No, I don’t have kids in this school.” I stared at her, horrified. “Seriously, how old do you think I am?”

“I don’t know. About thirty-sev—”

“Forget I asked. The kids are my brother Brad’s. Stepbrother’s, I mean.” Brad and I were actually the same age, but had always had vastly different tastes and attitudes. “He knocked up his girlfriend with triplets right after high school, and now their daughters are in kindergarten here. See what can happen if you don’t practice safe sex?”

I widened my eyes at Becca dramatically, but she didn’t look very scared. The truth is when you’re a girl who’s miserable enough to carve the word
stupid
in your arm with a compass, the idea of having three kids in kindergarten by the time you’re twenty-five probably seems like awesome sauce . . . or maybe so unimaginable, it’s not even in the realm of possibility.

I decided to change the subject.

“Do you have siblings, Becca?”

“No.”

I eyed the horse pendant she was clutching again. “None at all? Ever?”

“No.”

“Not even stepsisters? Half sisters? Adopted?”

She gave me a look that made it clear she thought I’d not only jumped aboard the train to Crazy Town, I was the engineer. “No. Why?”

This mediation might prove to be even tougher than the one that had ruined my boots. The problem with my job is that in reality—unlike on TV shows such as
Ghost Mediator
, which are completely scripted while purporting to be “reality”—if you simply come out and say, “Oh, hey, I’m in touch with the spirit world and your dead relative wants you to know such-and-such,” people do not really burst into tears of gratitude and thank you for setting their conscience at ease.

They run away, and then sometimes, if they’re of a litigious nature, they come back with a team of lawyers and sue you for causing them emotional distress.

“No reason. I notice you like horses—”

She instantly dropped the pendant, then tucked it away inside her shirt. “Not really.”

“Oh. I thought maybe you did because of that necklace. It’s pretty. Did someone important to you give it to you?”

She shrugged, looking away. “No. I saw it in a store in New York this one time. My mom moved there after . . . after she and my dad split up. I said I liked it, so she bought it for me.”

“That was nice of her.” One of the things they’re always drumming into our heads in class is when in doubt, look to the patient’s home life, especially the mother. It always goes back to the mother. Thanks, Freud. “Are you and your mom close?”

She shrugged again, looking out the office windows at the sunshine. “I guess.”

“Do you get to see her very much?”

Another shrug. “A few weeks in the summer. Holidays.”

I could tell there was something going on with the mother. Why else had she moved all the way to New York from the West Coast? It wasn’t unheard of for a father to get primary custody, but it wasn’t the most common thing, either, even in kooky California.

And what was with the horse thing? Who was Lucia to her? Her bond with Becca had to be a strongly emotional one. I hadn’t seen a reaction that violent from a spirit in a long, long time, not since . . . well, a certain spirit I’d laid to rest by putting it back in its living body, which wasn’t something I was ever, ever going to do again, thanks to apparently having stirred up the ire of some ancient Egyptian gods . . .

I really needed to get my computer back up and running, so I could look up the veracity of Paul’s threat. I never had much success looking things up on my phone.

I tried again, keeping my voice cheerfully neutral. “It must be hard not having your mom around. How long has she been gone?”

“It’s fine,” she said. Thank God she didn’t shrug again, or I might have knocked over a few file cabinets myself in frustration. “Why are you asking me all these questions? She left when I was little, okay, right after the accident—”

She broke off after the word
accident
as if she’d said something she shouldn’t have, then looked down at the bandage I’d put on her wrist. “How long will I have to wear this thing?” she whined. “It’s starting to itch.”

I ignored the question, pouncing on her previous statement. “Right after what accident, Becca?” This was it, I knew. In therapy, they called it the Breakthrough. In Non-Compliant Deceased Person mediation, we called it the Key. “What accident? Did something happen to your mother?”

But before Becca could reply, my cell phone rang once more. “Someone Saved My life Tonight.”

I couldn’t hit Ignore a second time. Jesse would abandon his patients, get in his car, drive over, and strangle me. Well, not literally, but metaphorically.

“I have to take this,” I said to Becca. “It’s important. But we’re going to get back to that accident you were talking about. Okay?”

“Whatever,” Becca said with another one of her infernal shrugs. “It’s no big deal. I don’t know why you’re asking me all this stuff. I said I’d never do it again, and I won’t, okay? God.” Then she dug out her own phone, slumping even further in her chair as she began to text someone.

So she had friends. Interesting.

“Hey, Jesse,” I said, swiveling around in my desk chair so my back was to the haunted girl. “How’s your day going?”

“How’s
my
day going?” He sounded incredulous. “What’s happening over there?”

“Here?” I asked casually. “Nothing. It’s work. You know. Boring. Why?”

“Don’t, Susannah.”

Susannah. Susannah. Susannah.
I loved the way he said my name. The truth was, I loved everything about him.

“You know I can tell when you’re lying. Even over one of these
things
.”

Except the way he always knew when I was lying, and his impatience with modern technology. Those things I didn’t love so much.

This had made our separation when he’d gone away to medical school and me to college—though we’d only been four hours away from each other—extremely challenging. He’d insisted on letters.

“We may no longer have a mediator-ghost connection, Susannah,” Jesse went on, “but I can still tell when you’re feeling something strongly, and earlier, you were afraid. I felt it. I was dealing with a four-year-old with a bee in her ear, or believe me, I’d have driven over there.”

“And what, precisely, would you have driven over here to do?” I lowered my voice so Becca couldn’t overhear me. “Spank my naughty bottom? Please do not get my hopes up.”

I found that joking often worked as a means to distract him when he was being a little too extrasensory perceptive.

“Susannah.” He didn’t sound very amused.

“You know it gets me hot when you’re mad. What are you wearing right now under your stethoscope?”

“You’re not funny.”

“Oh, come on. I’m a
little
funny.”

“Not as funny as you think you are. Tell me what happened.”

Crap. This was one of the many problems of being in a relationship with a former ghost.

“There was a little incident here at work involving an NCDP,” I said. “Nothing I couldn’t handle. But she did turn out to be a little more aggressive than I expected.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Becca lift her head to glance at me. She was eavesdropping, of course, and thought I was talking about her. She didn’t know what NCDP stood for. She was probably wondering why I’d said she was aggressive.

“At the school?” Jesse sounded surprised. “The one you told me about earlier? A tourist?”

“Student.”

“Father Dominic must be slipping,” he said, sounding concerned. “I would think he’d have taken care of all of those when the semester first started, well before you got there.”

“I’m not sure he’d have noticed this one,” I said, carefully guarding my words, both because I was speaking in front of Becca and because I felt defensive on behalf of Father Dominic. “It seemed harmless at first, and barely perceptible.”

It was getting hard not to notice that one of Jesse’s other prejudices, in addition to cell phones, was against his own kind—well, what
used
to be his own kind, anyway. The closer he came to acquiring his medical license, the less interested he seemed in helping the dead.

I guess I could understand this. Having spent a century and a half as a deceased person wasn’t listed as one of the
official
causes of post-traumatic stress disorder in the DSM (
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
), the bible of mental health professionals, but I figured it was pretty much a given that Jesse was suffering from it.

I
hoped
it was this, rather than what Paul was insisting, that there was a part of Jesse that was still haunted . . . and that, if his original grave was destroyed, might be unleashed.

“Are you on call until tomorrow morning?” I asked, figuring it was best to change the subject.

“Fortunately,” he said. Unlike normal people, Jesse preferred the overnight shifts at his rotation in the ER. According to him, that’s when all the really interesting cases came in. People went to their primary physicians during the daytime. Only people in desperate straits—or who didn’t have primary-care physicians—went to the ER in the middle of the night.

That Jesse preferred seeing these people as patients wasn’t at all an indication that the curse was true, I told myself.

You can take the boy out of the darkness. But you can’t the darkness out of the boy.

Shut up, Paul.

“I’ll tell you about it when I see you tomorrow,” I said. “
Te amo
.”

He laughed as he always did when I attempted to say anything to him in his native tongue, even though I’ve been taking Spanish for more than four years. My accent is hopeless, according to both Jesse and my various language instructors.

“I love you, too,
querida
,” he said. As always, the word sent warming rays of delight down my spine . . .

Almost enough to cancel out the sense of impending doom that Paul’s phone call had caused to settle there.

“Who was that?” Becca demanded rudely as I hung up. “Your boyfriend?”

“Fiancé,” I said, looking down at my phone. I’d gotten two text messages. The first was from Jesse.

Jesse
Estoy contando las horas hasta que nos encontremos, mi amor.

N
OV
16 1:37 PM

After all the long hours I’d spent wearing earphones in the language lab, I should have been able to translate it on sight. But I had no idea what it said (except that
mi amor
meant my love). Later I was going to have to cut and paste it into my Spanish-to-English translation app.

Damn! Why did he have to torture me like this? A part of me suspected he did it on purpose, to keep me on my toes. As if he had to.

The second text—which I’d received earlier from a number with a Los Angeles area code—needed no translation.

Dinner is Friday night @8PM, Mariner’s, the Carmel Inn. Be there or else.

It was only a kiss, for chrissakes, Simon. Stop being such a girl.

N
OV
16 1:30 PM

Stop being such a girl
. How like Paul to think being called a girl was an insult.

“You’re engaged?” Becca seemed super interested. “Can I see your ring?”

I held out my left hand and waggled my ring at her without really thinking about it. I was too busy debating what to text back to Paul.

The last time I’d been foolish enough to agree to meet Paul Slater somewhere alone, I’d ended up with a nasty scrape across my back that had been extremely difficult to explain to my mother (she’d been the one who’d had to slather on the antibacterial cream, since I hadn’t been able to reach it, and of course I’d had to hide it entirely from Jesse).

BOOK: Remembrance (The Mediator #7)
12.32Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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