Reunion (9 page)

I bit my lip. “Well,” I said hesitantly.

“Look, don't worry about me. Jake said he'd take me on his delivery run—which holds a certain appeal, if you can stand getting down and dirty in a car full of pepperoni and pineapple pizzas. But if you want, I can stay here and hang with Brad. He's invited me to a video screening of his favorite movie of all time.”

I sucked in my breath. “Not
Hellraiser III…
?”

“Indeed.”

Gratitude washed over me like one of those waves that had knocked me senseless. “You would do that for me?”

“For you, Simon, anything. So what's it going to be?”

“Okay.” I threw down the dishtowel I'd been holding. “If you would just stay here and pretend like I'm upstairs in my room with cramps, I will worship you forever. They don't ask questions about cramps. Say that I'm in the bathtub, and then maybe a little while later, say I went to bed early. If anyone calls, will you take it for me?”

“As you wish, Queen Midol.”

“Oh, Gina.” I grabbed her by the shoulders and gave her a little shake. “You are the best. You understand? The
best.
Don't throw yourself away on my stepbrothers: You could do so much better.”

“You just don't see it,” Gina said, shaking her head wonderingly. “Your stepbrothers are
hot.
Well, except for that little red-headed one. And hey—” This she added as I was headed to the phone to make a call to Father Dominic. “—I expect compensation, you know.”

I blinked at her. “You know I only get twenty bucks a week allowance, but you can have it—”

Gina made a face. “I don't want your money. But a thorough explanation would be nice. You never would give me one. You always just dodged the question. But this time, you owe me.” She narrowed her eyes. “I mean, I am going to sit through a screening of
Hellraiser III
for you. You owe me
big
time. And yes,” she added, before I could open my mouth, “I won't tell anybody. I promise not to call the
Enquirer
or
Ripley's Believe It or Not.
”

I said, with what dignity I could muster, “I wouldn't have thought otherwise.”

Then I picked up the phone and dialed.

“So what is it, exactly,” I said as I swung the flashlight back and forth across the sandy trail, “that I'm supposed to be looking for?”

“I'm not sure,” Father Dominic, a few steps ahead of me, said. “You'll know, I expect, when you find it.”

“Great,” I muttered.

It was no joke trying to climb down a mountainside in the dark. If I had known this was what Father Dom was going to suggest when I called, I probably would have put off phoning him. I probably would have just stayed home and watched
Hellraiser III
instead. Or at least attempted to finish my geometry homework. I
mean, really. I had already nearly died once that day. The Pythagorean theorem hardly seemed threatening in comparison.

“Don't worry,” I heard a guy's voice behind me, laced with tolerant amusement, say. “There's no poison oak.”

I turned my head and gave Jesse a very sarcastic look, even though I doubted he could see it. The moon—if there was one—was hidden behind a thick wall of clouds. Tendrils of fog crept along the cliffside we were climbing down, gathering thickly in the dips the trail made, swirling whenever I set my foot down in it, as if it were recoiling at the prospect of touching me. I tried not to think about movies I'd seen in which horrible things happened to people out in such heavy fog. You know the movies I'm talking about.

At the same time, I tried not to think about all the poison oak that might be brushing up against me. Jesse had been joking, of course, but in his usual way, he had read my mind: I have a real thing about disfiguring skin rashes.

And don't even get me started about snakes, which I had every reason to believe might be curled up all along this sorry excuse for a path, just waiting to take a chunk out of the soft fleshy part of my calf just above my Timberlands.

“Yes,” I heard Father Dom say. The fog had rushed in and swallowed him up, and I could see only the faint pinprick of yellow his flashlight made in front of me. “Yes, I can see that the police have already been here. This must be where a section of the guardrail fell. You can see its imprint in the broken weeds.”

I staggered blindly along, using the beam from my flashlight primarily to hunt for snakes, but also to make sure I didn't step off the trail and plunge the several hundred feet or so into the churning surf below. Jesse had already reached out twice to steer me gently away from the edge of the path when I'd strayed from it while eyeing a suspicious branch.

Now I nearly staggered off it after colliding hard with Father Dom, who'd stopped in the middle of the trail and crouched down. I hadn't seen him at all, and both he and Jesse had to reach out and grab various articles of my clothing in order to right me again. This was not a little embarrassing.

“Sorry,” I muttered, mortified at my own clumsiness. “Um, what are you doing, Father D.?”

Father Dominic smiled in that infuriatingly patient way of his, and said, “Examining some of the evidence from the accident. You mentioned that your mother seemed to know something about
it, and I have a feeling that I know what it is.”

I zipped my windbreaker up more fully, so that my neck was no longer exposed to the chilly night air. It may have been springtime in California, but it couldn't have been more than forty degrees out there on that cliff. Fortunately, I had brought along gloves—mainly as protection, it must be admitted, from potential contact with poison oak—but they were doing double duty now, keeping my fingers from freezing.

“What do you mean?” I hadn't thought to bring along a hat, and so my ears felt like icicles, and my hair kept whipping around in the cold wind off the sea and smacking me in the eyes.

“Look at this.” Father Dominic shined his flashlight along a section of the earth, about six feet long, where the dirt was churned up, and the grass broken. “This, I think, is where the guardrail ended up. But do you notice anything odd about it?”

I pulled some hair out of my mouth and kept my eyes peeled for snakes. “No.”

“That particular section of rail seems to have come down in one piece. A vehicle would have to be moving at considerable speed to break through such strong metal fencing, but the fact that the entire section seems to have given way
suggests that the metal rivets holding it in place must have snapped.”

“Or they were loosened,” Jesse suggested quietly.

I blinked up at him. Being dead, Jesse wasn't suffering half as much discomfort as I was. The cold didn't affect him, although the wind was catching on his shirt quite a bit, pulling it out and affording me glimpses of his chest, which, I probably don't need to add, was every bit as buff as Michael's, only not quite as pale.

“Loosened?” For the second time that day, my teeth had started to chatter. “What would cause something like that? Rust?”

“I was thinking something a little more manmade, actually,” Jesse said quietly.

I looked from the priest to the ghost, then back again. Father Dominic looked as perplexed as I felt. Jesse had not exactly been invited along on this little expedition, but he had shown up as I'd made my way down the driveway to the spot where Father D. had said he'd pick me up. Father Dominic's reaction to the news I'd imparted—about the attempt on Michael's life at the beach, and his odd comments in the car later—had been swift and immediate. We needed, he declared, to find the RLS Angels, and fast.

And the easiest way to do that, of course, was
to visit the place where their lives had been lost, a locale, Jesse pointed out, best not visited alone at night by a sixty-five-year-old priest and a sixteen-year-old girl.

I have no idea what Jesse thought he was protecting us from by coming along: bears? But there he was, and apparently, he had a way better idea than I did about what was going on.

“What do you mean, manmade?” I demanded. “What are you talking about?”

“I just think it's strange,” Jesse said, “that a whole section of this railing would give way like that, while the rest—as we saw when we inspected it a little while ago—didn't even bend upon the impact.”

Father Dominic blinked. “You're suggesting that someone might have loosened the rivets in anticipation of a vehicle striking it. Is that it, Jesse?”

Jesse nodded. I got what he was driving at, but only after a minute or so.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Are you saying you think
Michael
purposely loosened that section of guardrail so that he could run Josh and the others over the cliff?”

“Someone certainly did,” Jesse said. “It might well have been your Michael.”

I took umbrage at that. Not at the suggestion that Michael might have done something so heinous, but at Jesse calling him
my
Michael.

“Wait just a minute—” I began. But Father Dominic rather uncharacteristically interrupted me.

“I have to agree with Susannah, Jesse,” Father Dominic said. “Certainly it appears that the rail did not perform the function it was intended to. In fact, a rather serious flaw in its design seems to have occurred. But to suggest that someone might have purposefully tampered with it…”

“Susannah,” Jesse said. “Didn't you say that Michael seems to dislike the people who died in the accident?”

“Well,” I said, “he did tell me he thought that they were a waste of space. But honestly, Jesse, in order for what you're suggesting to work, Michael would have had to know Josh and those guys were coming. How could he have known that? And he'd have had to wait for them, and then when they started to round the corner, he'd have had to purposefully put down the gas…”

“Well,” Jesse said with a shrug. “Yes.”

“Impossible.” Father Dominic straightened up, brushing dirt from the knees of his trousers. “I refuse even to consider such a possibility. That
boy, a cold-blooded murderer? You don't know what you're saying, Jesse. Why, he's got the highest GPA in school. He's a member of the Chess Club.”

I patted Father Dominic on the shoulder. “Hate to break it to you, Father D.,” I said, “but chess players can kill people, just like anyone else.” Then I looked down at the gouge mark in the earth where the guardrail had lain. “The real question is why?” I asked. “I mean,
why
would he do something like that?”

“I think,” Jesse said, “if we hurry, we might be able to find out.”

He pointed. We looked. The clouds overhead had parted enough to allow us to see the tiny slice of beach at the bottom of the cliff. The moonlight picked out four ghostly forms huddled in a circle around a pitiful little campfire.

“Oh, God,” I said as the clouds closed in again, quickly obscuring the sight. “All the way down there? I know I'm going to get bitten.”

Father Dominic had already started hurrying down the rest of the trail. Jesse, behind me, asked curiously, “Bitten by what, Susannah?”

“A snake, of course,” I said, avoiding a root that had looked a bit snakelike in the beam from my flashlight.

“Snakes,” Jesse said—and I could tell by his
voice that he was restraining an urge to laugh, “don't come out at night.”

This was news to me. “They don't?”

“Not usually. And particularly not on cold, wet nights like this. They like the sun.”

Well, that was a relief. Still, I couldn't help wondering about ticks. Did ticks come out at night?

It seemed to take forever—and I was sure that I'd wake up with shin splints—but we eventually reached the bottom of the path, though the last fifty feet or so were so steep, I practically sprinted down them, and not on purpose, either.

There on the beach, the sound of the waves was much, much louder—loud enough to completely drown out the sound of our approach. The smell of salt was heavy in the air. I realized, as our feet sank into the wet sand—well, except for Jesse's—why it was I hadn't seen any gulls earlier in the evening: animals, including birds, don't like ghosts.

And there were a lot of ghosts on this particular beach.

They were singing. I am not kidding you. They were singing around their sulky little fire. You won't believe what they were singing, either. “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” Seriously. They were on fifty-seven.

I tell you, if that's how I end up spending eternity when I die, I hope some mediator comes along and puts me out of my misery. I really do.

“Okay,” I said, slipping off my gloves and jamming them in my pockets. “Jesse, you take the guys. I'll take the girls. Father D., you just make sure none of them make a run for the waves, all right? I've already been swimming once today, and believe me, that water's cold. I am not going in after them.”

Father Dominic caught my arm as I started striding toward the firelit group.

“Susannah!” he cried, looking genuinely shocked. “Surely you can't…you aren't seriously suggesting that we—”

“Father D.” I gawked up at him. “Earlier this afternoon, those jerks over there tried to drown me. Pardon me if I feel that sauntering up to them and asking them if they'd like to join us for root beer floats isn't such a good idea. Let's go kick some supernatural butt.”

Father Dominic only clutched my arm tighter. “Susannah, how many times do I have to tell you? We are mediators. Our job is to intercede on behalf of troubled souls, not cause them more pain and grief by committing acts of violence upon them—”

“I'll tell you what,” I said. “Jesse and I will hold them down while you do the interceding. Because, believe me, that's the only way they're going to listen. They aren't real communicative.”

“Susannah,” Father Dom said again.

But this time, he didn't get to finish whatever it was he was going to say. That's because all of a sudden, Jesse went, “Stay here, both of you, until I say it's all right to move.”

And then he started striding across the beach toward the ghosts.

Huh. I guess he'd gotten sick of listening to the two of us arguing. Well, you couldn't really blame him.

Father Dominic looked worriedly after Jesse. “Oh, dear,” he said. “You don't think he's going to do anything…rash, do you, Susannah?”

I sighed. Jesse never did anything rash.

“No,” I said. “He's probably just going to try to talk to them. It's better this way, I guess. I mean, he's a ghost, they're ghosts…they've got a lot of stuff in common.”

“Ah,” Father Dominic said, nodding. “Yes, I see. Very wise. Very wise indeed.”

The Angels were at seventeen bottles of beer on the wall by the time they noticed Jesse.

One of the boys swore quite colorfully, but
before any of them had time to dematerialize, Jesse was speaking—and in such a low voice that Father D. and I couldn't hear him above the sound of the waves. We could only watch as Jesse—glowing a little, the way ghosts tend to—spoke to them, and then, slowly, after a little while, lowered himself onto the sand, still talking.

Father Dominic, watching the proceedings intently, murmured, “Excellent idea, sending Jesse in first.”

I shrugged. “I guess.”

I guess my disappointment that I'd missed out on what probably would have been a first-class brawl must have shown, since Father D. tore his gaze from the group around the campfire, and grinned down at me.

“With a little help from Jesse, we just might make a mediator of you yet,” he said.

As if he had a clue as to how many ghosts I'd mediated out of existence before I'd ever even met either of them
, I thought. But I didn't say it out loud.

“And how,” Father Dominic asked quietly, “is your little friend Gina occupying herself while you're out tonight?”

“Oh,” I said. “She's covering for me.”

Father Dominic raised his eyebrows—and his
voice—in surprised disapproval. “Covering for you? Your parents don't know you're here?”