I drove the girls to school the next morning, while Jesse drove to the Crossing to drop off Max, then to the hospital to check on Father Dom.
I didn’t mention anything to him—or anyone—about my suspicions concerning my stepnieces. What was I going to say, exactly? “Guess what? Okay, you’ll never guess, so I’ll just tell you: I’m pretty sure my stepbrother’s kids aren’t really his.”
No. Just no.
And even if in her quest to get me to open up more during our therapy sessions Dr. Jo is always telling me how keeping secrets leads to elevated levels of cortisol, the stress hormone, how do I know what Lucia suggested is true? So she pointed to a photo of Paul hanging from my sister-in-law’s bulletin board. That doesn’t prove anything.
Still, as they argued with one another in the backseat of my car over which one of them was going to get to tell the story for show-and-tell of how their aunt Suze and uncle Jesse had spent the night at their house, I checked out the girls’ reflections in my rearview mirror, and couldn’t help noticing how closely they resembled a certain mediator I happen to know.
They had the coloring—dark hair and blue eyes—and slim, tennis player build of both Jack and Paul Slater, instead of the sturdy, Nordic structure of the Ackermans (who, with the exception of redheaded David, were all blond).
Once I noticed this, I couldn’t unnotice it, no matter how much I wanted to. I could only wonder how I’d never seen it before.
Brad, I was certain, didn’t know. Did Debbie? She was shallow, and had occasionally followed her best friend Kelly’s lead in school and been nasty, even spiteful.
But I’d never seen her perform an act of outright cruelty—at least not so cruel as to force a man to unknowingly raise another man’s child . . . or children, as in this case.
Why then had she hung that photograph of Paul on her inspiration board? And why had Lucia pointed at it with a look of such solemn accusation on her face? She couldn’t have been accusing Paul of murder. Paul hadn’t even lived in Carmel at the time of her death.
And while I knew better than anyone how willing Paul was to commit murder—if you could call unleashing a demon curse murder—what interest would he have in killing a child?
None. That wasn’t his style.
I was halfway to the school when my phone rang. Normally I don’t even look at my phone when I’m driving—especially if the girls are in the car or I’m driving through early morning marine layer, like now.
But what if it was Jesse calling from the hospital because Father Dom had taken a turn for the worse? What if it was Shahbaz, the blogger, calling to tell me he knew how to break the curse?
What if it was Paul, calling to say he’d come to his senses and that he was sorry?
It wasn’t. It was my youngest stepbrother, David.
Something was wrong. David and I only talked on Sundays. I jabbed at the speakerphone.
“David? What is it? What’s happened?”
“Uncle David!” the girls screamed excitedly from the backseat. “Hi, Uncle David!”
“Uh, hi. Oh, great. The girls are with you.” Although he was fond of his nieces, there was a notable lack of enthusiasm in David’s voice. “Am I on speakerphone? I was hoping we could talk in private, Suze.”
“I stayed at Brad and Debbie’s last night, so I’m taking the girls to school with me. What’s wrong? Why are you calling? Today’s not Sunday.”
“I’m aware that today is not Sunday, Suze.” Doc’s tone suggested he suspected I might have been lobotomized since he’d last seen me. “I’m calling because I heard what happened to Father Dominic. Is he okay?”
I relaxed my grip on the wheel. “Oh. Yeah. Jesse’s on his way to see him now. He already talked to his doctor this morning, and Dr. Patel said Father Dom did well overnight, so everything should be—”
“What happened to him?”
“He fell. It happens.” I was conscious that the girls were listening, so I chose my words with care. “Old people fall down sometimes.”
“And break their hips and get pneumonia,” Mopsy added helpfully.
“Simmer down back there and watch your video,” I commanded, meaning the tablet I’d purchased for them to use in the car (as a means to keep them from pulling out one another’s hair, and me pulling out my own in frustration). “Or I’ll make you get out and walk to school.”
The girls laughed. I had to admit the threat had probably lost some of its punch since I used it every single time I drove them somewhere, but had yet actually to follow through.
“Well, what’s this weird thing your mom was talking about when I called her last night, about our old house getting bought by that Paul Slater guy?” David asked. “And does it have anything to do with that e-mail you sent to Shahbaz Effendi about some Egyptian curse?”
I nearly slammed on the brakes, and not just because the pickup in front of me, carrying crates full of freshly harvested pomegranates, had swerved suddenly to avoid hitting a cyclist.
“How the hell did you find out about that?”
“Because Shahbaz goes to my school, Suze,” David said in a patient voice as the triplets hooted in the backseat because I’d used a curse word. “He’s a grad student in NELC—that’s the Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Department here. After he got your e-mail, he looked you up on the Web to find out who you are. But of course you don’t have any social media accounts, so all he could find was some celebrity website that lists you as Andy Ackerman’s stepdaughter, and me as one of his sons. It also mentioned that I go here, so he got in touch with me through the school directory to ask if you’re really as mentally unstable as you sounded in your message to him—”
“Mentally unstable?” I interrupted, offended. “Where does he get off, accusing me of being mentally unstable? I’m not the one who sits around translating curses written in hieratic script all day so I can post them on the Internet where anyone can find them and—”
“And what, Suze?”
Well, okay. Maybe I might have sounded a little mentally unstable to someone who goes to an Ivy League school and isn’t entirely familiar with my side job.
A nervous glance in the rearview mirror showed me that the triplets’ dark heads were bent over the tablet. I wasn’t fooled, however. I knew them. They were completely eavesdropping.
I took David off speaker and lifted the phone to my ear, risking a penalty if I got caught talking on a non-hands-free mobile device while driving. But I decided the risk of allowing the girls to overhear David’s side of this conversation would be worse.
“Look, David, it’s nothing. I contacted Shahbaz for a client I’m working with.”
“Suze, don’t even try. I went to Shahbaz’s blog and looked up that curse you asked him about.”
Crap.
“It specifically references the darkness that will be unleashed upon anyone who dares to resurrect a departed soul, and what can happen if the dwelling place of that soul is destroyed. Your ‘client’ is obviously you and Jesse is the soul you resurrected and this has something to do with Paul tearing down our old house. So don’t tell me not to be silly. I’m not a child anymore. And I want to help.”
Wow. I was starting to think that the photo David had sent of himself wearing women’s clothing hadn’t been for fun—or a class on gender studies—after all. David was no longer the awkward nerdy kid I’d privately nicknamed Doc. He was all grown up now, and he wanted to let me know it.
“Okay, fine,” I said. “But, David, there’s nothing you can do. I have it all under control.”
“Oh, do you? Then why did you spend last night at Brad and Debbie’s? You can’t stand Debbie. Last time we had dinner together, you called her a self-centered harpy and said you hope she gets nail fungus under her gel manicure.”
Yikes. I really needed to cool it on the wine. “Okay, well, I might have been having a moment of—”
“Clearly you think the girls are in some kind of danger.”
“They were,” I admitted. “But not anymore. And that had nothing to do with—”
“Does Jesse know Paul bought the house?”
Wow. David was good. Too good. “No, but only because Jesse’s got a lot on his plate right now. He’s still waiting to hear about that grant. I really don’t want to stress him out or bother him right now with inane little—”
“Okay, that’s it,” David said firmly. “I’m changing my ticket and coming home tomorrow instead of next week.”
“What?” I nearly hit the back of the pomegranate truck. “David, no! That’s a terrible idea. It’s totally unnecessary.”
“Unnecessary? Father Dominic is in the hospital.”
“Yes, and being well taken care of. So please don’t—”
“It’s okay. I already turned in all my papers for this semester. I can tell my instructors I have a family emergency.”
Of course he’d already turned in all his papers. He may be a grown-up now, but he hadn’t changed that much.
“David, there’s no emergency. Father Dominic is going to be fine. What happened to him had nothing to do with that, uh, other thing.” I glanced at the girls. Still watching their video, except for Mopsy. I caught her gaze in the rearview mirror as she looked up, realized I was watching her, then glanced away again, ever so quickly. The little faker. “And there’s nothing we can do about that other thing, unless your friend Shahbaz mentioned something?”
“No, Suze, Shahbaz says he’s never heard of a way to break the Curse of the Dead because curses aren’t real.” David sounded exasperated. “They were written to scare away grave robbers, not because high priests in ancient religions actually had the ability to put curses on people.”
“Sure,” I said mildly. “Just like ghosts aren’t real. Just like people who can see ghosts aren’t real. Just like all those people who found King Tut’s tomb didn’t die of random mosquito bites and suicides and murders a year later—”
“Listen, Suze, I know. But what did you want me to say to him? I couldn’t exactly go, ‘Look, I know curses aren’t real—except that my stepsister communicates with the dead, has proven that multiple universe principle is, in fact, a reality, and occasionally travels to a parallel dimension somewhere between life and death that no one else has proven exists.’ I didn’t want him to think I’m nuts.”
I rolled my eyes. It was way too early in the morning to be talking to a sensitive genius.
“Okay, David,” I said. “Thanks for trying, anyway. Look, I gotta go; like I said, I’m driving—”
He wasn’t giving up that easily, though. “Listen, Suze, I thought of another way you can handle this thing. Something a lot easier than breaking some mummy’s curse.”
“Oh, yeah? What’s that?”
“Just go back through time and buy the house yourself.”
I was so startled I almost missed the turn to the school. I had to stomp on the brakes and swerve at the last minute, which caused the girls to sway dangerously in the back, even though they had their seat belts on.
Fortunately they weren’t prone to motion sickness, and also enjoyed carnival rides, so they cheered instead of vomited.
David, unaware of the traffic drama, went on excitedly. “Look, you already created this alternate universe in which we’re all living, the one in which Jesse never died—which makes no sense to me, since according to the Novikov self-consistency principle, that means we shouldn’t be able to remember that time Dad and Brad found his skeleton in the backyard. But we all do. So it makes sense that you should be able to do it again. Only this time, make it so you’re the one who buys the house from Mom and Dad, not Paul. Then everything will be fine. At least I think it should. Right?”
I’d managed to recover control of the car and, despite some irate honks from a few other motorists, get into my correct lane.
“David,” I said when I found my voice again. “That’s a great plan. Honestly. But it isn’t going to fly. Mediators can’t go popping back and forth through time without having to pay the consequences in the form of major loss of brain cells and cosmic tears in the universe.” Quoting Paul left a bad taste in my mouth. “That’s how this whole mess got started in the first place.”
“Oh.” David sounded let down. “I hadn’t considered that.”
“Yeah. And really, if time travel were that easy, don’t you think I’d be doing it all the time, trying to prevent plane crashes and Hitler and stuff?”
Now he sounded shocked. “Of course not. That would be a complete violation of the grandfather paradox—”
“And even if I wanted to, I couldn’t have bought our old house. My dad didn’t leave me that much money. And Jesse would never in a million years want to live there.”
David’s voice went up several octaves. “Why not?”
“Because our old house is where Jesse got M-U-R-D-E-R-E-D, remember?”
The girls immediately began murmuring the letters of the word I’d just spelled, but fortunately got nowhere as it was too advanced for the kindergarten set. Plus reading at the academy was being taught by sight or “whole language” rather than phonetically, which meant most students were reading well below their grade level (an opinion I’d been told by Father Dom to please keep to myself).
“Well, where are you two going to live, then, after you get married?” David demanded testily. “Some gated community, like Brad and Debbie? Oh, yeah, I can really see that working out. Hey, maybe Jesse could start playing golf with all the other doctors, while you shop with their wives.”
I really did not want to continue this conversation, not only because we’d reached the school parking lot, but because all of a sudden I could hear my mother’s voice in my head, suggesting that Jesse and I move to Los Angeles. It would be so much easier for me to visit my future grandbabies if they were right here in town . . .
“Look, David,” I said. “I appreciate the help with Shahbaz, and also your advice, but honestly, the best thing you can do right now is stay exactly where you are and not mention a word of this to anyone. Especially Jesse. Okay?”
“Um, okay.” He didn’t sound convincing. “Tell everyone hi from me, and that I love them. I’ll see you soon.”
“David. Are you listening to me? Please don’t—”
But he’d hung up.
“Aunt Suze,” Mopsy asked from the backseat. “What’s a mediator?”