The first thing I did when I got to my desk was to throw Paul’s flowers into the trash, vase and all. The second thing I did was look up Becca Walters’s class schedule. She had geometry first period. Excellent.
Now all I had to do was hope she showed up to school.
“That’s a waste,” Sister Ernestine remarked as she bustled past my trash can on the way into her office.
I glanced at the flowers. The nun had a point. Every petal was still snow white and perfect.
“The smell’s giving me a headache,” I said, though of course my headache had predated the flowers and this didn’t explain why they were in the garbage, one foot from my desk.
“If you didn’t want them, you could have given them to poor Father Dominic at the hospital.”
“I think we can do better for Father D than used flowers.”
“They’re still perfectly good. Maybe you could put them in the basilica for the worshippers to enjoy.”
I closed my eyes and said a quick prayer for strength to the nondenominational god of single girls and mediators.
“You’re so right, Sister.” I leaned over and picked the vase out of the trash can. Fortunately the glass was still intact, so it wasn’t leaking. “Are you going to lead Morning Assembly today in Father Dominic’s absence?”
“I am.” The nun was straightening her wimple in the same mirror Father Dom had straightened his clerical jacket the day before. “I’ve been named acting principal by the archdiocese until Father Dominic recovers enough to return to work, which will hopefully be soon.”
It wouldn’t be soon. It would be weeks, possibly months. I’d never get hired as a paid staff member unless I adjusted either my attitude, or how much I was needed around the Mission Academy.
Which is why I artfully arranged Paul’s flowers on the windowsill in Sister Ernestine’s office while she was giving the Morning Assembly message—which included a request for the entire student body to bow their heads in a moment of prayer for Father Dominic’s speedy recovery.
As soon as Assembly was over, I pulled Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cotton-tail out of their line back to class.
“Family emergency,” I told Sister Monica, who responded by looking relieved.
“What’s the matter, Aunt Suze?” Flopsy asked as I hurried them along the open-air corridor, past all the other classroom doors, until we got to where Becca’s geometry class was being held. “What’s the emergency?”
“The kind where I need you guys to go out into the courtyard and play quietly with your friend Lucy for a bit while I talk to her friend Becca. If you do that, without bothering us, I’ll buy you whatever you want for lunch.”
The girls exchanged excited glances. They couldn’t express their joy the way they wanted to, because shouting in the breezeway was forbidden, but their body language—they looked as if they were about to scream and do backflips—said it all. Chicken fingers and fries were infinitely preferable to the healthy lunch—turkey wraps and carrot sticks—their poor, long-suffering mother had made them.
There’s no getting around it: I might have helped a lot of people get into heaven, but I’m seriously starting to doubt my chances of ever getting there myself.
“Can we,” Mopsy whispered to me intensely, “play in the fountain?”
The ancient decorative fountain in the center of the mission’s courtyard, near which the students were expressly forbidden from going, was my stepnieces’ favorite place in all of creation. I’d like to have said this was due to their exquisite aesthetic taste, but I feared a different explanation.
“You may play near it,” I said. “Not in it.”
When all three girls began to pout, I gritted my teeth. “Listen, we are not going through this again. The people who put coins in that fountain made wishes as they threw them. If you fish them out and steal them, it’s like stealing people’s wishes, and that’s as wrong as stealing their money—which is against the law, by the way, as we have discussed repeatedly in the past.”
The three of them had been dragged into the office so many times for stealing coins from the fountain that they were known around the teacher’s lounge as the Three-K Banditos.
Mopsy opened her mouth to protest, but I cut her off, asking, “What did Jiminy Cricket say about wishes?”
Cotton-tail promptly replied, “They come true when you wish upon a star.”
“There’s nothing in that song about fountains.” Mopsy always had an angle.
Realizing that I was never going to get them to play nicely unless I sweetened the bribe—fries were losing their currency—I said, “Look, just this one time you can fish for coins from the fountain, but only if you promise to put them back when you’re done.” Their faces fell, and I added, through gritted teeth, “Fine. I’ll reimburse you after school from my own wallet, you little swindlers.”
Their faces lit up once more. The idea of scooping slimy quarters and dimes from the bottom of an old fountain brought them such happiness (because it was free money), I now knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were Paul Slater’s daughters. He loved money more than anyone I’d ever met.
“All right, be quiet and let me concentrate.”
I turned and rapped loudly on the door to Becca’s first-period classroom. No one had phoned in to say that she was staying home sick for the day, which surprised me. If the beloved principal of my school had nearly died at my house the day before, no way would I show up to class the morning after, if only to avoid nasty questions from the student body. This kid either had no common sense whatsoever, or a stepmother who wanted her out of the house. I suspected the latter.
Without waiting for anyone to answer my knock, I opened the door and entered the classroom.
“I’m Susannah Simon,” I said to the harassed-looking teacher, Ms. Temple. She wasn’t one I knew from my own days as a student at the Mission Academy. “I’m from the administrative office. Becca Walters is needed there. Now.”
As was typical when anyone was called to the office, the entire class began to catcall and hoot. All except for Becca, who was seated in the second-to-last row, near the windows, which looked out over the achingly blue sea. She seemed to be continuing her campaign to appear as inconspicuous as possible. She still had not brushed (or seemingly washed) her hair, her uniform was as ill-fitting as ever, and she wore the same bandage I’d affixed to her wrist two days earlier. It was now gray and frayed around the edges.
Lucia stood at her side, solemn-faced as always. Unlike Becca, Lucia did not seem surprised to see me, nor did her face turn bright red as she met my gaze.
“All right, students, simmer down,” Ms. Temple said, in a bored voice. “Becca, take your things in case you aren’t back by next period.”
Becca stood up, gathering her books with fingers that shook so nervously it was inevitable she’d drop one of them. This caused the hooting not only to increase, but for some of the boys to call out even ruder remarks than before, and the girls to smirk and whisper among themselves.
Ms. Temple, who appeared to be only a little older than I was, did nothing about any of this. Instead she took the interruption as an opportunity to pick up her cell phone and check her messages.
The only person in the room who looked the least bit concerned for Becca—besides me and her little ghost companion, who was one step behind her—was Sean Park, the tenth-grade computer whiz who’d saved my office desktop. He was sitting in the front row, gazing back at Becca with a look of compassion, while occasionally throwing his peers glances of disgust.
I shared his feelings.
After making sure Becca and her invisible bodyguard had safely exited the room into the hallway, I turned to look back at the class. The students were still buzzing among themselves, while Ms. Temple continued to check her phone. To my surprise, I saw that she was texting someone.
I understand that teachers work very long hours for too little pay. So do I.
But honestly.
“Hey,” I said. Possibly I said it a little too loudly, since the teacher wasn’t the only one who looked over. My outburst got the attention of the students, as well. All gazes fell upon me, so I decided to use the opportunity to make a little announcement.
“In case any of you are wondering,” I said, with a pleasant smile, “I’m the same Suze Simon who knocked the head off the Father Serra statue a few years back. And if I hear of a single one of you giving Becca Walters shit ever again, I’ll do the same to you. Have a nice morning.”
I slammed the door on their stunned expressions.
Out in the corridor, Becca was looking up at me, wide-eyed.
“Wh-what did you say to them?” she asked.
“Nothing.” I continued to smile as I wrapped an arm around her shoulders. “Come on. We need to have a little chat.”
Becca resisted my perfectly friendly overtures.
“That wasn’t nothing,” she said. “I heard you say—did you say something to them about me?”
“No. You worry too much.” I noticed that Lucia had begun to glow with spectral rage, and added, “Oh, calm down, Casper. I’m only going to talk to her. Go hang out with your three amigos over there.”
Becca looked around, oblivious as always to her ghostly companion. “Who are you talking to?”
“That’s what we’re going to chat about.” I waved at my stepnieces. “Girls, could you help me out here?”
They didn’t need any further coaching. Mopsy raced up to Lucia, gripped her by the arm, then whispered loudly, “My aunt Suze said we could take coins from the fountain!”
“But we have to put them back,” Cotton-tail warned. “It’s wrong to steal wishes.”
“And money,” Flopsy added. “But Aunt Suze says she’s going to pay us back, whatever we take, from her own wallet. We’re going to be rich.”
Becca stared at me as if I were a whack job while the three girls—four, really, but she couldn’t see Lucia—raced off into the courtyard, where the bright morning sun had already begun to burn off the thick fog I’d been driving through. It significantly dimmed Lucia’s aura . . . though she continued to throw me solemn looks, not quite trusting me with her precious Becca . . . yet.
As soon as they reached the wide stone fountain—which this early in the morning had yet to attract any adult visitors—the three living girls peeled off their shoes and socks and jumped in (exactly as I’d told them not to). Even Lucia looked tempted to follow suit. It was hard to believe she was the same spirit who, the night before last, had tried to drown me.
“Who are they?” Becca asked, her gaze following the triplets.
“They’re my stepnieces,” I said. “I brought them so we could talk. Last time we got interrupted, and it wasn’t by any earthquake. Those three are here to keep it from happening again.”
Becca looked more bewildered than ever. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I do know about you, though. My stepmother told me—”
“Yes, I’m sure Kelly had plenty to say about me.” I steered her by the arm through one of the stone archways. “Well, I’ve got a lot to say to you. But not about her.”
Becca immediately put on the brakes, refusing to budge from beneath the chilly shade of the breezeway. “We aren’t allowed to go out here,” she balked, staring at the warm, sunny courtyard like it was the pit of a lava-filled volcano, and she was the hapless missionary I was about to sacrifice to the native gods.
“You are if you’re escorted by a staff member. And lucky you, I just happen to be a staff member.”
I pulled her off the smooth flagstone and onto the pebbled pathway that meandered through the courtyard’s many garden plots. She came blinking into the sunlight as cautiously as a mole person.
It might have been November, but in Carmel, that’s one of the most beautiful months of the year—which was why Jesse and I wanted to be married in November, only a year from now. An explosion of brightly colored flowers—milkweed, bougainvillea, azaleas, wisteria, and rhododendrons—lined the paths and even the rooftops of the breezeways and buildings surrounding the courtyard. The milkweed had attracted monarch butterflies, which flew in lazy circles around the yard like low-flying, drunk hang gliders.
Though the stucco walls were three feet thick, and the birds flitting across the clear blue sky overhead were calling noisily to one another, it was still possible to hear the organ music being played at morning mass over in the basilica.
“Sit,” I commanded Becca when we came to an ancient stone bench in a mossy alcove, not far from the fountain the girls were marauding. The bench, coincidentally, was beneath the feet of the Father Serra statue I’d so wrongfully been accused of decapitating.
Maybe this was why Becca looked more nervous than ever as she sat down. “I didn’t mean it about my stepmother. All she said was—”
“I don’t care what Kelly said about me.” I sat down beside her. “I want to know what really happened to Father Dominic. But first, I want to know what really happened to your friend Lucia Martinez.”
Becca stared at me as round-eyed as if I’d slapped her. “L-Lucia Martinez? Wh-who’s that?”
“Come on, Becca, don’t bullshit me.” I’d had about as much as I could take from this girl. “You know exactly who Lucia is. You like the game Ghost Mediator? Well, your old friend Lucia’s ghost has been following you around for years. You want to know how I know that? Because I’m a real-life mediator, and it’s my job to send her to the next level.”
Becca stared at me expressionlessly for several seconds from behind the lenses of her glasses.
Then she burst into tears.