Remembrance by Meg Cabot (24)

If anyone at the school noticed that the wife of wealthy plastic surgeon Dr. Baracus looked a little tight-lipped as her husband hurried her back to their BMW, they didn’t mention it. They probably thought I was nauseous from having another bun in the oven.

To them, this must have been good news: Penelope Baracus was getting a potential baby sister! This meant more tuition money for them later down the line. Ka-ching!

But once we’d gotten safely in the parking lot and could no longer be overheard, I let loose. With word vomit, not actual vomit, since by then I’d found some chewable antacids in my bag—along with the various other items I’d shoved in there back at my apartment—and was concentrating on chomping them down, one by one. The chalky coating on my tongue kept me from tasting the bile that kept rising in the back of my throat.

“What the hell?” I didn’t say hell, though. If the tip jar from the office had been nearby, I’d have owed it five dollars. Well, more like fifty after my tirade. “He’s still in town. He didn’t go anywhere. He’s still right here in town.”

“Take it easy, Susannah,” Jesse said in his smooth, deep voice. “This is good news. It will only make it easier for the police to arrest him after Becca tells them what she knows.”

“The police?” I was shocked at his naïveté, though I suppose I shouldn’t have been. The police routinely got involved in his abuse cases at the hospital. As a medical practitioner, he was required to notify them, and they were required to respond. “Jesse, Becca could barely tell me what happened, and I’m hardly an authority figure. She found it easier to articulate that the guy had given her candy—candy—than that he’d molested her, which is completely normal for a survivor of abuse, but I honestly don’t see her being able to go to the cops about any of this soon. And even if she were to, there’s not a shred of evidence to connect Jimmy Delgado to Lucia’s murder. Becca didn’t actually see him kill her. And it’s not like Lucia can testify.”

“But Delgado threatened to kill Becca’s parents if she told anyone what he did to her.”

“Sure, he threatened to. He threatened to do a lot of things, but he never did any of them, except what he did to Lucia, which we can’t prove. Even the things he did to Becca are her word against his, and she’s a kid who, thanks to me, now thinks the ghost of her best friend’s been following her around for the past decade. If she opens up her mouth about that, no one’s going to believe anything else she says. I definitely screwed the pooch on that one.”

We’d gotten into the car, where I began pulling off my uncomfortable pumps, one by one, and hurling them to the floor. Jesse watched me with one eyebrow raised in amusement. “Screwed the pooch?”

“Yeah. It means messed up. It’s more polite than saying—well, you can figure it out.”

Now one corner of his mouth went up. “I think you’re being too hard on yourself.”

“Am I? If we’re to believe what that Dunleavy woman says, Delgado’s a respectable business owner. He’s got the money to hire a good defense attorney, one who’d rip Becca to shreds in five minutes on the stand, given her current state of mind. And what are the chances Becca’s parents are going to allow that to happen? Zip.”

Jesse’s half smile vanished. “But a photographer of children? You know what that means, Susannah.”

“Yeah. About that.” I pulled my phone from my bag and scrolled to the article about Lucia’s death. “Becca said he used to do lots of things for the school, not just work in the stables. Take another look at that photo of Lucia.”

Jesse took the phone from me and stared at the photo. “What am I supposed to be seeing?”

“The photo credit. The print’s really tiny, but as soon as I heard it, I knew the name sounded familiar.”

“ ‘Photo by James Delgado,’” he read aloud, then glanced at me. “Nombre de Dios.”

“Right? They probably thought they could save a few bucks by having their friendly amateur photographer-slash-handyman, Jimmy Delgado, do the school photos that year. All they’d have to pay was printing costs. It was right after Father Francisco started and the school was in all that financial trouble, as we know from our little tour.”

“No wonder Lucia looks so solemn,” Jesse said softly. “She knew Becca’s secret. And his.”

“Of course it doesn’t prove anything, either, but if he did murder her, wouldn’t the coroner have—?”

“You told me that Becca said Jimmy’s tall. A broken neck would look the same to a coroner who didn’t know to suspect foul play, whether she’d suffered a violent fall from a horse or been thrown to the ground by a tall man who wanted her dead.”

“That’s what Lucia says happened.”

A muscle leaped in Jesse’s jaw. “So exhuming the body would be useless. Any DNA evidence he might have left would be destroyed by now by the embalming process and by time. But what about the money?”

“What money?”

“Delgado got the money from somewhere to suddenly quit his job at the stables and open his own business. The timing is right. While I’m guessing there wasn’t enough money from the sale of that library flooring to open a photography studio, I think Father Francisco got the money from somewhere to bribe Delgado to leave Sacred Trinity and keep his mouth shut about what he did to Lucia.”

“Yes,” I said, after thinking about it. “You’re right. Father Francisco only pretended not to believe Becca’s confession. He must have gone straight from the chapel to Delgado and told him he’d have to leave. Sacred Trinity was already in bad financial straits. They couldn’t afford another scandal.”

“And Delgado demanded money in exchange for leaving without a fuss.” Jesse switched on the ignition and backed the car from the parking lot. “And once again, thanks to Father Francisco, Sacred Trinity was saved.”

“Amazing Father Francisco.” I stared grimly at the neat rows of Italian cypress trees as we headed down the school’s driveway back toward 17-Mile Drive. “Is there no miracle he can’t perform?”

“Yes. One. He can’t hide the money trail from him to Delgado. Somewhere there has got to be a record of it—the priest withdrawing it, and Delgado depositing it.”

“A lot of donations made to churches are in cash, as you well know. You’ve seen the collection plate as it goes around.” As Jesse’s bride-to-be, I occasionally tagged along when he went to church to give a good impression to the local bishop, since we needed his permission to marry in the mission basilica (I must have done a good job since we got it—though a fat lot of good it was going to do us now).

“And even if Father Francisco did write Delgado a check,” I went on, determined to keep my mind on the matter at hand, “it doesn’t connect either of them to Lucia’s death. It’s still Becca’s word against theirs. There’s no evidence, Jesse.”

“No.” He eased the BMW out into the traffic on 17-Mile Drive. “That leaves us with only one option.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Look up where Delgado Photography Studio is, then tell Lucia. Then she can do to Jimmy what she did to me in the pool the other night. Let’s bring lawn chairs and a six-pack so we can watch. It’ll be more fun than the fireworks on Fourth of July.”

“No.” Now more than one muscle was leaping in Jesse’s jaw. “Don’t tell Lucia. I’ll take care of Delgado.”

“You?” I whipped off Becca’s glasses, squinting at him in the late-afternoon sunlight. “I was kidding about sending Lucia after Jimmy.”

“Well, I’m not.” Jesse gripped the wheel more tightly, and not because people were driving like maniacs, although they were, it being a Friday afternoon in Northern California. “This isn’t a job for a child.”

“Well, it isn’t a job for you, either.”

“Why not? I killed a man once. I’d be more than happy to do so again, in this case. Or two men, actually.”

“You killed a man once, Jesse, because he was about to kill you, and me, too. This isn’t the same.”

“How?”

“Because that was self-defense. This is vigilantism.”

“Well, in some cases a little vigilantism is necessary. Delgado needs to be stopped, and so does the priest.”

I was more thankful than ever I hadn’t told him about Paul.

“That may be true, but not this way, and certainly not by you. You swore an oath to do no harm, remember?”

“If destroying a monster prevents it from doing harm to others, and preserving the quality of life of the rest of my patients, I’m upholding that oath. That’s how physicians who administer lethal injections to prisoners on death row justify their actions.”

Whoa. I’d thought last night that he was making progress when he’d told me how it felt to be dead, unable to reach out to the people he’d loved.

But this wasn’t progress. This was premeditation . . . something with which I was not unfamiliar, but that still didn’t make it all right.

“Okay,” I said, hanging on to the passenger door. He was taking the hairpin curves along the sea at an impressive clip now that the traffic was thinning out. “Well, I guess that’s what you’d better do, then. Go ahead and take out Jimmy and the priest. I’ll enjoy CeeCee’s headline: “ ‘Young Physician Wastes Promising Future with Sizzling Hot Wife by Murdering Scumbags.’ ”

Jesse didn’t laugh. “Someone has to do it, Susannah.”

“Yeah, but like I said, that someone doesn’t have to be you. Your job is to save lives, not take them.”

“Like I said, sometimes by taking one, you can save others. And if I don’t do it, who will? You?”

“Why not me? It’s not like . . .”

“Like what?”

I clamped my mouth shut, realizing what I’d been about to cavalierly admit to Jesse: that I’d been contemplating killing Paul ever since I’d received that e-mail from him. The only reason I’d agreed to have dinner with him was because afterward, when we retired to his hotel room for “dessert,” I planned to mediate him, permanently.

But this was another thing a girl should keep secret, right? There’s no reason for her intended to know everything about her.

“Never mind,” I murmured, looking out over the sea. It had been burnished amber by the sun, slowly sinking toward the west. The sky, the beaches, the water—the whole area, as far as the eye could see, was glowing with the same golden sheen as Lucia’s hair . . .

Saint Lucia is the one they always show wearing a crown of lit candles around her head, usually at Christmastime. She’d supposedly worn the candles around her head in order to be hands-free while leading hundreds of Christians to freedom through the darkness of the catacombs beneath Rome, a job not unlike my own, leading the souls of the dead to the light of the afterlife.

“What did you say?” Jesse asked. The wind rushing past us from behind the windshield was noisy, making it hard to hear.

“Nothing. Look, how long is your shift this weekend?”

“I’m on call starting at five tonight. I’m not off again until tomorrow afternoon.”

“Okay,” I said, shouting to be heard above the wind. “Great. I’ll get in touch with CeeCee and see what she can find out about where Jimmy Delgado lives.” I made a big show of pulling my phone from my purse. “Then maybe we can hit him—and Father Francisco, assuming he’s back from his alleged conference—tomorrow night.”

By tomorrow night, if things worked out the way I was planning, the Delgado Photography Studio and possibly even Sacred Trinity would be in ashes.

The only thing still standing would be 99 Pine Crest Road. I hoped.

“We?” Jesse threw me a suspicious glance as we headed through the gate that said THANK FOR YOU VISITING 17-MILE DRIVE. PLEASE COME AGAIN. “Not we.”

“Yes, we,” I said. “I’m your fiancée. I understand you’re not entirely up on twenty-first-century social mores, Jesse, but it’s considered rude these days not to invite your fiancée to your vigilante party.”

His lips twisted into a cynical smile. “Not this time, Susannah.”

“What do you mean, not this time? What kind of sexist bullsh—?”

“I’m well acquainted with your feelings about my nineteenth-century macho-man ways, Susannah, and I’ll be the first to admit many of those ways were wrong. But some of them aren’t. Some of them work better than your twenty-first-century ways, which seem to allow child murderers to go unpunished and”—he held up a hand to silence me when I began to protest—“young girls to needlessly suffer. So perhaps just this once you’ll allow me to do things my way.”

“Oh,” I said. “Oh, okay, Sheriff de Silva. I’ll just go decorate some bonnets while you execute a few criminals without due process.”

His smile became even more infuriatingly cynical. “You don’t even know how to sew.”

“Yeah, well, I do know how to shoot a gun. I’ve been taking target lessons with Jake over at the range in Monterey. But if you don’t want me around, fine. I’ll just sit quietly at home like a good little bride-to-be while you’re out fighting the bad guys.”

His lifted his gaze from the road to glance at me.

“I do want you around, Susannah,” he said. “That’s why I want you at home. I’ve lost too many people—all the people—I love. I can’t lose you, too. Do you understand? That’s why you have to let me take Delgado myself, alone. I want you around forever.”

“Oh.” Now I felt like a jerk for having called him a macho man so many times. Not, of course, that it made a difference. If anything, his admission only strengthened my resolve not to change a single thing I was planning to do. “Well, when you put it that way. Okay. Okay, sure.”

Even through the dark lenses of his sunglasses, I could see that his gaze hadn’t strayed from mine. “Why do I get the feeling that you’re hiding something from me, querida?”

“Me?” I asked in an innocent voice as I texted rapidly. “I would never hide anything from you.”