I’ve been seeing the souls of the dead who’ve left unfinished business on earth for as long as I can remember. I “mediated” my first ghost—mediate is what we pros call it when we help a troubled spirit cross from this world to the next, which, unless you happen to be Paul Slater, we do without charge—when I was just a toddler.
I can remember it like it was yesterday: I think that old lady ghost was more frightened of me than I was of her.
But this was the first time I’d ever seen a ghost clutching a wad of paper towels to a wound to staunch the blood flowing from it.
Forgetting to keep my cool, let alone my secret (that I see dead people), I leapt from my office desk chair, crying, “Oh, my God!”
It took me a few seconds to realize that if she was recently deceased, this girl wouldn’t still be gushing blood.
Nor would the full-bosomed, gray-haired figure of the vice-principal be steering her toward me, saying with forced cheer, “It’s all right, Becca, dear. Everything’s going to be all right. Miss Simon will get that little cut bandaged up, and this will all be straightened out.”
In that instant I knew:
This girl was very much alive.
Also that Sister Ernestine was crazy. That “little cut” on Becca’s arm didn’t look so little to me, judging from the amount of blood pumping out of it. It looked like a full-on gusher. And none of this was going to be “straightened out” anytime soon, especially since the phone in my back pocket was buzzing.
Paul was calling back, of course, to make sure I’d be showing up for our “dessert.”
“Susannah.” There wasn’t the faintest trace of cheer in Sister Ernestine’s voice when she addressed me.
This was not unusual. I’d never been one of Sister Ernestine’s favorite students back when I’d attended school here, and six years later she’d been appalled at the idea of hiring me. She had preferred the former full-time administrative assistant, Ms. Carper, but due to cutbacks, dwindling enrollment, Father Dominic’s insistence that I’d make a fine, read: free, intern, and Ms. Carper’s sudden decision to run off to India with her married Bikram Yoga instructor, the nun had had no choice.
“Where is Father Dominic?” Sister Ernestine demanded.
“He’s at that conference in San Luis Obispo,” I reminded her, my fingers hovering over the phone. Not my cell—I let Paul’s call go to voice mail—but the office phone. “He won’t be back until tonight. Sister, I really think we should call 911, don’t—”
The nun cut me off, her gaze darting to the open doorway to the guidance counselor’s office on the other side of my desk.
“Becca’s fine. Put that phone down. Where is Miss Diaz?”
“Lunch,” I said. “Ms. Diaz said she’d be back in half an hour.”
What Ms. Diaz actually said was that she was going down to Carmel Beach to “split a footlong” with Mr. Gillarte, the track coach and PE instructor, but as they were trying to keep their sizzling affair with cold cuts and one another on the down-low from the higher-ups, I obviously couldn’t mention this.
What I also couldn’t mention to Sister Ernestine was the second emergency I could now see blooming on the horizon. That’s because my initial assessment of the situation had been correct:
There was a dead girl in the room.
It just wasn’t Becca, the student Sister Ernestine had escorted into the office, who was barely managing to keep the blood flow from her left wrist under control with paper towels someone—I was guessing the good sister—had seized from one of the restrooms.
Younger than Becca by about six or eight years, the dead girl was peeping out from behind Becca’s skirt. She seemed to be trying to make herself as transparent and unnoticeable as possible.
It wasn’t working, though. Her otherworldly glow was bright enough that I could see it even with the sunlight streaming through the office’s tall, wide casement windows. It was as noticeable to me as the blood on the living girl.
No one else could see it, however. No one but me.
There wasn’t time to deal with a dead girl, though. Not when there was a living one in the same room, dripping blood down her own shirt.
I went into Ms. Diaz’s office and grabbed the first-aid kit. Since the Junípero Serra Mission Academy lacks not only a full-time (paid) administrative assistant but a school nurse, I’ve been filling in as both.
My cell phone chimed again. I knew without looking that this time it wasn’t Paul, but Jesse calling from St. Francis, the newly renovated medical center in Monterey where he’d been lucky enough to win his fellowship . . . although I sometimes wondered, in spite of Jesse’s being a brilliant medical student, how much luck had to do with it. St. Francis had at one time been a Catholic hospital, and Father Dominic’s influence over the local archdiocese is considerable.
The ringtone I’d assigned Jesse was Elton John’s oldie but still goodie “Someone Saved My Life Tonight.” Jesse had saved my life so many times—and I his—that it was pretty much a no-brainer that this was our song, especially given the line about butterflies being free to fly away. We’d given each other the freedom to fly away, but we’d chosen instead to stay together, despite what had seemed, at times, like insurmountable odds against us.
Now, even though Jesse and I no longer shared a mediator/non-compliant-deceased-person bond, he still always seemed to know when my life needed saving, or even when I was merely feeling uneasy . . . like because there were a couple of very distressed girls—one living, one not so much—standing in my office.
I told myself that’s why he was calling, anyway, and not because he’d sensed, from a half dozen miles away, that Paul Slater was trying to sextort me.
“Hi,” I whispered into the phone. “I can’t talk right now. Things here at work are a little crazy. Can I call you back?”
“Of course, querida.”
Simply hearing that deep, smooth tone made the tight muscles in the back of my neck loosen, my shattered nerves begin to heal. Jesse’s voice was a soothing elixir, whipped cream floating on rich steaming cocoa on a cold winter morning.
“I wanted to make sure you were all right,” he said. “I got the strangest feeling a few minutes ago that something was wrong. I’d have called then, but I was with a patient.”
“Wrong? Nope, everything’s fine.”
What was I doing? Jesse and I were engaged. We were supposed to be completely honest with each other.
Except I couldn’t afford to be honest with Jesse. Not about one thing. Well, one person, anyway.
“Sister E brought a student in here who’s a little banged up, that’s all,” I said. “Everything else is totally copacetic.”
Don’t let him sense I’m lying, don’t let him sense I’m lying, don’t let him sense I’m lying . . .
“I see,” Jesse said. “Well, you know where you can bring her if it gets to be too much for you to handle. Not that there’s much you can’t handle, Susannah.”
Jesse’s always insisted my nickname, Suze, is too ugly and diminutive for a girl of my strength and beauty. With Jesse it’s always been Susannah or—later, when he got to know me better—querida, which means sweetheart or my darling. It still sends a thrill through me when he says it, just like when he says my name.
Let’s face it, I’m warm for the boy’s form. Which is good, since I fully intend to marry that form. I don’t care how many Egyptian curses I have to break in order to do it.
“I think I’ve got things under control for now,” I said. “I’ll call you later when I can talk more.”
“Yes, you will. Because there is very definitely something going on that you’re not telling me. Am I right, Susannah?”
“Damn, Jesse,” I said, hoping my lighthearted tone would disguise the fact that I really was unsettled by his seeing through my lie. “You may not be a ghost yourself anymore, but you sure as hell can sense when one’s around. How do you do that?”
“A ghost? Is that all? I thought at the very least you’d found out you’d won the Powerball.”
“Ha! I wish. I’d buy you that cool new PET scanner you’ve been wanting.”
I knew Jesse was only acting as if he wasn’t concerned. He’s protective by nature, and when it came to the supernatural, he’s more than simply protective. He was what we call in the counseling trade hypervigilant.
Considering what he’d been through, however, this was only natural.
“Look out for yourself, then, all right, querida? The last thing I want is my fiancée being brought in to the ER as a patient.”
“You know that’s never going to happen. I can’t stand doctors, remember? They think they know everything.”
“Because we do know everything, actually. Te amo, querida.”
Thankfully he hung up before he could do any more extrasensory percepting (or turn me into a puddle of desire right there on the phone).
I hung up, too. There was no way on earth I was going to tell Jesse about Paul’s threat, let alone his proposition. It would only make him angry.
Angry? It would set off a thermal nuclear explosion inside his head.
And now—despite Paul’s assertions otherwise—Jesse was a gainfully employed, full-blooded citizen. Unlike before, if he was caught attempting to kill a fellow citizen, he had a lot to lose, what with his fellowship and our planned wedding next year in the basilica at the Carmel Mission. True, the invitations hadn’t gone out yet, but there were two hundred guests and counting on the list . . . none of them family from the groom’s side, of course, all of Jesse’s relatives having died over a century earlier, something Jesse pretended not to mind. But who wouldn’t be bothered by it?
It would be awkward to have to pay back all those deposits due to the groom having been indicted for murder.
And what about the private grant Jesse had applied for that, if he won it, would help pay back a substantial chunk of what he owed in student loans, and also help finance his own practice after he became certified? (As long as he agreed to serve uninsured and low-income patients, something he’d planned on doing anyway. One in five American households lives below the poverty line, even in a community as outwardly glitzy as Carmel.)
Jesse’s chances of winning it out of so many hundreds of applicants would be another miracle that I didn’t think we could count on.
I came out of Ms. Diaz’s office and waved the first-aid kit at the bleeding girl. “Let me take a look at that.”
“No, it’s okay,” Becca protested, backing away from me and pulling her arm close. “I’m fine.”
She was so far from fine this statement was almost hilarious—except no one was laughing. Besides the blood dripping from her arm, some had spilled down the front of her school uniform—the school had reinstituted a uniform policy after having relaxed it in the years I’d been there (I tried not to take the reinstitution personally). Now all students were required to wear a navy blue sweater over a white shirt, with either gray trousers or a blue plaid skirt. This girl had opted for the skirt.
Her mouse brown hair looked as if it had never met conditioner . . . or a brush. Her skin was pale and unhealthily blemished, her uniform a size or two too big on her. She was wearing glasses with frames that appeared to have been purchased in the early 2000s, or perhaps were hand-me-downs from the nineties.
To use the phrasing of a (soon-to-be) professional school counselor, this kid was a hot mess, and that’s not even mentioning the Non-Compliant Deceased Person hanging on to one of the pleats of her too-big navy plaid skirt, dragging it even further askew.
I was the only person in the room who could see it, but I was sure Becca could feel the extra weight. She probably had chronic back or neck pain for which her doctor could find no medical cause.
I knew the cause. It was a ghostly parasite, and I was staring right at it, and at the miserable expression it was provoking from its human host.
Then again, that misery might have been because Becca had just jacked up her wrist so badly, and was being hauled around by one of the state of California’s biggest busybodies.
“You sit down right here, Becca,” Sister Ernestine said, all but shoving the bleeding girl into the mission-style chair across from my desk. Only it wasn’t a chair designed to look mission style, it was a chair likely dating back to the 1700s when Father Junípero Serra, a Franciscan friar from Spain who had recently been sainted by Pope Francis, had run up and down the coast of California, frantically building missions so he could beat the Lord’s word into the Native Americans he had captured and held there. Judging by their extreme creakiness, I wouldn’t doubt most of the school’s office furniture has been around since old Father Serra’s time. “Let Miss Simon bandage those cuts. I’m going to telephone your parents.”
“No!” Becca cried, trying to leap back up from the chair. “I told you, Sister, I’m fine! This is stupid. My compass slipped in geometry, is all. You don’t have to call my parents. Mr. Walden was way overreacting—”
“Mr. Walden?” I raised a skeptical eyebrow as I snapped on a pair of latex gloves.
It’s completely humiliating that after nearly six years of postsecondary education, the only place in the entire state of California where I could find employment (and not even paying employment) is my former high school. But there are a few upsides. At least here I can tell when kids are lying to my face about the teachers.
“Mr. Walden doesn’t overreact,” I said. “I had him for my junior and senior years. If he says there’s a problem, there’s a problem. So show me your arm, please.”
The girl stared at me through her overlarge, brown plastic frames.
“Wait,” she said, registering what the nun had called me. “Miss Simon? Are you Suze Simon? The one who knocked the head off the Father Serra statue in the courtyard?”
My gaze slid quickly toward Sister Ernestine, who’d fortunately bustled into her office and was already on the phone, presumably with Becca’s parents.
“Nope,” I said, turning back to Becca. “Never heard of her.”
The girl dropped her voice so the nun couldn’t overhear us. “Yes, you are. Everyone says you knocked Father Serra’s head off with your bare hands during a fight, and that you had to work here in the office to pay to get the statue’s head soldered back on.” Her eyes widened. “Oh, my God. Are they still making you work here to pay it off? Didn’t you graduate, like, ten years ago?”
“Six. Six years ago. How old do people think I am, anyway? Arm, please.”
Reluctantly, the girl stretched her wrist toward me and I plucked the wad of paper towels from it . . . then inhaled almost as sharply as she did, but not for the same reason. Her blood had finally coagulated, and my ripping the paper towels from the wound had torn it open afresh, causing her to cry out in pain.
I gasped because now that I could finally see the injury, I could tell it hadn’t been the result of any accident, though it had definitely been done with a sharp instrument—maybe even like she said, a geometry compass. Carved into the pale flesh of the back of her left wrist were the red letters:
STUP
Whoever—or whatever—had done it had been stopped before getting to what I had to assume were the last two letters, ID.
Stupid.
Someone—or something—had tried to carve the word stupid in the flesh of this girl’s arm.