Remembrance (The Mediator #7) (20 page)

I winced. It didn’t help that the only job Brad had ever been able to keep was with his father-in-law, Debbie Mancuso’s dad, the Mercedes King of Carmel. Trying to keep up with the mortgage payments on the overpriced home on the golf course Debbie insisted they
had
to have in Carmel Valley Ranch (because that’s where all her friends who couldn’t afford houses in Pebble Beach lived), plus pay the fees for the girls’ private school education wasn’t easy. My mom and Andy helped out where they could, and both Jake and I had given Brad a few loans, too.

But I didn’t know how long the two of them were going to be able to keep it together, especially since Debbie insisted on being a stay-at-home mom, even with the girls gone all day (the mission believed a full-day kindergarten program improved cognitive development. It also improved the mission’s tuition coffers).

Debbie said she needed the “me” time to be the best mom she could be. A lot of her “me” time seemed to be spent working out at the gym with a personal trainer, buying clothes, and going to lunch with the likes of Kelly Prescott Walters.

Of course, Brad took a lot of “me” time for himself, playing golf and partying at Snail Crossing.

I totally understood their need for so much “me” time, since being the parents of rambunctious triplets (and the spouses of one another) had to be really exhausting.

“Brad, you’ve got to find a new job. One where you aren’t dependent on your father-in-law for your income.”

“I know.” He kicked at another dried bougainvillea bud. “But who’d want to hire me? I don’t have a college degree. I barely managed to graduate high school. I know I screwed up. At least I have them.” His gaze rested tenderly on his three daughters, who were now having a contest to see who could stretch their gum into the longest strand.

My own gaze rested on Brad—not exactly tenderly, but with more affection than in the past. He’d driven me crazy the entire time we’d been forced by our parents to live together—so much so that I’d given him the private nickname Dopey, and often wished for his premature death.

But his love for his daughters—and the fact that I rarely, if ever, had to watch him drink directly from a milk carton anymore—mostly made up for that.

“Hey!” he yelled at the girls, startling me. “What have I told you before? Gum stays in your mouth!”

That’s when I noticed something sitting beside Jesse on the bench, something I hadn’t seen earlier because it hadn’t been there earlier. It was white and fuzzy, with brown spots on it. It was shaped like a stuffed horse.

Lucia’s stuffed horse.

Jesse noticed the direction of my stare. He’d never seen Lucia’s horse, and had no way of knowing it belonged to her. But he knew it didn’t belong to the girls, because it was gleaming with the faint otherworldly glow all paranormal objects give off when they’ve recently made the journey from their dimension to ours.

That was why Jesse reached out instinctively to knock it from the bench, even though it could not hurt the girls. Not being mediators, they couldn’t see it. Still, his hypervigilance was not something he could turn on and off like a switch.

It turned out not to matter, however.

“
That’s mine
,” Mopsy said, and snatched the horse from beneath his fingers, then hugged it to her heart.

dieciseis

“
I don’t think this is a good idea,” Jesse said.

“Your objection’s duly noted. And you’re obviously not the only one. Debbie doesn’t seem too happy about it, either.”

It was much later. Jesse and I were seated in uncomfortable lawn chairs beside the fire pit in the backyard of Brad and Debbie’s three-bedroom house in Carmel Valley Ranch.

Brad’s fire pit paled in comparison to the one his older brother had constructed at Snail Crossing. Jake’s was made of limestone and was sunk into the ground and surrounded by luxurious built-in couches in a wooded area of the Crossing’s backyard, not far from the redwood hot tub (which comfortably fit ten).

Brad’s fire pit was an overturned metal drum that he’d placed not far from the girls’ swing set, engendering the wrath of his wife, who felt this was unsafe.

This wasn’t all that had engendered Debbie’s wrath.

“You don’t have to stay,” I whispered to Jesse, for what had to have been the fiftieth time since we’d pulled through the gated entrance to the golf resort community in which my stepbrother and his wife lived.

“Of course I have to stay. I’m not going to leave my future wife alone in a house that’s being haunted by a murderous demon child.”

“We don’t know that she’s haunting it. And I thought we established that she probably isn’t murderous, just overprotective. A lot like someone else I know . . .” I let my voice trail off suggestively.

He ignored me. “Then why, precisely, are we here?”

“To make sure the girls are okay.”

We had to keep our voices low because Brad and Debbie were inside the house having what they called “a discussion,” but what I thought might better be described as a domestic dispute. Debbie hadn’t been too happy when she’d come home from Pilates to find that she had houseguests.

I could understand it. I probably wouldn’t be too thrilled, either, to come home from my exercise class to find that my stepsister-in-law and her boyfriend had shown up at my house with their overnight bags.

Still, it was for a good cause. Too bad we couldn’t explain what it was.

Every once in a while we could hear Brad’s and Debbie’s voices through the thin walls and vinyl siding of their bi/split level. Their home was lovely, but it hadn’t been made of the soundest construction material. I wondered if Slater Properties had had something to do with it.

“Why did you have to pick tonight, of all nights, to invite them over?” I could hear Debbie demanding with perfect clarity from inside their kitchen (all stainless-steel appliances, but the dishwasher and trash compactor were often broken, usually at the same time).

“I told you. They invited
themselves
over, Debbie.” Brad sounded tired. “Something about a class Suze is taking. She needs to observe kids in their home environment overnight.”

“Great. So she chooses tonight to do it? With no advance warning?”

“She’s my sister. What was I supposed to do?”

“She’s your
step
sister. And you could have said no. God, you are such a pushover, Brad. You let everyone walk all over you. Did you lose your balls as well as your brains when you got that concussion playing football in high school?”

“Hey,” Brad said. “Could you keep it down? They can probably hear you. And it was wrestling, not football.”

“Ask me how much I care, Brad.”

“You know, I really don’t understand it,” I said to Jesse, taking a sip of the wine we’d brought, along with a couple of pizzas. “How do you think it happened?”

“Father Dominic was probably taken off guard,” Jesse said. He reached out to squeeze my hand reassuringly. “But like I said, he’s strong. His vitals were looking much better before we left.”

I remembered the father’s pale and battered face as I’d last seen it underneath the fluorescent lights of his hospital room, how sunken his eyes had looked beneath those paper-thin lids, the frailness of his hands resting on the blue blanket, the tangle of IV tubes flowing from them.

If that was “much better,” I’d hate to know what “worse” looked like.

“And we made good use of those items I ‘borrowed’ from the church,” Jesse went on. “That Medal of Mary we hung over his bed should keep him safe tonight, along with all the holy water.”

“That isn’t what I meant,” I said. “I meant the girls. How could
that
have happened? How could they be
mediators
?”

“Oh, that,” Jesse said. “Well, as you so astutely explained to me only last night, Susannah, when a man and a woman like each other very much, they make love, and when they do, if they don’t use protection—like your stepbrother and sister-in-law—sometimes the man’s sperm can fertilize the woman’s egg, and if either of them is carrying the genetic chromosome for communicating with the dead, then there’s a chance their baby could turn out to be—”

I punched him in the shoulder, causing him to slosh some of the wine in his glass. But it was okay, since Max—whom we’d stopped off at the Crossing to bring along, as he’s such an excellent ghost detector—jumped up immediately, eager for the possibility that some food might have been spilled. Disappointed that it was only wine, however, he lay back down at our feet with a sigh.

“Ow,” Jesse said, rubbing his shoulder where I’d punched him.

“I didn’t hit you that hard. And that’s exactly what I mean. I don’t think either the Ackerman family or the Mancusos are carrying the mediator gene. I didn’t meet a single person at Brad and Debbie’s wedding who seemed remotely intuitive. Did you?”

“No.” Jesse poured more wine into his glass. “And sometimes I think you don’t know your own strength. But I’ve always felt that your stepbrother David is very perceptive. Occasionally I was able to communicate with him back when I was . . .”

“—dead,” I finished for him when he hesitated to say the word.

“Yes. Thank you.”

“No problem.”

I took a sip from my glass and looked up at the stars—what I could see of them through the many electric wires intersecting the sky across the yard from Brad and Debbie’s neighbors’ houses—and wondered how I was ever going to get over to Carmel Hills to salt the old house now. It seemed that fate, in the form of Lucia Martinez, was conspiring against me.

“I agree, David’s a really insightful kid,” I said. I was speaking quietly so neither the girls, who had upon occasion opened their bedroom window to spy on us after being put to bed, nor Debbie or Brad would overhear me. “But David’s not those girls’ dad. Brad is. And Debbie’s their mom. Brad is much less intuitive than good old Max here, and Debbie thinks vaccines
cause
diseases. So how can their kids see ghosts? And how are we ever going to explain that to their parents?”

“We’re not going to,” Jesse said. “Any more than I explained to them that in a previous lifetime I watched entire families die from smallpox. If Debbie doesn’t believe the substantial scientific proof that vaccines will protect her children from disease, how likely do you think she is to believe that they—and you and I—can see and speak to ghosts?”

“Uh, very? Especially now, since that toy the girls had belongs to the ghost of a child who died before they were born—a child who tried to murder their school principal this afternoon. The girls shouldn’t have been able to see it, let alone have possession of it, unless they’re mediators, which they can’t be, because no one on either side of their parents’ families has ever been a mediator—”

“That we know of.”

“Fine, that we know of. And yet, they could see that toy. And Lucia, too, apparently.”

Jesse couldn’t deny it was true. When I’d snatched the toy away from the triplets and asked them where it had come from, Cotton-tail had volunteered, “He belongs to our friend Lucy. But she lets us borrow him sometimes.”

“Yeah,” Mopsy had said. “Whenever we want, basically.”

A chill had passed over me even though I’d been wearing my black leather jacket. It had gotten worse when their father had laughed and asked, “You’ve never met Lucy, Suze? What’s wrong with you? Lucy’s their favorite new friend. They play with Lucy all the time at school, don’t you, guys?”

“Sometimes,” Flopsy had corrected him. “Sometimes she comes to school, sometimes she doesn’t. She wasn’t in school today.”

“But she’s here now, isn’t she?” Brad had asked. “Lucy’s standing over there, right, Emma?”

He’d pointed at one of the bougainvillea vines to the left of Mopsy.

The girls had glanced in the direction their father was pointing, then looked scornfully away.

“No, Daddy,” Flopsy had said in a pitying voice. “Lucy isn’t here right now. Lucy went home.”

Brad had given me another sheepish grin and shrugged. “Oops, sorry. Lucy isn’t here right now. I guess she left her toy behind.” He’d said the word
toy
like it had quotation marks around it.

I’d looked from the girls to their father, my feeling of horror turning to one of incredulity.

“Wait a minute,” I’d said to my stepbrother. “Can you see this?” I’d held up the stuffed horse.

“Sure,” Brad had said. “Of course I can see it.” Then he’d given me a broad wink.

I still hadn’t been able to tell if Brad could see the toy or was only play-acting for the girls.

“If you see it,” I’d said to him, “tell me what it is.”

“An elephant, of course,” Brad had said.

The girls had fallen over themselves with laughter that their tall, invincible father had gotten the answer wrong.

So Debbie and Brad’s daughters were mediators. How could I not have recognized the signs until a very dangerous—and very angry—ghost had decided to use them to deliver a message to me? I couldn’t fathom it.

But that’s what Lucia’s giving them her toy at the hospital, right under my nose, had to be. A message.

But about what? To say what? That she could get to the people I loved—the most vulnerable and innocent of all—anytime she wanted?

Hadn’t she already delivered this message by nearly killing Father Dominic?

So many things had begun to fall into place. Like this greatgrandmother the girls were always talking about, the one who’d broken her hip, then died of pneumonia. When they mentioned things she’d said, they weren’t things she’d said to them before she’d died, but
after.

And their extraordinarily high energy level, and frequent outbursts, including the one the day before, when they had sensed all the way in the kindergarten classroom Lucia’s attack on me in the office, and Sister Ernestine had been summoned to calm them down.

All of these were signs not that they had ADHD, as Sister Ernestine suggested, but that they could—and often did—communicate with the dead.

This gift—as Father Dominic chose to call it—affected different people in different ways. It had caused Paul’s younger brother Jack to withdraw into himself, giving him night terrors and eventually agoraphobia. I’m sure my therapist, Dr. Jo, probably would have said he lacked the “inner resiliency” to handle so much psychic energy coming at him all at once, until I’d shown him how to process it.