Remembrance (The Mediator #7) (21 page)

Other people, however—like Paul, and my stepnieces—found this psychic energy stimulating rather than draining, and enjoyed having twice as many playmates as their friends (even if no one but them could see them) . . . or making twice as much money because of it.

I was already feeling a lot of guilt for not having picked up sooner rather than later on all the clues about the triplets, and for many of the things I’d done to NCDPs in front of them.

The question now was, how much of it had they understood? And just what, precisely, was their relationship with Lucia? Were their lives really in danger from the little girl? Or was she, as the girls insisted, a playmate? It seemed hard to believe that creature who’d tried to drown me in the pool and nearly killed Father Dominic and seemed slowly to be draining the life from Becca Walters was on friendly terms with anyone.

I wished, for the hundredth time that evening, that Father Dom were not lying unconscious on the third floor of St. Francis Medical Center. He would have known exactly what to do—not only about the triplets, but about Lucia.

Then again, his conviction that he’d known what to do about Lucia was how he’d ended up in the ICU in the first place.

We were on our own with this one.

We’d had no luck questioning the girls back at the hospital, nor later when we’d arrived bearing pizza. Brad had been anxious to get them bathed and fed before Mommy got home, and the girls had been too excited about having Uncle Jesse and Aunt Suze over to rationally answer any of my questions about their new friend Lucy.

Then Mommy had returned. Debbie had been none too happy to find us there, even though in addition to pizza, we’d brought her favorite wine—the good kind, from a vineyard in the area that sold their bottles to expensive restaurants in New York City for three times what they cost locally. Debbie had drunk a whole bottle on her own and was working on a second one.

“I just don’t get it,” I said to Jesse as he poured me some of the very good wine from an extra bottle we’d hidden in the car. “Brad used to tease me that he knew I had a boy in my room, back in high school, because he said he heard us talking. But I think he only overheard
my
end of the conversation. He never actually saw you. And Debbie never did, either. So how can their children be mediators?”

“Neither of your parents saw spirits. Obviously it can skip a generation. Maybe even two or more.” Jesse poured a splash of pinot noir into his own glass. “And we don’t know that the girls are full-fledged mediators, necessarily. Children tend to be more sensitive in general to paranormal phenomena than adults. They’re more imaginative, and more open-minded.”

“
Sensitive?
Did you see those girls fighting over that horse, Jesse? They each grabbed a leg and pulled. If I hadn’t stopped them, they’d have ripped it apart, then killed each other. I wouldn’t exactly call the Ackerman girls sensitive.”

“Well . . . a better description might be high-spirited, like their aunt.”

“I’m not even related to them by blood, remember? None of that is from me.”

I shivered in the cool night air. The fire from Brad’s pit wasn’t doing much to cut the chill, though the pungent smell of the smoke was pleasant, as was the crackling sound of the wood as it burned.

“What I don’t get is how this could have happened right under our noses, without us ever noticing. I had no clue. Did you?”

“The girls had that private language,” he reminded me. “They spoke it among themselves until last year.”

I straightened. “That’s right! How could I forget? You even wrote that paper on it—cryptophasia. Debbie was so worried the mission was going to put them into special education.”

“But it’s not unusual for multiples. There’ve been many incidents of siblings—mainly twins, but occasionally triplets and quads—developing their own language. And, like your nieces, they usually grow out of it by the time they get to school.”

“That’s why it took so long for us to catch on.” I relaxed a little. “And all of us thinking it was so cute probably only encouraged them to use it more, and be
more
secretive. Well, all of us except Debbie. She didn’t think it was cute. And she was right! Jesse, they must have been talking to each other about the ghosts they were seeing. Could we have been bigger idiots?”

“I think you’re being a little hard on yourself,” Jesse said mildly.

“Do you really think Lucia plays with them, like they said, or is she only setting them up to push them down the stairs, too, when they least suspect it?”

“You’re the one who keeps insisting she’s an innocent child in pain.”

“She is,” I said hastily. “I’m sure.”

“You’d better hope so. Otherwise, if she murders Brad and Debbie in their sleep tonight, we’ll end up with custody of your nieces, since we’re their appointed legal guardians.”

“Why do you think we’re here? Brad and Debbie don’t have life insurance. We can’t let them croak. We’ll have to put off having our own kids in order to be able to afford to raise theirs.”

He glanced around the balding, toy-strewn lawn and muttered something rapidly in Spanish. I didn’t understand what he said, but I understood the tone.

“Oh, my God, Jesse, I was kidding! Would you stop worrying so much about money? I told you, I have plenty. And we can get on the having children of our own thing tonight, if you want.” I laid a hand upon his knee. “I’m pretty sure their guest room door has a lock on it.”

The look he gave me was crushing. “Really, Susannah? That’s where you’d like for us to make love for the first time, in your brother Brad’s guest room, where he keeps his wrestling trophies?”

“Stepbrother. God.” I removed my hand. “Way to ruin the moment. When are you going to—”

Max leapt suddenly to his feet. But this time it wasn’t because either of us had dropped food, or even spilled our wine. Max had sensed something he didn’t like in the darkest corner of the yard, over by the girls’ pink and white fairy playhouse, big enough only for three very small girls (and one sheepish step-aunt) to squeeze into.

“What—?” I began, but Jesse shushed me.

All the fur on Max’s back had risen, and he began to growl, deep in his throat. For an elderly dog of such a mild, friendly temperament, Max had reverted with startling abruptness to his lupine ancestry. His lips were curled to reveal yellowed fangs I was certain I’d never seen before.

Now Jesse placed a hand on
my
knee, but unfortunately it was only to keep me in my seat, since my instinctive reaction had been to rise and head toward the fairy playhouse sitting so benignly in the blackness.

“Stay where you are,” Jesse whispered, his own gaze never leaving the innocuous plastic structure. He’d risen and begun following Max, who’d sunk down to his haunches and was creeping toward the dark corner of the yard like a wolf stalking prey.

“I’m sure it’s only a raccoon,” I said, not believing for an instant that it was only a raccoon.

Jesse confirmed this suspicion when he said, “Max has never growled like that at a raccoon.” He’d reached into the pocket of his coat and extracted a small shiny object that he pointed in the direction of the playhouse.

My heart skipped a beat. I don’t know if I was more frightened or impressed. “Is that a
gun
?”

“Of course it’s not a gun, Susannah. It’s a cordless lamp.” Jesse noticed I hadn’t obeyed his command to stay where I was and was creeping along behind him. “What are you doing? Get back to the house.”

“Don’t be stupid. What’s a cordless lamp? Oh, you mean a flashlight. Oh,
Jesus.
”

Jesse had switched on his flashlight and trained the bright blue beam at the playhouse. As soon as he did, it seemed to startle whatever was inside.

What happened next came in quick succession. Max snarled, then lunged at what came bursting through one of the playhouse’s windows.

At first, because it made a flapping sound, I assumed it was a bird.

But since it was also very large and glowing with the intensity of a pair of car headlights, right into my eyes, and let out a scream as piercing and shrill as a kettle left too long on a hot burner, I knew it was no bird. It was something otherworldly.

And it was very unhappy to have been disturbed.

diecisiete

I threw my hands over my head, unable to stifle a shriek of my own. I heard Jesse shout beside me, and Max barking as he turned into a vicious guard dog from a prison movie.

When the shrill banshee shriek finally faded from my ears, I lowered my arms and opened my eyes to find that the light had gone. The yard was once again in darkness, except for the light cast by the thin sliver of moon that had just begun to rise, the warm red glow from the fire pit, and the yellow patches of light cast from the windows of Brad and Debbie’s house. In their reflection I could see Max running around the yard, sniffing frantically to locate the quarry he’d flushed from the playhouse.

On either side of Brad and Debbie’s house, I saw neighbors parting the curtains and looking through their own windows, wondering what could possibly be going on next door. Nothing at all happened inside Brad and Debbie’s, which was odd. How could they not have heard something that had roused the rest of the block?

“What,” I whispered to Jesse, knowing we were being watched, “was that?”

The beam from Jesse’s cordless lamp was still trained against what now looked like a perfectly ordinary pink and white fairy castle . . . with one exception.

“I think we both know.” He’d sunk down to one knee in front of the three-foot door to the fairy castle. He pointed to something in the grass. “She left something behind.”

“What is it?” My ears were still ringing from the shrillness of the scream. I wasn’t sure if it was Lucia’s or my own. “It better not be a bloody horse head, or I will lose my shit.”

Jesse prodded it. “A horse head? Oh, you mean
The Godfather
.” This was one of the many movies I’d made Jesse watch in order catch up with modern American culture. “No. It’s quite small. I think it’s a flower.”

“A
flower
?” I knelt down in the grass beside him. “Are you sure? That sounds awfully tame for Lucia.”

“Yes.” He lifted a small purple thing from the grass. It was no larger than a tube of my lip gloss. “A flower. Bougainvillea, I think.”

Bougainvillea? Why did that seem familiar?

An uneasy feeling—I’d been having way too many of those lately—came over me. I tapped him on the shoulder. “Give me the cordless lamp. I want to see something.”

He passed me the flashlight, and I leaned over to shine the beam inside the playhouse.

Then I froze, my blood suddenly going as cool as the evening air around us. “Crap.”

“What is it?” Jesse joined me in peering inside the fairy castle, but when he saw what I’d seen, his curse was in Spanish, not English, so it sounded a little classier.

Flowers. That was all. No bloody body parts, no Satanic symbols scrawled on the wall, no bizarre ritualistic runes made of sticks. Only flowers. Not just a few, either, scattered across the floor the way the triplets had been practicing for when they were in our wedding, but
hundreds
of dead flowers dumped as if someone had been getting rid of their yard waste, using the girls’ fairy castle as a trash receptacle.

Except that I knew who that someone was, and the yard waste had been carefully selected. It was
all
bougainvillea, all pink and purple flowers, like the ones that had been growing on the vines on the gazebo outside the hospital, beneath which Jesse and I had sat talking earlier that evening about Lucia Martinez’s murder.

As if that wasn’t creepy enough, four dolls sat around the table inside the playhouse (the very table at which I’d had pretend tea with the girls last week), their eyes staring unblinkingly at us through the dead bougainvillea blossoms that had been poured over their heads. The dolls were dressed in what I knew to be their “fanciest” outfits—because I’d been the one badgered into buying them—gowns that were now stained brown and yellow by the decomposing flowers.

I’d seen some pretty upsetting stuff done by the souls of the dead in the past, and even worse done by the living.

But the blank-eyed gazes of those dolls staring out at me from the darkness, amid that sea of flower corpses, was something I knew was going to haunt me forever.

I dropped the flashlight in order to press a hand to my mouth, then staggered away from the playhouse.

Jesse was at my side in an instant.

“What is it?” he asked, putting his arms around me protectively. “The dolls?”

I shook my head. “The smell.” Rotting bougainvillea stinks, especially in great quantities.

But I was lying. I was ashamed to admit how much the dolls had unnerved me. It wasn’t only their dead-eyed stare, but the fact that they looked just like my nieces—or how my nieces thought they looked. The girls had picked out the dolls themselves last Christmas from a catalog that advertised a line of “create your own dolls,” so each girl had selected a doll she felt represented herself. Flopsy and Cotton-tail had chosen mini-me’s, with blue eyes, long brown hair, and fair skin.

But Mopsy, ever the iconoclast, had scandalized her ultra-conservative maternal grandparents by choosing a doll with brown skin and even darker brown hair and eyes, a fact that had flattered and amused Jesse so much that I’d had to whisper to him during Christmas brunch to settle down, in case Grandpa Mancuso overheard him crowing, “She picked a doll that looks like me! I always told you, Emily’s the smart one. She wants to follow in my footsteps.”

I certainly hoped he was right, since if Paul got his way, Mopsy was the closest thing to a daughter Jesse was likely to get.

The fourth doll at the table had been a hand-me-down from one of the girls’ Ackerman cousins. She had blond hair that had been roughly hacked in front to give her the appearance of bangs.

Her resemblance to Lucia was close enough to cause my stomach to clench.

“What do you think she’s trying to do?” I asked. “Send us another message?”