Ninth Key

  Jesse glanced at me over his shoulder. He looked amused. “So?” he said.

  “So.” I slammed the receiver down. “Nailed, Jesse. As in impossible to budge.”

  “For you, maybe.” Even as he said it, the wooden shutters over the window closest to me began to tremble ominously as if blown by some unseen gale. “But not for me.”

  I watched, impressed. “Golly gee, mister,” I said. “I forgot all about your superpowers.”

  Jesse’s look went from amused to confused. “My what?”

  “Oh.” I dropped the imitation I’d been doing of a kid from an episode of Superman.

  “Never mind.”

  I heard, above the sound of nails screaming as if caught in the suck zone of an F5 tornado, people shouting. I glanced toward the elevator. The thugs, apparently concerned for their employer’s welfare, were calling his name up the shaft.

  I guess I didn’t blame them. Smoke was steadily filling the room. I could hear small eruptions now as chemicals—most likely of a hazardous nature—used in the upkeep of Mr. Beaumont’s fish tank burst into flames next door. If we didn’t get out of there soon, I had a feeling we’d all be inhaling some pretty toxic fumes.

  Fortunately, at that moment the shutters burst off first one and then another of the windows, with all the force as if a hurricane had suddenly ripped them off. Blam! And then blam again. I’d never seen anything like it before, not even on the Discovery Channel.

  Gray light rushed in. It was, I realized, still raining out.

  I didn’t care. I don’t think I’d ever been so glad to see the sky, even as darkly overcast as it was. I rushed to the window closest to me and looked out, squinting against the rain.

  We were, I saw, in the upper story of the house. Below us lay the patio….

  And the pool.

  The shouting up the elevator shaft was growing louder. The thicker the smoke grew, apparently, the more frantic the thugs became. God forbid one of them should think to dial 911. Then again, considering the career choices they’d made, that number probably didn’t hold much appeal for them.

  I measured the distance between myself and the deep end of the pool.

  “It can’t be more than twenty feet.” Jesse, observing my calculations, nodded to Marcus. “You go. I’ll look after him.” His dark-eyed gaze flicked toward the elevator shaft. “And them, if they make any progress.”

  I didn’t ask what he meant by “looking after.” I didn’t have to. The dangerous light in his eyes said it all.

  I glanced at Tad. Jesse followed my gaze, then rolled his eyes, the dangerous light extinguished. He muttered some stuff in Spanish.

  “Well, I can’t just leave him here,” I said.

  “No.”

  Which was how, a few seconds later, Tad, supported by me, but transported via the Jesse kinetic connection, ended up perched on the sill of one of those windows Jesse had blown open for me.

  The only way to get Tad into the pool—and to safety—was to drop him into it out the window. This was a risky enough endeavor without having an inferno blazing next door, and hired assassins bearing down on you. I had to concentrate. I didn’t want to do it wrong. What if I missed and he smacked onto the patio, instead? Tad could break his poison-oaky neck.

  But I didn’t have much choice in the matter. It was either turn him into a possible pancake, or let him be barbecued for true. I went with the possible pancake, thinking that he was likelier to heal in time for the prom from a cracked skull than third-degree burns, and, after aiming as best I could, I let go. He fell backward, like a scuba diver off the side of a boat, tumbling once through the sky and doing what Dopey would call a pretty sick inverted spin. (Dopey is an avid, if untalented, snowboarder.)

  Fortunately, Tad’s sick inverted spin ended with him floating on his back in the deep end of his father’s pool.

  Of course, to guarantee he didn’t drown—unconscious people aren’t the best swimmers—I jumped in after him…but not before one last look around.

  Marcus was finally starting to regain consciousness. He was coughing a little because of the smoke, and splashing around in the fishy water. Jesse stood over him, looking grim-faced.

  “Go, Susannah,” he said when he noticed I’d hesitated.

  I nodded. But there was still one thing I had to know.

  “You’re not…” I didn’t want to, but I had to ask. “You’re not going to kill him, are you?”

  Jesse looked as incredulous as if I’d asked him if he were going to serve Marcus a slice of cheese-cake. He said, “Of course not. Go.”

  I went.

  The water was warm. It was like jumping into a giant bathtub. When I’d swum up to the surface—not exactly easy in boots, by the way—I hurried to Tad’s side….

  Only to find that the water had revived him. He was splashing around, looking confused and taking in great lungfuls of water. I smacked him on the back a couple of times, and steered him to the side of the pool, which he clung to gratefully.

  “S-Sue,” he sputtered, bewilderedly. “What are you doing here?” Then he noticed my leather jacket. “And why aren’t you wearing a bathing suit?”

  “It’s a long story,” I said.

  He looked even more confused after that, but that was all right. I figured that, with as much stuff as he was going to have to deal with—his dad being a Prozac candidate, his uncle a serial killer—he didn’t need to have all the gory details spelled out for him right away. Instead, I guided him over toward the shallow end. We’d only been standing there a minute before Mr. Beaumont opened the sliding glass door and stepped outside.

  “Children,” he said. He was wearing a silk dressing gown and his bedroom slippers. He looked very excited. “What are you doing in that pool? There’s a fire! Get away from the house at once.”

  Even as he said it, I could hear, off in the distance, the whine of a siren. The fire department was on its way. Someone, anyway, had dialed 911.

  “I warned Marcus,” Mr. Beaumont said, as he held out a big fluffy towel for Tad to step into, “about the wiring in my office. I had a feeling it was faulty. My telephone absolutely would not make outgoing calls.”

  Still standing in the waist-high water, I followed Mr. Beaumont’s gaze, and found myself looking up at the window I’d just leaped from. Smoke was billowing out of it. The fire seemed to be contained in that section of the house, but still, it looked pretty bad. I wondered if Marcus and his thugs had gotten out in time.

  And then someone stepped up to the window and looked down at me.

  It wasn’t Marcus. And it wasn’t Jesse, either, though this person was giving off a telltale glow.

  It was someone who waved cheerfully down at me.

  Mrs. Deirdre Fiske.

  Chapter

  Twenty-two

  I never saw Marcus Beaumont again.

  Oh, stop worrying: He didn’t croak. Of course, the firemen looked for him. I told them I thought there was at least one person trapped in that burning room, and they did their best to get in there in time to save him.

  But they didn’t find anyone. And no human remains were discovered by the investigators who went in after the fire was finally put out. They found an awful lot of burned fish, but no Marcus Beaumont.

  Marcus Beaumont was officially missing.

  Much in the same way, I realized, that his victims had gone missing. He simply vanished, as if into thin air.

  A lot of people were puzzled by the disappearance of this prominent businessman. In later weeks, there would be articles about it in the local papers, and even a mention on one cable news network. Interestingly, the person who knew the most about Marcus Beaumont’s last moments before he vanished was never interviewed, much less questioned, about what might have led up to his bizarre disappearance.

  Which is probably just as well, considering the fact that she had way more important things to worry about. For instance, being grounded.

  That’s right. Grounded.

&nb
sp; If you think about it, the only thing I’d really done wrong on the day in question was dress a little less conservatively than I should have. Seriously. If I’d gone Banana Republic instead of Betsey Johnson, none of this might have happened. Because then I wouldn’t have been sent home to change, and Marcus would never have gotten his mitts on me.

  On the other hand, he’d still probably be going around, slipping environmentalists into cement booties and tossing them off the side of his brother’s yacht…or however it was he got rid of all those people without ever being caught. I never really did get the full story on that one.

  In any case, I got grounded, completely unjustly, although I wasn’t exactly in a position to defend myself…not without telling the truth, and I couldn’t, of course, do that.

  I guess you could imagine how it must have looked to my mother and stepfather when the cop car pulled up in front of our house and Officer Green opened the back door to reveal…well, me.

  I looked like something out of a movie about post-apocalyptic America. Tank Girl, but without the awful haircut. Sister Ernestine wasn’t going to have to worry about me showing up to school in Betsey Johnson ever again, either. The skirt was completely ruined, as was my cashmere sweater set. My fabulous leather motorcycle jacket might be all right, someday, if I can ever figure out a way to get the fishy smell out of it. The boots, however, are a lost cause.

  Boy, was my mom mad. And not because of my clothes, either.

  Interestingly, Andy was even madder. Interestingly because, of course, he’s not even my real parent.

  But you should have seen the way he lit into me right there in the living room. Because of course I’d had to explain to them what it was I’d been doing at the Beaumonts’ place when the fire broke out, instead of being where I was supposed to have been: school.

  And the only lie I could think of that seemed the least bit believable was my newspaper article story.

  So I told them that I’d skipped school in order to do some follow-up work on my interview with Mr. Beaumont.

  They didn’t believe me, of course. It turned out they knew I’d been sent home from school to change clothes. Father Dominic, alarmed when I didn’t return in a timely fashion, had immediately called my mother and stepfather at their respective places of work to alert them to the fact that I was missing.

  “Well,” I explained. “I was on my way home to change when Mr. Beaumont’s brother drove by and offered me a ride, and so I took it, and then when I was sitting in Mr. B’s office, I started to smell smoke, and so I jumped out the window….”

  Okay, even I have to admit that the whole thing sounded super suspicious. But it was better than the truth, right? I mean, were they really going to believe that Tad’s uncle Marcus had been trying to kill me because I knew too much about a bunch of murders he’d committed for the sake of urban sprawl?

  Not very likely. Even Tad didn’t try that one on the cops who showed up along with the fire department, and demanded an explanation as to why he was hanging around the house in a swimsuit on a school day. I guess he didn’t want to get his uncle in trouble since it would look bad for his dad, and all. He started lying like crazy about how he had a cold, and the doctor had recommended he try to clear his sinuses by sitting for long bouts in his hot tub (good one: I was definitely going to have to remember it for future reference—Andy was talking about building a hot tub onto our deck out back).

  Tad’s father, God bless him, denied both our stories completely, insisting he’d been in his room waiting for his lunch to be delivered when one of the servants had informed him that his office was in flames. No one had said anything about Tad having stayed home with a cold, or a girl waiting for an interview with him.

  Fortunately, however, he also claimed that while waiting for his lunch to be delivered, he’d been taking a nap in his coffin.

  That’s right: his coffin.

  This caused a number of raised eyebrows, and eventually, it was decided that Mr. Beaumont ought to be admitted to the local hospital’s psychiatric floor for a few days’ observation. This, as you might understand, necessarily cut off any conversation Tad and I might have had at the time, and while he went off with EMS and his father, I was unceremoniously led to a squad car and, eventually, when the cops remembered me, driven home.

  Where, instead of being welcomed into the bosom of my family, I received the bawling out of a lifetime.

  I’m not even kidding. Andy was enraged. He said I should have gone straight home, changed clothes, and gone straight back to school. I had no business accepting rides from anyone, particularly wealthy businessmen I hardly knew.

  Furthermore, I had skipped school, and no matter how many times I pointed out that a) I’d actually been kicked out of school, and b) I’d been doing an assignment for school (at least according to the story I told him), I had, essentially, betrayed everyone’s trust. I was grounded for one week.

  I tell you, it was almost enough to make me consider telling the truth.

  Almost. But not quite.

  I was getting ready to slink upstairs to my room—in order to “think about what I’d done”—when Dopey strolled in and casually announced that, by the way, on top of all my other sins, I had also punched him very hard in the stomach that morning for no apparent reason.

  This, of course, was an outright lie, and I was quick to remind him of this: I had been provoked, unnecessarily so. But Andy, who does not condone violence for any reason, promptly grounded me for another week. Since he also grounded Dopey for whatever it was he had said that had led to my punching him, I didn’t mind too much, but still, it seemed a bit extreme. So extreme, in fact, that after Andy had left the room, I sort of had to sit down, exhausted in the wake of his rage, which I had never before seen unleashed—well, not in my direction, anyway.

  “You really,” my mother said, taking a seat opposite me, and looking a bit worriedly down at the slipcover on which I was slumped, “should have let us know where you were. Poor Father Dominic was frightened out of his mind for you.”

  “Sorry,” I said woefully, fingering the remnants of my skirt. “I’ll remember next time.”

  “Still,” my mother said. “Officer Green told us that you were very helpful during the fire. So I guess…”

  I looked at her. “You guess what?”

  “Well,” my mother said. “Andy doesn’t want me to tell you now, but…”

  She actually got up—my mother, who had once interviewed Yasir Arafat—and slunk out of the room, ostensibly to check whether or not Andy was within earshot.

  I rolled my eyes. Love. It could make a pretty big sap out of you.

  As I rolled my eyes, I noticed that my mother, who always gets a lot of nervous energy in a crisis, had spent the time that I’d been missing hanging up more pictures in the living room. There were some new ones, ones I hadn’t seen before. I got up to inspect them more closely.

  There was one of her and my dad on their wedding day. They were coming down the steps of the courthouse where they’d been married, and their friends were throwing rice at them. They looked impossibly young and happy. I was surprised to see a picture of my mom and dad right alongside the pictures of my mom’s wedding to Andy.

  But then I noticed that beside the photo of my mom and dad was a picture from what had to have been Andy’s wedding to his first wife. This was more of a studio portrait than a candid shot. Andy was standing, looking stiff and a little embarrassed, next to a very skinny, hippyish-looking girl with long, straight hair.

  A hippyish-looking girl who seemed a little familiar.

  “Of course she does,” a voice at my shoulder said.

  “Jeez, Dad,” I hissed, whirling around. “When are you going to stop doing that?”

  “You are in a heap of trouble, young lady,” my father said. He looked sore. Well, as sore as a guy in jogging pants could look. “Just what were you thinking?”

  I whispered, “I was thinking of making it safe for people to protest t
he corporate destruction of northern California’s natural resources without having to worry about being sealed up in an oil drum and buried ten feet under.”

  “Don’t get smart with me, Susannah. You know what I’m talking about. You could have been killed.”

  “You sound like him.” I rolled my eyes toward Andy’s picture.

  “He did the right thing, grounding you,” my father said, severely. “He’s trying to teach you a lesson. You behaved in a thoughtless and reckless manner. And you shouldn’t have hit that kid of his.”

  “Dopey? Are you joking?”

  But I could tell he was serious. I could also tell that this was one argument I wasn’t going to win.

  So instead, I looked at the picture of Andy and his first wife, and said, sullenly, “You could have told me about her, you know. It would have made my life a whole lot simpler.”

  “I didn’t know, either,” my dad said, with a shrug. “Not until I saw your mom hang up the photo this afternoon.”

  “What do you mean, you didn’t know?” I glared at him. “What was with all the cryptic warnings, then?”

  “Well, I knew Beaumont wasn’t the Red you were looking for. I told you that.”

  “Oh, big help,” I said.

  “Look.” My dad seemed annoyed. “I’m not all-knowing. Just dead.”

  I heard my mother’s footsteps on the wood floor. “Mom’s coming,” I said. “Scat.”

  And Dad, for once, did as I asked, so that when my mother returned to the living room, I was standing in front of the wall of photos, looking very demure—well, for a girl who’d practically been burned alive, anyway.

  “Listen,” my mother whispered.

  I looked away from the picture. My mother was holding an envelope. It was a bright pink envelope, covered with little hand-drawn hearts and rainbows. The kind of hearts and rainbows Gina always put on her letters to me from back home.

  “Andy wanted me to wait to tell you about this,” my mom said in a low voice, “until after your grounding was up. But I can’t. I want you to know I’ve spoken with Gina’s mom, and she’s agreed to let us fly Gina out here for a visit during her school’s Spring Break next month—”