Ninth Key

  “Oh my God,” I said. I turned away from him, and started heading back toward the house. “Oh my God. He did not just say that.”

  “Yes, I did just say that.” Jesse followed me. “I know what I saw, Susannah.”

  “You know what you sound like?” I asked him, turning around at the bottom of the steps to the front porch to face him. “You sound like a jealous boyfriend.”

  “Nombre de Dios. I am not,” Jesse said with a laugh, “jealous of that—”

  “Oh, yeah? Then where’s all this hostility coming from? Tad never did anything to you.”

  “Tad,” Jesse said, “is a…”

  And then he said a word I couldn’t understand, because it was in Spanish.

  I stared at him. “A what?”

  He said the word again.

  “Look,” I said. “Speak English.”

  “There is no English translation,” Jesse said, setting his jaw, “for that word.”

  “Well,” I said. “Keep it to yourself, then.”

  “He’s no good for you,” Jesse said, as if that settled the matter.

  “You don’t even know him.”

  “I know enough. I know you didn’t listen to me or to your father when you went off tonight by yourself to that man’s house.”

  “Right,” I said. “And I’ll admit, it was very, very creepy. But Tad brought me home. Tad’s not the problem there. His dad’s the one who is a freak, not Tad.”

  “The problem here,” Jesse said, shaking his head, “is you, Susannah. You think you don’t need anyone, that you can handle everything on your own.”

  “I hate to break it to you, Jesse,” I said, “but I can handle everything on my own.” Then I remembered Heather, the ghost of the girl who’d almost killed me the week before. “Well, most everything,” I corrected myself.

  “Ah,” Jesse said. “See? You admit it. Susannah, this one—you need to ask the priest for help.”

  “Fine,” I said. “I will.”

  “Fine,” he said. “You had better.”

  We were so mad at each other, and had been standing there yelling so hard, our faces ended up only a few inches apart. For a split second, I stared up at Jesse, and even though I was totally mad at him, I wasn’t thinking about what a self-righteous jerk he was.

  Instead, I was thinking about this movie I saw once where the hero caught the heroine kissing another man, and so he grabbed her and looked down at her all passionately and said, “If kisses were what you were looking for, little fool, why didn’t you come to me?”

  And then he laughed this evil laugh and started kissing her.

  Maybe, I couldn’t help thinking, Jesse would do that, only he’d call me querida, like he does sometimes when he’s not all mad at me for Frenching guys in cars.

  And so I sort of closed my eyes, and let my mouth get all relaxed, you know, in case he decided to stick his tongue in there.

  But all that happened was that the screen door slammed, and when I opened my eyes, Jesse was gone.

  Instead, Doc was there standing on the front porch looking down at me, eating an ice-cream sandwich.

  “Hey,” Doc said, between licks. “What are you doing out here? And who were you yelling at? I could hear you all the way inside. I’m trying to watch Nova, you know.”

  Furious—but at myself more than anybody—I said, “Nobody,” and stalked up the stairs and into the house.

  Which was why the next day, I went to Father Dom’s office first thing, and spilled my guts. No way was Jesse getting away with accusing me of thinking I don’t need anyone. I need a lot of people.

  And a boyfriend would be number one on that list, thank you very much.

  “Sensitive to light,” Father Dominic said, coming out of his thoughtful reverie. “His nickname is Red, but he doesn’t have red hair. He was looking at your neck.” Father Dom opened the top drawer of his desk and took out his crumpled, unopened pack of cigarettes. “Don’t you see, Susannah?” he asked me.

  “Sure,” I said. “He’s a whacko.”

  “I don’t think so,” Father Dom said. “I think he’s a vampire.”

  Chapter

  Ten

  I gaped at him.

  “Uh, Father D.?” I said after a while. “No offense, but have you taken too many of your pain pills, or something? Because I hate to be the one to break it to you, but there’s no such thing as vampires.”

  Father Dom looked closer than I’d ever seen him to ripping that pack open and popping one of those cigarettes into his mouth. He restrained himself, however.

  “How,” he asked, “do you know?”

  “How do I know what?” I demanded. “That there’s no such thing as vampires? Um, the same way I know there’s no Easter Bunny or Tooth Fairy.”

  Father Dominic said, “Ah, but people say that about ghosts. And you and I both know that that’s not true.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but I’ve seen ghosts. I’ve never seen a vampire. And I’ve hung out in a lot of cemeteries.”

  Father Dominic said, “Well, not to state the obvious, Susannah, but I’ve been around a good deal longer than you have and while I myself have never before encountered a vampire, I am at least willing to concede the possibility of such a creature existing.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Okay, Father D. Let’s just go out on a limb here and say the guy’s a vampire. Red Beaumont is a very high-profile guy. If he was going to go running around after dark biting people on the neck, somebody would notice, don’t you think?”

  “Not,” Father Dominic said, “if he has, like you said, employees who are eager to protect him.”

  This was too much. I said, “Okay. This has gotten a little too Stephen King for me. I gotta get back to class or Mr. Walden’s going to think I’m AWOL. But if I get a note from you later saying I’m gonna have to stake this guy in the heart, all bets are off. Tad Beaumont will so totally not ask me to the prom if I kill his dad.”

  Father Dominic put the cigarettes aside. “This,” he said, “is going to take some research….”

  I left Father Dominic doing what he loved best, which was surfing the Net. The Mission’s administrative offices had only recently gotten computers, and no one there really knew how to use them very well. Father Dominic in particular had no idea how a mouse worked, and was constantly sweeping it from one side of his desk to the other, no matter how many times I told him all he had to do was keep it on the mouse pad. It would have been cute if it hadn’t been so frustrating.

  I decided, as I walked down the breezeway, that I would have to get CeeCee on the job. She was a little more adept at surfing the Web than Father Dominic.

  As I approached Mr. Walden’s classroom—which last week had unfortunately received the brunt of the damage from what everyone had assumed was a freak earthquake, but which had actually been an exorcism gone awry—I noticed, standing to one side of the pile of rubble that had once been a decorative arch, a little boy.

  It wasn’t unusual to see very little kids hanging around the halls of the Mission Academy since the school had classes from kindergarten all the way up to twelfth grade. What was unusual about this kid, however, was that he was glowing a little.

  And also, the construction workers who were swarming around trying to put the breezeway back up occasionally walked right through him.

  He looked up at me as I approached, as if he’d been waiting for me. Which, in fact, he had been.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hi,” I said. The workmen were playing the radio pretty loud, so fortunately none of them noticed the weird girl standing there talking to herself.

  “You the mediator?” the kid wanted to know.

  “One of them,” I said.

  “Good. I got a problem.”

  I looked down at him. He couldn’t have been more than nine or ten years old. Then I remembered that the other day at lunch, the Mission’s bells had rung out nine times, and CeeCee had explained it was because one of the third graders ha
d died after a long bout with cancer. You couldn’t tell it to look at the kid—the dead I encounter never wear outward signs of the cause of their death, assuming instead the form in which they’d lived before whatever illness or accident had taken their lives—but this little guy had apparently had a wicked case of leukemia. Timothy, I thought CeeCee had said his name was.

  “You’re Timothy Mahern,” I said.

  “Tim,” he corrected me, making a face.

  “Sorry. What can I do for you?”

  Timothy, all business, said, “It’s about my cat.”

  I nodded. “Of course. What about your cat?”

  “My mom doesn’t want him around,” Timothy said. For a dead kid, he was surprisingly straightforward. “Every time she sees him, he reminds her of me so she starts crying.”

  “I see,” I said. “Would you like me to find your cat another home?”

  “That’s the basic idea,” Timothy said.

  I was thinking that about the last thing I wanted to deal with right then was finding some mangy cat a new home, but I smiled gamely and said, “No problem.”

  “Great,” Timothy said. “There’s just one catch….”

  Which was how, after school that day, I found myself standing in a field behind the Carmel Valley mall, yelling, “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty!”

  Adam, whose help—and car—I’d enlisted, was the one beating the tall yellow grass since I’d shown him my poison-oaky hands and explained that I could not possibly be expected to venture anywhere near vegetation. He straightened, lifted a hand to wipe the sweat from his forehead—the sun was beaming down hard enough to make me long for the beach with its cool ocean breezes and, more importantly, totally hot lifeguards—and said, “Okay. I get that it’s important that we find this dead kid’s cat. But why are we looking for it in a field? Wouldn’t it be smarter to look for it at the kid’s house?”

  “No,” I said. “Timothy’s father couldn’t stand listening to his wife cry every time she saw the cat, so he just packed it up in the car and dumped it out here.”

  “Nice of him,” Adam said. “A real animal lover. I suppose it would have been too much trouble to take the cat to the animal shelter where someone might have adopted it.”

  “Apparently,” I said, “there isn’t a whole lot of chance of anybody adopting this cat.” I cleared my throat. “It might be a good idea for us to call him by his name. Maybe he’d come then.”

  “Okay.” Adam pulled up his chinos. “What’s his name?”

  “Um,” I said. “Spike.”

  “Spike.” Adam looked heavenward. “A cat called Spike. This I can’t wait to see. Here, Spike. Here, Spikey, Spikey, Spikey…”

  “Hey, you guys.” CeeCee came toward us waving her laptop in the air.

  I’d enlisted CeeCee’s help as well as Adam’s, only with a project of a different nature. All of my new friends, I’d discovered, had different talents and abilities. Adam’s lay primarily in the fact that he owned a car, but CeeCee’s strengths lay in her superlative research skills…and what’s more, in the fact that she actually liked looking stuff up. I’d asked her to look up what she could on Thaddeus Beaumont Senior, and she’d obliged. She’d been sitting in the car cruising the Net with the help of the remote modem she’d gotten for her birth-day—have I mentioned that everyone in Carmel, with the exception of myself, is way rich?—while Adam and I looked for Tim’s cat.

  “Hey,” CeeCee said. “Get a load of this.” She skimmed something she’d downloaded. “I ran the name Thaddeus Beaumont through a search engine, and came up with dozens of hits. Thaddeus Beaumont is listed as CEO, partner, or investor in over thirty land development projects—most of which, by the way, are commercial ventures, like cineplexes, strip malls, or health clubs—on the Monterey peninsula alone.”

  “What does that mean?” Adam asked.

  “It means that if you add up the number of acres owned by companies that list Thaddeus Beaumont as either an investor or a partner, he becomes roughly the largest land owner in northern California.”

  “Wow,” I said. I was thinking about the prom. I bet a guy who owned that much land could afford to rent his son a stretch limo for the night. Dorky, I know, but I’d always wanted to ride in one.

  “But he doesn’t really own all that land,” Adam pointed out. “The companies do.”

  “Exactly,” CeeCee said.

  “Exactly what do you mean by ‘exactly’?”

  “Well,” CeeCee said, “just that it might explain why it is that the guy hasn’t been hauled into court for suspicion of murder.”

  “Murder?” Suddenly, I forgot all about the prom. “What about a murder?”

  “A murder?” CeeCee spun her laptop around so that we could see the screen. “We’re talking multiple murders. Although technically, the victims have all been listed only as missing.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Well, after I made a list of all of the companies affiliated with Thaddeus Beaumont, I entered each company name into that same search engine and came up with a couple of pretty disturbing things. Look here.” CeeCee had pulled up a map of the Carmel Valley. She highlighted the areas she was talking about as she mentioned them. “See this property here? Hotel and spa. See how close it is to the water? That was a no-building zone. Too much erosion. But RedCo—that’s the name of the corporation that bought the land, RedCo, get it?—used some pull down at city hall and got a permit anyway. Still, this one environmentalist warned RedCo that any building they put up there would not only be dangerously unstable, but would endanger the seal population that hangs out on the beach below it. Well, check this out.”

  CeeCee’s fingers flew over her keyboard. A second later, a picture of a weird-looking guy with a goatee filled the screen, along with what looked like a newspaper story. “The environmentalist who was making such a fuss over the seals disappeared four years ago, and no one has seen him since.”

  I squinted at the computer screen. It was hard to see in the strong sunlight. “What do you mean, disappeared?” I asked. “Like, he died?”

  “Maybe. Nobody knows. His body was never found if he was killed,” CeeCee said. “But check this out.” Her fingers did some quick rat-tat-tatting. “Another project, this strip mall here, was endangering the habitat of this rare kind of mouse, found only in this area. And this lady here—” Another photo came up on screen. “She tried to stop it to save the mouse, and poof. She disappeared, too.”

  “Disappeared,” I echoed. “Just disappeared?”

  “Just disappeared. Problem solved for Mount Beau—that was the name of that project’s sponsor. Mount Beau. Beaumont. Get it?”

  “We get it,” Adam said. “But if all these environmentalists connected with Red Beaumont’s companies are disappearing, how come nobody has looked into it?”

  “Well, for one thing,” CeeCee said, “Beaumont Industries made one of the biggest campaign donations in the state to our recently elected governor. They also made considerable contributions to the guy who was voted sheriff.”

  “A cover-up?” Adam made a face. “Come on.”

  “You’re assuming anyone even suspects anything. These people aren’t dead, remember. Just gone. Near as I can tell, the attitude seems to be, well, environmentalists are kind of flighty, anyway, so who’s to say these folks didn’t just take off for some bigger, more menacing disaster? All except this one.” CeeCee hit another button, and a third photo filled the page. “This lady didn’t belong to any kooky save-the-seals group. She owned some land Beaumont Industries had its eye on. They wanted to expand one of their cineplexes. Only she wouldn’t sell.”

  “Don’t tell me,” I said. “She disappeared.”

  “Sure did. And seven years later to the day—seven years being the time after which you can legally declare a missing person dead—Beaumont Industries made an offer to her kids, who jumped on it.”

  “Finks,” I said, meaning the lady’s kids. I leaned forward so I could
get a better look at her picture.

  And had quite a little shock: I was looking at a picture of the ghost who’d been paying me those charming social calls.

  Okay, well, maybe she didn’t look exactly the same. But she was white and skinny and had the same haircut. There was certainly enough of a resemblance to make me go, “That’s her!” and point.

  Which was, of course, the worst thing I could have done. Because both CeeCee and Adam turned to look at me.

  “That’s her who?” Adam wanted to know.

  And CeeCee said, “Suze, you can’t possibly know her. She disappeared over seven years ago, and you just moved here last month.”

  I am such a loser.

  I couldn’t even think of a good excuse, either. I just repeated the one I’d stammered to Tad’s father: “Oh, um, I had this dream and she was in it.”

  What was wrong with me?

  I had not, of course, explained to CeeCee the reason why I’d wanted her to look up stuff on Red Beaumont, any more than I had told Adam how it was that I knew so much about little Timothy Mahern’s cat. I had merely mentioned that Mr. Beaumont had said something odd during my brief meeting with him the night before. And that Father Dom had sent me to look for the cat, presumably because Timothy’s dad had admitted abandoning it during his weekly confession—only Father Dom, being sworn to secrecy, couldn’t actually tell me that. I was only, I assured Adam, surmising….

  “A dream?” Adam echoed. “About some lady who’s been dead for seven years? That’s weird.”

  “It probably wasn’t her,” I said quickly, backpedaling for all I was worth. “In fact, I’m sure it wasn’t her. The woman I saw was much…taller.” Like I could even tell how tall this woman was by looking at her picture somebody had posted on the Internet.

  Adam said, “You know, CeeCee has an aunt who dreams about dead people all the time. They visit her, she says.”

  I threw CeeCee a startled glance. Could we, I wondered, be talking about another mediator? What, was there some kind of glut of us in the greater peninsula area? I knew Carmel was a popular retirement spot, but this was getting ridiculous.