Page 9 of Ninth Key


  “She doesn’t have dreams about them,” CeeCee said, and I didn’t think I was imagining the level of disgust in her voice. “Aunt Pru summons the spirits of the dead and she’ll tell you what they said. For a small fee.”

  “Aunt Pru?” I grinned. “Wow, CeeCee. I didn’t know you had a psychic in the family.”

  “She isn’t a psychic.” CeeCee’s disgust deepened. “She’s a complete flake. I’m embarrassed to be related to her. Talk to the dead. Right!”

  “Don’t hold back, CeeCee,” I said. “Let us know how you really feel.”

  “Well,” CeeCee said. “I’m sorry. But—”

  “Hey,” Adam interrupted brightly. “Maybe Aunt Pru could help tell us why”—he bent down for a closer look at the dead woman’s photo on CeeCee’s computer screen—“Mrs. Deirdre Fiske here is popping up in Suze’s dreams.”

  Horrified, I leaned forward and slammed CeeCee’s laptop closed. “No thanks,” I said.

  CeeCee, opening her computer back up again, said irritably, “Nobody fondles the electronics but me, Simon.”

  “Aw, come on,” Adam said. “It’ll be fun. Suze’s never met Pru. She’ll get a big kick out of her. She’s a riot.”

  CeeCee muttered, “Yeah, you know how funny the mentally ill can be.”

  I said, hoping to get the subject back on track, “Um, maybe some other time. Anything else, CeeCee, that you were able to dig up on Mr. Beaumont?”

  “You mean other than the fact that he might possibly be killing anyone who stands in the way of his amassing a fortune by raping our forests and beaches?” CeeCee, who was wearing a khaki rainhat to protect her sensitive skin from the sun, as well as her violet-lensed sunglasses, looked up at me. “You’re not satisfied yet, Simon? Haven’t we thoroughly vetted your paramour’s closest relations?”

  “Yeah,” Adam said. “It must be reassuring to know that last night you hooked up with a guy who comes from such a nice, stable family, Suze.”

  “Hey,” I said with an indignation I was far from actually feeling. “There’s no proof Tad’s dad is the one who’s responsible for those environmentalists’ disappearances. And besides, we just had coffee, okay? We did not hook up.”

  CeeCee blinked at me. “You went out with him, Suze. That’s all Adam meant by hooking up.”

  “Oh.” Where I come from, hooking up means something else entirely. “Sorry. I—”

  At that moment, Adam let out a shout. “Spike!”

  I whirled around, following his pointing finger. There, peering out from the dry underbrush, sat the biggest, meanest-looking cat I’d ever seen. He was the same color yellow as the grass, which was probably how we’d missed him. He had orange stripes, one chewed-off ear, and an extremely nasty look on his face.

  “Spike?” I asked, softly.

  The cat turned his head in my direction and glared at me malevolently.

  “Oh my God,” I said. “No wonder Tim’s dad didn’t take him to the animal shelter.”

  It took some doing—and the ultimate sacrifice of my Kate Spade book bag, which I’d managed to purchase only at great physical risk at a sample sale back in SoHo—but we finally managed to capture Spike. Once he was zipped up inside my bag, he seemed to resign himself to captivity, although throughout the ride to Safeway, where we went to stock up on litter and food for him, I could hear him working industriously on the bag’s lining with his claws. Timothy, I decided, owed me big time.

  Especially when Adam, instead of turning up the street to my house, turned in the opposite direction, heading farther up the Carmel hills until the big red dome covering the basilica of the Mission below us was the size of my thumbnail.

  “No,” CeeCee immediately said as firmly as I’ve ever heard her say anything. “Absolutely not. Turn the car around. Turn the car around now.”

  Only Adam, chuckling diabolically, just sped up.

  Holding my Kate Spade bag on my lap, I said, “Uh, Adam. I don’t know where, exactly, you think you’re going, but I’d really like to at least get rid of this, um, animal first—”

  “Just for a minute,” Adam said. “The cat’ll be all right. Come on, Cee. Stop being such a spoil-sport.”

  CeeCee was madder than I’d ever seen her. “I said no!” she shouted.

  But it was too late. Adam pulled up in front of a little stucco bungalow that had wind chimes hanging all over the place tinkling in the breeze from the bay, and giant hibiscus blossoms turned up toward the late afternoon sun. He put his VW in park and switched off the ignition.

  “We’ll just pop in to say hi,” he said to CeeCee. And then he unfastened his seat belt and hopped out of the car.

  CeeCee and I didn’t move. She was in the backseat. I was in the front with the cat. From my bag came an ominous rumbling.

  “I hesitate to ask,” I said, after a while of sitting there listening to the wind chimes and Spike’s steady growling. “But where are we?”

  That question was answered when, a second later, the door to the bungalow burst open and a woman whose hair was the same whitish yellow as CeeCee’s—only so long that she could sit on it—yoo-hooed at us.

  “Come in,” CeeCee’s aunt Pru called. “Please come in! I’ve been expecting you!”

  CeeCee, not even glancing in her aunt’s direction, muttered, “I just bet you have, you psychic freak.”

  Remind me never to tell CeeCee about the whole mediator thing.

  Chapter

  Eleven

  “Oh, goodness,” CeeCee’s aunt Pru said. “There it is again. The ninth key. This is just so strange.”

  CeeCee and I exchanged glances. Strange wasn’t quite the word for it.

  Not that it was unpleasant. Far from it. At least, in my opinion, anyway. Pru Webb, CeeCee’s aunt, was a little odd. That was certainly true.

  But her house was very aromatic what with all the scented candles she kept lit everywhere. And she’d been quite the attentive hostess, giving us each a glass of homemade lemonade. It was too bad, of course, that she’d forgotten to put sugar in it, but that kind of forgetfulness apparently wasn’t unusual for someone so in touch with the spirit world. Aunt Pru had informed us that her mentor, the most powerful psychic on the West Coast, often couldn’t remember his own name because he was channeling so many other souls.

  Still, our little visit hadn’t been particularly enlightening so far. I had learned, for instance, that according to the lines in my palm, I am going to grow up to have a challenging job in the field of medical research (Yeah! That’ll be the day). CeeCee, meanwhile, is going to be a movie star, and Adam an astronaut.

  Seriously. An astronaut.

  I was, I admit, a little jealous of their future careers, which were clearly a great deal more exciting than my own, but I tried hard to control my envy.

  What I’d given up trying to control—and CeeCee apparently had as well—was Adam. He had told Aunt Pru, before I could stop him, about my “dream,” and now the poor woman was trying—pro bono, mind you—to summon Deirdre Fiske’s spirit using tarot cards and a lot of humming.

  Only it did not appear to be working because every time she started to turn the cards over, she kept coming up with the same one.

  The ninth key.

  This was, apparently, upsetting to her. Shaking her head, Aunt Pru—that’s what she’d told me to call her—scooped all the cards back into a pile, shuffled them, and then, closing her eyes, pulled one from the middle of the deck, and laid it, face up, for us to see.

  Then she opened her eyes, looked down at it, and went, “Again! This doesn’t make any sense.”

  She wasn’t kidding. The idea of anyone summoning a ghost with a deck of cards made no sense whatsoever…to me, at least. I couldn’t even summon them by standing there screaming their names—something I’d tried, believe me—and I’m a mediator. My job is to communicate with the undead.

  But ghosts aren’t dogs. They don’t come if you call them. Take my dad, for instance. How many times had I wanted—even
needed—him? He’d shown up, all right: three, four weeks later. Ghosts are way irresponsible for the most part.

  But I couldn’t exactly explain to CeeCee’s aunt that what she was doing was a huge waste of time…and that while she was sitting there doing it, there was a cat trying to eat his way out of my book bag in Adam’s car.

  Oh, and that a guy who might or might not have been a vampire—but was certainly responsible for the disappearances of quite a number of people—was running around loose. I could only just sit there with this big stupid smile on my face, pretending to be enjoying myself, while really I was itching to get home and on the phone with Father D., so we could figure out what we were going to do about Red Beaumont.

  “Oh, dear,” Aunt Pru said. She was very pretty, CeeCee’s aunt Pru. An albino like her niece, her eyes were the color of violets. She wore a flowing sundress of the same shade. The contrast her long white hair made against the purple of her dress was startling—and cool. CeeCee, I knew, was probably going to look just like her aunt Pru someday, once she got rid of the braces and puppy fat, that is.

  Which was probably why CeeCee couldn’t stand her.

  “What can this mean?” Aunt Pru muttered to herself. “The hermit. The hermit.”

  There appeared, from what I could see, to be a hermit on the card Aunt Pru kept turning over and over. Not of the crab variety, either, but the old-man-living-in-a-cave type. I didn’t know what a hermit had to do with Mrs. Fiske, either, but one thing I did know: I was bored stupid.

  “One more time,” Aunt Pru said, sending a cautious glance in CeeCee’s direction. CeeCee had made it clear that we didn’t have all day. I was the one who needed to get home most, of course. I had an Ackerman dinner to contend with. Kung pao chicken night. If I was late, my mom was going to kill me.

  “Um,” I said. “Ms. Webb?”

  “Aunt Pru, darling,”

  “Right. Aunt Pru. May I use your phone?”

  “Of course.” Aunt Pru didn’t even glance at me. She was too busy channeling.

  I wandered out of the darkened room and went out into the hallway. There was an old-fashioned rotary phone on a little table there. I dialed my own number—after a brief struggle to remember it since I’d only had it for a few weeks—and when Dopey picked up, I asked him to tell my mother that I hadn’t forgotten about dinner and was on my way home.

  Dopey not very graciously informed me that he was on the other line and that because he was not my social secretary, and had no intention of taking any messages for me, I should call back later.

  “Who are you talking to?” I asked. “Debbie, your love slave?”

  Dopey responded by hanging up on me. Some people have no sense of humor.

  I put down the receiver and was standing there looking at this zodiac calendar and wondering if I was in some kind of celestial good-luck zone—considering what had happened with Tad and all—when someone standing right beside me said, in an irritated voice, “Well? What do you want?”

  I jumped nearly a foot. I swear, I’ve been doing this all my life, but I just can’t get used to it. I would so rather have some other secret power—like the ability to do long division in my head—than this mediator crap, I swear.

  I spun around, and there she was, standing in Aunt Pru’s entranceway, looking cranky in a gardening hat and gloves.

  She was not the same woman who’d been waking me up at night. They were similar body types, little and slender, with the same pixieish haircut, but this woman was easily in her sixties.

  “Well?” She eyed me. “I don’t have all day. What did you call me for?”

  I stared at the woman in wonder. The truth was, I hadn’t called her. I hadn’t done anything, except stand there and wonder if Tad was still going to like me when Mercury retrograded into Aquarius.

  “Mrs. Fiske?” I whispered.

  “Yes, that’s me.” The old lady looked me up and down. “You are the one who called me, aren’t you?”

  “Um.” I glanced back toward the room where I could still hear Aunt Pru saying, apparently to herself, since neither CeeCee nor Adam could have understood what she was talking about, “But the ninth key has no bearing…”

  I turned back to Mrs. Fiske. “I guess so,” I said.

  Mrs. Fiske looked me up and down. It was clear she didn’t much like what she was seeing. “Well?” she said. “What is it?”

  Where to begin? Here was a woman who’d disappeared, and been presumed dead, for almost half as long as I’d been alive. I glanced back at Aunt Pru and the others, just to make sure they weren’t looking in my direction, and then whispered, “I just need to know, Mrs. Fiske…Mr. Beaumont. He killed you, didn’t he?”

  Mrs. Fiske suddenly stopped looking so crabby. Her eyes, which were very blue, fixed on mine. She said, in a shocked voice, “My God. My God, finally…someone knows. Someone finally knows.”

  I reached out to lay a reassuring hand upon her arm. “Yes, Mrs. Fiske,” I said. “I know. And I’m going to stop him from hurting anybody else.”

  Mrs. Fiske shrugged my hand off and blinked at me. “You?” She still looked stunned, but now in a different way.

  I realized how when she burst out laughing.

  “You’re going to stop him?” she cackled. “You’re…you’re a baby!”

  “I’m no baby,” I assured her. “I’m a mediator.”

  “A mediator?” To my surprise, Mrs. Fiske threw back her head and laughed harder. “A mediator. Oh, well, that makes it all better, doesn’t it?”

  I wanted to tell her I didn’t really care for her tone, but Mrs. Fiske didn’t give me a chance.

  “And you think you can stop Beaumont?” she demanded. “Honey, you’ve got a lot to learn.”

  I didn’t think this was very polite. I said, “Look, lady, I may be young, but I know what I’m doing. Now, just tell me where he hid your body, and—”

  “Are you insane?” Mrs. Fiske finally stopped laughing. Now she shook her head. “There’s nothing left of me. Beaumont’s no amateur, you know. He made sure there weren’t any mistakes. And there weren’t. You won’t find a scrap of evidence to implicate him. Believe me. The guy’s a monster. A real bloodsucker.” Then her mouth hardened. “Though no worse, I suppose, than my own kids. Selling my land to that leech! Listen, you. You’re a mediator. Give my kids this message for me: tell them I hope they burn in—”

  “Hey, Suze.” CeeCee suddenly appeared in the hallway. “The witch has given up. She has to consult her guru, ’cause she keeps coming up bust.”

  I threw a frantic look at Mrs. Fiske. Wait! I still hadn’t had a chance to ask her how she’d died! Was Red Beaumont really a vampire? Had he sucked all the life out of her? Did she mean he was literally a bloodsucking leech?

  But it was too late. CeeCee, still coming toward me, walked right through what looked—and felt—to me like a little old lady in a gardening hat and gloves. And the little old lady shimmered indignantly.

  Don’t, I wanted to scream. Don’t go!

  “Ew,” CeeCee said with a little shudder as she threw off the last of Mrs. Fiske’s clinging aura. “Come on. Let’s get out of here. This place gives me the creeps.”

  I never did find out what Mrs. Fiske’s message to her kids was—though I had a bit of an idea. The old lady, with a last, disgusted look at me, disappeared.

  Just as Aunt Pru came into the hallway, looking apologetic.

  “I’m so sorry, Susie,” she said. “I really tried, but the Santa Anas have been particularly strong this year, and so there’s been a lot of interference in the spiritual pathways I normally utilize.”

  Maybe that explained how I had managed to summon the spirit of Mrs. Fiske. Could I do it again, I wondered, and this time remember to ask exactly how Red Beaumont had killed her?

  Adam, as we headed back toward his car, looked immensely pleased with himself.

  “Well, Suze?” he said, as he held open the passenger side door for CeeCee and me. “You ever in your life
met anybody like that?”

  I had, of course. Being a magnet for the souls of the unhappily dead, I’d met people from all walks of life, including an Incan priestess, several witch doctors, and even a Pilgrim who’d been burned at the stake as a witch.

  But since it seemed so important to him, I smiled and said, “Not exactly,” which was the truth, in a way.

  CeeCee didn’t look too thrilled with the fact that one of her family members had managed to provide the boy she—let’s face it—had a huge crush on with so much entertainment. She crawled into the backseat and glowered there. CeeCee was a straight-A student who didn’t believe in anything that couldn’t be proved scientifically, especially anything to do with the hereafter…which made the fact that her parents had stuck her in Catholic school a bit problematic.

  More problematic to me, however, than CeeCee’s lack of faith or my newfound ability to summon spirits at will was what I was going to do with this cat. While we’d been inside Aunt Pru’s house, he’d managed to chew a hole through one corner of my bag, and now he kept poking one paw through it, swiping blindly with claws fully outstretched at whatever came his way—primarily me, since I was the one holding the bag. Adam, no matter how hard I wheedled, wouldn’t take the cat home with him, and CeeCee just laughed when I asked her. I knew there was no way I was going to talk Father Dominic into taking Spike to live in the rectory: Sister Ernestine would never allow it.

  Which left me only one alternative. And I really, really wasn’t happy about it. Besides what the cat had done to the inside of my bag—God only knew what he’d do to my room—there was the fact that I was pretty sure felines were verboten in the Ackerman household due to Dopey’s delicate sensitivity to their dander.

  So I still had the stupid cat, plus a Safeway bag containing a litter box, the litter itself, and about twenty cans of Fancy Feast, when Adam pulled up to my house to drop me off.

  “Hey,” he said, appreciatively, as I struggled to get out of the car. “Who’s visiting you guys? The Pope?”

  I looked where he was pointing…and then my jaw dropped.

  Parked in our driveway was a big, black stretch limo, just like the kind I’d fantasized about going to prom with Tad in!