My mother looked at me curiously. "Upstairs in his room, I think, doing his homework. Why?"
"Oh, I just have to tell him something."
Something I should have told him a long time ago.
CHAPTER 23
"So?" Jesse asked. "How did he take it?"
"I don't want to talk about it."
I was stretched out on my bed, totally without makeup, attired in my oldest jogging clothes. I had a new plan: I had decided I was going to treat Jesse exactly the way I would my stepbrothers. That way, I'd be guaranteed not to fall in love with him.
I was flipping through a copy of Vogue instead of doing my Geometry homework like I was supposed to. Jesse was on the window seat - of course - petting Spike.
Jesse shook his head. "Come on," he said. It always sounded strange to me when Jesse said things like Come on. It seemed so strange coming out of a guy who was wearing a shirt with laces instead of buttons. "Tell me what he said."
I flipped a page of my magazine. "Tell me what you guys did to Marcus."
Jesse looked a little too surprised by the question. "We did nothing to him."
"Baloney. Where'd he go, then?"
Jesse shrugged and scratched Spike beneath the chin. The stupid cat was purring so loud, I could hear it all the way across the room.
"I think he decided to travel for a while." Jesse's tone was deceptively innocent.
"Without any money? Without his credit cards?" One of the things the firemen had found in the room was Marcus's wallet … and his gun.
"There is something to be said" - Jesse gave Spike a playful swat on the back of the head when the cat took a lazy swipe at him - "for seeing this great country of ours on foot. Maybe he will come to have a better appreciation for its natural beauty."
I snorted, and turned a page of my magazine. "He'll be back in a week."
"I think not." He said it with such certainty that I instantly became suspicious.
"Why not?"
Jesse hesitated. He didn't want to tell me, I could tell.
"What?" I said. "Telling me, a mere living being, is going to violate some spectral code?"
"No," Jesse said with a smile. "He's not coming back, Susannah, because the souls of the people he killed won't let him."
I raised my eyebrows. "What do you mean?"
"In my day, it was called bedevilment. I don't know what they call it now. But your intervention had a rallying effect on Mrs. Fiske and the three others whose lives Marcus Beaumont took. They have banded together, and will not rest until he has been sufficiently punished for his crimes. He can run from one end of the earth to the other, but he will never escape them. Not until he dies himself. And when that happens" - Jesse's voice was hard - "he will be a broken man."
I didn't say anything. I couldn't. As a mediator, I knew I shouldn't approve of this sort of behavior. I mean, ghosts should not be allowed to take the law into their own hands any more than the living should.
But I had no particular fondness for Marcus, and no way of proving that he'd killed those people anyway. He'd never be punished, I knew, by inhabitants of this world. So was it so wrong that he be punished by those who lived in the next?
I glanced at Jesse out of the corner of my eyes, remembering that, from what I'd read, no one had ever been convicted of his murder, either.
"So," I said. "I guess you did the same thing, huh, to the, um, people who killed you, right?"
Jesse didn't fall for this sly question, though. He only smiled, and said, "Tell me what happened with your brother."
"Stepbrother," I reminded him.
And I wasn't going to tell Jesse about my interview with Doc, anymore than Jesse was going to tell me diddly about how he'd died. Only in my case, it was because what had happened with Doc was just too excruciatingly embarrassing to go into. Jesse didn't want to talk about how he'd died because . . . well, I don't know. But I doubt it's because he's embarrassed about it.
I had found Doc exactly where my mother had told me he'd be, in his room doing his homework, a paper that wasn't due until the following month. But that was Doc for you: why put off until tomorrow homework you could be doing today?
His "Come in," when I'd tapped at the door had been casual. He hadn't suspected it would be me. I never ventured into my stepbrothers' rooms if I could avoid it. The odor of dirty socks was simply too overwhelming.
Only since I wasn't smelling too daisy-fresh myself at that particular moment, I thought I could bear it.
He was shocked to see me, his face turning almost as red as his hair. He jumped up and tried to hide his pile of dirty underwear beneath the comforter of his unmade bed. I told him to relax. And then I sat down on that unmade bed, and said I had something to tell him.
How did he take it? Well, for one thing, he didn't ask me a lot of stupid questions like How do you know? He knew how I knew. He knew a little about the mediation thing. Not a lot, but enough to know that I communicate, on a somewhat regular basis, with the undead.
I guess it was the fact that it was his own mother I'd been communicating with this time that brought tears to his blue eyes . . . which freaked me out a bit. I had never seen Doc cry before.
"Hey," I said, alarmed. "Hey, it's okay - "
"What - " Doc was choking back a sob. I could totally tell. "What did she l-look like?"
"What did she look like?" I echoed, not sure I'd heard him right. At his vigorous nod, however, I said, carefully, "Well, she looked . . . she looked very pretty."
Doc's tear-filled eyes widened. "She did?"
"Uh-huh," I said. "That's how I recognized her, you know. From the wedding photo of her and your dad, downstairs. She looked like that. Only her hair was shorter."
Doc said, the effort he was making not to cry causing his voice to shake, "I wish I could … I wish I could see her looking like that. The last time I saw her, she looked terrible. Not like in that picture. You wouldn't have recognized her. She was in a c-coma. Her eyes were sunken in. And there were all these tubes coming out of her - "
Even though I was sitting like a foot away from him, I felt the shudder that ran through him. I said, gently, "David, what you did, when you guys made the decision to let her go … it was the right thing. It was what she wanted. That's what she needs to make sure you understand. You know it was the right thing, don't you?"
His eyes were so deeply pooled in tears, I could hardly see his irises anymore. As I watched, one drop escaped, and trickled down his cheek, followed quickly by another on the opposite side of his face.
"I-intellectually," he said. "I guess. B-but - "
"It was the right thing," I repeated, firmly. "You've got to believe that. She does. So stop beating yourself up. She loves you very much - "
That did it. Now the tears were coming down in full force.
"She said that?" he asked, in a broken voice that reminded me that he was, after all, still a pretty young kid, and not the superhuman computer he sometimes acts like.
"Of course she did."
She hadn't, of course, but I'm sure she would have if she hadn't been so disgusted by my gross incompetency.
Then Doc did something that completely shocked me: he flung both his arms around my neck.
This kind of impassioned display was so unlike Doc, I didn't know what to do. I sat there for one awkward moment, not moving, afraid that if I did, I might gouge his face with some of the rivets on my jacket. Finally, however, when he didn't let go, I reached up and patted him uncertainly on the shoulder.
"It's okay," I said, lamely. "Everything is going to be okay."
He cried for about two minutes. His clinging to me, crying like that, gave me a strange feeling. It was kind of a protective feeling.
Then he finally leaned back, and, embarrassed, wiped his eyes again and said, "Sorry."