So I admit it. I lied. So what? So sue me.
"Nope," I said. "Nothing to report, Father Dom. Supernatural or otherwise."
Was it my imagination or did Father Dominic look a little disappointed? To tell you the truth, I think he sort of liked that I'd wrecked the school. Seriously. Much as he complained about it, I don't think he minded my mediation techniques so much. It certainly gave him something to get on a soapbox about, and as the principal of a tiny private school in Carmel, California, I can't imagine he really had all that much to complain about. Other than me, I mean.
"Well," he said, trying not to let me see how let down he was by my lack of anything to report. "All right, then." He brightened. "I understand there was a three-car pileup out in Sunnyvale. Maybe we should drive out there and see if any of those poor lost souls need our aid."
I looked at him like he was out of his mind. "Father Dom," I said, shocked.
He fiddled with his glasses. "Yes, well … I mean, I just thought …"
"Look, padre," I said, getting up. "You gotta remember something. I don't feel the same way about this gift of ours that you do. I never asked for it and I've never liked it. I just want to be normal, you know?"
Father Dom looked taken aback. "Normal?" he echoed. As in, who would ever want to be that?
"Yes, normal," I said. "I want to spend my time worrying about the normal things sixteen-year-old girls worry about. Like homework and how come no boy wants to go out with me and why do my stepbrothers have to be such losers. I don't exactly relish the ghost-busting stuff, okay? So if they need me, let them find me. But I'm sure as heck not going looking for them."
Father Dominic didn't get out of his chair. He couldn't really, with that cast. Not without help. "No boy wants to go out with you?" he asked, looking perplexed.
"I know," I said. "It's one of the wonders of the modern world. Me being so good looking, and all. Especially with these." I raised my oozing hands.
Father Dominic was still confused, though.
"But you're terribly popular, Susannah," he said. "I mean, after all, you were voted vice president of the sophomore class your first week at the Mission Academy. And I thought Bryce Martinsen was quite fond of you."
"Yeah," I said. "He was." Until the ghost of his ex-girlfriend - whom I was forced to exorcize - broke his collarbone, and he had to change schools, and then promptly forgot all about me.
"Well, then," Father Dominic said, as if that settled it. "You haven't anything to worry about in that category. The boy category, I mean."
I just looked at him. The poor old guy. It was almost enough to make me feel sorry for him.
"Gotta get back to class," I said, gathering my books. "I've been spending so much time in the principal's office lately, people are gonna think I've got ties with the establishment and ask me to resign from office."
"Certainly," Father Dominic said. "Of course. Here's your hall pass. And try to remember what we discussed, Susannah. A mediator is someone who helps others resolve conflicts. Not someone who, er, kicks them in the face."
I smiled at him. "I'll keep that in mind," I said.
And I would, too. Right after I'd kicked Red's butt.
Whoever he was.
CHAPTER 3
I found out who he was easily enough, it turned out. All I had to do was ask at lunch if anybody knew of a guy named Red.
Generally it's not that easy. I won't even tell you about the number of phone books I've scoured, the hours I've spent on the Internet. Not to mention the lame excuses I've had to make to my mother, trying to explain the phone bills I've racked up calling Information. "I'm sorry, Mom. I just really had to find out if there was a store within a fifty-mile radius that carries Manolo Blahnik loafers...."
This one was so easy, though, it almost made me think, Hey, maybe this mediator stuff's not so bad.
That, of course, was then. I hadn't actually found Red at that point.
"Anybody know of a guy named Red?" I asked the crowd I had started eating lunch with, on what I guess was going to be a regular basis.
"Sure," Adam said. He was eating Cheetos out of a family-size bag. "Last name Tide, right? Enjoys killing harmless sea otters and other aquatic creatures?"
"Not that Red," I said. "This one is a human being. Probably adult. Probably local."
"Beaumont," Cee Cee said. She was eating pudding from a plastic cup. A big fat seagull was sitting not even a foot way from her, eyeing the spoon each time Cee Cee dipped it back into the cup, then raised it again to her lips. The Mission Academy has no cafeteria. We eat outside every day, even, apparently, in January. But this, of course, was no New York January. Here in Carmel, it was a balmy seventy degrees and sunny outside. Back home, according to the Weather Channel, it had just snowed six inches.
I'd been in California almost three weeks, but so far it hadn't rained once. I was still waiting to find out where we were supposed to eat if it was raining during lunch.
I had already learned the hard way what happens if you feed the seagulls.
"Thaddeus Beaumont is a real estate developer." Cee Cee finished up the pudding, and started on a banana she pulled from a paper bag at her hip. Cee Cee never buys school lunches. She has a thing about corn dogs.
Cee Cee went on, peeling her banana, "His friends call him Red. Don't ask me why, since he doesn't have red hair. Why do you want to know, anyway?"
This was always the tricky part. You know the why-do-you-want-to-know? part. Because the fact is, except for Father Dom, no one knows about me. About the mediator thing, I mean. Not Cee Cee, not Adam. Not even my mother. Doc, my youngest stepbrother, suspects, but he doesn't know. Not all of it.
My best friend Gina, back in Brooklyn, is probably the closest to having figured it out of anyone I know, and that's only because she happened to be there when Madame Zara, this tarot-card reader Gina had made me go to, looked at me with shock on her face and said, "You talk to the dead."
Gina had thought it was cool. Only she never knew - not really - what it meant. Because what it means, of course, is that I never get enough sleep, have bruises I can't explain given to me by people no one else can see, and, oh, yeah, I can't change clothes in my bedroom because the hundred-and-fifty-year-old ghost of this dead cowboy might see me naked.
Any questions?
To Cee Cee I just said, "Oh, it's just something I heard on TV." It wasn't so hard, lying to friends. Lying to my mother, though, now that got a little sticky.
"Wasn't that the name of that guy you danced with at Kelly's?" Adam asked. "You remember, Suze. Tad, the hunchback with the missing teeth and the terrible body odor? You came up to me afterward and threw your arms around me and begged me to marry you so you'd be protected from him for the rest of your life."
"Oh, yeah," I said. "Him."
"That's his father," Cee Cee said. Cee Cee knows everything in the world because she is editor - and publisher, chief writer, and photographer - for the Mission News, the school paper. "Tad Beaumont is Red Beaumont's only child."
"Aha," I said. It made a little more sense then. I mean, why the dead woman had come to me. Obviously, she felt a connection to Red through his son.
"What aha?" Cee Cee looked interested. Then again, Cee Cee always looks interested. She's like a sponge, only instead of water, she absorbed facts. "Don't tell me," she said, "you've got it bad for that tool of a kid of his. I mean, what was that guy's problem? He never even asked your name."