Spike had padded across the room toward me. I thought he was going to bite me, as usual, but he didn’t. Instead, he trotted right up to my face and let out a very loud, very plaintive cry.

“Good God,” Father Dominic cried into the phone. “Is that her? Is she there already?”

I reached out and scratched Spike behind his one remaining ear, amazed he was even letting me touch him. “No,” I said. “That was Spike. He misses Jesse.”

Father Dominic said, “Susannah, I know how painful this must be for you. But you must know that wherever Jesse is now, he’s better off than he’s been for the past hundred and fifty years, living in limbo between this world and the next. I know it’s difficult, but you must try to be happy for him, and know that, above all, he would want you to take care of yourself, Susannah. He would want you to keep yourself and your family safe—”

As I listened to Father Dom, I realized he was right. That was what Jesse would have wanted. And there I was, sitting around in a pair of lounging pajamas when there was work to be done.

“Father D.,” I said, interrupting him. “In the cemetery, over at the Mission. Are there any de Silvas buried there?”

Father Dominic, startled from his safety-first lecture, said, “I—de Silva? Really, Susannah, I don’t know. I don’t think—”

“Oh, wait,” I said. “I keep forgetting, she married a Diego. There’s a Diego crypt, isn’t there?” I tried to picture the cemetery, which was a small one, surrounded by high walls, directly behind the basilica down at the Mission where Father Dominic works and I go to school. There are only a small number of graves there, mainly of the monks who had first worked with Junipero Serra, the guy who’d founded the Carmel Mission back in the 1700s.

But a few wealthy landowners in the 1800s had managed to get a mausoleum or two squeezed in by donating a sizable portion of their fortunes to the church.

And the biggest one—if I remembered correctly from the time Mr. Walden, our world civ teacher, had taken us to the cemetery to give us a taste of our local history—had the word DIEGO carved into the door.

“Susannah,” Father Dominic said. For the first time, there was a note of something other than urgency in his voice. Now he sounded frightened. “Susannah, I know what you are thinking, and I…I forbid it! You are not to go near that cemetery, do you understand me? You are not to go near that crypt! It is much too dangerous….”

Just the way I like it.

But that’s not what I said out loud. Aloud I said, “Okay, Father D. You’re right. I’ll wake my mom up. I’ll tell her everything. And I’ll get everyone out of the house.”

Father Dominic was so astonished, he didn’t say anything for a minute. When he was finally able to find his voice, he said, “Good. Well…good, then. Yes. Get everyone out of the house. Don’t do anything foolish, Susannah, like call upon the ghost of this woman, until I get there. Promise me.”

Promise me. Like promises mean anything anymore. Look at Jesse. He’d promised me he wasn’t going to go away, and where was he?

Gone. Gone forever.

And I’d been too much of a coward ever to tell him how I really felt about him.

And now I’d never get the chance to.

“Sure,” I said to Father Dominic. “I promise.”

But I think even he knew I didn’t mean it.

chapter

nine

Ghost busting is a tricky business.

You’d think it would be easy, right? Like if a ghost’s bothering you, you just, you know, bust its chops and it’ll go away.

Yeah. Doesn’t work that way much, unfortunately.

Which is not to say that busting someone’s chops does not have therapeutic value. Especially for someone who, like me, might be grieving. Because that’s what I was doing, of course. Grieving for Jesse.

Except—and I don’t know if this applies to all mediators or just me—I don’t really grieve like a normal person. I mean, I sat around and cried my eyes out after the realization first hit me that I was never going to see Jesse again.

But then something happened. I stopped feeling sad and started feeling mad.

Really mad. There I was, and it was after midnight, and I was extremely angry.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to keep my promise to Father D. I really did. But I just couldn’t.

Any more than Jesse could apparently keep his promise to me.

So it was only about fifteen minutes after my phone call to Father D. that I emerged from my bathroom—Jesse was gone, of course, so I could have changed in my room, but old habits die hard—in full ghost-busting regalia, including my tool belt and hooded sweatshirt, which even I will admit might seem a bit excessive for California in July. But it was nighttime, and that mist rolling in from the ocean in the wee hours can be chilly.

I don’t want you to think I didn’t give serious thought to what Father D. had said about my telling my mom everything and getting her and the Ackermans out of there. I really did think about it.

It’s just that the more I thought about it, the more ridiculous it sounded. I mean, first of all, my mom is a television news journalist. She simply is not the type to believe in ghosts. She only believes in what she can see or, barring that, what has been proven to exist by science. The one time I did try to tell her, she totally did not understand. And I realized then that she never would.

So how could I possibly go busting into her bedroom and tell her and her new husband that they have to get out of the house because a vengeful spirit is after me? She would be on the phone to her therapist back in New York, looking for communities where I could go to “rest,” so fast you wouldn’t believe it.

So that plan was out.

But that was all right, because I had a much better one. One that, really, I should have thought of right away, but I guess that whole seeing-the-skeleton-of-the-guy-I-love-being-hauled-out-of-a-hole-in-my-backyard thing really got to me, and so I didn’t think of it until I was on the phone with Father D.

But once I’d come up with it, I realized it really was the perfect plan. Instead of waiting for Maria to come to me, I was simply going to go to her and, well…

Send her back from where she came.

Or reduce her to a mound of quivering gelatinous goo. Whichever came first.