When the phone rang a little after nine, and Andy called up the stairs that it was for me, I was already up, standing in my bathroom in my sweats, examining the enormous bruise that had developed beneath my bangs. I looked like an alien. I’m not kidding. It was a wonder, really, I hadn’t broken my neck. I was convinced that Maria and her boyfriend thought that’s exactly what I’d done. It was the only reason I was still alive. The two of them were so cocky, they hadn’t stuck around to make sure I was well and truly dead.

They’d obviously never met a mediator before. It takes a lot more than a fall off a roof to kill one of us.

“Susannah.” Father Dominic’s voice, when I picked up the phone, was filled with concern. “Thank God you’re all right. I was so worried…. But you didn’t, did you? Go to the cemetery last night?”

“No,” I said. There hadn’t been any reason to go there, in the end. The cemetery had come to me.

But I didn’t say that to Father D. Instead, I asked, “Are you back in town?”

“I’m back. You didn’t tell them, did you? Your family, I mean.”

“Um,” I said uncertainly.

“Susannah, you must. You really must. They have a right to know. We’re dealing with a very serious haunting here. You could be killed, Susannah—”

I refrained from mentioning that I’d actually already come pretty close.

At that moment, the call-waiting went off. I said, “Father D., can you hold on a second?” and hit the receiver.

A high-pitched, vaguely familiar voice spoke in my ear, but for the life of me, I could not place it right away.

“Suze? Is that you? Are you all right? Are you sick or something?”

“Um,” I said, extremely puzzled. “Yeah. I guess. Sort of. Who is this?”

The voice said, very indignantly, “It’s me! Jack!”

Oh, God. Jack. Work. Right.

“Jack,” I said. “How did you get my home number?”

“You gave it to Paul,” Jack said. “Yesterday. Don’t you remember?”

I did not, of course. All I could really remember from yesterday was that Clive Clemmings was dead, Jesse’s portrait was missing…

And that Jesse, of course, was gone. Forever.

Oh, and the whole part where the ghost of Felix Diego tried to split my head open.

“Oh,” I said. “Yeah. Okay. Look, Jack, I have someone on the other—”

“Suze,” Jack interrupted. “You were supposed to teach me to do underwater somersaults today.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m really sorry. I just…I just really couldn’t face coming in to work today, bud. I’m sorry. It’s nothing against you or anything. I just really need a day off.”

“You sound so sad,” Jack said, sounding pretty sad himself. “I thought you’d be really happy.”

“You did?” I wondered if Father D. was still waiting on the other line or if he’d hung up in a huff. I was, I realized, treating him pretty badly. After all, he’d cut his little retreat short for me. “How come?”

“On account of how I—”

That’s when I saw it. Just the faintest glow, over by the daybed. Jesse? Again my heart gave one of those lurches. It was really getting pathetic, how much I kept hoping, every time I saw the slightest shimmer, that it would be Jesse.

It wasn’t.

It wasn’t Maria or Diego either—thank God. Surely not even they would be bold enough to try to take a whack at me in broad daylight….

“Jack,” I said into the phone. “I have to go.”

“Wait, Suze, I—”

But I’d hung up. That’s because sitting there on my daybed, looking deeply unhappy, was Dr. Clive Clemmings, Ph.D.

Just my luck: Wish for a Jesse. Get a Clive.

“Oh,” he said, blinking behind the lenses of his Coke-bottle-bottom glasses. He seemed almost as surprised to see me as I was to see him materialize there in my bedroom. “It’s you.”

I just shook my head. Sometimes my bedroom feels like Grand Central Station.

“Well, I simply didn’t—” Clive Clemmings fiddled with his bow tie. “I mean, when they said I should contact a mediator, I didn’t…I mean, I never expected—”

“—that the mediator would be me,” I finished for him. “Yeah. I get that a lot.”

“It’s only,” Clive said apologetically, “that you’re so…”

I just glared at him. I really wasn’t in the mood. Can you blame me? What with the concussion, and all? “That I’m so what?” I demanded. “Female? Is that it? Or are you going to try to convince me you’re shocked by my preternatural intelligence?”

“Er,” Clive Clemmings said. “Young. I meant that…it’s just that you’re so young.”

I sank down onto the window seat. Really, what had I ever done to deserve this? I mean, nobody wants to be visited by the specter of a guy like Clive. I’m almost positive nobody ever wanted him to visit when he was alive. So why me?

Oh, yeah. The mediator thing.

“To what do I owe the pleasure, Clive?” I probably should have called him Dr. Clemmings, but I had too much of a headache to be respectful of my elders.

“Well, I hardly know,” Clive said. “I mean, suddenly, Mrs. Lampbert—that’s my receptionist, don’t you know?—she isn’t answering when I call her, and when people telephone for me, well, she tells them…the most horrible thing, actually. I simply don’t know what’s come over her.” Clive cleared his throat. “You see, she’s saying that I’m—”

“Dead,” I finished for him.

Clive eyes grew perceptibly bigger behind his glasses.

“Why,” he said, “that’s extraordinary. How could you know that? Well, yes, of course, you are the mediator, after all. They said you’d understand. But really, Miss Ackerman, I’ve had the most trying few days. I don’t feel at all like myself, and I—”

“That,” I interrupted him, “is because you’re dead.”

Ordinarily, I might have been a little nicer about it, but I guess I still felt a little kernel of resentment toward old Clive for his cavalier dismissal of my suggestion that Jesse might have been murdered.