“Fine,” I said again. You would have thought that Father D. would notice how accommodating I’d become all of a sudden. I mean, didn’t he realize that he wasn’t the only person in town who could help me? I had an ace up my sleeve, and he didn’t even know it.

“Be back in a flash,” I said with a full-on, hundred-watt smile.

Then I turned and went into the offices of the Carmel Pine Cone like I was just going in there to place a personal ad or something.

What I was doing, of course, was something way more insidious.

“Is CeeCee Webb here?” I asked the pimply kid at the reception desk.

He looked up, startled. I don’t know what freaked him out more, my slip dress or the fact that I’d asked to see CeeCee.

“Over there,” he said, pointing. His voice wobbled all over the place.

“Thanks,” I said, and started down a long and quite messy corridor, passing a lot of industrious journalists who were eagerly tapping out their stories on the recent spate of wind chime thefts off people’s front porches, and the more alarming problem of parking in front of the post office.

CeeCee was in a cubicle in the back. It appeared to be the photocopier cubicle, because that was what she was doing: photocopying.

“Oh my God,” she said, when she saw me. “What are you doing here?”

She didn’t say it in an unhappy way, though.

“Slumming,” I said, and settled myself into an office chair beside the fax machine.

“I can see that,” CeeCee said. She was taking her role as girl reporter very seriously. Her long, stick-straight white hair was coiled up on top of her head with a number-two pencil, and there was a smudge of toner on one pink cheek. “Why aren’t you at the resort?”

“Mental health day,” I said. “On account of the dead body they found in our backyard yesterday.”

CeeCee dropped a ream of paper.

“Oh my God!” she gushed. “That was you? I mean, there’s a mention of a coroner’s call up to the hills in the Police Beat section, but somebody said it must have been a Native American burial site or something….”

“Oh, no,” I said. “Not unless the Native Americans around here wore spurs.”

“Spurs?” CeeCee reached for a notepad that was resting on top of the copier, then pulled the pencil from the knot on top of her head, causing her long hair to fall down around her shoulders. Because she is an albino, CeeCee keeps the vast majority of her skin protected from the sun at all times, even when she’s working inside an office. Today was no exception. In spite of the heat outside, she was wearing jeans and a brown button-down sweater.

On the other hand, the air-conditioning in the place had to be on high. It was like an icebox in there.

“Spill,” CeeCee said, perching on the edge of the table that supported the fax machine.

I did. I spilled it all. Everything, from the letters Dopey had found to my trip to Clive’s office to his untimely death the day before. I mentioned Clive’s grandfather’s book and Jesse and the historically significant role my house had played in his murder. I told her about Maria and Diego and their no-account kids, the fact that Jesse’s portrait was now missing from the historical society, and my suspicions that the skeleton found in my backyard belonged to him.

When I was through, CeeCee raised her gaze from the notepad and went, “Jeez, Simon. This could be a movie of the week.”

“Lifetime channel,” I agreed.

CeeCee pointed at me with the pencil. “Tiffani-Amber Thiessen could play Maria!”

“So,” I said. “Are you going to print it?”

“Heck, yeah,” CeeCee said. “I mean, it’s got everything. Romance and murder and intrigue and local interest. Too bad almost everybody involved has been dead a hundred years or more. Still, if I can get confirmation from the coroner that your skeleton belonged to a male in his twenties…Any idea how they did it? Killed him, I mean?”

I thought about Dopey and his shovel. “Well,” I said, “if they shot him—you know, in the head— I doubt the coroner will be able to tell, thanks to Brad’s ham-fisted digging technique.”

CeeCee looked at me. “You want to borrow my sweater?”

Surprised, I shook my head. “Why?”

“You’re shivering.”

I was, but not because I was cold.

“I’m okay,” I said. “Look, CeeCee, it’s really important you get them to run this story. And they have to do it soon. Like tomorrow.”

She said, not looking up again from her notepad, “Oh, I know. And I think it’d go great alongside Dr. Clemmings’s obituary, you know? The project he was working on when he died. That kind of thing.”

“So,” I said, “it’ll run tomorrow? Do you think it’ll run tomorrow?”

CeeCee shrugged. “They won’t want to run it until they get the coroner’s report on the body. And that could take weeks.”

Weeks? I didn’t have weeks. And though CeeCee didn’t know it, she didn’t have weeks either.

I was shaking uncontrollably now. Because I had realized, of course, what I’d just done: put CeeCee in the same kind of jeopardy I’d put Clive Clemmings in. Clive had been just fine until Maria had overheard him telling his dictaphone what I’d said about Jesse. Then faster than you could say The Haunting, he was suffering from a massive, paranormally induced coronary. Had I just sentenced CeeCee to the same gruesome end? While I highly doubted Maria was going to ransack the offices of the Carmel Pine Cone the way she had the Carmel Historical Society, there was still a chance she might find out what I had done.

I needed that story to run right away. The sooner people found out the truth about Maria and Felix Diego, the better my chances of them not killing me—or the people I cared about.

“It’s got to run tomorrow,” I said. “Please, CeeCee. Can’t you call the coroner and get some kind of unofficial statement?”

CeeCee did look up from her notebook then. She looked up and said, “Suze. What is the rush? These people have been dead for, like, forever. What does it matter?”

“It matters,” I said. My teeth were starting to chatter. “It just really matters, okay, CeeCee? Please, please see what you can do to put a rush on it. And promise you won’t talk about it. The story, I mean. Outside these offices. It’s really important that you keep it to yourself.”