Jack wrinkled his nose. “I don’t like to read much.”

“Well,” I said. We had gone out into the living room, and now I picked up my purse and opened it. “You’re going to have to do some reading if we’re going to get Jesse back. I’m going to need you to read this.”

And I passed him an index card on which I’d scrawled some words. Jack squinted down at it.

“What is this?” he demanded. “This isn’t English.”

“No,” I said. I started taking other things out of my purse. “It’s Portuguese.”

“What’s that?” Jack asked.

“It’s a language,” I explained, “that they speak in Portugal. Also in Brazil, and a few other places.”

“Oh,” Jack said, then pointed at a small Tupperware container I’d taken from my purse. “What’s that?”

“Oh,” I said. “Chicken blood.”

Jack made a face. “Eew!”

“Look,” I said. “If we’re going to do this exorcism, we’re going to do it right. And to do it right, you need chicken blood.”

Jack said, “I didn’t use chicken blood when Maria was here.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Well, Maria does things her way, and I do things my way. Now let’s go into the bathroom to do this. I have to paint stuff on the floor with the chicken blood, and I highly doubt the housekeeping staff will appreciate it if we do it here on the carpet.”

Jack followed me into the bathroom that joined his room to his brother’s. In the part of my brain that wasn’t concentrating on what I was doing, I kind of wondered where Paul was. It was strange he hadn’t called after that whole thing where he’d dropped me off at my house and there’d been all those cop cars and stuff in front of it. I mean, you’d have thought he’d wonder, at least, what that had been all about.

But I hadn’t heard a peep out of him.

Not that I cared. I had way more important things to worry about. But it was still kind of odd.

“There,” I said, when we had everything set up. It took an hour, but when we were done, we had a fairly decent example of how an exorcism—the Brazilian voodoo variety, anyway—is supposed to look. At least according to a book I’d read on the subject once.

With the chicken blood I’d procured from the meat counter of one of the gourmet shops downtown, I’d made these special symbols in the middle of the bathroom floor, and around them I’d stuck assorted candles (the votive kind, the only ones I could get at short notice, between the offices of the Carmel Pine Cone and the hotel; they were cinnamon scented, too, so the bathroom smelled sort of like Christmas…well, except for the not-so-festive fragrance of chicken blood).

In spite of the amateurishness with which it had been thrown together, it was, in fact, a working portal to the afterlife—or at least it would be, once Jack did his part with the notecard. I’d gone over the pronunciation of each word, and he seemed to have it down pretty well. The only thing he couldn’t seem to get around was the fact that the person we were exorcising was, well, me.

“But you’re alive,” he kept saying. “If I exorcise your spirit from you, won’t you be dead?”

Actually, this was a thought that had not really occurred to me. What would happen to my body after my spirit had left it? Would I be dead?

No, that was impossible. My heart and lungs wouldn’t stop working just because my soul was gone. Probably I’d just lie there, like someone in a coma.

This was not, however, very comforting to Jack.

“But what if you don’t come back?” he wanted to know.

“I’m going to come back,” I said. “I told you. The only reason I can come back is that I do have a living body to return to. I just want to have a look around out there and see if Jesse’s okay. If he is, fine. If not…well, I’ll try to bring him back with me.”

“But you just said the only reason you can come back is because you have a living body to return to. Jesse doesn’t. So how can he come back?”

This was, of course, a good question. That was probably why it put me in such a bad mood.

“Look,” I said finally. “Nobody has ever tried this before, so far as I know. Maybe you don’t have to have a body to come back. I don’t know, okay? But I can’t not try just because I don’t know the answer. Where would we be if Christopher Columbus hadn’t tried? Huh?”

Jack looked thoughtful. “Living in Spain right now?”

“Very funny,” I said. It was at this point that I took the last thing from my bag and tied one end around my waist. I tied the other end to Jack’s wrist.

“What’s the rope for?” he asked, looking down at it.

“So I can find my way back to you,” I said.

Jack looked confused. “But if just your spirit’s going, what’s the point of tying a rope around your body? You said your body wasn’t going anywhere.”

“Jack,” I said from between gritted teeth. “Just reel me back in if I’m gone more than half an hour, all right?” I figured half an hour was about as long as anybody’s soul could be separated from their body. On TV I was always seeing stuff about little kids who’d slipped into icy water and drowned and been technically dead for up to forty minutes, yet recovered without any brain damage or anything. So I figured half an hour was cutting it as close as I could.

“But how—”

“Oh my God,” I snapped at him. “Just do it, okay?”

Jack glowered at me. Hey, just because we’re both mediators doesn’t mean we get along all the time.

“Okay,” he said. Under his breath, I heard him mutter, “You don’t have to be such a witch about it.”

Only he didn’t say “witch.” Really, it is shocking, the words kids are using these days.

“All right,” I said. I stepped into the center of the circle of candles and stood in the middle of all the chicken blood symbols. “Here goes nothing.”

Jack looked down at his notecard. Then he looked back up at me.

“Shouldn’t you lie down?” he asked. “I mean, if it’s gonna be like you’re in a coma, I don’t want you to fall down and hurt yourself.”