“I’ll give him a call,” I said as I accidentally dropped a piece of chicken into my lap, where it was immediately vacuumed up by the Ackermans’ enormous dog, Max, who maintains a watchful position at my side during every meal.

It was only when Dopey chortled that I realized I’d said the wrong thing. Never having been a normal teenage girl, it is sometimes hard for me to imitate one. And normal teenage girls do not, I know, give their high school principals calls on any sort of regular basis.

I glared at Dopey from across the table.

“I was going to call him anyway,” I said, “to find out what I’m supposed to do with the leftover cash from our class trip to Six Flags.”

“I’ll take it,” Sleepy joked. Why did my mother have to marry into a family of comedians?

“Can I see them?” I asked, pointedly ignoring both my stepbrothers.

“See what, honey?” Andy asked me.

For a moment I forgot what we were talking about. Honey? Andy had never called me honey before. What was going on here? Were we—I shudder to think it—bonding? Excuse me, I already have one father, even if he is dead. He still pops by to visit me all too often.

“I think she means the letters,” my mother said, apparently not even noticing what her husband had just called me.

“Oh, sure,” Andy said. “They’re in our room.”

“Our room” is the bedroom Andy and my mother sleep in. I try never to go in there, because, well, frankly, the whole thing grosses me out. Yeah, sure, I’m glad that my mom’s finally happy, after ten years of mourning the death of my dad. But does that mean I want to actually see her in bed with her new husband, watching The West Wing? No thank you.

Still, after dinner, I steeled myself and went in there. My mom was at her dressing table taking off her makeup. She has to go to bed very early in order to be up in time for her stint on the morning news.

“Oh, hi, sweetie,” my mom said to me in a dazed, I’m-busy kind of way. “They’re over there, I think.”

I looked where she pointed on top of Andy’s dresser and found the metal box Dopey had dug up along with a lot of other guy-type stuff, like loose change and matches and receipts.

Anyway, Andy had tried to clean the box up, and he’d done a pretty good job of it. You could read almost all the writing on it.

Which was kind of unfortunate, because what the writing said was way politically incorrect. Try new Red Injun cigars! it urged. There was even a picture of this very proud-looking Native American clutching a fistful of cigars where his bow and quiver ought to have been. The delicious aroma will tempt even the choosiest smoker. As with all our products, quality assured.

That was it. No surgeon general’s warning about how smoking can kill. Nothing about fetal birth weight. Still, it was kind of strange how advertising from before they had TV—before they even had radio—was still basically the same as advertising today. Only, you know, now we know that naming your product after a race of people will probably offend them.

I opened the box and found the letters inside. Andy was right about their poor condition. They were so yellowed that you could hardly peel them apart without having pieces crumble off. They had, I could see, been tied together with a ribbon, a silk one, which might have been another color once, but was now an ugly brown.

There was a stack of letters, maybe five or six in all, in the box. I can’t tell you, as I picked up the first one, what I thought I’d see. But I guess a part of me knew all along what I was going to find.

Even so, when I’d carefully unfolded the first one and read the words Dear Hector, I still felt like somebody had snuck up behind me and kicked me.

I had to sit down. I sank down into one of the armchairs my mom and Andy keep by the fireplace in their room, my eyes still glued to the yellowed page in front of me.

Jesse. These letters were to Jesse.

“Suze?” My mom glanced at me curiously. She was rubbing cream into her face. “Are you all right?”

“Fine,” I said in a strangled voice. “Is it okay…is it okay if I just sit here and read these for a minute?”

My mom began to slop cream onto her hands. “Of course,” she said. “You’re sure you’re all right? You look a little…pale.”

“I’m great,” I lied. “Just great.”

Dear Hector, the first letter said. The handwriting was beautiful—loopy and old-fashioned, the kind of handwriting Sister Ernestine, back at school, used. I could read it quite easily, despite the fact that the letter was dated May 8, 1850.

1850! That was the year our house had been built, the first year it was in business as a boardinghouse for travelers to the Monterey Peninsula area. The year—I knew from when Doc and I looked it up—that Jesse, or Hector (which is his real name; can you imagine? I mean, Hector) had mysteriously disappeared.

Though I happen to know there hadn’t been anything mysterious about it. He’d been murdered in this very house…in fact, in my bedroom upstairs. Which is why, for the past century and a half, he’s been hanging out there, waiting for…

Waiting for what?

Waiting for you, said a small voice in the back of my head. A mediator, to find these letters and avenge his death, so he can move on to wherever it is he’s supposed to go next.

The thought struck me with terror. Really. It made my hands go all sweaty, even though it was cool in my mom and Andy’s room, what with the air-conditioning being on full blast. The back of my neck started feeling prickly and gross.

I forced myself to look back down at the letter. If Jesse was meant to move on, well, then I was just going to have to help him do it. That’s my job, after all.

Except that I couldn’t help thinking about Father Dom. A fellow mediator, he had admitted to me a few months ago that he had once had the misfortune to fall in love with a ghost, back when he’d been my age. Things hadn’t worked out—how could they?—and he’d become a priest.

Got that? A priest. Okay? That’s how bad it had been. That’s how hard the loss had been to get over. He’d become a priest.

Frankly, I don’t see how I could ever become a nun. For one thing, I’m not even Catholic. And for another, I don’t look very good with my hair pulled back. Really. That’s why I’ve always avoided ponytails and headbands.

Stop it, I said to myself. Just stop it and read.