I had not, of course, explained to Cee Cee the reason why I'd wanted her to look up stuff on Red Beaumont, anymore than I had told Adam how it was that I knew so much about little Timothy Mahern's cat. I had merely mentioned that Mr. Beaumont had said something odd during my brief meeting with him the night before. And that Father Dom had sent me to look for the cat, presumably because Timothy's dad had admitted abandoning it during his weekly confession – only Father Dom, being sworn to

secrecy, couldn't actually tell me that. I was only, I assured Adam, surmising....

"A dream?" Adam echoed. "About some lady who's been dead for seven years? That's weird."

"It probably wasn't her," I said quickly, backpedaling for all I was worth. "In fact, I'm sure it wasn't her. The woman I saw was much . . . taller." Like I could even tell how tall this woman was by looking at her picture somebody had posted on the Internet.

Adam said, "You know, Cee Cee has an aunt who dreams about dead people all the time. They visit her, she says."

I threw Cee Cee a startled glance. Could we, I wondered, be talking about another mediator? What, was there some kind of glut of us in the greater peninsula area? I knew Carmel was a popular retirement spot, but this was getting ridiculous.

"She doesn't have dreams about them," Cee Cee said, and I didn't think I was imagining the level of disgust in her voice. "Aunt Pru summons the spirits of the dead and she'll tell you what they said. For a small fee."

"Aunt Pru?" I grinned. "Wow, Cee Cee. I didn't know you had a psychic in the family."

"She isn't a psychic." Cee Cee's disgust deepened. "She's a complete flake. I'm embarrassed to be related to her. Talk to the dead. Right!"

"Don't hold back, Cee Cee," I said. "Let us know how you really feel."

"Well," Cee Cee said. "I'm sorry. But – "

"Hey," Adam interrupted brightly. "Maybe Aunt Pru could help tell us why" – he bent down for a closer look at the dead woman's photo on Cee Cee's computer screen – "Mrs. Dierdre Fiske here is popping up in Suze's dreams."

Horrified, I leaned forward and slammed Cee Cee's laptop closed. "No thanks," I said.

Cee Cee, opening her computer back up again, said irritably, "Nobody fondles the electronics but me, Simon."

"Aw, come on," Adam said. "It'll be fun. Suze's never met Pru. She'll get a big kick out of her. She's a riot."

Cee Cee muttered, "Yeah, you know how funny the mentally ill can be."

I said, hoping to get the subject back on track, "Um, maybe some other time. Anything else, Cee Cee, that you were able to dig up on Mr. Beaumont?"

"You mean other than the fact that he might possibly be killing anyone who stands in the way of his amassing a fortune by raping our forests and beaches?" Cee Cee, who was wearing a khaki rainhat to protect her sensitive skin from the sun, as well as her violet-lensed sunglasses, looked up at me. "You're not satisfied yet, Simon? Haven't we thoroughly vetted your paramour's closest relations?"

"Yeah," Adam said. "It must be reassuring to know that last night you hooked up with a guy who comes from such a nice, stable family, Suze."

"Hey," I said with an indignation I was far from actually feeling. "There's no proof Tad's dad is the one who's responsible for those environmentalists' disappearances. And besides, we just had coffee, okay? We did not hook up."

Cee Cee blinked at me. "You went out with him, Suze. That's all Adam meant by hooking up."

"Oh." Where I come from, hooking up means something else entirely. "Sorry. I – "

At that moment, Adam let out a shout. "Spike!"

I whirled around, following his pointing finger. There, peering out from the dry underbrush, sat the

biggest, meanest-looking cat I'd ever seen. He was the same color yellow as the grass, which was

probably how we'd missed him. He had orange stripes, one chewed-off ear, and an extremely nasty look on his face.

"Spike?" I asked, softly.

The cat turned his head in my direction and glared at me malevolently.

"Oh, my God," I said. "No wonder Tim's dad didn't take him to the animal shelter."

It took some doing – and the ultimate sacrifice of my Kate Spade book bag, which I'd managed to purchase only at great physical risk at a sample sale back in SoHo – but we finally managed to capture Spike. Once he was zipped up inside my bag, he seemed to resign himself to captivity, although

throughout the ride to Safeway, where we went to stock up on litter and food for him, I could hear him working industriously on the bag's lining with his claws. Timothy, I decided, owed me big time.

Especially when Adam, instead of turning up the street to my house, turned in the opposite direction, heading farther up the Carmel hills until the big red dome covering the basilica of the Mission below us was the size of my thumbnail.

"No," Cee Cee immediately said as firmly as I've ever heard her say anything. "Absolutely not. Turn the car around. Turn the car around now."

Only Adam, chuckling diabolically, just sped up.

Holding my Kate Spade bag on my lap, I said, "Uh, Adam. I don't know where, exactly, you think you're going, but I'd really like to at least get rid of this, um, animal first – "

"Just for a minute," Adam said. "The cat'll be all right. Come on, Cee. Stop being such a spoilsport."

Cee Cee was madder than I'd ever seen her. "I said no!" she shouted.

But it was too late. Adam pulled up in front of a little stucco bungalow that had wind chimes hanging all over the place tinkling in the breeze from the bay, and giant hibiscus blossoms turned up toward the late afternoon sun. He put his VW in park and switched off the ignition.

"We'll just pop in to say hi," he said to Cee Cee. And then he unfastened his seatbelt and hopped out of the car.

Cee Cee and I didn't move. She was in the backseat. I was in the front with the cat. From my bag came an ominous rumbling.

"I hesitate to ask," I said, after a while of sitting there listening to the wind chimes and Spike's steady growling. "But where are we?"

That question was answered when, a second later, the door to the bungalow burst open and a woman whose hair was the same whitish yellow as Cee Cee's – only so long that she could sit on it – yoo-hooed at us.