covered with soot. Look, there's black gunk now all over my new Pottery Barn slipcovers."

I stared at the photo.

"Did she …" I struggled to formulate the correct question. "Did she go into a coma, or something?"

My mother looked up from the slipcover she'd been yanking from the armchair where I'd been lounging.

"I think so," she said. "Yes, toward the end. Why?"

"Did Andy have to …" I turned Gina's letter over and over in my hands. "Did they have to pull the plug?"

"Yes." My mother had forgotten about the slipcover. Now she was staring at me, obviously concerned. "Yes, as a matter of fact, they had to ask that she be taken off life support at a certain point since Andy believed she wouldn't have wanted to live like that. Why?"

"I don't know." I looked down at the hearts and rainbows on Gina's envelope. Red. I had been so stupid. You know me, Doc's mother had insisted. God, I should so have my mediator license revoked. If there were a license, which, of course, there isn't.

"What was her name?" I asked, nodding my head toward the photo. "Brad's mom, I mean?"

"Cynthia," my mother said.

Cynthia. God, what a loser I am.

"Honey, come help me, would you?" My mother was still futzing with the chair I'd been sitting in. "I can't get this one cushion loose – "

I tucked Gina's envelope into my pocket and went to help my mother. "Where's Doc?" I asked. "I mean, David."

My mother looked at me curiously. "Upstairs in his room, I think, doing his homework. Why?"

"Oh, I just have to tell him something."

Something I should have told him a long time ago.

CHAPTER

23

"So?" Jesse asked. "How did he take it?"

"I don't want to talk about it."

I was stretched out on my bed, totally without makeup, attired in my oldest jogging clothes. I had a new plan: I had decided I was going to treat Jesse exactly the way I would my stepbrothers. That way, I'd be guaranteed not to fall in love with him.

I was flipping through a copy of Vogue instead of doing my Geometry homework like I was supposed to. Jesse was on the window seat – of course – petting Spike.

Jesse shook his head. "Come on," he said. It always sounded strange to me when Jesse said things like Come on. It seemed so strange coming out of a guy who was wearing a shirt with laces instead of

buttons. "Tell me what he said."

I flipped a page of my magazine. "Tell me what you guys did to Marcus."

Jesse looked a little too surprised by the question. "We did nothing to him."

"Baloney. Where'd he go, then?"

Jesse shrugged and scratched Spike beneath the chin. The stupid cat was purring so loud, I could hear it all the way across the room.

"I think he decided to travel for a while." Jesse's tone was deceptively innocent.

"Without any money? Without his credit cards?" One of the things the firemen had found in the room was Marcus's wallet … and his gun.

"There is something to be said" – Jesse gave Spike a playful swat on the back of the head when the cat took a lazy swipe at him – "for seeing this great country of ours on foot. Maybe he will come to have a

better appreciation for its natural beauty."

I snorted, and turned a page of my magazine. "He'll be back in a week."

"I think not." He said it with such certainty that I instantly became suspicious.

"Why not?"

Jesse hesitated. He didn't want to tell me, I could tell.

"What?" I said. "Telling me, a mere living being, is going to violate some spectral code?"

"No," Jesse said with a smile. "He's not coming back, Susannah, because the souls of the people he killed won't let him."

I raised my eyebrows. "What do you mean?"

"In my day, it was called bedevilment. I don't know what they call it now. But your intervention had a rallying effect on Mrs. Fiske and the three others whose lives Marcus Beaumont took. They have banded together, and will not rest until he has been sufficiently punished for his crimes. He can run from one end of the earth to the other, but he will never escape them. Not until he dies himself. And when that

happens" – Jesse's voice was hard – "he will be a broken man."

I didn't say anything. I couldn't. As a mediator, I knew I shouldn't approve of this sort of behavior. I mean, ghosts should not be allowed to take the law into their own hands any more than the living should.

But I had no particular fondness for Marcus, and no way of proving that he'd killed those people

anyway. He'd never be punished, I knew, by inhabitants of this world. So was it so wrong that he be punished by those who lived in the next?

I glanced at Jesse out of the corner of my eyes, remembering that, from what I'd read, no one had ever been convicted of his murder, either.

"So," I said. "I guess you did the same thing, huh, to the, um, people who killed you, right?"

Jesse didn't fall for this sly question, though. He only smiled, and said, "Tell me what happened with your brother."

"Stepbrother," I reminded him.

And I wasn't going to tell Jesse about my interview with Doc, anymore than Jesse was going to tell me diddly about how he'd died. Only in my case, it was because what had happened with Doc was just too excruciatingly embarrassing to go into. Jesse didn't want to talk about how he'd died because . . . well, I don't know. But I doubt it's because he's embarrassed about it.

I had found Doc exactly where my mother had told me he'd be, in his room doing his homework, a paper that wasn't due until the following month. But that was Doc for you: why put off until tomorrow homework you could be doing today?

His "Come in," when I'd tapped at the door had been casual. He hadn't suspected it would be me. I never ventured into my stepbrothers' rooms if I could avoid it. The odor of dirty socks was simply too

overwhelming.

Only since I wasn't smelling too daisy-fresh myself at that particular moment, I thought I could bear it.

He was shocked to see me, his face turning almost as red as his hair. He jumped up and tried to hide his pile of dirty underwear beneath the comforter of his unmade bed. I told him to relax. And then I sat down on that unmade bed, and said I had something to tell him.