I hesitated. “Well, thank you, Father. That’s very nice. But shouldn’t you still let me—”

“Let you what?” He was putting on his black jacket, checking in the mirror to make sure his clerical collar was straight. “Let you come with me? Then who will do your job? Sister Ernestine will certainly discover Ms. Diaz and Mr. Gillarte’s affair if you are not here to make excuses for them. No, Susannah—” He turned from the mirror to look at me, not seeming to notice my astonished expression. I’d had no idea he knew about the Diaz-Gillarte imbroglio. “It’s my responsibility, not yours.”

“But.” I had to try one more time. “Supposing she does reveal herself to you. She’s not normal. Even you admit she’s insanely strong. So if you piss her off, you could get more than drowned, or the head of a statue thrown at you—”

“Susannah, I’ve been doing this quite a bit longer than you. I do think I know my way around a mediation by now. Besides,” he added with a grin, “believe it or not, children like me. It’s entirely possible that Becca, and even her spirit companion, will listen calmly to what I have to say. Most people do, you know.”

I tried my hardest to stop him. In retrospect, I should have tried harder. I should have called Jesse—even though he was back at the Crossing, catching up on the sleep he’d missed over the last forty-eight hours.

In retrospect, I should have made Gina or Jake wake Jesse up and drive after Father Dominic to stop him. Or I should have gone with him myself, especially after Aunt Pru’s warning.

But he was so confident about it, so adamant that he could fix everything. And I was tired from my own lack of sleep, and preoccupied, I’ll admit, about what was going on with my boyfriend.

And really, maybe it was insensitive of me to try to stand in the way of this, Father Dominic’s last mediation (or attempt at one, anyway). Ageist, even. I didn’t want to be accused of discriminating against someone because of their advancing years.

So I said, “Okay, Father D. If you’re sure. I guess I could stay here and see what I can find out about the riding accident.”

He nodded and said, “Good thinking.”

It wasn’t, though. It turned out to be terrible thinking.

Only I didn’t know it until I heard Sister Ernestine pick up the phone in her office a few hours later, then cry, “What?”

That’s when I knew how wrong I’d been.

trece

“That’s how old people die. They fracture their hip, get pneumonia, then die.”

That’s what my stepniece Mopsy assured me of as we stood in front of the main reception desk at the hospital later that evening.

“Shut up, Emily,” I said.

“But it’s true. And you’re not supposed to say shut up. You’re supposed to sing the listening song. That’s what Sister Monica taught us in school.”

“I’m not going to sing the goddamn listening song, Emily.”

“You’re not supposed to swear, Aunt Suze. You’re not supposed to swear or say shut up.”

I took a deep breath, fighting for patience. The only reason my stepnieces were with me was because a fight had erupted between their parents over Sister Ernestine’s request to discuss the possibility of their daughters having ADHD.

Even though we hadn’t always (okay, ever) gotten along, I considered Debbie a loving and hands-on mom, especially given the fact that she’d had all three of her babies at the same time, without the aid of fertility drugs. Multiples ran in Debbie’s family. She had an older cousin who’d had two sets of triplets, also naturally.

One might think this would have served as a warning to Debbie to use protection, but the opposite was true. Debbie was completely opposed to all forms of pharmaceutical products, including birth control—to Brad’s everlasting chagrin—and vaccinations, despite Jesse pointing out that because of people like her, preventable (and potentially deadly) diseases like measles, mumps, and whooping cough were on the rise again in the state of California.

Debbie didn’t care. She was convinced that keeping Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cotton-tail (my nicknames for my admittedly adorable but somewhat high-spirited stepnieces) drug and vaccine free was the right thing to do.

Although I didn’t agree with her (and wasn’t sure how long any school, even the Mission Academy, would keep accepting her bogus “health exemptions” from her quack doctor), in a weird way I admired her fiercely protective—if misdirected—maternal instinct.

Except that this latest tiff between her and my stepbrother over the subject had resulted in a communications gap so vast that neither of them had remembered to retrieve the girls after school. That’s how I’d been forced to corral them into the backseat of my embarrassingly dilapidated Land Rover, then take them with me to the hospital when I’d heard the news about Father Dom.

Hospitals are the last place you’re supposed to take children—especially ones who haven’t had their vaccinations.

But what other choice did I have? I had to see Father Dominic as soon as he got out of recovery. They’d decided it was best to operate on his hip right away, as the “accident” he’d allegedly suffered at the Walterses’s home had completely shattered it.

So it was to St. Francis that the four of us went.

I’d realized belatedly what a horrible idea this was not only when Mopsy opened her mouth to ask, “Why is your car so old, Aunt Suze?” (it had been in the family for ages until I’d inherited it, and there was no point in my buying a nicer car, since it was only going to be abused by my terrible driving, the triplets, and, of course, mediation-resistant spirits), but when she’d followed that up by declaring, in the hospital lobby, that Father Dom was going to die.

Even worse, the redhead at the hospital’s main reception desk turned out to be someone new, who didn’t recognize me as either Jesse’s fiancée—I’d been to the hospital many times to visit him during his breaks—or a member of the clergy and therefore “family” of Father D’s, and so wouldn’t tell me the exact extent of his injuries, how he was doing, or which floor he’d been taken to.

“Look,” I said to the redhead, pointedly ignoring Mopsy, the most outspoken of Brad and Debbie’s daughters, “I get that you can’t give me any information about what room Father Dominic is in for privacy reasons. But can you at least tell me his status? He was supposed to have been out of surgery an hour ago.”