I punched him in the shoulder, causing him to slosh some of the wine in his glass. But it was okay, since Max—whom we’d stopped off at the Crossing to bring along, as he’s such an excellent ghost detector—jumped up immediately, eager for the possibility that some food might have been spilled. Disappointed that it was only wine, however, he lay back down at our feet with a sigh.

“Ow,” Jesse said, rubbing his shoulder where I’d punched him.

“I didn’t hit you that hard. And that’s exactly what I mean. I don’t think either the Ackerman family or the Mancusos are carrying the mediator gene. I didn’t meet a single person at Brad and Debbie’s wedding who seemed remotely intuitive. Did you?”

“No.” Jesse poured more wine into his glass. “And sometimes I think you don’t know your own strength. But I’ve always felt that your stepbrother David is very perceptive. Occasionally I was able to communicate with him back when I was . . .”

“—dead,” I finished for him when he hesitated to say the word.

“Yes. Thank you.”

“No problem.”

I took a sip from my glass and looked up at the stars—what I could see of them through the many electric wires intersecting the sky across the yard from Brad and Debbie’s neighbors’ houses—and wondered how I was ever going to get over to Carmel Hills to salt the old house now. It seemed that fate, in the form of Lucia Martinez, was conspiring against me.

“I agree, David’s a really insightful kid,” I said. I was speaking quietly so neither the girls, who had upon occasion opened their bedroom window to spy on us after being put to bed, nor Debbie or Brad would overhear me. “But David’s not those girls’ dad. Brad is. And Debbie’s their mom. Brad is much less intuitive than good old Max here, and Debbie thinks vaccines cause diseases. So how can their kids see ghosts? And how are we ever going to explain that to their parents?”

“We’re not going to,” Jesse said. “Any more than I explained to them that in a previous lifetime I watched entire families die from smallpox. If Debbie doesn’t believe the substantial scientific proof that vaccines will protect her children from disease, how likely do you think she is to believe that they—and you and I—can see and speak to ghosts?”

“Uh, very? Especially now, since that toy the girls had belongs to the ghost of a child who died before they were born—a child who tried to murder their school principal this afternoon. The girls shouldn’t have been able to see it, let alone have possession of it, unless they’re mediators, which they can’t be, because no one on either side of their parents’ families has ever been a mediator—”

“That we know of.”

“Fine, that we know of. And yet, they could see that toy. And Lucia, too, apparently.”

Jesse couldn’t deny it was true. When I’d snatched the toy away from the triplets and asked them where it had come from, Cotton-tail had volunteered, “He belongs to our friend Lucy. But she lets us borrow him sometimes.”

“Yeah,” Mopsy had said. “Whenever we want, basically.”

A chill had passed over me even though I’d been wearing my black leather jacket. It had gotten worse when their father had laughed and asked, “You’ve never met Lucy, Suze? What’s wrong with you? Lucy’s their favorite new friend. They play with Lucy all the time at school, don’t you, guys?”

“Sometimes,” Flopsy had corrected him. “Sometimes she comes to school, sometimes she doesn’t. She wasn’t in school today.”

“But she’s here now, isn’t she?” Brad had asked. “Lucy’s standing over there, right, Emma?”

He’d pointed at one of the bougainvillea vines to the left of Mopsy.

The girls had glanced in the direction their father was pointing, then looked scornfully away.

“No, Daddy,” Flopsy had said in a pitying voice. “Lucy isn’t here right now. Lucy went home.”

Brad had given me another sheepish grin and shrugged. “Oops, sorry. Lucy isn’t here right now. I guess she left her toy behind.” He’d said the word toy like it had quotation marks around it.

I’d looked from the girls to their father, my feeling of horror turning to one of incredulity.

“Wait a minute,” I’d said to my stepbrother. “Can you see this?” I’d held up the stuffed horse.

“Sure,” Brad had said. “Of course I can see it.” Then he’d given me a broad wink.

I still hadn’t been able to tell if Brad could see the toy or was only play-acting for the girls.

“If you see it,” I’d said to him, “tell me what it is.”

“An elephant, of course,” Brad had said.

The girls had fallen over themselves with laughter that their tall, invincible father had gotten the answer wrong.

So Debbie and Brad’s daughters were mediators. How could I not have recognized the signs until a very dangerous—and very angry—ghost had decided to use them to deliver a message to me? I couldn’t fathom it.

But that’s what Lucia’s giving them her toy at the hospital, right under my nose, had to be. A message.

But about what? To say what? That she could get to the people I loved—the most vulnerable and innocent of all—anytime she wanted?

Hadn’t she already delivered this message by nearly killing Father Dominic?

So many things had begun to fall into place. Like this greatgrandmother the girls were always talking about, the one who’d broken her hip, then died of pneumonia. When they mentioned things she’d said, they weren’t things she’d said to them before she’d died, but after.

And their extraordinarily high energy level, and frequent outbursts, including the one the day before, when they had sensed all the way in the kindergarten classroom Lucia’s attack on me in the office, and Sister Ernestine had been summoned to calm them down.

All of these were signs not that they had ADHD, as Sister Ernestine suggested, but that they could—and often did—communicate with the dead.

This gift—as Father Dominic chose to call it—affected different people in different ways. It had caused Paul’s younger brother Jack to withdraw into himself, giving him night terrors and eventually agoraphobia. I’m sure my therapist, Dr. Jo, probably would have said he lacked the “inner resiliency” to handle so much psychic energy coming at him all at once, until I’d shown him how to process it.