Did we ever. I figured that out as soon as I saw the dead girl behind her.

tres

I’ve been seeing the souls of the dead who’ve left unfinished business on earth for as long as I can remember. I “mediated” my first ghost—mediate is what we pros call it when we help a troubled spirit cross from this world to the next, which, unless you happen to be Paul Slater, we do without charge—when I was just a toddler.

I can remember it like it was yesterday: I think that old lady ghost was more frightened of me than I was of her.

But this was the first time I’d ever seen a ghost clutching a wad of paper towels to a wound to staunch the blood flowing from it.

Forgetting to keep my cool, let alone my secret (that I see dead people), I leapt from my office desk chair, crying, “Oh, my God!”

It took me a few seconds to realize that if she was recently deceased, this girl wouldn’t still be gushing blood.

Nor would the full-bosomed, gray-haired figure of the vice-principal be steering her toward me, saying with forced cheer, “It’s all right, Becca, dear. Everything’s going to be all right. Miss Simon will get that little cut bandaged up, and this will all be straightened out.”

In that instant I knew:

This girl was very much alive.

Also that Sister Ernestine was crazy. That “little cut” on Becca’s arm didn’t look so little to me, judging from the amount of blood pumping out of it. It looked like a full-on gusher. And none of this was going to be “straightened out” anytime soon, especially since the phone in my back pocket was buzzing.

Paul was calling back, of course, to make sure I’d be showing up for our “dessert.”

“Susannah.” There wasn’t the faintest trace of cheer in Sister Ernestine’s voice when she addressed me.

This was not unusual. I’d never been one of Sister Ernestine’s favorite students back when I’d attended school here, and six years later she’d been appalled at the idea of hiring me. She had preferred the former full-time administrative assistant, Ms. Carper, but due to cutbacks, dwindling enrollment, Father Dominic’s insistence that I’d make a fine, read: free, intern, and Ms. Carper’s sudden decision to run off to India with her married Bikram Yoga instructor, the nun had had no choice.

“Where is Father Dominic?” Sister Ernestine demanded.

“He’s at that conference in San Luis Obispo,” I reminded her, my fingers hovering over the phone. Not my cell—I let Paul’s call go to voice mail—but the office phone. “He won’t be back until tonight. Sister, I really think we should call 911, don’t—”

The nun cut me off, her gaze darting to the open doorway to the guidance counselor’s office on the other side of my desk.

“Becca’s fine. Put that phone down. Where is Miss Diaz?”

“Lunch,” I said. “Ms. Diaz said she’d be back in half an hour.”

What Ms. Diaz actually said was that she was going down to Carmel Beach to “split a footlong” with Mr. Gillarte, the track coach and PE instructor, but as they were trying to keep their sizzling affair with cold cuts and one another on the down-low from the higher-ups, I obviously couldn’t mention this.

What I also couldn’t mention to Sister Ernestine was the second emergency I could now see blooming on the horizon. That’s because my initial assessment of the situation had been correct:

There was a dead girl in the room.

It just wasn’t Becca, the student Sister Ernestine had escorted into the office, who was barely managing to keep the blood flow from her left wrist under control with paper towels someone—I was guessing the good sister—had seized from one of the restrooms.

Younger than Becca by about six or eight years, the dead girl was peeping out from behind Becca’s skirt. She seemed to be trying to make herself as transparent and unnoticeable as possible.

It wasn’t working, though. Her otherworldly glow was bright enough that I could see it even with the sunlight streaming through the office’s tall, wide casement windows. It was as noticeable to me as the blood on the living girl.

No one else could see it, however. No one but me.

There wasn’t time to deal with a dead girl, though. Not when there was a living one in the same room, dripping blood down her own shirt.

I went into Ms. Diaz’s office and grabbed the first-aid kit. Since the Junípero Serra Mission Academy lacks not only a full-time (paid) administrative assistant but a school nurse, I’ve been filling in as both.

My cell phone chimed again. I knew without looking that this time it wasn’t Paul, but Jesse calling from St. Francis, the newly renovated medical center in Monterey where he’d been lucky enough to win his fellowship . . . although I sometimes wondered, in spite of Jesse’s being a brilliant medical student, how much luck had to do with it. St. Francis had at one time been a Catholic hospital, and Father Dominic’s influence over the local archdiocese is considerable.

The ringtone I’d assigned Jesse was Elton John’s oldie but still goodie “Someone Saved My Life Tonight.” Jesse had saved my life so many times—and I his—that it was pretty much a no-brainer that this was our song, especially given the line about butterflies being free to fly away. We’d given each other the freedom to fly away, but we’d chosen instead to stay together, despite what had seemed, at times, like insurmountable odds against us.

Now, even though Jesse and I no longer shared a mediator/non-compliant-deceased-person bond, he still always seemed to know when my life needed saving, or even when I was merely feeling uneasy . . . like because there were a couple of very distressed girls—one living, one not so much—standing in my office.

I told myself that’s why he was calling, anyway, and not because he’d sensed, from a half dozen miles away, that Paul Slater was trying to sextort me.

“Hi,” I whispered into the phone. “I can’t talk right now. Things here at work are a little crazy. Can I call you back?”

“Of course, querida.”

Simply hearing that deep, smooth tone made the tight muscles in the back of my neck loosen, my shattered nerves begin to heal. Jesse’s voice was a soothing elixir, whipped cream floating on rich steaming cocoa on a cold winter morning.

“I wanted to make sure you were all right,” he said. “I got the strangest feeling a few minutes ago that something was wrong. I’d have called then, but I was with a patient.”