But of course Kurt, Gina, Debbie, and Kelly couldn't see these ghosts. Only I could.

Because I'm the mediator.

It's a crummy job, but somebody has to do it.

Only I have to tell you, at that particular moment, I wasn't too keen to.

This was because the ghosts were behaving in a particularly reprehensible manner. They were trying, as near as I could tell, to steal beer. Not a noble pursuit at any time, and, if you think about it, an especially stupid one if you happen to be dead. Don't get me wrong – ghosts do drink. In Jamaica, people traditionally leave glasses of coconut rum for Change Macho, the espiritu de la buena suerte. And in Japan, fishermen leave sake out for the ghosts of their drowned brethren. And you can take my word for it, it isn't just evaporation that makes the level of liquid in those containers go down. Most ghosts enjoy a good drink, when they can get one.

No, what was stupid about what these ghosts were doing was the fact that they were obviously quite new at the whole being dead thing, and so they weren't real coordinated yet. It isn't easy for ghosts to lift things, even relatively light things. It takes a lot of practice. I've known ghosts who got really good at rattling chains and chucking books and even heavier stuff – usually at my head, but that's another story.

But for the most part, a twelve-pack of beer is way beyond your average new ghost's abilities, and these clowns were not about to pull it off. I would have told them so, but since I was the only one who could see them – and the twelve-pack, which was hovering behind the lotion rack, just out of range of everybody else's vision but mine – it might have looked a little strange.

But they got the message without my saying anything. One of the girls – a blonde in an ice-blue sheath dress – hissed, "That one in the black is looking at us!"

One of the boys – they were both in tuxedos, both blond, both muscular; your basic interchangeable jock-type – went, "She is not. She's looking at the Bain de Soleil."

I pushed my DKs all the way to the top of my head so they could see that I really was glaring at them.

"Shit," the boys said at the same time. They dropped the pack of beer as if it had suddenly caught on fire. The sudden explosion of glass and beer caused everyone in the store – well, except for me, of course – to jump.

Kurt, behind the counter, looked up from his copy of Surf Digest and asked, "What the hell?"

Then Kurt did a very surprising thing. He reached under the counter and pulled out a baseball bat.

Gina observed this with great interest.

"You go, homey," she said to Kurt.

Kurt didn't seem to hear these words of encouragement. He ignored us, and strode over to where the pack of beer lay behind the lotion rack. He looked down at the roaming mess of broken glass and cardboard and asked, again, plaintively, "What the hell?"

Only this time, he didn't say hell, if you get my meaning.

Gina wandered over to look at the wreckage.

"Now, that's just a shame," she said, toeing one of the bigger shards with her platform sandal. "What do you think caused it? Earthquake?"

When my stepfather, driving Gina back to our house from the airport, had asked her what she most hoped to experience while in California, Gina had replied without hesitation, "The big one." Earthquakes were the one thing we didn't get a lot of back in New York.

"There wasn't no quake," Kurt said. "And these beers are from the fridge against that wall back there. How'd they get all the way up here?" he wanted to know.

Kelly and Debbie joined Gina and Kurt in surveying the damage and wondering at its cause. Only I hung back. I could, I suppose, have offered an explanation, but I didn't think anyone was going to believe me – not if I told the truth, anyway. Well, Gina probably would have. She knew a little bit – more than anybody else I knew, with the exception, maybe, of my youngest stepbrother, Doc, and Father Dom – about the mediator thing.

Still, what she knew wasn't much. I've always sort of kept my business to myself. It simplifies things, you know.

I figured it would be wisest if I just stayed out of the whole thing. I opened my soda and took a deep swallow. Ah. Potassium benzoate. It always hits the spot.

It was only then, my attention wandering, that I noticed the headline on the front of the local paper. Four Dead, it proclaimed, in Midnight Plunge.

"Maybe," Kelly was saying, "somebody took it out and was gonna buy it, and at the last minute, changed their mind, and left it on the shelf right there – "

"Yeah," Gina interrupted enthusiastically. "And then an earthquake shook it off!"

"There wasn't no earthquake," Kurt said. Only he didn't sound as sure as before. "Was there?"

"I kind of felt something," Debbie said.

Kelly said, "Yeah, I think I did, too."

"Just for a minute there," Debbie said.

"Yeah," Kelly said.

"Damn!" Gina put her hands on her hips. "Are you telling me there was an actual earthquake just now, and I missed it ?"

I took a copy of the paper off of the pile and unfolded it.

Four seniors from Robert Louis Stevenson High School were tragically killed in a car accident last night as they were returning home from a spring formal. Felicia Bruce, 17; Mark Pulsford, 18; Josh Saunders, 18; and Carrie Whitman, 18, were declared dead at the scene after a head-on collision along a treacherous stretch of California Highway 1 caused their vehicle to to careen past a protective guardrail and into the sea below.

"What'd it feel like?" Gina demanded. "So I'll know if there's another one."

"Well," Kelly said. "This wasn't a very big one. It was just … well, if you've been through enough of them, you can just sort of tell, you know? It's like a feeling you get, on the back of your neck. The hair there kind of raises up."

"Yeah," Debbie said. "That's just how I felt. Not so much that the ground was moving underneath me, but like a cold breeze moved through me real fast."

"Exactly," Kelly said.

A thick fog, which rolled in from the sea after midnight last night, causing poor visibility and dangerous driving conditions along the area of the coastline known as Big Sur, is said to have contributed to the accident.