Remembrance (The Mediator #7)(10)

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.”

“Wrong? Nope, everything’s fine.”

What was I doing? Jesse and I were engaged. We were supposed to be completely honest with each other.

Except I couldn’t afford to be honest with Jesse. Not about one thing. Well, one person, anyway.

“Sister E brought a student in here who’s a little banged up, that’s all,” I said. “Everything else is totally copacetic.”

Don’t let him sense I’m lying, don’t let him sense I’m lying, don’t let him sense I’m lying . . .

“I see,” Jesse said. “Well, you know where you can bring her if it gets to be too much for you to handle. Not that there’s much you can’t handle, Susannah.”

Jesse’s always insisted my nickname, Suze, is too ugly and diminutive for a girl of my strength and beauty. With Jesse it’s always been Susannah or—later, when he got to know me better—querida, which means sweetheart or my darling. It still sends a thrill through me when he says it, just like when he says my name.

Let’s face it, I’m warm for the boy’s form. Which is good, since I fully intend to marry that form. I don’t care how many Egyptian curses I have to break in order to do it.

“I think I’ve got things under control for now,” I said. “I’ll call you later when I can talk more.”

“Yes, you will. Because there is very definitely something going on that you’re not telling me. Am I right, Susannah?”

“Damn, Jesse,” I said, hoping my lighthearted tone would disguise the fact that I really was unsettled by his seeing through my lie. “You may not be a ghost yourself anymore, but you sure as hell can sense when one’s around. How do you do that?”