Remembrance (The Mediator #7)(107)
As soon as I did, I snatched up the note. It was computer generated, like a gift card from a store. The seller had sent the boots to me on behalf of the buyer. The buyer was Maximillian28, of Carmel Valley, California, which made no sense to me at all until I read the note.
Susannah,
Saw these and thought of you. They look just like the ones you lost. I hope they are.
Te amo.
Jesse
Jesse? Jesse was Maximillian28?
It was only then that I remembered the day I’d dragged him around the mall in Monterey, fruitlessly searching for these exact boots after my original pair had been destroyed, and how they’d been sold out everywhere in my size. He’d gamely tagged along, only occasionally pointing out that there were dozens of other black leather platform boots on the shelves. He’d never once rolled his eyes as I’d described how poorly designed and not right those other boots were. He’d paid attention, and turned out to be Maximillian28 (named for the Ackerman dog and Jesse’s age—if one counted only the years during which his physical body had been alive).
Of course. He’d do anything to make me happy . . . anything within his power, which, not having inherited millions from his family—because they’d all died out over a century ago—was buy me the impossible-to-get boots I wanted.
And save my life, over and over.
I was still laughing—or something—when Jesse pulled up behind me in front of 99 Pine Crest Road.
“Oh,” he said when he leaned in to see why I was still in the car. “You opened it. Are they the right ones?”
“Exactly right,” I said.
“Are you crying?” He looked astonished.
“No. Allergies. God, I love you.”
“You have a strange way of showing it sometimes.” He opened my car door for me. “Come on, let’s go see this place. I can’t say it looks very promising from the outside. They’ve ruined your mother’s landscaping.”
It was true. The steep, sloping yard that led up to the rambling Victorian house was still dotted with the flowers my mom had planted there, but they’d been crushed beneath the careless boots of the construction workers I’d seen outside the house the day before.
That wasn’t the only change to the place. The trunk of the pine tree I remembered so well—because it grew beside the porch roof I used to leap from when escaping my room, or various murderous spooks—was now growing dangerously close to the foundation.
“Slater wasted no time putting the other houses on the block back on the market, I see.” Jesse pointed. There were two men in coveralls hammering signs into the front yards of our former neighbors. Now, instead of warning that the houses were slated for demolition, the signs said:
FOR SALE
SLATER PROPERTIES
CARMEL HILLS EXCLUSIVE
PRICED TO SELL
The only house on the street without a sign in front of it was mine.
“Oh, how nice,” I said. “We’ll have new neighbors.” I didn’t mention out loud my next thought, which was that I hoped I wouldn’t have to mediate any of the non-compliant deceased relatives those new neighbors might bring along. This was always a problem. “Hang on, let me try these.”
I pulled off my second-best pair of boots and tugged on the new ones. They fit perfectly, and of course looked great. The heel was sexily stacked and gave me a lot of height, while at the same time being easy to walk on. When I got out of the car and stood up, my eyes were almost level with Jesse’s.
“Ah,” he said with the lopsided grin. “Now I remember why you liked them so much.”
“Right?” I didn’t have to stand on tiptoe to kiss him on the lips, only tilt my head. His mouth tasted of fresh mint. Whatever he’d been doing since he’d been released from jail, he’d cleaned up nicely. I took him by the hand. “Thank you. Now let’s go see where we’re going to raise our own demon spawn.”
treinta y seis
It smelled the same. A combination of old wood and the faint scent of something CeeCee had always referred to as “books.”
“You’re crazy,” I’d told her the first time she’d said it. “We have books, but not that many.”
“No,” she’d insisted. “Your house smells great. Just like old books, in a library.”
I hadn’t wanted to tell her that the odor she was mistaking for books was actually old souls. There are always a few of them roaming the halls of older buildings, especially libraries. The supernatural don’t have an unpleasant odor. If you can smell them at all—and you mostly can’t, unless you’re extremely perceptive, like CeeCee—it really is remarkably (and comfortingly, if you’re a reader) like old books, or vanilla.
Instead I’d said to her, “I think the word you’re looking for is mildew. The source of it can be traced to Brad’s feet.”
When I flung open the front door to 99 Pine Crest Road, I was shocked to be hit in the face with the exact same odor—not of Brad, but of Jesse, before I returned his soul to his body.
I glanced back at him in surprise, speechless.
“What?” he asked. He couldn’t smell it, of course. You can’t smell yourself. Or the way you smelled back when you were a ghost, anyway.