Remembrance (The Mediator #7)(53)

“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.

Other people, however—like Paul, and my stepnieces—found this psychic energy stimulating rather than draining, and enjoyed having twice as many playmates as their friends (even if no one but them could see them) . . . or making twice as much money because of it.

I was already feeling a lot of guilt for not having picked up sooner rather than later on all the clues about the triplets, and for many of the things I’d done to NCDPs in front of them.

The question now was, how much of it had they understood? And just what, precisely, was their relationship with Lucia? Were their lives really in danger from the little girl? Or was she, as the girls insisted, a playmate? It seemed hard to believe that creature who’d tried to drown me in the pool and nearly killed Father Dominic and seemed slowly to be draining the life from Becca Walters was on friendly terms with anyone.

I wished, for the hundredth time that evening, that Father Dom were not lying unconscious on the third floor of St. Francis Medical Center. He would have known exactly what to do—not only about the triplets, but about Lucia.

Then again, his conviction that he’d known what to do about Lucia was how he’d ended up in the ICU in the first place.

We were on our own with this one.

We’d had no luck questioning the girls back at the hospital, nor later when we’d arrived bearing pizza. Brad had been anxious to get them bathed and fed before Mommy got home, and the girls had been too excited about having Uncle Jesse and Aunt Suze over to rationally answer any of my questions about their new friend Lucy.