Remembrance (The Mediator #7)(58)
“Seriously, forget it. It was nothing.”
“It didn’t sound like nothing.”
“Well, it was.”
Fortunately a childish voice called from the open window upstairs. “Mommy? What’s going on?”
“Oh, great.” Debbie sounded irritated. “Now the kids are up. Nothing, sweetie. Just a raccoon. Max chased it away. Go back to sleep.”
“Mommy.” Mopsy sounded drowsy, but upset. “It wasn’t a raccoon. It was Lucy. Max scared her. Don’t let Daddy shoot her.”
Looking up, I saw three small, dark silhouettes crowding one of the upstairs windows. I could dimly make out the girls’ faces as they stared down at us, their expressions concerned in the moonlight.
“Girls.” Debbie came down into the yard until she stood beneath the girls’ window. She’d done an amazing job of whipping her body back into shape after their delivery with both Pilates and a tummy tuck (paid for by her father, the Mercedes King), and she knew it. She liked to show off her great figure by wearing a lot of Spandex. She stood craning her neck to look up at the girls, a glass of barely touched wine in her hand. “You know perfectly well Lucy isn’t real. I’ve asked you repeatedly to quit making up stories about her. Now get back in bed, all of you.”
Mopsy ignored her mother, and shifted her appeal to me. “Aunt Suze, don’t let Max get Lucy. She’s our friend.”
I glanced at Jesse. I didn’t have to say anything out loud. He nodded and said, “I’ll get the dog.” He started after Max, who’d found his way back to the playhouse and was digging through the bougainvillea, where he’d apparently picked up the odor of something edible. Jesse hauled him out by his collar, though Max put up a struggle. “That’s enough for tonight, Max,” I heard Jesse saying to the dog. “Good boy.”
“Don’t worry, girls,” I said, crossing the yard until I stood beside their mother. I looked up at the three worried little faces, barely discernible in the moonlight. “Max can’t hurt Lucy, and neither can your dad. Lucy’s a ghost, and dogs and guns can’t hurt ghosts. Now do as your mother says, and go back to bed.”
“Okay, Aunt Suze,” the girls said in tones of bitter disappointment—not about their ghost friend, but about having to go back to bed. One by one, their little heads disappeared from the window.
When I turned back toward their mother, I found her staring at me in disbelief.
“What?” I asked.
“Suze,” Debbie said. “Lucy’s their invisible friend.”
“So?”
“She’s a figment of their imagination. You just called her a ghost. I know how popular that stupid video game Ghost Mediator is, and I’m fairly certain some of the parents in the girls’ class let their children play it, even though it’s age inappropriate and much too violent. But Brad and I are actively trying to discourage the girls from believing in the supernatural.”
I stared back at her. “Oh . . . kay.”
“Deborah.” Jesse came by, dragging Max by the collar behind him. “You send the girls to Catholic school. Part of their religious education involves instruction in the Holy Trinity, which includes the Holy Spirit.”
“Oh, that’s different,” Debbie said, using the simpering tone she always adopted whenever addressing my fiancé. It was like Jesse gave off pheromones that some women couldn’t help reacting to. Obviously I was one of those women, but at least I tried not to show it . . . in public, anyway. “We obviously want them to have strong moral beliefs. But with the exception of the Holy Ghost, ghosts aren’t real.”
I’d had enough. “How do you know they aren’t real?” I walked around her, back toward my lawn chair, in order to retrieve my glass of wine. “They could be.”
“Oh, really?” Debbie dropped the simpering tone since she was addressing me. “Could they, Suze? The same way you told Emma wine is filled with vitamins when she asked why you drink so much of it? Is that real? Thanks a lot for that, Suze, by the way, because she asked if she could have wine with her breakfast tomorrow morning.”
“Yeah, well, there are vitamins in wine, Debbie.” I lifted the bottle of wine we’d brought with us, and topped off both Debbie’s glass and my own. “But for your information, I also told her the health benefits only work for people who are over twenty-one. And there’s a lot of crap you believe in that isn’t real, either, Debbie, but we go along with it just to keep the peace. So I suggest you do the same, as far as Lucy is concerned. Cheers.” I clinked her glass.
Debbie stared at me in astonishment just as Brad came bursting out of the back door, his rifle pumped and loaded. “Which way did it go?”
“Not tonight, amigo,” Jesse said, gently removing the rifle from his hands. “Not tonight.”
dieciocho
I had more trouble than ever falling asleep that night.
It was only partly because Debbie had gotten rid of the bed in the guest room—along with all of Brad’s wrestling awards, which she’d relegated to the garage—so she could convert it into her “crafting center.”
So I had to share a bed down the hall with Mopsy, while Jesse was banished to the hard, lumpy couch in the living room (which didn’t have a door, with or without a lock for privacy).