I sniffled. It felt so good - I can't even describe to you how good it felt - to have someone telling me what to do. Really. Ordinarily the last thing I want is to be told what to do. But in this case, I really, really appreciated it. I clung to the phone, waiting breathlessly for Father Dominic's instructions.

"You're in your room, I suppose?" Father D said.

I nodded, realized he couldn't see me, and said, "Yes."

"Good. Wake your family and tell them exactly what you just told me. Then get out of the house. Get out of that house, Susannah, just as quickly as you can."

I took the phone away from my ear and looked at the receiver as if it had just started bleating in my ear like a sheep. Seriously. Because that would have made about as much sense as what Father Dom just said.

I put the receiver back to my ear.

"Susannah?" Father Dom was saying. "Did you hear me? I am perfectly serious about this. One man is already dead. I do not doubt that someone in your family will be next if you do not get them out of there."

I know I was a wreck and all. But I wasn't that much of a wreck.

"Father D," I said. "I can't tell them - "

"Yes, you can, Susannah," Father Dominic said. "I always thought it was wrong of you to keep your gift a secret from your mother all these years. It's time you told her."

"As if," I said, into the phone.

"Susannah," Father D said. "The insects were only the beginning. If this de Silva woman is taking demonic possession of your household, horrors such as ... well, horrors such as you or I could never even imagine are going to begin - "

"Demonic possession of my household?" I gripped the phone tighter. "Listen, Father D, she may have got my boyfriend, but she is not getting my house."

Father Dominic sounded tired. "Susannah," he said. "Please, just do as I say. Get yourself and your family out of there, before harm comes to any of you. I understand that you are upset about Jesse, but the fact is, Susannah, that he is dead and you, at least for the time being, are still alive. We've got to do whatever we can to see that you remain that way. I will leave here now, but I'm a six-hour drive away. I promise I will be there in the morning. A thorough administration of holy water should drive away any evil spirits remaining in the house, but - "

Spike had padded across the room toward me. I thought he was going to bite me, as usual, but he didn't. Instead, he trotted right up to my face and let out a very loud, very plaintive cry.

"Good God," Father Dominic cried into the phone. "Is that her? Is she there already?"

I reached out and scratched Spike behind his one remaining ear, amazed he was even letting me touch him. "No," I said. "That was Spike. He misses Jesse."

Father Dominic said, "Susannah, I know how painful this must be for you. But you must know that wherever Jesse is now, he's better off than he's been for the past hundred and fifty years, living in limbo between this world and the next. I know it's difficult, but you must try to be happy for him, and know that, above all, he would want you to take care of yourself, Susannah. He would want you to keep yourself and your family safe - "

As I listened to Father Dom, I realized he was right. That was what Jesse would have wanted. And there I was, sitting around in a pair of lounging pajamas when there was work to be done.

"Father D," I said, interrupting him. "In the cemetery, over at the Mission. Are there any de Silvas buried there?"

Father Dominic, startled from his safety-first lecture, said, "I - de Silva? Really, Susannah, I don't know. I don't think - "

"Oh, wait," I said. "I keep forgetting, she married a Diego. There's a Diego crypt, isn't there?" I tried to picture the cemetery, which was a small one, surrounded by high walls, directly behind the basilica down at the Mission where Father Dominic works and I go to school. There are only a small number of graves there, mainly of the monks who had first worked with Junipero Serra, the guy who'd founded the Carmel Mission back in the 1700s.

But a few wealthy landowners in the 1800s had managed to get a mausoleum or two squeezed in by donating a sizeable portion of their fortunes to the church.

And the biggest one - if I remembered correctly from the time Mr. Walden, our World Civ teacher, had taken us to the cemetery to give us a taste of our local history - had the word Diego carved into the door.

"Susannah," Father Dominic said. For the first time, there was a note of something other than urgency in his voice. Now he sounded frightened. "Susannah, I know what you are thinking, and I. . . I forbid it! You are not to go near that cemetery, do you understand me? You are not to go near that crypt! It is much too dangerous...."

Just the way I like it.

But that's not what I said out loud. Aloud I said, "Okay, Father D. You're right. I'll wake my mom up. I'll tell her everything. And I'll get everyone out of the house."

Father Dominic was so astonished, he didn't say anything for a minute. When he was finally able to find his voice, he said, "Good. Well . . . good, then. Yes. Get everyone out of the house. Don't do anything foolish, Susannah, like call upon the ghost of this woman, until I get there. Promise me."

Promise me. Like promises mean anything anymore. Look at Jesse. He'd promised me he wasn't going to go away, and where was he?

Gone. Gone forever.

And I'd been too much of a coward ever to tell him how I really felt about him.

And now I'd never get the chance to.

"Sure," I said to Father Dominic. "I promise."

But I think even he knew I didn't mean it.

CHAPTER 9

Ghost busting is a tricky business.

You'd think it would be easy, right? Like if a ghost's bothering you, you just, you know, bust its chops and it'll go away.

Yeah. Doesn't work that way much, unfortunately.

Which is not to say that busting someone's chops does not have therapeutic value. Especially for someone who, like me, might be grieving. Because that's what I was doing, of course. Grieving for Jesse.

Except - and I don't know if this applies to all mediators or just me - I don't really grieve like a normal person. I mean, I sat around and cried my eyes out after the realization first hit me that I was never going to see Jesse again.

But then something happened. I stopped feeling sad and started feeling mad.

Really mad. There I was, and it was after midnight, and I was extremely angry.

It wasn't that I didn't want to keep my promise to Father D. I really did. But I just couldn't.

Any more than Jesse could apparently keep his promise to me.

So it was only about fifteen minutes after my phone call to Father D that I emerged from my bathroom - Jesse was gone, of course, so I could have changed in my room, but old habits die hard - in full ghost-busting regalia, including my tool belt and hooded sweatshirt, which even I will admit might seem a bit excessive for California in July. But it was nighttime, and that mist rolling in from the ocean in the wee hours can be chilly.

I don't want you to think I didn't give serious thought to what Father D had said about my telling my mom everything and getting her and the Ackermans out of there. I really did think about it.

It's just that the more I thought about it, the more ridiculous it sounded. I mean, first of all, my mom is a television news journalist. She simply is not the type to believe in ghosts. She only believes in what she can see or, barring that, what has been proven to exist by science. The one time I did try to tell her, she totally did not understand. And I realized then that she never would.

So how could I possibly go busting into her bedroom and tell her and her new husband that they have to get out of the house because a vengeful spirit is after me? She would be on the phone to her therapist back in New York, looking for communities where I could go to "rest," so fast you wouldn't believe it.

So that plan was out.

But that was all right, because I had a much better one. One that, really, I should have thought of right away, but I guess that whole seeing-the-skeleton-of-the-guy-I-love-being-hauled-out-of-a-hole-in-my-backyard thing really got to me, and so I didn't think of it until I was on the phone with Father D.

But once I'd come up with it, I realized it really was the perfect plan. Instead of waiting for Maria to come to me, I was simply going to go to her and, well. . .

Send her back from where she came.

Or reduce her to a mound of quivering gelatinous goo. Whichever came first.

Because even though ghosts are, of course, already dead, they can still feel pain, just as people who lose a limb can still feel it itching from time to time. Ghosts know, when you plunge a knife into their sternum, that it should hurt, and so it does. The wound will even bleed for a while.

Then, of course, they get over the shock of it, and the wound disappears. Which is discouraging, since the wounds they, in their turn, inflict upon me do not heal half so fast.

But whatever. It works. More or less.

The wound Maria de Silva had inflicted on me wasn't visible, but that didn't matter. What I was going to do to her certainly would be. With any luck, that husband of hers would be around and I could do the same to him.

And what was going to happen if things didn't work out that way, and the two of them got the best of me?

Well, that was the coolest part of the whole thing: I didn't even care. Really. I had cried out every last ounce of emotion in me, and now, I simply didn't care. It didn't matter. It really didn't.