"Don't get smart with me, Susannah. You know what I'm talking about. You could have been killed."

"You sound like him." I rolled my eyes toward Andy's picture.

"He did the right thing, grounding you," my father said, severely. "He's trying to teach you a lesson. You behaved in a thoughtless and reckless manner. And you shouldn't have hit that kid of his."

"Dopey? Are you joking?"

But I could tell he was serious. I could also tell that this was one argument I wasn't going to win.

So instead, I looked at the picture of Andy and his first wife, and said, sullenly, "You could have told me about her, you know. It would have made my life a whole lot simpler."

"I didn't know, either," my dad said, with a shrug. "Not until I saw your mom hang up the photo this afternoon."

"What do you mean, you didn't know?" I glared at him. "What was with all the cryptic warnings, then?"

"Well, I knew Beaumont wasn't the Red you were looking for. I told you that."

"Oh, big help," I said.

"Look." My dad seemed annoyed. "I'm not all-knowing. Just dead."

I heard my mother's footsteps on the wood floor. "Mom's coming," I said. "Scat."

And Dad, for once, did as I asked, so that when my mother returned to the living room, I was standing in front of the wall of photos, looking very demure - well, for a girl who'd practically been burned alive, anyway.

"Listen," my mother whispered.

I looked away from the picture. My mother was holding an envelope. It was a bright pink envelope, covered with little hand-drawn hearts and rainbows. The kind of hearts and rainbows Gina always put on her letters to me from back home.

"Andy wanted me to wait to tell you about this," my mom said in a low voice, "until after your grounding was up. But I can't. I want you to know I've spoken with Gina's mom, and she's agreed to let us fly Gina out here for a visit during her school's Spring Break next month - "

My mother broke off as I flung both my arms around her neck.

"Thank you!" I cried.

"Oh, honey," my mom said, hugging me - although a little tentatively, I noticed, since I still smelled like a fish. "You're welcome. I know how much you miss her. And I know how tough it's been on you, adjusting to a whole new high school, and a whole new set of friends - and to having stepbrothers. We're so proud of how well you're doing." She pulled away from me. I could tell she'd wanted to go on hugging me, but I was just too gross even for my own mother. "Well, up until now, anyway."

I looked down at Gina's letter, which my mom had handed to me. Gina was a terrific letter writer. I couldn't wait to go upstairs and read it. Only … only something was still bothering me.

I looked back, over my shoulder, at the photo of Andy and his first wife.

"You hung up some new pictures, I see," I said.

My mom followed my gaze. "Oh, yes. Well, it kept my mind occupied while we were waiting to hear from you. Why don't you go upstairs and get yourself cleaned up? Andy's making individual pizzas for dinner."

"His first wife," I said, my eyes still glued to the photo. "Dopey's - I mean, Brad's - mom. She died, right?"

"Uh-huh," my mother said. "Several years ago."

"What of?"

"Ovarian cancer. Honey, be careful where you put those clothes when you take them off. They're covered with soot. Look, there's black gunk now all over my new Pottery Barn slipcovers."

I stared at the photo.

"Did she …" I struggled to formulate the correct question. "Did she go into a coma, or something?"

My mother looked up from the slipcover she'd been yanking from the armchair where I'd been lounging.

"I think so," she said. "Yes, toward the end. Why?"

"Did Andy have to …" I turned Gina's letter over and over in my hands. "Did they have to pull the plug?"

"Yes." My mother had forgotten about the slipcover. Now she was staring at me, obviously concerned. "Yes, as a matter of fact, they had to ask that she be taken off life support at a certain point since Andy believed she wouldn't have wanted to live like that. Why?"

"I don't know." I looked down at the hearts and rainbows on Gina's envelope. Red. I had been so stupid. You know me, Doc's mother had insisted. God, I should so have my mediator license revoked. If there were a license, which, of course, there isn't.

"What was her name?" I asked, nodding my head toward the photo. "Brad's mom, I mean?"

"Cynthia," my mother said.

Cynthia. God, what a loser I am.

"Honey, come help me, would you?" My mother was still futzing with the chair I'd been sitting in. "I can't get this one cushion loose - "

I tucked Gina's envelope into my pocket and went to help my mother. "Where's Doc?" I asked. "I mean, David."

My mother looked at me curiously. "Upstairs in his room, I think, doing his homework. Why?"

"Oh, I just have to tell him something."

Something I should have told him a long time ago.

CHAPTER 23

"So?" Jesse asked. "How did he take it?"

"I don't want to talk about it."

I was stretched out on my bed, totally without makeup, attired in my oldest jogging clothes. I had a new plan: I had decided I was going to treat Jesse exactly the way I would my stepbrothers. That way, I'd be guaranteed not to fall in love with him.

I was flipping through a copy of Vogue instead of doing my Geometry homework like I was supposed to. Jesse was on the window seat - of course - petting Spike.

Jesse shook his head. "Come on," he said. It always sounded strange to me when Jesse said things like Come on. It seemed so strange coming out of a guy who was wearing a shirt with laces instead of buttons. "Tell me what he said."

I flipped a page of my magazine. "Tell me what you guys did to Marcus."

Jesse looked a little too surprised by the question. "We did nothing to him."

"Baloney. Where'd he go, then?"

Jesse shrugged and scratched Spike beneath the chin. The stupid cat was purring so loud, I could hear it all the way across the room.

"I think he decided to travel for a while." Jesse's tone was deceptively innocent.

"Without any money? Without his credit cards?" One of the things the firemen had found in the room was Marcus's wallet … and his gun.

"There is something to be said" - Jesse gave Spike a playful swat on the back of the head when the cat took a lazy swipe at him - "for seeing this great country of ours on foot. Maybe he will come to have a better appreciation for its natural beauty."

I snorted, and turned a page of my magazine. "He'll be back in a week."

"I think not." He said it with such certainty that I instantly became suspicious.

"Why not?"

Jesse hesitated. He didn't want to tell me, I could tell.

"What?" I said. "Telling me, a mere living being, is going to violate some spectral code?"

"No," Jesse said with a smile. "He's not coming back, Susannah, because the souls of the people he killed won't let him."

I raised my eyebrows. "What do you mean?"

"In my day, it was called bedevilment. I don't know what they call it now. But your intervention had a rallying effect on Mrs. Fiske and the three others whose lives Marcus Beaumont took. They have banded together, and will not rest until he has been sufficiently punished for his crimes. He can run from one end of the earth to the other, but he will never escape them. Not until he dies himself. And when that happens" - Jesse's voice was hard - "he will be a broken man."

I didn't say anything. I couldn't. As a mediator, I knew I shouldn't approve of this sort of behavior. I mean, ghosts should not be allowed to take the law into their own hands any more than the living should.

But I had no particular fondness for Marcus, and no way of proving that he'd killed those people anyway. He'd never be punished, I knew, by inhabitants of this world. So was it so wrong that he be punished by those who lived in the next?

I glanced at Jesse out of the corner of my eyes, remembering that, from what I'd read, no one had ever been convicted of his murder, either.

"So," I said. "I guess you did the same thing, huh, to the, um, people who killed you, right?"

Jesse didn't fall for this sly question, though. He only smiled, and said, "Tell me what happened with your brother."

"Stepbrother," I reminded him.

And I wasn't going to tell Jesse about my interview with Doc, anymore than Jesse was going to tell me diddly about how he'd died. Only in my case, it was because what had happened with Doc was just too excruciatingly embarrassing to go into. Jesse didn't want to talk about how he'd died because . . . well, I don't know. But I doubt it's because he's embarrassed about it.

I had found Doc exactly where my mother had told me he'd be, in his room doing his homework, a paper that wasn't due until the following month. But that was Doc for you: why put off until tomorrow homework you could be doing today?

His "Come in," when I'd tapped at the door had been casual. He hadn't suspected it would be me. I never ventured into my stepbrothers' rooms if I could avoid it. The odor of dirty socks was simply too overwhelming.

Only since I wasn't smelling too daisy-fresh myself at that particular moment, I thought I could bear it.

He was shocked to see me, his face turning almost as red as his hair. He jumped up and tried to hide his pile of dirty underwear beneath the comforter of his unmade bed. I told him to relax. And then I sat down on that unmade bed, and said I had something to tell him.