Hush
Three
"What's the first rule of mediation?" I asked as I stood in front of the triplets a few hours later. I'd left work two hours early to give them a mediator lesson in lieu of sitting in my empty office and wondering when I'd get more clients. Mopsy, Flopsy, and Cottontail stood across from me in the living room, and from where I was standing, I could see the bullet hole in the wall across the tops of their heads.
"Tell Aunt Suze everything," they chorused.
"What's the second rule of mediation?"
"Tell Aunt Suze everything."
"And the third rule?"
"Never underestimate a ghost."
"Exactly," I said.
There were a lot of things I'd had to learn by myself in the early days of being a mediator that I never wanted the girls to go through. What kind of aunt would I be if I didn't try to keep them from getting stabbed or shot at or pushed off of roofs into the space where the family hot tub was supposed to go? My lessons with the triplets had been going on for over a year, with Debbie and Brad none the wiser that the gifted and talented classes I said I took them to were actually ghostbusting lessons. What I wanted the girls to understand most was that they shouldn't just keep spectral news amongst themselves.
This understanding did not work both ways though. Occasionally, I'd let the girls help me solve an easy mediation case, but for the most part I shielded them as much as I could from any potentially abrasive ghosts. For instance, I had no plans of telling them about the ghost robber.
But the ghost robber wasn't the only ghost in my life right now.
I pictured the ghost in question in my mind. She was of East Asian descent, with an ombré bob, and looked like she was somewhere in her twenties.
She materialized a moment later between me and the girls.
"Suze?" the ghost asked.
"I've got some help for you," I said, and I waved a hand to indicate the triplets.
She turned to face them, clearly confused at the fact that they were looking straight at her, not through her, and said, "Uh…hello."
"Hi," the girls said in unison.
"I'm Emma."
"I'm Elizabeth."
"And I'm Emily. And we're mediators."
"That means we help ghosts move on to Heaven," Cottontail added.
"Or the bad place," Flopsy whispered.
"What's your name?" Mopsy asked.
The ghost looked back towards me in hesitation. "I told Suze this the other day," she said slowly, "but the problem is I don't remember."
This was not what the girls were expecting to hear. Mopsy looked at me in confusion. My only response was a nod for them to go on. Not every mediator case was open and shut, most weren't, so they could use a challenge. I wanted to see if they'd be able to figure out what I had the first time I'd talked to this ghost.
Mopsy still looked uncertain, but she asked, "What do you remember then?"
"I woke up in water," the ghost said.
The girls looked between themselves and then back towards me.
"You woke up in water," Flopsy repeated slowly.
The ghost nodded.
"Did you die at the beach? Were you going swimming?" Cottontail asked.
"I don't know. Maybe?"
The girls did not seem to be sure what to make of this again, so I spoke up.
"We went over this," I said. "Why might someone not remember what happened to them?"
Flopsy raised her hand very dramatically and bounced about. "I know, I know! An accident!"
"Bingo," I said. "Well, probably. What do we do next?"
The ghost looked at me in curiosity. The last time I'd seen her, ever so briefly, we'd ended things here.
"We ask Daddy," Cottontail said.
I sighed. "What's rule number four?"
"Don't tell anyone about ghosts who isn't Aunt Suze, Uncle Jesse, or Father Dominic," they said, slightly out of unison.
"You don't actually go to the police in real life. You go to the police online. They have a list of all the car accidents that have happened," I said.
"What happens then?" the ghost asked.
"We find out who you are, then you find out who you are, and you'll hopefully remember why you're sticking around."
"Sticking around?"
I nodded towards the girls. "You guys mind explaining?" I asked.
"You're not supposed to be a ghost, so it means you needed to do something before you died," Mopsy said.
"Did you need to tell someone something?" Flopsy said.
"Did you need to deliver something to someone?" Cottontail said.
"Oh," said the ghost.
In the meantime, I'd pulled out my phone and loaded up the browser. I had the California fatal accident reports page saved as a bookmark. I hadn't looked up our ghost yet, to give the lesson some authenticity, but I handed my phone over to the girls anyway.
"Find her," I said. "Look for someone a woman in her twenties."
Not only was being able to navigate databases like this a good ghostbusting skill, it would also help them with their reading comprehension and future school research.
After five minute of Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail passing my phone between themselves, Flopsy said, "We can't find her."
"Let me see," I said.
Flopsy handed my phone back to me, and I scrolled through the results myself. I checked the results the girls had gone through and found that there weren't any fatal car accidents with women in their twenties in the past few days in the area. That would typically have been good news, but now it meant that I'd have to work harder.
I had to scroll through a week's worth of accidents to find someone who matched the ghost's description, Mika Thompson. But when I entered the name into Google and added car crash, the results indicated that Mika Thompson was black, which our ghost was not.
I kept scrolling and kept Googling, but I didn't find anyone who looked like our ghost.
The ghost in question looked at me hopefully, but the look in her eyes faltered as they met mine.
"I'll keep searching," I said to her. I'd have to take a look at the Missing Persons Database later, which would take longer. "I'll let you know when I find something."
The ghost nodded in understanding disappointment and dematerialized a second later.
Similarly, the lesson of the day began to draw to a close.
"What'd we learn today?" I asked once I'd gotten everyone piled in the backseat of the BMW.
"Logic puzzles," Flopsy said.
"Not what you're going to tell your parents if they ask. I mean, what did you actually learn today?"
"Nothing," Cottontail said decisively.
Flopsy and Mopsy quickly agreed with this.
I sighed.
"You learned that mediation can come with setbacks but not to get discouraged," I said.
None of them seem convinced by this, but we pulled into the driveway at their house shortly afterwards. They hopped out of the car the second I put it in park and killed any opportunity I had to further convince them that today wasn't entirely useless.
The triplets briefly swarmed Brad, who was standing outside to greet them, before they headed around to the backyard.
"Thanks again for taking them to lessons all the time," Brad said. "I wish my shift was over by the time the girls got out of school."
Brad had been accepted as a member of the Carmel-by-the-Sea police force. It was great for his relationship with Debbie to not be working with his father-in-law anymore. And it was great for me as a mediator because now I had connections not only to the press and to the church but to law enforcement as well.
"No problem," I said. "You must be really busy with the jewelry store robberies. I know CeeCee is."
"Yeah," he said with a nod. "Pretty much the whole force is investigating."
"Any leads?"
Brad shook his head and said, "And whoever it is has already hit up most of the stores in town."
I took a moment to try and decide how to subtly ask him which stores hadn't been hit up when Brad decided to do the work for me.
"Only two stores haven't been hit up, the ones on Ocean Avenue," Brad said.
I almost said "thank you" but caught myself. Instead, I said, "You guys have your work cut out for you, huh?"
I said goodbye to Brad soon after and headed back to the clinic. Jesse and I had come to work together, so leaving to get the triplets meant he didn't have a car to go home in.
Jesse only stayed a half hour later than usual today, so he got in the car only a couple of minutes after I'd pulled up. Even though Jesse was a better driver than me, which was not fair, seeing as he was born in 1830 and all, he got into the passenger side and we were off.
"Mediation lessons went well?" he asked.
"Pretty well," I said as I thought about how we still didn't know the accident victim's identity.
Jesse narrowed his eyes. "You didn't try and do more with the thief did you?" he asked.
"How irresponsible do you think I am? I said I'd wait for you, right?"
Jesse accepted this and did not ask for further details on spectral activity. This, however, was a mistake on his part. Although I had not and would not involve the girls in the ghost robbery, I had no intention to wait on Jesse.
The only thing I was waiting on Jesse for was for him to fall asleep.
It wasn't a long wait either.
Once we got home, I did my best at fixing a responsible adult dinner that wasn't takeout, but wound up not being able to make anything better than spaghetti. If Jesse thought there was anything strange about me washing down my dinner with two cups of coffee (I needed the caffeine to stay awake for later), then he didn't mention it. After dinner, Jesse read Herodotus, for fun, and I did yoga, for maintaining my physical flexibility as a mediator.
Jesse closed The Histories after we'd passed over an hour of time this way.
"Coming to bed?" he asked.
"I'll be up soon," I lied. And with my back turned to him in the downward dog position he couldn't tell I wasn't being dishonest.
"Are you sure you don't want to come up now?" he asked in a low tone.
And I knew that tone.
If I went up those stairs with him, there was no way I was going to be in any shape to go out and do ghostbusting tonight. Jesse might get turned on the most when I'm dressed with more propriety, but, like most men, Jesse was defenseless against the allure of a pair of yoga pants.
"Just gonna keep doing yoga," I said.
I moved out of my downward dog, which was probably part of what was giving him ideas, and into a plank where I faced him. There was a definitive bulge at the front of his pants, and I tried to keep myself from shuddering. What I wouldn't have given to spend the night intertwined with my husband as opposed to staking out a ghost in a jewelry store.
The first rule of mediation is not "tell Aunt Suze everything." It's "the life of a mediator is unfair."
So I told him goodnight, in a tone as firm as what was in his pants, and maintained my plank for a few more seconds. I waited downstairs until it was a little past eleven before I climbed the stairs to our bedroom. My mediating boots, the ones that Jesse had bought as Maximilian28, were still upstairs in my closet. I wasn't sure how physical things between me and the ghost might get tonight, but I wanted to be prepared.
I crept in as quietly as possible and retrieved the boots without turning on any lights. The room was somewhat lit by the moon, which was streaming in through the bay window.
I headed out as quietly as I came before the silence was interrupted by Jesse's voice behind me.
"And where exactly do you think you're going, querida?" he asked. He sounded tired, but he was sitting up and looking straight at me while his bare chest reflected the glow of the moonlight.
Fun fact: Jesse did not wear anything to sleep at night.
But I tried not to focus on this too much.
"I wasn't going anywhere," I said as I looked anywhere besides him.
"You're lying to me," Jesse said. "I knew something was strange when you turned me down earlier."
"I'm not sex obsessed," I said.
Jesse gave me a look that said he disagreed.
"I'm not," I said petulantly. Considering how amazing Jesse looked and how talented he was in that arena, my sexual appetite was perfectly normal.
"Regardless," he said firmly. "You were going to go out looking for that ghost from the robberies, weren't you?"
"Time is important here," I said. "If we don't head this ghost off while we know its MO, then it may be harder to figure out where it'll be next. And I know you're tired, so I didn't want to bother you."
Jesse sighed. If he had a first rule of mediation, it probably was "nombre de dios, Susannah, just tell me before you do something stupid on your own."
"Where exactly did you plan on going?" he asked me, and he stood up and headed towards me. I thought he was coming over to interrogate me some more, and if Jesse thought that I could pay attention to him while he was standing in front of me naked in the moonlight, then we might as well have gotten divorced right then and there because he clearly did not know me at all.
But he wasn't coming over to talk to me. He was headed for the closet.
"I was going to go to one of the jewelry stores on Ocean Avenue," I said. I'd looked up the directions to both stores while I'd been downstairs. I figured I would start with the one that was slightly closer to our house.
Jesse emerged from the closet a few moments later in a slightly wrinkled button down and a pair of straight fits. He was holding his keys in his hands.
"I'm coming with you," he said.
Note: At some point in time, eventually, I want to post an edit of this to Archive of Our Own.
I have a complete outline of this story, and I'm promising myself to write three chapters a week (to a total of eighteen chapters), so editing is not a thing that is happening at this point in time. I realize I should be breaking this up into more chapters or something (maybe having actual transitions?) so that it flows better (and more similarly to the original series), but there is no time to be thinking about flow or authenticity. Must write must write must produce must produce. Must not fall victim to writer's block.