Hush
Six
If Jesse knew I'd left to do some ghostbusting last night, then he didn't let on about it. The only thing he'd mentioned to me that was out of the ordinary was that I would be meeting with Dr. Whitehall today to discuss his benefits and all the other things I was supposed to talk to him about as the unofficial HR representative of the clinic.
The first thing I noticed about Dr. Whitehall when I met him a couple of hours later was that he was a very good looking guy. He reminded me of Jake sort of. I wouldn't have been surprised if he spent his free time hitting the waves on Carmel Beach. He was blonde haired and blue eyed and sun kissed. He smiled at me while I shook his hand, and I couldn't help but notice how white his teeth were.
The Carmel Pediatrics Center was well on its way to becoming the most attractive healthcare facility in the valley.
"Excellent meeting you, Mrs. de Silva," Dr. Whitehall said. "I'm Brett Whitehall. Call me Brett."
"Nice to meet you, too, Brett. Call me Suze."
"Suze," he repeated, testing the name out briefly before he smiled again. Jesse's smile was by far my favorite one, but I had to give Brett credit for his.
I explained his benefits to him and then we talked casually for a brief period before he rose, shook my hand again, and turned to leave.
Jesse entered for lunch no more than ten minutes after Brett had left. He performed his usual routine of hanging up his lab coat and setting some takeout down on the coffee table. Instead of taking a seat at one of the chairs though, he strode over to my desk until he met me behind it.
"Do you feel alright today, querida?" he asked as he put one of his hands on the desktop.
I was keeping a toothbrush in the top drawer of my desk in case I threw up at work, but Jesse didn't need to know that. What mattered was that right now, in this moment, with the sleeves of Jesse's shirt rolled up and revealing his sculpted forearms, I felt more than fine.
"Perfect," I said.
"Good," Jesse said.
And then he attacked me.
His kiss was so searing it nearly surprised me. But then again, in all the years since I'd first kissed Jesse, I'd never built up a tolerance for him. Each kiss was just as intoxicating as the very first one had been. I felt slightly dazed when he pulled back from me.
"Alright enough for this?" Jesse asked me lowly.
There was no mistake what "this" was. I could already see the tightness against the front of his pants.
"More than alright," I said.
And this time I kissed him, while pulling him towards me by his belt loops.
My blouse was halfway unbuttoned by the time the phone rang. Not the office phone but my cell phone. It was lying on the desktop and vibrating annoyingly, but I was more than willing to ignore it.
Jesse, on the other hand, spared it a glance.
I kissed his neck in an effort to remind him that there were much more important things to be doing right now than answering phone calls. Lunch break was only an hour after all. But Jesse picked up the phone anyway.
"Father Dominic," he said.
In an instant every bit of arousal I'd felt was as dead as roadkill. Which wasn't to say that Father Dominic was a hideous monster or something. Far from it. Father Dom was definitely good looking for someone in their seventies. He still had all of his hair, a pair of killer baby blue eyes, and, though less spry than he used to be, he looked nice enough in his priestly robes. If he wasn't a priest, I'm sure he could've gotten as much senior citizen tail as he wanted.
But he was a priest, and he had formerly been my principal and was still my mentor, so Father Dominic and lustful thoughts might as well have been oil and water.
"We're both here," Jesse said, in response to something Father Dom had said. "I'll put you on speaker phone."
Father Dominic's voice filled the room a second later.
"Jesse? Susannah?"
"Present, Father D.," I said, and I took to the task of buttoning my blouse back up.
"Oh good," Father Dom said. "I've been meaning to talk to the both of you lately. But it's been hard to get a hold of you, Susannah. I haven't seen you at Mass lately."
"I haven't been feeling well lately," I said, which was true.
Jesse raised an eyebrow at me, as if to say, "You must not have been feeling well for over a year then." He didn't say this though, so Father Dominic continued.
"I wish I could be calling under better circumstances, but I think there may be some ghost activity in Carmel," Father Dom said. "I was on Facebook the other day when I a saw a video about all of the commotion at several local jewelry stores."
Of course Father Dom was getting his news from Facebook. The last time I'd logged on, months ago, it felt like half of my feed had been posts from him. He posted photos from every retreat he went to, any special service down at the Mission, and very frequently provided links to articles about birds. I was only surprised that Father Dom hadn't heard about everything sooner, between the coverage on actual TV and the frequency with which he visited Facebook.
"We're aware, Father," Jesse said. "We're going to investigate it further soon."
"Yeah," I said, doing my best to not let my tone give away the fact that the investigation was more than underway on my end.
"Well, at any rate, we should strategize in the meantime," Father Dom said.
"Jesse and I will strategize, Father D. We're not going to let you wind up in the hospital again."
"Do not treat me like an invalid, Susannah," Father Dom said, and his tone was strict and left no doubt that he'd been a teacher at one point.
"You're not an invalid, Father, but Susannah is right," Jesse said. "I've seen the videos on the news myself, and this ghost is powerful. It could be that we are dealing with someone who has been dead for quite some time now."
I could hear Father Dom sigh from the other end. "Well, I trust you will still keep me up to date on whatever should happen with this ghost?"
"Of course, Father D.," I said.
The conversation went on for another fifteen minutes or so, effectively killing any chances Jesse and I had for a naughty nooner. We spent the rest of our lunch break eating, and then went back to our respective jobs afterwards. Jesse's schedule was still booked solid in contrast to mine. I only had a couple of appointments that afternoon, but my appointment at half past three was of particular import.
At 3:32, Daniel Powell entered my office unaccompanied and sat in one of the chairs around the coffee table, the same place he'd sat last time. I quickly joined him, paper and crayons in tow, and slid a piece of paper across the table to him.
"Same as last time, OK, Daniel?" I said.
Daniel nodded and picked up one of the pieces of paper from the table. He studied it momentarily, like he was trying to visualize a piece of art coming into instantaneous fruition on the page, and he selected an orange crayon. He put the orange crayon down a few moments later without making any marks on the page and exchanged it for a brown one.
Well, technically, the crayon colors were neither "orange" nor "brown." When you're working out of a 152 pack of crayons, the names of the colors get a little funny. He was probably using "monarch butterfly" and "coffee bean" or something.
I picked up a blue crayon ("Wild Blue Yonder") and started drawing the outlines of small, puffy clouds. I was a terrible artist, as Daniel already knew from my previous drawing of Spike, so clouds were a good safety zone for me.
From where I was sitting, I could see out of the window next to my desk. The sea lay beyond that window, and I picked up a different shade of blue, without thinking, to begin to draw its waters.
Sitting and drawing wasn't just therapeutic for Daniel, it was also therapeutic for me. The last time I'd sat down with crayons out of my own volition, I must've been in elementary school. That had been before my dad died and before I'd understood my responsibilities as a mediator. Life had been simpler back then, to say the least.
But in a weird way, I wouldn't call it better.
I still got that feeling, like everything was OK and nothing that I couldn't handle would dare to exist, every time I watched the sunset at the beach with Jesse. I couldn't wait for that feeling again. Once we'd caught the ghost robber I would be able to tell Jesse that he was going to be a father before too long, and the dishonesty between us would dissipate.
And as I began to draw sand at the bottom of my picture, I started to think that I should just tell Jesse now. Tell him everything. So things could be simple again and…
And then I realized that I was starting to give myself therapy. Serenity could wait. Right now, I had a client and a case that needed to be sorted out.
Just as I was putting the finishing touches on a starfish on the sand, Daniel slid his paper across the table to show me what he had drawn.
His drawing today was no less impressive than the fighter jet I'd seen him draw yesterday. Today's drawing was a man, or at least a man from the waist up. The bottom half of the man was the body of a horse, or some hooved animal. Daniel had only taken twenty minutes, but his work spared no attention to detail.
"That's a great minotaur," I said.
After a moment's hesitation, he nodded.
I might've been mistaken, but I was pretty sure minotaurs were the ones with human bodies and horse heads, and what Daniel had actually drawn was a centaur. I was hoping he would take offense to me slandering his art and speak out to correct me, but he didn't.
I turned my paper around to show him the beach I'd drawn. My drawing was rudimentary, but the subject was still obvious enough.
"I drew a beach," I said. "I grew up in New York, and there aren't any beaches out there. Not real beaches, at least. So ever since I came to California, I've loved going to the beach. Would you like to tell me anything more about your drawing?"
Daniel shook his head, and I tried not to sigh.
He then selected a blank sheet of paper from the stack on the table, and we started the process all over again.
I decided to challenge myself this time by drawing a horse. Jesse liked horses. I could probably give him my drawing afterwards, and it would make him laugh for at least two solid minutes.
Progress on the horse I was drawing didn't look good nearly a half hour later, and Daniel's appointment was rapidly drawing to a close. I was about to inform him of this when he slid his last drawing of the day across the table to me.
I picked it up and surveyed it for a few seconds.
"Who is she?" I asked.
But, in line with his usual MO, Daniel did not provide me a with single word of explanation. So I looked closer to piece things together for myself. Daniel had drawn a very pretty woman with long, wavy hair that was a mix of browns and golds. If I hadn't known what his mother looked like from the police report and subsequent obituary, I would've assumed he was drawing her. Though judging from how attractive the woman he'd drawn was, maybe she was just as imaginary as the centaur he'd put to paper earlier.
But as I stared at the waves in her hair and the almost photographic way that Daniel had captured them, I realized that I knew exactly who this woman was.
Or, rather, I didn't know who she was at all, but I had seen her before-last night.
I'd never gotten a glimpse of her face, but Daniel had drawn it in its full glory.
"She's very pretty," I offered. More than anything, I wanted Daniel to say something, anything, about her.
Daniel just shrugged, and the clock struck half past four before I could try and combine my mediator-counselor skills further.
I couldn't help but wonder the whole time as I walked Daniel from my office to the parking lot, where his aunt was waiting for him, how Daniel had known the ghost. Had he seen her the night his mother was murdered? And did that mean he was a mediator or had it just been a one time ghost sighting? What were the chances of there being another mediator in the Carmel area, between me, Jesse, and Father Dom? Or, more likely, had Daniel known the ghost back when she'd been alive? And how so? Was the murder in the jewelry store more than a necessary take down of personnel unexpectedly present at the scene?
I tried not to look like I was too deep in thought, but I was still almost surprised that Jesse didn't demand a full explanation from me when I stole a goodbye kiss from him an hour later. I wouldn't see him again until later tonight as he was meeting up for dinner with some friends of his from the hospital, and I was going to have dinner with CeeCee and Adam at the Happy Medium.
Adam was in town for his younger sister's eighth birthday. He hadn't really gotten a chance to know her, since he'd gone to school out of state, and she hadn't existed while we were in high school. Sometime during our senior year, Adam's parents had announced that they were going to make good on their idea of having another kid. Adam's graduation present had been his parent's lack of presence as his mother was too busy in labor to see her son graduate.
Adam hadn't minded too much though. I knew he cared about his younger sister enough to take a break from being a lawyer and come back to Carmel for a few days every time she had another birthday.
The only person sitting at the table when I arrived at the Happy Medium a few minutes later was CeeCee though. She commented that Adam had just left for the restroom, and I decided to take advantage of his absence.
What I was going to do next was almost definitely a breach of counselor-patient confidentiality, but sometimes morals and laws had to take a back seat for the cause of the greater good. Besides, I figured Daniel wouldn't mind me getting one step closer to finding the woman who'd killed his mother.
I slid the picture Daniel had drawn of the ghost robber across the table to CeeCee.
"I didn't know you could draw, Suze," CeeCee said. "This is really good. Who is she?"
"I didn't draw it," I said, "And 'who is she' was what I was hoping you could help with."
CeeCee paused for a moment and then said, "This is whose obit you want?"
I nodded.
"This is a good picture, Suze, but do you know how databases work? You can't just put in a drawing into a search field and then watch as magic happens."
I had never been an ace with technology the way CeeCee was, but I still knew enough to know that I was asking for a lot.
"I'll make it worth your while. Gift card to the Apple store? Truckload of Thin Mints?"
"I'm more of a Samoa girl."
"Truckload of Samoas then," I said. "Look, I know it's a longshot, but I'll keep looking for more info, and if you keep looking through the database, then we should be able to come up with something between the two of us."
"OK, I'll keep looking. For the greater good, I'll keep looking," CeeCee said.
"That's the spirit," I said brightly, just as Adam rejoined our table.
"What's the spirit?" he asked.
Adam did not know about my mediation abilities, and, although he was nowhere near the skeptic at heart CeeCee was, he did not believe in ghosts as far as I knew. The truth was definitely not a valid explanation in this case.
"Just trying to persuade CeeCee to accept Hugo's hand in marriage," I said.
CeeCee rolled her eyes so hard, I was surprised they didn't fall out of her head. "For the last time, Suze, we're just friends."
"Who's Hugo?" Adam asked. And if I wasn't wrong, his tone sounded more than a bit cool.
"This guy I work with," CeeCee said offhandedly. "He used to go to the Mission."
"Oh," Adam said. "I remember him then. Hugo with the huge hands yet unfortunately small-."
"Adam," CeeCee said sharply. "I'm sure everything there is fine."
"You're sure?" Adam asked, emphasizing the word "sure" in a way that might as well have been him directly asking her if she'd had sex with Hugo.
I bit my lip as I realized I'd opened up a pretty big can of worms in my attempt to make sure Adam didn't find out about the spectral goings-on of Carmel.
"Whether or not I'm sure is between me and Hugo," CeeCee said.
Oh God. Was this going to happen? And with me sitting at the table and everything? As far as I could understand from what CeeCee had said, she and Adam had never really taken the time to talk out whatever the hell their on-and-off-but-mostly-off relationship was the last time they'd switched things to off. They had to realize that right now, with me still sitting there, unable to bail since my food hadn't even come out yet, was not good timing for their long overdue discussion.
As a small miracle, CeeCee's Aunt Pru approached the table next, bearing food.
She set a plate of sweet potato fries down in front of CeeCee, an avocado panini in front of Adam, and a pita wrap in front of me.
"Hmm," Aunt Pru said, surveying our table briefly. "I think things tonight are going to be a bit chilly, don't you think?"
As if you needed to be a psychic to sense the way the temperature surrounding our table had dropped a good ten degrees since Hugo's name had come up. The way our table felt now, undeniably chilly, must have been the same way it felt when non-mediators interacted with ghosts. Our table was effectively a cold spot.
I tried my best to make the table into a less hostile environment. After all, it was my bringing Hugo into the conversation that had made things so hostile in the first place. But my efforts were to no avail. Every new conversation topic I created inevitably followed the same path, a path whose destination was Hugo Braggart.
Once I finished my pita wrap and left Adam and CeeCee to continue talking, or arguing, I put the money for my wrap on the table and exited the Happy Medium alone. But I didn't make it so far as the car door to the Land Rover before I heard a voice calling to me from over my shoulder.
I wasn't surprised when I turned around to see a ghost. I wasn't even surprised that the ghost in question knew my name or that I was a mediator.
No, what surprised me was that I recognized this ghost. Because I'd read the police report on her death just yesterday.
My latest spectral client was none other Daniel's mother, Francesca Powell.