Ninth Key (14 page)

“I mean it,” I assured him, as I slipped a hand inside my bag and fumbled around inside it for the pepper spray. “It would be a really bad idea for you to mess with me, Mr. Beaumont. I’m not who you think I am.”

Mr. Beaumont just looked more sad when he heard that. He said, with another big sigh, “Neither am I.”

“No,” I said. I had found the pepper spray, and now, one-handed, I worked the little plastic safety cap off it. “You think I’m just some stupid girl your son’s brought home for dinner. But I’m not.”

“Of course you’re not,” Mr. Beaumont said. “That’s why it was so important that I speak with you again. You talk to the dead, and I, you see…”

I eyed him suspiciously. “You what?”

“Well.” He looked embarrassed. “I make them that way.”

What had that dopey lady in my bedroom meant when she insisted he hadn’t tried to kill her? Of course he had! Just like he’d killed Mrs. Fiske!

Just like he was getting ready to kill me.

“Don’t think I don’t appreciate your sense of humor, Mr. Beaumont,” I said. “Because I do. I really do. I think you’re a very funny guy. So I hope you won’t take this personally —”

And I sprayed him, full in the face.

Or at least I meant to. I held the nozzle in his direction and I pressed down on it. Only all that came out was sort of a
spliff
noise.

No paralyzing pepper spray, though. None at all.

And then I remembered that bottle of Paul Mitchell styling spritz that had leaked all over the bottom of my bag the last time I was at the beach. That stuff, mixed with sand, had gunked up nearly everything I owned. And now, it seemed, it had coated the hole my pepper spray was supposed to squirt out of.

“Oh,” Mr. Beaumont said. He looked very disappointed in me. “Mace? Now is that fair, Susannah?”

I knew what I had to do. I threw down the useless bottle and started to make a run for it —

Too late, however. He lashed out — so suddenly, I didn’t even have time to move — and seized my wrist in a grip that, let me tell you, hurt quite a bit.

“You better let go of me,” I advised him. “I mean it. You’ll regret it —”

But he ignored me, and spoke without the least bit of animosity, almost as if I hadn’t just tried to paralyze his mucous membranes.

“I’m sorry if I seemed flippant before,” he said, apologetically. “But I really mean it. I have, unfortunately, made some very serious errors in judgment that have resulted in several persons losing their lives, and at my own hands…. It is imperative that you help me speak to them, to assure them that I am very, very sorry for what I’ve done.”

I blinked at him. “Okay,” I said. “That’s it. I’m out of here.”

But no matter how hard I pulled on my arm, I couldn’t break free of his viselike grip. The guy was surprisingly strong for someone’s dad.

“I know that to you I seem horrible,” he went on. “A monster, even. But I’m not. I’m really not.”

“Tell that to Mrs. Fiske,” I grunted as I tugged on my arm.

Mr. Beaumont didn’t seem to have heard me. “You can’t imagine what it’s like. The hours I’ve spent torturing myself over what I’ve done…”

With my free hand, I was rooting through my bag again. “Well, a real good prescriptive for guilt, I’ve always found, is confessing.” My fingers closed over the roll of dimes. No. No good. He had my best punching arm. “Why don’t you let me make a phone call, and we can get the police over here, and you can tell them all about it. How does that sound?”

“No,” Mr. Beaumont said, solemnly. “That’s no good. I highly doubt the police would have any respect whatsoever for my somewhat, well,
special
needs….”

And then Mr. Beaumont did something totally unexpected. He smiled at me. Ruefully, but still, a smile.

He had smiled at me before, of course, but I had always been across the room, or at least the width of a coffee table away. Now I was right there, right in his face.

And when he smiled, I was given a very special glimpse of something I certainly never expected to see in my lifetime:

The pointiest incisors ever.

Okay, I’ll admit it. I freaked. I may have been battling ghosts all of my life, but that didn’t mean I was at all prepared for my first encounter with a real live vampire. I mean, ghosts, I knew from experience, were real.

But vampires? Vampires were the stuff of nightmares, mythological creatures like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster. I mean, come on.

But here, right in front of me, smiling this completely sickening my - kid - is - an - honor - student kind of smile at me, was an actual, real-life vampire in the flesh.

Now I knew why, when Marcus had shown up that day in Mr. Beaumont’s office, he’d kept looking at my neck. He’d been checking to make sure his boss hadn’t tried to go for my jugular.

I guess that’s why, considering that my free hand was still inside my shoulder bag, I did what I did next.

Which was grasp the pencil I’d put in there at the last minute, pull it out, and plunge it, with all my might, into the center of Mr. Beaumont’s sweater.

For a second, both of us froze. Both Mr. Beaumont and I started at the pencil sticking out of his chest.

Then Mr. Beaumont said, in a very surprised voice, “Oh, my.”

To which I replied, “Eat lead.”

And then he pitched forward, missing the glass coffee table by only a few inches, and ended up on the floor between the couch and the fireplace.

Where he lay unmoving for several long moments, during which all I could do was massage the wrist he’d been clutching so hard.

He didn’t, I noticed after a while, crumble into dust the way vampires on TV did. Nor did he burst into flame as vampires in the movies often do. Instead, he just lay there.

And then, little by little, the reality of what I had just done sank in:

I had just killed my boyfriend’s dad.

Well, okay, Tad wasn’t exactly my boyfriend, and I had honestly believed that his dad was a vampire.

But guess what? He wasn’t. And I had killed him.

How unpopular was
that
going to make me?

And this little bubble of hysteria started rising up into my throat. I could tell I was going to scream. I really didn’t want to. But there I was in a room with an unconscious kid and his psycho dad, whom I had just staked through the heart with a Number Two pencil. How could I help thinking, You know, they are so totally going to kick me off the student council….

Come on. You’d have started screaming, too.

But no sooner had I sucked in a lungful of air and was getting ready to let it out in a shriek guaranteed to bring Yoshi and all those waiters who’d served me dinner come running, than someone standing behind me asked, sharply, “What happened here?”

I spun around. And there, looking stunned, stood Marcus, Red Beaumont’s secretary.

I said the first thing that came into my head, which was, “I didn’t mean to, I swear it. Only he was scaring me, so I stabbed him.”

Marcus, dressed much like the last time I’d seen him, in a suit and tie, rushed toward me. Not toward his boss, who was sprawled out on the floor. But toward me.

“Are you all right?” he demanded, grabbing me by the shoulders and looking all up and down my body…but mostly at my neck. “Did he hurt you?”

Marcus’s face was white with anxiety.

“
I’m
fine,” I said. I was starting to feel a lump in my throat. “It’s your boss you ought to be worried about….” My gaze flitted toward Tad, still face-down on the couch. “Oh, and his kid. He poisoned his kid.”

Marcus went over to Tad and pried open one of his eyelids. Then he bent and listened to his breathing. “No,” he said, almost to himself. “Not poisoned. Just drugged.”

“Oh,” I said, with a nervous laugh. “Oh, then that’s okay.”

What the hell was going on here? Was this guy for real?

He seemed like it. He was obviously very concerned. He shoved the coffee table out of the way, then bent and turned his boss over.

I had to look away. I didn’t think I could bear to see that pencil sticking out of Mr. Beaumont’s chest. I mean, I had rammed ghosts in the chest with all sorts of stuff — pickaxes, butcher’s knives, tent poles, whatever was handy. But the thing about ghosts is…well, they’re already dead. Tad’s father had been alive when I’d jabbed that pencil into him.

Oh, God,
why
had I let Father Dom put that stupid vampire idea into my head? What kind of idiot believes in vampires? I must have been out of my mind.

“Is he…” I could barely choke the question out. I had to keep my gaze on Tad because if I looked down at his dad, I had a feeling I’d hurl all that lamb and mesclun salad. Even in my anxiety I couldn’t help noticing that, unconscious, Tad still looked pretty hot. He certainly wasn’t drooling or anything. “Is he dead?”

And I thought my mother was going to be mad if she found out about the mediator thing. Could you imagine how mad she’d be if she found out I’m a teenage killer?

Marcus’s voice sounded surprised. “Of couse he’s not dead,” he said. “Just fainted. You must have given him quite a little scare.”

I snuck a peek in his direction. He had straightened up, and was standing there with my pencil in his hands. I looked hastily away, my stomach lurching.

“Is this what you used on him?” Marcus asked, in a wry voice. When I nodded silently, still not willing to glance in his direction in case I caught a glimpse of Mr. Beaumont’s blood, he said, “Don’t worry. It didn’t go in very far. You hit his sternum.”

Jeesh. Good thing Red Beaumont hadn’t turned out to be the real thing or I’d have been in serious trouble. I couldn’t even stake a guy properly. I really must be losing my touch.

As it was, all I had succeeded in doing was making a complete ass of myself. I said, still feeling that little bubble of hysteria in my chest, which I blamed for causing me to babble a little incoherently, “He poisoned Tad, and then he grabbed me, and I just freaked out…”

Marcus left his boss’s unconscious body and laid a comforting hand on my arm. He said, “Shhh, I know, I know,” in a soothing voice.

“I’m really sorry,” I jabbered on. “But he has that thing about sunlight, and then he wouldn’t eat, and then when he smiled, he had those pointy teeth, and I really thought —”

“— he was a vampire.” Marcus, to my surprise, finished my sentence for me. “I know, Miss Simon.”

I’m embarrassed to admit it, but the truth is, I was pretty close to bursting into tears. Marcus’s admission, however, made me forget all about my urge to break down into big weepy sobs.

“You
know
?” I echoed, staring up at him incredulously.

He nodded. His expression was grim. “It’s what his doctors call a fixation. He’s on medication for it, and most days, he does all right. But sometimes, when we aren’t careful, he skips a dose, and…well, you can see the results for yourself. He becomes convinced that he is a dangerous vampire who has killed dozens of people —”

“Yeah,” I said. “He mentioned that, too.” And had looked very upset about it, too.

“But I assure you, Miss Simon, that he isn’t in any way a menace to society. He’s actually quite harmless — he’s never hurt a soul.”

My gaze strayed over toward Tad. Marcus must have noticed because he added quickly, “Well, let’s just say he’s never caused any
permanent
damage.”

Permanent damage? Your own dad slipping you a mickey wasn’t considered permanent damage around here? And how did that explain Mrs. Fiske and those missing environmentalists?

“I can’t apologize enough to you, Miss Simon,” Marcus was saying. He had put his arm around me, and was walking me away from the couch, and toward, of all things, the front entranceway. “I’m very sorry you had to witness this disturbing scene.”

I glanced over my shoulder. Behind me, Yoshi had appeared. He turned Tad over so his face wasn’t squashed into the seat cushion, then draped a blanket over him while a couple of other guys hauled Mr. Beaumont to his feet. He murmured something and rolled his head around.

Not dead. Definitely not dead.

“Of course, I needn’t point out to you that none of this would have happened” — Marcus didn’t sound quite so apologetic as he had before — “if you hadn’t played that little prank on him last night. Mr. Beaumont is not a well man. He is very easily agitated. And one thing that gets him particularly excited is any mention whatsoever of the occult. The so-called dream that you described to him only served to trigger another one of his episodes.”

I felt that I had to try, at least, to defend myself. And so I said, “Well, how was I supposed to know that? I mean, if he’s so prone to episodes, why don’t you keep him locked up?”

“Because this isn’t the Middle Ages, young lady.”

Marcus removed his arm from around my shoulders and stood looking down at me very severely.

“Today, physicians prefer to treat persons suffering from disorders like the one Mr. Beaumont has with medication and therapy rather than keeping him in isolation from his family,” Marcus informed me. “Tad’s father can function normally, and even well, so long as little girls who don’t know what’s good for them keep their noses out of his business.”

Ouch! That was harsh. I had to remind myself that I wasn’t the bad guy here. I mean,
I
wasn’t the one running around insisting I was a vampire.

And I hadn’t caused a bunch of people to disappear just because they’d stood in the way of my building another strip mall.

But even as I thought it, I wondered if it were true. I mean, it didn’t seem as if Tad’s father had enough marbles rolling around in his head to organize something as sophisticated as a kidnapping and murder. Either my weirdo meter was out of whack or there was something seriously wrong here…and a mere “fixation” just didn’t explain it. What, I wondered, about Mrs. Fiske? She was dead and Mr. Beaumont had killed her — she’d said so herself. Marcus was obviously trying to downplay the severity of his employer’s psychosis.

Or was he? A man who fainted just because a girl poked him with a pencil didn’t exactly seem the sort to successfully carry out a murder. Was it possible he hadn’t been suffering from his current “disorder” when he’d offed Mrs. Fiske and those other people?