Ninth Key (17 page)

I grabbed my leather jacket and came pounding down the stairs to where Andy was standing shelling out lunch money to each of us as we came by.

“My goodness, Suze,” he said when he saw me.

“What
?” I demanded, defensively.

“Nothing,” he said, quickly. “Here.”

I plucked the five-dollar bill from his hand and, casting him one last, curious glance, followed Doc down to the car. When I got there, Dopey took one look at me and let out a howl.

“Oh my God,” he cried, pointing at me. “Run for your lives!”

I narrowed my eyes at him.

“Do you have a problem?” I asked him, coldly.

“Yeah, I do,” he sneered at me. “I didn’t know it was Halloween.”

Doc said, knowingly, “It isn’t Halloween, Brad. Halloween isn’t for another two hundred and seventy-nine days.”

“Tell that to the Queen of the Undead,” Dopey said.

I don’t know what made me do it. I was in a bad mood, I guess. Everything that had happened the night before, from stabbing Mr. Beaumont to finding out I’d had the wrong man all along — not to mention my discovery that my feelings about Jesse weren’t exactly what I’d have liked them to be — came back to me.

And the next thing I knew, I’d turned around and sunk my fist into Dopey’s stomach.

He let out a groan and pitched forward, then sprawled out into the grass, gasping for air.

Okay, I admit it. I felt bad. I shouldn’t have done it.

But still. What a baby. I mean, seriously. He’s on the wrestling team. What are they teaching these wrestlers, anyway? Clearly not how to take a punch.

“Whoa,” Sleepy said when he noticed that Dopey was on the ground. “What the hell happened to you?”

Dopey pointed at me, trying to say my name. But all that came out were gasps.

“Aw, Jesus,” Sleepy said, looking at me disgustedly.

“He called me,” I said, with all the dignity I could muster, “the Queen of the Undead.”

Sleepy said, “Well, what do you expect him to say? You look like a hooker. Sister Ernestine’s going to send you home if she sees you in that skirt.”

I sucked in my breath, outraged. “This skirt,” I said, “happens to be by Betsey Johnson.”

“I don’t care if it’s by Betsy Ross. And neither will Sister Ernestine. Come on, Brad, get up. We’re going to be late.”

Brad got up with elaborate care, as if every movement was causing him excruciating pain. Sleepy didn’t look as if he felt too sorry for him. “I told you not to mess with her, sport,” was all he said as he slid behind the wheel.

“She sucker-punched me, man,” Brad whined. “She can’t get away with that.”

“Actually,” Doc said pleasantly, as he climbed into the backseat and fastened his seatbelt, “she can. While statistics concerning domestic violence are always difficult to obtain due to low reportage, incidents in which females batter male family members are reported even less, as the victims are almost always too embarrassed to tell members of law enforcement that they have, in fact, been beaten by a woman.”

“Well, I’m not embarrassed,” Dopey declared. “I’m telling Dad as soon as we get home.”

“Go ahead,” I said, acidly. I was in a really bad mood. “He’s just going to ground you again when I tell him you went ahead and snuck out the night of Kelly Prescott’s pool party.”

“I did not,” he practically screamed in my face.

“Then how is it,” I inquired, “that I saw you in her pool house giving Debbie Mancuso’s tongue a Jiffy Lube?”

Even Sleepy hooted at that one.

Dopey, completely red with embarrassment, looked as if he might start crying. I licked my finger and made a little slashing motion in the air as if I were writing on a scoreboard. Suze, one. Dopey, zero.

But Dopey, unfortunately, was the one who had the last laugh.

We were approaching our lines for Assembly — they seriously make every single grade stand outside the school in these lines separated by sex, boys on one side, girls on the other, for fifteen minutes before class officially starts, so they can take attendance and read announcements — when Sister Ernestine blew her whistle at me, and signaled for me to come over to her, where she was standing by the flagpole.

Fortunately, she did this in front of the entire sophomore class — not to mention the freshmen — so that every single one of my peers had the privilege of seeing me get bawled out by a nun for wearing a miniskirt to school.

The upshot of it all was that Sister Ernestine said I had to go home and change.

Oh, I argued. I insisted that a society that valued its members solely for their outward appearance was a society destined for destruction, which was a line I’d heard Doc use a few days earlier when she’d busted him for wearing Levi’s — there’s a strict anti-jeans rule at the Academy.

But Sister Ernestine didn’t go for it. She informed me that I could go home and change, or I could sit in her office and help grade the second graders’ math quizzes until my mother arrived with a pair of slacks for me.

Oh, that wouldn’t be
too
embarrassing.

Given the alternative, I elected to go home and change — although I argued strenuously on behalf of Ms. Johnson and her designs. A skirt however, with a hem higher than three inches above the knee, is not considered appropriate Academy attire. And my skirt, unfortunately, was more than four inches above my knees. I know because Sister Ernestine took out a ruler and showed me. And the rest of the sophomore class, as well.

And so it was that, with a wave to CeeCee and Adam, who were leading the class’s shouts of encouragement to me — which fortunately drowned out the catcalls Dopey and his friends were making — I shouldered my backpack and left the school grounds. I had, of course, to walk home, since I could not face the indignity of calling Andy for a ride, and I still hadn’t figured out whether or not there was such a thing as public transportation in Carmel.

I wasn’t too deeply bummed. After all, what had I had to look forward to? Oh, just Father Dominic reaming me out for not telling him about Jesse. I could, I suppose, have distracted him by telling him how wrong he’d been about Tad’s dad being a vampire — he just
thinks
he’s one — and what CeeCee had discovered about his brother, Marcus. That certainly would have gotten him off my back…for a little while, anyway.

But then what? So a couple of environmentalists were missing? That didn’t prove anything. So a dead lady had told me a Mr. Beaumont had killed her? Oh, yeah, that’d stand up in court, all right.

Not a lot to go on. We had, in fact, nothing. Nada. Zilch.

Which was what I was feeling like as I strolled along. A big miniskirted zero.

As if whoever was in charge of the weather agreed with me about my loser status, it was sort of raining. It was foggy every morning along the coast in northern California. The fog rolled in from the sea and sat in the bay until the sun burned it all off.

But this morning, on top of the fog, there was this light drizzle coming down. It wasn’t so bad at first, but I hadn’t gotten farther than the school gates before my hair started curling up. After all the time I’d spent that morning straightening it. I didn’t, of course, have an umbrella. Nor, it seemed, did I have much of a choice. I was going to be a drenched, curly-haired freak by the time I walked the two miles — mostly uphill — to the house, and that was the end of it.

Or so I thought. Because as I was passing the school gates, a car pulling in between them slowed.

It was a nice car. It was an expensive car. It was a black car with smoked windows. As I looked at it one of those windows lowered and a familiar face peered out at me from the backseat.

“Miss Simon,” Marcus Beaumont said pleasantly. “Just the person I was looking for. May I have a word?”

And he opened the passenger door invitingly, beckoning for me to come in out of the rain.

Every single one of my mediator neurons fired at once.
Danger
, they screamed.
Run for it
, they shrieked.

I couldn’t believe it. Tad had done it. Tad had asked his uncle what I’d meant.

And Marcus, instead of shrugging it off, had come here to my school in a car with smoked windows to “have a word” with me.

I was dead meat.

But before I had a chance to spin around and hightail back into the school, where I knew I’d be safe, the passenger doors of Marcus Beaumont’s sedan sprang open and these two guys came at me.

Let me just say in my defense that deep down, I never thought Tad would have the guts to do it. I mean, Tad seemed like a nice enough guy, and God knew he was a great kisser, but he didn’t seem to be the sharpest knife in the drawer, if you know what I mean. This, I imagine, is why a girl like Kelly Prescott would find him so appealing: Kelly’s used to being the Wüsthof. She doesn’t welcome competition in that capacity.

But I had obviously underestimated Tad. Not only had he gone to his uncle as I’d suggested, but he’d evidently managed to raise Marcus’s suspicions that I knew more than I’d let on.

Way more if the two thugs who were circling me, cutting off any possible chance at escape, were any indication.

My option for flight pretty much voided by these two clowns, I saw that I was going to have to fight. I do not consider myself a slouch in the fighting department. I actually kind of like it, if you haven’t figured that out already. Of course, usually I’m fighting ghosts, and not live human beings. But if you think about it, there’s not really that much of a difference. I mean, nasal cartilage is nasal cartilage. I was willing to give it a go.

This seemed to come as something of a surprise to Marcus’s flunkies. A couple of thickset frat boys who looked as if they were more used to pounding brewskies than people, they were out to impress the boss in a big way.

At least until I threw down my book bag, hooked my foot behind the knee of one them, and brought him down with a ground-shaking thud to the wet asphalt.

While Thug #1 lay there staring up at the overcast sky with a surprised look on his face, I got in an excellent kick to Thug #2. He was too tall for me to get him in the nose, but I knocked the wind out of him by applying my three-inch heel to his rib cage. That had to have hurt, let me tell you. He went spinning around, lost his balance, and hit the ground.

Amateur.

Marcus got out of the car then. He stood with the rain beating down on his fluffy blond hair and went, “You idiot,” to Thug #2.

He was right to be upset, if you think about it. I mean, here he’d hired these guys to roust me, and they were doing a thoroughly bad job of it. It just goes to show you can’t get good help anymore.

You would think that, with all this going on in front of a pretty popular tourist destination like the Mission — not to mention a
school
— somebody would have noticed and phoned the cops. You would think that, wouldn’t you?

But if you’re thinking that, you obviously haven’t been in California when it was raining out. I’m not kidding, it’s like New York City on New Year’s Eve: Only the tourists venture outside. Everyone else stays inside and waits until it’s safe to come out.

Oh, a couple of cars whizzed by going fifty miles an hour in a twenty - mile - per - hour zone. I was hoping one of them would notice us and decide that two guys on one girl wasn’t quite playing fair — even if the girl did look a bit like a hooker.

But our little tussle went on for a surprisingly long time before Marcus — who’d apparently realized what his thugs hadn’t, that I wasn’t exactly your typical Catholic schoolgirl — cut the whole thing short by laying me out with a totally unfair right to the chin.

I didn’t even see him coming. What with the rain and all, my hair was getting plastered to my face, obscuring my peripheral vision. I’d been concentrating on applying a knee to Thug #1’s groin — it had been a bad idea, his decision to get up again — while keeping my eye on Thug #2, who kept grabbing for handfuls of my hair — he had obviously gone to the Dopey school of fighting — and hadn’t even noticed that Marcus was headed my way.

But suddenly, a heavy hand landed on my shoulder and spun me around. A second later, an explosion sounded in my head. The world tilted sickeningly, and I felt myself stumble. Next thing I knew, I was inside the car, and brakes were squealing.

“Ow,” I said when the stars I’d been seeing had receded enough for me to speak. I reached up and touched my jaw. None of my teeth felt loose, but I was definitely going to have a bruise that there wasn’t enough Clinique in the world to cover up. “What’d you have to hit me so hard for?”

Marcus just blinked at me expressionlessly from where he sat on the seat beside me. Thug #1 was driving and Thug #2 sat beside him in the front seat. Judging from the backs of their extremely thick necks, they were unhappy. It couldn’t have been too pleasant sitting there with all those various body parts throbbing with pain in wet, muddy clothes. My leather jacket had fortunately protected me from the worst of the rain. My hair, however, was undoubtedly a lost cause.

We were going fast down the highway. Water sluiced on either side of us as we barreled through what had become a steady downpour. There wasn’t a soul on the highway but us. I tell you, you’ve never seen people as scared of a little bit of rain as native Californians. Earthquakes? They’re nothing. But a hint of drizzle and it’s head - between - the - knees time.

“Look,” I said. “I think you should know something. My mother is a reporter for WCAL in Monterey, and if anything happens to me, she is going to be all over you like ants on a Jolly Rancher.”

Marcus, clearly bored by my posturing, pulled back his coat sleeve and looked at his Rolex. “She won’t,” he said, tonelessly. “No one knows where you are. It was quite fortuitous, your leaving the school at the very moment we were pulling up to it. Did another one of your
ghosts
” — he said the word with a sarcasm I suppose he found scathing — “warn you that we were coming?”

Scowling, I muttered, “Not exactly.” No way was I going to tell him I’d been sent home for violating the school dress code. I’d been humiliated enough for one day.

“Just what were
you
doing there, anyway?” I demanded. “I mean, were you just going to stroll in and yank me out of class at gunpoint in front of everyone?”