Ninth Key (7 page)

“Poison oak,” I said, bitterly. “You’re lucky you’re dead and can’t get it. It bites. Nobody warned me about it, you know. About poison oak, I mean. Palm trees, sure, everybody said there’d be palm trees, but —”

“You should try putting a poultice of gum flower leaves on them,” he interrupted.

“Oh, okay,” I said, managing not to sound too sarcastic.

He frowned at me. “Little yellow flowers,” he said. “They grow wild. They have healing properties, you know. There are some growing on that hill out behind the house.”

“Oh,” I said. “You mean that hill where all the poison oak is?”

“They say gunpowder works, too.”

“Oh,” I said. “You know, Jesse, you might be surprised to learn that medicine has advanced beyond flower poultices and gunpowder in the past century and a half.”

“Fine,” he said, dropping my hands. “It was only a suggestion.”

“Well,” I said. “Thanks. But I’ll put my faith in hydrocortisone.”

He looked at me for a little while. I guess he was probably thinking what a freak I am.
I
was thinking how weird it was, the fact that this guy had held my scaly, poison-oaky hands. Nobody else would touch them, not even my mother. But Jesse hadn’t minded.

Then again, it wasn’t as if he could catch it from me.

“Susannah,” he said, finally.

“What?”

“Go carefully,” he said, “with this woman. The woman who was here.”

I shrugged. “Okay.”

“I mean it,” Jesse said. “She isn’t — she isn’t who you think she is.”

“I know who she is,” I said.

He looked surprised. So surprised it was kind of insulting, actually. “You
know?
She
told
you?”

“Well, not exactly,” I said. “But you don’t have to worry. I’ve got things under control.”

“No,” he said. He got up off the bed. “You don’t, Susannah. You should be careful. You should listen to your father this time.”

“Oh, okay,” I said, very sarcastically. “Thanks. Do you think maybe you could be creepier about it? Like, could you drool blood, or something, too?”

I guess maybe I’d been a little
too
sarcastic, though, because instead of replying he just disappeared.

Ghosts. They just can’t take a joke.

“You want me to
what
?”

“Just drop me off,” I said. “On your way to work. It’s not out of your way.”

Sleepy eyed me as if I’d suggested he eat glass or something. “I don’t know,” he said slowly as he stood in the doorway, the keys to the Rambler in his hand. “How are you going to get home?”

“A friend is coming to pick me up,” I said, brightly.

A total lie, of course. I had no way of getting home.

But I figured in a pinch, I could always call Adam. He’d just gotten his license as well as a new VW Bug. He was so hot to drive, he’d have picked me up from Albuquerque if I’d called him from there. I didn’t think he’d mind too much if I called him from Thaddeus Beaumont’s mansion on Seventeen Mile Drive.

Sleepy still looked uncertain. “I don’t know….” he said, slowly.

I could tell he thought I was headed for a gang meeting, or something. Sleepy has never seemed all that thrilled about me, especially after our parents’ wedding when he caught me smoking outside the reception hall. Which is so totally unfair since I’ve never touched a cigarette since.

But I guess the fact that he’d recently been forced to rescue me in the middle of the night when this ghost made a building collapse on me didn’t exactly help form any warm bond of trust between us. Especially since I couldn’t tell him the ghost part. I think he believes I’m just the type of girl buildings fall on top of all the time.

No wonder he doesn’t want me in his car.

“Come on,” I said, opening up my camel-colored calf-length coat. “How much trouble could I get up to in this outfit?”

Sleepy looked me over. Even he had to admit I was the epitome of innocence in my white cable-knit sweater, red plaid skirt, and penny loafers. I had even put on this gold cross necklace I had been awarded as a prize for winning an essay contest on the War of 1812 in Mr. Walden’s class. I figured this was the kind of outfit an old guy like Mr. Beaumont would appreciate: you know, the sassy schoolgirl thing.

“Besides,” I said. “It’s for school.”

“All right,” Sleepy said at last, looking like he really wished he were someplace else. “Get in the car.”

I hightailed it out to the Rambler before he had a chance to change his mind.

Sleepy got in a minute later, looking drowsy, as usual. His job, for a pizza stint, seemed awfully demanding. Either that or he just put in a lot of extra shifts. You would think by now he’d have saved enough for that Camaro. I mentioned that as we pulled out of the driveway.

“Yeah,” Sleepy said. “But I want to really cherry her out, you know? Alpine stereo, Bose speakers. The works.”

I have this thing about boys who refer to their cars as “she,” but I didn’t figure it would pay to alienate my ride. Instead, I said, “Wow. Neat.”

We live in the hills of Carmel, overlooking the valley and the bay. It’s a beautiful place, but since it was dark out all I could see were the insides of the houses we were driving by. People in California have these really big windows to let in all the sun, and at nighttime, when their lights are on, you can see practically everything they’re doing, just like in Brooklyn, where nobody ever pulled down their blinds. It’s kind of homey, actually.

“What class is this for, anyway?” Sleepy asked, making me jump. He so rarely spoke, especially when he was doing something he liked, like eating or driving, that I had sort of forgotten he was there.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“This paper you’re doing.” He took his eyes off the road a second and looked at me. “You did say this was for school, didn’t you?”

“Oh,” I said. “Sure. Uh-huh. It’s, um, a story I’m doing for the school paper. My friend CeeCee, she’s the editor. She assigned it to me.”

Oh my God, I am such a liar. And I can’t leave at just one lie, either. Oh, no. I have to pile it on. I am sick, I tell you. Sick.

“CeeCee,” Sleepy said. “That’s that albino chick you hang out with at lunch, right?”

CeeCee would have had an embolism if she’d heard anyone refer to her as a chick, but since, technically, the rest of his sentence was correct, I said, “Uh-huh.”

Sleepy grunted and didn’t say anything else for a while. We drove in silence, the big houses with their light-filled windows flashing by. Seventeen Mile Drive is this stretch of highway that’s supposed to be like the most beautiful road in the world, or something. The famous Pebble Beach Golf Course is on Seventeen Mile Drive, along with about five other golf courses and a bunch of scenic points, like the Lone Cypress, which is some kind of tree growing out of a boulder, and Seal Rock, on which there are, you guessed it, a lot of seals.

Seventeen Mile Drive is also where you can check out the colliding currents of what they call the Restless Sea, the ocean along this part of the coast that’s too filled with riptides and undertows for anyone to swim in. It’s all giant crashing waves and tiny stretches of sand between great big boulders on which seagulls are always dropping mussels and stuff, hoping to split the shells open. Sometimes surfers get split open there, too, if they’re stupid enough to think they can ride the waves.

And if you want, you can buy a really big mansion on a cliff overlooking all this natural beauty, for a mere, oh, zillion dollars or so.

Which was apparently what Thaddeus “Red” Beaumont had done. He had snatched up one of those mansions, a really, really big one, I saw, when Sleepy finally pulled up in front of it. Such a big one, in fact, that it had a little guardhouse by the enormous spiky gate in front of its long, long driveway, with a guard in it watching TV.

Sleepy, looking at the gate, went, “Are you sure this is the place?”

I swallowed. I knew from what CeeCee had said that Mr. Beaumont was rich. But I hadn’t thought he was
this
rich.

And just think, his kid had asked me to slow dance!

“Um,” I said. “Maybe I should just see if he’s home before you take off.”

Sleepy said, “Yeah, I guess.”

I got out of the car and went up to the little guardhouse. I don’t mind telling you, I felt like a tool. I had been trying all day to get through to Mr. Beaumont, only to be told he was in a meeting, or on another line. For some reason, I’d imagined a personal touch might work. I don’t know what I’d been thinking, but I believe it had involved ringing the doorbell and then looking winsomely up into his face when he came to the door.

That, I could see now, wasn’t going to happen.

“Um, excuse me,” I said, into the little microphone at the guard’s house. Bulletproof glass, I noticed. Either Tad’s dad had some people who didn’t like him, or he was just a little paranoid.

The guard looked up from his TV. He checked me out. I saw him check me out. I had kept my coat open so he’d be sure to see my plaid skirt and loafers. Then he looked past me, at the Rambler. This was no good. I did not want to be judged by my stepbrother and his crappy car.

I tapped on the glass again to direct the guard’s attention back to me.

“Hello,” I said, into the microphone. “My name’s Susannah Simon, and I’m a sophomore at the Mission Academy. I’m doing a story for our school paper on the ten most influential people in Carmel, and I was hoping to be able to interview Mr. Beaumont, but unfortunately, he hasn’t returned any of my calls, and the story is due tomorrow, so I was wondering if he might be home and if he’d see me.”

The guard looked at me with a stunned expression on his face.

“I’m a friend,” I said, “of Tad, Tad Beaumont, Mr. Beaumont’s son? He knows me, so if you want him, you know, to check me out on the security camera or whatever, I’m sure he could, you know, ID me. If my ID needs verifying, I mean.”

The guard continued to stare at me. You would think a guy as rich as Mr. Beaumont could afford smarter guards.

“But if this is a bad time,” I said, starting to back away, “I guess I could come back.”

Then the guard did an extraordinary thing. He leaned forward, pressed a button, and said, into the speaker, “Honey, you talk faster than anyone I ever heard in my life. Would you care to repeat all that? Slowly, this time?”

So I said my little speech again, more slowly this time, while behind me, Sleepy sat at the wheel with the motor running. I could hear the radio blaring inside the car, and Sleepy singing along. He must have thought that his car was soundproof with the windows rolled up.

Boy, was he ever wrong.

After I was done giving my speech the second time, the guard, with a kind of smile on his face, said, “Hold on, miss,” and got on this white phone, and started saying a bunch of stuff into it that I couldn’t hear. I stood there wishing I’d worn tights instead of pantyhose since my legs were freezing in the cold wind that was coming in off the ocean, and wondering how I could ever have possibly thought this was a good idea.

Then the microphone crackled.

“Okay, miss,” the guard said. “Mr. Beaumont’ll see you.”

And then, to my astonishment, the big spiky gates began to ease open.

“Oh,” I said. “Oh my God! Thank you! Thanks —”

Then I realized the guard couldn’t hear me since I wasn’t talking into the microphone. So I ran back to the car and tore open the door.

Sleepy, in the middle of a pretty involved air guitar session, broke off and looked embarrassed.

“So?” he said.

“So,” I said back to him, slamming the passenger door behind me. “We’re in. Just drop me off at the house, will you?”

“Sure thing, Cinderella.”

It took like five minutes to get down that driveway. I am not even kidding. It was
that
long. On either side of it were these big trees that formed sort of an alley. A tree alley. It was kind of cool. I figured in the daytime it was probably really beautiful. Was there anything Tad Beaumont didn’t have? Looks, money, a beautiful place to live…

All he needed was cute little old me.

Sleepy pulled the car to a stop in front of this paved entranceway, which was flanked on either side by these enormous palm trees, kind of like the Polynesian Resort at Disney World. In fact, the whole place had kind of a Disney feel to it. You know, really big, and kind of modern and fake. There were all these lights on, and at the end of all the paved stones I could see this giant glass door with somebody hovering behind it.

I turned to Sleepy and said, “Okay, I’m good. Thanks for the ride.”

Sleepy looked out at all the lights and palm trees and stuff. “You sure you got a way home?”

“I’m sure,” I said.

“Okay.” As I got out of the car, I heard him mutter, “Never delivered a pie
here
before.”

I hurried up the paved walkway, conscious, as Sleepy drove away, that I could hear the ocean somewhere, though in the darkness beyond the house, I couldn’t see it. When I got to the door, it swung open before I could look for a bell, and a Japanese man in black pants and a white housecoat-looking thing bowed to me and said, “This way, miss.”

I had never been in a house where a servant answered the door before — let alone been called miss — so I didn’t know how to act. I followed him into this huge room where the walls were made out of actual rocks from which actual water was dripping in these little rivulets, which I guess were supposed to be waterfalls.

“May I take your coat?” the Japanese man said, and so I shrugged out of it, though I kept my bag from which my writing tablet was peeking out. I wanted to look the part, you know.

Then the Japanese man bowed to me again and said, “This way, miss.”

He led me toward a set of sliding glass doors, which opened out onto a long, open-air courtyard in which there was a huge pool lit up turquoise in the dark. Steam rose from its surface. I guess it was heated. There was a fountain in the middle of it and a rock formation from which water gushed, and all around it were plants and trees and hibiscus bushes. A very nice place, I thought, for me to hang out in after school in my Calvin Klein one-piece and my sarong.