Ninth Key (9 page)

“Be that as it may,” Marcus said, “Mr. Beaumont does not have time for little girls who enjoy playing pranks.”

“Prank?”
I echoed, mightily offended. “Listen, mister, I really did…” What was I
saying
? “I really did, um, have that dream, and I resent —”

Marcus looked down at me tiredly. “Miss Simon,” he said, in a bored voice. “I really don’t want to have to call your parents. And if you promise me you won’t bother Mr. Beaumont ever again with any more of this psychic dream business, I won’t.”

I almost laughed out loud at that. My
parents
? I’d been worried he was set to call the
police.
My parents I could handle. The police were another matter entirely.

“Oh,” I said when the elevator stopped and Marcus opened the door to let me back out into the little corridor off the courtyard where the pool was. “All right.” I tried to put a lot of petulant disappointment in my voice. “I promise.”

“Thank you,” Marcus said.

He nodded, and then started walking me toward the front door.

He probably would have kicked me out without another thought if it hadn’t been for the fact that as we were heading past the pool I happened to notice that someone was swimming laps in it. I couldn’t tell who it was at first. It was really dark out, the night sky both moonless and starless because of a thick layer of clouds, and the only lights were the big round ones under the water. They made the person in it look all distorted — kind of like Mr. Beaumont’s face with the light from the aquarium all over it.

But then the swimmer reached the end of the pool and, his exercise regimen apparently complete, lifted himself out of it, and reached for a towel he’d thrown across a deck chair.

I froze.

And not just because I recognized him. I froze because really, it’s not every day you see a
Greek god
right here on earth.

I mean it. Tad Beaumont in a bathing suit was a beautiful sight to see. In the blue light from the pool, he looked like an Adonis, with water sparkling all over the dark hair that coated his chest and legs. And if his abs weren’t quite as impressive as Jesse’s, well, at least he had a really buff set of biceps to make up for it.

“Hi, Tad,” I said.

Tad looked up. He’d been drying himself with the towel. Now he paused and looked me over.

“Oh, hey,” he said, recognizing me. A big smile broke out across his face. “It’s you.”

CeeCee had been right. He didn’t even know my name.

“Yeah,” I said. “Suze Simon. From Kelly Prescott’s party.”

“Sure, I remember.” Tad sauntered over to us, the towel slung casually over his shoulders. “How you doin’?”

His smile was something to see, let me tell you. His dad had probably paid some orthodontist a pretty penny for it, but it was worth it, every cent.

“You know this young lady, Tad?” Marcus said, his disbelief evident in his tone.

“Oh, sure,” Tad said. He stood next to me, water still dripping from his dark hair like diamonds. “We go way back.”

“Well,” Marcus said. And then he evidently couldn’t think of anything to add to that, since he said it again.
“Well.”

And then, after an awkward silence, he said it a third time, but then added, “I guess I’ll leave you two alone then. Tad, you’ll show Miss Simon the way out?”

“Sure,” Tad said. Then, when Marcus had disappeared back through the sliding glass doors into the house, he whispered, “Sorry about that. Marcus is a great guy, but he’s kind of a worrier.”

Having met his boss, I didn’t exactly blame Marcus for worrying. But since I couldn’t say that to Tad, I just went, “I’m sure he’s very nice.”

And then I told him about the story I was doing for the school paper. I figured even if they discussed it later, his dad wasn’t going to go, “Oh, no,
that’s
not why she was here. She was here to tell me about this dream she had.”

And even if he did, he was so weird I doubt even his own son would believe him.

“Huh,” Tad said when I was through describing my article on the ten most influential people in Carmel. “That’s cool.”

“Yeah,” I babbled on. “I didn’t even know he was your dad.” God, I can lay it on when I try. “I mean, I never did get your last name. So this is a real surprise. Hey, listen, can I borrow a phone? I’ve got to see about engineering a ride home.”

Tad looked down at me in surprise. “You need a ride? No sweat. I’ll take you.”

I couldn’t help looking him up and down. I mean, he was practically naked, and all. Okay, well, not naked, since he was wearing a pair of swimming trunks that did reach practically to his knees. But he was naked enough for me not to be able to look away.

“Um,” I said. “Thanks.”

He followed my gaze, and looked down at his dripping shorts.

“Oh,” he said, the beautiful smile going gorgeously sheepish. “Let me just throw something on first. Wait here for me?”

And he took the towel from around his neck and started toward the back of his house —

— but froze when I gasped and said, “Oh my God! What’s wrong with your
neck
?”

Instantly, he hunched his shoulders, and spun around to face me again. “Nothing,” he said too fast.

“There most certainly is
not
nothing wrong with it,” I said, taking a step toward him. “You’ve got some kind of horrible —”

And then, my voice trailing off, I dropped my gaze down toward my hands.

“Look,” Tad said, uncomfortably. “It’s just poison oak. I know it’s gross. I’ve had it for a couple of days. It looks worse than it is. I don’t know how I got it, especially on the back of my neck, but —”

“I do.”

I held up both my hands. In the blue glow from the pool lights, the rash on them looked particularly grotesque — just like the rash on the back of his neck.

“I tripped and fell into some plants the night of Kelly’s party,” I explained. “And right after that, you asked me to dance….”

Tad looked down at my hands. Then he started to laugh.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. I really felt bad. I mean, I had disfigured the guy. This incredibly sexy, fabulous-looking guy. “Really, you don’t know —”

But Tad just kept laughing. And after a while, I started laughing with him.

“Shuttered,” Father Dominic repeated. “The windows were shuttered?”

“Well, not all of them,” I said. I was sitting in the chair across from his desk, picking at my poison oak. The hydrocortisone was drying it out. Now, instead of oozy, it was just plain scaly. “Just the ones in his office, or whatever it was. He said he’s sensitive to light.”

“And you say he kept staring at your neck?”

“At my necklace. It was his assistant who checked out my throat like he expected to see a giant hickey there, or something. But you’re missing the point, Father Dom.”

I had decided to come clean with the good father. Well, at least about the dead woman who’d been waking me up in the middle of the night lately. I still wasn’t ready to tell him about Jesse — especially considering what had happened when Tad had dropped me off the night before — but I figured if Thaddeus Beaumont Senior was actually the creepy killer I couldn’t help suspecting he might be, I was going to need Father D.’s help to bring him to justice.

“The point,” I said, “is that he was surprised for the wrong reason. He was surprised this woman had said he
hadn’t
killed her. Which implies — to me, anyway — that he really had. Killed her, I mean.”

Father Dom had been working a straightened-out coat hanger underneath his cast when I’d walked in. Apparently he had an itch. He’d stopped scratching, but he couldn’t let go of the piece of wire. He kept fingering it thoughtfully. But at least he hadn’t gotten the cigarettes out yet.

“Sensitive to light,” he kept murmuring. “Looking at your neck.”

“The point,” I said again, “is that it seems like he really did kill this lady. I mean, he practically admitted it. The problem is, how can we prove it? We don’t even know her name, let alone where she’s buried — if anybody bothered burying her at all. We don’t even have a body to point to. Even if we went to the cops, what would we say?”

Father D., however, was deeply absorbed in his own thoughts, turning the wire over and over in his hands. I figured if he was going to slip off into la-la land, well, then I would, too. I sat back in my chair, scratching my poison oak, and thought about what had happened after Tad and I were done laughing at each other’s disfiguring rashes — the only part of my evening I hadn’t described to Father Dom.

Tad had gone and changed clothes. I had waited out by the pool, the steam rising from it warming my pantyhose-clad legs. Nobody bothered me, and it had actually been kind of restful listening to the waterfall. After a while, Tad reappeared, his hair still wet, but fully dressed in jeans and, unfortunately, another black silk shirt. He was even wearing a gold necklace, though I doubt he won his by writing a scintillating essay on James Madison.

It was all I could do not to point out that the gold was probably irritating his rash, and that black silk with jeans on a man is hopelessly Staten Island.

I managed to restrain myself, however, and Tad took me back inside, where Yoshi reappeared like magic with my coat. Then we went out to Tad’s car, which I saw to my complete horror was some kind of sleek black thing that I swear to God David Hasselhoff drove on that show he did before
Baywatch.
It had these deep leather seats and the kind of stereo system that Sleepy would have killed for, and as I put my seat belt on, I prayed Tad was a good driver since I would die of embarrassment if anyone ever had to use the jaws of life to pry me from a car like that.

Tad, however, seemed to think the car was cool, and that in it, he was, too. And I’m sure that in Poland, or somewhere, it is considered cool to drive a Porsche and wear necklaces and black silk, but at least back in Brooklyn if you did those things you were either a drug dealer or from New Jersey.

But Tad apparently didn’t know that. He put the car in gear and an instant later, we were on the Drive, taking the hairpin curves along the coast as easily as if we were on a magic carpet. As he drove, Tad asked if I wanted to go somewhere, maybe get a cup of coffee. I guess now that we shared the common bond of poison oak, he wanted to hang.

I said sure, even though I hate coffee, and he let me use his cell phone to call my mother and tell her I’d be late. My mom was so thrilled to hear I was going somewhere with a boy, she didn’t even do the usual things mothers do when their daughters are out with a boy they don’t know, like demand his mother’s name and home phone number.

I hung up, and we went to the Coffee Clutch, a particularly favorite haunt of kids from the Mission Academy. CeeCee and Adam, it turned out, were there, but when they saw me come in with a boy, they tactfully pretended not to know me. At least, CeeCee did. Adam kept looking over and making rude faces whenever Tad’s back was turned. I don’t know if the faces were due to the fact that Tad’s rash was plainly evident even in the Coffee Clutch’s dim lighting, or if Adam was just expressing his personal feelings for Tad Beaumont in general.

In any case, after two cappuccinos — for him — and two hot ciders for me, we left, and Tad drove me home. He wasn’t, I’d discovered, an especially bright guy. He talked an awful lot about basketball. When he wasn’t talking about basketball, he was talking about sailing, and when he wasn’t talking about sailing, he was talking about jet-skiing.

And suffice to say, I know nothing about basketball, sailing, or jet-skiing.

But he seemed like a decent enough guy. And unlike his father, he was clearly not nuts, always a positive. And he was, of course, devastatingly good-looking, so all in all, I would have rated the evening around a seven or eight, on a one to ten scale, one being lousy, ten being sublime.

And then, as I was undoing my seat belt after having said good night, Tad suddenly leaned over, took my chin in his hand, turned my face toward him, and kissed me.

My first kiss. Ever.

I know it’s hard to believe. I’m so vibrant and bubbly and all, you would think boys had been flocking to me like bees to honey all my life.

Let’s just say that’s not exactly what happened. I like to blame the fact that I am a biological freak — being able to communicate with the dead, and all — for the fact that I have never once been on a date, but I know that’s not really it. I’m just not the kind of girl guys think about asking out. Well, maybe they think about it, but they always seem to manage to talk themselves out of it. I don’t know if it’s because they think I might ram a fist down their throats if they try anything, or if it’s just because they are intimidated by my superior intelligence and good looks (ha ha). In the end, they just aren’t interested.

Until Tad, that is. Tad was interested. Tad was
very
interested.

Tad was expressing his interest by deepening our kiss from just a little good-night one to a full fledged French — which I was enjoying immensely, by the way, in spite of the necklace and the silk shirt — when I happened to notice — yeah, okay. I’ll admit it. My eyes were open. Hey, it was my first kiss, I wasn’t going to miss anything, okay? — that there was somebody sitting in the Porsche’s tiny little backseat.

I pulled my head away and let out a little scream.

Tad blinked at me in confusion.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Oh, please,” said the person in the backseat, pleasantly. “Don’t stop on my account.”

I looked at Tad. “I gotta go,” I said. “Sorry.”

And I practically flew out of that car.

I was barreling up the driveway to my house, my cheeks on fire with embarrassment, when Jesse caught up to me. He wasn’t even walking fast. He was just strolling along.

And he actually had the nerve to say, “It’s your own fault.”

“How is it
my
fault?” I demanded, as Tad, after hesitating a moment, started backing out of our driveway.

“You shouldn’t,” Jesse said, calmly, “have let him get so forward.”