Reunion (10 page)

I didn’t say anything. I was quite certain that Rick really did believe that Michael had been the victim of a Portuguese man-of-war. The human mind will do whatever it must to trick itself into believing anything but the truth — that there might be something else out there, something unexplainable…something not quite normal.

Something
para
normal.

So the rope of seaweed that had been wrapped around Michael’s throat became the arm of a giant squid, and then, later, the stinging tentacle of a jellyfish. It certainly couldn’t have been what it had appeared to be: a piece of seaweed being used with deadly intent by a pair of invisible hands.

“And look at your ankles,” CeeCee said.

I looked down. Around both my ankles were bright red marks, like rope burns. Only they weren’t rope burns. They were the places Felicia and Carrie had grabbed me, trying to drag me down to the ocean floor, and to certain death.

Those stupid girls needed manicures, and badly.

“You’re lucky,” Adam said. “I’ve been stung by a man-of-war before, and it hurts like a —”

His voice trailed off as he noticed Gina listening intently. Gina, who had four brothers, had certainly heard every swear word in the book, but Adam was much too gentlemanly to utter any in front of her.

“A lot,” he finished up. “But you guys don’t seem to have been hurt too badly. Well, except for that whole drowning thing.”

I reached for my towel, and did my best to wipe off the sand that seemed to be coating me all over. What had that lifeguard done, anyway? Dragged me through the stuff?

“Well,” I said. “I’m okay now. No harm done.”

Sleepy, who’d followed me over along with everybody else, went, exasperatedly, “It is not okay, Suze. Do what the lifeguard tells you. Don’t make me have to call Mom and Dad.”

I looked at him in surprise. Not because I was mad about his threatening to rat me out, but because he’d called my mother
Mom.
He’d never done it before. My stepbrothers’ own mother had died years ago.

Well
, I thought to myself.
She
is
the best mother in the world
.

“Go ahead and call them,” I said. “I don’t care.”

I saw Sleepy and the lifeguard exchange meaningful looks. I hurried to find my clothes, and started to wiggle into them, pulling them on right over my damp bikini. I wasn’t trying to be difficult. Really, I wasn’t. It’s just that I totally could not afford a trip to the hospital just then, and the three-hour wait it would entail. In those three hours, I was fairly certain the RLS Angels were going launch another attack against Michael…and I could not in good conscience leave him to their devices.

“I am not,” Sleepy said, folding his arms across his chest, a motion that caused the rubber of the wetsuit he was still wearing to squeak audibly, “taking you home unless you let the EMS guys check you out first.”

I turned toward Michael, who looked extremely surprised when I asked him, politely, “Michael, would
you
mind taking me home?”

Now he seemed to have no problem meeting my gaze. His eyes very wide behind his glasses — he’d evidently found them where I’d abandoned them on my towel — he stammered, “Of c-course!”

This caused the lifeguard to shake his head in disgust and stomp away. Everyone else just stood around looking at me as if I were demented. Gina was the only one who came up to me as I was gathering up my books and preparing to follow Michael to where his car was parked.

“You and I,” she whispered, “are going to be doing some talking when you get home.”

I regarded her with what I hoped was an innocent look. The last slanting rays of the sun had set her aura of copper-colored curls glowing like a flaming halo.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You
know
what I mean,” she said meaningfully.

And then she turned around and sauntered back over to where Sleepy stood, regarding me worriedly.

The truth was, I
did
know what she meant. She meant Michael. What was I doing, messing around with a boy like Michael, who was so obviously not my one true love?

But the thing was, I couldn’t tell her. I couldn’t tell her that Michael was being stalked by four ghosts with murderous intent, and that it was my sacred duty as a mediator to protect him.

Although considering what happened later on that night, I probably should have.

“So,” I said, as soon as Michael got the car — his mother’s minivan again; his car, he explained, was still in the shop — going. “We need to talk.”

Michael, now that he was back in his glasses and clothes, wasn’t nearly the intimidatingly buff male specimen he’d been without them. Like Superman when he was in his Clark Kent attire, Michael had turned back into a stammering geek.

Only I couldn’t help noticing, as he stammered, how nicely he filled out that sweater vest.

“Talk?” He gripped the wheel quite tightly as we sat in what, for Carmel, represented rush-hour traffic: a single tour bus and a Volkswagen filled with surfboards. “W-what about?”

“About what happened to you this weekend.”

Michael turned his head sharply to look at me, then just as quickly turned back to face the road. “W-what do you m-mean?” he asked.

“Come off it, Michael,” I said. I figured there was no point in being gentle with him. It was like a Band-Aid that needed to come off: either you did it with agonizing slowness, or you got it over with, hard and quick. “I know about the accident.”

The tour bus finally started moving. Michael put his foot on the gas.

“Well,” he said after a minute, a wry smile on his face, though he kept his eyes on the road, “you must not blame me too much, or you wouldn’t have asked for a ride.”

“Blame you for what?” I asked him.

“Four people died in that accident.” Michael picked up a half-empty can of Coke from the cup holder between our seats. “And I’m still alive.” He took a quick swallow and put the can back. “You be the judge.”

I didn’t like his tone. It wasn’t that it was self-pitying. It was that it wasn’t. He sounded hostile. And he wasn’t stammering anymore, I noticed.

“Well,” I said carefully. Like I mentioned, Father Dominic is the one who’s good at reasoning. I’m more like the muscle of our little mediator family. I knew I was venturing out into deep and troubled waters — if you’ll excuse the pun.

“I read in the paper today that your breath test came back negative for alcohol,” I said cautiously.

“So?” Michael exploded, startling me a little. “What does that prove?”

I blinked at him. “Well, that you, at least, weren’t drinking and driving.”

He seemed to relax a little. He said, “Oh.” Then he asked, tentatively, “Do you want…”

I looked at him. We were driving along the coastline, and the sun, sinking into the water, had cast everything into either brilliant orange or deep shadow. The light reflecting off the lenses of Michael’s glasses made it impossible to read his expression.

“Do you want to see where it happened?” he asked all in a rush, as if he wanted to get the words out before he changed his mind.

“Um, sure,” I said. “If you feel like you want to show me.”

“I do.” He turned his head to look at me, but once again, I couldn’t read his eyes behind his glasses. “If you don’t mind. It’s weird, but…I really feel like you might understand.”

Ha! I thought smugly to myself. Take that, Father Dom! All your nagging about how I always hit first and talk later. Well, look at me now!

“Why did you do it?” Michael asked abruptly, interrupting my self-congratulations.

I threw a startled glance in his direction. “Do what?” I genuinely hadn’t the slightest idea what he was talking about.

“Go in,” he said in that same quiet voice, “after me.”

“Oh.” I cleared my throat. “That. Well, you see, Michael…”

“Never mind.”

When I glanced over at him, I saw he was smiling.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “You don’t have to tell me. I know.” His voice dropped about an octave. I looked over at him in alarm. “I know.”

And then he reached across the Coke can, nestled in the cup holder between our seats, and dropped his right hand over my left.

Oh my God! I felt my stomach lurch all over again, just like it had back down at the beach.

Because suddenly it was all very clear to me. Michael Meducci didn’t just have a crush on me. Oh, no. It was much, much worse than that:

Michael Meducci thinks
I
have a crush on
him.

Michael Meducci thinks I
more
than just have a crush on him. Michael Meducci thinks I’m in love with him.

I had just one thing to say, and since I couldn’t say it out loud, I said it in my head:

EEEEW!

I mean, he might have looked good in a bathing suit and all, but Michael Meducci still wasn’t exactly…

Well, Jesse.

And that
, I thought with a sigh,
is pretty much how my love life is going to go from now on, isn’t it?

Carefully, I tried to pull my hand out from under Michael’s.

“Oh,” he said, lifting his hand off mine so he could grip the wheel. “It’s coming up. Where the accident happened, I mean.”

Hideously relieved, I glanced to my right. We were moving along Highway 1 at quite a little clip. The sands of Carmel Beach had turned into the majestic cliffs of Big Sur. A few more miles down the coast, and we’d hit redwood groves and Point Sur Lighthouse. Big Sur was a haven for hikers and campers, and just about anybody who liked magnificent views and breathtaking natural beauty. Me, I’ll take the views, but nature leaves me cold…especially after a little poison oak incident that had occurred a week or two after I’d arrived in California.

And don’t even get me started on ticks.

Big Sur — or at least the pretty much one-lane road that winds along it — also hosts quite a few hairpin curves. Michael eased around a completely blind one just as a Winnebago, coming from the other direction, came thundering around the other side of this massive cliff. There wasn’t exactly room for both vehicles, and considering that all that was separating us from the sheer drop-off to the sea was a metal guardrail, it was a bit disconcerting. Michael, however, backed up — we hadn’t been going that fast — and then pulled over, allowing the Winnebago to ease by with only a foot or so of room to spare.

“Jeez,” I said, glancing back at the huge RV. “That’s kind of dangerous, huh?”

Michael shrugged. “You’re supposed to honk,” he said, “as you round that corner. To let anyone behind that rock thing know you’re there. That guy didn’t know, obviously, because he’s a tourist.” Michael cleared his throat. “That’s what happened, um, on Saturday night.”

I sat up straighter in my seat.

“This —” I swallowed. “— is where it happened?”

“Yeah,” Michael said. There was no change in the inflection of his voice at all. “This is it.”

And indeed it was. Now that I knew to look for them, I could plainly see the black skid marks the wheels of Josh’s car had left as he’d tried to keep from going over. A large section of the guardrail had already been replaced, the metal shiny and new just where the skid marks ended.

I asked, in a quiet voice, “Can we stop?”

“Sure,” Michael said.

There was a scenic overlook around the corner, not a hundred yards away from where the cars had narrowly missed each other. Michael pulled into it and turned off the engine.

“Observation point,” he said, pointing to the wooden sign in front of us that said,
OBSERVATION POINT. NO LITTERING
. “A lot of kids come here on Saturday night.” Michael cleared his throat and looked at me meaningfully. “And park.”

I have to say, up until that moment I really had no idea I was capable of moving as fast as I did getting out of that car. But I was unbuckled and out of that seat quicker than you could say
ectoplasm.

The sun had almost completely set now, and it was already growing chilly. I hugged myself as I stood on tiptoe to look over the edge of the cliff, my hair whipping my face in the wind off the sea, which was much wilder and cooler up here than it had been back down on the beach. The rhythmic pulse of the sea below us was loud, much louder than the engines of the cars going by on Highway 1.

There were, I noticed, no gulls. No birds of any kind.

That should, of course, have been my first clue. But as usual, I missed it.

Instead, all I could concentrate on was how sheer the drop was. Hundreds of feet, straight down, into waves churning against giant boulders knocked down from the cliffsides during various earthquakes. Not exactly the kind of cliff you’d catch anyone — not even Elvis back in his Acapulco prime — diving off.

Strangely, at the bottom of the place where Josh’s car had gone off of the road was a small, sandy beach. Not the kind you’d go to sunbathe, but a nice picnic area, if you were willing to risk your neck climbing down to get there.

Michael must have noticed my gaze, since he said, “Yeah, that’s where they landed. Not in the water. Well, at least, not right away. Then high tide came in, and —”

I shuddered and looked away.

“Is there some way,” I wondered aloud, “to get down there?”

“Sure,” he said, and pointed at an open section of the guardrail. “Over there. It’s a trail. Hikers are the only ones who use it, mostly. But sometimes tourists try it. The beach down there is amazing. You never saw such huge waves. Only it’s too dangerous to surf. Too many riptides.”

I looked at him curiously in the purpling twilight. “You’ve been down there?” I asked. The surprise in my voice must have been evident.

“Sure,” he said with a smile. “I’ve lived here all my life. There aren’t a whole lot of beaches I haven’t been to.”

I nodded, and pulled at a strand of hair that had found its way into my mouth thanks to the wind. “So, what,” I asked him, “happened, exactly, that night?”

He squinted at the road. It was dark enough now that the cars traveling on it had switched on their lights. Occasionally, the glow of one swept his face as he spoke. Again, it was difficult to see his eyes behind the reflection of the light against the lenses of his glasses.