Reunion (8 page)

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.

“I was coming home,” he said, “from a workshop at Esalen—”

“Esalen?”

“Yeah. The Esalen Institute. You've never heard of it?” He shook his head. “My God, I thought it was known worldwide.” My expression must have been pretty blank, since he said, “Well, anyway, I was at a lecture there. ‘Colonization of Other Worlds, and What It Means for Extraterrestrials Here on Earth.' ”

I tried not to burst out laughing. I was, after all, a girl who could see and speak to ghosts. Who was I to say there wasn't life on other planets?

“Anyway, I was driving home—it was pretty late, I guess—and they came barreling around that corner, didn't honk, nothing.”

I nodded. “So what did you do?”

“Well, I swerved to avoid them, of course, and ended up going into that cliff there. You can't see it because it's dark out now, but my front bumper took out a big chunk of the side of the hill. And they…well, they swerved the other way, and it was foggy, and the road might have been a little slick, and they were going really fast, and…”

He finished, tonelessly, with another shrug. “And they went over.”

I shuddered again. I couldn't help it. I had met these kids, remember. They hadn't exactly been at their best—in fact, they'd been trying to kill me—but still, I couldn't help feeling sorry for them. It
was a long, long way down.

“So what did you do?” I asked.

“Me?” He seemed strangely surprised by the question. “Well, I hit my head, you know, so I blacked out. I didn't come around until someone pulled over and checked on me. That's when I asked what happened to the other car. And they said ‘What other car?' And I thought they'd, you know, driven away, and I have to admit, I was pretty hacked. I mean, that they hadn't bothered to call an ambulance for me, or anything. But then we saw the guardrail….”

I was getting really cold now. The sun was completely gone, although the western sky was still streaked violet and red. I shivered and said, “Let's get in the car.”

And so we did.

We sat there staring at the horizon as it turned a deeper and deeper shade of blue. The headlights from the cars that went by occasionally lit up the interior of the minivan. Inside the car it was much quieter, without the wind and the sound of the waves below us. Another wave of extreme tiredness passed over me. I could see by the glow of the clock in the dashboard that soon it would be dinnertime. My stepfather Andy had a very strict rule about dinner. You showed up. Period.

“Look,” I said, breaking the stillness. “It sounds horrible, what happened. But it wasn't your fault.”

He looked at me. In the green glow from the instruments in the dash, I could see that his smile was rueful. “Wasn't it?” he asked.

“No,” I said sternly. “It was an accident, plain and simple. The problem is…well, not everyone sees it that way.”

The smile disappeared. “Who doesn't see it that way?” he demanded. “The cops? I gave them my statement. They seemed satisfied. They took a blood sample. I tested completely negative for alcohol, for all drugs. They can't possibly—”

“Not,” I said quickly, “the cops.” How, I wondered, was I going to put this? I mean, the guy was obviously one of those UFO geeks, so you'd think he wouldn't have a problem with ghosts, but you never knew.

“The thing is,” I began, carefully, “I've kind of noticed that since the accident this weekend, you've been a bit…danger prone.”

“Yeah,” Michael said. All of a sudden, his hand was on mine again. “If it wasn't for you, I might even be dead. That's twice now you've saved my life.”

“Ha ha,” I said nervously, pulling my hand
away, and pretending I had another hair in my mouth so I needed to use that particular hand, you know, to brush it away. “Um, but seriously, haven't you kind of, I mean, wondered what was going on? Like why all of a sudden so many…
things
were happening to you?”

He smiled at me again. His teeth, in the glow of the speedometer, looked green. “It must be fate,” he said.

“Okay,” I said.
Why me?
“Not those kinds of things. I mean
bad
kinds of things. Like at the mall. And at the beach just now…”

“Oh,” he said. Then he shrugged those incredibly strong shoulders. “No.”

“Okay,” I said yet again. “But if you were to think about it, don't you think one sort of logical explanation might be…angry spirits?”

His smile faded a little. “What do you mean?”

I heaved a sigh. “Look, that wasn't a jellyfish back there, and you know it. You were being pulled under, Michael. By something.”

He nodded. “I know. I haven't quite…I'm used to undertows, of course, but that was—”

“It wasn't an undertow. And it wasn't jellyfish. And I just…well, I think you should be careful.”

“What are you saying?” Michael asked. He peered at me curiously. “It almost sounds like
you're suggesting that I've been the victim of some kind of…demonic force.” He laughed. In the quiet of the car, his laugh was loud. “Brought on by the deaths of those kids who almost ran me off of the road? Is that it?”

I looked out my window. I couldn't see anything except the huge purple shadows of the steep cliffs around us, but I kept looking anyway. “Yes,” I said. “That's exactly it.”

“Suze.” Michael reached for my hand again, and this time, he squeezed it. “Are you trying to tell me that you believe in ghosts?”

I looked at him. I looked him straight in the eye. And I said, “Yes, Michael. Yes, I am.”

He laughed again. “Oh, come on,” he said. “Do you honestly think that
Josh Saunders
and his friends are capable of communicating from beyond the grave?”

Something in the way he said Josh's name caused me to…I don't know. But I didn't like it. I didn't like it at all.

“I mean—” Michael let go of my hand, then leaned forward and switched on the ignition. “Face facts. The guy was a dumb jock. The most impressive thing he ever did was plunge off of a cliff with another dumb jock, and their equally low-wattage girlfriends. It's not necessarily such
a bad thing they're gone, you know? They were just taking up space.”

My jaw sagged. I felt it. And yet there didn't seem to be anything I could do about it.

“And as for any of them being able to summon up any sort of powers of darkness,” Michael said, putting vocal quotes around the words
powers of darkness,
“to avenge their pitifully stupid deaths, well, thanks for the warning, but I think that whole
I Know What You Did Last Summer
thing has pretty much been played out, don't you?”

I stared at him. Really stared at him. I couldn't believe it. So much for Mr. Sensitive. I guess he only stammered and blushed when his own life was being threatened. He didn't seem to care very much about anybody else's.

Unless maybe he was going out with them on Friday night, as was illustrated by his comment as we were about to pull out onto the highway again:

“Hey,” he said with a wink. “Buckle up.”

I flung myself into my seat just as everybody else was picking up their forks.

Ha! Not late! Not technically, since no one had actually started eating yet.

“And where have you been, Suze?” my mother asked, lifting a basket of rolls and passing it directly to Gina. Good thing, too. Otherwise, given the way my brothers ate, that thing would be empty before it ever reached her.

“I went,” I said as Max, my stepbrothers' extremely large, extremely slobbery dog, dropped his head down upon my lap, his traditional station at mealtimes, and rolled his soft brown eyes up at me, “on a drive.”

“With whom?” my mother asked in that same mild tone, the one that indicated that if I didn't answer carefully, I could potentially be in serious trouble.

Before I could say anything, Dopey went, “Michael Meducci,” and made some gagging noises.

Andy raised his eyebrows. “That boy who was here last night?”

“That'd be the one,” I said, shooting Dopey a dirty look that he ignored. Gina and Sleepy, I noticed, had taken care to sit beside each other and were strangely quiet. I wondered, if I dropped my napkin and leaned down to pick it up, what I'd see going on underneath the table. Probably, I thought to myself, something I did not particularly care to see. I kept my napkin tightly in my lap.

“Meducci,” my mother murmured. “Why is that name familiar to me?”

“Doubtlessly,” Doc said, “you are thinking of the Medicis, an Italian noble family that produced three popes and two queens of France. Cosimo the Elder was the first to rule Florence, while Lorenzo the Magnificent was a patron of the arts, with clients that included Michelangelo and Botticelli.”

My mother looked at him curiously. “Actually,” she said, “that's not what I was thinking.”

I knew what was coming. My mom has a memory like a steel trap. She needs it, of course, in her line of work. But I knew it was only a matter of time before she figured out where she'd heard Michael's name before.

“He was the one who was in that accident this weekend,” I said, to hasten the inevitable. “The one where those four RLS students were killed.”

Dopey dropped his fork. It made quite a clatter as it landed on his plate.

“Michael
Meducci
?” He shook his head. “No way. That was
Michael Meducci
? You are shitting me.”

Andy said, sharply, “Brad. Language, please.”

Dopey said, “Sorry,” but his eyes, I noticed, were very bright. “Michael Meducci,” he said again. “Michael Meducci killed Mark Pulsford?”

“He didn't kill anybody,” I snapped. I could see I should have kept my mouth shut. Now it was going to be all over school. “It was an accident.”

“Really, Brad,” Andy said. “I'm sure the poor boy didn't mean to kill anyone.”

“Well, I'm sorry,” Dopey said. “But Mark Pulsford was like one of the best quarterbacks in the state. Seriously. He had a scholarship to
UCLA, the whole thing. That guy was really cool.”

“Oh, yeah? Then what was he doing hanging around you?” Sleepy, in a rare moment of wit, grinned at his brother.

“Shut up,” Dopey said. “We happen to have partied together.”

“Right,” Sleepy said with a sneer.

“We did,” Dopey insisted. “Last month, in the Valley. Mark was the bomb.” He grabbed a roll, stuffed most of it into his mouth, then said around the doughy mass, “Until Michael Meducci came along and murdered him, that is.”

I noticed that Gina was observing me with one eyebrow—one only—raised. I ignored her.

“The accident wasn't Michael's fault,” I said. “At least, he hasn't been charged with anything.”

My mother laid down her own fork. “The investigation into the accident,” she said, “is still ongoing.”

“As many accidents as they've had,” my stepfather said as he rolled a few spears of asparagus onto my mother's plate, then passed the platter of them to Gina, “on that section of highway, you would think somebody would do something to improve the road conditions.”

“The narrow stretch of highway,” Doc said conversationally, “along the one-hundred-mile stretch
of seacoast known as Big Sur has traditionally been considered treacherous—even highly dangerous. Frequently enshrouded with coastal fog, this winding and narrow mountainous road is, thanks to historical preservationists, unlikely to be expanded. The very isolation of the area is what has held such appeal for the many poets and artists who have made their homes there, including Robinson Jeffers, who found the splendor of the bleak wilderness highly appealing.”

I blinked at my youngest stepbrother. His photographic memory could, at times, be annoying, but for the most part it was highly useful, particularly when term paper time came rolling around.

“Thanks,” I said, “for that.”

Doc smiled, revealing a mouthful of food-encrusted braces. “Don't mention it.”

“The worst part of it,” Andy said, continuing his rant on the safety conditions on Highway 1, “is that young drivers seem irresistibly drawn to that particular stretch of road.”

Dopey, shoveling wild rice into his mouth as if it were the first food he'd seen in weeks, snickered and said, “Well, duh, Dad.”

Andy looked at his middle-born son. “You know, Brad,” he said mildly. “In America—and,
I'm told, much of Europe—it is considered socially acceptable to occasionally lay down our fork between bites, and spend some time actually chewing.”

“That's where the action is,” Dopey said, laying down his fork as his father had suggested, but compensating by speaking with his mouth full.

“What action?” my stepfather asked curiously.

Sleepy, who generally didn't speak unless absolutely forced to, had grown almost garrulous since Gina's arrival. “He means the Point,” Sleepy said.

My mother looked confused. “The point?”

“The Point,” Sleepy corrected her. “The observation point. It's where everybody goes to make out on Saturday night. At least”—Sleepy chuckled to himself—“Brad and his friends.”

Dopey, far from taking offense at this slanderous remark, waved an asparagus spear as if it were a cigar while he explained, “The Point is the bomb.”

“Is that,” Doc asked interestedly, “where you take Debbie Mancuso?” and then he winced in pain as one of his shins was brutally assaulted beneath the table. “Ow!”

“Debbie Mancuso and I are not going out!” Dopey bellowed.

“Brad,” Andy said. “Do not kick your brother. David, do not invoke Miss Mancuso's name at the dinner table. We've talked about this. And Suze?”

I looked up with raised eyebrows.

“I don't like the idea of you getting into a car with a boy who was involved in a fatal accident, whether it was his fault or not.” Andy looked at my mother. “Do you agree?”

“I'm afraid I'm going to have to,” my mother said. “I feel bad about it. The Meduccis have certainly been through some trying times lately—” When my stepfather looked at her questioningly, my mother said, “Their little girl was the one who almost drowned a few weeks ago. You remember.”

“Oh.” Andy nodded. “At that pool party. There was no parental supervision—”

“And plenty of alcohol,” my mother said. “Poor thing apparently drank too much and fell in. Nobody noticed—or if they did, nobody did anything about it. Not until it was too late. She's been in a coma ever since. If she lives, it will be with severe brain damage. Suze.” My mother laid down her fork. “I don't think it's a good idea for you to be seeing this boy.”

Ordinarily, this would have cheered me up considerably. I mean, I wasn't exactly looking forward to going out with the guy.

But I sort of had to. I mean, if I was to have any hope at all of keeping him from slipping into a nerd coffin.

“Why?” I carefully swallowed a mouthful of salmon. “It's not Michael's fault his sister's an alcoholic who can't swim. And what were her parents thinking, anyway, letting an eighth grader go to a party like that?”

“That,” my mother said, her mouth tightening, “is not the issue here, and you know it. You're just going to have to call that young man and tell him that your mother absolutely forbids you to get into a vehicle with him. If he wants to come here and spend the evening with you watching videos or whatever, that's fine. But you are not getting into a car with him.”

My eyes widened.
Here?
Spend the evening
here
? Under Jesse's watchful eye? Oh, God, just what I needed. The image these words conveyed filled me with such horror, the forkful of salmon I'd had poised before my lips fell into my lap, where it was instantly vacuumed up by a long canine tongue.

My mother touched my hand. “Suze,” she said softly. “I really mean it. I don't want you getting into a car with that boy.”

I looked at my mother curiously. It's true that in
times past I have been forced to disobey her, largely due to circumstances beyond my control. But she didn't know that. That I had disobeyed her, I mean. For the most part, I'd managed to keep my transgressions to myself—except for the occasions I'd been brought home by the police, incidents so few they are hardly worth mentioning.

But since that had not been the case in this situation, I didn't quite understand why she felt it necessary to repeat her edict concerning Michael Meducci.

“Okay, Mom,” I said. “I got it the first time.”

“It's just something I feel very strongly about,” she said.

I looked at her. It wasn't that she appeared…well, guilty. But she definitely knew something. Something she wasn't letting on.

This was not particularly surprising. A television journalist, my mother was often privy to information not necessarily meant for release to the public. She wasn't one of those reporters you hear about, either, who'd do anything to get the “big” story. If a cop told my mother something—and they often do; my mother, even though she's forty-something, is still pretty hot, and just about anybody would tell her anything she wanted to know if she licked her lips enough—he could
depend on her not mentioning it on air if he asked her not to. That's just how she is.

I wondered what, exactly, she knew about Michael Meducci and the accident that had killed the four Angels.

Enough, apparently, to keep her from wanting me to hang around with him.

I didn't exactly think she was being particularly unfair to him, either. I couldn't help remembering what Michael had said in the car, right before pulling back out onto the highway:
They were just taking up space.

Suddenly, I didn't blame those kids so much for trying to drown him.

“Okay, Mom,” I said. “I get it.”

Apparently satisfied, my mother turned back to her salmon, which Andy had grilled to perfection and served with a delicate dill sauce.

“So how are you going to break it to him?” Gina asked a half hour later as she helped me load the dishwasher after dinner—having brushed aside my mother's insistence that, as a guest, she did not have to do this.

“I don't know,” I said hesitantly. “You know, the whole Clark Kent thing aside—”

“Geeky on the outside, dreamy in the middle?”

“Yeah. In spite of that—which is hard to resist,
believe me—he's still kind of got this quality that strikes me as…”

“Stalkery?” Gina said, rinsing the salad bowl before handing it to me to put in the dishwasher rack.

“Maybe that's it. I don't know.”

“It was very stalkery how he showed up here last night,” she said. “Without even calling first. Any guy ever tried to do that to me”—she waved her fingers in the air and then snapped them—“and he is so gone.”

I shrugged. It was different back east, of course. In the city, you simply do not stop by someone's place without calling first. In California, I'd noticed, “drive-bys” were more socially acceptable.

“But don't even act,” Gina went on, “like you care, Simon. You don't like that guy. I don't know what, exactly, you've got going on with him, but if definitely isn't anything gonadal.”

I thought, fleetingly, of how pleasantly surprised we'd all been when Michael had taken his shirt off. “It might have been,” I said with a sigh.

“Please.” Gina handed me a fistful of silverware. “You and Supergeek? No. Now, tell me. What is going on with you and this guy?”

I looked down at the silverware I'd been shoving
into the dishwasher. “I don't know,” I said. I couldn't tell her the truth, of course. “There's just…I've got this feeling that there's more to this accident thing than he's letting on. My mom seems to know something about it. Did you notice?”

“I noticed,” Gina said, not really grimly, but not happily, either.

“Well, so…I just can't help wondering what really happened. The night of the wreck. Because…well, that wasn't a jellyfish this afternoon, you know.”

Gina just nodded. “I didn't think so. I suppose this all has something to do with that mediator thing, huh?”

“Sort of,” I said uncomfortably.

“Right. Which might also explain that little mishap with the fingernail polish the other night?”

I couldn't say anything. I just kept thrusting the silverware into the plastic compartments in the dishwasher door. Forks, spoons, knives.

“All right.” Gina turned off the water in the sink and dried her hands on a dishtowel. “What do you want me to do?”

I blinked at her. “Do? You? Nothing.”

“Come on. I know you, Simon. You didn't miss homeroom seventy-nine times last year because
you were enjoying a leisurely breakfast over at the Mickey D's. I know perfectly well you were out there fighting the undead, making this world a safer place for children, and all that. So what do you want me to do? Cover for you?”