"Finks," I said, meaning the lady's kids. I leaned forward so I could get a better look at her picture.

And had quite a little shock: I was looking at a picture of the ghost who'd been paying me those charming social calls.

Okay, well, maybe she didn't look exactly the same. But she was white and skinny and had the same haircut. There was certainly enough of a resemblance to make me go, "That's her!" and point.

Which was, of course, the worst thing I could have done. Because both Cee Cee and Adam turned to look at me.

"That's her who?" Adam wanted to know.

And Cee Cee said, "Suze, you can't possibly know her. She disappeared over seven years ago, and you just moved here last month."

I am such a loser.

I couldn't even think of a good excuse, either. I just repeated the one I'd stammered to Tad's father: "Oh, um, I had this dream and she was in it."

What was wrong with me?

I had not, of course, explained to Cee Cee the reason why I'd wanted her to look up stuff on Red Beaumont, anymore than I had told Adam how it was that I knew so much about little Timothy Mahern's cat. I had merely mentioned that Mr. Beaumont had said something odd during my brief meeting with him the night before. And that Father Dom had sent me to look for the cat, presumably because Timothy's dad had admitted abandoning it during his weekly confession - only Father Dom, being sworn to secrecy, couldn't actually tell me that. I was only, I assured Adam, surmising....

"A dream?" Adam echoed. "About some lady who's been dead for seven years? That's weird."

"It probably wasn't her," I said quickly, backpedaling for all I was worth. "In fact, I'm sure it wasn't her. The woman I saw was much . . . taller." Like I could even tell how tall this woman was by looking at her picture somebody had posted on the Internet.

Adam said, "You know, Cee Cee has an aunt who dreams about dead people all the time. They visit her, she says."

I threw Cee Cee a startled glance. Could we, I wondered, be talking about another mediator? What, was there some kind of glut of us in the greater peninsula area? I knew Carmel was a popular retirement spot, but this was getting ridiculous.

"She doesn't have dreams about them," Cee Cee said, and I didn't think I was imagining the level of disgust in her voice. "Aunt Pru summons the spirits of the dead and she'll tell you what they said. For a small fee."

"Aunt Pru?" I grinned. "Wow, Cee Cee. I didn't know you had a psychic in the family."

"She isn't a psychic." Cee Cee's disgust deepened. "She's a complete flake. I'm embarrassed to be related to her. Talk to the dead. Right!"

"Don't hold back, Cee Cee," I said. "Let us know how you really feel."

"Well," Cee Cee said. "I'm sorry. But - "

"Hey," Adam interrupted brightly. "Maybe Aunt Pru could help tell us why" - he bent down for a closer look at the dead woman's photo on Cee Cee's computer screen - "Mrs. Dierdre Fiske here is popping up in Suze's dreams."

Horrified, I leaned forward and slammed Cee Cee's laptop closed. "No thanks," I said.

Cee Cee, opening her computer back up again, said irritably, "Nobody fondles the electronics but me, Simon."

"Aw, come on," Adam said. "It'll be fun. Suze's never met Pru. She'll get a big kick out of her. She's a riot."

Cee Cee muttered, "Yeah, you know how funny the mentally ill can be."

I said, hoping to get the subject back on track, "Um, maybe some other time. Anything else, Cee Cee, that you were able to dig up on Mr. Beaumont?"

"You mean other than the fact that he might possibly be killing anyone who stands in the way of his amassing a fortune by raping our forests and beaches?" Cee Cee, who was wearing a khaki rainhat to protect her sensitive skin from the sun, as well as her violet-lensed sunglasses, looked up at me. "You're not satisfied yet, Simon? Haven't we thoroughly vetted your paramour's closest relations?"

"Yeah," Adam said. "It must be reassuring to know that last night you hooked up with a guy who comes from such a nice, stable family, Suze."

"Hey," I said with an indignation I was far from actually feeling. "There's no proof Tad's dad is the one who's responsible for those environmentalists' disappearances. And besides, we just had coffee, okay? We did not hook up."

Cee Cee blinked at me. "You went out with him, Suze. That's all Adam meant by hooking up."

"Oh." Where I come from, hooking up means something else entirely. "Sorry. I - "

At that moment, Adam let out a shout. "Spike!"

I whirled around, following his pointing finger. There, peering out from the dry underbrush, sat the biggest, meanest-looking cat I'd ever seen. He was the same color yellow as the grass, which was probably how we'd missed him. He had orange stripes, one chewed-off ear, and an extremely nasty look on his face.

"Spike?" I asked, softly.

The cat turned his head in my direction and glared at me malevolently.

"Oh, my God," I said. "No wonder Tim's dad didn't take him to the animal shelter."

It took some doing - and the ultimate sacrifice of my Kate Spade book bag, which I'd managed to purchase only at great physical risk at a sample sale back in SoHo - but we finally managed to capture Spike. Once he was zipped up inside my bag, he seemed to resign himself to captivity, although throughout the ride to Safeway, where we went to stock up on litter and food for him, I could hear him working industriously on the bag's lining with his claws. Timothy, I decided, owed me big time.

Especially when Adam, instead of turning up the street to my house, turned in the opposite direction, heading farther up the Carmel hills until the big red dome covering the basilica of the Mission below us was the size of my thumbnail.

"No," Cee Cee immediately said as firmly as I've ever heard her say anything. "Absolutely not. Turn the car around. Turn the car around now."

Only Adam, chuckling diabolically, just sped up.

Holding my Kate Spade bag on my lap, I said, "Uh, Adam. I don't know where, exactly, you think you're going, but I'd really like to at least get rid of this, um, animal first - "

"Just for a minute," Adam said. "The cat'll be all right. Come on, Cee. Stop being such a spoilsport."

Cee Cee was madder than I'd ever seen her. "I said no!" she shouted.

But it was too late. Adam pulled up in front of a little stucco bungalow that had wind chimes hanging all over the place tinkling in the breeze from the bay, and giant hibiscus blossoms turned up toward the late afternoon sun. He put his VW in park and switched off the ignition.

"We'll just pop in to say hi," he said to Cee Cee. And then he unfastened his seatbelt and hopped out of the car.

Cee Cee and I didn't move. She was in the backseat. I was in the front with the cat. From my bag came an ominous rumbling.

"I hesitate to ask," I said, after a while of sitting there listening to the wind chimes and Spike's steady growling. "But where are we?"

That question was answered when, a second later, the door to the bungalow burst open and a woman whose hair was the same whitish yellow as Cee Cee's - only so long that she could sit on it - yoo-hooed at us.

"Come in," Cee Cee's aunt Pru called. "Please come in! I've been expecting you!"

Cee Cee, not even glancing in her aunt's direction, muttered, "I just bet you have, you psychic freak."

Remind me never to tell Cee Cee about the whole mediator thing.

CHAPTER 11

"Oh, goodness," Cee Cee's aunt Pru said. "There it is again. The ninth key. This is just so strange."

Cee Cee and I exchanged glances. Strange wasn't quite the word for it.

Not that it was unpleasant. Far from it. At least, in my opinion, anyway. Pru Webb, Cee Cee's aunt, was a little odd. That was certainly true.

But her house was very aromatic what with all the scented candles she kept lit everywhere. And she'd been quite the attentive hostess, giving us each a glass of homemade lemonade. It was too bad, of course, that she'd forgotten to put sugar in it, but that kind of forgetfulness apparently wasn't unusual for someone so in touch with the spirit world. Aunt Pru had informed us that her mentor, the most powerful psychic on the West Coast, often couldn't remember his own name because he was channeling so many other souls.

Still, our little visit hadn't been particularly enlightening so far. I had learned, for instance, that according to the lines in my palm, I am going to grow up to have a challenging job in the field of medical research (Yeah! That'll be the day). Cee Cee, meanwhile, is going to be a movie star, and Adam an astronaut.

Seriously. An astronaut.

I was, I admit, a little jealous of their future careers, which were clearly a great deal more exciting than my own, but I tried hard to control my envy.

What I'd given up trying to control - and Cee Cee apparently had as well - was Adam. He had told Aunt Pru, before I could stop him, about my "dream," and now the poor woman was trying - pro bono, mind you - to summon Deirdre Fiske's spirit using tarot cards and a lot of humming.

Only it did not appear to be working because every time she started to turn the cards over, she kept coming up with the same one.

The ninth key.

This was, apparently, upsetting to her. Shaking her head, Aunt Pru - that's what she'd told me to call her - scooped all the cards back into a pile, shuffled them, and then, closing her eyes, pulled one from the middle of the deck, and laid it, face up, for us to see.

Then she opened her eyes, looked down at it, and went, "Again! This doesn't make any sense."

She wasn't kidding. The idea of anyone summoning a ghost with a deck of cards made no sense whatsoever … to me, at least. I couldn't even summon them by standing there screaming their names - something I'd tried, believe me - and I'm a mediator. My job is to communicate with the undead.

But ghosts aren't dogs. They don't come if you call them. Take my dad, for instance. How many times had I wanted - even needed - him? He'd shown up, all right: three, four weeks later. Ghosts are way irresponsible for the most part.

But I couldn't exactly explain to Cee Cee's aunt that what she was doing was a huge waste of time . . . and that while she was sitting there doing it, there was a cat trying to eat his way out of my book bag in Adam's car.

Oh, and that a guy who might or might not have been a vampire - but was certainly responsible for the disappearances of quite a number of people - was running around loose. I could only just sit there with this big stupid smile on my face, pretending to be enjoying myself, while really I was itching to get home and on the phone with Father D, so we could figure out what we were going to do about Red Beaumont.

"Oh, dear," Aunt Pru said. She was very pretty, Cee Cee's aunt Pru. An albino like her niece, her eyes were the color of violets. She wore a flowing sundress of the same shade. The contrast her long white hair made against the purple of her dress was startling - and cool. Cee Cee, I knew, was probably going to look just like her aunt Pru someday, once she got rid of the braces and puppy fat, that is.

Which was probably why Cee Cee couldn't stand her.

"What can this mean?" Aunt Pru muttered to herself. "The hermit. The hermit."

There appeared, from what I could see, to be a hermit on the card Aunt Pru kept turning over and over. Not of the crab variety, either, but the old-man-living-in-a-cave type. I didn't know what a hermit had to do with Mrs. Fiske, either, but one thing I did know: I was bored stupid.

"One more time," Aunt Pru said, sending a cautious glance in Cee Cee's direction. Cee Cee had made it clear that we didn't have all day. I was the one who needed to get home most, of course. I had an Ackerman dinner to contend with. Kung pao chicken night. If I was late, my mom was going to kill me.

"Um," I said. "Ms. Webb?"

"Aunt Pru, darling."

"Right. Aunt Pru. May I use your phone?"

"Of course." Aunt Pru didn't even glance at me. She was too busy channeling.

I wandered out of the darkened room and went out into the hallway. There was an old-fashioned rotary phone on a little table there. I dialed my own number - after a brief struggle to remember it since I'd only had it for a few weeks - and when Dopey picked up, I asked him to tell my mother that I hadn't forgotten about dinner and was on my way home.