"See?" The first EMT grinned down at me. "Singing like a canary. You're not going to have to worry about running into him in school on Monday. Not for a real long time."

Was Michael confessing? I wondered. And if so, what about? About the Angels? About what he'd done to the Rambler?

Or was he merely explaining to the detective what had happened to him? That he'd been attacked by some unseen, unmanageable force - the same force that had broken my ribs, split open my head, and busted my lip?

The detective didn't look as if anything Michael was telling him was all that extraordinary. But I happen to know from experience that this is the way detectives always look.

Just as they were closing the ambulance doors, Father Dominic cried, "Don't worry, Susannah. I'll tell your mother where to find you."

Can I just tell you that if this was supposed to comfort me, it totally didn't.

But right after that the morphine kicked in. And I found that, happily, I didn't care anymore.

CHAPTER 19

"This," Gina said, "is so not how I pictured spending my spring break."

"Hey." I looked up from the copy of Cosmo she'd brought me. "I said I was sorry. What more do you want?"

Gina seemed surprised by the vehemence in my tone.

"I'm not saying I haven't had fun," she said. "I'm just saying it's not how I pictured it."

"Oh, right." I tossed the magazine aside. "Yeah, it's been real fun, visiting me in the hospital."

I couldn't talk very fast with the stitches in my lip. Nor could I enunciate too well, either. I had no idea how I looked - my mother had instructed everyone, including the hospital staff, not to allow me access to mirrors, which of course led me to believe that I looked hideous; it had probably been a wise move, however, considering how I get when all I've got is a zit. Still, one thing for sure, I certainly sounded stupid.

"It's just for a few more hours," Gina said. "Until they get the results of your second MRI. If it comes out normal, you're free to go. And you and I can hit the beach again. And this time" - she glanced at the door to my private room to make sure it was all the way closed and no one could overhear her - "there won't be any pesky ghosts to ruin everything."

Well, that much was true, anyway. Michael's arrest, while anticlimactic, had nevertheless satisfied the Angels. They probably would have preferred to see him dead, but once Father Dominic convinced them of how miserable a sensitive boy like Michael was going to find the California penal system, they snapped right out of their murderous rage. They even asked Father Dominic to tell Jesse and me that they were sorry about the whole beating us into a bloody pulp thing.

I, for one, was not exactly ready to forgive them, even after Father D had assured me that the Angels had moved on to their afterlife destinations - whatever those might be - and would be troubling me no more.

Jesse's opinion on the matter I did not know. He had not deigned to grace either Father Dom or me with his presence since the night the Angels had attacked us. He was, I feared, extremely upset with me. Seeing as how the whole thing had been my fault, I didn't exactly blame him. Still, I wished he'd stop by, if only to yell at me some more. I missed him. More, I knew, than was probably healthy.

Damn that Madame Zara, anyway, for being right.

"You should hear what everyone at school is saying about you," Gina said. She was perched on the end of my hospital bed, already clad in her bikini, over which she'd thrown a leopard print baby doll dress. She wanted to waste as little time as possible when we finally got to the beach.

"Oh, yeah?" I tried to drag my thoughts from Jesse. It wasn't easy. "What are they saying?"

"Well, your friend Cee Cee's writing this story about you in the school paper … you know, the whole amateur sleuth angle of it all, how you caught on that it was Michael who'd committed all these heinous crimes and set out to trap him - "

"Something," I said drily, "that I'm sure she heard from you."

Gina looked innocent. "I don't know what you're talking about. Adam sent you those" - Gina pointed at an enormous bouquet of pink roses on the window sill - "and Mr. Walden, according to Jake, is taking up a collection to get you a complete set of Nancy Drew books. He apparently thinks you have a crime-solving fixation."

Mr. Walden was right about that. But my fixation wasn't on solving crimes.

"Oh, and your stepdad's thinking about buying a Mustang to replace the Rambler," Gina informed me.

I made a face, then regretted it. It was hard to make expressions of any kind with my sore lip, not to mention the stitches in my scalp.

"A Mustang?" I shook my head. "How are we all supposed to fit into a Mustang?"

"Not for you guys. For himself. He's giving you guys the Land Rover."

Well, that, at least, made sense.

"What about …" I wanted to ask her about Jesse. After all, she was sharing a room with him - alone, thanks to my being held overnight in the hospital for observation. The thing is, she didn't know it. About Jesse, I mean. I still hadn't told her about him.

And now, well, there didn't seem to be any reason to. Not now that he wasn't speaking to me anymore.

"What about Michael?" I asked instead. None of my other visitors - my mother and stepfather; Sleepy, Dopey, and Doc; Cee Cee and Adam; even Father Dom - would tell me anything about him. The doctors had advised them that the topic might be "too painful" for me to discuss.

As if. You want to know what's painful? I'll tell you what's painful. Having two broken ribs, and knowing that for weeks, you're going to have wear a one-piece to the beach in order to hide the black and blue marks.

"Michael?" Gina shrugged. "Well, you were right. What you said about him keeping stuff on his computer. The police got a warrant and confiscated his PC, and it was all there - journals, emails, the schematics of the Rambler's brake system. Plus they found the wrench he used. You know, on the bolts that held the guardrail in place? They matched the metal tracings. And the clippers he used to snip the Rambler's brake line. They got brake fluid off the blades. The boy didn't do such a good job cleaning up after himself, it appears."

I'll say.

He was arrested on four counts of first-degree murder - the RLS Angels - and six counts of attempted murder: five for those of us who'd been in the Rambler the afternoon the brakes had given out, and one for what the police were convinced Michael had done to me out at the Point.

I didn't correct them. I mean, it wasn't like I was about to sit there and go, "Uh, yeah, about my injuries? Yeah, Michael didn't inflict them. No, the ghosts of his victims did that because I wouldn't let them kill him."

I figured it was just as well to let them go on thinking it was Michael who was responsible for my broken ribs and the fourteen stitches in my scalp … not to mention the two in my lip. I mean, after all, he'd been going to kill me. The Angels had just interrupted him. If you thought about it, they'd actually saved my life.

Yeah. So they could kill me themselves.

"So listen," Gina was saying. "Your grounding - you know, for sneaking out and getting into a car with Michael when your mother had told you expressly not to - isn't supposed to start until after I leave. I say we spend the next four days at the beach. I mean, there's no way you're going to school. Not with broken ribs. You wouldn't be able to sit down. But you can certainly lie down, you know, on a towel. I should be able to talk your mom into letting you do that, at least."

"Sounds good to me," I said.

"Ex," Gina said. She apparently meant excellent, only she'd shortened it - much in the way Sleepy often shortened words because he was too lazy to say all the syllables. Thus pizza became " 'za," Gina became "G." She had, I realized, more in common with Sleepy than I'd ever guessed.

"I'm going to get a Diet Coke," she said, climbing down from my bed - careful not to jostle the mattress since the nurse had already come in twice and warned her not to. Like I hadn't consumed enough Tylenol with codeine to block out the pain. Somebody could have dropped a safe on my head and I probably wouldn't have felt it.

"You want?" Gina asked, pausing by the door.

"Sure," I said. "Just make sure - "

"Yeah, yeah," she said over her shoulder as the door swung slowly shut behind her. "I'll find a straw somewhere."

Alone in my room, I adjusted the pillows behind me carefully, and then sat there, staring at nothing. People who are on as many painkillers as I was tend to do that a lot.

But I wasn't thinking about nothing. I was thinking, actually, about what Father Dominic had told me when he'd visited a few hours ago. In what could only be the cruelest of ironies, the morning after Michael's arrest, his sister, Lila Meducci, had wakened from her coma.

Oh, it wasn't like she'd sat up and asked for a bowl of Cheerios, or anything. She was still severely messed up. According to Father D, it was going to take her months, even years, of rehabilitation to get her back to the way she'd been before the accident - if ever. It would be a long, long time before she'd be able to walk, talk, even eat on her own again like she used to.

But she was alive. She was alive and she was conscious. It wasn't much of a consolation prize for poor Mrs. Meducci, but it was something.

It was as I was reflecting over the vagaries of life that I heard a rustle. I turned my head just in time to catch Jesse trying to dematerialize.

"Oh, no, you don't," I said, sitting up - and jolting my ribs quite painfully, I'd like to add. "You come back here right now."

He came back, a sheepish expression on his face.

"I thought you were asleep," he said. "So I decided to come back later."

"Baloney," I said. "You saw I was awake, so you decided to come back later when you were sure I was asleep." I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe what I'd caught him trying to do. This hurt, I discovered, way more than my ribs. "What, you're only going to visit me when I'm unconscious now? Is that it?"

"You've been through an ordeal," Jesse said. He looked more uncomfortable than I'd ever seen him. "Your mother - back at the house - I heard her tell everyone they weren't to do anything to upset you."

"Seeing you won't upset me," I said.

I was hurt. I really was. I mean, I'd known Jesse was mad at me for what I'd done - you know, that whole tricking-Michael-into-coming-out-to-the-Point-so-the-RLS-Angels-could-kill-him thing - but not even to want to talk to me anymore....

Well, that was harsh.

The hurt I felt must have shown in my face since when Jesse spoke, it was in the gentlest voice I'd ever heard him use.

"Susannah," he said. "I - "

"No," I interrupted him. "Let me go first. Jesse, I'm sorry. I'm sorry for that whole thing last night. It was all my fault. I can't believe I did it. And I'll never, ever forgive myself for dragging you into it."

"Susannah - "

"I am the worst mediator," I went on. Once I had the ball rolling, I found it was hard to stop it. "The worst one that ever lived. I should be thrown out of the mediator organization. Seriously. I can't believe I actually did something that stupid. And I wouldn't blame you if you never spoke to me again. Only - " I looked up at him, aware that there were tears in my eyes. Only this time, I wasn't ashamed to let him see them. "It's just that you've got to understand: he tried to kill my family. And I couldn't let him get away with that. Can you understand that?"

Jesse did something then that he'd never done before. I doubt he'll ever do it again, either.

And it happened so fast, I wasn't even sure afterward if it had really happened, or if, in my drugged-out state, I imagined it.

But I'm pretty sure he reached out and touched my cheek.

That's all. Sorry if I got your hopes up. He just touched my cheek, the only part of me, I imagine, that wasn't scraped, bruised, or broken.

But I didn't care. He'd touched my cheek. Grazed it, actually, with the backs of his fingers, not the tips. Then he dropped his hand.

"Yes, querida," he said. "I understand."

My heart started beating so fast, I was certain he could hear it. Plus, I probably don't need to tell you, my ribs really, really ached. Each pulse seemed to send my heart slamming into them.