But that’s what Lucia’s giving them her toy at the hospital, right under my nose, had to be. A message.
But about what? To say what? That she could get to the people I loved—the most vulnerable and innocent of all—anytime she wanted?
Hadn’t she already delivered this message by nearly killing Father Dominic?
So many things had begun to fall into place. Like this greatgrandmother the girls were always talking about, the one who’d broken her hip, then died of pneumonia. When they mentioned things she’d said, they weren’t things she’d said to them before she’d died, but after.
And their extraordinarily high energy level, and frequent outbursts, including the one the day before, when they had sensed all the way in the kindergarten classroom Lucia’s attack on me in the office, and Sister Ernestine had been summoned to calm them down.
All of these were signs not that they had ADHD, as Sister Ernestine suggested, but that they could—and often did—communicate with the dead.
This gift—as Father Dominic chose to call it—affected different people in different ways. It had caused Paul’s younger brother Jack to withdraw into himself, giving him night terrors and eventually agoraphobia. I’m sure my therapist, Dr. Jo, probably would have said he lacked the “inner resiliency” to handle so much psychic energy coming at him all at once, until I’d shown him how to process it.
Other people, however—like Paul, and my stepnieces—found this psychic energy stimulating rather than draining, and enjoyed having twice as many playmates as their friends (even if no one but them could see them) . . . or making twice as much money because of it.
I was already feeling a lot of guilt for not having picked up sooner rather than later on all the clues about the triplets, and for many of the things I’d done to NCDPs in front of them.
The question now was, how much of it had they understood? And just what, precisely, was their relationship with Lucia? Were their lives really in danger from the little girl? Or was she, as the girls insisted, a playmate? It seemed hard to believe that creature who’d tried to drown me in the pool and nearly killed Father Dominic and seemed slowly to be draining the life from Becca Walters was on friendly terms with anyone.
I wished, for the hundredth time that evening, that Father Dom were not lying unconscious on the third floor of St. Francis Medical Center. He would have known exactly what to do—not only about the triplets, but about Lucia.
Then again, his conviction that he’d known what to do about Lucia was how he’d ended up in the ICU in the first place.
We were on our own with this one.
We’d had no luck questioning the girls back at the hospital, nor later when we’d arrived bearing pizza. Brad had been anxious to get them bathed and fed before Mommy got home, and the girls had been too excited about having Uncle Jesse and Aunt Suze over to rationally answer any of my questions about their new friend Lucy.
Then Mommy had returned. Debbie had been none too happy to find us there, even though in addition to pizza, we’d brought her favorite wine—the good kind, from a vineyard in the area that sold their bottles to expensive restaurants in New York City for three times what they cost locally. Debbie had drunk a whole bottle on her own and was working on a second one.
“I just don’t get it,” I said to Jesse as he poured me some of the very good wine from an extra bottle we’d hidden in the car. “Brad used to tease me that he knew I had a boy in my room, back in high school, because he said he heard us talking. But I think he only overheard my end of the conversation. He never actually saw you. And Debbie never did, either. So how can their children be mediators?”
“Neither of your parents saw spirits. Obviously it can skip a generation. Maybe even two or more.” Jesse poured a splash of pinot noir into his own glass. “And we don’t know that the girls are full-fledged mediators, necessarily. Children tend to be more sensitive in general to paranormal phenomena than adults. They’re more imaginative, and more open-minded.”
“Sensitive? Did you see those girls fighting over that horse, Jesse? They each grabbed a leg and pulled. If I hadn’t stopped them, they’d have ripped it apart, then killed each other. I wouldn’t exactly call the Ackerman girls sensitive.”
“Well . . . a better description might be high-spirited, like their aunt.”
“I’m not even related to them by blood, remember? None of that is from me.”
I shivered in the cool night air. The fire from Brad’s pit wasn’t doing much to cut the chill, though the pungent smell of the smoke was pleasant, as was the crackling sound of the wood as it burned.
“What I don’t get is how this could have happened right under our noses, without us ever noticing. I had no clue. Did you?”
“The girls had that private language,” he reminded me. “They spoke it among themselves until last year.”