‘Ha ha,’ I said, and hung up.

Sitting on the window seat, I rested my chin on my knees and gazed down across the Valley towards the curve of the bay. The sun was starting to sink low in the west. It hadn’t hit the water yet, but it would in a few minutes. My room was ablaze with reds and golds, and the sky around the sun looked as if it were striped. The clouds were so many different colours – blue and purple and red and orange – like the ribbons I once saw waving from the top of a May pole at a Renaissance fair. I could smell the sea, too, through my open window. The breeze carried the briny scent towards me, even as high up in the hills as I was.

Had Jesse, I wondered, sat in this window and smelled the ocean like I was doing, before he died? Before – as I was sure had happened – Maria de Silva’s lover, Felix Diego, slipped into the room and killed him?

As if he’d read my thoughts, Jesse suddenly materialized a few feet away from me.

‘Jeez!’ I said, pressing a hand over my heart, which was beating so hard I thought it might explode. ‘Do you have to keep on doing that?’

He was leaning, sort of nonchalantly, against one of my bedposts, his arms folded across his chest. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. But he didn’t look it.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘If you and I are going to be living together – so to speak – we need to come up with some rules. And rule number one is that you have got to stop sneaking up on me like that.’

‘And how do you suggest I make my presence known?’ Jesse asked, his eyes pretty bright for a ghost.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Can’t you rattle some chains or something?’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. What would rule number two be?’

‘Rule number two . . .’ My voice trailed off as I stared at him. It wasn’t fair. It really wasn’t. Dead guys should not look anywhere near as good as Jesse looked, leaning there against my bedpost with the sun slanting in and catching the perfectly sculpted planes of his face . . .

He lifted that eyebrow, the one with the scar in it. ‘Something wrong, querida?’ he asked.

I stared at him. It was clear he didn’t know that I knew. About MDS, I mean. I wanted to ask him about it, but in another way, I sort of didn’t want to know. Something was keeping Jesse in this world and out of the one he belonged to, and I had a feeling that something was directly related to the manner in which he’d lost his life. But since he didn’t seem all that anxious to talk about it, I figured it was none of my business.

This was a first. Most times, ghosts were all over me to help them. But not Jesse.