Good thing people on the West Coast go to bed so early.

The whole way home, I obsessed over what I’d done wrong in my dealings with Heather. I didn’t do it out loud – I figured I’d done enough of that; I didn’t want to sound like a broken record or player piano, or whatever it was they had back in Jesse’s day. But it was all I could think about. Never, not in all my years of mediating, had I ever encountered such a violent, irrational spirit. I simply did not know what to do. And I knew I had to figure it out, and quick; I only had a few hours before school started and Bryce walked straight into what was, for him, a death trap.

I don’t know if Jesse figured out why I was so quiet, or if he was thinking about Heather, too, or what. All I know was that, suddenly, he broke the silence we’d been walking in and went, ‘“Heav’n has no rage like love to hatred turn’d, nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.”’

I looked at him. ‘Are you speaking from experience?’

I saw him smile a little in the moonlight. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I am quoting William Congreve.’

‘Oh.’ I thought about that. ‘But you know, sometimes the woman scorned has every right to be mad.’

‘Are you speaking from experience?’ he wanted to know.

I snorted. ‘Not hardly.’ A guy has to like you before he can scorn you. But I didn’t say that out loud. No way would I ever say something like that out loud. I mean, not that I cared what Jesse thought about me. Why should I care what some dead cowboy thought of me?

But I wasn’t about to admit to him that I’d never had a boyfriend. You just don’t go around saying things like that to totally hot guys, even if they’re dead.

‘But we don’t know what went on between Heather and Bryce – not really. I mean, she could have every right to feel resentful.’

‘Towards him, I suppose she does,’ Jesse said, though he sounded grudging about admitting it. ‘But not towards you. She had no right to try to hurt you.’

He sounded so mad about it that I thought it was probably better to change the subject. I mean, I guess I should have been mad about Heather trying to kill me, but you know, I’m sort of used to dealing with irrational people. Well, OK, not quite as irrational as Heather, but you know what I mean. And one thing I’ve learned is, you can’t take it personally. Yeah, she’d tried to kill me, but I wasn’t really sure she knew any better. Who knew what kind of parents she had, after all? Maybe they went around murdering anybody who made them mad . . .

Although somehow, after having seen that add-a-pearl necklace, I sort of doubted that.

Thinking about murder made me wonder what had gotten Jesse so hot under the collar about it. Then I realized that he’d probably been murdered. Either that or he’d killed himself. But I didn’t think he was really the suicide type. I supposed he could have died of some sort of wasting disease . . .