‘Yes.’ He looked at me then. He looked at me for a long time. Then he said, ‘But it’s a long story, and you must be very tired. Go to bed. In the morning we will decide what to do about Heather.’

Talk about unfair!

‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘I am not going anywhere until you finish that story.’

He shook his head. ‘No. It’s too late. I’ll tell you some other time.’

‘Jeez!’ I sounded like a little kid whose mom had told him to go to bed early, but I didn’t care. I was mad. ‘You can’t just start a story and then not finish it. You have to—’

Jesse was laughing at me now. ‘Go to bed, Susannah,’ he said, coming up and giving me a gentle push towards the front steps. ‘You have had enough scaring for one night.’

‘But you—’

‘Some other time,’ he said. He had steered me in the direction of the porch, and now I stood on the lowest step, looking back at him as he laughed at me.

‘Do you promise?’

I saw his teeth flash white in the moonlight. ‘I promise. Good night, querida.’

‘I told you,’ I grumbled, stomping up the steps, ‘not to call me that.’

It was nearly three o’clock in the morning, though, and I could only summon up token indignation. I was still on New York time, remember, three hours ahead. It had been hard enough getting up in time for school when I’d had a full eight hours of sleep. How hard was it going to be after only having had four?

I slipped into the house as quietly as I could. Fortunately, everybody except the dog was dead asleep. The dog looked up from the couch on which he was reclining and wagged his tail when he saw it was me. Some watchdog. Plus my mom didn’t want him sleeping on her white couch. But I wasn’t about to make an enemy out of Max by shooing him off. If allowing him to sleep on the couch was all that was necessary to keep him from alerting the household that I’d been out, then it was well worth it.

I slogged up the stairs, wondering the whole time what I was going to do about Heather. I guessed I was going to have to wake up early and call over to the school, and warn Father Dom to meet Bryce the minute he set foot on campus and send him home. Even, I decided, if we had to resort to head lice, I wouldn’t object. All that mattered, in the long run, was that Heather was kept from her goal.

Still, the thought of waking up early to do anything – even save the life of my date for Saturday night – was not very appealing. Now that the adrenalin rush was gone, I realized I was dead tired. I staggered into the bathroom to change into my pj’s – hey, I was pretty sure Jesse wasn’t spying on me, but he still hadn’t told me how he’d died, so I wasn’t taking any chances. He could have been hanged, you know, for peeping Tomism, which I believed happened occasionally a hundred and fifty years ago.