Except, of course, Jesse had to show up just as I was jumping off the porch roof.

‘OK,’ I said, straightening up, my feet smarting a little in spite of the soft ground I’d landed on. ‘Let’s get one thing straight right now. You are not going to show up down at the Mission tonight. Got that? You show up down there, and you are going to be very, very sorry.’

Jesse was leaning against one of the giant pine trees in our yard. Just leaning there, his arms folded across his chest, looking at me as if I were some sort of interesting sideshow attraction, or something.

‘I mean it,’ I said. ‘It’s going to be a bad night for ghosts. Real bad. So I wouldn’t show up down there if I were you.’

Jesse, I noticed, was smiling. There wasn’t as much moon as there’d been the night before, but there was enough so that I could see that the little curl at the corners of his lips was turning skywards, not down.

‘Susannah,’ he said. ‘What are you up to?’

‘Nothing’ I marched over to the carport, and yanked out the ten-speed. ‘I just got some things to settle.’

Jesse strolled over towards me as I was strapping on the bike helmet. ‘With Heather?’ he asked lightly.

‘Right. With Heather. I know things got out of hand last time, but this time, things are going to be different.’

‘How, precisely?’

I swung a leg over that stupid bar they put on boys’ bikes, and stood at the top of the driveway, my fingers curled round the handlebars. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll level with you. I’m going to perform an exorcism.’

His right hand shot out. It gripped the bar between my fingers. ‘A what?’ he said in a voice completely devoid of the good humour that had been in it before.

I swallowed. OK, I wasn’t feeling quite as confident as I was acting. In fact, I was practically quaking in my Converse All Stars. But what else could I do? I had to stop Heather before she hurt anybody else. And it would have been really helpful if everybody could have just supported me in my efforts.

‘You can’t help me,’ I said, woodenly. ‘You can’t go down there tonight, Jesse, or you might get exorcized, too.’

‘You,’ Jesse said, speaking as tonelessly as I was, ‘are insane.’

‘Probably,’ I said, miserably.

‘She’ll kill you,’ Jesse said. ‘Don’t you understand? That’s what she wants.’

‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘She doesn’t want to kill me. She wants to kill everybody I care about first. Then she wants to kill me.’ I sniffled. For some reason, my nose was running. Probably because it was so cold out. I don’t see how those palm trees could stay alive. It was like forty degrees, or something, outside.

‘But I’m not going to let her, see?’ I continued. ‘I’m going to stop her. Now let go of my bike.’

Jesse shook his head. ‘No. No. Even you wouldn’t do something so stupid.’