The Mediator 03 - Reunion by Meg Cabot

Author:Meg Cabot [Cabot, Meg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, Read, Young Adult
ISBN: 9780743426763
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2009-07-18T05:17:36+00:00

C H A P T E R

11

"So what is it, exactly," I said as I swung the flashlight back and forth across the sandy trail, "that I'm supposed to be looking for?"

"I'm not sure," Father Dominic, a few steps ahead of me, said. "You'll know, I expect, when you find it."

"Great," I muttered.

It was no joke trying to climb down a mountainside in the dark. If I had known this was what Father Dom was going to suggest when I called, I probably would have put off phoning him. I probably would have just stayed home and watched Hellraiser III instead. Or at least attempted to finish my geometry homework. I mean, really. I had already nearly died once that day. The Pythagorean theorem hardly seemed threatening in comparison.

"Don't worry," I heard a guy's voice behind me, laced with tolerant amusement, say. "There's no poison oak."

I turned my head and gave Jesse a very sarcastic look, even though I doubted he could see it. The moon – if there was one – was hidden behind a thick wall of clouds. Tendrils of fog crept along the cliffside we were climbing down, gathering thickly in the dips the trail made, swirling whenever I set my foot down in it, as if it were recoiling at the prospect of touching me. I tried not to think about movies I'd seen in which horrible things happened to people out in such heavy fog. You know the movies I'm talking about.

At the same time, I tried not to think about all the poison oak that might be brushing up against me. Jesse had been joking, of course, but in his usual way, he had read my mind: I have a real thing about disfiguring skin rashes.

And don't even get me started about snakes, which I had every reason to believe might be curled up all along this sorry excuse for a path, just waiting to take a chunk out of the soft fleshy part of my calf just above my Timberlands.

"Yes," I heard Father Dom say. The fog had rushed in and swallowed him up, and I could see only the faint pinprick of yellow his flashlight made in front of me. "Yes, I can see that the police have already been here. This must be where a section of the guardrail fell. You can see its imprint in the broken weeds."

I staggered blindly along, using the beam from my flashlight primarily to hunt for snakes, but also to make sure I didn't step off the trail and plunge the several hundred feet or so into the churning surf below. Jesse had already reached out twice to steer me gently away from the edge of the path when I'd strayed from it while eyeing a suspicious branch.

Now I nearly staggered off it after colliding hard with Father Dom, who'd stopped in the middle of the trail and crouched down. I hadn't seen him at all, and both he and Jesse had to reach out and grab various articles of my clothing in order to right me again.

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