Free Ninth Key by Meg Cabot Page A

wife?”
    On the word
wife
, I pulled the curtains apart, expecting to find a window I could neatly put my foot through, then jump to safety. No biggie. I’d done it a hundred times before.
    And there was a window there, all right. A ten-foot one with lots of individual panes, set back a foot, at least, in a nicely paneled casement.
    But someone had pulled the shutters — you know, the ones that go on the outside of the house and are mostly just decorative — closed. Tightly closed. Not a ray of sunshine could have penetrated those things.
    “It must be terribly exciting,” Mr. Beaumont was saying behind me as I stared at the shutters, wondering if they’d open if I kicked them hard enough. But then who was to say what kind of drop lay below them? I could be fifty feet up for all I knew. I’ve made some serious leaps in my life, but I usually like to know what I’m leaping into before I go for it. “Being psychic, I mean,” Tad’s dad went on. “I wonder if you would mind getting in touch with other deceased individuals I might know. There are a few people I’ve been longing to talk to.”
    “It doesn’t” — I let go of those curtains and moved to the next window — “work that way.”
    Same thing. The window was completely shuttered up. Not even a chink where sunlight might spill through. In fact, they looked almost nailed shut.
    But that was ridiculous. Who would nail shutters over their windows? Especially with the kind of sea view I was sure Mr. Beaumont’s house afforded.
    “Oh, but surely, if you really concentrated” — Mr. Beaumont’s pleasant voice followed me as I moved to the next window — “you could communicate with just a few others. I mean, you’ve already succeeded with one. What’s a few more? I’d pay you, of course.”
    I couldn’t believe it. Every single one of the windows was shuttered.
    “Um,” I said as I got to the last window and found it similarly shuttered. “Agoraphobic much?”
    Mr. Beaumont must have finally noticed what I was doing since he said, casually, “Oh, that. Yes. I’m sensitive to sunlight. So bad for the skin.”
    Oh, okay. This guy was certifiable.
    There was only one other door in the room, and that one was behind Mr. Beaumont, next to the aquarium. I didn’t exactly relish the idea of going anywhere near that guy, so I headed back for the door to the elevator.
    “Look, can you please unlock this so I can go home?” I tugged on the knob, trying not to let my fear show. “My mom is really strict, and if I miss my curfew, she…she might
beat
me.”
    I know this was shoveling it on a bit thick — especially if he ever happened to watch the local news and saw my mother doing one of her reports. She is so not the abusive type. But the thing was, there was something so creepy about him, I really just wanted to get out, and I didn’t care how. I’d have said anything to get out of there.
    “Do you think,” Mr. Beaumont wanted to know, “that if I were very quiet, you might be able to summon this woman’s spirit again so that I could have a word with her?”
    “No,” I said. “Could you please open this door?”
    “Don’t you wonder what she could have meant?” Mr. Beaumont asked me. “I mean, she told you to tell me not to blame myself for her death. As if I, in some way, were responsible for killing her. Didn’t that make you wonder a little, Miss Simon? I mean, about whether or not I might be a —”
    Right then, to my utter relief, the knob to the elevator door turned in my hand. But not, it turned out, because Mr. Beaumont had released it. No, it turned out somebody was getting off the elevator.
    “Hello,” said a blond man, much younger than Mr. Beaumont, dressed in a suit and tie. “What have we here?”
    “This is Miss Simon, Marcus,” Mr. Beaumont said, happily. “She’s a psychic.”
    Marcus, for some reason, kept looking at my necklace, too. Not just my necklace, either, but my whole throat area.
    “Psychic, eh?”