"But ... " Jack shook his head. "I don't know anything about heaven."

"You don't have to." I tried to think how to explain it to him, then decided showing was better than telling. That's what Mr. Walden, who I had last year for English and World Civ, was always saying, anyway.

"Look," I said, taking Jack by the hand. "Come on. Watch me, and you can see how it works."

Jack put the brakes on right away, though.

"No," he gasped, his brown eyes, so like his brother's, wild with fear. "No, I don't want to."

I yanked him to his feet. Hey, I never said I was cut out for this baby-sitting thing, remember?

"Come on," I said again. "Jorge won't hurt you. He's really nice. Let's see what he wants."

I practically had to carry him, but I finally got Jack over to where we'd last seen Jorge. A moment later the gardener - or, I should say, his spirit - reappeared, and after a lot of polite nodding and smiling, we got down to business. It was kind of hard, considering that Jorge's English was about as good as my Spanish - which is to say, not good at all - but eventually, I was able to figure out what was keeping Jorge from moving on from this life to his next - whatever that might be: His sister had appropriated a rosary left by their mother for her first grandchild, Jorge's daughter.

"So," I explained to Jack, as I steered him into the hotel lobby, "what we have to do is get Jorge's sister to give the rosary back to Teresa, his daughter. Otherwise, Jorge will just keep hanging around and pestering us. Oh, and he won't be able to find eternal rest. Got it?"

Jack said nothing. He just wandered behind me in a daze. He had been silent as death during my conversation with Jorge, and now he looked as if someone had whacked him on the back of the head with a Wiffle bat a couple hundred times.

"Come here," I said, and steered Jack into a fancy mahogany phone booth with a sliding glass door. After we'd both slipped through it, I pulled the door shut, then picked up the phone and fed a quarter into the slot. "Watch and learn, grasshopper," I said to him.