Darkest Hour tm-4

by Meg Cabot

  Eighteen fifty! That was the year our house had been built, the first year it was in business as a boarding house for travelers to the Monterey Peninsula area. The year - I knew from when Doc and I looked it up - that Jesse, or Hector (which is his real name; can you imagine? I mean, Hector) had mysteriously disappeared.

  Though I happen to know there hadn't been anything mysterious about it. He'd been murdered in this very house ... in fact, in my bedroom upstairs. Which is why, for the past century and a half, he's been hanging out there, waiting for ...

  Waiting for what?

  Waiting for you, said a small voice in the back of my head. A mediator, to find these letters and avenge his death, so he can move on to wherever it is he's supposed to go next.

  The thought struck me with terror. Really. It made my hands go all sweaty, even though it was cool in my mom and Andy's room, what with the air conditioning being on full blast. The back of my neck started feeling prickly and gross.

  I forced myself to look back down at the letter. If Jesse was meant to move on, well, then I was just going to have to help him do it. That's my job, after all.

  Except that I couldn't help thinking about Father Dom. A fellow mediator, he had admitted to me a few months ago that he had once had the misfortune to fall in love with a ghost, back when he'd been my age. Things hadn't worked out - how could they? - and he'd become a priest.

  Got that? A priest. Okay? That's how bad it had been. That's how hard the loss had been to get over. He’d become a priest.

  Frankly, I don't see how I could ever become a nun. For one thing, I'm not even Catholic. And for another, I don't look very good with my hair pulled back. Really. That's why I've always avoided ponytails and headbands.

  Stop it, I said to myself. Just stop it and read.

  I read.

  The letter was from someone called Maria. I don't know much about Jesse's life before he died - he's not exactly big on discussing it - but I do know that Maria de Silva was the name of the girl Jesse had been on his way to marry when he'd disappeared. Some cousin of his. I'd seen a picture of her once in a book. She was pretty hot, you know, for a girl in a hoop skirt who lived before plastic surgery. Or Maybelline.

  And you could tell by the way she wrote that she knew it, too. That she was hot, I mean. Her letter was all about the parties she'd been to, and who had said what about her new bonnet. Her bonnet, for crying out loud. I swear to God, it was like reading a letter from Kelly Prescott, except that it had a bunch of hithers and alacks in it, and no mention of Ricky Martin. Plus a lot of stuff was spelled wrong. Maria may have been a babe, but it was pretty clear, after reading her letters, she hadn't won too many spelling bees back at ye olde schoolhouse.

  What struck me, as I read, was the fact that it really didn't seem possible that the girl who had written these letters was the same girl who had, I was pretty sure, ordered a hit on her fiancé. Because I happened to know that Maria hadn't wanted to marry Jesse at all. Her dad had arranged the whole thing. Maria had wanted to marry this other guy, this dude named Diego, who ran slaves for a living. A real charming guy. In fact, Diego was the one I suspected had killed Jesse.

  Not, of course, that Jesse had ever mentioned any of this - or anything at all, for that matter, about his past. He is, and always has been, completely tight-lipped on the whole subject of how he'd died. Which I guess I can understand: getting murdered has to be a bit traumatizing.

  But I must say it's kind of hard getting to the bottom of why he's still here after all this time when he won't contribute at all to the conversation. I had had to find out all of this stuff from a book on the history of Salinas County that Doc had dug up out of the local library.

  So I guess you could say that I read Maria's letters with a certain sense of foreboding. I mean, I was pretty much convinced I was going to find something in them that was going to prove Jesse had been murdered ... and who'd done it.

  But the last letter was just as fatuous as the other four. There was nothing, nothing at all to indicate any wrongdoing of any kind on Maria's part . . . except for maybe a complete inability to spell the word fiancé. And really, what sort of crime is that?

  I folded the letters carefully again and stuck them back into the tin, realizing, as I did so, that the back of my neck, as well as my hands, was no longer sweating. Was I relieved that there was nothing incriminating here, nothing that helped solve the mystery of Jesse's death?

  I guess so. Selfish of me, I know, but it's the truth. All I knew now was what Maria de Silva had worn to some party at the Spanish ambassador's house. Big deal. Why would anybody stick letters as innocuous as that into a cigar box and bury them? It made no sense.

  "Interesting, aren't they?" my mother said when I stood up.

  I jumped about a mile. I'd forgotten she was even there. She was in bed now, reading a book on how to be a more effective time manager.

  "Yeah," I said, putting the letters back on Andy's dresser. "Really interesting. I'm so glad I know what the ambassador's son said when he saw Maria de Silva in her new silver gauze ballgown."

  My mom looked up at me curiously through the lenses of her reading glasses. "Oh, did she mention her last name somewhere? Because Andy and I were wondering. We didn't see it. De Silva, did you say?"

  I blinked. "Um," I said. "No. Well, she didn't say. But Doc and I ... I mean, David, he told me about this family, the de Silvas, that lived in Salinas around that time, and they had a daughter called Maria, and I just ... " My voice trailed off as Andy came into the room.

  "Hey, Suze," he said, looking a little surprised to see me in his room, since I'd never set foot in there before. "Did you see the letters? Neat, huh?"

  Neat. Oh my God. Neat.

  "Yeah," I said. "Gotta go. Good night."

  I couldn't get out of there fast enough. I don't know how kids whose parents have been married multiple times deal with it. I mean, my mother's only remarried once, and to a perfectly nice man. But still, it's just so weird.

  But if I'd thought I could retreat to my room to be alone and think things over, I was wrong. Jesse was sitting on my window seat.

  Sitting there looking like he always looked: totally hot, in the white open-necked shirt and black toreador pants he habitually wears - well, it's not like you can change clothes in the afterlife - with his short dark hair curling crisply against the back of his neck, and his liquid black eyes bright beneath equally inky brows, one of which bore a thin white scar....

  A scar that, more times than I like to admit, I'd dreamed of tracing with my fingertips.

  He looked up when I came in - he had Spike, my cat, on his lap - and said, "This book is very difficult to understand." He was reading a copy of First Blood, by David Morrell, which they based the movie Rambo on.

  I blinked, trying to rouse myself from the dazed stupor the sight of him always seemed to put me in for a minute or so.

  "If Sylvester Stallone understood it," I said, "I would think you could."

  Jesse ignored that. "Marx predicted that the contradictions and weaknesses within the capitalist structure would cause increasingly severe economic crises and deepening impoverishment of the working class," he said, "which would eventually revolt and seize control of the means of production . . . which is precisely what happened in Vietnam. What induced the U.S. government to think that they were justified in involving themselves in the struggle of the people of this developing nation to find economic solidarity?"

  My shoulders sagged. Really, is it too much to ask that I be able to come home from a long day of work and relax? Oh, no. I have to come home and read a bunch of letters written to the love of my life by his fiancée, who, if I am correct, had him killed a hundred and fifty years ago.

  Then, as if that is not bad enough, he wants me to explain the Vietnam War.

  I really have to start hiding my textbooks from him. The thing is, he reads them and actually manages to retain what they say, and then applies that to other things he finds to read
around the house.

  Why he can't just watch TV, like a normal person, I do not know.

  I went over to my bed and collapsed onto it, face first. I was, I should mention, still wearing my horrible shorts from the hotel. But I couldn't bring myself to care what Jesse thought about the size of my butt at that particular moment.

  I guess it must have showed. Not my butt, I mean, but my general unhappiness with the way my summer was going.

  "Are you all right?" Jesse wanted to know.

  "Yes," I said, into my pillows.

  Jesse said, after a minute, "Well, you don't seem all right. Are you sure nothing is wrong?"

  Yes, something is wrong, I wanted to shriek at him. I just spent twenty minutes reading a bunch of private correspondence from your ex-fiancée, and might I add that she seems like a terrifically boring individual? How could you have ever been stupid enough to have agreed to marry her? Her and her stupid bonnet?

  But the thing is, I didn't want Jesse to know I'd read his mail. I mean, we're basically roommates and all, and there are certain things you just don't do. For instance, Jesse is always tactfully not around whenever I am changing and bathing and whatnot. And I am very careful to stock up on food and litter for Spike, who, unlike a normal animal, actually seems to prefer ghost company to human. He only tolerates me because I feed him.

  Of course, Jesse has, in the past, felt no compunction about materializing in the backseats of cars in which I happened to have been making out with someone.

  But I know Jesse would never read my mail, of which I get only a limited amount, mostly in the form of letters from my best friend Gina, back in Brooklyn. And I have to admit, I felt guilty for reading his, even though it was almost two hundred years old and there certainly wouldn't have been anything about me in it.

  What surprised me was that Jesse, who is, after all, a ghost, and can go anywhere without being seen - except by me and Father Dom, of course, and now, I guess, by Jack - didn't know about the letters. Really, he seemed to have no idea both that they'd been found and that, just moments before, I'd been downstairs, reading them.

  But then, First Blood is pretty engrossing, I suppose.

  So instead of telling him what was really wrong with me - you know, anything about the letters, and especially anything about the whole I’m in love with you, only where can it go? Because you’re not even alive and I’m the only one who can see you, and besides, it’s clear you don’t feel the same way about me. Do you? Well, do you? thing - I just said, "Well, I met another mediator today, and I guess that kind of weirded me out."

  And then I rolled over and told him about Jack.

  Jesse was very interested and told me I ought to call Father Dom with the news. What I wanted to do, of course, was call Father Dom and tell him about the letters. But I couldn't do that with Jesse in the room, because of course he'd know I'd been prying in his personal affairs, which, given his whole secrecy thing about how he'd died, I doubted he'd appreciate.

  So I said, "Good idea," and picked up the phone and dialed Father D's number.

  Only Father D didn't answer. Instead, a woman did. At first I freaked out, thinking Father Dominic was shacking up. But then I remember that he lives in a rectory with a bunch of other people.

  So I went, "Is Father Dominic there?" hoping it was only a novice or something and would go away and get him without comment.

  But it wasn't a novice. It was Sister Ernestine, who is the assistant principal of my high school, and who of course recognized my voice.

  "Susannah Simon," she said. "What are you doing calling Father Dominic at home at this hour? Do you know what time it is, young lady? It is nearly ten o'clock!"

  "I know," I said. "Only - "

  "Besides, Father Dominic isn't here," Sister Ernestine went on. "He's on retreat."

  "Retreat?" I echoed, picturing Father Dominic sitting in front of a campfire with a bunch of other priests, singing Kumbaya My Lord and possibly wearing sandals.

  Then I remembered that Father Dominic had mentioned that he would be going on a retreat for the principals of Catholic high schools. He'd even given me the number there, in case there was some kind of ghost emergency and I needed to reach him. I didn't count discovering a new mediator as an emergency, however . . . though doubtless Father Dom would. So I just thanked Sister Ernestine, apologized for disturbing her, and hung up.

  "What is a retreat?" Jesse wanted to know.

  So then I explained to him what a retreat is, but the whole time I was sitting there thinking about the time he'd touched my face in the hospital and wondering if it had been because he just felt sorry for me or if he actually liked me (as more than just as a friend - I know he likes me as a friend) or what.

  Because the thing is, even though he's been dead for a hundred and fifty years, Jesse is really an extreme hottie - much hotter even than Paul Slater ... or maybe I just think so because I'm in love with him.

  But whatever. I mean, he really is like someone straight off the WB. He even has nice teeth for a guy born before they invented fluoride, very white and even and strong-looking. I mean, if there were any guys at the Mission Academy who looked even remotely like Jesse, going to school wouldn't seem at all like the massive waste of time it actually is.

  But what good is it? I mean, him looking so good, and all? He's a ghost. I'm the only one who can see him. It's not like I'll ever be able to introduce him to my mother, or take him to the prom, or marry him, or whatever. We have no future together.

  I have to remember that.

  But sometimes it's really, really hard. Especially when he's sitting there in front of me, laughing at what I'm saying, and petting that stupid, smelly cat. Jesse was the first person I met when I moved to California, and he became my first real friend here. He has always been there when I needed him, which is way more than I can say for most of the living people I know. And if I had to choose one person to be marooned on a desert island with, I wouldn't even have to think about it: of course it would be Jesse.

  This is what I was thinking as I explained about retreats. It was what I was thinking as I went on to explain what I knew about the Vietnam War, and then the eventual fall of communism in the former Soviet Union. It was what I was thinking as I brushed my teeth and got ready for bed. It was what I was thinking as I said good night to him and crawled under the covers and turned out the light. It was what I was thinking as sleep overcame me and blissfully blotted out all thought whatsoever . . . the time I spend sleeping being the only time, lately, when I can escape thoughts of Jesse.

  But let me tell you, it came back in full force when, just a few hours later, I woke with a start to find a hand pressed over my mouth.

  And, oh yeah, a knife held to my throat.

  CHAPTER 4

  Being a mediator, I am not unaccustomed to being woken in, shall we say, a less than gentle manner.

  But this was a lot less gentle than usual. I mean, usually when someone wants your help, they go out of their way not to antagonize you . . . which waving a knife around has a tendency to do.

  But as soon as I opened my eyes and saw who this knife-wielding individual was, I realized that probably what she wanted was not my help. No, probably what she wanted was to kill me.

  Don't ask me how I knew. Undoubtedly those old mediator instincts at work.

  Well, and the knife was a pretty significant indicator.

  "Listen to me, you stupid girl," Maria de Silva hissed at me. Maria de Silva Diego, I should say, since at the time of her death, she was married to Felix Diego, the slave-runner. I know all this from that book Doc got out of the library called My Monterey, a history of Salinas County from 1800 to 1850. There'd even been that portrait of Maria in it.

  Which was how I happened to know who was trying to kill me this time.

  "If," Maria hissed, "you don't get your father and brother to stop digging that hole" - um, stepfather and stepbrother, I wanted to correct her, only I couldn't, on account of the hand over my mout
h - "I'll make you sorry you were ever born. Got that?"

  Pretty tough talk from a girl in a hoop skirt. Because that's what she was. A girl.

  She hadn't been when she'd died. When she had died, around the turn of the century - last century, of course, not this one - Maria de Silva Diego had been around seventy or so.

  But the ghost on top of me appeared to be my own age. Her hair was black, without a hint of gray, and she wore it in these very fancy ringlets on either side of her face. She appeared to have a lot going on in the jewelry department. There was this big fat ruby hanging from a gold chain around her long, slender neck - very Titanic and all - and she had some heavy-duty rings on her fingers. One of them was cutting into my gums.

  That's the thing about ghosts, though - the thing that they always get wrong in the movies. When you die, your spirit does not take on the form your body had at the moment you croaked. You just don't ever see ghosts walking around with their guts spilling out, or their severed head in their hands, or whatever. If you did, Jack might have been justified in being such a little scaredy cat.

  But it doesn't happen that way. Instead, your ghost appears in the form your body had when you were at your most vital, your most alive.

  And I guess for Maria de Silva, that was when she was sixteen or so.

  Hey, it was nice she had an option, you know? Jesse hadn't been allowed to live long enough to have much of a choice. Thanks to her.

  "Oh, no, you don't," Maria said, the backs of her rings scraping against my teeth in a manner I would really have to describe as unpleasant. "Don't even think about it."

  I don't know how she'd known, but I had been considering ramming my knees into her spine. The knife blade pressing against my jugular soon dissuaded me of that plan, however.

  "You're going to make your father stop digging back there, and you're going to destroy those letters, understand, little girl?" Maria hissed. "And you aren't going to say a word about them - or me - to Hector. Am I making myself clear?"

  What could I do? She had a knife to my throat. And there was nothing in her manner at all reminiscent of the Maria de Silva who'd written those idiotic letters. This chick was not gushing about her new bonnet, if you get my drift. I hadn't any doubt at all that she not only knew how to use that knife, but that she fully intended to do so, if provoked.