by Meg Cabot
I nearly choked on a chip. “What?”
“Your first quake. There was one last night, around two in the morning. Not a big one, really—round about a four pointer—but it woke me up. No damage, except down at the Mission, evidently. Breezeway collapsed. But then, that should come as no surprise to them. I’ve been warning them for years about that timber. It’s nearly as old as the Mission itself. Can’t be expected to last forever.”
I chewed more carefully. Wow. Heather’s good-bye bang must have really packed a wallop if people all over the Valley, and even up in the hills, had felt it.
But that still didn’t explain how David had known to look for me down at the school.
I’d moved upstairs and was sitting on the window seat in my room flipping through a mindless fashion magazine, wondering where Jesse had gone off to, and how long I was going to have to wait before he showed up to give me another one of his lectures, and if there was any chance he might call me querida again, when the boys got home from school. Dopey stomped right past my room—he still blamed me for getting him grounded—but Sleepy poked his head in, looked at me, saw that I was all right, then went away, shaking his head. Only David knocked, and when I called for him to come in, did so, shyly.
“Um,” he said. “I brought you your homework. Mr. Walden gave it to me to give to you. He said he hoped you were feeling better.”
“Oh,” I said. “Thanks, David. Just put it down there on the bed.”
David did so, but he didn’t go. He just stood there staring at the bedpost. I figured he needed to talk, so I decided to let him by not saying anything myself.
“CeeCee says hi,” he said. “And that other kid. Adam McTavish.”
“That’s nice of them,” I said.
I waited. David did not disappoint.
“Everybody’s talking about it, you know,” he said.
“Talking about what?”
“You know. The quake. That the Mission must be over some fault no one ever knew about before, since the epicenter seemed to be…seemed to be right next to Mr. Walden’s classroom.”
I said, “Huh,” and turned the page of my magazine.
“So,” David said. “You’re never going to tell me, are you?”
I didn’t look at him. “Tell you what?”
“What’s going on. Why you were down at the school in the middle of the night. How that breezeway came down. Any of it.”
“It’s better that you don’t know,” I said, flipping the page. “Trust me.”
“But it doesn’t have to do with…with what Jake said. With a gang. Does it?”
“No,” I said.
I looked at him then. The sun, pouring through my windows, brought out the pink highlights in his skin. This boy—this redheaded boy with the sticky-outy ears—had saved my life. I owed him an explanation, at the very least.
“I saw it, you know,” David said.
“Saw what?”
“It. The ghost.”
He was staring at me, white-faced and intent. He looked way too serious for a twelve-year-old.
“What ghost?” I asked.
“The one who lives here. In this room.” He glanced around, as if expecting to see Jesse looming in one of the corners of my bright, sunny room. “It came to me, last night,” he said. “I swear it. It woke me up. It told me about you. That’s how I knew. That’s how I knew you were in trouble.”
I stared at him with my mouth hanging open. Jesse? Jesse had told him? Jesse had woken him up?
“It wouldn’t let me alone,” David said, his voice trembling. “It kept on…touching me. My shoulder. It was cold and it glowed. It was just a cold, glowing thing, and inside my head there was this voice telling me I had to get down to the school and help you. I’m not lying, Suze. I swear it really happened.”
“I know it did, David,” I said, closing the magazine. “I believe you.”
He’d opened his mouth to swear it was true some more, but when I told him I believed him, his jaw clicked shut. He only opened it again to say wonderingly, “You do?”
“I do,” I said. “I didn’t get a chance last night to say it, so I’ll say it now. Thank you, David. You and Jake saved my life.”
He was shaking. He had to sit down on my bed, or he probably would have fallen down.
“So…” he said. “So it’s true. It really was…the ghost?”
“It really was.”
He digested that. “And why were you down at the school?”
“It’s a long story,” I said. “But I promise you, it doesn’t have anything to do with gangs.”
He blinked at me. “Does it have to do with…the ghost?”
“Not the one who visited you. But yes, it had to do with a ghost.”
David’s lips moved, but I don’t think he was really aware he was speaking. What came out of his mouth was an astonished, “There’s more than one?”
“Oh, there’s way more than one,” I said.
He stared at me some more. “And you…you can see them?”
“David,” I said. “This isn’t really something I’m all that comfortable discussing—”
“Have you seen the one from last night? The one who woke me up?”
“Yes, David. I’ve seen him.”
“Do you know who he is? How he died, I mean?”
I shook my head. “No. Remember? You were going to look it up for me.”
David brightened. “Oh, yeah! I forgot. I checked some books out yesterday—stay here a minute. Don’t go anywhere.”
He ran from the room, all of his recent shock forgotten. I stayed where I was, exactly as he’d told me to. I wondered if Jesse was somewhere nearby, listening. I figured it would serve him right if he were.
David was back in a flash, bringing with him a large pile of dusty, oversize books. They looked really ancient, and when he sat down beside me and eagerly began leafing through them, I saw that they were every bit as old as they looked. None of them had been published after 1910. The oldest had been published in 1849.
“Look,” David said, flipping through a large, leather-bound volume entitled My Monterey. My Monterey had been written by one Colonel Harold Clemmings. The colonel had a rather dry narrative style, but there were pictures to look at, which helped, even if they were in black and white.
“Look,” David said again, turning to a reproduction of a photograph of the house we were sitting in. Only the house looked a good deal different, having no porch and no carport. Also, the trees around it were much smaller. “Look, see, here’s the house when it was a hotel. Or a boardinghouse, as they called it back then. It says here the house had a pretty bad reputation. A lot of people were murdered here. Colonel Clemmings goes into detail about all of them. Do you suppose the ghost who came to me last night is one of them? One of the people who died here, I mean?”
“Well,” I said. “Most likely.”
David began reading out loud—quickly and intelligently, and without stumbling over the big, old-fashioned words—the different stories of people who had died in what Colonel Clemmings referred to as the House in the Hills.
None of those people, however, was named Jesse. None of them sounded even remotely like him. When David was through, he looked up at me hopefully.
“Maybe the ghost belongs to that Chinese launderer,” he said. “The one who was shot because he didn’t wash that dandy’s shirts fine enough.”
I shook my head. “No. Our ghost isn’t Chinese.”
“Oh.” David consulted the book again. “How about this guy? The guy who was killed by his slaves?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “He was only five feet tall.”
“Well, what about this guy? This Dane who they caught cheating at cards, and blew away?”
“He’s not Danish,” I said with a sigh.
David pursed his lips. “Well, what was he, then? This ghost?’
I shook my head. “I don’t know. At least part Spanish. And…” I didn’t want to go
into it right there in my room, where Jesse might overhear. You know, about his liquid eyes and long brown fingers and all that.
I mean, I didn’t want him to think that I liked him or anything.
Then I remembered the handkerchief. It had been gone when I’d woken up the next morning, after I’d washed my blood out of it, but I still remembered the initials. MDS. I told them to David. “Do those letters mean anything to you?”
He looked thoughtful for a minute. Then he closed Colonel Clemmings’s book and picked up another one. This one was even older and dustier. It was so old, the title had rubbed off the spine. But when David opened it, I saw by the title page that it was called Life in Northern California, 1800–1850.
David scanned the index in the back, and then went, “Aha.”
“Aha what?” I asked.
“Aha, I thought so,” David said. He flipped to a page toward the end. “Here,” he said. “I knew it. There’s a picture of her.” He handed me the book, and I saw a page with a layer of tissue over it.
“What’s this?” I said. “There’s Kleenex in this book.”
“It isn’t Kleenex. It’s tissue. They used to put that over pictures in books to protect them. Lift it up.”
I lifted up the tissue. Underneath it was a black-and-white copy on glossy paper of a painting. The painting was a portrait of a woman. Underneath the woman’s portrait were the words MARIA DE SILVA DIEGO, 1830–1916.
My jaw dropped. MDS! Maria de Silva!
She looked like the type that would have a handkerchief like that tucked up her sleeve. She was dressed in a frilly white thing—at least, it looked white in the black-and-white picture—with her shiny black hair all ringleted on either side of her head, and a big old expensive-looking jewel hanging from a gold chain around her long neck. A beautiful, proud-looking woman, she stared out of the frame of the portrait with an expression you just had to call…well, contemptuous.
I looked at David. “Who was she?” I asked.
“Oh, just the most popular girl in California at around the time this house was built.” David took the book away from me, and flipped through it. “Her father, Ricardo de Silva, owned most of Salinas back then. She was his only daughter, and he settled a pretty hefty dowry on her. That’s not why people wanted to marry her, though. Well, not the only reason. Back then, people actually considered girls who looked like that beautiful.”
I said, “She’s very beautiful.”
David glanced at me with a funny little smile. “Yeah,” he said. “Right.”
“No. She really is.”
David saw I was serious, and shrugged. “Well, whatever. Her dad wanted her to marry this rich rancher—some cousin of hers who was madly in love with her—but she was all into this other guy, this guy named Diego.” He consulted the book. “Felix Diego. This guy was bad news. He was a slave runner. At least, that’s what he’d done for a living before he came out to California to strike it rich in the gold mines. And Maria’s dad, he didn’t approve of slavery, any more than he approved of gold diggers. So Maria and her dad, they had this big fight about it—who she was going to marry, I mean, the cousin or the slave runner—until finally, her dad said he was going to cut her off if she didn’t marry the cousin. That shut Maria up pretty quick because she was a girl who liked money a lot. She had something like sixty dresses back when most women had two, one for work and one for church—”
“So what happened?” I interrupted. I didn’t care how many dresses the woman owned. I wanted to know where Jesse came in.
“Oh.” David consulted the book. “Well, the funny thing is, after all that, Maria won out in the end.”
“How?”
“The cousin never showed up for the wedding.”
I blinked at him. “Never showed up? What do you mean, he never showed up?”
“That’s just it. He never showed up. Nobody knows what happened to him. He left his ranch a few days before the wedding, you know, so he’d get there on time or whatever, but then nobody heard from him again. Ever. The end.”
“And…” I knew the answer, but I had to ask, anyway. “And what happened to Maria?”
“Oh, she married the gold-digging slave runner. I mean, after they’d waited a decent interval and all. There were all these rules back then about that kind of thing. Her dad was so disappointed, you know, that the cousin had turned out to be so unreliable, that he finally just told Maria she could do whatever she wanted, and be damned. So she did. But she wasn’t damned. She and the slave runner had eleven kids and took over her father’s properties after he died and did a pretty good job running them—”
I held up my hand. “Wait. What was the cousin’s name?”
David consulted the book. “Hector.”
“Hector?”
“Yes.” David looked back down at the book. “Hector de Silva. His mom called him Jesse, though.”
When he looked back up, he must have seen something in my face since he went, in a small voice, “Is that our ghost?”
“That,” I said softly, “is our ghost.”
Chapter
Nineteen
The phone rang a little while later. Dopey yelled down the hall that it was for me. I picked up, and heard CeeCee squealing on the other end of the line.
“Ms. Vice President,” she said. “Ms. Vice President, do you have any comment?”
I said, “No, and why are you calling me Ms. Vice President?”
“Because you won the election.” In the background, I heard Adam shout, “Congratulations!”
“What election?” I asked, baffled.
“For vice president!” CeeCee sounded annoyed. “Duh!”
“How could I have won it?” I said. “I wasn’t even there.”
“That’s okay. You still won two-thirds of the sophomore class’s vote.”
“Two-thirds?” I’ll admit it. That shocked me. “But, CeeCee—I mean, why did people vote for me? They don’t even know me. I’m the new kid.”
CeeCee said, “What can I say? You exude the confidence of a born leader.”
“But—”
“And it probably doesn’t hurt that you’re from New York, and around here, people are fascinated by anything to do with New York.”
“But—”
“And, of course, you talk really fast.”
“I do?”
“Sure you do. And that makes you seem smart. I mean, I think you are smart, but you also seem smart because you talk really fast. And you wear a lot of black, and black is, you know, cool.”
“But—”
“Oh, and the fact that you saved Bryce from that falling chunk of wood. People like that kind of thing.”
Two-thirds of the sophomore class at Mission High School, I thought, would probably have voted for the Easter Bunny if someone could have gotten him to run for office. But I didn’t say so. Instead, I said, “Well. Neat. I guess.”
“Neat?” CeeCee sounded stunned. “Neat? That’s all you have to say, neat? Do you have any idea how much fun we’re going to have now that we’ve managed to get our hands on all that money? The cool things we’ll be able to do?”
I said, “I guess that’s really…great.”
“Great? Suze, it’s awesome! We are going to have an awesome, awesome semester! I’m so proud of you! And to think, I knew you when!”
I hung up the phone feeling a little overwhelmed. It isn’t every day a girl gets elected vice president of a class she’s been in for less than a week.
I hadn’t even put the phone back into its cradle before it rang again. This time it was a girl’s voice I didn’t recognize, asking to speak to Suze Simon.
“This is she,” I said, and Kelly Prescott shrieked in my ear.
“Omigod!” she cried. “Have you heard? Aren’t you psyched? We are going to have a bitching year.”
Bitching. All right. I said calmly, “I look forward to working with you.”
“Look,” Kelly said, suddenly all business. “We h
ave to get together soon and choose the music.”
“The music for what?”
“For the dance, of course.” I could hear her flipping through an organizer. “I’ve got a DJ all lined up. He sent me a playlist, and we have to choose what songs for him to play. How’s tomorrow night? What’s wrong with you, anyway? You weren’t in school today. You’re not contagious, are you?”
I said, “Um, no. Listen, Kelly, about this dance. I don’t know about it. I was thinking it might be more fun to spend the money on…well, something like a beach cookout.”
She said in a perfectly flat tone of voice, “A beach cookout.”
“Yeah. With volleyball and a bonfire and stuff.” I twisted the phone cord around my finger. “After we have Heather’s memorial, of course.”
“Heather’s what?”
“Her memorial service. See, I figure you already booked the room at the Carmel Inn, right, for the dance? But instead of having a dance there, I think we should have a memorial service for Heather. I really think, you know, she’d have wanted it that way.”
Kelly’s tone was flat. “You never even met Heather.”
“Well,” I said. “That may be. But I have a pretty good feeling I know what type of girl she was. And I think a memorial service at the Carmel Inn would be exactly what she’d want.”
Kelly didn’t say anything for a minute. Well, it had occurred to me she might not like my suggestions, but she couldn’t really do anything about it now, could she? After all, I was the vice president. And I don’t think, short of expulsion from the Mission Academy, I could be impeached.
“Kelly?” When she didn’t answer, I said, “Well, look, Kell, don’t worry about it now. We’ll talk. Oh, and about your pool party on Saturday. I hope you don’t mind, but I asked CeeCee and Adam to come. You know, it’s funny, but they say they didn’t get invited. But in a class as small as ours, it really isn’t fair not to invite everybody, you know what I mean? Otherwise, the people who didn’t get invited might think you don’t like them. But I’m sure in CeeCee’s and Adam’s cases, you just forgot, right?”