Darkest Hour

by Meg Cabot

  Only now it looked as if I wouldn’t get the chance.

  “What happened?” I asked, gazing up at the cops bewilderedly.

  “We’re not sure, precisely,” Officer Knightley said. “He was found this morning at his desk at the historical society, dead from an apparent heart attack. According to the receptionist’s sign-in log, you were one of the few people who saw him yesterday.”

  Only then did I remember that the lady behind the reception desk had made me sign in. Damn!

  “Well,” I said heartily—but not too heartily, I hoped. “He was fine when I talked to him.”

  “Yes,” Officer Knightley said. “We’re aware of that. It’s not Dr. Clemmings’s death we’re here about.”

  “It isn’t?” Wait a minute. What was going on?

  “Miss Simon,” Officer Jones said. “When Dr. Clemmings was found this morning, it was also discovered than an item of particular value to the historical society was missing. Something you apparently looked at, with Dr. Clemmings, just yesterday.”

  The letters. Maria’s letters. They were gone. They had to be. She had come and taken them, and Clive Clemmings had caught a glimpse of her somehow and had had a heart attack from the shock of seeing the woman in the portrait behind his desk walking around his office.

  “A small painting.” Officer Knightley had to refer to his notepad. “A miniature of someone named Hector de Silva. The receptionist, Mrs. Lampbert, says Dr. Clemmings told her you were particularly interested in it.”

  This information, so unexpected, shook me. Jesse’s portrait? Jesse’s portrait was gone from the collection? But who would have taken that? And why?

  I did not have to feign my innocence for once as I stammered, “I—I looked at the painting, yes. But I didn’t take it or anything. I mean, when I left, Mr.—Dr. Clemmings was putting it away.”

  Officers Knightley and Jones exchanged glances. Before they could say anything more, however, someone came around the corner of the Pool House.

  It was Paul Slater.

  “Is there a problem with my brother’s babysitter, officers?” he demanded in a bored voice that suggested—to me, anyway—that the Slater family’s employees were often being dragged off for questioning by members of law enforcement.

  “Excuse me,” Officer Knightley said, sounding really very offended. “But as soon as we are done questioning this witness, we—”

  Paul whipped off his sunglasses and barked, “Are you aware that Miss Simon is a minor? Shouldn’t you be questioning her in the presence of her parents?”

  Officer Jones blinked a few times. “Pardon me, uh, sir,” he began, though it was clear he didn’t really consider Paul a sir, seeing as how he was under eighteen and all. “The young lady isn’t under arrest. We’re just asking her a few—”

  “If she isn’t under arrest,” Paul said swiftly, “then she doesn’t have to speak to you at all, does she?”

  Officers Knightley and Jones looked at each other again. Then Officer Knightley said, “Well, no. But there has been a death and a theft, and we have reason to believe she might have information—”

  Paul looked at me. “Suze,” he said, “have these gentlemen read you your rights?”

  “Um,” I said. “No.”

  “Do you want to talk to them?”

  “Um,” I said, glancing nervously from Officer Knightley to Officer Jones, and then back again. “Not really.”

  “Then you don’t have to.”

  Paul leaned down and took hold of my arm.

  “Say good-bye to the nice police officers,” he said, pulling me to my feet.

  I looked up at the police officers. “Uh,” I said to them. “I’m very sorry Dr. Clemmings is dead, but I swear I don’t know what happened to him, or that painting, either. Bye.”

  Then I let Paul Slater pull me back out to the pool.

  I am not normally so docile, but I have to tell you, I was in shock. Maybe it was post-being-questioned-by-the-police-but-not-taken-down-tothe-station-house exhilaration, but once we were out of the sight of Officers Knightley and Jones, I whirled around and grabbed Paul’s wrist.

  “All right,” I said. “What was all that about?”

  Paul had put his sunglasses back on, so it was hard to read the expression in his eyes, but I think he was amused.

  “All what?” he asked.

  “All that,” I said, nodding toward the back of the Pool House. “That whole Lone-Ranger-to-the-rescue thing. Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t it just yesterday that you were going to turn me over to the authorities yourself? Or rat me out to my boss, anyway?”

  Paul shrugged. “Yes,” he said. “A certain someone pointed out to me, however, that you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar.”

  At the time, all I felt was a little miffed at being called a fly. It didn’t even occur to me to wonder who that “certain someone” might have been.

  It wasn’t long before I found out, however.

  chapter

  eight

  Okay, so I went out with him.

  So what?

  So what does that make me? I mean, the guy asked me if I wanted to go with him for a burger after I dumped his brother back off with his parents at five, and I said yes.

  Why shouldn’t I have said yes? What did I have to look forward to at home, huh? Certainly not any hope of dinner. Roach à la mode? Spider fricassee?

  Oh, yeah, and a ghost who had her fiancé murdered and was going to try to off me next, at her earliest opportunity.

  I thought maybe I’d misjudged Paul. Maybe I hadn’t been fair. I mean, yeah, he had been kind of stalkerish the day before, but he more than made up for it with the whole rescuing-me-from-the-police thing.

  And he didn’t make a single move on me. Not one. When I said I wanted to go home, he said no problem, and took me home.

  It certainly wasn’t his fault that when we drove up to my house, he couldn’t pull into the driveway on account of all the police cars and ambulances parked there.

  I swear, one thing I am getting with my summer job money is a cell phone. Because stuff keeps on happening, and I have no idea, because I’m off having burgers with someone at Friday’s.

  I jumped out of the car and ran up to where I saw all the people standing. When I reached the caution tape, which was strung up all around the hole where the hot tub was supposed to go, someone grabbed me by the waist and spun me around before I had a chance to do what I intended, which was, although I’m not too clear on this, scramble down into the hole, to join the people I saw down at the bottom of it, bending over something that I was pretty sure was a body.

  But, like I said, someone stopped me.

  “Whoa, tiger,” that someone said, swinging me around. It turned out to be Andy, looking extremely dirty and sweaty and unlike his normal self. “Hang on. Nothing for you to see there.”

  “Andy.” The sun hadn’t quite set, but I was having trouble seeing anyway. It was like I was in a tunnel, and all I could see was this bright pin-prick of light at the end of it. “Andy, where’s my mom?”

  “Your mom’s fine,” Andy said. “Everyone’s fine.”

  The pinprick started getting a little wider. I could see my mom’s face now, peering at me worriedly from the deck, with Dopey behind her, wearing his usual sneer.

  “Then what—” I saw the men in the bottom of the hole lift up a stretcher. On the stretcher was a black body bag like the kind you always see on TV. “Who is that?” I wanted to know.

  “Well, we’re not sure,” my stepfather said. “But whoever he is, he’s been there a very long time, so chances are, he isn’t anyone we know.”

  Dopey’s face loomed large in my line of vision.

  “It’s a skeleton,” he informed me with a good deal of relish. He appeared to have gotten over the fact that only that morning he’d had a mouth full of beetles, and was back to his normal insufferable self. “It was totally awesome, Suze, you should have been here. My shovel went r
ight through his skull. It cracked like it was an egg or something.”

  Well, that was enough for me. My tunnel vision came right back, but not soon enough to miss something that tumbled from the stretcher as it went past me. My gaze locked on it and followed it as it fluttered to the ground, landing very near my feet. It was only a deeply stained and extremely threadbare piece of material, no bigger than my hand. A rag, it looked like, though you could see that at one time it had had lace around its edges. Little bits of lace still clung to it like burrs, especially around the corner where, very faintly, you could read three embroidered initials:

  MDS.

  Maria de Silva. It was the handkerchief Jesse had used last night to dry my tears. Only it was the real handkerchief, frayed and brown with age.

  And it had fallen out of the jumble of decaying material holding Jesse’s bones together.

  I turned around and threw up my Friday’s bacon cheeseburger and potato skins all over the side of the house.

  Needless to say, no one except my mother was very sympathetic about this. Dopey declared it the most disgusting thing he had ever seen. Apparently he’d forgotten what he’d had in his mouth less then twelve hours before. Andy simply went and got the hose, and Sleepy, equally unimpressed, said he had to get going or he’d be late delivering ’za.

  My mother insisted on putting me to bed, even though having her in my room just then was about the last thing I wanted. I mean, I had just seen them removing Jesse’s body from my backyard. I would have liked to have discussed this disturbing sight with him, but how could I do that with my mother there?

  I figured if I just let her fuss over me for half an hour, she’d go. But she stayed much longer than that, making me take a shower and change out of my uniform and into a silky pair of lounging pajamas she’d bought me for Valentine’s Day (pathetically, it was the only Valentine I received). Then she insisted on combing my hair out, like she used to when I was a little kid.

  She wanted to talk, too, of course. She had plenty to say on the subject of the skeleton Andy and Dopey had found, insisting it was only “some poor man” who had gotten killed in a shoot-out back in the days when our home was a boardinghouse for mercenaries and gunslingers and the odd rancher’s son. She said the police would insist on treating it as a homicide until the coroner had determined how long the body had been there, but since, she went on, the fellow still had his spurs on (spurs!) she assumed they would come to the same conclusion she had: that this guy had been dead for a lot longer than any of us had been alive.

  She tried to make me feel better. But how could she? She didn’t have any idea why I was so upset. I mean, I’m not Jack. I had never blabbed to her about my secret talent. My mom didn’t know that I knew whose skeleton that was. She didn’t know that just twelve hours ago he had been sitting on my daybed, laughing at Bridges of Madison County. And that a few hours before that, he had kissed me—albeit on the top of my head, but still.

  I mean, come on. You’d be upset, too.

  Finally, finally she left. I heaved a sigh of relief, thinking I could relax, you know?

  But no. Oh, no. Because my mother didn’t retreat with the intention of leaving me alone. I found that out the hard way a couple of minutes later when the phone rang, and Andy hollered up the stairs that it was for me. I really did not feel like talking to anyone, but what could I do? Andy had already said I was home. So I picked up, and whose cheerful little voice do I hear on the other end?

  That’s right.

  Doc’s.

  “Suze, how are you doing?” my youngest stepbrother wanted to know. Although clearly he already knew. How I was doing, I mean. Obviously, my mother had called him at camp—who gets calls from their stepmother at camp, I ask you?—and told him to call me. Because, of course, she knows. She knows he’s the only one of my stepbrothers I can stand, and I’m sure she thought I might tell him whatever it was that was bothering me, and then she could pump him for information later.

  My mother isn’t an award-winning television news journalist for nothing, you know.

  “Suze?” Doc sounded concerned. “Your mom told me about…what happened. Do you want me to come home?”

  I flopped back down on my pillows. “Home? No, I don’t want you to come home. Why would I want you to come home?”

  “Well,” Doc said. He lowered his voice as if he suspected someone was listening in. “Because of Jesse.”

  Out of all the people I live with, Doc was the only one who had the slightest idea that We Are Not Alone. Doc believed…and he had good reason to. Once when I’d been in a real jam, Jesse had gone to him. Scared out of his wits, Doc had nevertheless come through for me.

  And now he was offering to do so again.

  Only what could he do? Nothing. Worse than nothing, he could actually get hurt. I mean, look at what had happened to Dopey that morning. Did I want to see Doc with a faceful of bugs? No way.

  “No,” I said quickly. “No, Doc—I mean, David. That isn’t necessary. You stay where you are. Things are fine here. Really.”

  Doc sounded disappointed. “Suze, things are not fine. Do you want to talk about it, at least?”

  Oh, yeah. I want to discuss my love life—or lack thereof—with my twelve-year-old stepbrother.

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Look, Suze,” Doc said. “I know it had to be upsetting. I mean, seeing his skeleton like that. But you’ve got to remember that our bodies are simply the vessel—and a very crude one, at that—in which our souls are carried while we’re alive on earth. Jesse’s body…well, it doesn’t have anything to do with him anymore.”

  Easy for him to say, I thought miserably. He’d never gotten a look at Jesse’s abs.

  Not that, if he had, they would have interested Doc much, of course.

  “Really,” Doc went on, “if you think about it, that’s probably not the only body Jesse’s going to have. According to the Hindus, we shed our outer shells—our bodies—several times. In fact, we keep doing so, depending on our karma, until we finally get it right, thus achieving liberation from the cycle of rebirth.”

  “Oh?” I stared at the canopy over my bed. I really could not believe I was having this conversation. And with a twelve-year-old. “Do we?”

  “Sure. Most of us, anyway. I mean, unless we get it right the first time. But that hardly ever happens. See, what’s going on with Jesse is that his karma is all messed up, and he got bumped off the path to nirvana. He just needs to find his way back into the body he’s supposed to get after, you know, his last one, and then he’ll be fine.”

  “David,” I said. “Are you sure you’re at computer camp? Because it sounds to me like maybe Mom and Andy dropped you off at yoga camp by mistake.”

  “Suze,” Doc said with a sigh. “Look. All I’m saying is, that skeleton you saw, it wasn’t Jesse, all right? It has nothing to do with him anymore. So don’t let it upset you. Okay?”

  I decided it was high time to change the subject.

  “So,” I said. “Any cute girls at that camp?”

  “Suze,” he said severely. “Don’t—”

  “I knew it,” I said. “What’s her name?”

  “Shut up,” Doc said. “Look, I gotta go. But remember what I said, will you? I’ll be home Sunday, so we can talk more then.”

  “Fine,” I said. “See you then.”

  “See you. And Suze?”

  “Yeah, Doc—I mean, David?”

  “Be careful, okay? That Diego—the guy from that book, who supposedly killed Jesse?—he seemed kind of…mean. You might want to watch your back or…well, whatever.”

  Whatever was right.

  But I didn’t say so to Doc. Instead, I said goodbye. What else could I say? Felix Diego isn’t the half of it, sonny? I was too upset even to entertain the idea that I might possibly have a second hostile spirit to deal with.

  But I didn’t even know what upset was until Spike came scrambling through my open window, looked around expectantly, and
meowed….

  And Jesse didn’t show up.

  Not even after I called out his name.

  They don’t, as a rule. Ghosts, I mean. Come when you call them.

  But for the most part, Jesse does. Although lately he’s been showing up before I even had a chance to call him, when I’ve only thought about calling him. Then wham, next thing I knew, there he was.

  Except not this time.

  Nothing. Not a flicker.

  Well, I said to myself as I fed Spike his can of food and tried to remain calm, that’s okay. I mean, it doesn’t mean anything. Maybe he’s busy. I mean, that was his skeleton down there. Maybe he’s following it to wherever they’re taking it. To the morgue or whatever. It’s probably very traumatic, watching people dig up your body. Jesse didn’t know anything about Hinduism and karma. At least, that I knew of. To him, his body had probably been a lot more than just a vessel for his soul.

  That’s where he was. The morgue. Watching what they did with his remains.

  But when the hours passed, and it got dark out, and Spike, who usually goes out prowling at night for small vermin and any Chihuahuas he can find, actually climbed onto my bed, where I sat leafing sightlessly through magazines, and butted his head against my hand…

  Well, that’s when I knew.

  That’s when I knew something was really, really wrong. Because that cat hates my guts, even though I’m the one who feeds him. If he’s climbing up onto my bed and butting his head against my hand, well, I’m sorry, that means the universe as I know it is crumbling.

  Because Jesse isn’t coming back.

  Except, I kept telling myself as my panic mounted, he promised. He swore.

  But as the minutes ticked past and there was still no sign of him, I knew. I just knew. He was gone. They’d found his body, and that meant he was no longer missing, and that meant there was no need for him to hang around my room. Not anymore, just like I’d tried to explain to him last night.

  Only he had sounded so sure…so sure that that wasn’t it. He had laughed. He had laughed when I first said it, like it was ridiculous.

  But then where was he? If he wasn’t gone—to heaven, or to his next life (not to hell; there’s no place, I’m sure, for Jesse in hell, if there is a hell)—then where was he?