The Mediator #4: Darkest Hour Read online

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.

  I nodded to show her that I was perfectly willing, under the circumstances, to follow her orders.

  "Good," Maria de Silva said. And then she lifted her fingers from my mouth. I could taste blood.

  She had straddled me – which accounted for all the lacy petticoat in my face, tickling my nose – and now she looked down at me, her pretty features twisted into an expression of disgust.

  "And they said for me to look out," she sneered. "That you were a tricky one. But you aren't so tricky, are you? You're just a girl. A stupid little girl."

  She threw back her head and laughed.

  And then she was gone. Just like that.

  As soon as I felt like I could move again, I got out of bed and went into my bathroom, where I turned on the light and looked at my reflection in the mirror above my sink.

  No. It hadn't been a nightmare. There was blood between my teeth where Maria de Silva's ring had cut into me.

  I rinsed until all the blood was gone, then turned off the bathroom light and came back into my room. I think I was in a daze or something. I couldn't quite register what had just happened. Maria de Silva. Maria de Silva, Jesse's fiancée – I think it would be safe to say ex-fiancée, under the circumstances – had just appeared in my room and threatened me. Me. Sweet little old me.

  It was a lot to process, especially considering it was, oh, I don't know, four in the morning?

  And yet it turned out I was in for yet another late-night shock. No sooner had I stepped from the bathroom than I noticed someone was leaning against one of the posts to the canopy over my bed.

  Only it wasn't just someone, it was Jesse. And when he saw me, he straightened up.

  "Are you all right?" he asked, worriedly. "I thought I … Susannah, was somebody just here?"

  Uh, your knife-wielding ex-girlfriend, you mean?

  That's what I thought. What I said was, "No."

  Okay. Don't start with me. The reason I didn't tell him had nothing to do with Maria's threat.

  No, it was the other thing Maria had said. About telling Andy to quit digging in the backyard. Because that could mean only one thing: that there was something buried in the backyard Maria didn't want anybody to find.

  And I had a feeling I knew what that something was.

  I also had a feeling that that something was the reason Jesse had been hanging around the Carmel Hills for so long.

  I should have blurted this all out to Jesse, right? I mean, come on: he had a right to know. It was something that very directly concerned him.

  But it was also something that, I was fairly sure, was going to take him away from me forever.

  Yeah, I know: if I really loved him, I'd have been willing to set him free, like in that poem that's always on those posters with the seagulls flying in the wind: If you love something, set it free. If it was meant to be, it will come back to you.

  Let me tell you something. That poem is stupid, all right? And it so totally does not apply in this situation. Because once Jesse gets set free, he is never coming back to me. Because he won't be able to. Because he'll be in heaven, or another life, or whatever.

  And then I'll have to become a nun.

  God. God, everything sucks.

  I crawled back into bed.

  "Look, Jesse," I said, pulling the covers up to my chin. I had on a T-shirt and boxers, but, you know, no bra or anything. Not that he could tell, in the dark and all, but you never know. "I'm really tired."

  "Oh," he said. "Of course. But … You're sure there wasn't anyone in here? Because I could swear I – "

  I waited expectantly for him to finish. Just how would he end that sentence? I could swear I heard the sweet dulcet tones of the woman I once loved? I could swear I smelled her perfume – which, by the way, was of orange blossoms?

  But he didn't say either of those things. Instead, looking really confused, he said, "Sorry," and disappeared, exactly the way his ex-girlfriend had disappeared. In fact, you'd think they might have run into each other, wouldn't you, out there on the spiritual plane, with all of this materializing and dematerializing?

  But apparently not.

  I won't lie and tell you that I dropped back off to sleep right away. I didn't. I was really, really tired, but my mind just kept repeating what Maria had said, over and over. What on earth was she so hot and bothered about, anyway? Those letters didn't have anything the least bit incriminating in them. I mean, if it's true that she had Jesse iced so she could marry her boyfriend Diego instead of him.

  And if those letters were so important, why hadn't she had them destroyed properly all those years ago? Why were they buried in our backyard in a cigar box?

  But that wasn't what was really bothering me. What really bothered me was the fact that she wanted me to get Andy to stop digging altogether. Because that could only mean one thing:

  There was something even more incriminating back there.

  Like a body.

  And I didn't even want to think about whose.

  And when I woke up again a few hours later, after finally managing to nod off, I still didn't want to think about it.

  But one thing I did know: I was not going to ask Andy to stop digging (like he'd even listen to me if I did), nor was I going to destroy those letters. No freaking way.

  In fact, I took personal possession of them, just in case, telling Andy that I'd deliver them to the historical society myself. I figured they'd be safe there, in case old Maria Diego got up to anything. Andy looked surprised, but not enough actually to ask me what I was up to. He was too busy yelling at Dopey for shoveling in the wrong place.

  When I got to the Pebble Beach Hotel and Golf Resort that morning, it was to be greeted by Caitlin with an accusatory, "Well, I don't know what you did to Jack Slater, but his family asked that you be assigned to watch him for the rest of their stay … until Sunday, actually."

  I wasn't surprised. Nor did I mind, particularly. The Paul factor was troubling, of course, but now that I knew the reason behind Jack's odd behavior, I genuinely liked the kid.

  And he, it became clear, the moment I set foot inside his family's suite, was wild about me. No more lying on the floor in front of the TV for him. Jack was in his swimsuit and ready to go.

  "Can you teach me the butterfly today, Suze?" he wanted to know. "I've always wanted to know how to do the butterfly."

  "Susan," his mother said to me, in a whispered aside, right before she ran off to her hair appointment (neither Paul nor his father were around, much to my relief, having had a seven-o'clock tee time). "I can't thank you enough for what you've done for Jack. I don't know what you said to him yesterday, but he is like a different child. I have never seen him so happy. You know, he really is the most remarkably sensitive person. Such an imagination, too. Always thinking he's seeing . . . well, dead people. Has he mentioned this to you?"

  I said nonchalantly that he had. />
  "Well, we've been at our wits' end. We must have had thirty different doctors look at him, and no one – no one – seemed able to get through to him. Then you came along, and …" Nancy Slater looked down at me with carefully made-up blue eyes. "Well, I don't know how we'll ever be able to thank you, Susan."

  You could start, I thought, by calling me by my right name. But I didn't really care. I just said, "No problem, Mrs. Slater," and went and got Jack and headed with him back to the pool.

  Jack was like a different kid. There was no denying that. Even Sleepy, roused from his semipermanent doze by Jack's happy splashing, asked me if that was the same boy he'd seen me with the morning before, and when I told him it was, actually looked incredulous for a second or two before going back to sleep. The things that had once frightened Jack – basically, everything – no longer seemed to bother him in the least.

  And so when, after burgers at the Pool House, I suggested he and I take the hotel shuttle bus into town, he didn't even protest. He even commented that the plan "sounded like fun."

  Fun. From Jack. Really, maybe mediating isn't my calling at all. Maybe I should be a teacher, or a child psychologist, or something. Seriously.

  Jack wasn't particularly thrilled, however, when, once we got into town, we headed toward the building that houses the Carmel-by-the-Sea Historical Society. He wanted to go to the beach, but when I told him that it was to help a ghost and that we'd go to the beach afterward, he was okay with it.

  I'm not really a historical society type of gal, but even I have to admit it was kind of cool, looking at all the old photos on the walls of the place, photos of Carmel and Salinas County a hundred years earlier, before all the strip malls and Safeways opened, when it was all just fields dotted with cypress trees, like in that book they made us read in the eighth grade, The Red Pony. They had some pretty cool stuff there – not much, really, from Jesse's time, but a lot from later on, like after the Civil War. Jack and I were admiring something called a stereo-viewer, which is what people used for entertainment before movies, when this untidy-looking bald man came out of his office and peered at us through glasses with lenses as thick as Coke bottle bottoms and said, "Yes, you wanted to see me?"

  I said we wanted to see someone in charge. He said that was him, and introduced himself as Dr. Clive Clemmings, Ph.D. So I told Dr. Clive Clemmings, Ph.D., who I was and where I lived, and took the cigar tin from my JanSport backpack (Kate Spade really doesn't go with pleat-front khaki shorts) and showed him the letters....

  And he freaked out.

  I mean it. He freaked out. He was so excited, he told the old lady at the reception desk to hold his calls (she looked up, astonished, from the romance novel she was reading; it was clear that Dr. Clive Clemmings, Ph.D., must not get many calls) and ushered Jack and me back into his private office....

  Where I nearly had a coronary. Because there, above Clive Clemmings's desk, was Maria de Silva's portrait, the one I had seen in that book Doc had taken out of the library.

  The painter had done, I realized, an extraordinarily good job. He'd gotten it completely right, down to the artfully ringleted hair and the gold and ruby necklace around her elegantly curved neck, not to mention her snooty expression....

  "That's her!" I cried, completely involuntarily, stabbing my finger at the painting.

  Jack looked up at me as if I'd gone mental – which I suppose I momentarily had – but Clive Clemmings only glanced over his shoulder at the portrait and said, "Yes, Maria Diego. Quite the jewel in the crown of our collection, that painting. Rescued it from being sold at a garage sale by one of her grandchildren, can you imagine? Down on his luck, poor old fellow. Disgraceful, when you think about it. None of the Diegos ever amounted to much, however. You know what they say about bad blood. And Felix Diego – "

  Dr. Clive had opened the cigar box and, using some special tweezery-looking things, unfolded the first letter. "Oh, my," he breathed, looking down at it.

  "Yeah," I said. "It's from her." I nodded up at the painting. "Maria de Silva. It's a bunch of letters she wrote to Jesse – I mean, to Hector de Silva, her cousin, who she was supposed to marry, only he – "

  "Disappeared." Clive Clemmings stared at me. He had to be, if I guessed, in his thirties or so – despite the very wide spot of bare scalp along the top of his head – and though by no means attractive, he did not look so utterly repulsive just then as he had before. A look of total astonishment, which certainly does not become many, did wonders for him.

  "My God," he said. "Where did you find these?"

  And so I told him again, and he got even more excited, and told us to wait in his office while he went and got something.

  So we waited. Jack was very good while we did so. He only said, "When can we go to the beach already?" twice.

  When Dr. Clive Clemmings, Ph.D., came back, he was holding a tray and a bunch of latex gloves, which he told us we had to put on if we were going to touch anything. Jack was pretty bored by that time, so he elected to go back out into the main room to play with the stereo-viewer some more. Only I donned the gloves.

  But was I glad I did. Because what Clive Clemmings let me touch when I had them on was everything the historical society had collected over the years that had anything whatsoever to do with Maria de Silva.

  Which was, let me tell you, quite a lot.

  But the things in the collection that most interested me were a tiny painting – a miniature, Clive Clemmings said it was called – of Jesse (or Hector de Silva, as Dr. Clive referred to him; apparently only Jesse's immediate family ever called him Jesse … his family, and me, of course) and five letters, in much better condition than the ones from the cigar box.

  The miniature was perfect, like a little photograph. People could really paint back in those days, I guess. It was totally Jesse. It captured him perfectly. He had on that look he gets when I'm telling him about some great conquest I had made at an outlet – you know, scoring a Prada handbag for fifty percent off, or something. Like he couldn't care less.

  In the painting, which was just of Jesse's head and shoulders, he was wearing something Clive Clemmings called a cravat, which was supposedly something all the guys wore back then, this big frilly white thing that wrapped around the neck a few times. It would have looked ridiculous on Dopey or Sleepy or even Clive Clemmings, in spite of his Ph.D.

  But on Jesse, of course, it looked great.

  Well, what wouldn't?

  The letters were almost better than the painting, though, in a way. That's because they were all addressed to Maria de Silva . . . and signed by someone named Hector.

  I pored over them, and I can't say that at the time I felt a lick of guilt about it, either. They were much more interesting than Maria's letters – although, like hers, not the least romantic. No, Jesse just wrote – very wittily, I might add – about the goings-on at his family's ranch and the funny things his sisters did. (It turns out he had five of them. Sisters, I mean. All younger, ranging in age, the year Jesse died, from sixteen to six. But had he ever mentioned this to me before? Oh, please.) There was also some stuff about local politics and how hard it was to keep good ranch hands on the job what with the gold rush on and all of them hurrying off to stake claims.

  The thing was, the way Jesse wrote, you could practically hear him saying all this stuff. It was all very friendly and chatty and nice. Much better than Maria's braggy letters.

  And nothing was spelled wrong, either.

  As I read through Jesse's letters, Dr. Clive rattled on about how now that he had Maria's letters to Hector, he was going to add them to this exhibit he was planning for the fall tourist season, an exhibit on the whole de Silva clan and their importance to the growth of Salinas County over the years.

  "If only," he said wistfully, "there were any of them left alive. De Silvas, I mean. It would be lovely to have them as guest speakers."

  This got my attention. "There have to be some left," I said. "Didn't Maria and that Diego guy have like
thirty-seven kids or something?"

  Clive Clemmings looked stern. As a historian – and especially a Ph.D. – he did not seem to appreciate exaggeration of any kind.

  "They had eleven children," he corrected me. "And they are not, strictly, de Silvas, but Diegos. The de Silva family unfortunately ran very strongly to daughters. I'm afraid Hector de Silva was the last male in the line. And of course we'll never know if he sired any male offspring. If he did, it certainly wasn't in Northern California."

  "Of course he didn't," I said, perhaps more defensively than I ought to have. But I was peeved. Aside from the obvious sexism of the whole "last male in the line" thing, I took issue with the guy's assumption that Jesse might have been off procreating somewhere when, in fact, he had been foully murdered. "He was killed right in my own house!"

  Clive Clemmings looked at me with raised eyebrows. It was only then that I realized what I had said.

  "Hector de Silva," Dr. Clive said, sounding a lot like Sister Ernestine when we grew restless during the begats in Religion class, "disappeared shortly before his wedding to his cousin Maria and was never heard from again."

  I couldn't very well sit there and go, Yeah, but his ghost lives in my bedroom, and he told me …

  Instead, I said, "I thought the, um, perception was that Maria had her boyfriend, that Diego dude, kill Hector so she didn't have to marry him."

  Clive Clemmings looked annoyed. "That is only a theory put forward by my grandfather, Colonel Harold Clemmings, who wrote – "

  "My Monterey," I finished for him. "Yeah, that's what I meant. That guy's your grandfather?"

  "Yes," Dr. Clive said, but he didn't look too happy about it. "He passed away a good many years ago. And I can't say that I agree with his theory, Miss, er, Ackerman." I had donated Maria's letters in my stepfather's name, so Dr. Clive, sexist thing that he was, assumed that that was my name, too. "Nor can I say that his book sold at all well. My grandfather was extremely interested in the history of his community, but he was not an educated man, like myself. He did not possess even a B.A., let alone a Ph.D. It has always been my belief – not to mention that of most local historians, with the sole exception of my grandfather – that young Mr. de Silva developed what is commonly referred to as 'cold feet' " – Dr. Clive made little quotation marks in the air with his fingers – "a few days before the wedding and, unable to face his family's embarrassment over his jilting the young woman in such a manner, went off in search of a claim of his own, perhaps near San Francisco...."