Meg Cabot: Shadowland

"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 boarding house, 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, "Ah ha."

"Ah ha what?" I asked.

"Ah ha, 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, anymore 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 19

The phone rang a little while later. Dopey yelled down the hall that it was for me. I picked up, and heard Cee Cee 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!" Cee Cee 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' vote."

" Two-thirds ?" I'll admit it. That shocked me. "But, Cee Cee – I mean, why did people vote for me ? They don't even know me. I'm the new kid."