Darkest Hour Read online

  I glared at Dopey from across the table.

  “I was going to call him anyway,” I said, “to find out what I’m supposed to do with the leftover cash from our class trip to Six Flags.”

  “I’ll take it,” Sleepy joked. Why did my mother have to marry into a family of comedians?

  “Can I see them?” I asked, pointedly ignoring both my stepbrothers.

  “See what, honey?” Andy asked me.

  For a moment I forgot what we were talking about. Honey? Andy had never called me honey before. What was going on here? Were we—I shudder to think it—bonding? Excuse me, I already have one father, even if he is dead. He still pops by to visit me all too often.

  “I think she means the letters,” my mother said, apparently not even noticing what her husband had just called me.

  “Oh, sure,” Andy said. “They’re in our room.”

  “Our room” is the bedroom Andy and my mother sleep in. I try never to go in there, because, well, frankly, the whole thing grosses me out. Yeah, sure, I’m glad that my mom’s finally happy, after ten years of mourning the death of my dad. But does that mean I want to actually see her in bed with her new husband, watching The West Wing? No thank you.

  Still, after dinner, I steeled myself and went in there. My mom was at her dressing table taking off her makeup. She has to go to bed very early in order to be up in time for her stint on the morning news.

  “Oh, hi, sweetie,” my mom said to me in a dazed, I’m-busy kind of way. “They’re over there, I think.”

  I looked where she pointed on top of Andy’s dresser and found the metal box Dopey had dug up along with a lot of other guy-type stuff, like loose change and matches and receipts.

  Anyway, Andy had tried to clean the box up, and he’d done a pretty good job of it. You could read almost all the writing on it.

  Which was kind of unfortunate, because what the writing said was way politically incorrect. Try new Red Injun cigars! it urged. There was even a picture of this very proud-looking Native American clutching a fistful of cigars where his bow and quiver ought to have been. The delicious aroma will tempt even the choosiest smoker. As with all our products, quality assured.

  That was it. No surgeon general’s warning about how smoking can kill. Nothing about fetal birth weight. Still, it was kind of strange how advertising from before they had TV—before they even had radio—was still basically the same as advertising today. Only, you know, now we know that naming your product after a race of people will probably offend them.

  I opened the box and found the letters inside. Andy was right about their poor condition. They were so yellowed that you could hardly peel them apart without having pieces crumble off. They had, I could see, been tied together with a ribbon, a silk one, which might have been another color once, but was now an ugly brown.

  There was a stack of letters, maybe five or six in all, in the box. I can’t tell you, as I picked up the first one, what I thought I’d see. But I guess a part of me knew all along what I was going to find.

  Even so, when I’d carefully unfolded the first one and read the words Dear Hector, I still felt like somebody had snuck up behind me and kicked me.

  I had to sit down. I sank down into one of the armchairs my mom and Andy keep by the fireplace in their room, my eyes still glued to the yellowed page in front of me.

  Jesse. These letters were to Jesse.

  “Suze?” My mom glanced at me curiously. She was rubbing cream into her face. “Are you all right?”

  “Fine,” I said in a strangled voice. “Is it okay…is it okay if I just sit here and read these for a minute?”

  My mom began to slop cream onto her hands. “Of course,” she said. “You’re sure you’re all right? You look a little…pale.”

  “I’m great,” I lied. “Just great.”

  Dear Hector, the first letter said. The handwriting was beautiful—loopy and old-fashioned, the kind of handwriting Sister Ernestine, back at school, used. I could read it quite easily, despite the fact that the letter was dated May 8, 1850.

  1850! That was the year our house had been built, the first year it was in business as a boardinghouse 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 hoopskirt 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 mu
rdered…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 after-life—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 more than a hundred and fifty 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 remembered 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 (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.