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 nineteen ten. The oldest had been published in eighteen forty-nine.
"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!