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."