But let me tell you, it came back in full force when, just a few hours later, I woke with a start to find a hand pressed over my mouth.

And, oh yeah, a knife held to my throat.

chapter

four

Being a mediator, I am not unaccustomed to being woken in, shall we say, a less than gentle manner.

But this was a lot less gentle than usual. I mean, usually when someone wants your help, they go out of their way not to antagonize you …which waving a knife around has a tendency to do.

But as soon as I opened my eyes and saw who this knife-wielding individual was, I realized that probably what she wanted was not my help. No, probably what she wanted was to kill me.

Don’t ask me how I knew. Undoubtedly those old mediator instincts at work.

Well and the knife was a pretty significant indicator.

“Listen to me, you stupid girl,” Maria de Silva hissed at me. Maria de Silva Diego, I should say, since at the time of her death, she was married to Felix Diego, the slave-runner. I know all this from that book Doc got out of the library called My Monterey, a history of Salinas County from 1800 to 1850. There’d even been that portrait of Maria in it.

Which was how I happened to know who was trying to kill me this time.

“If,” Maria hissed, “you don’t get your father and brother to stop digging that hole”—um, step- father and stepbrother, I wanted to correct her, only I couldn’t, on account of the hand over my mouth—“I’ll make you sorry you were ever born. Got that?”

Pretty tough talk from a girl in a hoopskirt. Because that’s what she was. A girl.

She hadn’t been when she’d died. When she had died, around the turn of the century—last century, of course, not this one—Maria de Silva Diego had been around seventy or so.

But the ghost on top of me appeared to be my own age. Her hair was black, without a hint of gray, and she wore it in these very fancy ringlets on either side of her face. She appeared to have a lot going on in the jewelry department. There was this big fat ruby hanging from a gold chain around her long, slender neck—very Titanic and all—and she had some heavy-duty rings on her fingers. One of them was cutting into my gums.

That’s the thing about ghosts, though—the thing that they always get wrong in the movies. When you die, your spirit does not take on the form your body had at the moment you croaked. You just don’t ever see ghosts walking around with their guts spilling out, or their severed head in their hands, or whatever. If you did, Jack might have been justified in being such a little scaredy-cat.

But it doesn’t happen that way. Instead, your ghost appears in the form your body had when you were at your most vital, your most alive.

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 from 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.