I said we wanted to see someone in charge. He said that was him, and introduced himself as Dr. Clive Clemmings, Ph.D. So I told Dr. Clive Clemmings, Ph.D., who I was and where I lived, and took the cigar tin from my JanSport backpack (Kate Spade really doesn’t go with pleat-front khaki shorts) and showed him the letters….

And he freaked out.

I mean it. He freaked out. He was so excited, he told the old lady at the reception desk to hold his calls (she looked up, astonished, from the romance novel she was reading; it was clear that Dr. Clive Clemmings, Ph.D., must not get many calls) and ushered Jack and me back into his private office….

Where I nearly had a coronary. Because there, above Clive Clemmings’s desk, was Maria de Silva’s portrait, the one I had seen in that book Doc had taken out of the library.

The painter had done, I realized, an extraordinarily good job. He’d gotten it completely right, down to the artfully ringleted hair and the gold-and-ruby necklace around her elegantly curved neck, not to mention her snooty expression….

“That’s her!” I cried, completely involuntarily, stabbing my finger at the painting.

Jack looked up at me as if I’d gone mental—which I suppose I momentarily had—but Clive Clemmings only glanced over his shoulder at the portrait and said, “Yes, Maria Diego. Quite the jewel in the crown of our collection, that painting. Rescued it from being sold at a garage sale by one of her grandchildren, can you imagine? Down on his luck, poor old fellow. Disgraceful, when you think about it. None of the Diegos ever amounted to much, however. You know what they say about bad blood. And Felix Diego—”

Dr. Clive had opened the cigar tin and, using some special tweezery-looking things, unfolded the first letter. “Oh, my,” he breathed, looking down at it.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s from her.” I nodded up at the painting. “Maria de Silva. It’s a bunch of letters she wrote to Jesse—I mean, to Hector de Silva, her cousin, who she was supposed to marry, only he—”

“Disappeared.” Clive Clemmings stared at me. He had to be, if I guessed, in his thirties or so—despite the very wide spot of bare scalp along the top of his head—and though by no means attractive, he did not look so utterly repulsive just then as he had before. A look of total astonishment, which certainly does not become many, did wonders for him.

“My God,” he said. “Where did you find these?”

And so I told him again, and he got even more excited, and told us to wait in his office while he went and got something.

So we waited. Jack was very good while we did so. He only said, “When can we go to the beach already?” twice.

When Dr. Clive Clemmings, Ph.D., came back, he was holding a tray and a bunch of latex gloves, which he told us we had to put on if we were going to touch anything. Jack was pretty bored by that time, so he elected to go back out into the main room to play with the stereo viewer some more. Only I donned the gloves.

But was I glad I did. Because what Clive Clemmings let me touch when I had them on was everything the historical society had collected over the years that had anything whatsoever to do with Maria de Silva.

Which was, let me tell you, quite a lot.

But the things in the collection that most interested me were a tiny painting—a miniature, Clive Clemmings said it was called—of Jesse (or Hector de Silva, as Dr. Clive referred to him; apparently only Jesse’s immediate family ever called him Jesse…his family, and me, of course) and five letters, in much better condition than the ones from the cigar box.

The miniature was perfect, like a little photograph. People could really paint back in those days, I guess. It was totally Jesse. It captured him perfectly. He had on that look he gets when I’m telling him about some great conquest I had made at an outlet—you know, scoring a Prada handbag for fifty percent off, or something. Like he couldn’t care less.

In the painting, which was just of Jesse’s head and shoulders, he was wearing something Clive Clemmings called a cravat, which was supposedly something all the guys wore back then, this big frilly white thing that wrapped around the neck a few times. It would have looked ridiculous on Dopey or Sleepy or even Clive Clemmings, in spite of his Ph.D.

But on Jesse, of course, it looked great.

Well, what wouldn’t?

The letters were almost better than the painting, though, in a way. That’s because they were all addressed to Maria de Silva…and signed by someone named Hector.

I pored over them, and I can’t say that at the time I felt a lick of guilt about it, either. They were much more interesting than Maria’s letters—although, like hers, not the least romantic. No, Jesse just wrote—very wittily, I might add—about the goings-on at his family’s ranch and the funny things his sisters did. (It turns out he had five of them. Sisters, I mean. All younger, ranging in age, the year Jesse died, from sixteen to six. But had he ever mentioned this to me before? Oh, please.) There was also some stuff about local politics and how hard it was to keep good ranch hands on the job what with the gold rush on and all of them hurrying off to stake claims.

The thing was, the way Jesse wrote, you could practically hear him saying all this stuff. It was all very friendly and chatty and nice. Much better than Maria’s braggy letters.

And nothing was spelled wrong, either.

As I read through Jesse’s letters, Dr. Clive rattled on about how now that he had Maria’s letters to Hector, he was going to add them to this exhibit he was planning for the fall tourist season, an exhibit on the whole de Silva clan and their importance to the growth of Salinas County over the years.

“If only,” he said wistfully, “there were any of them left alive. De Silvas, I mean. It would be lovely to have them as guest speakers.”

This got my attention. “There have to be some left,” I said. “Didn’t Maria and that Diego guy have like thirty-seven kids or something?”

Clive Clemmings looked stern. As a historian—and especially a Ph.D.—he did not seem to appreciate exaggeration of any kind.

“They had eleven children,” he corrected me. “And they are not, strictly, de Silvas, but Diegos. The de Silva family unfortunately ran very strongly to daughters. I’m afraid Hector de Silva was the last male in the line. And of course we’ll never know if he sired any male offspring. If he did, it certainly wasn’t in northern California.”