Cry in the Night (9 page)

Chapter 8

I slipped like a ghost past the living room where embers glowed in the fireplace and tiptoed down the stone stairs and paused beside the splashing fountain to listen. Knowing myself to be an intruder now, I crept to the door of the poolroom and watched a long moment to be sure the glimmering green water was empty, that the tables and chairs waited silently for players who would not come this night.

My soft slippers slapped against the tile floor. I stopped twice more to listen. The night seemed full of movement and sound, but each time there was nothing but the soft ripple of water, distant barking of dogs, and, once, the faint trill of a whistle.

I reached the sliding door and cautiously stepped out onto volcanic flagstones. The colonnaded wing loomed darkly to my left.

It must have taken me some few minutes to make that journey, to slip on a dressing gown and move uncertainly down the dark hall, to pass the living room and then to step quietly down the stairs, pausing to make sure no one was about.

It was only when I was outside, shivering in the chill air, that I realized I was not alone in the garden. First I strained to see into the shadows beneath the colonnade, where Tony had entered a room. The faint murmur of voices wasn’t coming from that direction. No, somewhere deep in the garden voices whispered as lightly as leaves rustling in a gentle breeze.

Now it was I who stepped from shadow to shadow, moving ever deeper into the garden. The deep, sweet scent of the roses and freshly turned damp earth mingled. Water fell softly in the central fountain. Once I stepped on a magnolia leaf and it crackled so sharply I knew the whisperers must hear. I waited, breath held, but the soft light whispers continued. Then it was silent. Footfall by footfall, I crept on. I was almost upon them when they spoke again. They were hidden deep inside the concealing shadow of an arbor thickly vined with honeysuckle. I was so close I could have reached out and touched them.

Somehow it didn’t shock me to recognize Gerda’s voice. She was anxious, frightened. I could not understand the Spanish but I could hear the fear.

Then the man spoke. He whispered, too, and his voice was soft and gentle. I could not believe my ears. Did not want to believe my ears.

Oh please, no. It mustn’t be Tony. Not Tony.

But I had seen him in the garden only a little while before. Had it been Gerda’s door that had opened and closed so quickly?

Surely not. Somehow that did not seem a likely spot for the bedroom of the mistress of the house.

“My father’s wife.” That was how he had introduced her to me that first night on the stairs. I had thought he did not like her. Was it, instead, that he liked his father’s wife all too well? As for the things he had told me this afternoon, was it on his father’s account that they rankled?

Unable to leave, but hating to listen, I stayed beside the arbor a moment longer. I could not see them, could only hear them behind their curtain of vines. But I heard his voice, a soft and tender voice, and it was the timbre of Tony’s though lighter than I remembered. But that would be the lightness of love, of intimacy.

She started to speak again and then her voice fell away and I knew his mouth had closed on hers.

I did turn then and moved blindly away, somehow managing not to make any noise. I regained my room without being seen. I no longer cared whose room he had stepped into earlier. He was nothing that he had seemed to be.

I must have slept. It didn’t seem that my eyes ever closed that long, miserable night, but darkness shaded to dawn, pigeons cooed a welcome to a cool shining morning, and the house awoke.

I dressed slowly, heavily. I tried to analyze why I felt so bereft. Why should I care what Tony Ortega did? I brushed my hair, one stroke after another, and remembered the unfeigned admiration in his eyes when he looked up the steps at me that first night. That had been real. I knew it. I felt it. I was sure of it.

But Sheila, a dry sardonic voice inquired, you’ve been wrong on everything so far, haven’t you?

I laid down the brush and leaned close to the mirror. Coral-toned lipstick and a delicate touch of eye shadow, but the green eyes I stared into were somber, the green of hanging moss, still and lifeless.

When I was dressed, when I had taken all the time over it that I could, I stood for a moment and stared at my closed door. I could hear, outside on the patio, the rhythmic whish of a broom as one of the maids swept the terrace. The morning had started and I could not stay forever in this room. At dinner last night, a lifetime ago, they all had tried to help me plan today and we had settled, Tony and I, on a trip to Teotihuacán, the city “where god was offered prayers.”

I could not possibly spend the day with Tony.

I would, at the moment, have done almost anything to escape the Casa Ortega. But I had accepted the big freebie and I was committed, for good or ill.

I straightened my belt one last time, smoothed my hair and, face schooled, opened my door and began the day. I realized, even before I reached the stone stairs, that the house itself had an air of uneasiness. It was too quiet, a house listening to itself, waiting, wondering.

When I reached the patio, I turned reluctantly toward the breakfast table, expecting to see some member of the family, dreading to see Tony.

The table was set, each place setting a gay spot of color with mats of yellow straw and napkins of pale lime. No one was there. I looked down at my watch. It was half past eight, the same hour I had breakfasted with everyone the morning before.

I walked slowly toward that empty table. If no one else came, no one at all, it could only mean that they were avoiding me. Did all of them, every last one of them, know or guess why the dismembered doll was thrown in my room? What did they think?

I stopped at the place where I had sat yesterday and there was an envelope waiting there. It was addressed to me in a heavy sloping script that I did not know.

I read the message:

Dear Sheila,

A business matter requires my attention today so I must forego our trip to Teotihuacán. Maria is fixing you a box lunch and Manuel will be ready to leave at your pleasure.

I hope you find the pyramids interesting.

Tony

Signed Tony and that was all. Nothing about tonight or tomorrow. I should have been delighted that I would not have to face him. Instead my disappointment was sharp and startling.

I ate alone. The little maid who had brought me chocolate the first night waited the table. Twice I caught her watching me, her eyes huge and frightened. I tried once, in a pidgin sort of Spanish dredged up from guidebook studies, to ask where the family was but when she answered I could not understand a word.

I wasn’t hungry. There is nothing quite like the feeling of being a pariah to discourage appetite. I picked at my papaya and drank one cup of the hot sweet coffee, and then I dropped the napkin beside my plate and left the table. I stopped on the terrace to look across the beautiful garden and to wonder what I was going to do next.

It was very still, still and cool in the early-morning quiet. At the far end of the garden, near the sudden stark uplift of lava, the glossy bright green leaves of a huge magnolia rustled, were still, rustled again.

I began to walk that way, down a graveled path that curved among gladiolas then around a fountain with iron frogs spewing water in never-ending streams. The leaves rustled again on this one particular low branch and I heard a quickly smothered giggle and I knew my guess was correct.

The girls, in blue shorts and bright orange T-shirts, clung like locusts to a broad low-hanging branch and were, from only a few feet away, well hidden by the broad glossy leaves of the magnolia.

“Rita? Francesca?” I called softly.

“Shh,” they whispered.

“We aren’t supposed to be out. Maria told us—” Rita nudged her sister. There was an instant of sharp silence.

Told them what? Not to talk to the American visitor?

I knew better than to ask a direct question. But I felt sure they could tell me what was happening or, at least, some of it. Sometimes children don’t understand what they see, but they always see more than anyone thinks.

I sat down on a wrought-iron bench beside the magnolia. “I won’t tell anyone I spoke to you or saw you here. We’ll keep it a secret between us.”

They liked that. They had, like healthy kittens, a hungry curiosity. I let them in their artless fashion work around to last night.

“Couldn’t you see anything?” Rita asked.

“Not a thing. Tell me, girls, I’ll bet you have some ideas about it. What do you think it means?”

They backed and filled, interrupted each other, bubbling with excitement.

“Maria said it was spite, a mean trick by Lorenzo,” Francesca explained.

“Who’s Lorenzo?”

“He was Pancho’s assistant in the garden and Gerda fired him last week,” Rita said importantly.

“Juan laughed when Gerda wondered if it was Lorenzo. Juan said it was meant to scare you, a sacrifice,” Francesca said quickly.

“A sacrifice?” I repeated.

“You know,” Rita said, “like the Aztecs.”

I remembered too clearly the sundered arms and legs, the torn chest of the torso.

“The Aztecs,” I said faintly.

The little girl nodded casually. “They had to have sacrifices all the time so the sun would come up.”

I must have looked shocked at that.

Childlike, she took it as a lack of belief. “I mean it,” she insisted, forgetting to whisper. “They took people up to the top of the pyramid and they say it was almost at the Zócalo and when they got them up to the top, they had to stretch out on this sort of stone slab—”

“Then the priests, and they were all dirty and smelly because they didn’t bathe,” Francesca interrupted, “they took a knife, just like the one Juan found on your floor last night, and made a kind of big
X
on their chests and pulled out the heart and it was all pumping blood and they put it in this special stone holder.”

“I see.” I paused and looked at the two earnest little faces above me. “Juan said someone hurt the doll to frighten me?”

They both looked scared at that and whispered again and said I mustn’t repeat what they had told me because they just happened to overhear Juan and Gerda and they would be in lots of trouble if anyone knew they had heard.

They had been eavesdropping. It was as clear as the suddenly distinct freckles on their noses. Obviously, they were scared witless of Gerda and Juan. I wondered why. I reassured them and reminded them again that everything we had talked about was a secret between us. They were relieved, but still nervous and ready to slip away.

It was then, and somehow I kept my voice steady, that I asked them what Tony thought.

“He is afraid it’s El Viejito,” Francesca said.

Rita hissed in Spanish at her sister like an angry little duck.

Francesca clapped her hand to her mouth, then said hurriedly, “It couldn’t be him. Maria said it was much more likely to be Lorenzo. She said El Viejito doesn’t do strange things, that it was only Gerda who wanted everyone to think he was crazy.”

This time Rita clapped her own hand over Francesca’s mouth and stared defiantly at me. “It isn’t El Viejito.”

I had no idea who El Viejito was, but I knew what to say. “I’m sure it isn’t. I can’t imagine why anyone would think that.”

My fishing expedition was so successful that I felt a quick rush of shame.

Rita smiled, grateful for those comforting words. “It is only, señorita, that he is old now and Gerda would like for him to be sent away. She says he watches her and that he is too much taken up with the old gods and the old ways.” Her small brown face furrowed in a frown. “He has been very upset lately, but he won’t tell us why.”

“Rita. Francesca.”

Maria stood at the top of the terrace, shading her eyes, staring this way.

“She mustn’t know we talked to you,” Rita said frantically.

I knew then I was not mistaken in thinking the family was trying to shut me out of what was happening. “I won’t tell her. I promise.”

I left the twins clinging to their branch, still invisible to anyone walking in the garden. Maria watched me come up the path, her dark face impassive, but before I reached the terrace she turned and went back into the house.

Was she avoiding me purposely? Or was she busy about her own tasks and I wasn’t one of them?

I walked slowly up the path toward the house. I was uncertain what to do next. I had made one attempt to leave the house and go to a hotel. It would be awkward to try again. I couldn’t as a representative of my museum afford to offend such important benefactors.

I paused on the terrace, looking up at the house. Its stucco gleamed a soft apricot. It was utterly beautiful in the soft morning light and I hated it and wished I were back in sooty, smelly New York, passing by glass-fronted shops near my apartment, nodding to old Mr. Kaber sweeping out his grocery, stopping on my way to the subway to buy my morning paper.