Dead on Delivery (35 page)

Emilia nodded. “Let me go in first. I’ll walk in so she sees me. It will distract her. You and Meredith can slip in unnoticed and help me if I need it.”

It wasn’t much of a plan. It sounded reasonable, but my thoughts were clouded with worries about Ted. “What do you think she’s doing?” I asked.

Emilia shook her head. “I have no idea, but I don’t think it’s good.”

We parked the Buick a few blocks away from the cemetery and made our way separately on foot, with Emilia walking in the front gates bold as brass. Meredith and I split up. She was looking for a side gate. I didn’t bother. I vaulted into the cemetery over the fence. My fear for Ted was growing by the second.

I crept from tree to tree, ducking behind the large monuments, staying close to the ground. I could hear Emilia marching her way in, making no attempt at subterfuge. I hoped the noise she made masked any sign of my entrance and Meredith’s as well.

It only took a few minutes to figure out which direction to go. I could see a little pocket of light ahead of me and to my right. I made my way toward it as silently as I could.

Cemeteries at night are always creepy. It doesn’t matter how modern the cemetery is, how uniform the graves are or anything else. They’re just creepy. They always are. I am used to ghosts and goblins, and I am well aware that just because a person is dead doesn’t mean they’re out to get you and I still avoid going into cemeteries at night.

Cemeteries are even more creepy when someone has lit a ring of black candles on a relatively fresh grave site and has placed a skull with a candle jammed into it in the center of that circle. Maybe it’s the way the candlelight flickers and casts moving shadows across the ground or the way it lights just a few things, making the pockets of darkness all that much more intense. I don’t know. I just know it’s creepy.

If the person who made the ring of candles is dressed in a long white robe knotted with a rope and has a young man kneeling before her while she holds a knife to his throat, it ups the creepy factor considerably.

It makes my heart almost stop in my chest when I see my boyfriend lying facedown in the dirt with his hands and feet bound.

Suffice it to say, then, that when we found Rosalinda, her left hand fisted into Drew Bossard’s hair as he knelt in front of her and her right hand holding a knife to his throat, all while surrounded by a ring of black candles with a skull in the center of the ring, I was officially creeped out. Gooseflesh stood up all over my body. The hair on the back of my neck stood at attention and my flesh buzzed with recognition of magic in the air.

I watched Ted’s back rise and fall, so I knew he was still breathing. I needed to get to him, but there were yards of open space between him and me. My panic rose.

Emilia, however, seemed totally calm. I wasn’t sure if that made me feel better or worse.

“I knew you’d come.” Rosalinda smiled. The warmth and welcome of her smile chilled me. “I see you’ve brought friends. Come out, come out, wherever you are.”

So much for the surprise attack. I stepped out from behind the tree.

“Nice to meet you in person, Ms. Markowitz.”

“I’d say the pleasure was mine, but I’m trying to give up lying.” I smiled right back at her, but I kept my eye on the knife. It never wavered from Drew’s throat. I couldn’t let myself be distracted by her seductive voice, though. I could get to Ted before she could get to him with the knife, but then what? There was no way I could get him away from her before she could get to us with the knife. My focus didn’t go undetected.

“Do you like my knife?” she asked.

“It’s lovely.” What can I say? I like a nice piece of cutlery. “How’s the balance on it?” I held my hand out, as if she might give it to me so that I could test the heft.

She laughed. “Really? That’s your best effort?”

I shrugged. “Nah. Just an opening gambit. It never hurts to try, you know?”

“I disagree. Sometimes it can hurt quite a bit.” She turned the knife ever so slightly and nicked Drew. He cried out. Rosalinda merely tightened her grip on his hair. “Hush, love. Now’s not the time to make a fuss.”

“Rosalinda,” Emilia said. “Let the boy go. Please.”

Rosalinda laughed. It was a surprisingly pretty laugh, considering the circumstances. Musical, even. It wasn’t an evil mwa-ha-ha or even a hysterical laugh with a squeal at the end. She sounded genuinely amused. Personally, I didn’t think it was all that funny. “Why would I do that, Emilia?”

“Because he has no part in this. Not really.” Emilia sounded so calm. I was pretty sure my voice would come out a little squeaky and shaky if I tried to speak.

“But he’s where it began, Emilia.” Rosalinda leaned forward and kissed the top of Drew’s head. “Didn’t it, Drew? Didn’t it begin with you?”

“I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.” Drew’s voice sounded like what I thought mine would sound like, more than a little quavery.

“Don’t be like that, sweetheart. No regrets now. That’s the best way to live.”

She had a point, but I didn’t think she meant it quite the same way Aunt Kitty did when she was trying to talk me into buying a pair of boots at Macy’s Presidents’ Day Sale.

“Drew came to me. His brother had come home. You know the one. Neil Bossard? One of the ones who killed your cousin? I think he may have even been the one who gave the final kick to Jorge’s head, the one that truly finished him off.” Rosalinda’s voice had an almost singsong quality to it. She swayed a little as she spoke. Drew swayed with her as she pulled him back and forth by his hair, the knife right at his throat.

“I know him,” Emilia said between gritted teeth. At least she didn’t sound freaky calm anymore. It made me feel a little better.

“That’s right. You know him quite well. You made him that special doll with his hair and fingernail clippings. It’s an intimate process, isn’t it, Emilia? It makes a connection between you and that person. Were you surprised by that?” Rosalinda smiled at her.

“You were my
mentora
. You should have warned me. You should have told me.” Anger tinged Emilia’s voice.

“Where would the fun have been in that?” Rosalinda laughed again. “You have no idea how much I enjoyed watching you suffer through that. Oh, the tears that ran down your face onto those dolls!”

“I thought you were helping me heal myself,” Emilia accused.

“I know! Wasn’t that beautiful? When all the time I was going to use those dolls to kill you,” Rosalinda said.

“Wait a minute,” I broke in, and surprised myself with the strength in my voice. “Why did you want to kill Emilia? I thought you were her teacher?”

Rosalinda’s face sobered in an instant. “I was. She was a most promising pupil. I knew she would be. I felt her power the moment she came into my town. I knew she would be an incredible
bruja
, strong and compassionate. People would come from miles around for her help.”

“So why try to kill her?”

“Because this is my town!” Rosalinda screamed. Her hand clutched tighter in Drew’s hair, and he screamed out in pain as the knife bit into his throat for an instant. “My town! I tell you. Mine! Why should I let some simple girl from the backcountry come and take my town from me? That’s what she was doing, you know. Taking my town. Taking all I’d worked for for so long. All I heard was how Emilia had helped this one stop drinking or made that one stop beating his wife or cured a rash or calmed an ulcer.”

Meredith had been right. It all came down to envy and territory. “You started this because you were jealous?” I asked.

Rosalinda chuckled. “I wish I could take credit, but I can’t. This one started it.” She yanked on Drew’s hair again. He moaned. “Couldn’t stand to have big brother back, could you? It was bad enough that your parents had used up every dime of their money trying to keep him from going to jail. Every cent of the money that was to send you to college, to get you out of this town, to buy you fancy cars and computers and trinkets, had gone to their failed effort to defend him. Now he was home and everyone was acting like he was some kind of hero. You didn’t kick an innocent man to death for walking with a white girl. You didn’t call him a spic or a beaner or a wetback. Where were the dinners in your honor? Where were the hugs and the praise? Like always, they all went to Neil, didn’t they? Poor little Drew. He came to me. He wanted his brother gone, out of the way, for good. And I knew just how to do it without getting my hands dirty.” Rosalinda looked satisfied.

“You got Emilia to make the dolls that would curse them,” I said.

“Oh, yes. I made sure she saw those boys strutting around town as if they owned it. I whispered in her ear about how unfair it was that they should be living and laughing while her poor cousin rotted in the earth. Who wouldn’t be angry? Who wouldn’t want revenge? Even our sainted Emilia is human underneath it all, aren’t you,
cara
?”

“Too human,” she said, her voice soft. “I hated those boys. I hated them for what they had done. I hated them for having so much handed to them on a silver platter. I hated them for taking what little poor Jorge had and spitting on it. I hated this town for creating them, for making the monsters that thought it was good sport to kill a boy because his skin was a different color than theirs. I hated that they’d gotten so little punishment in light of what they’d done. I had so much hate.”

Rosalinda cocked her head, her face full of sympathy. “You did. You had so much hate. It was poisoning you. You couldn’t sleep. You couldn’t eat. Your work suffered. Remember when Margo came to you with that rash? It should have been simple for a
curandera
like yourself to heal it, but you couldn’t make it go away, could you? It just stayed and stayed, just like those boys staying and staying.”

Tears rolled down Emilia’s cheeks. “Yes. My hate. It tainted everything I touched. It made my food taste bitter. It gave me dreams of blood and revenge. I came to you, my
mentora
, for help.”

“And I did help, didn’t I? I gave you someplace to put that hate to get it out of you, out of your system.” Rosalinda smiled.

Emilia nodded, tears still streaming from her eyes. “You did. You showed me how to take all that hate and pour it into something else and then you and I came here together and buried them in the cemetery under the full moon. They would rest here with the dead and no harm would come to anyone.”

“And on the next full moon, I came and dug them up! It was so simple, so beautiful. All I had to do was have them delivered to their rightful recipients and everything would be set in motion. That’s where you came in, Melina. I heard about you. A person who makes deliveries. No questions asked, but that’s not how it worked, was it? You started asking questions.” Rosalinda made a tsking noise. “See where that gets you?”

Apparently in a cemetery under a full moon, hoping you can stop the murder of a young, if not terribly innocent, man. “Sorry about that. I’ll make sure I edit my ad in the supernatural yellow pages next time.”

“Well, as sorry as you are, Drew here is going to be sorrier. You ruined everything, you know.” Rosalinda caressed the side of Drew’s jaw with the flat of the knife. “The second you made the doll, I felt it. I felt what you’d done. Now he’s going to die and it will be all your fault.”

“Why does he have to die?” Emilia stepped forward.

Rosalinda laughed. “Because I love him now.” She turned the knife and slid it along the side of his cheek. Drew screamed and a long, thin line of red appeared on his cheek.

I ignored the blood. I am not terribly squeamish. Working as a filing clerk in the emergency room will root out the delicate and weak-stomached pretty quickly. As long as the body fluids don’t spray directly on me, I’m generally okay.

Cruelty, however, turns my stomach. Maybe it’s a general feeling that mean people suck, but seeing someone deliberately inflicting pain on another makes me queasy. Go figure.

“You’re upset,” Rosalinda said, her mouth pursed. Her face looked sympathetic. It was hard to take her concern as sincere when she was tipping Drew forward to let his blood drip into a bowl set on the ground next to him.

“A little.”

“Not nearly as much as Emilia is, though.” Rosalinda smiled at her former student again. “You thought you could undo all of what you’ve done with one little doll?”

“I’ll never be able to undo what I’ve done.” Emilia hung her head. “I’d hoped to balance it out.”

“Ah, yes, balance and harmony. That’s always your goal, isn’t it, Emilia?” Rosalinda asked.

Emilia nodded. It didn’t sound all bad to me. There were plenty of days I wished I had a little balance and harmony going.

“Here’s the thing about balance, Emilia, I believe in it, too. You’re always looking at the little details, though. Is the head balanced with the heart? Is the liver balanced with the lungs? You have to look at the bigger picture. Without the darkness, light has no meaning. Without sour, there is no sweet. And without hate, there is no love. Did you think about that when you tried to destroy my hatred, Emilia? Did you think of the consequences of that?”

Emilia shook her head.

“Of course not. You never think in the big picture. You have a lot to learn yet,
mi hija
. Did you think of what it would mean for me to have to love this pathetic excuse of a man?” She shook Drew’s head again. He whimpered. “The thought of it disgusts me and yet here I am, feeling a tightness in my chest every time I look at him. His own hate has been sucked dry now. He got his revenge on his brother, on his parents, on his town and it wasn’t the tasty dish he bargained for, was it, Drew?”

“No,” he whimpered. “No. If I could take it back, I would.”

Rosalinda laughed her beautiful trill of a laugh again. “Oh, it’s much too late for that,
mi querido
. Much, much too late.”

“If you love him, then let him go, Rosalinda. I beg you. Let us stop this. No one else needs to get hurt.” Emilia stepped forward.