Sacred Ground (42 page)

When they neared the town they could smell the stench from the irrigation ditches into which plumbing from houses and shops all drained by means of wooden pipes. The streets were lit by lanterns hung outdoors by homeowners and shop owners, required by law. But the word was, gas lighting was coming to Los Angeles. The saloons were still brightly lit with honky-tonk music pouring out. Gunfire could be heard in the distance. Two men were fighting on the wooden sidewalk.

And they saw Indians sleeping in doorways, or staggering down the street, drunk on white man’s liquor.

The carriage passed Public School Number One on the corner of Spring Street. On Temple and Main Streets, where the town used to have only adobe buildings, they saw how Yankees were taking over with new buildings made of wood and brick. Spanish patios and fountains were being replaced by architectural styles with fancy names such as Romanesque, Queen Anne, Colonial Revival, and using pillars, gables, and mansard roofs. Street names had been changed: what was once
Loma
was now Hill,
Accytuna
was Olive,
Esperanzas
, Hope, and
Flores
was now Flower. Changed because of the Yankees.

As they rode around the Plaza, which stank of a recent bullfight, Angelique told Marina that there was word of a new hotel that was going to be built here and that it was going to have a bath on every floor, gas lighting, and a French restaurant. At three stories high it was going to be the tallest building in Los Angeles.

But Marina wasn’t interested. “Mother, why are we here?”

Angela didn’t know, only that she must keep going.

They left the main town and continued on the northeast road, three women in a carriage driven by a silent driver. They passed Chavez Ravine, a canyon where the town had put its potter’s field, a cemetery for strangers and the friendless poor, until finally they arrived at the Mission, its long narrow windows between tall buttresses making it look more like a fortress than a church. When Mexico had taken possession of Alta California, the new governor had abolished the Mission system and had either given or sold the land to his friends and relatives. San Gabriel had stood neglected for years, its Indians living in squalor, the walls and roof falling in, vineyards going to seed, until 1859, when the new American government restored the property to the Church. But it wasn’t the same anymore. Shacks and shanties surrounded the once-beautiful church.

As they sat solemnly in the carriage, the driver waiting for his mistress to issue further orders, Angela entertained a dim memory of a garden that had once been here, and an Indian woman tending herbs, humming softly in the sunshine. But then fever and a coughing sickness had taken her, and she had stood weak and ill during the dedication ceremony at the new Plaza. After that, a donkey ride to the mountains by the sea—

Angela gasped. Suddenly she knew. Knowledge that had been buried in her heart for eighty-five years broke free of its prison and soared like a bird.

I was born in this place. Not in Mexico as my mother told me. Or rather, not as Luisa had told me. For Luisa was not my real mother.

And now she understood why her thoughts throughout the day had been filled with memories of her childhood.
Perhaps when we draw near to the end, we are also drawing near to the beginning.

She also saw clearly what it was that had been haunting her all day— the feeling that there was something left undone, a final duty she had to fulfill. Now she knew what it was and why she had taken a midnight ride through Los Angeles.

She had come to say good-bye.

* * *

As they neared the foothills they could smell the sea. They knew they were riding across Rancho San Vicente y Santa Monica, owned by the Sepúlveda family. They heard the bells on sheep grazing nearby.

When they arrived at the canyon, Angela saw the rocks with the petroglyphs but she had forgotten what they meant. She had a dim memory of being brought here has a child, someone telling her that she was going to learn stories. But Angela was never taught those stories. She didn’t understand the significance of the cave, or its paintings, or why she felt that at one time this had been a very important place. She remembered riding here on her wedding night, and cutting off her braid.

Marina and Angelique accompanied her up to the cave. They unclamped a lantern from the carriage to light their way, and assisted the older woman, one on either side of her. Marina remembered this place. It was where Daniel had found her the night they started their life together.

They helped Angela inside. The cave was cold and dank, and smelled of centuries. The carriage lantern threw golden light upon walls covered in strange graffiti, and words carved into it:
La Primera Madre.
When they saw the painting of the two suns they gasped, it was so beautiful.

Bidding her daughter and granddaughter to sit, asking that they be silent, Angela eased herself down to the cold floor. The lantern stood in the center of the strange little circle, the faces of the three women cast in a surreal glow.

Angela sat for some minutes in the silence until she began to feel in her bones and in her blood what it was that had been missing. She closed her eyes.
Mama, are you here?
And she instantly felt a presence, warm, loving and protective. She realized that all her life there had been a hole inside her, a small area of emptiness so that she had never felt complete, had always felt she should be searching for something. She knew now what it was: her bloodline.

She suddenly understood why she had come here, why she had brought the oilskin bag with her, for it contained a parchment granting ownership of land to people who had no right to the land, whose ancestors dwelled far away. To the shock of her companions, Angela started digging into the floor of the cave, driving her ancient fingers into the hard earth. When Marina and Angelique tried to protest, she silenced them, and there was something in her voice, the set of her features, that made them obey.

They watched as the hole grew until she seemed satisfied. They did not know what was in the oilskin bag or why Angela placed it in the hole. They watched in fascination as she slowly scooped the earth back over it, covering also the jade Aztec figurine that had fallen from the pocket of her shawl. Angelique opened her mouth, but something silenced her. The Aztec goddess, that had seen her through some strange and beautiful times, was being consigned to the floor of this strange cave.

After she had finished burying the deed to Rancho Paloma, Angela felt a sense of peace steal over her. The land belonged to the First Mother and her descendants, not to the intruders, the invaders, but to the original people from whom it was stolen. As she patted down the soil, she thought:
I must tell the others. Marina, Angelique. They have Indian blood. Daniel, Seth… their children descended from this First Mother.

She started talking, urgently now because she knew her time was short: “We are Indian, we are Topaa, we descend from the First Mother who is buried here. We are the keepers of this cave. It is up to us to continue to pass down the traditions and stories and religion of our people. We have to keep the memories alive.”

They stared at her. “What is Grandmother saying, Auntie Marina?”

“I have no idea. She speaks gibberish.”

“Is it a language she speaks? It’s not at all like Spanish.”

“You must remember this place,” Angela said, not realizing she was speaking Topaa, the language she had spoken when she was a child and her mother had called her Marimi and told her she would someday be the clan medicine woman. “You must tell others about this cave.”

Angela took Marina’s hand, and said, “I named you Marina. I misunderstood the message in my dream. It was meant to be
Marimi.
”

“Mother, we do not understand what you are saying. Let us take you out of this place. Let us take you home.”

But Angela thought: I
am
home.

“Mother, please, you are frightening us.” Angelique and Marina reached for her.

But Angela’s thoughts were now upon the First Mother, who had trekked across the desert alone, outcast from the tribe, and pregnant. Yet she had endured. Angela looked at Marina, who had undergone rigors in China and endured much adversity yet had found the strength to work at her husband’s side, and Angelique, who had suffered a great ordeal in a mining camp up north. And Angela herself, no matter what Navarro did to her, she kept her pride and self-respect and dignity.
We are the daughters of the First Mother. This is her legacy to us.

Angela knew now why she had brought Marina and Angelique with her. Both would have, in another place and time, been clan medicine women for their tribe. But now they were married to Americans and had children named Charles and Lucy and Winifred. She closed her eyes and saw the silhouette of a raven against a blood-red sunset. He was flying to the land of the dead, where the ancestors had gone, and where they were waiting for her, Marimi, to join them.

Chapter Seventeen

She never used tricks. The ghosts that appeared were neither illusions nor the products of chicanery and hocus-pocus— or so Sister Sarah claimed. She always welcomed psychic debunkers to come to her Church of the Spirits in Topanga and run any analysis on her séances they wished. They would arrive with their cameras and recording equipment, heat sensors and motion detectors, the most sophisticated scientific devices of the day, hoping to catch her in a fraud. But they never did. Psychiatrists and men of the Church claimed the apparitions were the result of mass hysteria— people seeing what they
wanted
to see. But Sister Sarah maintained that her spirits were real and that she was the human conduit through which they passed from the realm of the Beyond to that of the living.

Erica was glued to the TV set in Jared’s motor home. When she had found the documentary video on the 1920s’ spiritualist, she had had no idea what a rich mine she was about to tap into: rare archival footage of Sister Sarah’s sermons where audiences of six thousand were brought to their feet in ecstasy as they saw deceased loved ones materialize, with the charismatic Sister Sarah onstage in her flowing robes, arms outstretched, head back, eyes closed, quivering with spiritual energy.

She had been an astounding beauty. Film clips from the few movies she had made prior to being discovered showed a sultry, sloe-eyed siren who had been variously labeled vamp, goddess, seductress, femme fatale. Audiences loved her. Footage also included home movies made by Edgar Rice Burroughs on his Tarzana Rancho, where Sarah was a frequent visitor, along with Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford. It was in those early days that her talent had been discovered, when she told fortunes to friends, counseled them on important decisions, and even helped the police locate a child that had gone missing in the Baldwin Hills. Word of mouth had spread, and she became more and more in demand for private séances. Sarah moved to larger venues, finding that she was just as able to summon numbers of ghosts as easily as one. People worshiped her. She reunited them with the dear departed. She was also the living promise of life after death.

While Sarah lifted her arms and eyes heavenward in the video, her audience breathless with spiritual anticipation, Erica consulted her watch. What was keeping Jared?

He had left hours ago for an urgent meeting with the Confederated Tribes of Southern California, hoping to dissuade them from putting a stop to DNA testing on the Emerald Hills skeleton. Their surprise move, resulting in a court order suspending all archaeological and forensic work in the cave, could ruin all possibilities for identifying the skeleton once and for all. Temporarily restrained from working in the cave, Erica had decided to take the time to pursue her search for the source of the painting in her dreams.

If Mrs. Dockstader was not her grandmother, and if Erica had never before set eyes on the painting over Mrs. Dockstader’s fireplace, then her childhood dreams must have stemmed from another source. It seemed logical that since Sister Sarah bought this property and filled in the canyon, someone might have taken a photograph inside the cave and published it somewhere.

But Erica was having a hard time concentrating.

All she could think about was she and Jared making love beneath the stars. Was
this
what it was like to be in love? No wonder people wrote songs about it! She felt giddy and silly, happy and delirious. But scared, too, that it might all be just a dream, or that she might lose him before she even had him. Maybe that was all part of—

She suddenly stared at the screen. Restored film footage, taken in 1922, was showing Sister Sarah going inside the cave. Erica shifted to the edge of her seat.

The camera was on the south ridge and focused down on the cave entrance. Sarah, in her trademark white robe and hood, disappeared into the darkness while her entourage and reporters waited dramatically outside. When she emerged minutes later, her expression was transfixed. The voice-over said, “Did Sister Sarah experience a spiritual revelation in this cave as she later claimed, or was she acting”? Shortly after she purchased the property, she had the canyon filled in, burying the cave so that we will never know what she saw in there.”

The closing film clip of the documentary, shot in 1928, showed a distraught Sister Sarah in front of microphones and journalists saying farewell to her followers. The news had come abruptly and unexpectedly, when the Church of the Spirits was at its peak popularity. Sarah did not explain why she was dropping out of public work, only that it was “God’s will.” She then vanished from view and although efforts were made to find her— newspapers ran contests, reporters vied for the big story— Sister Sarah was never heard from again.

The documentary ended, and as Erica turned off the TV, she thought: It all comes down to the cave. It was the painting that brought me here in the first place, and others over the centuries were drawn to the cave— the people who left behind the spectacles, the reliquary, the crucifix, the braid, the spirit-stone, the Aztec fetish, the deed to the rancho. Sister Sarah. How are they all connected? How do they connect to the painting in Kathleen Dockstader’s house?
How does it all connect to me?

What she and Jared had found on the original owners of Rancho Paloma was that the Navarros had been a prominent founding family in Los Angeles. Apparently the matriarch, a woman named Angela, had been a major force in shaping the new town. One of the things she had accomplished was pushing for a city park where people could sit or walk, and where bullfights would not be held, as they were in the Plaza. The park was created in 1866 and originally called Central Park— its contemporary name was Pershing Square. Today, in the San Fernando Valley there was a school named Angela Navarro Elementary, in her honor. Erica and Jared had also found out that Angela Navarro had lived at Rancho Paloma and died in there in 1866, and that a legal hassle had ensued upon her death when the family couldn’t produce the deed to the property.

Because it was buried in our cave. Whoever hid it there knew about the skeleton buried there, and who she was. And the people who visited the cave through the centuries knew who the woman was. DNA tests would at least point us in a direction.

“Hi.”

She looked up at Jared’s smile. Her heart executed a somersault. “Hi.” Sister Sarah’s séances weren’t the only miracles that had taken place here. Jared had finally called his father. They had talked for an hour. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a start. And Jared was going to design a house just for Erica. She said she liked the one the miniature Arbogasts lived in.

“I’m afraid I have some bad news. I can’t get them to change their minds about blocking the DNA testing.”

“We’ll just have to keep trying.”

He paused, smoky eyes filling up with the sight of her. Erica wondered if she and Jared would ever tire of the delicious thrill of suddenly being in each other’s presence. “There’s worse news, I’m afraid,” he said. “The bones are going to be removed and buried in a local Native American cemetery.”

“No! When?”

“As soon as possible. I’m sorry, Erica. You know, I never thought I would come around to your way of thinking, but I now believe that it’s wrong to remove bones until a cultural affiliation can be identified. I’ve never been a religious or spiritual man, but we know that the woman buried in the cave was, and that the people who came and paid homage to her were spiritual people. We have to honor that, and we also have a duty to find who are the rightful caretakers of her final resting place.”

He bent to kiss her.

Luke stuck his head through the door. “Uh, Erica? You have visitors. They said it’s important.”

She stepped outside and shielded her eyes against the sun. “Mrs. Dockstader!”

The older woman was dressed in white slacks and a pale pink blouse, with open-toed sandals and a small shoulder purse hanging from a long gold chain. Her eyes were hidden behind enormous sunglasses. “Tell me about the headaches,” she said.

* * *

Jared invited Kathleen Dockstader and her attorney to meet with Erica in his RV, which was more comfortable and more private than Erica’s tent or the lab trailer.

“Dr. Tyler,” the older woman began, “after you left I had my lawyer run a background check on you. As you seemed legitimate, an anthropologist working for the state with impressive credentials, I decided to check out your story. I hired a private detective to do a search on hippie communes, anyone who might have lived in one and could remember that far back. He tracked down someone running a tavern in Seattle, who had lived in a commune during the years my daughter would have. He said he remembered the Dockstader girl, a runaway heiress who didn’t want to have anything to do with her mother’s millions. They all admired her at the time. In retrospect, he thinks she was crazy. The detective asked him if he knew what happened to her. He said she left the commune with a musician on a Harley motorcycle.”

Kathleen paused, clasping and unclasping her hands. It was just as Jared had speculated: after he and Erica left her house a week ago, Mrs. Dockstader hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Erica. She had even canceled her world golf tour.

“And then there was this,” she said as she signaled to the attorney, who retrieved a book from his briefcase, handing it to her. Erica was astonished to see that it was her high school yearbook from 1982, the year she graduated. Kathleen opened it to a page marked with what turned out to be a small black-and-white photograph that looked as if it had been clipped from an earlier yearbook. The girl in the picture had a bouffant hairdo that curled out at the bottom in a flip. “This was taken in 1965,” Kathleen said. “When Monica was seventeen.” She laid the picture next to the one of Erica. “You were both the same age in these photos. The resemblance is astonishing, isn’t it?”

“We look like twins,” Erica murmured.

Kathleen closed the book and handed it back to the lawyer. “But what finally convinced me that you were my granddaughter was when you asked about the headaches. My mother had blinding headaches. Not just migraines, but strange fainting spells during which she heard things and saw things. Visions. Apparently it is an inherited trait. She told me that a great-aunt suffered from the same thing. No one knew about it. It was sort of our family secret. Others pretending to be you, who had come hoping to claim a reward or inheritance, knew nothing about the headaches.”

“Mrs. Dockstader—”

“Please call me Kathleen.”

“Why did my mother run away?”

“Because we wanted her to stay at a home for unwed mothers and keep her pregnancy a secret. Afterward, we were going to place the child with one of Herman’s sisters— Herman was my husband, Monica’s father. The child would have been raised as a cousin. We believed that having a baby would ruin Monica’s life.

“After she ran away, it devastated us. She was Herman’s princess, the light of his life. When she left, something died in him. We placed ads in all the personal classified sections of major newspapers around the country telling her that we wanted her and the baby to come home. But… we never heard.”

“Do you know who my father was?” Erica asked in a whisper.

“Monica would never tell us.” Kathleen brought a monogrammed handkerchief out of her purse. “I have no idea who he was. She wasn’t a bad girl. She was just spirited. You don’t know how many times since the day she left us I’ve wished her father and I had spoken different words. She wanted to have the baby at home. She would have stayed with us.” Kathleen turned shimmering, vulnerable eyes to Erica. “You would have been raised in our home.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

Kathleen dabbed her eyes with the handkerchief. “Neither do I. This is going to take some getting used to.”

They looked at each other, the younger woman scrutinizing the older woman’s face for signs of similarity— they shared the same widow’s peak hairline— the older woman looking at the face that would have been her daughter’s one day.

“I wonder,” said Kathleen, “if I might be permitted to see the cave.”

“The cave?”

“If I may.”

Jared escorted them both down the scaffolding, assisting the older woman down the steps while Erica produced a key for the padlock on the iron security gate. Inside, she turned on the fluorescent lights that bathed the cavern in a surreal glow, illuminating wooden timbers and struts, trenches carved into the floor, the wall covered with scarlet and gold suns and mysterious symbols, and finally the Lady, lying peacefully on her side beneath a protective transparent cover that looked like a glass sarcophagus.

Kathleen’s sigh whispered like a breeze, her eyes were filled with wonder. “I know all about this cave,” she said softly, as if not wishing to disturb the slumbering Lady, “the paintings on the wall, the words
Primera Madre.
It’s all exactly how I imagined it to be.”

Erica gave her a surprised look. “You’ve been here?”

“No no. This canyon was already filled in when I was a child. But I was told about it by someone who
had
been in here.”

“Who?”

She smiled. “The woman who painted the canvas of the two suns that hangs in my living room. The woman who built a retreat here called the Church of the Spirits. Sister Sarah, my mother. Your great-grandmother. I was her love child. I was the reason she vanished.”

* * *

“My mother always knew someone was buried in the cave,” Kathleen said. She and Erica were sitting in the sun-filled living room of Mrs. Dockstader’s Palm Springs house, going through albums full of pictures, news clippings, and mementos. “She sensed it, even though she had no proof. She even claimed that the spirit that dwelled in the cave had instructed her to build her Church of the Spirits on that spot.”

“What happened to her? Why did she vanish?”

“She was in love with a married man, but his wife wouldn’t give him a divorce. When my mother found out she was pregnant, she knew it would upset her followers, so she opted to vanish. She moved to a small town where there was no movie theater and where people were not likely to recognize her. I was born, and she raised me alone. I never saw my father. I don’t know if they ever had contact after that. All I know is that it was very tragic. My mother died when I was twenty-two. She was buried in the cemetery in that small town, and to this day no one knows that the woman in that grave is the famous Sister Sarah.”