The Secret of Everything (9 page)

Easy does it. She’d have to pace herself. Start small and gauge her progress carefully.

In between, there were plenty of other things to do. She would definitely explore the church and the pilgrimage route to the shrine, and discover any attractive legends and stories they could use in the brochure. She also needed to visit Green Gate Farms. And, for herself, she needed to go down to the river.

A coppery cold moved along her spine at the thought. It could wait.

This morning, she’d head down to the hotel restaurant and check out their brunch. Much as she’d love to just go back to 100 Breakfasts, she should sample more than one meal at the hotel. And there might be some celebrity-sightings, too. Always fun.

The heat surprised her when she left the hotel in late morning. It murmured around her as she walked down the portico in the deep shade, but when she stepped out of the shadows, the sun
fell on her skin like a skillet, heavy and hot. She paused for a moment, closing her eyes, letting it sink deep into her bones. Sunlight at such a high altitude had ferocity to it, texture, weight.

“Don’t forget your sunscreen, young lady,” said a man passing by.

Tessa opened her eyes. He was thin and stooped, maybe eighty or a little more, and she’d seen him doing his loops around the plaza yesterday. She smiled. “It feels good, doesn’t it?”

“I like the snow myself, but we’re not long off for that, so it’s all right I reckon.” He waved twisted fingers her way and marched onward.

Earlier, the church bells had been ringing loud and long. Tessa had looked up the history of the ancient church on the Internet as she ate her breakfast on the patio, covertly watching a pair of actors feed each other cubed cantaloupe.

Her father had told her there were ghosts attached to the church, and the history of the place certainly lent itself to that idea. Maybe the missionaries slaughtered by the Indians, or the Indians the Spanish slaughtered when they returned. There had also been a raid by the Comanche, who stole seven women from a wedding feast.

Standing now in the high, hot sun, Tessa shaded her eyes to look at it. It was the kind of church painters could not resist, with adobe covering its curved bones like peachy flesh, exaggerated by the sharp shadow cast by that fierce sun. Over the whole stretched the plastic blue sky. Constructed simply, it had two bell towers, with a heavy pine doorway between them. A wall created a protected garden in front. A bus with its motor still running was parked in the narrow street in the rear, and milling tourists shot it from several angles.

Tessa resisted shooting it now, when there were so many people about. Not only the cluster of tourists from the bus but another knot of people had gathered outside the wall, at the base of what looked to be a trail. Most of them were barefoot, and as she watched, they took off their hats and gave water bottles to a young man collecting them in a box.

She asked a man nearby, “Do you know what they’re doing?”

“Pilgrims,” he said. “They walk to the top of the mountain to visit a shrine.”

“Ah, I read about that.”

Through her viewfinder she focused on a woman who looked to be in her sixties, with curly salt-and-pepper hair and knobby knees. A rosary looped around her left wrist, green beads glittering. For a minute, Tessa was lost in the repetitive shapes—curls and kneecaps and beads. Joy, the soft white of clouds, moved in her. She was shooting everything in her drunken rediscovery and would be lucky to get even a handful of great shots, but it didn’t matter. The colors and shapes, the quietness of seeing the world only in a single frame at a time was filling some empty chamber of her heart.

She made a mental note to check the length of the pilgrimage route and its difficulty. It was the kind of walk she always did in any locale—whatever was notable or interesting. Maybe, before she left, she’d be able to hike it.

For now she would explore the church. Entering through the wooden gates set into the adobe wall, Tessa found herself in a splendiferous garden. Trumpet vines, blooming orange in defiance of the heat, covered the internal walls, mixed with wilted morning glories. Corn with silky new tassels grew in tidy rows, along with the elephant-ear leaves of squashes and tomatoes staked within wire supports.

A young priest with dark-framed glasses and a black shirt with short sleeves filled a basket with zucchini and crooknecks. When he spied Tessa, he nodded. “Good morning.”

“Weren’t these courtyards usually given to graves?” she asked him.

“They were. Very good.” He straightened, brushing off his knees. “It was so dangerous here at St. Nicholas that the garden was created inside the walls and the bodies buried behind the church. Even so, the first missionaries were killed.”

Tessa held back a slight smile. “That’s what you get for ‘nailing lifts to the natives’ feet.’”

His dark eyes held a bright twinkle. “George Carlin.”

“Very good.”

“We do get out now and then to hear something of the world.”

“Touché.” She gestured to the healthy plants. “It looks very fertile.”

“Well, we have animals in the pasture. Once, they kept the animals inside the walls, too, but that’s not such a problem for us nowadays.” He slapped his gloves together.

“Do you sell what you grow at the farmers’ market?”

“Oh, no, my dear. All of this produce goes to the poor. We feed many every year.”

“Now, that’s a church program that makes sense. Do you do all the work yourself?”

“Afraid not. I mainly putter. There’s a garden committee that plans and tends it for us. One of our parishioners runs the kitchens at Green Gate Farms, and she’s been gardening organically for twenty years. She’s helped us set up a system that works very well.”

Tessa watched a fat bumblebee, heavy with nectar, launch himself lazily from the wide trumpet of a squash blossom.
Pumpkins ripened near the wall, and she could make out peppers, garlic, onions, and what might be potatoes. “So is this all organic, too?”

“It is,” he said proudly.

The sound of the bus trundling up the hill, away from the church, barely disturbed the depth of silence. “Why St. Nicholas? Isn’t he Santa Claus?”

“He’s the patron saint of thieves—
los ladrones.”

“Ah! Of course.” She grinned. “Is the pilgrimage to St. Nicholas, too?”

“No, it’s a shrine to the Blessed Mother.”

She nodded. “Do you get a lot of tourists here?”

“A few. The pilgrims—did you see them leaving?—come once or twice a month. It’s usually a church group or something like that. Once,” he said with a grin, “we had a Red Hat Society make the trek.”

Tessa chuckled.

“Mostly, it’s just a bus that stops on its way to see something else. The church is not that important or particularly unusual.” He stabbed at a weed with his toe. “The tourists come for the town.”

“How long has the foodie thing been going on?”

“Oh, that.” He waved a hand.

“You don’t like it?”

He smiled gently. “It’s very indulgent, isn’t it? Greed and gluttony mixed together with a big helping of lust.”

Startled by the acuity of his observation, Tessa laughed. “True. But it’s also beauty and nurturance and creation, right?”

“Absolutely. All things in balance.” His smile broadened. He couldn’t be thirty, and yet an old soul gazed at her through dark brown eyes. Stepping forward, he offered his hand. “I’m Father Timothy,” he said.

“Tessa Harlow.” His grip was strong and solid. “How far is it to the top of the mountain?”

“Four miles and a bit, and nearly twenty-five hundred feet in altitude.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Wow. Steep!”

“Well,” he said gently, “a pilgrimage is meant to be trying.”

“I see.”

“If you’d like a less challenging walk, the lake is only a mile and a half.”

She wanted to protest, to present her credentials, like a badge of fitness—she had led adventure tours all over the world! She had sometimes hiked more than twenty miles a day in rugged terrain!—but it would all be a smoke screen. Four miles—eight by the time she returned—would be far more than she could do on her still-healing foot. Even a mile and a half might be pushing it, but she was going to give it a try. “Thanks.”

“The views are magnificent.”

A woman with the cropped hair and round shape of a lifelong nun appeared at the door of the rectory. “Father? There’s a call for you.”

“Excuse me.” He bowed. “Good to meet you.”

Before Natalie’s dad had to work on Saturday morning, rescuing somebody who wasn’t supposed to be climbing the rocks anyway, they were all supposed to go on a picnic. Instead, they got stuck at Grandma’s, and now they were going on a picnic today and it was hot, hot, hot.

Natalie sat in the shade beneath the tree in the plaza, holding her sister Hannah’s hand, waiting for her dad to come out
of the drugstore with sunscreen. They had to
walk
to the lake, naturally, because nobody could ever just drive anywhere around here. Already her skin was prickly down her back. Her grandma said she should wear a hat, but Natalie just did not see how that would make a person cooler.

She would rather stay right here in the shade all day and read a book. Climb up into the tree, maybe, and then come down later and go into Le Fleur de Mer and look at salts from the Dead Sea, which she imagined was probably a desert, all glittery in the sunshine like diamonds even though it was big crystals of gray salt. The lady in there didn’t like Natalie to come in by herself; she said it was nothing that would interest a child, but she didn’t know Natalie. Or that she had her own salt cellar and was just waiting to find the right salt to put in it.

She swung her feet, banging her heels against the wall, and slapped a fly away from her neck. He was drinking the sweat, she thought. Disgusting.

After she visited the salt store, she would go into the drugstore for a cherry phosphate, made with cherry syrup and lime juice and plain soda water right out of the fountain. The man took a maraschino cherry and a triangle of lime, stuck them on a tiny plastic sword, and propped it on the top of the ice. It came in a shapely glass in a silver holder, with a fat paper straw, not plastic. She would sit at the counter on one of the turquoise chairs that swung back and forth and look at magazines, maybe the one with Rachael Ray on it, because she always seemed really really nice, or one of the ones that had beautiful pictures of cakes on the front. It didn’t matter. When she opened those magazines, it seemed like a whole world whispered out at her, inviting her inside their glossy pages to share a secret.

If she closed her eyes, she could imagine the counter inside
the drugstore, the fan swirling air over her head, the pages of her magazine riffling a little. She would take tiny, tiny sips of the phosphate to make it last an hour, and only then would she eat the cherry.

“Don’t nod off on me, sleepyhead,” her dad said, all cheery, like she wanted to walk to some stupid lake and eat stupid mushy bananas and stupid lunchmeat sandwiches.

“I’m not,” she said crossly. “Do we have to go on a picnic? Can’t we just have a picnic here?”

“No!” Jade roared. “I want to swim!” She had a red-and-white polka-dot bathing suit under her shorts, and her hair was braided tightly in one long white horsetail down her back.

“Me, too! Swim!” said Hannah, who still talked like a baby, even though she was three. Grandma said it was because everybody talked for her.

Daddy sat down next to Natalie. “You don’t want to go swimming? It’ll feel pretty good up there. And I got you a surprise for lunch.”

“What surprise?” she asked without excitement. “A candy bar?”

“Nope. Something good. Something only you would think to ask for.”

A kindling of hope sparked in her chest. “Really?”

Sometimes, not often, he actually got it right. She wasn’t holding her breath or anything, but she stood up and put her backpack on. “Okay.” Pedro scrambled to his feet and she took his leash. “Let’s go.”