Mexican Gothic(45)

“My mother doesn’t believe in tardiness,” he said as he stood in front of her and took off the felt hat with the navy band he’d put on that morning.

“Did you tell her where we went?”

“I didn’t go back to the house. If I had, my mother or Virgil might have started asking why I’d left you alone.”

“Were you driving around?”

“A bit. I parked under a tree over there and took a nap too. Did anything happen to you?” he asked, pointing at her bandaged wrist.

“A rash,” Noemí said.

She extended her hand so that he might help her up, and he did.

Without her monumental high heels, Noemí’s head barely reached his shoulder. When such a height difference presented itself, Noemí might stand on her tiptoes. Her cousins teased her about it, calling her “the ballerina.” Not Catalina, because she was too sweet to tease anyone, but cousin Marilulu did it all the time. Now, reflexively, she did that, and that little meaningless motion must have startled him, because he let go with the hand that had been holding his hat, and a gust of wind blew it away.

“Oh, no,” Noemí said.

They chased after the hat, running for a good two blocks before she managed to get hold of it. In her tight skirt and stockings this was no small feat. The yellow dog she’d seen at the store, amused by the spectacle, barked at Noemí and circled her. She pressed the hat against her chest.

“Well, I suppose now I’ve done my daily calisthenics,” she said, chuckling.

Francis seemed amused too and watched her with an unusual levity. There was a sad and resigned quality to him that struck her as odd for someone his age, but the midday sun had washed his melancholy away and gave color to his cheeks. Virgil was good looking, Francis was not. He had an almost nonexistent upper lip, eyebrows that arched a little too much, heavy-lidded eyes. She liked him nevertheless.

He was odd and it was endearing.

She offered him the hat, and Francis turned it in his hands carefully. “What?” he asked, sounding bashful, because she was looking at him.

“Won’t you thank me for rescuing your hat, dear sir?”

“Thank you.”

“Silly boy,” she said, planting a kiss on his cheek.

She was afraid he’d drop the hat and they’d have to chase it again, but he managed to hold on to it and smiled as they walked back to the car.

“You finished the errands you needed to run in town?” he asked.

“Yes. Post office, doctor. I was also talking to someone about High Place, about what happened there. You know, with Ruth,” she told him. Her mind kept going back to Ruth. It really should be no concern of hers, this decades-old murder, but there it was, the nagging thought, and she wanted to talk about it. Who better than him?

Francis tapped the hat twice against his leg as they walked. “What about her?”

“She wanted to run away with her lover. Instead, she ended up shooting her whole family. I don’t understand why she’d do what she did. Why didn’t she run away from High Place? Surely she could have simply left.”

“You can’t leave High Place.”

“But you can. She was an adult woman.”

“You’re a woman. Can you do anything you want? Even if it upsets your family?”

“Technically I can, even if I wouldn’t every single time,” Noemí said, though she immediately remembered her father’s issues with scandals and the fear of the society pages. Would she ever risk an outright rebellion against her family?

“My mother left High Place, she married. But she came back.

There’s no escaping it. Ruth knew as much. That’s why she did what she did.”

“You sound almost proud,” she exclaimed.

Francis placed the hat on his head and looked at her gravely. “No.

But truth be told Ruth ought to have burnt High Place to the ground.”

It was such a shocking pronouncement that she thought she must have heard him wrong, and she would have been able to convince herself this was the case if they had not driven back to the house in a bubble of silence. That piercing silence more than anything affirmed his words. It underlined them and made her turn her face toward the window. In her hand she held her unlit cigarette, watching the trees, light streaming through the branches.





13





N


oemí decided they’d have themselves a mini casino night. She’d always loved casino night. They’d sit in the dining room, and everyone dressed the part, using old clothes picked from their grandparents’ trunks, pretending they were high rollers in Monte Carlo or Havana. All the children played, and even when they were way too old for games of pretend, the Taboada cousins would gather around the table and put the record player to good use, tapping their feet to a snappy tune and carefully laying down their cards. It couldn’t be quite like that at High Place since they had no records to play, but Noemí decided the spirit of their casino nights could be captured if they tried.

She slipped the deck into one large sweater pocket and the little bottle into the other, and then she peeked her head inside Catalina’s room. Her cousin was alone and she was awake. Perfect.

“I have a treat for you,” Noemí said.