The House in the Pines(23)

“?Qué fue el . . . ?” Maya says—but now she can’t remember the Spanish word for title. She searches her brain, and as she does, detects an unusual smell on the patio, an ethereal floral note beneath her aunt’s cigarette smoke. At first, she thinks she must be imagining it. “?Qué era el nombre,” she tries again, embarrassed by her bad Spanish, “del libro de mi papá?”

“Ah, el título . . .” Carolina says. She narrows her eyes, tries to remember the title of Jairo’s unfinished book. Then she shakes her head in frustration. Explains that she can’t recall at the moment—it’s been a long while since she thought of her brother’s writing. All she remembers is that the title was long, the entire line of a very old poem he had loved.

The smell grows stronger as Carolina says this, heady and sweet.

Maya’s sense of smell is stronger than most—she once detected a gas leak in the kitchen hours before her mom noticed anything amiss—and now she’s pretty sure she’s not imagining it. There is something otherworldly about this smell blossoming beneath her aunt’s smoke, as if it were wafting in from another realm. A paradise. Some timeless place where flowers bloom at night—a place Maya shouldn’t be able to smell from here, but she can and it’s the exact opposite, she thinks, of the smell at the cemetery. And every bit as real. “Mom?” she says.

“Yeah, Muffin?”

“Do you smell that?”

Maya’s question prompts both Brenda and Carolina to sniff the air.

Carolina smushes out her cigarette in an ashtray. A look of wonder comes over her face as the smoke clears and the mesmerizing smell fills her nose. “No puede ser . . .” She rises from the table and walks around the corner of the house. Maya and her mom follow.

There they see that an ordinary-looking cactus stationed in a plain plastic pot has erupted with a single dinner-plate-sized flower. The long white petals yawn into the most dramatic bloom Maya has ever seen, like the gaping eye of some god or a firework frozen in time. It gives off the strongest smell of any flower she’s ever come across.

“?Qué es?” she asks her aunt.

“La Reina de la Noche,” Carolina says.

“?Qué?” Brenda asks.

Carolina explains that each bud of this type of cactus only blooms for one night. This particular plant hadn’t flowered in years, and she had thought it was dead. “No lo puedo creer,” Carolina says, shaking her head in near disbelief as tears fill her eyes. The Queen of the Night, she says in Spanish, was my mother’s favorite flower.



* * *



—

Maya is folding her black dress back into her suitcase when she hears a light rap on the open door and looks up to see her grandfather.

“Hola!” she says.

“Hi, mija.” His voice is small but warm. They’ve sat in rooms together over the past five days, but their exchanges have been brief.

“Por favor, entra,” she says, realizing that he is waiting for her to invite him into his own room.

He’s in his late sixties but seems older because of his creaky gait and all-white hair. He opens the wooden cabinet in the corner, takes out a cardboard box the size of a wine crate, and sets it on the bed beside Maya’s suitcase. He takes out a photo album. “Look,” he says in heavily accented English. “Your grandmother made this.” He opens the cover to reveal a photo of Maya when she was a baby, sitting on her mom’s lap, then a few more baby pictures, the turning pages revealing Maya growing up before their eyes. There she is at her fifth birthday. There she is jumping on a trampoline with Kayla, her best friend in second grade. Grimacing into a camera for school picture day. Smiling at the top of Mount Greylock. Her mother, it seems, has been sending Abuela photos all of Maya’s life.

“Your grandmother loved you,” Abuelo says. “And I do too.”

“Oh . . .” Maya says, momentarily stunned. Then the words rush from her. “I love you too, Abuelo. Te quiero también. Gracias para—para todo.”

He nods. Closes the photo album, pats it with his hand. “I keep this,” he says. “But I have something for you.”

He reaches back into the cardboard box and takes out a thick manila envelope. He unwinds the thin piece of twine holding it closed. Opens the flap and pulls out a stack of yellowed pages. Maya’s eyes go wide. She knows at once what this is. Her father’s name is on the title page, spelled out in yellowing typewriter ink. And above his name, the title of the book, the mystery, he’d been writing before he died: Olvidé que era hijo de reyes.





TWELVE




Maya wasn’t always sure what she believed in, but she knew that she didn’t believe in ghosts or evil spirits. She’d gone looking for the redheaded waitress hoping to learn something about Frank but had instead wound up questioning herself. Again. She was exhausted. She stopped at a red light outside a liquor store and debated going inside. She had no appetite for the buffalo wings cooling beside her on the passenger seat but could really go for some gin, just enough to help her sleep tonight.

The light turned green and she continued on, passing back across the Housatonic River. Her head still ached from last night’s daiquiri and wine, and her mother would be on to her. There was something eerie about Cristina, in the final moments of her life, appearing to stare at something no one else saw—Maya could understand why Barb’s thoughts had turned to the supernatural. But it was also possible that Cristina had been acting that way because she was high. Maybe Dan was right. An overdose was the most obvious answer, and the most likely.