The Spanish Daughter(57)

“Did you tell anyone your suspicions?”

“No.” He leaned over the kitchen counter, arms folded in front of his chest. “You want to tell me what happened? Why are you pretending to be your husband?”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to trust him, but I didn’t have a lot of options. He’d already discovered me. The best I could do was tell him the truth in the hopes that he wasn’t implicated in Cristóbal’s death and that instead, he could shed some light on my family and who might have done this.

I started from the beginning: the day I received the letter from the lawyer, back in Sevilla. I’d had another miscarriage a couple of months prior and was eager to leave all the heartbreak behind. The irony was that I really wasn’t as unhappy then as I believed.

True heartbreak still awaited.

Was I making the biggest mistake of my life by confessing to Martin? Perhaps the time had come to confront my sisters and my brother, no saint himself. Was that why he’d been so preoccupied with thoughts about goodness being innate or learned?

Martin nodded, pouring me another shot to loosen my tongue. As I needed all the courage I could, I drank. And talked.

“I know your sisters weren’t happy with the will,” he said as I neared the end of my story. “But from there to wanting to kill you seems somewhat farfetched.”

“Then how do you explain the assassin on the ship?”

“A mistake?”

“What about the check and the note with my name I found among his things?”

“I know Angélica has many defects: she’s vain, arrogant, and ambitious, but she’s not a murderer. And Catalina, well, she’s a saint.”

“She’s not a saint. She’s a human being with flaws like everybody else. But if you think so highly of Angélica then what did you mean when you told the neighbor—Fernando del Río, right?—that he should know better than anyone who Angélica was?”

“That has nothing to do with her moral character. A few years ago, before Angélica married Laurent, Del Río asked for her hand in marriage. Don Armand considered it for a while as a partnership between the two men and joining both haciendas would’ve meant owning the largest plantation in the region, but Angélica declined. Del Río could never forgive Angélica for rejecting him. After that, the Frenchman came along and she married him instead. Del Río and”—he hesitated—“your father had a strained relationship ever since.”

“I heard something about the creek.”

“Yes, the damned creek.”

“And now Angélica is suing him.”

He nodded. Under different circumstances, I would admire my sister’s audacity to behave as she wanted in spite of what our father, or anybody else, desired. But not when it could also mean that she would hurt her own sister to get her way.

“If Angélica is as harmless as you say, then how do you explain that I found a snake in my room—the same kind she keeps as a pet?”

Martin’s face paled. “It could be a coincidence. There are a lot of snakes in this area.”

“I don’t believe in coincidences.”

Martin paced the kitchen, absorbed in thought, hopefully trying to make connections that would shed some light into my predicament.

“I just can’t imagine any of Don Armand’s children doing something like that. There has to be another answer.”

I stared at my empty glass. “What about my father’s other daughter?”

“Another daughter?”

“Elisa,” I said. “Apparently, she used to live here but Do?a Gloria sent her away when she found out she was her husband’s child with one of the maids.”

“I’ve never heard of her. Elisa, you say?”

“Yes.” This time, I added aguardiente to my own glass. “What if she’s in town? What if she’s the woman Soledad Duarte mentioned?”

“I haven’t seen anybody new in town. And I spend a lot of time there.”

“Then who is the woman who hired Franco to kill me?”

Martin didn’t have an answer.

I was about to mention what I’d discovered about Alberto, too, but didn’t. I’d promised Mayra I wouldn’t say who the father of her baby was and there was no reason to betray her.

“I’d better go,” I said. “Are you going to tell my sisters who I really am?”

“No, but they’re bound to find out sooner or later.”

“I know that, but I need a little more time. I believe that if I come out as Puri, my life would be in danger. The person who sent Franco aboard the Andes may still be here, and perhaps closer than we think.”

I didn’t know how to read his silence. It lingered on me all the way to my father’s house. What was Martin going to do with all the information I’d given him? Moreover, why had he given me that inscrutable look?





CHAPTER 28

Angélica

Vinces, 1913



“Laurent needs one last push,” my mother said, mashing green plantains for tigrillo. “The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.”

Once again, my mother and I were talking about my ongoing problem with Laurent: the fact that he hadn’t proposed. I knew it bothered my father, too—he questioned me every time the Frenchman visited.