The Spanish Daughter(85)

That morning, when I’d been talking to Martin, taking inventory of the things in Julia’s room, I’d seen the puppets of Red Riding Hood and the Wolf sitting on one of the shelves, buried between other dolls and ornaments, but I hadn’t thought anything of it. Not at the time, anyway.

“And Ramona,” I said. “She’s always repeating something about the wolf, cuidado con el lobo. I heard you sing that tune this morning. Ramona must have learned it from you.”

“What on earth is she talking about?” Angélica asked Elisa.

Elisa frowned. For the first time, I noticed how much her gestures resembled Catalina’s, and yet they were so different.

Everything made sense now. Elisa had put Mayra in Aquilino’s house to get information about me and my father’s will. She’d forged my father’s check. Of course, she had access to his checkbook, to his signature, and she’d paid Franco with the pocket watch and promises of a fortune she would share with him. I glanced at Catalina. She was the woman he’d loved and he’d done this to be worthy of her.

“Caperucita,” Elisa said, void of emotion. “It was a show we put up for the kids.”

“Why didn’t you tell us you were Elisa?” Angélica said. “You’ve been living here for three and a half years!”

“I was going to do it,” Elisa said, unable to look Angélica in the eye. “I came here with every intention to tell the truth. After our mothers died, there was no reason to hide anymore, but Don Armand, with that problem in his brain, couldn’t remember me. At first, I told him who I was, and he hugged me.” Her voice broke. “But then, the next day, he’d forgotten all about me. He asked who I was again and again. In his mind, the only daughter he remembered and who really mattered was María Purificación, his firstborn, his legitimate, European daughter.” Her voice turned bitter. “I was an embarrassment to him because I was the daughter of a mestiza,” she scoffed, “the maid.” She dried her tears and straightened her back. “And his wife didn’t want us here.”

Catalina sat down, pressing her hand against her forehead.

“I know that!” Angélica sounded annoyed. “My parents argued about you all the time.”

“You knew?” Catalina asked.

“But there’s something I don’t understand, Ju . . . Elisa,” Alberto said, his voice rusty. “Why did you think that if Puri died, you would get her part of the inheritance?”

Elisa crossed her arms.

“I knew Angélica would do right by me. I heard her speak to our father a few days before he passed and she told him that they needed to find me, that it would be fair that I received part of the inheritance. She remembered me as a little girl, and how her mother had kicked me and my mother out of the hacienda. She knew it was unfair and I deserved a part of the money, too. Our father agreed, but he died before he could speak to Mr. Aquilino about it.” She turned to me, her eyes brimming. “But you would’ve never understood anything. You would come here and collect all the money and all the land you didn’t deserve. You were never here for our father, you didn’t tend to him when he was dying like we did. You didn’t clean his vomit, or his dirty sheets, or give the injections he needed. And yet, he loved you so, he never stopped talking about you.”

“I don’t understand why you didn’t tell me who you were,” Angélica said.

“Because you were so upset about Purificación that I thought you might send me away, too. I wanted to fix things for you, for all of us.” She appealed to her other siblings. “Don’t you think it’s unfair that our father would leave almost everything to this woman, to this . . . this person that we hadn’t even met before?”

Neither Alberto nor Catalina would look her in the eye.

“The irony of it all was that my grandfather was also a Spaniard,” Elisa said, facing me again. “He’d been my grandmother’s patrón at another finca. So I guess history repeated itself. My father loved you the most because of your European blood, but I had it, too.”

Everyone stood in tense silence. Aquilino broke it.

“What you did was very serious,” he told Elisa in that somber voice of his. “A crime.”

Elisa reached out to Angélica. “Hermana? ”

“I’m afraid I will have to contact the authorities, se?orita,” Aquilino said.

Angélica removed her arm from Elisa’s grasp.

Elisa fixed her eyes on me with a hatred that made me shiver. “Why did you have to come? Nobody wanted you here. Nobody.”

I looked at the faces around me. Nobody said anything.

“This is all your fault!” Elisa came at me with a strength that I never imagined she could possess. I fell hard on the floor. Elisa raised her hand, but before she could hit me, Alberto restrained her arms.

“Calm down!” he told her.

I came to my feet, dusting my trousers with my hands, and gave one last glance to my father’s portrait before walking out of the room.





CHAPTER 41

I didn’t bother going back to my bedroom. I needed to get out of the hacienda immediately.

But there weren’t a lot of places to go. I didn’t want to go to Martin’s house or to Vinces, either; it was too long of a walk. There was one more option, though not ideal.