The Hacienda(21)

Paloma gestured for me to follow her around the back of the servants’ quarters. The sun was bright here; with each passing moment I felt lighter, as if every step leading away from the house were stripping off a heavy layer of clothing.

Maybe I was going mad.

No. I wasn’t. I knew what I had seen.

The smell of horses greeted me as we reached the stables. Paloma led me inside the barn, into a small room off the main aisle. Juana was seated on a stool with her legs crossed, her shoulders curled inward, and her head down. Strands of light hair fell into her face as she stitched a bridle, mending it.

“Do?a Juana.” The way Paloma addressed Juana was stony and flat, and her hands hung at her sides instead of respectfully in front of her. Her weight had shifted, as if she were ready to run.

If she was afraid of me, or was shy around me, then she loathed Juana. It was written all over her face: the girl practically itched to be out of Juana’s presence.

How odd, given how close her mother Ana Luisa and Juana seemed.

Juana’s brows rose when she saw me. “You look wretched,” she said bluntly.

“Someone died,” I blurted out. “I found a body. A skeleton.”

Juana went still.

On the road to Apan from Mexico City, Rodolfo and I spent the night in a roadside inn. Alone, he could have made the journey in one long day on horseback, as the riders who carried the post did, but the carriage was slower. We rose early to set out, before dawn had perfectly broken, when the touch of the morning was velvet, when mauve and pink lined the eastern horizon bright against the purple gray of the dome of the sky. Rodolfo stopped dead in his tracks as we walked toward the stables. He grabbed my arm.

“Don’t move,” he breathed, then pointed east.

A puma crouched not ten meters from the barn. If it had been stalking chickens or goats, its attention now turned to us. We stared at it; it stared at us. I had never seen a puma before, and I hadn’t known its shoulders would be so large, its eyes so wide-set and intelligent as it assessed me.

Nor that it could be as still as a painting.

A horse whinnied from the barn, shattering the silence.

Rodolfo whistled to the grooms in the stables and nudged me to walk slowly backward, never turning our backs on the puma. He raised the alarm and called for a gun, but by the time the grooms rushed from the barn with a musket, the cat was gone. Melted into the dawn like smoke on a breeze.

Juana was as still as the puma as she looked at me.

“What?” she said. There was something of the puma’s fluid movements in her as she cast aside the bridle and stood.

“A wall collapsed,” I said. Why was my breath coming short? My heart was racing—perhaps it had been racing since I first saw the skull grinning gruesomely at me through the dark. “Come. You must come.” I took a step back and turned, to return to the house, even though my muscles protested, even though going back into the house, back to the weight of it, was the last thing I ever wanted to do.

Juana followed reluctantly, Paloma trailing her. Every time I looked over my shoulder, Paloma’s eyes were locked on the back of Juana’s head, watchful as a hound. Juana looked wan as we entered the house and turned to the north wing, and slowed, so much that I snapped at her at least twice to hurry.

Then instead of turning right toward my bedroom, as she and I had yesterday before finding my clothing drenched in blood, I turned left to the north wing and the ruined wall.

My notes lay on the floor of the hall, my pencil abandoned a few feet past them.

The wall was unblemished. Whole.

“No,” I breathed. “But—”

Juana and Paloma stopped as I barreled down the hall, as I ran my hands over the wall, the wall where I had taken down three bricks and nearly been crushed by the resulting tumult. The wall was cool and dry, but I could not see the outline of bricks as I had before. “No.”

I struck the wall with the heel of my left hand, biting my lip as the rough surface of stucco bit into my palm. Stucco. Not lime whitewash. This couldn’t be. I ran down the hall, trailing my hand along the wall, searching for the bricks, searching for the lime whitewash that had covered me in dust. For the love of God, the backs of my hands were still pale with it.

I stopped again right before the place where the wall had nearly crushed me. I hammered the heels of my hands against the wall in frustration.

“Do?a . . .” Paloma interrupted.

“It was here!” I whirled on them. “The wall was open, and there was a body in there. There was a dead person. Someone covered it with bricks. It was here, I swear it was here.”

Their eyes were wide, but not with fear.

With something else.

They thought I was mad.

My heart hammered in my throat.

“It’s true,” I cried. “I leaned on the wall and it started caving. It’s true.” Tears sprang to my eyes; my throat was tight with frustration. I picked up my notes and abandoned pencil from the ground, miming how I had been writing against the wall before.

The solidness of the wall mocked me.

Juana raised a single brow.

“What is that?” she wondered, her gaze falling on my notes. She stepped forward and looked over my shoulder.

“It’s a list of things for Rodolfo,” I said. “To outfit the house and make it presentable again. Why aren’t you listening to me?”