The Hacienda(78)

26





BEATRIZ


Present day


I WAITED WITH PALOMA in the study outside my bedchamber. The latter was filled with more people than I thought it had ever seen: Padre Andrés, José Mendoza, and the caudillo Victoriano Román, who was the local military officer charged with maintaining order in the district of Tulancingo. He and his men had arrived with surprising alacrity, given the hour at which we sent for them. Román’s men now walked the property, looking for evidence of bandits.

We had asked for the doctor as well, but he was not in town. His wife told our messenger that he was nearly a day’s ride away at Hacienda Alcantarilla, tending to the feverish pregnant daughter of the hacendado. He would come to us as soon as he could.

Paloma stood at the doorway. At her insistence, I had changed into actual clothing, but I had not touched my hair, nor put on stockings or shoes: my feet pacing the rug were still dirtied with cracked mud from the courtyard.

“Do?a Solórzano.” Román called for me from the bedchamber.

I looked up, startled. Paloma’s brow furrowed with concern. “They need you,” she whispered.

I knew that. Still, I hesitated. I didn’t want to pass through the door to my bedchamber, but I had to.

I swallowed the dread in my throat and stepped into the room.

Andrés and José Mendoza stood closest to the door, near my vanity. Román was on the far side of the room, opposite them. He gestured up at the wall, brusque and authoritative. “Is this window normally left open at night, do?a?”

I meant to keep my eyes on him. I tried as hard as I could. But against my will, as if drawn by gravity, or the weight of horror, they fell to the bed.

Rodolfo lay on his back, tangled in sheets. His face was pale, his eyes open, glassy and frozen wide with horror, just as Ana Luisa’s had been.

Like Ana Luisa, he was dead.

That was where the similarities ended.

Blood soaked his shirt and the sheets, blackened and gruesome in the light of morning. It reached the foot of the bed; it spilled on the floor. It had even fanned out to the stucco wall beneath the window where Román stood, waiting for my reply.

His throat was slit from ear to ear like a butchered sheep. The red edges of the cut were profane in the light, but I could not look away.

I could not.

Not even as Rodolfo’s head turned to the side in an avian-sharp movement, his eyes jerking side to side, scanning, then falling on me. His beautiful bronze hair fell back against the pillow as his back arched, as if he were lifted by a thread tied to his rib cage.

His eyes were fixed on me, but they were unseeing. Glassy and vacant.

Then he spoke.

Or rather, something animated his lips, moving them in stiff, wrenching movements. The voice that emerged was not his, nor even a man’s. It was a girl’s voice, a young woman’s voice, shrill with anger.

“Answer him, bitch.”

Silence rang in my ears. I tore my eyes from Rodolfo, looking wildly to Andrés. José Mendoza. Román. They all looked at me expectantly.

They had not heard the voice that came from Rodolfo. They had not seen him move his head so sharply it made the loose ends of the cut in his neck slide against each other like the lips of a monstrous mouth.

“Answer him!”

My gaze shot back to Rodolfo. That voice. Those movements distorting what should be a dead, stiff face, moving my husband’s features in uneven, spasm-like jerks.

“Tell him the truth!”

Darkness crept along the edges of my vision.

Distantly, I heard the words she may faint; Andrés was at my side, taking my arm and backing me out of the room.

“Tell him the truth!”

No one else could hear that voice. Nor see that movement, though it happened right before their eyes, in the cold light of morning.

It was Paloma who took me down the stairs and out the front door as quickly as she could, who knelt by my side as I fell to my knees and vomited into the dead flower bed next to the entry stairs.

I heaved violently, until acid stung my nose and my eyes burned. Paloma took a kerchief from a hidden pocket and wiped my face, her own still and solemn. She guided me back to the steps and sat me down at her side, holding me upright with a firm, steadying grip on my upper arm.

“I’m sorry,” I said, crumbling the kerchief up in a tight fist.

Paloma released her hold on my arm and rubbed my upper back with an equally firm hand.

You’re one of us, now, she had said. You’re trapped in San Isidro, just like the rest of us.

And there was nothing I wanted more than to be anywhere but San Isidro. I wanted to be back in the capital, scalding my hands and my pride with hot laundry water as I washed Tía Fernanda’s dirty underclothes. At least Mamá was by my side. At least I slept soundly. At least when the dead passed, they stayed dead.

My eyes filled with tears. How scornful I had been of Mamá insisting I should marry for love. How convinced I was that I was right to be practical, to sacrifice a loving partnership like she and Papá had for an estate in the country and financial security.

But what had my sacrifice won me?

Hacienda San Isidro. Madness and torment. This could never be a home for my mother, no matter how hard I worked to fix it, no matter how much porcelain and glass arrived from the capital. No matter how many exorcisms tried to drive the evil from its bones. Mamá would never plant flowers in this garden, nor orange trees nor birds of paradise nor the olives that the hacendados had discussed introducing to their own properties at dinner.