The Hacienda(80)

But Juana?

Juana killed him.

She must have killed María Catalina too, for the same reasons. She was the one who buried her in the wall, covering up evidence of her crime and showing her brother the grave behind the capilla.

Shouts and swift footsteps sounded from beyond the courtyard gates. Paloma and I looked up as Juana appeared in the open doorway, flanked by two of Román’s troops.

“There she is!” she cried, voice wretched from weeping. She was a portrait of perfect anguish, her hair dirty and wild around her tear-streaked face. The men broke into a run, charging me and Paloma.

It was as if the world slowed and went silent as realization dawned on me. That was why the caudillo and his men had arrived so quickly: they had already been on their way. For Juana had summoned them.

Paloma yelped and leaped to her feet. But where was there to run?

The clean skirts of Juana’s work dress swirled around her legs as she stopped walking. She lifted a finger and pointed at me.

I was frozen to the spot, even when Paloma grabbed my arm and tried to wrench me to my feet. For when Juana met my eyes, my blood ran cold: there was a hardness in her gaze that pierced me like a bayonet.

She had planned this.

“That’s the bitch who killed my brother,” she said.





27





ANDRéS



I PACED THE COMMON room of José Mendoza’s house. Though the area before the hearth was no broader than four strides, I walked those four strides back and forth, back and forth, as desperately as if the act alone could solve our troubles.

Mendoza and Paloma sat at the table on wooden chairs, watching as I wore the flagstones down. Then they exchanged a look I could not parse. They knew each other well, Paloma and Mendoza. Not only was Paloma friends with the foreman’s daughters, she had become his protégé in all but name when the patrón was in the capital. I was glad he had offered her a place to stay—she was still too shaken by the suddenness of Tía Ana Luisa’s death to stay in her own home alone. I turned to him for his steadiness and his wisdom, now that the tide had changed and the world had been turned on its head.

Do?a Juana accused Beatriz of murdering Rodolfo. She was placed under house arrest. The caudillo Victoriano Román left the keys of the house with Juana, and two of his men standing guard as he returned to Apan. He needed to check the state of the prison, he said. During the war, the small jail on the outskirts of Apan was barely more than a way station for captured insurgents, men who spent mere hours under its roof before being dragged from their cells and shot against the stucco walls at dawn. Now it was populated by town drunks and the occasional bandit; apparently, it would be inappropriate to place a member of the landed class among their ilk, even if that person was accused of murder.

Fury filled me when I heard this. What was inappropriate were these monstrous accusations against an innocent woman.

“She didn’t do it,” I said for the fifth time. “She was in the chapel all night. I know. I was with her.” At this, Mendoza and Paloma exchanged a second pointed look. I stopped in my tracks and whirled to glower at them with all the righteousness I could summon—a skill much practiced and perfected by men of the cloth. I had learned from the best. “We prayed. She fled the house weeping, so we prayed. All night. And then, as Paloma said, she saw us return to the house at dawn.”

Mendoza set his hat on the table between him and my cousin and ran a hand over his weathered face. “I believe you, Padre,” he said. It was so strange to hear him call me that. Mendoza was gruff, but not unkind—his primary way of expressing affection for the children of the village was calling them malcriados. All my life before I left for the seminary, I was simply chamaco to him. Part of me still expected him to address me so. “But couldn’t she have killed him before she went to the capilla?”

I fought the urge to shudder remembering the scene in the bedchamber. “You saw the amount of blood,” I said. “She would have been drenched. And she was wearing white!” I exclaimed. “A white nightdress. It had mud on it from the courtyard, but no blood. Paloma saw it. Didn’t you help her change out of it, when Mendoza went to town?” I barreled on, too impassioned to wait for a reply. “If one of us could sneak past the guards and get the dress, it would be proof of her innocence.”

“Padre.” Mendoza rubbed his temples. “It won’t change what has already been done.”

“How can you say that?” I had promised to keep Beatriz safe, and I would not stop until I had succeeded. The darkness bound deep in my chest hummed in accord, straining at its chains. “You said you saw someone run away from the house in the night. I saw no blood on her, was at her side all night, and returned her to the house in the morning. We have witnesses! We have proof!”

Mendoza lifted his head. “But it is our word against Do?a Juana’s,” he said. “And forgive me for saying so, Padre, but in their eyes . . . your word is only as good as ours.”

In their eyes. The eyes of the caudillo, the eyes of a judge, the eyes of the hacendados . . . they bore down on me, scrutinizing me, my cousin, my friend. Scrutinizing who we were. What we were. The casta system was abolished, of course, but the courts outside the capital carried on with business as usual: legally, the word of a criolla like Juana was still worth that of two Indios in court. The word of hacienda workers against their hacendado? Worthless. The word of a low-ranking mestizo cura like me?