Jacaranda

by Cherie Priest

  “I will bring Sarah down. I will lay her out,” the nun cut him off. “Whether there’s any need or not. She was not a brave girl, but she was a decent one.”

  “None of us are decent.” The padre breathed, “Certainly none of us here, in this hotel, during this storm. We’re all of us terrible, if this is what we’ve come to.” He did not finish his dire thoughts out loud, but when he caught the Ranger’s eye, he wondered if the old man hadn’t heard him anyway.

  The Ranger and the padre left the nun to whatever task she had in mind, with regards to the dead woman hanging from the ceiling in the 2-room suite. Sister Eileen had insisted, and though it seemed pointless to them both, they tacitly agreed that it’d be likewise pointless to argue with her. She’d made a decision. She didn’t want their help. She’d join them later.

  She’d made it all quite clear.

  “Very well,” Korman had told her. “We’ll track down the ladies who work here, and start with them.”

  Juan Rios said, “We could begin with Violetta. I expect she’s still at the desk.”

  “A captive audience. Perfect.”

  Indeed she was there, reading a cheaply printed paperback story about an explorer in the Northwest. She set it aside to speak with them; when she closed it and turned it over, the padre saw a man in a gasmask on the cover.

  “Did you find Sarah?”

  “We found her,” the padre said quickly. “But I’m afraid she won’t be joining us. You may need to work a second shift, or find your sister. Sarah isn’t well.”

  Violetta sighed, because his careful wording hadn’t fooled her. “You mean the hotel’s taken her, too?”

  The Ranger cleared his throat, and Juan Rios surrendered. “Yes, señorita. I’m very sorry, but that’s the truth.”

  “I’m…surprised, a little. I thought Sarah would be the last. The Jacaranda needs her. Or it needed her. Or…or I thought it did.” She shook her head and crossed herself, then leaned forward on the counter as if she needed it for support. “Sarah’s been here the longest. She knew the most. She really seemed to understand the hotel, and what it needed. But if she’s gone…it surely means the end is very near. If even Sarah is taken, what hope is there for the rest of us?”

  Her eyes filled up with tears, and the despair on her face made the padre’s heart hurt. It was a familiar grief, and he wondered if it would be his own hell—to bear witness and offer comfort to every doomed girl who served as the Jacaranda’s gatekeeper.

  What else was he there for? What else could he do?

  He took her hand. It was cool to the touch, and faintly damp. Her pulse fluttered at the edge of her wrist. “Tell me, why are you still here? You and your family, I mean? Constance Fields suggested that you were caught here, just like her—and like the other guests, perhaps. If we can learn why people come to this place, why they stay, we may solve the mystery yet.”

  “So what if we do?” she asked. She took her hand away from his, and swiped at her eyes with the back of her sleeve. “Solve it, understand it…it does not matter. It will devour us all, or else the storm will take us.” She bobbed her head toward the doors, which shook and hummed against the gusts outside.

  “No,” the Ranger argued. “No, we aren’t going to talk like that. There’s time yet, before the storm hits us good—and time before we’re all dead, from one thing or another. Now answer the good padre’s question, if you please.”

  “But I don’t know. Not for certain…”

  “Then give me your best guess,” Juan Rios pushed. “Tell me why you think you’ve come here, and maybe you’re right, maybe you’re wrong. But it will be a place to start.”

  The younger Alvarez daughter glanced anxiously toward the Ranger, who did his best to look encouraging, but there was only so much his eyebrows could accomplish alone. So he told her, “If there’s been some crime committed, by you or your mother, or your sister…I want you to know: I don’t care about it. That’s not why I’m here. Right now, at this hotel, I’m no officer of the law and I’m on no mission from Austin; I only want to stop whatever darkness is eating the heart of this place. Same as the padre here, and the little nun in Sarah’s room.”

  In Spanish, Juan Rios told her, “Besides, you said it does not matter. If you’re right, then what harm does it do to tell us? Unburden yourself. Confess what you will, and you’ll see no punishment for it…except whatever we may all find here, at the hands of the storm or at the gates of heaven.”

  Violetta looked over her shoulder at the hotel’s office, then beyond and behind the two men who so gently interrogated her. Seeing no one, she crossed herself again and leaned in close, her eyes red as pennies.

  So softly he barely heard her, she replied in her first tongue.

  “You mustn’t tell my mother, you must promise me that. You can’t let her know that I told you.” When the padre nodded solemnly in return, she said, “We are here because of this: My mother kept her mother in our house, though Grandmother’s mind was weak, and she was very difficult. She was easily confused and prone to wandering. She fought us sometimes, when she could not remember who we were, or why we wanted her to eat. She tried to run away from us, but my mother always went after her. She always brought her home, even if she swore at us and struck us with her fists.

  “My mother had promised, you see—back when Grandmother was still aware of herself, and when she was first afraid that her mind would leave her. She made my mother promise to keep her safe, when she could not keep herself safe anymore.

  “So my mother, my sister and I…we kept her safe for three years, until the night she screamed at my mother and hit her with a pan. My mother screamed back, and told her to go—if that’s what she wanted to do. So Grandmother went. My sister and I followed after her, but it was dark and Grandmother threw rocks at us. So we gave up and went home.”

  She lowered her voice even more, until there was scarcely any sound at all—just the soft rush of breath pushed past her lips. “The next day, they found her in the tide. She’d gone to the ocean and drowned. Mother told the police she’d wandered away in the night, when we were all asleep. But we were not asleep,” she concluded in the very faintest of whispers. If the padre hadn’t been watching her lips so closely, he wouldn’t have understood her.

  He patted her shoulder and asked, “Have you confessed this to your priest?”

  “Yes. But it does not feel any different to me. I told God what we did, and I told Him that I am sorry, and that I wish I could have that night back—to do the right thing, this time. Please forgive me, Father, but I do not think that God is listening anymore…not to me. Because when the hotel creaks and moans at night, and the shadows slip back and forth when I’m alone…when the men and women die, one by one or two by two, going to hell like animals into the ark…when I wonder why we remain at the Jacaranda, and try to imagine leaving…I think of my grandmother, throwing rocks in the dark.”

  Her throat finally closed, and her tears fell, and she would say no more.

  To the Ranger, the padre said, “I’ll explain what she told me, later.” For right that moment, from the corner of his eye, he saw a figure moving outside the far window—struggling to walk upright the wind. “Violetta…over there. Through the window, you see? That’s Sarah’s cousin Tim, isn’t it?”

  Violetta nodded. “He should come inside,” she squeaked.

  “We’ll see to him.”

  “Back into the gale?” asked Korman, even as the padre was stepping toward the doors, and the Ranger came to follow him.

  “The man outside, they say he has the mind of a child. We must bring him indoors for his own safety’s sake; and though it may be a difficult thing to do, we must tell him what’s become of his cousin.”

  Together they opened the great front doors, and closed them again—using all their weight and strength to see them fastened behind themselves. Then it was only the two men against the weather, the blowing, spinning low clouds that scrubbed the island raw.
>
  Tim was not so far away, only around the first corner.

  Even as tall and sturdily built as he was, the wind was hard on him—but he moved against it with determination, carrying something close to his chest and shielding it as best he could.

  “Tim!” shouted the padre.

  Tim turned to look at him, but seeing no one he recognized, he continued onward—hunched against the coming storm, step by step, alongside the building.

  Ranger Korman tried another approach. “Tim, I’m a Texas Ranger and I’m ordering you to stop where you are!” But that didn’t work either.

  “Tim, please, you need to come inside!”

  Their words were whipped around and muddled by the maelstrom, but Tim heard enough to nod, and to call back to them. “I’m going inside. You should come too.”

  “A side entrance?” asked the Ranger.

  “Apparently.”

  “Wish I’d known about it five minutes ago.”

  “As do I.”

  Another twenty yards, and yes—they were at the end of the eastern wing. Or was it the north one? Everything was turned around, even the shape of the hotel was distorted, carved, and adjusted by the whims of the sky.

  But there was a door, and Tim opened it.

  He stepped inside and held it for the Ranger and the padre to join him; and when they were all back within the Jacaranda, he forced it shut with one long arm. (The other arm was still wrapped around something he kept hidden beneath his work jacket.)

  “Tim, I am Father Rios, and this is Ranger Korman.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “Did Sarah tell you?”

  He shook his head. “No.”

  The padre didn’t ask. Instead he tried, “What were you doing out there, in this terrible weather? You should be inside, somewhere safe.”

  “I’m going to Sarah’s room. She’s dead now.”

  From behind them, Sister Eileen said, “For what it’s worth, I didn’t tell him.”

  They all turned to look at her. No one had heard her coming up behind them.

  She ignored their surprise, and added wearily, “He knocked at her door, and when I answered it, he told me she was dead. He said he had to go get something for her.”

  “I got it. Can I see her now?”

  The nun nodded, despite the uncertain glances cast her way. “You can see her, Tim. I’ve laid her out, and she’s lovely. Come and pay your last respects, and leave your gift beside her.”

  He opened his jacket to reveal a ragdoll that had been much beloved in some years past. “It was hers,” he told them. “She let me keep it, for night time. I don’t need it anymore.”

  Inside Sarah’s room, the young woman was no longer dangling—but lying on the bed, dressed in something clean with a very high neck. Her hands were folded across her belly. Tim stared at her, but did not appear particularly grieved. Though that wasn’t fair, or so the padre told himself.

  Whatever went on in the boy’s mind, it stayed there. That was all.

  Tim placed the doll beside his cousin’s shoulder, leaving it staring at the ceiling from which she’d had hung. It was not a pretty doll, and its face was stitched from black thread—giving it an expression that should not have been very comforting at night; but it was Sarah’s again, and that’s what mattered to the young man now. He looked satisfied, at least.

  The Ranger asked him, “Who told you Sarah died?”

  “Jack told me.”

  The nun frowned. “Jack?”

  “Jack always knows. He always tells me.”

  Juan Rios felt a sinking in his stomach, because Sarah had been wrong. The hotel did speak to her cousin, innocent or not. “You mean Jacaranda.”

  Tim nodded. “It talks.”

  “To you?”

  He shrugged, and gave his cousin another long look before turning and walking away. “It just talks. It said that Sarah broke her promise. It said she left me alone.”

  Ranger Korman asked all the hotel guests the same question, inspired by Violetta’s hastily whispered testimony: “When you think of the Jacaranda, and why you’ve come here, and why you stay here…what memory springs to mind? Was there something you did? Some vow you broke?”

  The padre was unsettled by the answers, each of them recorded in the Ranger’s small notebook. Horatio Korman’s pencil scratched across the paper, testimony after testimony.

  A pattern emerged.

  But there was always a pattern, wasn’t there? When you stepped back far enough, when you were no longer standing at the center? Except this was still the center. This was still the Jacaranda Hotel, and there was still a storm drawing ever-nearer to the island—and soon they’d be at the center of that, too. With every interview, every statement, it felt more and more like standing inside a monster’s gaping mouth…ever on the verge of closing.

  ***

  Friendly, heavyset William Brewer’s face went pale and his eyes grew dark when he spoke of his mentor, Professor Hanson. Together they had discovered some wondrous new species of flower, with seeds that showed immense promise against certain respiratory diseases—as had long been rumored among the Comanche. (Who had surely known of it for a thousand years, and found the “discovery” something of an annoyance, or so the padre was rather certain).

  There were papers to be written, studies to be undertaken, seminars to be held…and credit to be assigned. The two men quarreled, but resolved their differences with a formal vow to share and share alike all profits and proceeds that might come of their work.

  But. Even so.

  At the center of the botanist’s confession was a field survey in the Texas panhandle, and a nighttime encounter with a roaming victim of the sap-plague—one of the last to wander undead, to be sure (after all these years). William Brewer could have warned his elderly companion. He might have helped him escape or come to his defense, but when the shambling revenant stumbled upon the professor’s tent, the botanist did none of those things. And now the credit and the profit from the flowering thistle (Cirsium brewsterae) belonged to William, and now he had come to the Jacaranda.

  And every night when the wind scraped its nails against his window, and the floorboards creaked as if he were not lying in bed alone, he thought of Professor Hanson roaming the north Texas wastelands, mindless and hungry, with nothing at all behind his dry and withered eyes to suggest a brilliant scientist, a curious mind, or the co-founder of an astonishing new medicine that might cure consumption.

  A chat with the newlywed Andersons revealed a story with a terrible center too—one hinted at by Constance Fields…an accusation breathed with some of her very last words.

  Yes, there’d been a nephew—a boy orphaned when his mother died in childbirth, for his father had died in a ridiculous hunting accident, some years before. “Keep him for me,” his mother pleaded, as she bled to death in the fine feather bed. “Promise me you’ll raise him, and love him, and guard his fortune like it was your own.”

  Mr. Anderson had done his level best but there was so much money and no, the money and the boy were not his own; and the boy was sickly, and unhappy—difficult enough to like, much less love in a fatherly fashion. But the child enjoyed swimming in the tide, when it came high and close to the Strand. He liked the feeling of the sand and the salt, and on the rare occasions that he smiled, he did so on the beach.

  It was Mrs. Anderson, who’d been left in charge…back before she was Mrs. Anderson, when she was only an ambitious governess. She wanted a marriage but not without the money, and there was a child in the way of both these things. A weak one, frail and in need of constant supervision. It was a simple matter to look away. A simple thing, to lose track of him. Easy as pie, finding him floating against the pier, having exhausted himself in the waves. Easy as inheriting a fortune.

  Easy as a wedding. Easy as a funeral.

  Lean, clever Frederick Vaughn denied any and all knowledge of any curse, any deaths, any unnatural draw, or anything he might have done to find
himself at the Jacaranda Hotel—except, perhaps, the idle lure of a holiday at an odd time of year, when the storms were cooking in the Gulf and the heat was often enough to wilt an oak.

  He stuck to that story until he’d had several drinks, and then several more.

  When the bottle was nearly empty, so empty he could see the table through the glass when he looked down inside it for answers, he confessed that there might have been a widow, once.

  There might have been a misunderstanding, with regards to her husband’s estate. Or perhaps the misunderstanding had more to do with Vaughn himself, and his intention to marry her for the money rather than swindle it away from her. Not that he swindled a damn thing, you understand. But misunderstandings did abound, and she died not long after their union, and his subsequent abandonment. Wrists slit, lying in a bathtub, that’s what the newspapers said. Not a tidy way to go, and certainly no fault of the salesman Frederick Vaughn, so his conscience was quite clean and his time at the hotel was entirely voluntary, he wanted the Ranger and the padre to damn well know.

  So the Ranger made note of it.

  Since Vaughn’s arrival, he’d only heard the widow’s voice once or twice, or perhaps a handful of times—mostly at night, when the wind rubbed itself shrieking against the windows and the drafty frame let little whispers inside the room. Sometimes, they sounded like her.

  Usually, they sounded like her.

  Maybe always.

  David and George McCoy were two brothers out of three. They were twins, though they looked little alike; and their older brother Matthew was recently deceased, so perhaps it could be said that now they were two brothers out of two.

  Matthew’s death had been a tragic event, and no one was clear on the specifics. Some kind of accident—there were no untoward suspicions, not cast upon David or George, and that was a fact. No investigation, no concerns on the part of any officials, anywhere.