Fiesta Moon

by Linda Windsor

  “It might help if you turn on the switch.” Mark was behind her now, leaning through the open door to slide the switch on for the overhead lights. “There they are.”

  Corinne could have sworn she’d run her hand over that spot a dozen times. “I don’t know why I’m such a ditz tonight.” Shoving the runaway keys into her purse, along with the papers that had spilled from it, she straightened.

  “Maybe you’ve been witched … in a good way,” he added hastily.

  No, there was nothing good about the breath that caught in her throat as Mark circled her waist to draw her out of the way to shut the door. The lights went out, and gradually the ethereal glow of the moon on the landscape regained its prominence.

  Somewhere in the distance a night bird called. Or was that the sigh she could no longer hold as he corralled her against the side of the vehicle?

  “Sleepy?”

  Corinne shook her head. “N-no, are you nuts?” She should have lied, but that wasn’t right either.

  Still without so much as a touch, he planted a hand on either side of her, allowing an age-old magic called animal attraction to do its thing. “Did you see that fiesta moon?” He pressed his forehead to hers.

  What moon? She’d nearly run off the road looking at him. And if she raised her gaze to seek it out through the tree branches overhead, their lips might touch, and that was the last thing she wanted … wasn’t it?

  “You won’t”—more ground rules—“kiss me if I look?”

  “Can’t answer that on the grounds that I might incriminate myself. But if I did, would it be so bad?”

  She really couldn’t see the eyes peering just beneath that sun-bleached brow of his, but boy, she could feel them—beating down her defenses and inviting the adventurous woman within to come out and play in the moonlight.

  Forgetting she had her purse in her hand, Corinne wiped her palms on her hips. It thudded near her feet, keys jingling.

  “O … oh—”

  Her groan was cut off by Mark’s lips planted firmly on her own.

  It was magic. It had to be, because she fully intended to grab her purse and run, not put her arms around his neck. The last thing he needed was the encouragement of delirious fingers straining that glorious hair instead of St. Matthew’s gnats.

  “That wasn’t too bad, was it?”

  But did she want to let the proverbial camel’s head past her defensive tent? Her voice was no more than a squeak. “No, it was good … very good. But I’m not sure this is—”

  “What is that scent?” he interrupted, his cheek brushing past her face with its past–five o’clock shadow as he sniffed her neck. “It’s so familiar.”

  “It … it’s orange blossom.” She wasn’t about to tell him he recognized it from his pet pig. “The orchard in the back was full of them when you first came.”

  He sniffed again, nuzzling beneath her ear.

  “I don’t think this is a good idea,” she blurted out, shifting her shoulder to drive the nose away to a less distracting distance.

  “And what’s wrong with a moonlight kiss between two people who happen to be attracted to each other?”

  What could she tell him? That he was a camel running over her tent?

  She rallied. “But that’s all it is.” And then shrank. “Isn’t it? A kiss that fades in the sun?”

  When her heart played, it was for keeps. That’s why she had to be selective, not cave in at the first flare-up of butterflies.

  “Enjoy the magic.” He cupped her chin in his hand. “And just to prove that this is something special, I’ll do it again tomorrow, in the sun, Corina.”

  Co-ree-na. The way he said her name was as irresistible as the mouth that closed over her own. “Cori—”

  A sharp scream pierced the still of the night, skewering Corinne’s heart in midbeat. While her passion-staggered senses scrambled to regroup, it sounded again, only then breaking the invisible bond that held her in Mark’s arms. If she could trust her ears, it had come from the house.

  CHAPTER 19

  Mark struggled to return to reality as Corinne turned with a gasp toward the house. “Soledad!”

  The housekeeper burst from the back door, voluminous nightgown hiked to her knees, and dashed out into the yard, shrieking in surround sound. She nearly bowled Mark over when he attempted to stop her.

  “Whoa, Soledad. What is it?”

  “No, no, no, no …”At close proximity, her continuous hysteria was ear-splitting.

  “Un fantasma,” she sobbed, struggling to pull away.

  “A ghost?” Corinne exclaimed, putting an arm around the trembling woman. “It’s okay, Soledad. Mark and I are here.”

  Still gulping for breath, the housekeeper looked from Mark to Corinne and back again, as if realizing for the first time who they were. Her chin quivered as she tried to speak. “I s-saw her with m-my own eyes. Sh-she is in the ballroom with our T-Toto, even as we speak.”

  “Wait,” Mark said, not ready to believe in ghosts. He hadn’t quite digested the idea of witches. “You saw a woman inside the house?”

  “Sí! Claro!” Soledad’s incredulity suggested he had the IQ of a slug. “I saw … S-Señora Lucinda.”

  “Right,” he said, leaving Soledad to the woman he’d just kissed a moment ago.

  Now, that was real. The sense of her softness lingered like a whisper around him.

  “What are you going to do?” Corinne called after him.

  He flung the screen door open, hollering over his shoulder. “I’m going to catch a ghost!”

  More than likely it was shadow that played upon the supersized superstition of the local population. Then caution stopped him. If it was someone—perhaps the crayon-carrying witch—forewarned was forearmed. He eased the door back gently.

  “What are you looking for?” Corinne called to him from the SUV, where she had seated the shaken Soledad in the passenger seat.

  In the car light that flooded the tree-shaded area, Mark spied a piece of the old shower piping that Juan Pedro had replaced with PVC.

  “A ghost buster,” he replied, picking it up. Reinforced with a length of galvanized metal, he reentered the hacienda.

  The moon afforded enough light through the window over the sink for him to see his way through to the kitchen. Hoping that Soledad’s wails hadn’t left him partially deaf, he stopped at the hallway entrance and peeked around it, listening. Instead of coming from the direction of the ballroom, footsteps sounded in the front of the house, followed by a hiss and a familiar grunt.

  A hissing ghost and a pig?

  Ridiculous or not, the hair pricked at Mark’s neck at the sight of a small figure silhouetted in the moonlight spilling in from the Palladian arch over the front door. At least that’s what he thought he saw. Soledad had hung clear plastic curtains both coming and going to separate the construction from the living quarters. And the one he looked through rustled as though recently disturbed.

  God, I know I’m six-two and in gym-prime shape, but please don’t let this be what Soledad said …

  Mark clenched the pipe and gave the figure one last blink to disappear. It did, in an image of flowing white … into the salon.

  … Or at least don’t let whatever it is have a gun. Gun trumps the lead pipe.

  A crash of furniture in the front room jumped Mark’s pulse to warp speed. Brushing his way through the curtain, he raced down the hall. Knowing where the furniture was, he had the advantage of the culprit now. The only way out was through the windows, which, with no one home, Soledad had locked as surely as she drew breath.

  Ghost buster ready, he charged into the room and pitched headlong over something that did not belong in his path. It squealed as Mark slammed against the floor, the metal pipe knocked from his hand by the impact. Advantage lost, he crawled toward the noise of its roll and collided, nose first, into a warm bristly body.

  Annoyed beyond the limits of caution, Mark gave the pig a backswing. “Whose side are you on?” But
instead of hitting the worrisome Toto, he struck his wrist on the corner of Doña Violeta’s hardwood desk.

  Pain jolted up his arm and left his hand numb in its wake. The sound of tile moving against tile silenced the flood of expletives that wanted to burst through his sealed lips. Clutching his numb hand to his chest, he groped with the other for the pipe in case the ghost was about to finish him off with a heavy floor tile.

  At the cool touch of metal, he seized the pipe and inch-wormed to his knees, trying to listen above the roar of the still outraged pressure point in his wrist. Unlike the hand beyond it, the wrist, unmercifully, had not gone numb.

  But above his pain and the stillness of the night, his heartbeat and the click of Toto’s feet were the only sounds he detected. Unaware that he had been holding his breath, he released it. Holding on to the desktop, Mark pulled himself to his feet and reached for the chain on the lamp.

  The sudden burst of light blinded him, but when his eyes adjusted, he couldn’t believe what he saw. Or rather, what he didn’t see. There was no one in the room at all. Just Toto, who seemed intent on nosing his way around the overturned library table. The curtains over the windows hung undisturbed, so the culprit couldn’t have escaped through them. And Mark would have heard that. The only other way out of the room was over Mark as he scrambled around on the floor. Only a ghost—

  No way … Right, God?

  Ghosts didn’t hiss and walk around in boots. So if the intruder didn’t get out, he still had to be in there. And since there had been no gunfire …

  Mark’s gaze fell on the bed—the only place where the figure could hide.

  “Okay, buddy, I know you’re there,” he announced in broken Spanish. “Tell me why you’re here and you go, no problema.”

  A long moment passed with no reply. It was probably a kid half-scared out of his wits. The figure hadn’t been very tall.

  Mark gave the intruder one more chance.

  “Tell me, amigo. No problema.”

  Still no answer.

  Mark marched over to the bed. Throwing up the spread, he swept the underneath with the pipe, producing a pair of his sneakers, but no intruder.

  But he’d seen it enter the salon.

  “Mark? Mark, are you okay?” Corinne shouted from the back of the house.

  “Yeah, but stay in the kitchen.”

  Unsettled and confused, he walked to the entrance and flipped on the hall lights. He and Soledad weren’t both hallucinating. Someone had been in the hacienda. Remembering the sound of tile, he walked over the floor, kicking at the large decorative tiles inset between the hardwood dividers. After all, a man, or a woman, might be able to drop through one of those to an underground passage of some kind.

  But none were loose. Shoulders weighted with disappointment and confusion, Mark turned full circle, looking for any sign of how or where the figure might have disappeared, when he noticed that Toto had climbed up on the raised hearth of the fireplace.

  Of course … the chimney. He’d seen thugs on TV reality crime shows stuck in chimneys. That was the only place the would-be ghost could be.

  “Snake-hunting again, Toto?” Mark tiptoed to the desk to retrieve a flashlight he kept in the top drawer. “Did you see any of those critters?”

  Easing onto the stone surface, Mark angled so that he could look up the chimney, but wouldn’t be a target, should the perp drop down on him. With the push of a button, the flashlight filled the soot-blackened column with its glow, but again, there was nothing up there but a rusted flue. Mark crawled under the low oak mantel built into the stone wall and maneuvered the shaft of light past the canted flap of iron, but aside from a star-studded patch of sky beyond its reach, there was nothing.

  “Mark?”

  Bolting upright, Mark cracked his head on the massive beam.

  “What?” he snapped, backing out of the enclosure. “I thought I told you to stay in the back until I checked out the house.”

  “Did you see anything?”

  “Yes and no.” Hiding the fact that she’d scared him out of three lives, he returned the flashlight to the desk and approached the overturned library table. “I saw someone … or something, but I didn’t see where he, she, or it went.”

  “What’s that?” Corinne asked as he righted the table. Hanging from the rough unfinished underside was a piece of white gauze.

  Mark picked it off. “I’d say our ghost has torn her dress.” And it was in here just seconds before he plunged—literally—into the room. “And did I say she wore combat boots?”

  Corinne pointed to the floor. “Look, aren’t those footprints?”

  Sure enough, their “ghost” had tracked some of the plaster dust from the ballroom into the salon.

  “Maybe the police can make some kind of cast or imprint or something.”

  Mark cut his optimistic companion off. “In Mexicalli?”

  She winced. “Guess you’re right … but we should still call them.”

  He shook his head. “How late do you want to stay up while Capitán Nolla tells you that unless we saw who the intruder was, there is nothing he can do. ‘After all, señorita,’” Mark said, mimicking the nasal quality of the officer’s voice, “‘we are just a small village, and I am only one policía.’”

  “After all, señorita, we are just a small village, and I am only one policeman,” Capitán Nolla told Corinne the next morning as he retreated into his blue-and-white compact car without trying to lift the prints, or whatever police did with them. “But I will write up a report, in case something else should happen.”

  Mark had been right. Calling the police was a waste of time, she thought, returning to the house with a weary step. It seemed like hours since a loud snort just before dawn had brought her upright in the bed that she shared with a still-sleeping Soledad.

  After coaxing the distraught housekeeper into the house with the promise that all three of them would hunker down in one room, they’d compromised on the use of Primitivo’s protection— burning candles as a night-light, but no copal.

  And now, they were no better off for Capitán Nolla’s visit. He’d looked at them as if they’d made up the entire story, despite the plaster-dust prints and Mark’s and Soledad’s witness. Determined not to simply roll over and let possible evidence go to waste, Corinne passed the salon, where Juan Pablo, who’d shown up shortly after the policeman’s arrival, was studying the blueprints with Mark.

  “It is with magnanimous regret, Señor Mark,” the plumber expounded, “that I and my brothers cannot assume the projection until after the fiesta next week. But you can build on my promise that we will be arrived on the mañana after which.”

  At least Mark had learned a lesson about dealing locally, she thought, ducking into her room to search through the plastic storage container of craft supplies stored under her bed. After rummaging through assorted colored paper, rolls of tape and crepe paper, and assorted markers and pens, she found what she was looking for. Using scissors from the box, she cut a length of the clear contact paper and returned the supplies to their place beneath the bed.

  “Don’t pay any attention to me,” she told the two men as she entered the room.

  “What are you going to do with that?” Mark asked.

  “I’m going to lift the print for evidence,” she said, picking at the corner of the contact paper’s backing with her fingernail.

  The clearest of the prints was still surrounded by the kitchen chairs that Soledad placed there to keep anyone from contaminating the evidence. Corinne moved a chair aside and knelt on the floor.

  “Right.”

  Scowling at both Mark’s disdain and the resistant backing, Corinne continued to work on it. “I wouldn’t expect someone who sleeps with a pig to understand.”

  “Not literally,” Mark informed Juan Pablo. “Soledad keeps the pig in the house as a pet.”

  “Got it,” Corinne said under her breath. With the sticky side down, she knelt and carefully positioned the square over
one of the footprints. It’s worth a try, she thought, easing it to the floor, where she ironed it out with her hands.

  “The pig didn’t run from the ghost,” Juan Pablo pointed out. “The animals see things that we cannot, and then they run.”

  “A ghost doesn’t wear boots and gauze, Juan. I think it was some kid …”

  “With big feet?” Corinne stood up, wiping her hands on her hips. “All I need is some plastic wrap to seal it on the sticky side.”

  “I had feet that big when I was ten,” Mark told her.

  “You’re not an Indio,” Corinne replied.

  “Maybe so,” the plumber acknowledged Mark, “but how is it explained that it disappeared like so?” Juan snapped his fingers.

  “The kid could have slipped past me when I fell.”

  “Except that the footprints lead into the room.” Corinne looked at the floor as if to confirm the thought that had just occurred to her. “Not out.”

  Juan Pablo exhaled, staring at the contact paper–covered print, his heavy mustache twitching. “Pues,” he said, taking up his hat from the desk, “I and my brothers will work during the day. You can build on that as well.”

  “Hasta luego, Juan,” Corinne told him, pulling up the contact paper from the floor and heading for the kitchen.

  A delicious stew of some kind simmered on the back burner of the stove, but Soledad had left to visit her sister at the parsonage. Corinne could imagine that by now everyone in Mexicalli was speculating about Hacienda Ortiz’s apparition.

  Mark sat at the table, going over a set of figures on Tres Juanes stationery.

  “So, what’s the verdict? Has being second choice brought his proposition up?”

  Mark shook his head. “Nope. Same as before.”

  She placed the contact-paper footprint next to his papers, plaster dust side up. “That dear little man,” she said, her faith in mankind renewed. “You might have to check behind his math, but I believe he has an honest heart.”

  “I see what you mean,” Mark admitted. “He could have held us over a barrel, too, but he didn’t.”