“I’m waiting,” I said, and hated the way my voice trembled.
He rose from the desk and bent toward me. His long fingers touched the weight of my hair at the back, moved lightly down my face, as though the artist in him sought for deeper knowledge than the eyes could give, reached my chin and tipped it upward. I sat frozen, resenting his touch, finding it more possessive than loving.
“I remember the small Amanda,” he said. “I remember holding her in my arms. I remember reading to her of Don Quixote while she sat on my knee.”
He was trying to beguile me. “Don Quixote when I was less than five?” I said.
“But of course. The meaning of the words is not important to a child. It is the interest of the adult and the music of the sound.” I did not move, and he sensed the resistance in me, drew away, sat down. Not hurt, but still amused, and obviously pleased because he had so upset me. He was a dreadful old man—wicked and quite dangerous.
“Now we will talk again,” he said. “All the things I’ve stated to you must be done, but you are right. It would not be good to antagonize the household yourself. I will take care of my orders. The others are used to the outrageous from me, as you are not, and they cannot run away—as you can. So I have them where I want them. At least, you are good for me. I feel more alive at this moment than I have in months. You may go now. And tomorrow we will begin.”
“I’m not sure I want this,” I said. “What is it you wish of me?”
“That depends on what you have to give. It will be best, however, if you do not go stirring up old fires, old wounds. All that could be done about your mother’s death was done at the time. Let it rest, Amanda, and do not bother yourself talking with Paul Stewart. Now, good night.”
“Good night,” I said. But I did not promise that I would let the matter of my mother’s death go. I had not been told everything yet, by any means.
I went through the door and out upon the landing. Only Eleanor sat in the living room below. She had a book in her hands, but I didn’t think she was reading. She looked up at me wih a searching glance.
“You were shouting,” she said. “You must have made Juan very angry.”
“He made me angry,” I said sharply. “I think I’ll go to bed now. I’m very tired—after all the graciousness that’s been extended to me by the Cordovas.”
“Of course,” she agreed, unruffled, and rose smoothly from her chair. “I’ll come with you and see if everything is right in your room.”
I had no wish for her company, but there was no way to discourage her. She followed me up the flight of stairs to my room and waited while I opened the door.
Someone had lighted a lamp on the bed table, and the shaggy white rug on the floor nearby glowed yellow. Something rested in its center that did not belong there. I bent to pick it up.
The little object lay heavy in my hand, and I saw that it was made of some black stone formed roughly in the shape of a mole, with a pointed snout and rudimentary legs. Bound to its back with sinew thongs were an arrowpoint and several colored beads, including a piece of turquoise that had been threaded onto a thong. These things looked old and were stained with some brownish color. Strangely, I felt a revulsion toward whatever they represented. There seemed no reason for so strong a flash of repugnance, but the feeling was there. Atavistic. This was some sort of Indian relic, I was sure, and it had not been left in my room for any but an evil purpose.
I looked at Eleanor and saw that her gaze was fixed with bright interest on the black stone I held.
“What is it?” I asked.
She raised her shoulders in a slight shiver. “It’s an Indian fetish. That’s probably dried blood on the back. There’s a ritual where the fetish is fed blood.”
In my hand, the black stone felt cold and heavy as a threat. But I refused to let the matter of its presence go.
“Why is it here?”
“How would I know? Someone must have put it there. Let me see.”
She took the thong-wrapped stone from me and examined it closely. “I think it’s a Zuni fetish, and I know where it came from. It’s been missing ever since Gavin brought home several fetishes to exhibit in the store. Genuine fetishes are hard to come by these days because no self-respecting Indian will sell anything so personal. I think this is a hunter’s fetish. It’s supposed to bring good luck in the hunt. Gavin told me it was a rare one because it’s in the form of a mole. Moles belong to the nether regions and they aren’t highly thought of as fetishes, so there aren’t many of them. Still—a mole has its virtues. It can burrow in the dark and lay traps for larger animals.”
She was all too well informed, and there was mocking intent in her words.
“But why would someone leave it here?”
“Perhaps it’s a warning, Cousin. Perhaps you are the prey.” There was an odd light in her violet eyes that did not reassure me.
“And who is hunting me?” I challenged.
Her hands moved gracefully and I was reminded again of a dancer. “Who knows the hunter until he strikes? It could be any of us, couldn’t it?”
I stared at the black stone mole in her hands. “Why should I be anyone’s prey?”
Eleanor laughed softly, and I heard the ruthless echo of Juan Cordova in the sound. “Isn’t it obvious? I heard some of what our grandfather said to you. He means to use you against us. He means to try to frighten us.”
From the living room below, a voice called up the stairs. “Is anyone at home? I’ve been wandering around without finding a soul.”
“That’s Paul.” Eleanor’s eyes lighted with a pleasure I did not like. “I’ll give the mole back to Gavin, Amanda. Don’t worry about it. Or”—she paused—“perhaps you had better worry about it.” Then she moved toward the door. “I expect Paul wants to talk to you.”
I shook my head. “Not now. I don’t want to see anyone tonight.” I’d had enough of the Cordovas, and in particular of Eleanor. “Good night,” I said in firm dismissal.
For a moment she regarded me intently, but I didn’t waver and she shrugged as she went toward the stairs. At the last minute she turned back with that bright look in her eyes.
“You really aren’t afraid, are you, Amanda?”
I met her look, asserting my own courage and dignity. The small victory was mine, and she ran lightly down the stairs. From below, as I closed the door softly, I could hear the sound of voices—low, conspiratorial.
Was I afraid?
I hadn’t come here with any wish to be used as a weapon for some veiled warfare that might be going on in this house, a weapon with which those who might oppose Juan Cordova could be subjugated. But neither did I mean to be threatened by those who opposed him. I would not let either side use me, and there was nothing to keep me from going home at once, if I chose. There was nothing to hold me here—except my own will. Was the wish to stay stronger than the desire to run?
Once more I had the feeling of adobe walls closing in on me, holding me a prisoner. Had Katy ever felt like that? And how had my mother felt, here in this room? Nothing I had learned about her seemed like the behavior of a prisoner—she who had grown up happily in these walls. Yet she had died, and a man had died too—they said because of her.
Feeling a little sick, I went to a window and spread the curtains that had been drawn across it. A cool night wind touched my face and under starlight the snow on pointed peaks glistened against the deep, dark blue of the sky. At least this room was above the walls. Here, at least, I was not closed in. Except by my own thoughts.
A past that had always seemed distant and something to be gently unraveled—a story to give me pleasure and a new knowledge of myself—now seemed imminent and threatening. I had been in this house at the time when they must have brought them back to it—Kirk Landers and my mother, Doroteo, both dead. Yet I had no memory of loss, of suffering. Whatever existed deep in my consciousness was smothered in a mist through which no light penetrated. I did not want to remember that time in order
to help Paul Stewart with his book, but now that I knew there must be something hidden in me, something lodged in the recesses of my own mind which had experienced a time of tragedy, I wanted to seek it out for myself, bring it into the open, know it for whatever it was. Katy had known—something. Or discovered something later. If I stayed here, could I perhaps find out what it was? Could I free my mother’s memory of that dreadful stamp of murder and suicide? How futile was such a wish?
I couldn’t know until I had stayed for a few days, at least, and had learned everything I could about the past. There were so many gaps that were still not filled in, and I still knew nothing at all about what dreadful thing had risen to cause violence between my mother and Sylvia Stewart’s stepbrother.
No, I could not leave right away. Not even if some threat to me existed in this house. What had happened long ago was all going on still. It had not ended with my mother’s death, and perhaps my coming had stirred sleeping terrors. I must stay and find out. For myself I must allay them.
VI
Weariness enveloped me the moment I was in bed. I fell soundly asleep and heard nothing of the whisperings of a strange house. It must have been well into the early, dark hours that the dream began to take shape in my sleeping mind. I knew with a sense of dread that it was coming, yet I was chained by sleep, unable to waken and protect myself from the vision that grew in my mind.
The tree was there. That dreadful, haunting tree—so enormous that it hid the sky, reaching upward with twisted black branches. I cowered close to the ground, staring up into that sickly green canopy that held all horror, that enclosed me in frozen terror. The thing was alive with movement, trembling, writhing, reaching toward me. In a few moments it would grasp and smother me with that awful green. Already, I could hardly breathe. A heavy limb lowered itself slowly, moving with a strange life of its own, to rest upon my chest and I struggled to fight it away, to cry out, to scream for aid that I knew would never come in time.
I sat up in bed struggling with the bedclothes, fighting for my breath. My nightgown was soaked with cold perspiration and the sharp breeze from the window chilled me into consciousness. I did not immediately know where I was because the familiar horror lingered. I could see the tree as though it grew within the walls of my room, and I fought to free myself of the clinging vapors. As always, there was a sense of loss in me, of abandonment.
I had been on feared and well-known territory. As a child I had dreamed of the tree and when I awakened screaming, my father had held me in his arms to soothe and quiet me. Yet his arms never obliterated that terrible sense of loss. I could never tell him how bad the dream was—how frightful. Sometimes it was hours before I knew I was safe with him in a real world, and there was no tree, no black limbs to twine about me and stop my breath with the smothering green of their leaves.
Even now that I was grown and awake, the sense of terror returned to me in waves, and it was a long while before the haunting faded and I was able to sleep again.
When I awakened the next time, the sun was up, but I felt drained and weary, as I always did when the nightmare had returned. Somehow I knew that I had come close to the source of the dream. I had come to the place where the tree waited, and I must find it in reality this time. Only when I knew why it haunted me would I be free of it.
When I came downstairs, the cook was still in the kitchen, though no one was left at the table. She served me cheerfully enough, and my appetite returned as I drank hot coffee and revived a little.
In bright daylight, I could put the dream away and face a present that, while not wholly attractive, was at least real and could be dealt with, as the dream could not. I would see Juan Cordova as soon as possible and try to clear the air between us. I would let him know that I would not be used for some purpose which might be unfair to others in his family, and I would also persuade him to tell me the full story of my mother’s death.
The still disturbing puzzle of the mole fetish which had been left in my room remained, but I supposed this too would be made clear eventually. There were those who did not want me here, but I would not be frightened off like a child. The word “evil” which had come to me last night was only something to make me smile by daylight. I was not without courage, and I would stand up to whatever must be faced. I’d come here to learn who I was, and I wouldn’t go away until I knew.
When I’d finished breakfast, I went into the living room and approached the short flight of steps to my grandfather’s room. Clarita stood on the balcony.
“I’d like to see my grandfather,” I told her.
She loomed above me, a black figure, with her thin arms folded across her body, and her aging face looked down at me in disapproval.
“That isn’t possible this morning. Your visit yesterday excited him too much. He isn’t well and he can see no one.”
Her concern for her father seemed genuine, but she was still the guardian dragon, as he’d called her. Though he had given me instructions as to what I must say to her, I would not give her his orders. She had a right to tell me what I might do in this house, and I couldn’t oppose her. I would see him eventually because he would ask for me. I would wait till then.
I went up to my room, feeling restless and at loose ends, and got out my sketchbook and a pencil. These always served me when I needed release from tension. I let myself out through a rear door to the patio, finding the air marvelously clear and bracing, the morning sky pure turquoise. Behind the house, the garden was surprisingly spacious, stretching down an incline toward the back. It was not, however, a garden in my sense of the word. There were areas of bluestone, where nothing grew, and there was little grass. Since such a small amount of rain fell that constant watering would have been necessary to keep anything growing, no great effort had been made to provide flower beds. There were clumps of cholla and other cactus, and the native gray-green chamiso bushes one saw everywhere. Fluff from a cotton-wood tree floated to the ground, whitening an area around its base, and a path wound downhill toward a small building on the lower level of the property. Beyond it was a rear gate which must open on the hillside. Around all of this ran the adobe wall, shutting in the Cordovas, sealing them away from the world. They had, indeed, had secrets they wanted to conceal behind their walls.
The small building at the bottom of the property offered a contrast to the rest of the neighborhood. Though the walls were adobe, redwood had been used for the roof and it slanted to a high peak, like the roof of a church, so that I wondered if it might be a chapel of some sort. Its construction was modern and graceful, appealing to the eye, and it drew me, so that I walked down to view it more closely.
The typical carved wooden door was closed, and thick curtains covered its windows, unlike the windows of a chapel. A nearby rock, flat enough to sit upon, gave me a perch, and I sat down and opened my sketchbook.
In a few quick lines I caught the outline of the building, blocking in a cottonwood tree nearby and a clump of cholla by the front door. I made notes about the colors I might use and took the liberty of sketching in the rise of a mountain above the adobe wall, though none was visible from this angle. For me, the interest of painting, the satisfaction, was never in copying a scene exactly, but in creating my own impression of what I saw, finding a dimension caught only by me, selecting and rejecting, searching for an expanded vision, until the result pleased me, existed as mine.
I did not notice the nearby gate in the side wall, or hear it open until Sylvia Stewart called to me.
“Good morning, Amanda.”
Apparently this gate led into the Stewarts’ patio and the two families moved back and forth to visit each other as they pleased.
She wore fawn slacks and an amber sweater, and her hair with its deliberate shade of brown was brushed straight back from her forehead. I found myself looking at her through my new knowledge, wondering whether, because of her stepbrother, she resented me as Doroteo’s daughter. All the time we had been together yesterday she had known what was sai
d about my mother, and I had not. But there seemed no particular uneasiness in her this morning.
“May I see what you’re drawing?” she asked, and came to look over my shoulder.
I had turned another page, to make a careful study of a cottonwood tree, but now I flipped back to my drawing of the chapel-like building.
“Juan will like that,” she said. “Though you ought to put in his pride—those climbing Castilian roses against the wall. They’re the only flowers the Cordovas give much attention to. Do you know what it is you’ve drawn?”
“It looks like a chapel.”
“In a way, it is. To Juan it’s quite sacred. He keeps his private collection of art treasures there. Most of them are paintings from old Spain. Rumor has it that one of them is a Velázquez. But there are other things too. Sometimes I suspect that not everything has been legitimately come by.”
She laughed wryly and I did not comment. It was one of her typically barbed remarks.
“I suppose you’ve seen the collection?” I asked.
“Of course—since I’m counted as one of the family. But he shows it to very few people, and it’s his own private passion that he’s not given to sharing. Don’t try to walk in. There are burglar alarms everywhere. You have to know the right combination or you set them off.”
“Did the pre-Columbian head disappear from here?”
“Not exactly. It belongs here, but I understand that Juan had given permission for it to be put on display in the store with a special exhibit. It’s from that exhibit that it was taken. If it’s true Gavin is to blame, he could easily have picked it up from the store.”
“But why would he do a thing like that?”
“I don’t think he did. I suppose you’ve met all of our family by now? How do you like them?”
“I’ve hardly had time to get acquainted,” I said.
Closing my sketchbook, I stood up from the rock, and at once she gestured toward the gate in the adobe wall. “Do come over and visit Paul. He’s been waiting to talk to you, and you might as well get it over with.”
The Turquoise Mask Page 8
