Clarita turned toward the door, offering me her stiff back and the heavy black coil of hair on the nape of her neck, the twinkling earrings.
“I have already told you that these things we do not discuss.”
“But they are being discussed,” I said gently. “My grandfather has told me that you saw what happened. And so has Eleanor. What I want—what I have a right to as Doroteo’s daughter—is to hear this from you. Please tell me.”
I half expected her to walk out the door and leave me standing there, rebuked, but instead she whirled toward me with a violence that left me startled. I had not thought her an emotional person.
“You might as well know that I was not fond of Doroteo. Sylvia was more a dear younger sister to me than your mother ever was. I owe nothing to you as Doro’s daughter. If you have heard what happened from both my father and Eleanor, then you know all there is to know. I did not grieve when Doro died.”
“But you grieved for Kirk,” I said, and stood my ground.
She came close enough to put an angry hand on my arm. “I did not grieve for him! Once, long ago, Doro and I loved him when he was a young boy. And I hated your mother then because he liked her best. Later it was different. But I do not wish to talk about these things. I have suffered enough. Remember that you are the daughter of a woman who committed murder, and you have no rights in this house.”
The violent emotion that shook her frightened me, but I would not step back from her touch.
“You forget something,” I said. “You forget that I too saw what happened. I was there. Closer than you. Close enough to see and hear as well.”
The shock of my words made her drop her hand from my arm, and step back from me. For just an instant I saw open fright in her eyes. Then her guard was up again, all emotion erased, her face as expressionless as usual, her eyes bleak, but unrevealing.
“So what did you see? What have you to reveal that would be any different from that which I saw very clearly with good eyesight?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing yet. But perhaps there will be a way of remembering. My grandfather has said he’d try to help me remember, if that’s what I wish. Aunt Clarita, were you really in Doroteo’s bedroom that day when it happened? Did you really stand at her window?”
Nothing moved in her eyes, her face. She simply walked to the door and stood aside, gesturing me through. There was nothing to do but walk past her and back to the living room. She did not follow me, and I stood in the cool, dim room, feeling shaken by a confrontation more extreme than I had expected or intended. Clarita would tell me nothing more now, but she’d already told me one thing. She had told me of her youthful disliking for my mother and her consequent lack of any liking for me.
Adobe walls were tight about me. Beyond them mountain and mesa seemed to close me in. For a little while I had to escape. I wanted to tell someone what had happened to me. Gavin, I thought. I would go downtown to the store again and see if it was possible to talk to Gavin. Yet I knew in the same breath that I would not. We hadn’t ended our morning as friends. He wouldn’t welcome the sight of me, and he was too closely involved with the Cordovas to listen to me with any sympathy. But I had another cousin—Sylvia Stewart. Tart of tongue though she might be, she had more honesty in her than the others, and she might be willing to listen to me as no one else would. Sylvia would be in her bookstore downtown.
I took the sandalwood box to my room, and stopped there long enough to clip on my mother’s earrings. The small winged birds seemed to flutter at my earlobes, and the Zuni work matched my grandfather’s gift of the brooch. When I’d picked up my handbag, I ran downstairs and went out through the front door. The little key was with me again, though when I’d have the chance to use it, I didn’t know.
Perhaps I could have had the use of a car, if I’d asked, but I didn’t want to speak to anyone in that house hi my present mood. The central plaza downtown was no great distance and I could find my way along Canyon Road and down the Alameda.
Walking calmed me to some degree. When I reached the plaza, dreaming in cool May sunshine, with its white wrought-iron benches and its memorials—a center of quiet, while traffic moved all around—I paused before the monument trying to focus on everyday things. There was a plaque and I read the words.
TO THE HEROES WHO HAVE FALLEN IN THE BATTLE WITH SAVAGE INDIANS IN THE TERRITORY OF NEW MEXICO
I wondered what New Mexico Indians thought of this plaque. But of course these words belonged to another century and different thinking.
I left the plaza, crossing to the long adobe building that was the Governor’s Palace which now housed a museum. On the sidewalk, beneath protruding brown vigas, Indians sat against the wall, displaying turquoise and silver jewelry spread before them on squares of cloth. Passers-by stopped to examine their wares, while the Indians, both men and women, regarded them impassively, urging nothing upon them. Hunched beneath shoulder blankets, they waited for whatever might come. Both “heroes” and “savages” were gone and these Pueblo Indians regarded the rush and avarice of the Anglos with a quiet, superior wisdom. It was a scene I would like to paint.
Walking about the square, I found the street Sylvia had indicated when she drove me through town on my arrival, and I moved slowly past the windows of small shops until I came to one which displayed books. When I stepped inside, I found Sylvia busy with a customer.
Her short brown hair was slightly rumpled and she looked at me through dark-rimmed glasses, gave me a nod and a signal to wait. The shop was small, with a single window at the back, and it was crowded with bright-jacketed books. They stood in neat rows on wall shelves and were piled in orderly fashion on a central table. In an alcove there was a desk and typewriter, where her assistant was working.
I found the books by Paul Stewart easily, since his wife had given them prominent display. I found Emanuella, The Trail of the Whip, and several others. I was browsing through a volume on the Pueblo Indians, when the customer left, and Sylvia came over to me.
“How are things going?” she asked.
I put the book back on the shelf. “I’m not sure. I’ve just had rather a row with Aunt Clarita. She gave me some things that had belonged to my mother and I asked her to tell me exactly what she saw that day when my mother died.”
“Did she tell you?”
“No. She seemed terribly upset and she wouldn’t talk about it. I did something rather foolish. I reminded her that I’d been there too that day, and that I had seen everything that happened.”
Sylvia gasped. “Do you mean you’ve begun to remember?”
“No—not at all. But Clarita looked positively frightened for a moment, and then she turned into stone again. I think she’s hiding something.”
Sylvia picked up a book and blew imaginary dust from its top a little too casually. “That’s unlikely, I should think.”
“I even asked her if she was really there at the window where she could see what happened.”
“You have stirred her up! Clarita is the most underestimated member of the Cordova family. There’s a lot more to her than she ever shows the world. Juan always discounted her and let her know it, yet she’s held that household together and been a loving mother to Eleanor. When we were young, she was very good to me, and I’m fond of her.”
“She said you were like a sister to her.”
“Katy appreciated her quality of loyalty and her sense of duty, but I think she guessed too that Clarita, when she was young, had a passionate nature. There was a time when she was blindly in love with Kirk—but that changed with the years, and a good thing. Only Juan, I think, kept his affection for Kirk—perhaps because Kirk tried to pattern himself after Juan Cordova. Sometimes I found it hard to take that Kirk was more Spanish than Spain. We fought a bit because he didn’t want me to marry Paul.”
But it was not Kirk who interested me most at the moment. I wanted to talk about Doroteo first, and I dared a question in the face of this outpouring. “Was Paul really
in love with my mother at one time, as he says?”
Sylvia shrugged a little too elaborately, and I suspected that there might be certain matters on which she too would not be altogether honest. Perhaps in self-deception?
“I think that was a little fantasy he developed while he was writing Emanuella—that he had once been in love with Doro. All the way through writing that book he admittedly saw Doro in Emanuella. But it hadn’t any reality in fact, as far as I know.”
Her voice had turned a little hard, and when a customer came into the shop, she hurried from me, as though relieved to end our conversation. She hadn’t, after all, been a satisfactory person to talk to. The interplay of all those emotions which had dogged the Cordovas and those involved with them was a complex thing.
While she was busy, I stepped to a rear window and looked through glass upon an unexpectedly pleasant vista. The building which housed Sylvia’s shop ran around the hollow square of a large patio. There were trees and shrubbery growing there, and brick walks crossed one another. On a stone bench near the center, Paul Stewart sat writing in a notebook.
He was not a man whose company I enjoyed, and I hadn’t liked the way he wanted to study me, extract from me those buried memories. I’d wondered besides about his relationship with Eleanor. But now there were things he could tell me, and I might do a little extracting myself.
Back in the shop’s alcove was a door to the courtyard. “May I go outside?” I asked Sylvia.
She nodded and I went through the door. There was the pungent scent of juniper warming in the sun, and snowball bushes displaying their white puffs. Iris grew along a walk and birds sang in this quiet place where traffic sounds were muffled and distant, and a blue sky arched overhead. Running part way about the hollow of the patio was a sheltered walk, with a wooden gallery overhead, and offices and shops opening off it. Again I had a sense of enclosure, of a place that tried to shut out the world. A Spanish family had once lived here, treasuring privacy, turning its back on all that lay outside. But increasingly, I didn’t like being shut in.
I walked toward Paul, my footsteps echoing on brick, and he looked up at me, smiling, though his eyes appraised and questioned.
“Am I interrupting?” I asked, glancing at the notebook.
He flipped it closed. “Not at all. I needed to get away from my typewriter and do some thinking. Have you been visiting Sylvia’s shop?”
“Yes. I’ve even been looking at some of your books. Is there one you can especially recommend?”
“I only know what the critics tell me. I’m a masterful writer to some, too fanciful in my nonfiction for others. Of course, I’m half fiction writer deliberately. I let my imagination go with Emanuella. It’s really a novel.”
“Your wife says you had my mother in mind when you were writing that book. What was Doro like?”
He answered with a slight edge to his voice. “She was unforgettable. Beautiful, and a little wild. Perverse, tantalizing. Mercurial. All the things Emanuella must have been. Are you any of these things, Amanda Austin?”
I shook my head, smiling back at him, though it was as if we dueled, and I thought once more of a faun with all its whimsicality and mischief-making ability.
“What you’re describing sounds like my cousin Eleanor.”
“Possibly. But Eleanor is her own woman.”
“And I think my mother was not very much like her.”
“Have they told you yet?”
I knew what he meant. “That I was there when it happened? Yes, Eleanor took care of that.”
“I made her see that she must. You couldn’t really begin to remember until you knew that. Now it will surface. Will you tell me what you discover?”
I didn’t think I would, but I evaded a direct reply, because I wanted him to answer me.
“You’ve told me a little about my mother. What was Kirk Landers like?”
He seemed to answer carefully. “Women thought him pretty dashing, and he enjoyed that. He wanted to masquerade as a Spanish caballero, a young Spanish don. I can’t say I cared for him.”
“Sylvia says he didn’t want her to marry you.”
“He had a prejudice against me. I’m not sure why. I think Juan sent him off with a bribe to get him away from Doroteo until they both grew up, and then Doro married your father—which didn’t please Juan very much. Of course when Kirk came home, his nose was pretty much out of joint, with Doro married, and Clarita no longer looking at him in adoration.”
Paul fingered the hinges of his notebook and his smile had a secret look, as though he glimpsed a joke he didn’t mean to tell me. When he looked up, there was speculation in his eyes.
“In any case, Amanda, there’s a way to help you remember, if you’ll let me try.”
I didn’t trust him at all, but I was curious to know what he meant. When I merely waited, he flipped open his notebook again.
“I’ve been sitting here jotting down bits and pieces out of my memory, trying to reconstruct what happened, and recall where everyone was at the time. But I’m not getting anything significant I’ve thought of going back to the actual place where the picnic was held, to see what might return to my mind. Will you come with me?”
Even though he took me by surprise, I didn’t hesitate. There were things this might tell me, and I already knew I had a rendezvous with that particular spot.
“When?” I said.
“What better time than now? My car’s outside, and we can drive there directly. Unless someone looks out of that high window, no one at the Cordovas’ needs to know we’re there.”
“All right,” I said. “Let’s go back through Sylvia’s shop. I’d like to tell her what we plan to do.”
He seemed to hesitate, as though he’d rather have gone directly through the archway to the street. Then he came with me as I started across the patio.
The shop was empty of customers, and Sylvia was unpacking a carton of brightly jacketed books. Her eyes went to Paul’s face, and in that look I knew how much he meant to her.
“We’re going to see what we can resurrect from the past,” he told her. “We’re going back to the picnic place to see what we can learn.”
That odd, dancing light was in his eyes again, and Sylvia looked her alarm, as though this was something she feared. However, she offered no objection. Perhaps she knew objecting would do no good. She went quickly to a small artificial tree set on a counter and hung with tiny squares. From it she selected one and brought it to me.
“You must have an Ojo de Dios. To protect you against evil.”
Her tone was light, but I sensed meaning beneath the surface, as though she was warning me. The piece I took from her was hardly an inch square, made of two crossed sticks, wound about with strands of colored yarn to form a pattern in red and green and white. In the center was a spot of black.
“What is it?” I asked.
She seemed anxious to hold me there talking, and she explained in detail, while Paul moved restlessly about the shop, examining book titles.
“The Zapotec Indians make one of these for every child at his birth. They cross two twigs and wind yarn about them, beginning at the center—for the years of a child’s life. There are bright colors and dark, for the gay and the sad. The years go very quickly there at the beginning, but they grow longer and slower at the outer edge. They used to hang one on the wall to represent all the years of a life. Nowadays they’re regarded as good luck charms against evil spirits. That black spot in the center is the Eye of God—the Ojo de Dios. Put it in your bag and keep it with you.”
I saw now that above a bank of bookshelves hung a row of larger squares of the same sort, made of various colored yarns. I thanked her and dropped the little token into my bag, but somehow I felt uneasy. Why should she warn me against Paul? She stood close to me, watching, and she said something odd for a woman who seemed as practical-minded as Sylvia.
“That’s an evil place he’s taking you to. I wish you wouldn’t go.”
> Paul heard her and laughed. “There’s no such thing as an evil place. There are only evil people.”
“Not my mother,” I said.
He smiled at me and that strange gleam was back in his eyes. “No, not your mother. Perhaps she was reckless and wild, but not truly evil.”
“Kirk was reckless too,” Sylvia said quickly, “but he wasn’t evil either. In spite of everything.”
“Then that leaves no one who was evil.” Paul seemed to challenge her.
For an instant there was fright in Sylvia. I could sense it in her tightened lips, in the look she gave him. Then she reached out to touch my arm.
“Don’t let him torment you with all this. Let what’s gone be forgotten.”
“Come along, Amanda,” Paul said curtly, and the look he threw his wife was not one of affection.
But I had ceased to pay attention. I’d known all along that the arroyo would summon me, and the moment was here. This was what I must do.
IX
We drove back to the Stewarts’ garage, and on the way Paul had little to say. I was aware of the occasional glance he turned in my direction, aware again of something in him that probed and searched. For what? What compulsion drove him that he had to know about the past?
From the house we went on foot, and he led the way out to the rear where the hillside curve followed above the arroyo. He pointed out that there were other ways to reach the picnic place from above, but this diagonal path which ran behind the Cordova wall was quicker.
“It’s the path you and your mother took that day when she was hurrying to meet Kirk,” he said.
His will was pressing upon me, exerting a force that I had to resist. If I wasn’t careful, he would make me “remember” something that had never been.
“How do you know that Doroteo went out to meet Kirk?” I asked.
“They think she’d taken Mark Brand’s gun from his room. She must have had it with her. She must have known she would meet him.”
I shivered in warm sunlight, and let him lead the way. The path we followed meant nothing to me. There seemed no memory here. Cottonwoods and poplars grew thickly above the dry arroyo, where water would sometimes rush furiously, coming down in a spill from the mountains. There were the usual clumps of chamiso and juniper. We came quickly upon the open space beneath a cottonwood tree, and stood in its shadow, looking around.
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