The Turquoise Mask

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  I nodded. “It was in a box with the mask and other things.”

  “I asked Clarita to search for this book, but she never found it. Or at least she told me she had not.”

  I opened the book to the last pages, where the leaves had been torn out, leaving only jagged scraps at the center.

  “We think this was done today. Has Clarita been away from the house?”

  He fixed me with that fierce gaze. “She has been here all afternoon. She looked in on me several times. Clarita would not do a thing like this.”

  “What would I not do?” Clarita asked from behind me.

  I turned my head as she came into the room. For once she did not look like a middle-aged Spanish lady. She had put on cinnamon brown slacks and a dark red blouse, and she wore no jewelry. The effect was different, younger, and somehow less subservient to Juan Cordova.

  He answered her words coldly. “You would not, I think, go out to the rancho and disturb your mother’s possessions. You would not tear pages from her diary.”

  “Naturally not. This has been done?” In spite of her denial, I sensed tension in her.

  “Tell her, Amanda.”

  I obeyed. “Since Katy had left me a message to go to the rancho, and left me a key, Gavin took me out there today. We found this book with the hasp of the lock torn loose and the last pages ripped out. The pages which must have told about the picnic and my mother’s death.”

  “Such pages would not matter,” Clarita said. “She knew only what was known to all of us from the beginning.”

  “I have told Amanda that you were in the house all this afternoon, and that you looked in on me several times.”

  “That is true.” Clarita spoke with dignity and assurance, but I did not know at all whether she was telling the truth or whether Juan might be shielding her. Something had made her tense.

  “I found one other thing out there,” I said, and took the turquoise mask from its box, holding it toward her.

  Her gasp was one of repugnance, and she took an involuntary step backward.

  “The mask disturbs you?” Juan asked, quickly alert.

  “You know very well why it does,” she said. “It was found there that day. The day when Kirk and Doro died. The child was holding it. My mother took it from her. Later she packed it in a box with other things and removed them to the hacienda. I have not seen this again until now. It is a thing of ill omen, Amanda.”

  “I know,” I said. “I had an immediate feeling of fright when I saw it.”

  “No one has told me of this.” Juan sounded irritable. “The mask was always hung on a wall at the rancho, but the last time I went there it was gone, and I did not ask about it. How could it have come to the picnic place?”

  If Clarita had any notion, she didn’t betray it. She simply reached past me to pick up the diary from the desk, and she would have carried it away if I hadn’t stopped her.

  “Please, Aunt Clarita. I’d like to read the pages that are left, if I may. I know so little about my grandmother. And this book would cover part of the year when I was five.”

  She gave it up to me reluctantly, and I put it and the mask into the box I’d brought from the rancho.

  “I’ll go to my room now,” I said. “Is there anything else you wanted of me, Grandfather?”

  There was nothing, and Clarita stood away from the door to let me by. Juan spoke as I went out.

  “You will remember our plans, Amanda?”

  I told him I would remember, and I would come to his study after dinner.

  The afternoon was already growing late and shadows lay long across my room when I returned to it. On the bed Paul Stewart’s Emanuella still awaited my attention, but I was not ready to dip into its pages. My grandmother’s diary interested me more because it had to do with the past which pressed with a growing threat upon the present.

  I sat down in the chair by a window and began to skim through the pages. Katy had expressed herself vividly, and there were passages I would read with more care at another time, but now I was filled with a strange uneasiness that made me read as though I awaited some revelation. It was as if I stood before a curtained doorway, knowing that it was within my power to fling the curtain aside in time to witness something terrible that was happening beyond. Yet my hand could not move to push aside the curtain. Somehow my will and my vision were blocked. Perhaps this book would give me the power to open that curtain.

  Katy had loved life and loved her family, yet she had worn no rose-colored glasses with which to deceive herself. She had lived in a real world in which she made allowances for those she loved, permitting them to be themselves—not always approving, but always loving. Her love for Juan, her husband, came through her words, yet she could be exasperated with him at times. Clarita she worried about and prayed for secretly.

  Once she wrote, “Clarita is doomed to unhappiness. I have no use for the man she loves and I do not think he will marry her.” She couldn’t have meant Kirk at the date of the writing, and I wondered who the man had been whom Clarita had loved in her adult years.

  Doroteo was Katy’s joy, and she delighted as well in her two small granddaughters, Eleanor and Amanda.

  Where she wrote about us, I read more carefully, taking sustenance from the words. Her affection for me—for Doroteo’s daughter—came through warmly in the strong script, and tears burned my eyes as I read. Here was the family I had sought. If only this darling grandmother had lived long enough for me to know her after I was grown.

  When she wrote about Eleanor, however, there was something a little strange, something pained and off-key, as though she forced herself. The affection was there, but there was something else beneath it—a sadness, a fear, a regret?—that made me wonder if Eleanor had shown disturbing traits even as a small child.

  She wrote of Kirk Landers’ return to town and there was distress and uncertainty in her words, giving way to relief as she seemed to realize that whatever Doroteo had once felt for Kirk was over, and that Doro would never be turned from her husband. But she fretted about Kirk in these pages. She and Juan had loved and raised him as a son, as his stepsister, Sylvia, had been their daughter. But now Kirk was disturbing the climate of a happy family because he was so unhappy himself. Juan was trying to guide and advise him wisely, and he was the only one Kirk seemed to listen to.

  I turned the page and Paul Stewart’s name leaped at me from the script. Kirk didn’t want Paul to marry his stepsister, and one day there had been a violent quarrel between them, in which Kirk had given Paul a dreadful beating. It had been Katy who’d found them fighting down in the lower patio of the Cordova house. She had managed with difficulty to break up the fight—and not before both men had gained a few battle scars, though Paul’s hurts were far worse than Kirk’s. Katy’s writing became a bit erratic as she told of what had happened, and she closed the episode with these words, “Such angry wounds won’t easily heal. Juan mustn’t know. He has been ill, and he is still weak. He loves Kirk deeply, and I won’t have him upset by Paul.”

  There was a space of a few days after that in which she didn’t write. Then came the time of the picnic, and the preparation for it. A dull passage that was more a listing than anything else—of food to be prepared, of guests to be invited. But there was something wrong in the very writing, because Katy was one to make the prosaic come to life, one to lace her own sense of humor into words with keen perception. There was none of that now—only the wooden setting down of words that might have been a cover for seething emotions she did not want to express.

  Then the time of the picnic arrived, and the words suddenly ended, leaving me once more frustrated and questioning, because there were no more pages to be read. Fingering the bits of torn paper at the center of the diary, I found here and there a meaningless word that remained. And one not so meaningless—a word standing by itself near the bottom of what had once been a page. The word “mask.”

  I sat with the book open in my lap, trying to force that c
urtain back. But only mists swirled before my eyes and something in me resisted all memory. I had seen something too terrible to be endured by so small a child, and all my forces of self-protection had worked through the years to keep it buried. Now the curtain would not stir. Only through a crack now and then had I glimpsed whatever lay behind the present. Juan himself had helped me more than anyone else, and I must go to him again at another time, but my probing had left him exhausted and I must move gently there.

  What was it about the mask?

  I went to the box, which I’d left on my bed, and took out the blue carving. I was getting used to it now, and the immediate reaction of terror had faded. But I knew it meant something to me—something agonizing, like its silent scream.

  On a sudden whim, I carried it to the dressing table that must once have been my mother’s, and sat down to face myself in the glass. With hands that were not quite steady, I raised the mask and placed it before my face. Through the slitted eyes of turquoise and silver I could just make out the mask in the glass, with my own hair sweeping back darkly above the line of blue. The quiver of terror returned. The mask was evil. It intended evil. The rounded mouth shouted silent obscenities at me. I was I no longer. I was the victim, toward whom evil was intended. I was the hunted.

  From across the room Sylvia’s voice startled me.

  “Since your door’s open, may I come in? Clarita said you were up here.”

  I stared at her in the glass, my vision narrowed by blue slits, and there was an instant in which I seemed unable to stir. Then I removed the mask, laid it upon the rosewood surface before me, and turned around to face Sylvia. I still couldn’t speak.

  She took my silence for invitation and came toward me across the room. “You’re white as a sheet. Have you been frightening yourself with bogeymen?” She reached past me and picked up the mask. “Blind Man’s Buff,” she said softly.

  “Clarita said they found me holding it the day my mother died,” I told her.

  She nodded, her own expression guarded. “Yes. I remember. Oh, not that you had it—I don’t remember that. I was too concerned about Kirk and Doro to think of anything else. But I know Kirk had taken it with him when he went to that place.”

  “Why? Why did he take it?”

  “He didn’t explain anything to me. I only know that he was wildly upset, and he went rushing off along the hillside by way of the lower short cut. Doro must have followed him, taking you with her. I didn’t want to go that way. I was frightened about what might happen, and I hurried along the upper road to find Katy, who’d gone ahead with one of the picnic baskets. I didn’t know where Paul was and I went alone.”

  A vague questioning stirred in my mind, though I didn’t know what it was I questioned—only that something she had said didn’t match something I already knew.

  “Why did you mention Blind Man’s Buff?” I asked.

  She set the mask down as though she didn’t like the feel of it and turned toward the window chair. “Mind if I sit down? It’s a long story. Do you really want to hear it?”

  “Yes. I want to hear everything I can.”

  Light from the window fell upon her insistently brown hair and showed the small lines about her eyes that had begun to make themselves evident. She lowered darkened lashes, shutting out the room, as though she were making a voyage backward in time.

  “When we were small, we used to play Blind Man’s Buff out at the rancho, and whenever we could sneak that mask off the wall without being caught, the one who was ‘It’ put it on. It made the game all the more scary, and you couldn’t really see very well with it on, so it was as good as a blindfold. Of course playing with it was forbidden, because it’s a valuable piece. But it fascinated us and added to our fright in being chased by whoever wore it. By the time we were twelve and older, we didn’t play such games any more—except out at the rancho, where they’d become a sort of ritual. Kirk used to put on the mask and chase Doro. I thought myself too old for such nonsense, and so did Clarita. Paul wasn’t around then, of course. He bought the house next door after we were all grown up.”

  “Who else was there?”

  “Sometimes Gavin, though we thought him too young in those days. Rafael was there, of course.”

  “Eleanor’s father?”

  Sylvia took her hands from her face and looked at me. “Yes. Eleanor’s father. He was always there. He made trouble even then.”

  “Rafael? No one has said much about him before. Except that he wanted to be an Anglo and he got away from the Cordovas as soon as he could. I hadn’t heard that he was a troublemaker. Perhaps Eleanor takes after him.”

  Sylvia seemed to shake herself, as though some confusion had risen in her mind, and she wanted to be free of old memories. “I don’t want to talk about all this. It’s gone. Buried. It needs to be forgotten.”

  But I didn’t think anyone was forgetting it. That was the trouble. It was a long while before her hesitation to speak about Eleanor’s father returned to me and brought an answer.

  In any case, I didn’t urge her further. Here and there the bits and pieces were being given me that would eventually add up to the whole—the truth that I was seeking.

  I motioned toward the diary, where it lay on my bed. “I went out to the rancho today. With Gavin. That’s where I found the mask—and an old diary of Katy’s as well. It covers the months up to the time of the picnic. The rest has been torn out.”

  In Sylvia’s quiet I sensed an alertness, as though she waited.

  “There was a fight, wasn’t there?” I went on. “Between your stepbrother and Paul Stewart? Katy wrote about it.”

  “I—I think there was something of the sort. I was away on a visit at that time.”

  She didn’t want to acknowledge the fight, for some reason. I had the feeling that she was evading her own knowledge of it as something she could not face—or wanted to forget.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “None of this helps me. I’ve only a crumb or two more to tell Paul.”

  She made an effort to recover herself. “That’s what I came over to hear. Paul sent me to find out whether anything more was stirring yet.”

  I wasn’t going to tell Sylvia the thing Juan wanted Paul to know. Since Kirk was Sylvia’s stepbrother, she might try to block those “extenuating circumstances.” If I talked to Paul at all, I would tell him myself.

  “What happened after—they died?” I asked. “Did you stay on with the Cordovas?”

  “Of course. It was my home. I couldn’t blame the others for what Doro had done. And Paul was living next door. By that time we were interested in each other. Well, I’d better be getting home—since you haven’t anything more to contribute to the book right now.”

  I wondered at her concern with something she disapproved, but let it go. When she had disappeared down the stairs, I stood for a few moments in the center of the white rug where the Indian mole fetish had lain, looking after her. The question she had aroused was stirring in my mind. Now I knew what it was.

  Sylvia had said that she’d hurried along the upper road to look for Katy at the picnic place. Alone. She’d been upset because Kirk had left the house carrying the turquoise mask. But earlier Paul had told me that he and Sylvia had come late to the picnic together. The two stories didn’t match, and I wondered which one of them was lying. If he hadn’t been with Sylvia, where had Paul been that day, and when had he arrived at the picnic?

  I went back to the dressing table and picked up the mask. Its silent cry of anguish was an enigma in itself. There were too many questions. Why had Kirk Landers gone along the hillside carrying it? And what had it meant to Doroteo Austin?

  XI

  Soon after I left the dinner table that evening, I went to my grandfather’s study and found him waiting for me. There was a change in him—a quickening that made him seem more alive and fiercer than ever. At once I was wary. Whatever he intended, I was not sure I would want to accommodate him.

  “Buenas tardes,
” he said eagerly. “Now you will tell me where each one is.”

  “I don’t know. They all went off in different directions. But they aren’t sitting around downstairs, if that’s what you mean.”

  “No matter,” he said. “Come with me, Amanda.”

  He rose from his desk and stepped into the darkened room behind him—the bedroom I hadn’t seen until now. A lamp near the big, four-poster bed came on at his touch and I went into the room for the first time.

  It was all dark brown against the white of the walls, from the high, carved posts of the bed, to the bed covering and a dark Spanish rug on the floor. Beside a carved table stood a monk’s chair, square-wrought, with dark leather across the back, and a crimson velvet cushion over the stretched leather seat. The arms were square-cut and broad, and I could imagine Juan sitting in it as though it were a throne, ruling his domain.

  There was nothing Indian in this room. The only relief which offered rich color was a great painting that occupied most of the wall opposite the bed, where he could lie in comfort and look at it. Though why anyone should want such a picture for a bedroom where rest was essential, I couldn’t guess.

  Fire flared at the painting’s center, climbing toward a storm-angry sky and beginning to envelop the man at the stake. Hooded figures with crosses upheld marched about the fire, and a little way off an old woman stood wringing her hands—perhaps suffering for her son who was being burned by the Holy Inquisition.

  My grandfather saw the fixed direction of my gaze. “A fine painting and very old. The artist is not known, but I found it long ago in a shop in Seville.”

  “It seems a strange choice for a bedroom.”

  He stared me down with proud arrogance. “That scene is part of Spain, part of the Spanish character. We cannot shrug our heritage away in gentler times.”

  “I’m not sure I like that Spanish heritage,” I said. “I haven’t any taste for torture in the name of religion.”