“I’ll wait as long as you like. But I won’t go away. I can’t go away now.”
He put the car in gear, backed around and started down the mountain. We drove in low gear most of the way, and this time we didn’t stop to look at the view. Once Gavin tried helplessly to say something, but only broke off. Not until we reached the Cordova garage did he pull me to him again, and I clung a little tearfully as he kissed my mouth and my wet eyelids. But there were no more words to be spoken and I understood that a wall not of our own making rose between us, and until it was leveled, he could not be wholly free to come to me. I could only wait until all the problems were solved, even though they were problems I didn’t wholly understand. Of course they would be solved—I must believe in that. It was all I had to hold onto.
The Cordova house was asleep when we left the car in the garage and went inside. Gavin did not touch me again, and his look was bleak when we said good night. I went to my high room and took the capsules Clarita had given me. I’d plunged from my high peak of joy, and I wanted to go quickly to sleep and for a little while to think about nothing.
XV
The next morning was Sunday, and when I went down to breakfast they were all gathered at the table, except Juan. Clarita had been up and out to early Mass, and she greeted me guardedly, inquiring about my head. The lump was there, and it was tender, but not unduly painful. I found myself speaking in a subdued manner, as though a heavy restraint lay upon me.
There were polite murmurs from Eleanor and Clarita when I said I was feeling better. Only Gavin was silent, and after a single searching look, he didn’t glance at me again, so that I had the feeling that during the night his burden had increased. Clearly depression rode him this morning, and it did not bode well for our happiness.
No one discussed last night’s occurrences—as though in that direction quicksand lay which none of them wanted to test. I had brought the Zuni fetish to the table with me, and when I’d taken my place I pushed it across to Eleanor.
“I think you must have left this in my room,” I said. “I thought you might want it back.”
Gavin raised his head and stared at her, but Eleanor only laughed.
“Since it keeps turning up, I’ll keep it for a lucky piece,” she said, and set it beside her place, neither acknowledging nor denying any part she might have had in placing it in my room.
Clarita spoke to me. “Juan has phoned to make a reservation for your flight to New York. Sylvia will drive you to Albuquerque this morning. There is a local plane, but the trip is apt to be bumpy, and this will get you there more comfortably in plenty of time. You must pack right after breakfast.”
They were all looking at me, including Gavin, and I raised my chin obstinately. “I’m not ready to go.”
Clarita began to fuss, but Eleanor cut in, silencing her. “In that case, Amanda, you can come with us on our visit to the rancho. Juan is feeling fine today, and he wants to go. You’ll come too, won’t you, Gavin? Since it’s Sunday?”
She had put on a pretty, pleading look, and though he responded with no warmth, he agreed to make the trip. I suspect that, like me, he wondered what she was up to.
“We’ll bring Sylvia and Paul along as well,” Eleanor rushed on. “It will be like old times out at the rancho. We’ll wake the place up.”
Her excitement seemed real enough, but its cause was faked. Something she had no intention of revealing motivated Eleanor, and as I buttered crisp toast, I wondered what this exodus meant. Last night at the store she had been plotting about it with Paul, but I had heard nothing worth reporting to Gavin or Juan.
Only Clarita seemed against making the trip. “I do not wish to go,” she said, looking the picture of black gloom.
Eleanor was after her in a flash. “Why not, Aunt Clarita?”
“I do not care for that place.”
“Because of its memories?” Eleanor persisted.
“Perhaps I will stay home today.”
“No!” Eleanor cried. “I won’t let you stay home. You never have any fun, and this will be good for you. Please come with us, Aunt Clarita.”
She left her place and ran to Clarita’s side, coaxing and cajoling until the older woman gave in, sighing.
“Very well, querida. But I have a feeling that no good will come of this. Old ghosts should be allowed their quiet.”
Eleanor threw a sharp glance at me. “Amanda doesn’t think so—do you, Amanda?”
“Perhaps the old ghosts have no quiet,” I said. “But if you think they’re stirring out at the rancho, I’d like to be there to meet them.”
Eleanor’s eyes were bright with some secret malice. “Then it’s settled!” she cried. “We’re practically on our way.”
After breakfast there was a flurry of preparation. Clarita reluctantly canceled my plane reservation. Sylvia was called and asked to change her plans and come with us. It developed that Paul wanted to work on his book today and would not give in to any coaxing. This latter fact alerted me, yet there was still nothing to give me a clue as to Eleanor’s intent. I would simply have to wait and keep my own watch for anything untoward that might happen. I felt as though I were marking time, waiting for some unseen explosive to go off and perhaps damage all of us. Perhaps even Eleanor, who held a torch to the fuse.
This morning I was no longer as sure of myself as I had been last night. What had happened on the mountain seemed distant and unreal, especially in the face of Gavin’s remote air and his lack of effort to speak to me. It all seemed part of a dream, rising to false heights of joy that inevitably meant a later plunge to despair. For the last year or so I had managed to move on a fairly even plane emotionally, without extremes of happiness or sorrow. It was safer that way. Since last night, however, my feelings had taken on a quicksilver quality and were all too ready to dart about, changing their character from one moment to the next, running the scale from high to low. Now a sense of foreboding haunted me, and the barrier was there that I could not see beyond. The barrier between Gavin and me.
Back in my room I tried to cheer myself by putting on my favorite beige slacks and a buttercup-yellow blouse, but the sunny combination seemed to mock me in the mirror. That was when I had another bad moment. The plan for going out to the rancho had made me think of the mask again, and I opened the drawer and rummaged under the clothes where I had hidden it. The mask was gone.
I looked in several other places, lest my memory had played a trick on me, but the mask was no longer in my room. In the end, I gave up my search and went downstairs, but the fact that it was missing seemed ominous. The mask had meant something to me, and someone, clearly, did not want me to have it.
There were six of us going on the trip, and it had been decided that we would take two cars. Juan and Clarita and Eleanor would go in one, with Eleanor driving, while Gavin would drive Sylvia and me. Except for Paul, who stayed behind with his book, we all assembled near the Cordova garage as the cars were backed out. Juan was brought downstairs last, and he leaned on Clarita only a little as she helped him into the back seat of Eleanor’s car. Some quickening force seemed to possess him this morning, and he had come thoroughly to life.
I stood well back in the garage, watching them settle Juan in his place, not projecting myself to his attention. He gave me a single look of annoyance and I looked away at once. He was displeased with me because I wouldn’t leave, and there was nothing I could do about it.
Something on the garage floor caught my eye as I stood there, and I bent to look more closely before I picked up the fine hoop of gold that was Clarita’s matching earring. How it came to be in the garage when she had gone nowhere last night, I didn’t know.
I went to her just as she was about to get into the back seat with Juan. “Your earring,” I said. “I just found it there in the garage.”
She snatched it from me impatiently and without a thank-you, dropped it into her handbag. All her attention was given to Juan, and she had no time or interest for me. Or perhaps
it was just that she had nothing to say to me, and wanted to attempt no explanation.
In Gavin’s car I managed to sit on the outside, with Sylvia in the middle. Last night’s dream was far away and he was so much on guard against me this morning that I couldn’t bear to sit next to him.
Sylvia had heard sketchily from Paul what had happened to me at the store, and she was full of questions, which I answered rather shortly. Strangely enough, she did no speculating as to who might have struck me. She seemed to have more concern about the fact that Eleanor had coaxed Paul into going to the store at that hour to restore the Penitente display, and I knew that she was worried about her husband.
Eleanor was already on her way ahead of us and she was driving as fast as usual, so that we did not even catch a glimpse of her car during the trip. Gavin drove more moderately, but he kept to the top of the speed limit and I sensed the nervous energy that spurred him.
In a way, I was glad to be going out to the rancho with all of them this morning. I would have a chance to observe the Cordovas in a familiar atmosphere that might recall old actions, might lead to revelations. I had no knowledge then of what Eleanor might be planning.
When we reached the hacienda and went inside, we found Juan and Clarita in the long sala, Juan sitting before a lively fire of piñon logs, and Clarita hovering about, trying to make sure he was comfortable. The brief rebellion that she had instituted last night when she wore the dress of claret velvet, had vanished, and she seemed to be Juan’s serving maid as always. Only when she looked at me did she stiffen with displeasure—perhaps because I had found her earring where she did not want it to be found.
Eleanor had disappeared, and no one knew where she had gone.
“The rancho is home to her,” Juan said when Sylvia inquired for her. “She knows every corner.”
“So do I,” said Sylvia. “Let me show you about the place, Amanda.”
Gavin had matters concerning the store to discuss with Juan, and he had no time for me this morning. I went with Sylvia, back into the dark reaches of the house, where narrow passageways with plastered walls led to series of rooms. The house had been built all on one floor, and it meandered into small, rather dark rooms packed with ancient and often shabby furniture. I had seen a little of it with Gavin.
“You should have been here in the days when they used to entertain out here,” Sylvia said. “Juan and Katy loved to have house parties, and they would fill every room with guests. In those days there were enough horses for everyone to ride who wanted to, and Kirk was the best rider of them all. Juan used to say that Kirk should have been his natural son, instead of Rafael, who did nothing but disappoint him. Kirk took up the Spanish ways and made them his own. He had that wild streak that Juan admires and he might have been one of the Cordovas, instead of a foster son. When he and Doro died, Juan lost a son as well as a daughter.”
I’d had only glimpses of Kirk before and I listened with interest.
Sylvia had opened the door to a small, rather cell-like room, which had been denuded of most of its furnishings. With one exception, there were no hangings on the walls, or rugs on the floor, and the single, narrow wooden bed was stripped to its springs, a table by the window was bare, and the bureau void of ornament. The single exception hung against the wall just over the head of the bed, and it was a large duplicate of the little Ojo de Dios I carried in my purse.
“I gave him that,” Sylvia said, her eyes on the red and black and yellow strands of wool wound outward from the central Eye of God. “A lot of good it did him!”
She wandered idly to the tall dresser and pulled open an empty drawer. If this had been Kirk’s room, I wanted to miss nothing, and I went to stand beside her. The drawer was empty, and she slammed it shut, opened another. This time there was an old newspaper inside, and Sylvia drew it out curiously and opened the pages, exclaiming as she spread them on the bare table.
“That was the year!” Sylvia said softly.
I knew what she meant. It was the year of the tragedy, but an earlier date. Sylvia turned to the second page and her hand was arrested on the paper. I saw why. Smiling at us from center page was a photograph of a young man in an elaborate costume of tight trousers, white shirt, short embroidered jacket and broad sombrero caught under his chin with a strap of leather thongs.
“Juan sent to Mexico for that charro outfit for Kirk,” Sylvia said. “And he wore it as though he’d been born to silver and leather and embroidered braid. He was as good a horseman as Juan, and when there was a fiesta he rode his own palomino.”
Her voice was low, lacking emotion, as though she thought aloud, without any awareness of me, standing beside her.
The photograph showed him full length, smiling arrogantly into the camera, and his narrow, full-lipped face was as handsome as the face of any man I’d seen. But there was something about it—something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.…
“You can see why women were mad about him,” Sylvia went on in that same even, rather dead voice. “Doro and Clarita were only two out of many. Though they were the two closest to him. I think Juan always wanted him for Doro, because that would make him doubly his son.”
“But I thought Juan sent him away so he couldn’t marry her?”
“That was mainly Katy’s doing. She persuaded Juan that Doro was too young. Katy loved Kirk, but she didn’t want Doro to marry him. So the arrangement, supposedly, was that he would go away for a few years. Juan got him a job in South America—Ecuador—since he spoke Spanish well and would feel at home. He was to come back to Santa Fe in a few years and then marry Doro, if they both still wished it. When he did return, of course, Doro had married your father, and Kirk was furious. Doro was more beautiful and fascinating, and Kirk fell in love with her all over again. He still thought Doro would run off with him, and I don’t think he was ever convinced that she could love someone else. Anyway, he was on their hands again, and since he knew horses so well, Juan put him in charge out here, and he worked on the rancho until the day he died.”
I studied the faintly insolent young face in the picture. It wore a confidence that was supreme—as though he knew very well that women and horses would obey him. There was no heartbreak in his eyes, but there seemed a steely determination.
What was it that bothered me about his face? As though I had seen it somewhere before—as though, somehow, I knew Kirk Landers very well.
“He doesn’t look like you,” I said to Sylvia.
“Of course not. He wasn’t related to me by blood. He was my stepbrother. I’m glad we weren’t alike.”
A cool note had come into her voice and I threw her a quick look. Until now I had taken it for granted that she had been fond of her stepbrother, but the tone of her voice seemed to repudiate him.
“What did you think of him?” I asked. “As a sister?”
“I detested him. He was cruel and thoughtless and selfish. He hurt Doro more than once, and he played with Clarita because it amused him to. Because I wanted Paul, he was against Paul, and he nearly killed him in that fight they had. If he’d lived, he might have come between Paul and me.”
She folded the newspaper roughly with hands that showed mounting emotion, and almost ran out of the room. I stood for a moment longer, looking about me, trying to get the measure of the man my mother had loved when she was young and before she had met my father. But if there was a haunting presence here, it told me nothing.
There was one thing, however. I thought I recognized the charro costume Kirk wore in the picture. Those were the same garments which had been stuffed into that box with the mask and diary, and which Gavin had taken from me without explanation. I remembered wondering why at the time, and now I wondered again.
Since Sylvia had given up guiding me about the house, I found my way back to the sala, and found her kneeling before the adobe hearth, warming her hands at the blaze as though something had chilled her to the bone. Clarita sat a little apart in the room, where shadows hid her face, and
I had a sense of her watching and listening presence, as though she wanted to be there without calling attention to herself.
Gavin stood up as I came into the room to make a place for me between him and Juan, and my grandfather smiled at me tightly, still not forgiving my obstinacy.
As I sat down, he pointed to a space at one side of the rounded adobe chimney. “That is where the turquoise mask always hung when the children were small, Amanda. We must bring it back and hang it there again.”
“It’s gone from my room,” I told him. “I’d put it into a drawer, but someone has taken it away.”
Gavin looked at me sharply. “More tricks?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m just as glad to have it out of my room, because it haunts me. But I didn’t take it away myself.”
Maria came to tell us that our lunch would be served in the dining room.
Juan asked where Eleanor was, and Maria said she was looking through old cartons in Señora Cordova’s former room. Maria would call her to lunch.
The dining room was long and narrow, and so was the dark wooden table with its woven straw place mats. High-back chairs with cracked leather seats awaited us, and dark paintings of somber Spanish scenes hung upon the walls, none lighted clearly enough to be appreciated. Arched windows set in deep walls looked out upon the courtyard of parched, dry earth.
“I used to hate this room when I was small,” Sylvia said. “It never made me feel like eating. I used to expect one of those figures from Grandfather Juan’s pictures of the Inquisition to come walking in, all hooded and threatening.”
“This is foolish,” Juan said. “There was always good conversation here, and laughter and fine wine. The hacienda is rich in Spanish tradition.”
The Turquoise Mask Page 24
