Beyond This Point Are Monsters

by Margaret Millar

  “Not exactly.”

  “He’s blackening our name. He’s making it appear that Robert deserved whatever fate he met. All the business about prejudice, it wasn’t true. Mr. Ford shouldn’t have allowed him to speak lies.”

  “Let’s go outside and take a walk in the fresh air.”

  “No. I must stay here and talk to Mr. Ford. He’s got to straighten things out.”

  “What Estivar said is a matter of record. Mr. Ford or anyone else can’t change it now.”

  “He can do something.”

  “All right, I’ll stay with you if you want me to.”

  “No, go take your walk.”

  To reach the main door Devon had to pass near the row of seats where Estivar still sat with his family. They seemed uncertain about what a recess was and how they were expected to act during it. As Devon approached, all of them, even Dulzura, looked up as though they’d forgot­ten about her and were surprised to see her in such a place. Then Estivar rose, and after a nudge from his father, so did Jaime.

  Devon stared at the boy, thinking how much he’d grown in just the short time since she’d seen him last. Jaime must be fourteen now. When Robert was fourteen he used to follow Estivar around everywhere, he called him Tío and pestered him with questions and ate at his table. Or did he? Why had it never been mentioned to her by anyone, Robert himself, or Estivar or Agnes Osborne or Dulzura? Perhaps the man, Tío, and the boy, Robbie, and their relationship had never existed except in Estivar’s mind.

  She said, “Hello, Jaime.”

  “Hello, ma’am.”

  “You’ve been growing so fast I hardly knew you.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I haven’t seen you since school started. Are you liking it better this year?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  It was a polite lie, just as every answer she’d get from him would be a polite lie. The ten years’ difference in their ages could have been a hundred, though it seemed only yesterday that people were telling her how much she’d grown and asking her how she liked school.

  In the corridor men and women were standing in small clusters at each window, like prisoners seeking a view of the world outside. Here and there cigarette smoke rose toward the ceiling. The teen-ager in the blond wig came out of the ladies’ room. The baby was fully awake now, kicking and squirming and pulling at the girl’s wig until it slipped down over her forehead and knocked off her sun­glasses. Before the baby’s hand was slapped away and the sunglasses and wig were put back in place, Devon had a glimpse of black hair, clipped very short, and of dark trou­bled eyes squinting even in the subdued light of the corri­dor.

  “Hello, Mrs. Osborne.”

  “Hello.”

  “I guess you don’t remember me, huh?”

  “No.”

  “It’s my weight, I lost fifteen pounds. Also the wig and sunglasses. Oh yeah, and the kid.” She glanced down at the baby with a kind of detached interest as though she still wasn’t quite sure where he’d come from. “I’m Carla, I helped Mrs. Estivar with the twins summer before last.”

  “Carla,” Devon said. “Carla Lopez.”

  “Yeah, that’s me. I got married for a while but it was a drag—you know? So we split and I took my real name back again. Why should I be stuck for the rest of my life with the name of a guy I hate?”

  Carla Lopez, you’ve grown so much I hardly know you. Devon remembered a plump smiling schoolgirl hardly older than Jaime, walking down the road to meet the mailman, her thigh-high skirt emphasizing the shortness of her legs. “Buenos días, Carla.” “Good morning, Mrs. Osborne . . .”

  Carla ironing the kinks out of her long black hair in the ranch-house kitchen, with Dulzura helping her—half ad­miring because she’d heard this was the latest style, half reluctant because she knew Devon would eventually come to investigate the smell of scorched hair that was pervad­ing the house. “What on earth are you doing, you two?” Dulzura explaining that curls and waves were no longer fashionable, while the girl knelt with her hair spread across the ironing board like a bolt of black silk . . .

  Carla sitting at dusk under a tamarisk tree beside the reservoir.

  “Why are you out here by yourself, Carla?”

  “It’s so noisy in the Estivars’ house, everyone talking at once and the TV on. Last summer when I worked for the Bishops, everything was real quiet. Mr. Bishop used to read a lot and Mrs. Bishop took long walks for her headaches. She had very bad headaches.”

  “You’d better go inside before the mosquitoes start bit­ing. Buenas noches.”

  “Good night, Mrs. Osborne.”

  Devon said, “Why are you here today, Carla?”

  “I think it was Valenzuela’s idea, he’s got it in for me.”

  “You mean you were subpoenaed.”

  “Yes, I was.”

  “For what reason?”

  “I told you, Valenzuela’s got it in for me, for my whole family.”

  “Valenzuela has no control over subpoenas,” Devon said. “He’s not even a policeman any more.”

  “Some of the muscle stayed with him. Ask anyone in Boca de Rio—he still swaggers around like he’s wearing a cop suit.” She switched the baby from her right arm to her left, patting him between the shoulder blades to soothe him. “The Estivars don’t like me either. Well, it’s mutual, one hundred percent mutual . . . I hear Rufo got married and Cruz is in the army.”

  “Yes.”

  “It was the other one I had a crush on—Felipe. I don’t suppose anyone ever hears from him.”

  “I wouldn’t know.” Devon remembered the three old­est Estivar boys only as a trio. When she used to meet them individually she was never certain whether she was seeing Cruz or Rufo or Felipe. They were uniformly quiet and polite, as though their father had spelled out to them ex­actly how to behave in her presence. There were rumors, passed along to her mainly by Dulzura, that away from the ranch the Estivar brothers were a great deal livelier.

  Beneath the girl’s platinum wig a narrow strip of brown forehead glistened with sweat. “My old lady was supposed to meet me here, she promised to look after the kid when I go on the stand. Maybe she got lost. That’s the story of my life—people I count on get lost.”

  “I’d be glad to help if I can.”

  “She’ll turn up sooner or later. She probably wandered into some church and started praying. She’s a great prayer but it never does much good, least of all for me.”

  “Why not for you?”

  “I got a jinx.”

  “Nobody believes in jinxes any more.”

  “No. But I got one just the same.” Carla glanced down at the baby, frowning. “I hope the kid don’t catch it from me. He’s gonna have enough trouble without people dying all around him, disappearing, drowning, being stabbed like Mr. Osborne.”

  “Mr. Osborne didn’t die because of your jinx.”

  “Well, I feel like if it wasn’t for me he’d still be alive. And her, too.”

  “Yes?”

  “Mrs. Bishop. She drowned.”

  Mrs. Bishop had had headaches and took long walks and drowned.

  the table reserved for the press when court was in session had been vacated for recess. Across its polished mahogany surface Ford and Mrs. Osborne faced each other. Mrs. Osborne still wore her public face and her jaunty blue hat, but Ford was beginning to look irritable and his soft voice had developed a rasp.

  “I repeat, Mrs. Osborne, Estivar talked more freely than I anticipated. No harm was done, however.”

  “Not to you, nothing touches you. But what about me? All that talk about prejudice and ill-feeling, it was embar­rassing.”

  “Murder is an embarrassing business. There’s no law stating the mother of the victim will be spared.”

&n
bsp; “I refuse to believe that a murder occurred.”

  “Okay, okay, you have a right to your opinion. But as far as this hearing today is concerned, your son is dead.”

  “All the more reason why you shouldn’t have allowed Estivar to blacken his name.”

  “I let him talk,” Ford said, “just as I intend to let the rest of the witnesses talk. This Judge Gallagher is no dope. He’d be highly suspicious if I tried to present Robert as a perfect young man without an enemy in the world. Perfect young men don’t get murdered, they don’t even get born. In presenting the background of a murder, the victim’s faults are more pertinent than his virtues, his enemies are more important than his friends. If Robert wasn’t getting along well with Estivar, if he had trouble with the migrant workers or with his neighbors—”

  “The only neighbors he ever had the slightest trouble with were the Bishops. You surely wouldn’t dredge that up again—Ruth’s been dead for nearly two years.”

  “And Robert had no part in her death?”

  “Of course not.” She shook her head, and the hat jumped forward as though it meant to peck at a tormentor. “Robert tried to help her. She was a very unhappy woman.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he was kind.”

  “No. I meant, why was she unhappy?”

  “Perhaps because Leo—Mr. Bishop—was more inter­ested in his crops than he was in his wife. She was lonely. She used to come over and talk to Robert. That’s all there was between them, talk. She was old enough to be his mother. He felt sorry for her, she was such a pathetic little thing.”

  “Is that what he told you?”

  “He didn’t have to tell me. It was obvious. Day after day she dragged her trouble over to our house like a sick animal she couldn’t cure, couldn’t kill.”

  “How did she get to your house?”

  “Walked. She liked to pretend that she did it for the exercise, but of course no one was fooled, not even Leo.” She paused, running a gloved hand across the surface of the table as though testing it for dirt. “I suppose you know how she died.”

  “Yes. I looked it up in the newspaper files. She was attempting to cross the river during a winter rain, got caught by a flash flood and drowned. A coroner’s jury returned a verdict of accidental death. There were indica­tions that she suffered from despondency, but suicide was ruled out by the finding of her suitcase a mile or so down­stream, waterlogged but still intact. It was packed for a journey. She was going some place.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Why just ‘perhaps,’ Mrs. Osborne?”

  “There was no evidence to prove Ruth and the suitcase entered the water at the same time. It’s easy enough to pack a woman’s suitcase and toss it in a river, especially for someone with access to her belongings.”

  “Like a husband?”

  “Like a husband.”

  “Why would a husband do that?”

  “To make people think his wife was on her way to meet another man and run away with him. The easiest method of avoiding blame is to cast it on someone else. That suit­case turned Leo into a poor grieving widower and Robert into an irresponsible seducer.”

  “What was in it?”

  “You mean exactly?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know. What difference does it make?”

  “A woman preparing for a rendezvous with her lover wouldn’t pack quite the same things as a man would pack for her, even a husband. I presume the contents of the suitcase were exhibited at the coroner’s inquest.”

  “I didn’t attend the inquest. By that time I’d stopped going anywhere because of the gossip. Oh, nothing was ever said in front of Robert or me, but it was there on everyone’s face, even the people who worked for us. If she hadn’t died it would have been laughable, the idea of Robert running off with a woman twice his age, a pale skinny little thing who looked like an elderly child.”

  “What do you think happened to Ruth Bishop, Mrs. Osborne?”

  “I know what didn’t happen. She did not pack a suit­case and start across that river in order to keep a rendez­vous with my son. It was raining before she left the house, and she was well aware of the danger of a flash flood.”

  “You believe that she walked into the river deliber­ately?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “And that Leo Bishop packed a suitcase and put it into the water so it would be found later downstream.”

  “Again, perhaps.”

  “Why?”

  “A wife’s suicide puts her husband in a bad light, starts people asking questions and prying under surfaces. As it was, all the bad light was on us. I sent Robert on a trip East to give the scandal a chance to blow over. That’s where he met Devon and married her two weeks later. Funny how things repeat themselves, isn’t it? The first thing that struck me about Devon was how much she looked like Ruth Bishop.”

  People had begun returning to the courtroom: the high school students; Leo Bishop and the ranchers; the Estivars, with Lum Wing shuffling along behind like a family pet that was currently out of favor; Carla Lopez, freshly groomed and without her baby, as though she’d suddenly decided she was too young to be burdened with a child and had left it somewhere in the corridor or the ladies’ room.

  Ford’s only reaction to the people coming back in was a slight lowering of his voice.

  “You also sent Robert away after his father’s death, is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did his father die, Mrs. Osborne?”

  “I’ve already told you.”

  “Tell me again.”

  “He fell off a tractor and fractured his skull. He was in a coma for days.”

  “And after his death Robert was enrolled in a school in Arizona.”

  “I was depressed and poor company for a growing boy. Robert needed men to guide him.”

  “Estivar claims that the guidance was the wrong kind.”

  “He exaggerates. Most Mexicans do.”

  “Do you agree with Estivar that Robert had changed when he returned home?”

  “Of course he’d changed. They’re years of change, be­tween fifteen and seventeen. Robert went away a boy and came back a man who had to take over the management of a ranch. I repeat, Estivar exaggerates. The relationship between him and Robert was never as close as he likes to remember it. Why should it have been? Robert had a per­fectly good father of his own.”

  “And they were on friendly terms?”

  “Of course.”

  “How did Mr. Osborne fall off the tractor, Mrs. Os­borne?”

  “I wasn’t there when it happened. And my husband didn’t tell me because he never regained consciousness. Just what are you trying to prove anyway? First, you bring up Ruth Bishop’s death and now my husband’s. They were totally unconnected and half a dozen years apart.”

  “I didn’t bring up the subject of Ruth Bishop,” Ford said. “You did.”

  “You led me into it.”

  “By the way, it’s not exactly easy to fall off a tractor.”

  “I wouldn’t know. I’ve never tried.”

  “The rumor is that your husband was drunk.”

  “So I heard.”

  “Was he?”

  “An autopsy was performed. There was nothing in the report about alcohol.”

  “You said a minute ago that Mr. Osborne lay in a coma for days. All traces of alcohol would have disappeared from the bloodstream during that time.”

  “I’m not a doctor. How would I know?”

  “I think you know a great deal, Mrs. Osborne. The problem is getting you to admit it.”

  “That was an ungentlemanly remark.”

  “I come from a long line of ungentlemen,” Ford said. “You’d better
go back to your place. The recess is over.”

  Judge Gallagher was striding back into the courtroom, his black robe flapping around him like the broken wings of a raven.

  “Remain seated and come to order,” the clerk said. “Superior Court is now in session.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  the name of john loomis was called, and one of the men in ranchers’ clothes came to the witness box and was sworn in: John Sylvester Loomis, 514 Paloverde Street, Boca de Rio; occupation, doctor of veterinary medicine. Dr. Loomis testified that on the morning of October 13, 1967, he was asleep in the apartment above his place of business when he was awakened by someone pounding on the office door. He went downstairs and found Robert Osborne with his dog, Maxie, on a leash.

  “I gave him hell, if you’ll pardon the expression, for waking me up so early, since I’d been at a foaling until three o’clock. But he seemed to think it was urgent, that someone had poisoned his dog.”

  “What was your opinion?”

  “I saw no evidence of poison. The dog was lively, his eyes were clear and bright, nose cold, no offensive breath odor. Mr. Osborne said he’d found Maxie in a field before dawn, that the dog’s legs were twitching violently, it was frothing at the mouth and had lost control of its bowels. I persuaded Mr. Osborne to leave the dog with me for a few hours, and he said he’d pick it up on his way home from San Diego in the late afternoon or early evening.”

  “And did he?”

  “Yes. About seven o’clock that night.”

  “Meanwhile you’d had a chance to examine the dog.”

  “Yes.”

  “And what did you find out?”

  “Nothing absolutely positive. But I was pretty sure it had suffered an epileptic seizure. Such seizures are not uncommon in dogs as they get older, and spaniels like Maxie are particularly susceptible. Once a seizure is over, the dog makes an immediate and complete recovery. It’s the speed of the recovery, in fact, which helps with the diagnosis.”

  “Did you explain this to Mr. Osborne, Dr. Loomis?”

  “I made an attempt. But he had this thing in his mind about poison, that the dog had been poisoned.”

  “Was there any basis for his belief?”