“Marc!” she breathed gladly. “It’s so good to see—”
“I came as soon as I heard.” He put out his arms, but not to embrace her. His hands on her upper arms held her lightly but firmly at a distance. His dark eyes looking down at her were remote, his expression impassive.
Trish was momentarily puzzled, then angry. “You’re not still angry about last night, are you?” she gasped.
“I beg your pardon?”
Trish just stared at him, angry and dismayed that he would let their trivial disagreement of the previous night come between them at a time like this. But his eyes met hers challengingly and there was no retreat in his gaze.
Trish dropped her arms and stepped away from him. He made no effort to restrain her. Crisply she explained what little she knew about the accident and Edith’s condition.
He raised a dark eyebrow. “I understood you planned to ride home with Edith.”
“Armando asked me to stay and help him set up a fireworks display. He and Edith had a little… disagreement. Now he’s blaming himself for upsetting her and causing the accident.” Trish deliberately kept her voice neutral, as unemotional as possible, trying to regather her strength after almost coming apart with relief when Marc arrived.
“I see. Has Edith’s father been informed?”
Trish bit her lip, aghast. Never once had she given even a moment’s thought to Edith’s father. The servants might have told him, but somehow Trish doubted that, considering his uncertain physical condition. She shook her head.
“I’ll take care of it then,” he said authoritatively.
For a moment Trish was startled, but then she remembered that at one time Marc and Robert Hepler had been cooperating neighbors—though Marc, no doubt, had ulterior motives and intended to use the friendship to get hold of the cafetal someday, she thought caustically.
“I’m sure Edith would appreciate that,” Trish said.
“Is there anything I can do… for Edith?” he added pointedly.
“I don’t think so. We may be able to see her this evening, but I’m not even sure about that.”
“And what are your plans?”
Briefly she explained that she and Armando planned to find temporary rooms nearby. He listened without comment and thanked her as impersonally as if she were a hospital employee giving out information. Her eyes followed him as he strode away without looking back, her feelings a turmoil of anger, dismay, and heartache. Damn him! she thought furiously, acting like a petulant child because he didn’t get his way. Or had she been the child, playing with passion like some fumbling adolescent? Oh, but there was nothing childish or adolescent about her feelings, she thought with a wrench of pain. Even after his rebuff, his cold indifference, she was still falling in love with him. In fact, she thought with despair, it was too late for that. She was in love with him.
Dispiritedly she went out the other way and found Armando waiting in the pickup. He seemed to have slid into the seat, placed his hands on the wheel, and not moved since. Trish made no mention of having seen Marc.
They ate a silent meal and then found rooms at an adequate, though hardly luxurious hotel. Trish washed her face, too weary even for a bath, pulled the drapes, and fell into bed.
It was late afternoon when she woke to an insistent tapping on the door. It was Armando, suggesting they have something to eat and then go to the hospital as soon as possible. Trish agreed. She hurried through a shower, wrinkling her nose distastefully at the soiled, wilted clothing she had to put back on.
Armando seemed to have revived somewhat. He looked less like a zombie, although he couldn’t seem to get his mind off the idea that he was responsible for the accident. At the hospital, the doctor gave permission for a short visit. Anxious as Trish was to see Edith, she suggested that Armando go in first, knowing he and Edith would want a few minutes alone. She waited in the hall, pacing back and forth, until Armando came to the door and beckoned to her.
Trish steeled herself for the worst when she stepped inside the door, but it was not as bad as she feared. Edith’s head and arm were bandaged and her smile a bit tremulous, but she was smiling. A tangle of tubes and bottles surrounded the bed.
Trish started to reach for her, then pulled back. “I want to hug you but I don’t know where without hurting you!”
Edith turned her palm up and Trish squeezed it emotionally. “We’re certainly a pair of accident-prone ones, aren’t we?” she said huskily. “Is there anything I can do?”
“I don’t think so.” Edith looked at Armando, her plain face soft and glowing with love. “Except maybe convince Armando that it wasn’t his fault. I was upset, but that had nothing to do with the accident.”
“I could kill myself for the stupid things I said,” Armando muttered remorsefully.
“Edith, what did happen?” Trish asked.
Edith’s brow wrinkled, then she winced as the movement evidently brought pain from her stitched scalp wounds. “I don’t know. I didn’t notice anything unusual when I got into the car and drove off. But by the second or third turn the brakes felt rather soft, as if they weren’t pushing against anything. And then the car just went out of control and there were no brakes at all. I made it around the first few turns, but the car kept picking up speed. And then—”
Her voice broke off, momentary terror filling her eyes until Armando touched her reassuringly. Trish stood up, quickly realizing this couldn’t be doing Edith any good. With a final squeeze of Edith’s hand, Trish left them alone to say their good-byes.
Outside the door she paced back and forth again, thinking about what Edith had said. Was this just an accident or was it another in a sinister chain of events? Was there any connection among all these “accidents”? Could someone have deliberately tampered with the brakes? And why was Edith a target now, after the other “accidents” had been aimed at Trish?
The questions hurtled through Trish’s mind like projectiles, bewildering, unanswerable. Then another thought came: Perhaps Edith was not meant to be the target after all. Trish was supposed to be in that car, had planned to be in it until almost the very last moment. Was it possible the victim was supposed to be Trish? And that someone was ruthlessly willing to let Edith die too, if she happened to be in the car, just to get Trish?
Trish leaned against the wall for support, her legs suddenly weak at the horror of that thought. Someone utterly ruthless, utterly obsessed…
If nothing else, she thought shakily, this eliminated any last, lingering doubts she might have about Robert Hepler. Even if, by some wild stretch of the imagination, he could have tampered with the car, he would never have risked injuring his own daughter. He might hate Trish passionately, but he would never harm Edith. Having observed the closeness between them, Trish could not doubt that.
Anyone could have known Trish was supposed to be in that car, Trish reflected—the servants, the cafetal owners they had talked with at the fiesta, maybe someone who simply hated gringos.
But she knew those were all unlikely suspicions. She tried to convince herself that the other lurking suspicion was just as unlikely, but it wouldn’t go away.
Marc knew she was supposed to be in that car. He had even questioned her about it this morning.
Preposterous, she told herself firmly. Absurd.
Armando came out of the room. Edith had requested that they pick up a few toilet articles for her and he was eager to comply. Without so much as a toothbrush along, Trish needed some things also.
The following morning they learned that Edith would be hospitalized for a week. By now it appeared there were no serious internal injuries. Edith said she could get along fine, that she did not want to cause anyone inconvenience, but Trish stayed in San Jose to be near her. Armando took care of his responsibilities at the plantation during the mornings and drove into San Jose in the afternoons.
One day he brought in a letter that had arrived for Trish from her mother. It was an odd letter, Trish thought, not totally disapproving
of what she had done in coming here but rather distant, with something of an I-wash-my-hands-of-this-matter attitude. She did, however, send her love to Edith, and Trish passed that on. Edith seemed pleased. In fact, she opened up somewhat and talked about memories of their mother, a lovely birthday party her mother had once arranged, how broken up her father had been when their mother left him.
Trish admired the way Edith managed to remain cheerful, even to make light of her injuries. Edith remarked that if the cast on her arm was not removed before the wedding, at least the white color would blend with her white wedding gown. She suggested that if her hair hadn’t grown out by then that she would just have to get a wig.
“I wonder how I’d look as a blonde?” she mused, and they both laughed.
In Edith’s presence Trish kept up a gay good humor too, but alone she couldn’t escape her dismal feelings about her last meeting with Marc. Nor could she escape her brooding suspicions. Finally she decided there was one thing she must do to set her mind at ease. She brought up the subject as she and Armando left the hospital together one afternoon.
“Armando, has it ever struck you as peculiar that the brakes on the car went out so suddenly that night?” she began. “I know they were working all right when Edith and I drove to the village earlier in the day.”
Armando cocked his dark head. “I have been so worried about Edith that I have thought of little else. But, now that you mention this, it did happen rather abruptly, didn’t it? But perhaps that is the way brakes are.” He shrugged ruefully. “Unfortunately my knowledge of the automobile is rather limited.”
“Mine too. But there’s something I think we should do.” She paused beside the Mercedes Armando had driven into San Jose that day. “I think we should inspect the car. Or what is left of it anyway. Do you know where it is?”
He shook his head doubtfully. “I told one of the men in the village to take a cable and pull it out of the ravine. He has probably taken it to a junkyard by now.”
“But you aren’t sure?” she pursued. When he shook his head, she went on rapidly. “Then let’s go to the village today and see if we can look at it. I’ll stay at the cafetal tonight and ride back to San Jose with you tomorrow. We won’t mention anything to Edith.”
“But why?” He looked perplexed. “What would we be looking for?”
“I don’t know,” Trish admitted. Her knowledge of the mechanical workings of an automobile was probably even more limited than Armando’s. “To see if we can find anything that had been cut, broken, or tampered with in some way, I guess.”
“Trish, what are you suggesting?” Armando asked slowly, his eyes widening. “That someone deliberately—”
“No, not really,” Trish said hastily. “I just want to make sure in my own mind that it really was an accident.” She hesitated. “There have been so many accidents.”
Armando’s face darkened grimly as he glanced upward in the direction of Edith’s room. “Have you mentioned any of this to Edith?”
Trish shook her head. “I didn’t want to alarm her.”
He nodded approvingly, but his face was set and grim as he held the car door open for Trish. “Come, we must not waste any more time.”
Chapter Eight
Trish forced herself not to look the other way when they passed the burned area where the car had gone up in flames. The ground was blackened, the surrounding trees and brush scorched. She thought briefly about asking Armando to stop there but decided there was no point in it. If anything could be learned, it would be from the mangled car itself.
The village was quiet when they entered, far different from the day of the fiesta. Odd, Trish thought now, but she had hardly thought of the fiesta after that fateful day. Had it continued as usual, as though nothing had happened, the patron saint solemnly returned to his usual place after the annual sojourn to the spring? There were still some marks on the ground where the temporary grandstand had stood, and Trish’s heart lurched unexpectedly as she remembered what had happened there. Had Marc returned to the fiesta to bestow his kisses on someone else? She had neither seen nor heard from him since his cold visit to the hospital the morning after the accident.
Armando drove the length of the dusty street. A few children looked at them curiously and waved. A chicken, scratching industriously in the road, squawked and fluttered out of the way.
“There!” Trish cried suddenly, spotting a tangle of blackened metal behind one of the houses.
“You have sharp eyes,” Armando commented approvingly.
He parked the car on the edge of the street and they walked around the house. Trish stared at the burned skeleton in dismay. She had no idea where to start looking or what to look for, nor, staring at the gaunt frame, any real hope that anything positive would be revealed. She touched a door tentatively, with the eerie feeling that she wouldn’t have been surprised to find it still hot. It wasn’t, of course, but her fingers came away blackened. Armando poked at what had once been the engine, now bent and melted into a tangled mass.
“I don’t think the brakes are up there, are they?” Trish asked doubtfully.
Armando lifted his shoulders helplessly. “I just don’t know where to look. I know about growing coffee and bananas, but cars… ?” He shook his head.
Trish nodded, feeling vaguely let down. What had she hoped to find? Proof that the car had been tampered with? No. Deep down she wanted proof that this was all some terrible accident, proof that would stop the awful suspicions gnawing at her mind. But she doubted that this blackened mass could reveal anything.
“Seňor Albeniz!”
They both looked up as a man approached from the house, talking rapidly in Spanish. As usual, Trish lagged behind in translating what he was saying to Armando, but she gathered he was apologizing about something. He looked relieved when Armando assured him everything was all right.
“He says he is sorry that the car is still here, but he has not had time to dispose of it yet,” Armando explained. “I told him I was pleased that it was still here.”
“Does he know anything about cars?” Trish asked.
The man nodded eagerly, evidently understanding enough English so that he did not need to wait for Armando’s translation. “Mecanico,” he said proudly.
“He’s a mechanic at the beneficio,” Armando explained. “He helps keep our trucks in good running order.”
Slowly and carefully Trish used her limited Spanish to ask the mechanic if he could tell what had caused the brakes to fail. Without hesitating he crawled partway under the car. Trish and Armando knelt to peer at the broken length of tubing he pointed out to them.
“What is that?” Trish questioned.
The answer came back through Armando’s translation. “He says that is the brake line. It supplies the fluid to the brakes. If the line is broken, all the fluid leaks out and you have no brakes.”
Which was exactly what had happened to Edith, Trish thought slowly. Again she directed a question to the mechanic, asking him if the broken line was the result of natural wear and tear or if it could have been deliberately cut.
The man frowned and inspected the blackened, bent tube again. He looked at Trish as if he might attempt to answer her directly, but finally he launched into a long and seemingly complicated explanation to Armando in Spanish. Trish listened in frustration, understanding only enough to be tantalized and swearing to herself that she was going to master this language so thoroughly that she would never again be at a loss.
Finally the man crawled out. Armando stood up and wiped his hands on his handkerchief.
“He says the brake line could have been damaged at some time in the past, perhaps bent by hitting something. Then over a period of time it worked back and forth until it eventually broke.”
“Then it was just an accident!” Trish said, relief surging through her.
Armando shook his head. “Not necessarily. He doubts that the brake line was actually cut with some tool, but he says the tube could have bee
n severed by being deliberately bent back and forth until it broke.”
The mechanic nodded. To illustrate he picked up a stray piece of wire from the ground and rapidly bent it back and forth a few times until it snapped in two.
Trish looked at the two pieces of broken wire, her heart sinking. “Done by someone who was careful enough to try to make it look as though it could have been natural wear and tear,” she said slowly.
Armando nodded. “I’m afraid so. It’s a frightening thought, isn’t it?”
He turned back to the mechanic and thanked him for his help. Trish added her gracias. Armando spoke a few more words in Spanish and then motioned Trish back to the Mercedes.
“You told him to dispose of the car, didn’t you?” Trish’s smooth brow creased slightly. “Do you think that was wise?”
“I don’t think I could stand to look at the cursed thing every time I came to the village,” Armando admitted with a shudder. “It makes me feel sick just to look at it. I still feel that if I had not behaved so… so like an ass toward Edith, none of this would have happened. If her mind had not been distracted by what I said, she might have noticed the brake problem earlier, in time to prevent the accident.”
Trish nodded but was not really paying attention to his words because another thought had just occurred to her. She turned back to the mechanic and put a detaining hand on Armando’s arm. “Ask him if anyone else has been here to inspect the car,” she directed Armando.
The answer came back loud and clear. Marcantonio de la Barca had come to look at the car even before it was pulled out of the ravine. However, the mechanic added, he himself had not been around when the seňor inspected the burned car and he did not know whether or not the broken brake line had been noticed. Trish had no doubts but that Marc had noticed. Was he checking to see if his dirty work had been concealed by the fire? But why? Why?
Shadows of the Heart Page 12
