Beyond the Grave

by Muller, Marcia

  When I got home I thought about having some more coffee, then drank a glass of wine instead. It eased the shakiness somewhat but also made me feel light-headed and curiously directionless. With several hours until I could go back to see Mama again, I prowled the house, straightening a pile of books on the bedside table, putting away a couple of pairs of shoes, washing the few dishes that stood in the sink. I tried Carlota again, and when I got no answer, I decided to pay some bills. But once I was back in the living room, I couldn't make myself sit down. So I paced.

  My thoughts kept moving, too: from Mama to Dave; from worry to disbelief. I felt disoriented, and there was a strangeness in my usually familiar surroundings. The living room walls seemed whiter than before; in contrast, the furnishings looked shabbier. I wasn't sure about that painting I'd bought a couple of months ago; it was a primitive, but maybe the technique was amateurish. Even my pottery sun face by an artist named Candelario looked strange to me; its wide red mouth and blazing eyes seemed too intense for a room I'd intended as a restful haven.

  Suddenly I had an overpowering impulse to drag all the furniture into the center of the room, pile the smaller things on top of it, and begin rearranging. To resist what could only be a disastrous urge, I finally paused and thumbed through the old detective's report that I'd left on my desk when I'd finished reading it the night before.

  After only a few lines, my mind was no longer on my troubles; instead it was with John Quincannon, arriving in the Santa Barbara of those earlier, more tranquil times. There would have been no shopping malls and housing tracts, no cars and trucks and exhaust fumes, no cute boutiques and trendy restaurants and all the other things that were now spoiling the charm of the town. I wished I could see Santa Barbara as Quincannon had seen it; wished I could go along with him as he pursued Don Esteban Velasquez's missing artifacts. It was strange, I thought, how I felt a kinship with the long-deceased detective. I wanted to know more about him, what had happened to him while he was here, how his case had turned out. I was terribly disappointed that the rest of the report was missing.

  Paging through the report again, I picked out the name of the church that the Velasquez family had constructed on their rancho—San Anselmo de las Lomas. Saint Anselm of the Hills. There was a little town in the Santa Ynez Valley, northeast of Santa Barbara, called Las Lomas; since the rancho had been located in that same general area, it was probable that its name was an abbreviated version of the church's.

  The reason I knew of Las Lomas was that a local historian, Sam Ryder, lived there. Sam had been a student of my mother's professor friend, Ciro Sis aeros, and had finished up a book Ciro had been writing when Ciro was murdered last summer. If anyone would know about the Velasquez family and their missing treasure, it would be a historian who practically lived on the site of the old rancho.

  I took out the county phone book and checked for a listing for Sam Ryder, but there wasn't any. That really didn't matter, though; Las Lomas was a tiny town, little more than a clearing in the vineyards for which the Santa Ynez Valley was becoming famous. I could drive out there to talk to him, maybe even take a picnic. It would be a good way to keep my mind off Mama and Dave….

  But then I sat down in my rocker, my excitement evaporating as quickly as it had come. I didn't want to drive out there alone. Didn't want to pack a picnic just for myself. What I wanted was to share this interesting discovery. And who I wanted to share it with was Dave. We'd shared so many things, important and unimportant, in the time we'd been together. It didn't feel right….

  Basta, Elena, I told myself. There isn't going to be any more sharing with Dave Kirk, so get used to it. If you don't want to go out there alone, get up and call a friend.

  I went to the phone and dialed Tina Aguilar, who had been my amiga from grade school to this very day. Tina would enjoy the kind of excursion I was planning, and she was also someone to whom I could talk about what was upsetting me. But Tina's phone rang eleven times before I remembered she'd gone to L.A. for the weekend. Then I called Susana Ibarra, my public relations director at the museum. She was home but about to go sailing with Carlos Bautista, whom she grandly referred to as “my fiancé.” It didn't raise my spirits to hear that; Carlos was chairman of our board of directors, very rich, fifty-three-years-old to Susana's nearly eighteen—and my former boyfriend. Never mind that I'd found him boring and stuffy and had failed to be impressed by his money; this was irritating in the extreme.

  But surely there was someone I knew who would want to go on a picnic. My secretary, Emily Dominguez, and her husband and baby? No, Emily had decided to take her vacation week the same time I did, and they had all gone up to Lindsay to visit her parents. What about Jesse Herrera, the artist who was my closest male friend? No, not him, either. Jesse had recently fallen in love, and all his waking hours were devoted to his pretty Estella….

  I could have continued down the list of my friends, but suddenly it seemed like a great deal of effort. Much more effort than it would take to simply throw some cheese and bread and a couple of bottles of Dos Equiis into a sack and set off for the valley alone.

  The Santa Ynez Valley contains some of the finest vineyards and cattle graze in California. Flowers are grown there for seed, and all-year-round colorful fields stretch toward the softly rounded hills in wide stripes of red and yellow, blue, pink, and white. There are excellent recreation areas, such as the several-thousand-acre county park at Lake Cachuma, the reservoir that provides Santa Barbara's drinking water, as well as two restored missions, Santa Ynez and La Purisima. And of course there are the historical towns-turned-tourist-traps, such as Solvang. Labeled “Little Denmark,” Solvang outdoes Scandinavia with half-timbered buildings, windmills, and thatched roofs with fake storks perched on top; smorgasbords, pastry shops, and souvenir stands abound. Solvang is a must for the type of person who just loves to bring home little plaques for the kitchen that say such things as GOOD FOOD, GOOD MEAT, GOOD GOD, LET'S EAT! But you can't convince me that the people of Danish descent whose forebears settled the area really enjoy being surrounded by all that tackiness—any more than I would want to live in an adobe hut with pinatas hanging on the front porch. The tourist dollar that just keeps flowing in is another matter entirely.

  Today I was able to avoid Solvang, turning east toward the hills between Santa Ynez and Los Olivos. The county road to Las Lomas rose gradually into rougher terrain—rocky outcroppings where chaparral gradually gave way to live oak and sycamore. Here and there I glimpsed delicate orange patches of the California poppy, and brown-and-white cattle grazed on the slopes, standing easily on an incline, as if their legs were shorter on one side than on the other. I smiled, remembering how I'd once advanced that fanciful theory to a rather serious, literal-minded man who had brought me out here for a picnic. He had looked at me as if I'd lost my senses, laughed nervously—and never asked me out again.

  After about five miles, the road narrowed, its pavement becoming rough and pitted and crumbling away at the shoulders. It wound between rock-strewn hills on which only scrub vegetation and half-dead trees grew, then went up a steep rise. At its top was what remained of a great white birch that looked as if it might have been struck by lightning; its upper branches were jagged and torn, pointing toward the cloud-streaked sky like angry fingers, and on its trunk a weathered sign was nailed. I slowed the car next to it and made out faded green lettering that said Las Lomas was one mile ahead.

  From there the road dipped sharply, and on the left, across a gully and through a clump of oaks, I saw a flash of white. I slowed once again, peering through the shadows beneath the trees. The white area was large and rectangular in shape—the wall of a building, perhaps?

  It was too soon for me to have reached the village, but this land might have been part of the old rancho, which had spread over many thousands of acres. I looked around for a place to pull off the road, and left the Beetle in a clearing that—from the litter of beer cans and bottles—looked as if it had been used for parki
ng and partying. After stumbling across the rock-strewn gully on the other side of the pavement, I followed an erratic path through the oak trees and came out in a level field of high grass and wildflowers. In the middle of it rose a tall adobe wall, once whitewashed but now begrimed by time and the elements. It was solid, about twenty-five-feet-high, with no doors or windows.

  I waded through the knee-high wildflowers, sneezing a couple of times because of the pollen in the air, and went up to the wall. It was genuine adobe, not the stucco that is mainly used today, and I could see the outlines where the bricks had skillfully been joined together. When I touched it, the wall felt rough and sun-warm. I moved along it to the left, peered around, and stopped in surprise.

  This wall and about half of the one perpendicular to it on the opposite side were all that remained of the structure. The rest was low weed-choked foundations, laid out in a rectangular pattern. Within them lay more of the kind of debris I'd seen where I left my car, as well as large pieces of half-rotten timber, shards of red tile, a scattering of adobe bricks. The rear wall was scrawled with graffiti, and over it all someone had arched a bright, spray-painted rainbow.

  I stepped over the two-foot foundation and picked my way through the rubble and thick vegetation toward the far end of the ruins, stopping to examine a massive piece of wood that bisected the space. It was large enough to have been the main roof beam and was jagged and blackened at both ends. Glancing at the back wall, I noted that it was also black at its top; whatever this structure had been, it had probably burned many years before.

  When I reached the foundation at the far end, I saw that it was divided in the center, as if for a wide door. Stepping through the opening, I turned and surveyed the ruins. The rectangular space was about forty feet in length; to my right was a square foundation—about ten feet on each side—that adjoined it. There was no way of telling if the side walls of the building had contained windows or not, but what remained of the one on the left was recessed on the interior. The recess reminded me of something. What?

  Of course—the apse in a church.

  I'd probably stumbled onto the ruins of the church mentioned in John Quincannon's report—San Anselmo de las Lomas. It would have been similar in style to the Franciscan missions: plain adobe and wood beam, without the elaborate stained glass windows and statuary of the typical Catholic church. The walls would have been whitewashed, the pews simple wooden benches, and any artworks would have been small paintings or statues of the saints. All those things were gone now, of course, destroyed in the fire or stolen. I was surprised that the great roof beam remained—it would make good firewood—but it was massive enough that it would have to be sawed up before it could be moved.

  I looked around, feeling the way an archaeologist must after stumbling onto a lost city. I was certain now that this was the site of Rancho Rinconada de los Robles's pueblo—that center of the day-to-day activities of those who worked and lived on the sprawling self-sufficient spread—and as I searched for it, I began to see more evidence. To the right of the church was what appeared to be a graveyard; the tips of a couple of headstones peeked through the tall grass. About thirty feet away, under a big olive tree, was a three-foot-high round structure that looked like a well; probably it had been a lavandería, the rancho's equivalent of the town pump, where the laundry was done. When I came to explore the surrounding area—perhaps crossed that dry creek bed to that gnarled apple orchard, or climbed the rocky, oak-crowned knoll off on the right—I might see where the foundations of the stables, outbuildings, vaqueros' quarters, or even the hacienda were.

  Had John Quincannon come here and seen these ruins? Had the place been as desolate then as it was now? No, the rancho was still being worked in those days; there would have been some buildings still standing, the hacienda for one. But the church would have been much the same, since it had been destroyed some forty-odd years before Felipe Velasquez had engaged the detective's services.

  I narrowed my eyes, squinting at the ruins of the church through my lashes. For a moment I could almost picture it as it had been in the days before the Bear Flag Revolt. It would have been an immaculate white with a red tile roof; a carved wooden or iron cross would have crowned the peak over the heavy double doors. The square structure to the right was undoubtedly the bell tower; it would have risen high above the rooftop, its heavy bell silhouetted against the sky.

  It was strange, I thought, that no one had tried to restore this place, or at least make a historical attraction of the ruins. Of course, the revolutionaries had destroyed a great deal of it. And then, it was also well off the beaten tourist track, in a rocky and inhospitable place. Perhaps whoever owned the land now preferred to let the ruins of the rancho lie in peace, visited only by teenagers seeking privacy, and occasional curious people like myself.

  A sudden breeze came up, rushing through the nearby orchard and rattling the trees' leaves. The wildflowers that surrounded me rippled with its passage. I looked up at the sky and saw that the streaky clouds were now tinged with gray. The temperature had dropped sharply, as it often does in the hills on uncertain spring days. I shivered, wishing I'd brought a sweater.

  The landscape had a bleak aura now, in spite of the still-bright sun; the remaining wall of the church seemed a lonely reminder of an age that was gone and would never come again; the bright colors of the spray-painted rainbow were a mockery of the grandeur these ruins represented.

  I crossed my arms, hugging my elbows and feeling my spirits sink. I thought of Dave, the loss of him. And I thought of Mama, her illness that was only a prelude to old age and death. My life had taken a turn in the last two days, a turn that I was powerless to stop.

  Always before I'd been the sort of person who fought against changes she didn't like. If there was a problem, I could think it through and fix it. If a situation displeased me, I could twist it around and make it right. But now I felt caught up in a great wave of inevitability, a force as strong as the one that had destroyed the great ranchos and the way of life that the dons had assumed would go on and on forever. Standing in this lonely place among the ruins made me realize for the first time how truly powerless we human beings are.

  I stood there for a long time, arms wrapped tightly across my breasts, feeling sorry for myself. But after a while—as it had the night before—my self-pity began to seem ludicrous.

  “Pobrecita Elena,” I said aloud. “You thought you were all grown-up, and now you find there's yet another lesson to be learned.”

  Then I wiped a couple of tears from my cheeks and made my way back to the car to get my picnic lunch.

  TWO

  BEFORE I COULD carry my picnic lunch back to the ruins of the church, it began to rain, so I gave up on that idea and ate in the car. By the time I had finished and started down the road toward Las Lomas, the sun was out again and a rainbow—delicate translucence that in no way resembled the gaudy imitation on the church wall—arched over the landscape. The tender spring leaves and blossoms were studded with droplets that broke the light into miniature prisms, as if pieces of the rainbow had flaked off and fallen to earth.

  The little village of Las Lomas shared none of the beauty of the country around it. lit nestled in a valley on the edge of Los Padres National Forest, where the foothills became mountainous and rugged. A ragtag collection of shabby frame and cinder-block buildings sprawled around a town square. Half weeds and half packed earth, the square contained a flagpole without either flag or rigging, a basketball hoop minus a net, and a broken-down green picnic table. A couple of small boys were tossing a baseball around on the dirt section that apparently served as a playground, and an old brown dog lay under the table watching them.

  The main road into the town deadended at the square. I turned left and parked in front of one of the few buildings that wasn't in poor repair—a freshly painted white Victorian house with a picket fence and well-tended garden. When I got out of the car and took a closer look, I saw that what grew there was not flowers
but vegetables—big spiky-leaved artichoke plants, seedling beans that had already begun to climb a trellis, tomato plants with yellow blossoms. White-flowered strawberry plants were everywhere, like a ground cover. It seemed an efficient and economical use of space, and for a moment I thought of all the room I had in my backyard and how attractive it would look filled with vegetables. Then I remembered last summer's zucchini disaster—zucchini grows like weeds for everybody but me—and dismissed my visions of living off the land.

  Back on the corner where the road had entered the town, I'd passed a grocery store with a gas pump out front, and now I started walking back to it. The sign on the cinder-block facade said MARSHALL'S, and there was a bin full of potatoes and onions and some sacks of feed sitting under the overhang of the rusty corrugated iron roof. When I got closer I could see, through the front window, wire racks containing potato chips, other snacks, and packaged baked goods. I opened the screen door and stepped inside.

  It was a country store but without the usual charm of such establishments. The wooden floor looked grimy; the light was a peculiar jaundiced yellow; the walls a dirty beige. Rows of shelves stretched from the door to the rear where the refrigerated cases were, but they were half-empty and what canned and boxed goods stood there were in total disorder. To my left was a counter with produce in crates; most of it looked wilted or half-rotten. To my right was a checkout counter, backed by high shelves that held liquor, candy, and cigarettes. An old man with wispy gray hair and a sallow complexion stood behind it, putting a fifth of Old Crow into a paper sack. His customer had his back to me and was slipping a wallet into the hip pocket of his faded jeans. When the screen door flapped shut, the customer glanced over his shoulder; he was about forty, with a suntanned, weathered face and a full head of faded sandy hair. I smiled self-consciously and began turning the rack of snacks to give myself something to do until they'd finished their business.