Beyond the Grave jq-2

by Bill Pronzini

  The remaining Velasquez family fortunes, I supposed, had taken a swift downward plunge in the years after Quincannon's investigation. Possibly Felipe's attempt to find the missing artifacts had been a last gamble at saving their holdings, and this poor stone was evidence that Quincannon had failed in his search. A sadness descended upon me and I turned, pushing through the grass toward the ruins of the lavanderia under the big olive tree, some ten yards away.

  Halfway there, however, I stopped, feeling a chill between my shoulder blades. It wasn't the kind of cold I'd felt before from the passage of the wind. This was an emotional chill, icy and striking straight to the bone. I whirled and looked back at the church, expecting to see someone there.

  The church looked the same as before. There was no one, not even a bird, in sight.

  I shook my head and kept going, but now the icy feeling intensified. I spun around, thinking someone might be hiding in the ruins, playing games with me. This time I thought I saw a swiftly moving shadow at the jagged corner of the rear wall. I waited, but there was no further motion. It could, I thought, have merely been the sunlight filtering through the leaves of the nearby trees.

  What is this, Elena? I asked myself. Perhaps you're afraid of espectros. Ghosts. Don Esteban and the padre and Felipe. The men and women and children who died here during the days of los ranchos grandes, and those who fell before Fremont's troops. Perhaps, like Quincannon, they're trying to tell you something.

  The idea of ghosts was one I would normally have dismissed as ridiculous. Ghosts belonged to el Dia de los Muertos, November second, when my people bring bread, food, drink, candles, and flowers to the cemeteries in honor of our departed loved ones. On that night the ghosts are supposed to come and feast, to visit their friends and relatives who have been left behind. But most people like me don't really believe that-any more than I believed that ghosts could stalk ruined churchyards in the middle of this bright spring afternoon.

  But then, I reminded myself, people like me didn't normally hold conversations with a long-dead Anglo detective.

  Forcefully, I pushed the idea of haunts from my mind and continued past the lavanderia, planning to look for more foundations, perhaps those of the stables, and-farther up on the distant hill-the hacienda itself. My problem, I thought, was that I was too sensitive to atmosphere, too easily swayed by my imagination-

  Then I felt it again. The chill returned, this time spreading over my whole body, raising goose bumps on my arms and legs. I whirled once more and was sure I saw a shadow by the back wall of the church. Without considering what I'd do if I found someone there, I began running toward it.

  The tall weeds caught at the legs of my jeans. I jammed my foot against some hard, protruding object and stumbled. I jumped over the foundation and skirted the massive charred roof beam. On the other side of what was left of the right-hand wall, my foot hit a patch of crumbled red tile, and I slipped to the ground. Pushing myself up with both hands, I lurched around the rear of the ruins.

  No one was there. Not a blade of grass moved. Not a flower was trampled.

  I scanned the area between me and the road; the grove of oak trees looked as if no one had passed through it in centuries; the fields and orchard lay similarly untouched. I listened, but the only sound was the shriek of a nearby jay.

  I stood there for a moment, feeling foolish, ashamed at having let my overactive imagination panic me. The chill was gone from my shoulder blades. I was certain no one watched me now.

  I continued looking around. Nothing moved, except for a few errant wildflowers. Then I lowered my gaze to the ground. There was a place where the grass was bent, as if someone had been standing on it quite recently. And in among the trampled green stalks lay a foreign object. A cigarette butt-or more accurately, a cigarette filter tip. It had been burned all the way down, singeing the white porous material.

  I went over and picked it up; it was still warm. The paper that might have identified the brand was completely burned; this could be any kind of cigarette with a white filter.

  I stood with the butt pinched between my thumb and forefinger, staring at the landscape, which once again seemed ominous. The chill I'd felt had not been a product of my imagination; it had not been caused by the wandering of ghosts. A very real flesh-and-blood person who smoked filter-tipped cigarettes had been hiding behind this wall observing me. A person who for some reason had chosen not to reveal himself.

  Somehow, I thought, I'd have preferred a ghost.

  FOUR

  After my return from Las Lomas, I spent a restless evening prowling around the house. I went from room to room, straightening a picture here, pinching off straggly shoots of a houseplant there, feeling out of sorts and purposeless and, above all, a stranger in my own home. It wasn't the same kind of alienation that had assailed me the other day, when I'd felt like piling all the furniture in the middle of the room and then rearranging it. That had been a simple reaction of emotional shock and anxiety. But this: It was as if I were viewing my surroundings through someone else's eyes, seeing them as someone from not only another place but another time.

  “And why not?” I asked aloud, stopping myself in the act of reducing my already-ailing Swedish ivy to a mere twig. “You've been living on close terms with John Quincannon for a couple of days now. Why wouldn't you begin to see things as he might?”

  I pulled my hand away from the abused plant and went to sit on the sofa, propping my feet on the coffee table and crossing my arms over my breasts. There was a stack of books on the cushion next to me-illustrated volumes on old Spanish church architecture that I'd pulled off the shelves of my personal art library with the idea that one of them might contain a drawing of San Anselmo de las Lomas. I glanced at them and then looked away.

  San Anselmo de las Lomas. The image of the ruins and the vestiges of the eerie feelings I'd experienced there that afternoon haunted me, haunted me almost as much as the phrase that still echoed in my mind:

  Mas alia del sepulcro.

  Perhaps, I thought, those strange feelings had been nothing more than the by-product of this uncanny identification I had developed with the long-dead San Francisco detective. Maybe all they proved was the power of suggestion upon an overactive imagination. Or if I were superstitious-and I am descended from an extremely superstitious people-I might say that I had picked up the vibrations from an unpleasant experience Quincannon had had on that spot. If the detective had gone to the pueblo, felt he was being watched, perhaps even encountered danger, as he had on the beach with Oliver Witherspoon and James Evans….

  “You're not thinking clearly, Elena,” I said aloud. “What about the freshly smoked cigarette?” As I thought of it, I shivered-and realized I would greatly prefer any number of supernatural experiences to the very real and possibly threatening one of having someone watch me from among those ruins.

  I'd faced much more disagreeable situations than that in the past year, however. And I knew that the only reasonable way to deal with them was with cool thinking and logic. I now made myself examine the problem more rationally than I had earlier on the drive home from Las Lomas.

  The cigarette could have been smoked and dropped there by any number of persons-both known and unknown to me. The obvious assumption was that it was a stranger, someone who frequented the place and had been surprised to find me there. A hiker who lived in the area, perhaps; or one of the teenagers who used the place to party and had spray-painted the rainbow on the church's wall. A teenager would naturally have wanted to keep out of sight-why risk an encounter with an unfamiliar adult? A lone hiker probably preferred his solitude and wouldn't have seen the need for conversation with me-after all, it was more or less a public place, and I had as much right to be there as anyone else. But wouldn't a hiker or a teenager have merely gone away? Why wait and watch from behind that wall for the length of time I'd sensed someone's eyes on me? And why disappear when I approached?

  The person's secretive behavior was what made me think it mu
st have been someone known to me, who hadn't wanted to encounter me at the ruins. But who? The only thing I knew for sure was that he or she was a smoker. In today's health-conscious society, that fact should have narrowed the possibilities greatly, but from what I recalled, no one in Las Lomas was concerned with that aspect of his health.

  Sam Ryder smoked constantly. I could picture him, gray plumes curling from his nostrils as he talked. He'd even had a cigarette going in an ashtray on the chopping block when he'd prepared the salad for the dinner party. After dinner, when he'd passed cigarettes around, Arturo had taken one. And Dora-a surprise in one so conscious of the other substances she took into her body. Gray had turned down the offer, but his abstinence apparently was an off-and-on thing; Dora had chided him for repeatedly quitting and starting up again, and I suspected he may have refused just so he could act self-righteous and annoy her.

  And that was the sum total of my acquaintances in the village. Well, not really, if you counted Jim Marshall, the gossipy old man who ran the general store. Did he smoke? Probably; his teeth were tobacco-stained. And he was the type to hide and observe someone in hopes of adding to his store of rumor.

  Of those people, who had known I planned to revisit the site of the old pueblo? Sam, of course. And Dora; I'd told her. Gray would naturally have access to anything Dora knew. Jim Marshall? Any of the three could have mentioned me to him in passing. What about Arturo? He had been off somewhere on his motor scooter.

  Like Jim Marshall, Arturo was a perfect candidate for the role of watcher, although not for the same reasons; the artist would have hesitated to approach me out of shyness, perhaps hidden behind the wall debating whether or not to reveal himself. And when I'd run in his direction, his natural inclination would have been to flee.

  “Maldito!” I said aloud. So much for logical thinking. All the process had done for me was point up that it could have been anyone behind that wall.

  How to narrow it down? I wondered. There was, of course, tangible evidence-the cigarette butt. I got up and went to get my purse, extracted the butt from the change compartment of my wallet, where I'd put it for safekeeping. It was an ordinary white filter tip, the tobacco and paper burned down so that the manufacturer's stamp had been destroyed. A police laboratory could easily analyze what brand it was, but that didn't help me; I didn't have access to such a facility. Had I still been seeing Dave, I might have been able to cajole him into having it analyzed for me. But right now Dave was probably packing his expensive camera gear and video recording equipment and skiis in preparation for his new life, which-he thought-would work out so much better without me….

  Camera gear and video equipment and skiis. Maybe Mama did have a point after all.

  I turned my mind away from Dave and back to the question of the cigarette butt. Surprisingly, doing that didn't take nearly the effort it would have the day before.

  In lieu of having a lab identify the cigarette brand, was there anything I could do? I supposed I could drive up to Las Lomas and examine everyone's cigarettes, to see if they smoked cork- or filter-tipped. But that wasn't really a very definitive test, and what about Gray, who probably bummed his smokes?

  I had to face it: My clue wasn't much of a clue at all. And what did it really matter, anyway, that someone had been watching me at those ruins? Any menace was probably all in my mind.

  Weary of playing detective, I glanced at my watch. Quarter to ten; much too late to call Mama. I'd stayed away from the hospital this evening, hadn't even attempted to phone her. Why? Because I was still angry with her? No, because I was more than a little ashamed of my behavior this past morning. I'd make it up to her tomorrow; we'd talk and all would be forgiven. Dios gracias, I thought as I reached for one of the books on church architecture, that I do not come from a family of grudge-holders!

  The volume I selected was one that incorporated modern photographs of those Spanish churches that had survived to the present day-mainly mission churches-with reproductions of old drawings of those that had fallen to ruins. I paused at pictures of one of my favorite missions, San Juan Capistrano, its stately bell tower reflected in the fountain of its inner courtyard; then I turned the pages until I came to another favorite, the ornate altar of Mission Santa Barbara. The architecture of the California missions is basically simple: soft arches, clean roof lines, graceful form embodied in plain wood, adobe, and tile. It is only in the most holy sanctuary that austerity gives way to splendor, to wooden and gilt and stone embellishments whose only purpose is the glorification of God.

  Near the end of the book I found what I was seeking-pen-and-ink drawings of San Anselmo de las Lomas. The church was much as I'd reconstructed it in my mind: even more austere than that of the missions, with a plain iron cross topping its peaked roof and a square tower containing one great bell. The sketches of the interior showed a long, windowless nave; its huge main beam-the same one that now lay charred and rotting on the ground-ran the length of the structure and was intersected by dozens of smaller cross beams. The altar was very plain: rough-hewn dark wood, with two tall candeleros upon it and a carved crucifix above. Unlike many of the churches, there were no niches bearing statues in the wall on either side of the altar; the apses I'd observed in the side walls of the ruins would have served that function. The artist had indicated the apses with areas of shadowing, but the angle from which the drawing had been made had prevented him from showing what was in them.

  I looked up from the drawing and closed my eyes, picturing the little church where the Aunts and their families had worshipped in the East L.A. barrio. It had been a poor church, more like the simple ones of los ranchos grandes than St. Joseph's, which Carlota and I had attended in Santa Barbara, and it, too, had had apses on either side of the altar. To the right as one faced the congregation had been the Virgin Mary, where she customarily is. To the left … I couldn't remember. Not that it mattered; it just pointed up how much my concern for things Catholic had dwindled since I'd stopped going to church. Not that I didn't still consider myself a Catholic; I had been baptized one, and I supposed one day I would receive the Church's last rites. I had no quarrel with the Church, had not ceased attending Mass for any particular reason. I had merely stopped going, caught up in the pleasures and concerns of my day-to-day life….

  The phone rang, making me start and clutch the art book harder. Then I laughed at my jumpiness and set the book aside, going to answer eagerly. The voice on the other end of the line was Sam Ryder's-and he was very agitated.

  “Elena,” he said, “Elena, I can't believe this has happened!”

  “What's wrong?”

  “The report-Quincannon's report-that you gave me this afternoon: It's gone!”

  “Gone? How?”

  “Someone broke into the house while I was down in Santa Ynez, doing my weekly shopping at Safeway. I've looked everywhere, but I can't find the report. It's the only thing missing.”

  I felt a brief sinking at the loss of the documents I'd gone to such lengths to find, but then I said, “The only thing? Sam, you must have misplaced it. No one breaks into a house to steal a hundred-year-old detective's report-”

  “Elena, the back door had been forced. And things had been moved around on my desk, as if someone had searched carefully.”

  I was silent, picturing the messy desk and wondering how he could know that things had been moved.

  As if he could read my thoughts, Sam said, “It may not look like it, but I know where every piece of paper on that desk is. They've been disturbed. But there's a jar of spare change that I keep right next to the pencil sharpener that wasn't touched, and whoever it was didn't bother with the TV or the stereo.”

  I frowned. It did sound like a burglary with a specific purpose.

  “Elena?” Sam said.

  “I'm here. Did you call the sheriffs department?”

  “Didn't seem much point in it. They've got more important crimes to worry about than the theft of an old document. But why would anybody take such a
thing?”

  “I don't know.”

  “It just doesn't make sense.”

  “No, it doesn't.” I was silent for a moment, then said, “Look, Sam, had you already read the papers?”

  “Yes. I saved them until I'd finished my afternoon's stint of work.”

  “Then, it doesn't really matter that they were taken.” It did; I hated to lose the documents, but it wouldn't help Sam for me to say so. “Why don't you just fix the lock on your door and try to relax? The thief got what he wanted, so there's not much chance he'll be back.”

  “I wish there were. I'd fix the son-of-a-bitch-”

  “Sam, just take it easy. Maybe we'll get the report back. And in the meantime, we've got another installment coming. I'll be up tomorrow as soon as it arrives.”

  Sam sounded somewhat cheered by that, and after a few pleasantries he hung up, leaving me to my now-uneasy solitude.

  I went to the sofa and sat down again, but made no attempt to go on reading. This latest development, I thought, would tend to prove that the menace I'd felt at the ruins of San Anselmo de las Lomas was real and that the watcher was no mere hiker or teenager. Someone was interested in my research into the Velasquez family-interested enough to follow and observe and, later, to break into Sam's house and steal the documents I'd brought him. Who? Why? What possible connection could there be between a nearly hundred-year-old mystery and present events in Las Lomas?