24: Beatriz

24

BEATRIZ

BEATRIZ.”

Sleep was deep and soft and dreamless, and I was reluctant to be drawn out of it. Let me be, let me sink deeper into silence. It was only when there was a hand on my shoulder that I floated to the surface of awareness.

I was curled on my side on a bench. Candlelight draped over me like a blanket. I blinked. There were pews before me. An altar. Where was I?

“Beatriz.” That was Andrés, his warm hand on my shoulder.

The night before flooded me: fleeing the house, racing through the rain to the capilla. How Andrés found me here and stayed with me through the night.

The Andrés who stood over me now was not the one I had embraced last night, whose black hair was messy from sleep, whose ragged nightshirt I had soaked with my tears. He was dressed in his austere black habit, and was freshly shaven, his hair slicked away from his face. He smelled of a piney local soap and, faintly, of copal.

I tightened the blanket around me. I was now—in a way I hadn’t been last night—acutely aware of how little I wore. I hadn’t cared in the middle of the night. Safety was what mattered then. Nothing else had crossed my mind.

Almost nothing else. Looking up at Andrés now—Padre Andrés, I emphasized to myself—should fill me with a sense of shame. I should not admire the dark line of his lashes or the placement of the small mole on his cheek. I should remember last night more innocently, not lingering on the warmth of his body, nor the weight of his hands on me. I hadn’t cared then. But as the daylight strengthened, so would my shame.

I didn’t want it to.

I wanted to stay in the capilla forever, abandoned in sleep, not a shred of guilt to be found within me.

I did not want to go back to the house. Which was precisely what Andrés had woken me to do.

Seeing I was awake, he sat next to me on the pew and offered me a cup of water. I snuck a glance at his face over the rim as I drank deeply.

He was staring into space, or perhaps up at the crucifix. His mouth was firm, and the lines forming around it seemed deeper than ever. There was no peace to be found there.

I lowered the cup and followed the line of his eye up to the crucifix. The carver and painter had fixed Jesus Christ’s gaze upward in agonized rapture, but a small, curling feeling of shame told me His attention was focused on the more earthly affairs before Him. I set the cup down and tightened the blanket around my shoulders.

Maybe He could turn that attention on the house and lend a hand, for once. That I would not mind.

“You said you saw things,” Andrés began, his voice rougher than usual—by a night of praying, by sleeplessness, or both?

I nodded.

“How distinct?”

“Like she was there.” My voice came out hoarse, cracking over the words. I cleared my throat. “She sat next to you at dinner.”

He shuddered. The grimness in his face deepened. “Not good.”

“Do you think Rodolfo killed her?”

“Beatriz.” There was a measure of surprise in his voice, of chastisement.

“Things changed, when he returned. Couldn’t you feel it?” The line of his mouth told me he did. “And the writing on the wall . . . Andrés, when did she die? Was he here?”

He searched my face. Looking for madness, no doubt. I did not blame him. Something in the house had slipped under my skin before I could stop it, and it had been growing, spreading, festering ever since. I could not know if I would ever be rid of it.

You’ll die here, like the rest of us.

“I couldn’t say,” Andrés said at last. “You would have to ask Paloma. There was a period . . . when I was not welcome here.”

His banishment. Part of me had assumed it was Rodolfo’s doing, but Rodolfo had no problem with inviting the priest to dinner, nor having him on the property. They were not warm with each other, certainly, but there was no open enmity between them either.

Something in Andrés’s face warned me from pressing that point further. I would have to ask Paloma about that.

“Maybe we could learn from him whether he did it or not,” I said. “You could sneak into the confessional in town as you did with me, but actually hear his confession, and—”

“Doña Beatriz.”

His scandalized tone made heat rush to my cheeks. “It’s a good idea,” I challenged.

“It is flawed for a number of reasons, the least of which being I will not break the vow of the confessional.”

The quiet fervor with which he spoke stung me. “But you would only tell me. To warn me. To protect me.”

“No.” He shook his head.

“Even if he told you he murdered his wife?”

He raised clasped hands and, pressing his fingers to his lips, gave me a measured look. “That is a complicated ethical question.”

“But what if he means to hurt me?”

“That is what I am afraid of.”

The dark sobriety of his words sent a chill through me, into my gut. “How then would speaking to protect me pose a complicated ethical question? Do you want me to end up a skeleton in a wall?”

He closed his eyes. I could almost hear him saying cielo santo in his mind. “That is not fair. We do not know what happened to Doña Catalina.”

And yet he did not revise what he had said.

I scowled, tossing one of my hands up in frustration. “I prayed for help, and what good did it do me? God has sent me the only incorruptible priest in México.”

He opened his eyes. This time, when they met mine, there was a shade of intensity in them that caught my breath and held it fast. “I would not go so far as to say that.”

A ribbon of warmth unspooled in my belly, its curiosity piqued by his words. I could not ignore it, not when heat bloomed in my cheeks, not when he sat barely a foot from me. Perhaps the yearning was forged from loneliness, from a lack of touch, but it was real all the same. It was a rope drawn taut, firmly anchored in me, and reaching to . . .

“Whatever happened to her, the fact of the matter is that she cannot move on,” Andrés said. There was a sobriety in his voice that brought reality over my shoulders, heavy as a leaden cloak.

“Do people often struggle to . . . move on?” I asked.

“No.” He lowered his hands, folding them in his lap. His eyes grew distant, lost in thought. “My grandmother had her theories about people who left behind unfinished business, who could not, for whatever reason, let go of their mortal lives. But there are also souls who are confused. Lost. Who need some guidance to find their way. Then there are the spirits who remain tied to this world by their anger.”

“Anger?” I repeated.

Andrés nodded. “It holds a great deal of energy.”

“Why is she so angry?” I wondered aloud.

Andrés’s brows rose to his hairline. “Doña Beatriz, we know someone killed her.”

“But I didn’t do it,” I cried, gesturing at myself emphatically. “So why torment me?”

A vision from the night before flashed before my eyes: the apparition of María Catalina in my dining room, her hellfire eyes fixed on the other end of the table, staring with naked adoration at my husband.

Herhusband.

If I were her, if my husband had remarried and my home been invaded by his new wife . . . wouldn’t I, too, be angry?

My thoughts were interrupted by Andrés. “Because she was like that in life,” he spat. “She struck Paloma. Ana Luisa hated her. They all did, because she was cruel and liked seeing people suffer. She—”

“Paloma thinks she killed Mariana,” I said softly. “Is that true?”

Andrés froze mid-gesture. His hand hung in the air for a long moment. He did not breathe, as if time itself had stilled around him and stolen the breath from his lips. Then he swore, twice, blunt and wretched, as he covered his face with his hands. “This is my fault. It is all my fault. I made her angry. I should never have . . .” He swore a third time.

I stared at him, mouth falling open in silent surprise as the pieces fell together in my mind. “She banished you,” I breathed.

Banishing Andrés from the land where his family had lived for generations meant separating him from the people he loved and served. I thought of Paloma shyly thanking me for bringing him back—María Catalina had separated him from his family. That was the one thing that could truly spark an anger so powerful it overcame his steadiness.

He lifted his head. Nodded curtly. “I hate her for it. For everything she did.” His voice trembled with it. “It is a sin, but no matter how much I repent, I cannot shake it.”

My heart shifted in my chest, disquieted, off-balance. I trusted him so earnestly, but how well did I know him, truly, if it took me aback to hear that heat in his voice? Since I met him, I had placed him on a pedestal as my savior, my protector against the darkness, my own private saint who kept the nightmares of San Isidro at bay. His injury rattled my faith in his omnipotence, but not my trust in his perfection.

Now, taking in the way he worried his hands in his lap, the shame that curled at the corners of his hard mouth as he looked away for me, I felt as if I were seeing him for the first time: yes, he was the priest who baptized children, who sat next to me in the chapel praying novenas until his voice went hoarse. Formal, sober, measured. He was the witch who drew my blood to exorcise a house at midnight, around whom copal and darkness and chaos bloomed, who heard voices and held a quiet power over the living. Over me.

But he was not perfect.

He doubted himself. He failed to forgive. He lost his temper. His was a bruised soul like my own, pitted with wounds and unhealed grudges.

A sudden wave of fondness for him flushed my chest, its sweet ache catching me off guard. Before I could stop myself, I reached out and put my hand over his fidgeting ones.

He stilled. His eyes dropped to our hands, but otherwise he did not move. For a moment, the capilla was so quiet it was as if both our hearts had stopped beating.

“What happened?” I asked.

For a long moment he did not reply. Perhaps he was weighing whether or not to tell me. Perhaps he did not want to shatter the silence of the chapel, the delicate, pale stillness that hung between us.

At last, he released a slow exhale. “It is a long story. And the sun is rising.”

I took my hand back, my throat tightening with dread. No. I wanted to stay here forever. Couldn’t he speak to still the sun and preserve this peace, this silence? Keep the softness of the gray light from melting away?

But instead I nodded. My thoughts strayed to Rodolfo, asleep in bed, as I rose. Pinpricks stabbed my lower legs; my shoulder was stiff from being pressed against wood for hours. I shook myself out. I had to return before he woke. For if I returned, looking like this, I would have to explain myself.

And that was the last thing I wanted to do. To anyone. Much less my husband.

I stepped out of the pew, the tiles of the chapel aisle cold against my bare soles. Andrés stood and followed, genuflecting and making the sign of the cross as he did so.

Then he turned to me. “I’ll walk with you,” he said, voice even. “I don’t trust her.” The house. “You must tell me when your husband plans to be away in the fields, or with José Mendoza. I will try again to cleanse the house.”

“He’s meant to see Don Teodosio Cervantes of San Cristóbal. He wants to buy land from us.” But that was in three days, maybe more—I could not remember. The conversation of the night before blurred in my mind, punctuated only by the appearance of the woman in gray. Of María Catalina. I shuddered as we stepped through the door of the chapel.

A low mist hung over the courtyard, veiling the house in silken gray. No birds sang; far away, the baying of dogs echoed from elsewhere on the property.

“How will I survive until then?” My words died on the cold cloud of my breath. I still clutched the blanket around me like a shawl, but it was not enough to keep the morning from seeping into my bones.

A warm hand against my upper back. A voice, its rasp soft now, and tender: “I am here.”

I knew he was worried. I knew he was frightened—but if he felt these emotions as powerfully as I did, he did not allow them to show. An aura of calm radiated from him; I basked in it as I would before a roaring fire on a damp night.

Priest and witch, a source of curses and comfort.

Truly, I could not understand him. Truly, I was more grateful for him than I had ever been for a man in my life.

His hand stayed on my back as we retraced my flight from the night before. The walls of San Isidro emerged through the mist, white and impenetrable. He stayed with me as we passed through the arch and crossed the courtyard. We did not speak. A reverent sort of silence hung around the house like shadows. Its attention was elsewhere, and—or so I thought—did not note our arrival. The front door was open. Tendrils of mist curled away from the sound of Andrés’s shoes as he and I walked up the low stone steps.

The darkness inside was gray and quiet. More still than I had ever seen it. But I had long ago learned not to trust appearances as far as Hacienda San Isidro was concerned. I inhaled deeply and squared my shoulders. Andrés’s hand dropped away.

Our eyes met. Wordlessly, I knew this was where he left me. That he could not pass farther, however much I wished him by my side.

I stepped into the house. He did not close the door behind me, but lingered, watching me cross the flagstones solemnly to the stairs. I did not look back. I did not know how long he waited there, nor when he closed the door. He must have stood there for a long moment, listening to the strange, gaping silence of the house. Wondering at it. He must have lingered far longer than anyone else would have, only stepping away from the threshold after heavy minutes. He must have walked slowly through the mist, lost in thought, wondering at the path we had set ourselves on.

For he was still close enough to the house to hear me scream.