27: Andrés

27

ANDRÉS

I PACED THE COMMON room of José Mendoza’s house. Though the area before the hearth was no broader than four strides, I walked those four strides back and forth, back and forth, as desperately as if the act alone could solve our troubles.

Mendoza and Paloma sat at the table on wooden chairs, watching as I wore the flagstones down. Then they exchanged a look I could not parse. They knew each other well, Paloma and Mendoza. Not only was Paloma friends with the foreman’s daughters, she had become his protégé in all but name when the patrón was in the capital. I was glad he had offered her a place to stay—she was still too shaken by the suddenness of Tía Ana Luisa’s death to stay in her own home alone. I turned to him for his steadiness and his wisdom, now that the tide had changed and the world had been turned on its head.

Doña Juana accused Beatriz of murdering Rodolfo. She was placed under house arrest. The caudillo Victoriano Román left the keys of the house with Juana, and two of his men standing guard as he returned to Apan. He needed to check the state of the prison, he said. During the war, the small jail on the outskirts of Apan was barely more than a way station for captured insurgents, men who spent mere hours under its roof before being dragged from their cells and shot against the stucco walls at dawn. Now it was populated by town drunks and the occasional bandit; apparently, it would be inappropriate to place a member of the landed class among their ilk, even if that person was accused of murder.

Fury filled me when I heard this. What was inappropriate were these monstrous accusations against an innocent woman.

“She didn’t do it,” I said for the fifth time. “She was in the chapel all night. I know. I was with her.” At this, Mendoza and Paloma exchanged a second pointed look. I stopped in my tracks and whirled to glower at them with all the righteousness I could summon—a skill much practiced and perfected by men of the cloth. I had learned from the best. “We prayed. She fled the house weeping, so we prayed. All night. And then, as Paloma said, she saw us return to the house at dawn.”

Mendoza set his hat on the table between him and my cousin and ran a hand over his weathered face. “I believe you, Padre,” he said. It was so strange to hear him call me that. Mendoza was gruff, but not unkind—his primary way of expressing affection for the children of the village was calling them malcriados. All my life before I left for the seminary, I was simply chamaco to him. Part of me still expected him to address me so. “But couldn’t she have killed him before she went to the capilla?”

I fought the urge to shudder remembering the scene in the bedchamber. “You saw the amount of blood,” I said. “She would have been drenched. And she was wearing white!” I exclaimed. “A white nightdress. It had mud on it from the courtyard, but no blood. Paloma saw it. Didn’t you help her change out of it, when Mendoza went to town?” I barreled on, too impassioned to wait for a reply. “If one of us could sneak past the guards and get the dress, it would be proof of her innocence.”

“Padre.” Mendoza rubbed his temples. “It won’t change what has already been done.”

“How can you say that?” I had promised to keep Beatriz safe, and I would not stop until I had succeeded. The darkness bound deep in my chest hummed in accord, straining at its chains. “You said you saw someone run away from the house in the night. I saw no blood on her, was at her side all night, and returned her to the house in the morning. We have witnesses! We have proof!”

Mendoza lifted his head. “But it is our word against Doña Juana’s,” he said. “And forgive me for saying so, Padre, but in their eyes . . . your word is only as good as ours.”

In their eyes.The eyes of the caudillo, the eyes of a judge, the eyes of the hacendados . . . they bore down on me, scrutinizing me, my cousin, my friend. Scrutinizing who we were. What we were. The casta system was abolished, of course, but the courts outside the capital carried on with business as usual: legally, the word of a criolla like Juana was still worth that of two Indios in court. The word of hacienda workers against their hacendado? Worthless. The word of a low-ranking mestizo cura like me?

Not enough.

“I will come forward anyway,” I said.

But as I spoke, my mind lingered on Juana. She had not waited for any other evidence. Clearly, she had decided to take advantage of the tragedy and rid herself of Beatriz.

Or had she designed it?

Bastard, Rodolfo said last night. He threatened to disown Juana. Now he was dead. The woman who would inherit all his property accused of his murder. Who, then, stood to profit from the blood spilled in San Isidro?

“Did you know that Doña Juana is a bastard?” I asked Mendoza suddenly.

Paloma gasped. Mendoza looked up, wide-eyed. “Your pardon, Padre. What the hell?”

“I heard Rodolfo discussing it with her last night,” I said.

“When?” Paloma said. “I didn’t hear anything.”

“Outside the green parlor, after dinner,” I said. “You must have left already. He called her a bastard, shouted at her for calling their father hers. Then he said that if she did not behave, she would inherit nothing of old Solórzano’s property. And now . . .” I let the words trail off suggestively.

Silence hung over the room like a shroud.

Mendoza swore softly.

“Blackmail,” Paloma said, firm with conviction. “We blackmail her. Make her withdraw her accusation, or you’ll tell all the hacendados she’s a bastard. She must have cousins somewhere who’ll gladly descend and take the land from her.”

“Not a bad idea, Palomita,” Mendoza said. “But you need proof, and the man who knew the truth is dead. If I were to go through old Solórzano’s documents . . .”

God forgive us, I thought, running a hand over my jaw. Talking of blackmail and bastards and stealing papers from the dead.

“Those would all be in the house,” I said.

“Carajo,” Paloma said, and thoroughly ignored my chastising look.

“I will go into the house tonight,” I said. “I will find the papers, and I will stay until dawn.”

“Are you crazy, chamaco?” Mendoza cried. “That house!” He crossed himself.

“I won’t leave Doña Beatriz alone in there after nightfall,” I said.

There was no need to explain why. I had seen the villagers cut the house a wide berth. They could feel it. They knew. They crossed themselves at the mention of it, and there were rumors that the reason Juana had abandoned the house was not simply because of money, because of the war, because of the lack of guests and family on the property. They knew it had done something to her: Juana had always been headstrong, almost churlish, but there was a wildness to her now, one that spoke of something shattered within her.

She heard things, perhaps even saw things. I saw it in the way she took her drink last night. That was how my father drank when he heard voices.

Doña Catalina’s cruelty was trapped in the rafters of the house, bound by her hatred into its very walls. Her essence was the sickness, and the house was festering, rotting with her from the inside out. Poisoning the foundation and spreading like disease. What emanated from its walls was a storm brewing, building in strength and venom. When it was unleashed . . . anyone within its walls could be harmed.

“I’m afraid . . .” I inhaled and let the breath out sharply. “I’m afraid the house may try to kill Doña Beatriz.”

“You’re right to be afraid,” Paloma said. “But you’re forgetting something.”

“What is that?”

She met my eyes levelly, her mouth set in a grim line. “Juana might kill her first.”