8

8

I WOKE THE NEXT MORNINGwith a stale taste in my mouth, my lips sticky and dry. Handfuls of blue sky winked at me through the windows set high in the walls. I stretched, wincing when the throb behind my eye sockets reminded me why I had fallen asleep in my dress, why I had let the candles melt down to shapeless mounds on their tray.

I rolled over onto my back and stared at the beams in the ceiling.

Something was wrong with this house.

Something lurked in it during the day and grew stronger at night.

I had slept curled in a tight ball, the herbs clutched to my chest like a talisman. I unfurled my hand stiffly. The herbs’ stems and leaves left red indentations on my palm and fingers.

I frowned. Was my mind playing tricks on me? I had not had my senses around me last night.

But . . . the blood in the chest. The cold hands shoving me forward on the stairs.

I shuddered. Were the servants testing me? Did they worry I was going to disrupt their way of life, their easy neglect of the house, and so thought to drive me away?

I was slow to bathe and dress myself but accomplished these as quickly as I could. I then walked into the study. I went straight to where I had hung Papá’s map and stood there for a long moment.

A weak part of me was quite ready to be driven away. In the capital, I could truly play the role of Rodolfo’s high-society wife, entertaining in the gilded rooms of his family’s house . . .

My mouth soured further when I remembered who I would be entertaining. Members of the government. The men who had ousted the emperor.

The men who had fought alongside my father, only to then turn on him.

Could I smile blandly at them and pour them chocolate? Could I chat mindlessly with their wives, coo over their children? As achy and stiff and nauseous as I was, I was overcome by the hot desire to seize one of the perfume glasses on my vanity and throw it as hard as I could against the stucco wall.

No. I could not. I would not.

This was my house. I would not shrink away from it the way Juana and Ana Luisa did, jumping every time boards creaked underfoot. I would scald its soot stains clean. I would strip its protective layer of dust and straighten its crooked edges, rebreaking and setting broken bones. I would make it mine, I would make it my home. My safe haven.

I had no other choice, after all.

Even if it meant facing a chest full of blood-soaked clothing. I had to face it at some point or another, to see what could be salvaged. Better to face it now, when the sunlight was hale and bright.

I turned. The chest was open, as Juana and I had left it. I braced myself, anticipating the buzz of flies, acidity preemptively rising at the back of my mouth as I drew close enough to peer inside.

Blue.

The silk was the dark, rich blue of traditional blown glass. And it was clean.

I fell to my knees, clenching my teeth as the sudden movement rattled my sore skull. I touched the silk tentatively, then moved it around, searching for any trace of blood. The room was filled with the sound of shifting fabric.

“What on earth?” I murmured.

Distantly, as if from three rooms away, a girlish giggle echoed.

I stood as fast as my aching head would allow and slammed the chest shut.

The room was silent.

I had not imagined it. I could not forget the expression that contorted Juana’s face as she drenched my hands, desperate to clean skin that was already bare of blood.

Juana saw what I had seen.

I needed to talk to her. If it was late morning, she must be in the fields, or tending to some other running of the hacienda beyond the house that I was not privy to. I would find her in the evening, then. First, I needed food.

The house watched me coyly as I descended the stairs. I shook the feeling off like a horse twitching flies from its hide. Houses did not watch. It simply was not true or possible.

But still my steps quickened. A faint smell of copal shrouded me, thanks to my hair; it had reeked of the incense when I brushed it out and pinned it into a knot high off my neck. I thought of the kitchen with its smoky sentries, how safe I had felt within that room.

When I reached the kitchen, the hope building in my heart dissipated. The incense had burned down; no smoke wreathed the doorway, no herbs scattered on the floor. No relief from the eerie feeling of being watched.

A bowl clattered to the ground.

I jumped, a cry in my throat, and whirled to face the sound.

It was Paloma, Ana Luisa’s reserved daughter. She dipped to the ground to collect the bowl and rose to put it on its shelf. “Doña! I wasn’t expecting you.”

I gave her as kind a smile as I could muster with my heart racing so wildly. I willed it to slow. How silly of me, to be frightened by her presence.

“I was expecting Ana Luisa,” I said. “Isn’t she the cook?”

“When the patrón is here, yes,” Paloma said quietly. “She still could be, if you wish. She sent me to tidy and with this.” Here she pointed at eggs, tortillas, and a small jug of chocolate atole. Steam curled above the jug, visible in the crisp morning air. “For you.”

I thanked Paloma effusively and sat to eat as she swept the kitchen. The slight spice in the atole soothed my nausea, and I savored it.

I had been dreading spending the morning scrubbing dried blood from silk, and now I would not have to. That was good. I could return to the task of compiling a list of things I wanted Rodolfo to send from the capital.

I glanced over my shoulder at the doorway. It yawned before me, crowned by black glyphs. Whispers twined through the shadows beyond it.

Not whispers, I corrected myself firmly. The creak of hundred-year-old wood. The wind in the drying leaves of the oaks in the side garden beyond the kitchen. Nothing more.

“Paloma,” I began.

“Yes, Doña Beatriz?” She turned and stood at attention, chin dipped submissively, gaze fixed on the floor somewhere near my shoes. Paloma was a mirror image of her mother, but very little like Ana Luisa in how she behaved around me.

“Are you busy this morning?” When she replied no, I asked her to accompany me as I walked the rooms of the house. “I come from a busy house with a very large family,” I said. Never mind that the very large family I referenced barely treated me as a part of it, relegating me to the scalding steam of the laundry whenever it suited Tía Fernanda’s needs or temper. “I dislike how quiet the house is and wish for company while I work.”

“Very well, Doña Beatriz,” Paloma said. There was something in her tone that hinted this was not at all an unusual request to her.

I gestured to the doorway.

“Do you know what the meaning of those marks is?”

“I couldn’t tell you, doña.” But as she spoke, Paloma’s eyes were still on the floor. I could not tell whether she was telling the truth or not.

I took a quick trip upstairs for paper and a charcoal pencil and a shawl. The echoes of my footsteps followed me as I returned. Aside from the kitchen, the patrón’s suite, and the parlor turned dining room where Rodolfo and I generally ate, the house was utterly empty; even the smaller rooms felt at once cavernous and stifling as I stood in them, imagining how they could be filled, thinking out loud to Paloma about how they would be scrubbed. I took notes all the while.

Green parlor. Will be green again. Fresh coat of paint. Re-brick the fireplace.

Dining room. Scrub the soot from above; add a railing to the balcony for safety. Wrought iron to match the doors. Colors: gold upholstery to match the dark wood table.

Halls: rugs. For the damn echoing.

Paloma giggled softly as I wrote this. I glanced at her. She was scanning the list over my shoulder as I placed the paper on the wall to write.

“You read and write?” I asked.

Paloma met my eyes. Now that she did not turn her face away from me, I noted how expressive it was, how the slim brows that framed her face could speak volumes before she even parted her lips.

She murmured something neither affirmative nor negative.

I raised my brows. Tía Fernanda’s servants were not literate; I did not expect this of any member of the staff besides the foreman.

“Wonderful,” I said. I meant it. I handed the paper and pencil to Paloma. “Will you write down what I say, then?”

She did not meet my gaze but took the writing instruments silently and did as instructed. We worked together until an hour to midday, when Paloma said she needed to help Ana Luisa prepare lunch for the tlachiqueros and the farm workers.

I stepped out of the last room we surveyed, then slowed near the foot of the staircase. A steep dip in temperature washed over me. Though I did not know why, my eye was drawn to the boarded-up entrance to the north wing.

It was damaged, Rodolfo said. Earthquake, or perhaps water damage. If he had asked the foreman José Mendoza to look into it, clearly it had not been done.

How odd. I put the pencil and paper down on the steps, resolved to investigate the damage myself. The first board came off easily. I tossed it to the side. It struck the flagstones; the sound echoed in the foyer as I took off another, and another, until the passage was open. I collected my pencil and paper and walked forward.

Though sunlight still shone outside the house, the clamminess in this narrow hall was thick as mist. It weighed heavily on my chest, akin to physical pressure. Perhaps there was a well nearby, or an underground spring.

I reached out to brush my fingertips against the wall, expecting them to come away damp. They didn’t. The wall was cool to the touch, but dry. Dry and cold as clay that had been left out in the chill of a winter night. Temperatures had an odd way of shifting in this house when I least expected them to. Our house in the capital was built of wood, and the house in Cuernavaca was stone; I was unlearned in the ways of stucco, of thick walls and slim windows.

Perhaps I could convert this part of the house into storage. It would be perfect for storing things that needed to remain cold. Wax in the summer. Maybe even ice, if that luxury were ever to be had in Apan. I smiled, half laughing at myself in a vain attempt to alleviate the clammy pressure in my chest. I had not seen ice in a home in years. I would have to write to Rodolfo to ask if there was even ice in the capital.

I placed the paper on the hall wall next to me and began to write. North wing: naturally cold storerooms. Check temperatures again in the late aftern—

The wall shifted beneath my weight.

I lurched backward so I wouldn’t fall.

Flakes of stucco went flying as I did. I hit the solidness of the opposite wall with a thud, cracking my skull against it.

Stars speckled my vision; I hissed in pain. My headache, which had faded over the last hour or so, roared back with a vengeance.

Last night had made me overly jumpy. Well done, Beatriz, I mocked myself. As easily spooked as a colt.

There was a dent in the wall before me. Bits of stucco had indeed crumbled away, like dry icing from a stale cake.

I frowned. If the wall before me was as solid as the wall behind me, that sort of dent should only be possible with the force of a battering ram, not a girl of twenty leaning against it to write.

But if it wasn’t as solid as the wall behind me? Gritting my teeth against the pain in my head, I stepped forward to the wall to investigate. While every wall in the house appeared to be made of the solid indigenous building materials, bricks of mixed mud and agave fiber and clay that had withstood centuries of earthquakes and floods, this wall was different.

I brushed my fingers over ruined stucco. It came apart at my touch, flaking like dandruff. It couldn’t be stucco. Or even good-quality paint. I took a piece and sniffed it. It was lime whitewash, covering stacked bricks.

How odd. Had part of the house been walled up hastily? I frowned at the wall. The hall was narrower than most, and dim, but I could make out the outline of bricks. San Isidro was many things, but shoddily built was not one of them. It was solid to its heart.

I set down my paper and pencil and tested one of the bricks.

It came away from the wall in my hands. I shrank a step back, surprised and somewhat afraid that the whole thing might come crashing down.

It didn’t. I set the brick down quickly and peered into the hole in the wall. Something caught the light and glinted. There was something back there.

Driven by curiosity, I took out two more bricks, then jumped aside with a yelp as half the wall came cracking down. White flakes of limestone went flying; clouds of dust rose from the wreckage. That was indeed shoddy workmanship, I thought. I must tell Rodolfo that the—

My thoughts stopped dead. The fallen bricks had been covering something up.

A skull, white as the limestone, grinned coquettishly out at me.

Its neck was bent at an angle not unlike the dead rat’s on the doorstep, and its spine curled down in positions I knew were wrong. Though I knew little of the human body, my gut told me it was wrong.

Around the skeleton’s broken neck, a golden necklace glinted dully. That was what had caught my eye.

I cast down the clay I had been holding.

A body had been bricked into the wall of San Isidro.

I needed to talk to Juana.

I turned on my heel and fled.

I found Ana Luisa in the outdoor kitchen of the servants’ courtyard, serving pozole to the tlachiqueros for lunch.

“Where is Juana?” I cried.

The tlachiqueros, the other servants, Paloma—they all turned to stare at me. I must have looked like a madwoman, racing from the house as if pursued, covered in dust and limestone, my eyes wild, my hair falling from its knot. I didn’t care.

“I need Juana,” I said to Ana Luisa. “Now.”

She took me in from head to toe, then jerked her chin at her daughter.

“Do as Doña Beatriz says,” she said. “Take her to Doña Juana.”

The weight of all the people’s eyes pressed down on me like a thousand hands. I wanted to be away from them; I needed to get away from them.

Paloma shot her mother a reluctant look and stood, slowly, too slowly.

“It is urgent,” I said to her.

She turned to me, her face still as a statue’s. My voice had come out hard, even if I felt like I was going to shatter like glass.

Paloma gestured for me to follow her around the back of the servants’ quarters. The sun was bright here; with each passing moment I felt lighter, as if every step leading away from the house were stripping off a heavy layer of clothing.

Maybe I was going mad.

No. I wasn’t. I knew what I had seen.

The smell of horses greeted me as we reached the stables. Paloma led me inside the barn, into a small room off the main aisle. Juana was seated on a stool with her legs crossed, her shoulders curled inward, and her head down. Strands of light hair fell into her face as she stitched a bridle, mending it.

“Doña Juana.” The way Paloma addressed Juana was stony and flat, and her hands hung at her sides instead of respectfully in front of her. Her weight had shifted, as if she were ready to run.

If she was afraid of me, or was shy around me, then she loathed Juana. It was written all over her face: the girl practically itched to be out of Juana’s presence.

How odd, given how close her mother Ana Luisa and Juana seemed.

Juana’s brows rose when she saw me. “You look wretched,” she said bluntly.

“Someone died,” I blurted out. “I found a body. A skeleton.”

Juana went still.

On the road to Apan from Mexico City, Rodolfo and I spent the night in a roadside inn. Alone, he could have made the journey in one long day on horseback, as the riders who carried the post did, but the carriage was slower. We rose early to set out, before dawn had perfectly broken, when the touch of the morning was velvet, when mauve and pink lined the eastern horizon bright against the purple gray of the dome of the sky. Rodolfo stopped dead in his tracks as we walked toward the stables. He grabbed my arm.

“Don’t move,” he breathed, then pointed east.

A puma crouched not ten meters from the barn. If it had been stalking chickens or goats, its attention now turned to us. We stared at it; it stared at us. I had never seen a puma before, and I hadn’t known its shoulders would be so large, its eyes so wide-set and intelligent as it assessed me.

Nor that it could be as still as a painting.

A horse whinnied from the barn, shattering the silence.

Rodolfo whistled to the grooms in the stables and nudged me to walk slowly backward, never turning our backs on the puma. He raised the alarm and called for a gun, but by the time the grooms rushed from the barn with a musket, the cat was gone. Melted into the dawn like smoke on a breeze.

Juana was as still as the puma as she looked at me.

“What?” she said. There was something of the puma’s fluid movements in her as she cast aside the bridle and stood.

“A wall collapsed,” I said. Why was my breath coming short? My heart was racing—perhaps it had been racing since I first saw the skull grinning gruesomely at me through the dark. “Come. You must come.” I took a step back and turned, to return to the house, even though my muscles protested, even though going back into the house, back to the weight of it, was the last thing I ever wanted to do.

Juana followed reluctantly, Paloma trailing her. Every time I looked over my shoulder, Paloma’s eyes were locked on the back of Juana’s head, watchful as a hound. Juana looked wan as we entered the house and turned to the north wing, and slowed, so much that I snapped at her at least twice to hurry.

Then instead of turning right toward my bedroom, as she and I had yesterday before finding my clothing drenched in blood, I turned left to the north wing and the ruined wall.

My notes lay on the floor of the hall, my pencil abandoned a few feet past them.

The wall was unblemished. Whole.

“No,” I breathed. “But—”

Juana and Paloma stopped as I barreled down the hall, as I ran my hands over the wall, the wall where I had taken down three bricks and nearly been crushed by the resulting tumult. The wall was cool and dry, but I could not see the outline of bricks as I had before. “No.”

I struck the wall with the heel of my left hand, biting my lip as the rough surface of stucco bit into my palm. Stucco. Not lime whitewash. This couldn’t be. I ran down the hall, trailing my hand along the wall, searching for the bricks, searching for the lime whitewash that had covered me in dust. For the love of God, the backs of my hands were still pale with it.

I stopped again right before the place where the wall had nearly crushed me. I hammered the heels of my hands against the wall in frustration.

“Doña . . .” Paloma interrupted.

“It was here!” I whirled on them. “The wall was open, and there was a body in there. There was a dead person. Someone covered it with bricks. It was here, I swear it was here.”

Their eyes were wide, but not with fear.

With something else.

They thought I was mad.

My heart hammered in my throat.

“It’s true,” I cried. “I leaned on the wall and it started caving. It’s true.” Tears sprang to my eyes; my throat was tight with frustration. I picked up my notes and abandoned pencil from the ground, miming how I had been writing against the wall before.

The solidness of the wall mocked me.

Juana raised a single brow.

“What is that?” she wondered, her gaze falling on my notes. She stepped forward and looked over my shoulder.

“It’s a list of things for Rodolfo,” I said. “To outfit the house and make it presentable again. Why aren’t you listening to me?”

Juana scanned the list: notes about china dealers in the capital, fresh talavera tiles from Puebla, a note to ask my mother about imported rugs.

Her face hardened. Then she turned to Paloma, her face transformed into a mask of sympathy.

“Doña Beatriz had a bit of a shock yesterday,” she said in a soft, maternal voice, as if she were explaining away the woes of a weeping child. “I think perhaps this must have been a misunderstanding.”

I stared at Juana, mortified.

“No.” The word came out strangled. “There is no misunderstanding. There is something—someone—in this wall.”

“You are dismissed, Paloma,” Juana said softly. “I will take care of this.”

Paloma’s eyes skipped to me. I couldn’t read her expression; if I had had longer to parse it, if I had known her better, perhaps I could have, but she turned and left. Her footsteps echoed down the hall.

Juana took me by the upper arm. “Let’s go.”

I dug in my heels. “You oughtn’t humiliate me in front of the servants,” I snapped, perhaps more harshly than I should have. Not only was I shaken, embarrassment burned in my cheeks as I faced Juana. “You heard Rodolfo. My word is his when he’s gone. They won’t respect me if you treat me like this.”

Perhaps that was what she intended all along. But she gave no indication if this was the case; her face did not shift from its mask of sympathy. She clucked.

“Did you not sleep well last night?” she wondered sweetly. “Perhaps you dreamed it. I used to have terrible nightmares as a child.”

A wave of hatred filled my chest. How dare she? I shrugged violently, trying to release my arm from her hold. Her grip tightened.

“Let me go, Juana.”

“Why don’t you come—”

“No.”

And, to my surprise, she released me. I nearly fell backward, the absence of pressure was so sudden.

“As you wish, Doña Beatriz,” she said silkily, her voice woven through with threads of venom, so spiderweb thin I barely caught them. “Your word is the patrón’s.”

She smiled, pale lipped and joyless, and turned. Her long stride took her around the corner and out of sight before I could say another word.

Distantly, I heard the enormous door of the main entryway thunder shut. For a long moment I stood, my pulse hammering in my ears.

Then, from the direction of my bedroom, there came the faint sound of a girl calling a name in a singsong voice.

Juana, Juana . . .

The hairs on my forearms stood on end.

A handful of cold truths unfurled before me as I stood in that hall, paralyzed by fear:

Someone had died in this house.

I needed help.

And no one at Hacienda San Isidro was going to give it to me.