Where Fortune Lies

by James Short

  “Did Jacinto ever talk about Mrs. Boller’s daughter, Penelope?” Aquino asked.

  “No, not much, even when he was speaking about the treasure. Ran in different circles. Jacinto was a fisherman and the coffin maker and undertaker for the poorer sort. My impression was that nobody liked Penelope, except for my mother-in-law who called her a real lady because she went to church every Sunday in an elegant carriage with a real servant and wore a modest veil over her face. Maricela’s Aunt Mariposa said the girl wore a veil because she was covering up a deformity, but Aunt Mariposa never said a nice thing about anybody ever. Of course, if you’re interested in the Bollers, you should visit the Solvidado Historical Society Museum. Half the things there came from the mansion. The curator Augustus Thornton might even have a picture of her.”

  “It’s the most boring museum I’ve ever been in!” Penelope exclaimed. One of the few things she and Philip agreed on over the last six days was that the six dollar entrance fee to the museum was a rip-off.

  Ignoring her outburst, Aquino commented, “I’ve entertained the notion that the treasure is hidden in the museum—in plain sight. It’s just that we can’t recognize it. Maybe the cast-iron bathtub or the bucket of coals is not what it seems. There is an unopened safe in the storage room. That’s a place where an honest man would hide the money. What a fine joke that would be.”

  Hal shook his great shaggy head. “Unfortunately, I cannot advise you, my friend, to go there. Augustus’s nephew, the police detective R. T. Middleton, asked him about a priest called Hornsby, who leaves off pamphlets in the lobbies of the pricier hotels, but is actually casing the places and targeting which rooms he is going to burgle. Gus somehow got it into his head from his nephew’s descriptions that our lady’s kidnapper here happens to be Father Hornsby and the burglar.”

  “I’ll just have to set him straight,” Aquino said.

  “Good luck with that. I told him that you never stole from me and never catechized me. If you want a good idea of how things were back then, pay Gaspar a visit. He’s nearly as old as me, never throws anything away and being Jacinto’s favorite son, he knows all his father’s secrets.”

  “Gaspar is still alive?” And in response to Aquino’s quizzical look, April explained, “He was mentioned in the letter.”

  “No thanks,” Aquino said. “It’s easier to strike up a conversation with a deaf-mute than with Gaspar.”

  “He is stingy with his words, however, Jacinto trusted him because he could keep secrets.”

  “I’ve no use for the man, then,” Aquino said. “To die with a secret is to kill the secret which is usually something of value.”

  “Anyway, Aquino,” Hal continued, “you’re finished here. It’s only a matter of time before Gus fingers you, and Middleton catches you.”

  “So be it. I’ve wondered why my God-given talent is breaking the sixth commandment. Maybe my purpose is to cause good to be done rather than do good. You never know the value of a thing until it’s stolen.”

  “God-given talent? Hogwash! You steal because you can make a lot of money quickly and don’t care how much grief you cause. Anything you touch loses most of its value. If you steal a diamond ring worth a thousand dollars, what do you fence it for? One, two hundred?”

  Aquino glared angrily at the old man. April felt frightened for him. “You’re not quite right, friend. I steal things because I cannot steal souls. I’d do that if I could. I’d hang them on a trophy wall, pin them to a display board, or put them in a glass case like a collection of shrunken heads. Pity, that’s beyond my gifts as a thief or a priest.” There was a glint of evil mirth in his dark eyes.

  “Please tell him he’s crazy,” April pleaded.

  “For the last ten years, I’ve been telling Aquino that and worse. Yet, he always comes back here. He’s always attentive. He opens my mail and sorts it. He makes sure my prescriptions are in order. He protects me from my sons-in-law who can’t wait until I die, and the children who see a blind old man as a perfect target for their pranks. He talks to me, not like I’m a doddering feeble-minded old fossil in need of a caretaker, but as a man.”

  Hal paused and sighed. “Maybe, Aquino is right, and you can break and enter into history, like he does into people’s homes, like he wants to do into people’s minds. Yes, the idea is crazy, like a séance is crazy, like dressing up in an old uniform and pretending to die in an old battle is crazy, like laying flowers on a grave is crazy, like regret is crazy. And I must be crazy too. Almost everybody I’ve truly loved has died, yet I still see them on the other side of this thick pane of glass. I may only be seeing the reflection of the images in my mind, but how I want to break that glass at times. Even if there is nothing, if Maricela is nothing, then I want to be nothing with her.”

  As soon as they stepped out of Hal’s house, a large crowd appeared at the end of the street following a prowling Cadillac. Aquino pulled April back into the darkness of the porch. Two police cars turned the corner at the other end of the street. There was a brief standoff. Then through a megaphone, a voice directed, “Please disperse now.” The crowd surged forward. Sirens went off. The crowd changed directions, knocking over trash cans, hitting cars setting off alarms.

  “We’ll go the back way to visit Gaspar,” Aquino said, taking April by the arm and leading her through the gate into Hal’s backyard. A loose board in the fence let them into an alley. “Don’t worry about the crowd. I know hundreds of secret passages through Solvidado. However, we must continue the story. Franklin came to Solvidado in June 1883 rather late in the afternoon. Unfortunately, his letter only goes so far, then stops at an inconvenient place.”

  April’s imagination fell through the trapdoor of Aquino’s tale.

  Franklin walked through a yard with knee-high weeds and knocked on the great front door, the spongy wood giving slightly and muffling the sound.

  “They ain’t going to let you in!” The teamster who drove him up yelled from his cart. “You can stand there all day and knock till you’re blue in the face and the cows come home, but they ain’t going to open the door. They ain’t going to let you in even if you go around to the back like you colored people are supposed to do."

  Franklin heard stirrings inside. An interior door opened, then there was a mad rush of four scrambling feet followed by a vicious barking on the other side of the wood six inches from his knuckles. The dog must have been very large because it was scratching at eye level. Franklin kept up his insistent rap, driving the hound into a frenzy. He had been hoping that the little girl who liked chocolate would answer the door.

  “Had enough?” the driver shouted.

  “You can go,” Franklin yelled back. “I always finish what I set out to do.”

  Around about dusk, long after the cart had disappeared and the dog’s fury had abated, Franklin spotted a figure in a long coat or dress creeping on the other side of the wooden picket fence which outlined the property. He called to it. The figure gave a sharp scream, jumped up and ran. Franklin pursued and caught up with the fleeing woman. When he grabbed her and turned her around, she spat at him, then started to babble. Franklin found he had laid hands on a lady of middle age, with a doughy, olive complected face and small frightened rabbit eyes.

  “My name is Franklin.”

  “Non, non, non.”

  “Je m’appelle Franklin.” She appeared to have a better understanding of French than English. Speaking softly, he coaxed the name Yelda out of her. Gently, he led her to the back door. She tried to scoot in and slam the door in his face, but with a forearm and a foot, he leveraged himself inside.

  Franklin found himself in a large kitchen. Yelda collapsed back into a chair with a mournful sigh of regret, like someone who had inadvertently brought the plague into the family home. The hound, a huge, dismal, lean beast, turned out to be a coward and growled at him from underneath the table.

  With a growing sense of unease, Franklin passed into the dark sitting room with a cold fireplace and beyond tha
t into a great cave of the ballroom, his footsteps coldly echoing off the high ceiling. A slight gravelly feel under his feet informed him that the floors hadn’t been swept in a very long time. He returned to the sitting room, emptied the remnants of oil from three lamps into one in order to have sufficient fuel for a while and lit it. Making himself comfortable in the sturdiest of the remaining chairs, he waited with the hound now curled at his feet. He didn’t have to wait long.

  “You couldn’t keep away, eh?” Madeleine Boller stood at the entrance of the sitting room with a shotgun leveled. “Thought I’d forget you, blackamoor?”

  The mistress of the house looked as if she were suffering from a wasting disease, her beauty being eaten from the inside out, drying the skin then sucking it against the bone. Her eyes, large black circles under the smudgy black arcs of her eyebrows, radiated intense inner turmoil. A wicked strand of hair extruded from a hole in her bonnet, her robe was equally threadbare.

  “You’ve come to conduct your evil business with my daughter, blackamoor, eh.” Her voice sawed the air.

  “You are correct. I’ve come to visit her, madam, however, I’ve no business with Penny other than to renew our acquaintance for the afternoon.”

  A half smile and a narrowing of the eyes indicating calculation replaced the scowl. “’Twill cost you.”

  “Why would it cost to visit your daughter, madam?”

  “Because she’s my daughter, blackamoor. Forty dollars I say. Pay the forty dollars to the apothecary Godfrey and come back with the package he has prepared for me.”

  Dread clotted in Franklin’s stomach. The driver had mentioned that no one he was acquainted with had ever seen the daughter.

  “Has something happened to Penny?”

  Madeleine emitted a shrill laugh. “The stain of your skin and the dreams in your head should make me forbid you to see her. However, I’ll make an exception for forty dollars. Deliver the forty dollars to the apothecary Godfrey, but not before he hands you my package. Return here with my package, and I will allow you to see her.”

  Franklin saw little point in arguing. He placed six gold eagles on the table. When Madeleine reached out for the sixty dollars, he quickly put his hand over the pile. “Find another courier. Now, I’d like to visit Penny.”

  The expressions of desire and fear battled on Mrs. Boller’s face for several minutes. Finally, she withdrew a set of keys from a capacious pocket in her robe and threw it down on the floor. “You may look for the little ghoul in the room of correction. That’s her room.”

  He lifted his hand up from the coins, and with a smile of deep satisfaction, Mrs. Boller swept them into her pocket. “Yelda! Yelda! Yelda!” she yelled, the call reverberating in every corner of the large house.

  On the third floor, Franklin followed the unsettling fetid odor that wafted down the hallway until he came to a door bolted from the outside and chained shut. He listened. He could not have sworn to have heard anything, yet he was certain this was the room of correction. The wood holding the bolt was rotted half through by continual dampness. Instead of taking the trouble of finding the right key, Franklin wrenched the chain out of its moorings and jerked open the door.

  Aquino’s Charity

  “Gaspar can wait,” Aquino said suddenly, halting the narration. “I have a personal errand first. I hope you don’t mind.”

  They were on a sidewalk now. April suddenly shielded her eyes from the headlights of a long Cadillac gliding down the street, seeming to pause ever so slightly as it passed them, then turning at the next corner.

  “Does it make a difference whether I mind or not?” April asked.

  “I could do it after you jump, but we’re close now.”

  “Is your errand a felony or a misdemeanor?” April was tired of Aquino’s highhanded way of doing things.

  “I never commit misdemeanors,” Aquino replied haughtily.

  They entered a neighborhood of smaller houses, weedier yards, and clammier air redolent with the vaguest whiff of garbage. The street terminated at the entrance to a mobile home park. Aquino led her down the row of dark trailers until the last one. April momentarily suspected that he might live there.

  “You may want to stay outside,” Aquino advised.

  “I always hated trailer parks,” April said, shuddering. “Inside is better than outside.”

  Aquino knocked on the door and announced, “Father Perkins and friend.”

  The door was opened by a woman pale and plain, large reddish freckles lying slightly beneath the surface of her translucent skin. A man in his fifties stood behind her, built square, neat, and compact. They both smiled stiffly at Aquino as if smiling were an exercise.

  “This is April, who is in training as a social worker for the diocese. April, these good people are the Corbers, Carol and Gary.” April offered her hand.

  Gary Corber shook it woodenly. Carol declined.

  “Doreen will be so glad to see you again, Father Perkins,” Gary said to Aquino. “She mentioned you at least a dozen times today after your visit.”

  “She is awake?”

  “You know Doreen,” Gary Corber said. “She doesn’t like days. Always been a night owl since a baby.” There was suddenly an uncomfortable pause.

  “You’ve heard about the results of the latest tests, Father?” Carol Corber asked Aquino.

  “Yes. It’s not encouraging, but it’s far from hopeless.”

  “Perky?” A child called in a voice that had the fragile, sharp quality of breaking glass.

  “Yes, Dory, I’m coming.”

  They entered a bedroom where a girl, small and matchstick thin, sat at the edge of a bed. She was bald, and on the side of her head, there was an indentation about the size of half an orange. All the life in her seemed to have been drawn into her bright brown eyes. On the computer, the screensaver showed a group of perfect teenagers smiling at the world.

  “I’ve brought a friend. Her name is April.”

  “So I see,” the girl said with a studied coolness, and then she brightened. “Good news, Perky. The doctors say I can’t live much longer than six months.”

  “That’s not good news for me. I’m going to miss you.”

  “I’m not going to miss me, Father. That’s the important thing. I’m tired of all this.” She pointed at the indentation in her head. “Who knows? Mom and Dad might actually begin to start to save for their retirement. They might even take a vacation where there isn’t a major hospital with an experimental program for cases like mine.”

  Aquino sat down on the bed beside Dory. “Your parents love you.”

  Dory leaned towards him, then inched away. “Of course, they love me, and they’ll be hurt when I am gone, but they’ll be relieved also. They stopped hoping for me long ago. What is a daughter supposed to do? Be a girl. Be pretty and bright and smart and full of hope, and do the girly things and beat the boys at their own games. Then I should grow up. Astound the world with my career. Get married. Have children so they can have grandchildren.”

  She sighed. “I’m pretty much a total loss as far as those things go. All I do all day is take my medication and watch TV and try to find something to interest me on the computer, and for excitement, I get really sick or the pain medicines stop working so I scream at them until they take me to the emergency room where the evil doctors figure out a way to keep my body from doing what it really wants to do—die.”

  “I will still miss you.”

  “I’m sorry then. You will have the consolation of faith. That’s your job, isn’t it, although I’ve never understood why you haven’t shoved God down my throat?”

  “One comes to faith through example and experience. Words are secondary.” Aquino held a beatific smile for a moment and then exhaled.

  “But, Father, aren’t you supposed to persuade me to love His eternal goodness and justice? No, you’re a very poor priest, Perky. There is too much of the world about you. That’s why I let you come. You bring the world into this room. I br
eathe differently. You have given me some little happiness and terrible unhappiness because you remind me of what I can’t have.”

  Aquino put his arm around the frail leaf of a girl in a strangely awkward way, especially for someone usually so fluid and graceful.

  “Don’t come again with her. You’re going to have to talk about God to prove that you’re doing your job and make me feel even sicker than I am. Obviously, I’m not the infinite being’s favorite.” The girl regarded April closely and a savage expression took over the delicate face. “Who is she, really, Perky?”

  “A social worker for the diocese in training.”

  “She doesn’t dress like a social worker. She doesn’t have the I’m-so-good-aren’t-I expression on her face like a social worker. And why would the diocese need social workers when they have priests? She looks sick. Is she like me?”

  Sensing her pain, April instinctively reached out to stroke Dory’s hand.

  “Don’t you dare pity me!” Dory’s voice approached a hiss, exactly like Ravela’s voice at her most malicious. “You will die too. You will die young because you are sick whether you know it or not, Miss Pretend Social Worker. We just have now—both of us. The same 'now' and then the same 'nothing.' Since you brought her to stare at me, Father Perky, I won’t allow you your guess.”

  “When I tell you where the gold is, it won’t be a guess.”

  “I don’t want her to be part of the game.”

  “April is new here. She has no idea what we’re talking about.”

  “The end of your nose is twitching. This April is in on the game. Are you showing me off to her like I’m some sort of freak?”