But now there was Gavin. The thought of him warmed and comforted me, and I tried to tell the Doroteo I saw in the picture that at last I had someone of my own, as she had had. Someone who loved me. But she only smiled her tantalizing smile, and I knew Doroteo had not been like the girl in the picture.
Dreamily I switched off the lights and went outside. Paul Stewart stood waiting for me in the patio. He was the last person I wanted to see, but there could be no escaping him now.
“I saw the light as you went in,” he said. “I wondered who was there.”
I locked the door and reactivated the alarm, “Juan gave me the keys. He was worried about the Velázquez.”
“I’m sure no one has touched it,” Paul said. “I haven’t been far from my typewriter all day. I’d have heard any disturbance.”
“That’s what I assured Juan,” I said, and started past him.
“Eleanor told me what happened today,” he went on. His eyes had that pale green light I didn’t like, and I knew he must have praised Eleanor for her wild prank.
“She didn’t succeed,” I said coolly. “I’ve remembered nothing more. But she managed to upset everyone. It was a dreadful thing to do.”
Paul paid no attention to my disapproval. “Will you promise me one thing—if it all comes suddenly back in your memory, will you tell me first?”
“Of course I won’t. Why should I?”
“It might be better for everyone if you did,” he said quietly, and turned away to disappear through the gate in the wall.
I watched him go and then walked slowly toward the entrance to the passageway to Juan’s rooms.
The door was unlocked, as promised, and I let myself into the narrow tunnel. A pool of light thrown by the bulb at this end illuminated the beginning of the stone-paved way, but it grew darker near the steps at the far end, and for a moment I hesitated. Too much had happened to me lately. But as I paused, the door of my grandfather’s room opened in the distance, and he called to me.
“Is that you, Amanda?”
I answered him, and moved along the passageway. He had stepped back from the doorway, and it was empty when I climbed the steps and entered the bedroom. It too was empty, but lighted, and I averted my eyes from the agony of the man in the painting who burned endlessly at the stake.
Juan awaited me in his study and he wore a long brown robe with a monk’s cowl thrown down at the back. For a moment I stared at him in dismay because he looked all too much like one of the dark, hooded figures which circled the fire in the painting.
But he was waiting for me, and I went into the room and dropped the keys on the desk before him, and watched as he put them away in a drawer.
“I don’t think anything has been touched,” I told him.
He seemed to relax in visible relief and his hands unclenched where they rested on the desk before him. He was obsessed by the Velázquez painting and I wondered if that was good for his peace of mind.
“Why don’t you send it back to Spain?” I asked.
“No! Not in my lifetime.”
“But you say you can’t see it clearly any more.”
“I can see it with my inner eye. I can see it with my mind and my heart, and I can touch it with my fingers. It is my greatest pleasure.”
“It would never have been Katy’s greatest pleasure,” I said. “I think Katy believed in what was human.”
“If Katy had lived, much would be different in my life,” he said. “Now a picture becomes important.”
“It isn’t even a very beautiful picture,” I objected. “I’ll agree that it’s magnificently painted, but there’s a sort of horror about it. I prefer the picture of Emanuella.”
“Then that painting shall be yours. I give it to you now. Let me keep it upon that wall while I live. Afterwards, it is for you to own. I will put this in writing.”
At once I was on guard. Juan Cordova was not a sentimental man, nor given to gestures of generosity. This was an attempt to win me.
“Thank you,” I said quietly, and moved toward the door.
At once he stopped me. “Wait. Sit down for a moment, Amanda.”
The lecture would come now, I thought. Because of the way I’d betrayed my feeling for Gavin. But he surprised me.
“What happened today? What came back to your memory?”
“Nothing. I remembered seeing Kirk in that charro costume wearing the mask. Why do you suppose he wore it?”
“Katy believed it was because Doroteo used to adore him when they were younger and he dressed like that. And they used to play some game of flirtation with the mask. So he wanted her to remember that time. He wanted her to run away with him. Which she would never have done.”
“Yet someone came along the hillside and shot him. Not my mother. I’ve remembered that much. I know it wasn’t Doroteo.”
I heard a choked sound behind me and turned in my chair to see Clarita standing there. She looked outraged, indignant.
“Of course it was Doro! I saw it with my own eyes—”
I stood up to face her. “No, you didn’t see anything, Aunt Clarita. I learned that much on the drive home today. Paul saw you outside the house. You couldn’t have been anywhere near that window when it happened.”
Juan reached across his desk and caught me by the hand.
“What are you saying? What do you mean?”
Clarita uttered another choked cry, put her hands over her face and fled from the room. The pressure of Juan’s fingers forced me back into the chair.
“You will explain yourself,” he said.
I repeated what Sylvia had told us in the car and Juan listened to me with a stunned expression.
“All these years I have believed her,” he said. “Why did she lie—if she was lying? Why?”
“To protect someone, I suppose,” I said.
With difficulty he roused himself and released my hand. “Go and find her. Bring her here to me, Amanda. And then leave us alone.”
He had forgotten all about Gavin, and I went away in relief. The living rooms of the house were empty, and I went into the bedroom wing. I tapped on Clarita’s door and when she didn’t answer, I opened it and looked in. Her black-clad form lay stretched upon the bed, and I thought for a moment that she was weeping. But when I spoke her name, she sat up and stared at me with dry, ravaged eyes.
“What do you want? Haven’t you done enough damage for one day?”
“Your father wants you. He said I was to bring you to him at once.”
She waved her hand at me in dismissal. “I will go to him. There is no need to bring me.”
As I knew very well, when Juan gave an order, he meant it literally, and I stayed where I was. After a moment she got up from the bed and came toward me.
“Why did you lie?” I asked her softly. “Who was it who went along the hillside that day?”
For just an instant I thought she was going to strike me. Her thin hand with its flashing rings came up, but I stood my ground and it fell back to her side just short of my face.
“You are like your mother,” she whispered. “You ask for killing.”
Then she pushed me aside and went out of the room. I followed her to the foot of the balcony steps and watched until I saw her go into her father’s study. When the door closed, I fled to my own room and got ready for bed.
I felt more than a little frightened. The corner into which I’d painted myself seemed to be narrowing. Before long there would be no way in which I could turn. All my motions were automatic as I undressed and got beneath the covers. Gavin seemed very far away.
XVI
That night a dream wakened me. It was not the dream of the tree, but it was so vivid, so horrible, that I sat up in bed and turned on my bed lamp. My small travel clock showed three-thirty. I tried to recall the details, but they were already fading. Something about a dog. Something quite dreadful about a dog. But there was no dog in this house, nothing to make me dream about one. I had not had a dog as a pet since I�
��d been a child in my aunt’s house in New Hampshire.
I slipped out of bed and went to the window where I could look down into the patio. The usual night light burned, and I could see the pale glimmer of adobe and redwood at the far end, but nothing moved down there. All was blank and empty.
Suddenly I remembered.
Of course. She had been in the nightmare too. It was the picture of Doña Inés with her dog that had made me dream. She had been part of the nightmare. Looking at the painting again had disturbed me. But what was it about the dog? There had been something—something eerie, something monstrous. I couldn’t remember.
I went to the other window and stood with a cool wind blowing in upon me. Once more I could see moonlight shining on the snow peaks. Night hours were the worst. They would always be the lonely time—the time when courage fades and I am sure that nothing in my life will ever come right. Now something dark and threatening seemed to menace me, and Clarita’s words echoed in my ears.
“You ask for killing,” she had said.
But I didn’t want killing, I wanted to live—as my mother had wanted to live. Because now there was Gavin. Yet there could be no turning back. I had gone too far. Eleanor had gone too far. There was no safety anywhere, and I had to live, somehow, until it was over.
Questions were sharp in my mind. Where had Paul really been at the time Kirk had died? Where had Clarita been? For that matter, where had Sylvia been at a time when she was angry with her stepbrother for quarreling with Paul?
I managed to sleep a little, and there were no more dreams that I could remember in the morning. I rose early and found only Clarita at the breakfast table. Her hair was not smoothed as usual, and for once she wore no earrings. It was as if something in her had begun to give up. I wondered what had passed between her and Juan, but I was not likely to know because she barely spoke to me. Indeed, I think she hardly saw me there at the table.
Eleanor didn’t appear at all, but Gavin joined us, and Clarita did not speak to him either. A restraint lay upon all of us, and though Gavin looked at me with concern, he made no attempt at conversation.
Not until I was about to leave the table, did he make his suggestion.
“Amanda, will you come to the store with me this morning? I’ve already phoned Paul and he’ll join us there. We can’t let the matter of the attack on you pass without some investigation. Perhaps we can reconstruct a little and find an answer. I’ll also ask the salesgirls to check on whether anything is missing from their stock.”
“What if it was Paul who struck me?” I said. “Or even Eleanor?”
Gavin sighed. “Anything is possible. But that’s all the more reason why we have to make this effort. We’ll both keep our eyes open for leads.”
Clarita rose gravely from the table and went away toward her room without comment. I thought of her earring on the floor of the garage.
“Perhaps we should take Clarita with us,” I said.
Gavin dismissed that as idle humor and looked at me down the table. I wanted to be in his arms, and I knew he wanted me there, but we both held back. Quick, stolen embraces under the roof of this house were not what either of us wished. Ahead of us were the mountains which had to be climbed. Higher than the Sangre de Cristos.
Paul met us at the store, as planned, and we went through a mock-up of all our actions of that night. It came to nothing. Paul seemed more than eager to help, but I didn’t trust him, and I sensed a secret mockery behind all he said and did. Gavin and he were carefully polite to each other, but the enmity between them showed, and if Paul Stewart had come to the store with something to conceal, it was still carefully hidden by the time we left.
Only one thing of any consequence happened during the hour we spent wandering the aisles of CORDOVA—and that occurred inside my own head. I began to worry again about my dream of the night before. What was it that disturbed me about Doña Inés and her dog? I began to wonder if the dog in the painting could have something special to tell me. The thought brought with it an impatience to get back to Juan’s house, and to somehow have another look at the collection.
Luck played into my hands. When Gavin drove me home, and then went back to the store, Rosa met me at the front door and told me that Clarita had taken my grandfather for a drive. That left the field clear. The moment Rosa went about her work at the far end of the house, I ran up the balcony steps and entered Juan’s study. The drawer of his desk was locked, as I might have expected, and the keys to the collection were there, where I couldn’t get them. While I was wondering what to do, I heard a sound that froze me. A sound that came from Juan’s bedroom.
I could have escaped. I could have fled out his study door and gone to another part of the house without being seen. But I had to know who stirred in his empty room while Juan was away. It took only a moment to drop down behind his long sofa and crouch there perfectly still.
The sound that came from his bedroom was one I recognized. It was the closing of a door. Someone had come up the passageway from the patio and let himself into Juan’s bedroom. A moment later there were steps into the study and the sound of a drawer being unlocked and opened. I peered around the end of the couch and saw Eleanor standing there. Her key was in the lock of the very drawer I had wanted to open, but she was not taking out the collection keys—she was putting them back.
From the living room, Rosa called to her, and Eleanor closed the drawer hastily and went out to the balcony to answer. I lost no time. In a moment I had the drawer open, the collection keys out, and had closed it again. When Eleanor came back to lock the desk and take away the key, I was once more hidden.
When she removed her key from the desk drawer, she didn’t linger, but went quickly out of the room, leaving by way of the balcony. I sprang up and hurried after her. When I reached the bedroom wing, I was in time to see her go through her own door at the far end of the hall. I tapped on the wood, and after a moment’s hesitation she called to me to come in.
I stepped into a room that was entirely Eleanor’s, and I knew she didn’t share it with Gavin. Curtains and spread and rug were of soft colors that complemented her gold and cream. But I gave the room no more than a glance. It was Eleanor who held my attention.
She stood upon a pale blue scatter rug in the center of the floor, and I could see that she was still nervous. Her fingers played with the silver medallions of the concho belt slung low on her hips, and her eyes studied me with a wary regard.
“Why did you have the keys to the collection?” I asked.
She brushed a hand over the dishevelment of her blond hair. “What are you talking about?”
“I saw you just now in Juan’s study when you put them back. Perhaps you wanted to know about the Velázquez too? You needn’t worry. It hasn’t been touched. He sent me to check.”
She laughed and seemed to relax a little. “Good for you. If you must know, I was a bit worried and I had a look myself. Perhaps he infects us all with his concern about his great treasure.”
“Would you keep it as he does—if it were yours?”
“Of course not.” She answered easily. “I’d sell it on some black market and be rich for the rest of my life.”
“Surely it ought to go back to Spain,” I said.
“And if he writes you into his will, you’ll send it there?”
“He won’t do anything of the kind. He’ll never take away what is yours. And I don’t want anything he can give me—except the truth about my mother.”
“As if you’d have anything to say about it!” She sauntered off the island of the rug and dropped onto a low ottoman, clasping her hands about her knees. A frown drew her brows together as if in puzzlement, and her mouth pursed quizzically. “Are you really like that, Amanda? Do you really care so little about money?”
“I can always earn money. Not a lot, but enough for what I need.”
“And I suppose you’re counting on Gavin anyway?”
“There isn’t anything in Santa Fe that I cou
nt on.”
She ducked her head down to her clasped hands for an instant, and when she brought it up again she was smiling at me in a manner more friendly than I’d seen until now.
“It doesn’t matter, Amanda. I don’t want him anyway. Once he thought I was marvelous—but somehow he got over that. As I got over how I felt about him. But let’s not talk about Gavin.”
She rose from her stool and came swiftly toward me across the room. I stiffened, and she saw and laughed ruefully.
“You don’t trust me at all, do you, Amanda? Not that I can blame you. That was an awful thing I did yesterday. I didn’t really understand how it might affect you. Juan has been scolding me.”
She seemed surprisingly contrite, but I knew she still didn’t understand the effect she’d had on me. Eleanor lacked the faculty of empathy, and she would never understand how other people felt. What she had done could not be erased by an apology, and I turned toward the door. Before I had taken two steps, she was after me, clinging to my arm.
“Amanda, let me make it up to you. I told you I’d drive you out to Madrid one of these days so you could paint. Let’s go now. Besides, there’s something I want to show you out there—something you ought to see.”
“What?” I asked bluntly. I had no desire to go with her anywhere, least of all to an empty ghost town.
“Something about your mother, Amanda. There’s something out there I’ve never shown anyone. But I’ll show you now, and it will answer a lot of your questions.”
“Do you mean you know the answers?”
“Some of them.”
“Then tell me here and now. We don’t need to go anywhere.”
Her hands moved in a helpless gesture. “You’d never believe me. You have to be shown.”
I hesitated for a moment longer, thinking of the keys to the collection, a lump against my thigh in the pocket of my slacks. But Juan was away and perhaps he would not look for them for a while. And I could do what I wanted to do when we came home from Madrid. Inés and her pet could wait.
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