Eleanor saw indecision in my eyes, and she smiled at me with that charm I had seen her exert before. “Get your painting things, Amanda. You can have all the time out there you like.”
“I’ll just take my sketchbook,” I said, and hurried off toward my room.
“Meet you in the garage,” Eleanor called after me.
I picked up a sweater and my handbag with the sketchbook in it, and hurried down to join her. I’d made up my mind and I didn’t dare linger to weigh whether what I was doing was sensible or not. In any case, Eleanor was unlikely to try anything in broad daylight, while I was watching her.
When I was beside her in the front seat, she wheeled the car a bit wildly out of the garage, and turned around in the street with a squealing of tires. It was as though she wanted to get away as quickly as possible. Without our being seen? I wondered.
Just before we pulled away, Clarita drew up in her car, with Juan Cordova in the front seat beside her. They both stared at us in surprise, and I leaned in the window to shout to Juan.
“Eleanor’s driving me out to Madrid. I’m going to do some sketching.”
Our car pulled away so fast that I wasn’t sure they’d heard me, and Eleanor looked sulky.
“Why did you do that? You shouldn’t have told anyone we were going out there.”
“Whyever not?”
“You’ll see,” she snapped at me.
The narrowness of Canyon Road and its traffic slowed her down, but once we were out on the highway, turning south, she let out the car, going faster and faster, well over the speed limit. I wondered how many rickets for speeding she collected in the course of a year, and how she had managed to keep her driver’s license. Los Cerrillos, with their individual humpy hills, seemed to move toward us rapidly, and I could see the Ortiz Mountains rising beyond.
“It’s wonderful to get away!” Eleanor cried, her sulkiness gone. “Don’t you feel sometimes that Grandfather’s house smothers you, walls you in?”
“I’ve felt that,” I agreed. “But I’m surprised you feel that way.”
“Of course I feel that way. Juan, Gavin, Clarita—all of them want to hold me down, keep me in a prison. But I’m going to escape. I’m going to show them all!”
She was becoming increasingly keyed up as we left Santa Fe behind, and I was filled with a growing uneasiness. I couldn’t imagine Eleanor settling down and waiting for me quietly while I did some sketching, and my puzzlement as to why she was really bringing me out here grew. Once or twice I protested her speed, and she would heed me for a mile or two, and then press her foot on the gas pedal again so that the wind would whistle by. I hoped that Madrid was not far away.
Some twenty miles or so out of Santa Fe we found ourselves on a canyon road, and I saw ahead the houses of a town dotting a slope of hillside. Eleanor slowed the car.
“Here we are. Take a good look at it, Amanda. This is our history too. Once a great-uncle of ours ran a coal mine here, and we still own some property. But it’s a dead town. As dead as the Cordovas.”
Slipping past the car windows, the gray houses on the slope were derelicts. There was no adobe here, and all the houses were built of splintery gray frame. They stood with broken windows and sagging doors, looking drearily out upon nothing. Eleanor drove on slowly, until more weathered, unpainted houses lined each side of the road, with others crowding behind in what had once been a fair-sized town. She was right—this would be something to sketch and paint.
“Thousands of people lived here once,” Eleanor said, slowing the car to a crawl. “That was when the mines flourished. A million tons of coal came out of just one seam in this area, and thousands of people flocked in. I’ve heard Juan tell how at Christmas time the ridges, the houses, the canyon sides were covered with lights at night. But now it’s all dark and dead. A true ghost town. Like ours has been turned into a ghost family, Amanda.”
Pulling the car off to the side of the road, she set the brake, opened the door and jumped out. Then she came around and opened my door.
“Come along! We’ve arrived, and there’s something I want to show you before you start sketching.
Suddenly I didn’t want to go with her. Crowding all about on the hillside, the ghost houses seemed inimical. They didn’t want their sleep disturbed. They didn’t want to be reminded of the life they no longer led. But Eleanor had already run across the scrabble of dry grass at the side of the road and was wandering in among the houses as they ranged above us.
“There’s a sign that tells us to keep out,” I called after her.
She turned and waved an arm at me, beckoning. “Who’s to see? Besides, we belong here. We’re ghosts too, aren’t we? The ghosts of the great Cordova family!”
I got out of the car and followed her uneasily as she wound among the irregularly set houses, running ahead, pausing now and then to make sure I was coming.
The place set its spell upon me, and I almost forgot my cousin. I climbed broken steps and looked past a sagging door into a bare room, where floorboards had buckled and something brown scurried down a hole in the corner of a room. I backed away hastily, and after that limited myself to staring through broken panes of glass into long-abandoned interiors. Only the sound of my own steps disturbed the sleeping hush.
Ahead of me, Eleanor waited, the canyon wind blowing her bangs and lifting the tendrils of her long fair hair. I could feel the gusts on my face, and it was a chill gray wind that had nothing to do with the blue sky overhead, and bright New Mexico sunlight. It was a wind that belonged to the sleeping Madrid.
“These are the houses where the miners lived,” Eleanor said. “The Cordova house was much grander, but it’s long gone. It burned down one night, and no one ever knew how the fire started. Everything we touch turns to ashes.”
With an effort I tried to resist her, tried to resist the very mood of the town around me.
“CORDOVA is hardly a pile of ashes,” I said. “I suspect that it will always keep you nicely.”
“Hush!” she whispered. “Don’t laugh at them, Amanda. Don’t make any sounds to wake them. They’re all asleep and it’s best to let them stay that way.”
Unwilling to accept her fantasies, I tried to shut away the eerie sound of her voice. If I came here to paint, I might be willing to enter into such a mood, but I had no desire now to stop and sketch, and my growing feeling was that I’d like to turn my back on this place and go quickly away.
Ahead of me Eleanor moved on again, and I called after her.
“Let’s go back. I’ve seen enough. I can sketch a bit in the car, and perhaps come here another time to paint.”
Eleanor stepped from shadow into bright sunlight and flung out her arms. “Can you imagine what it’s like at night, Amanda? I wonder if all the old ghosts come out and dance by moonlight? I’d like to be one of them. Maybe I am one of them.”
I wasn’t a child to be frightened by ghosts, but the uncanny mood which ruled her touched me. I’d had enough of Madrid, and I turned about and started down the hill, picking my path between the derelict houses, staying away from broken windows and empty doorways. At once Eleanor shouted to me, forgetting her own edict of silence.
“Wait! Don’t go back yet, Amanda. We’re almost there. You haven’t seen what I can show you. You want to know about Doro, don’t you?”
Her shouting roused a clacking of echoes among the bare, stark houses, as if they too shouted in protest at my departure, rattling their skeleton bones. I had begun to think that all her earlier talk about my mother had been pretense to get me out here for some reason that might put me at her mercy in this dead place. But she had come to a halt beside one of the gray houses where there were still panes of glass, where dark green shades had been drawn before all the windows, and the steps had been repaired, though unpainted.
She beckoned to me. “Come,” she said, and I surrendered, turning about to climb the hillside and stand beside her. “Go in,” she directed. “I’ve unlocked the door. Go in.”
She spoke with the authority of Juan Cordova, and I found myself obeying. I climbed the three gray steps and put my hand on a cracked china doorknob.
“Open it,” said Eleanor behind me.
I turned the knob and stepped into a strange world. At once she came up the steps and closed the door, so that we were shut together into a room that came out of the long ago.
In this place of abandoned dwellings and empty rooms, this room was completely furnished. There was wallpaper sprigged with blue cornflowers, instead of white-washed walls, and at the three windows of this main room hung blue and white crisscross curtains. There was a wide brass bed, a small table with a marble top, a wooden rocking chair, and an easy chair upholstered in red plush. True, the wallpaper hung in strips in one corner, the curtains were limp and gray-hued, a nest had been built by some animal in the center of the blue bedspread, the brass bed knobs were tarnished, the red plush chair was worn shiny in the seat and raveled across the back, and there were cobwebs everywhere. Yet this room had been used and left furnished.
“Why?” I said. “Why?”
“Doro and Kirk fixed it up like this when they were young—before Kirk went away, and Doro met your father. Clarita says they brought pieces of furniture from the hacienda, and bought other things. Doro made the curtains, which is why they’re lopsided. It was their hideaway. When Juan and Katy thought they were at the rancho, well chaperoned, they would come here. What a romance they must have had!”
“But why has it been left like this? Does Juan know?”
“Probably. He knows everything. But he’s shut it out of his consciousness. He won’t accept what he doesn’t want to accept. A love nest for Doro and Kirk was never in his picture. Katy knew, Clarita says, and she just locked it up after Doro and Kirk died. Clarita found the key to Katy’s things one time, and when I was in my teens she brought me out here to tell me about her younger sister and the wicked young man she loved. Wicked in Clarita’s lights.”
Stirring up dust wherever I moved, I wandered about the room, aching a little for the broken romance my mother had suffered, even though I wouldn’t be here if it had continued.
“Of course she never came here any more after Kirk went away and she met your father,” Eleanor went on. “When they were both dead, Clarita brought your father here and showed this room to him. She said he had to understand about the woman he had married, so that he would take his daughter away from the Cordovas and never come back again.”
The marble of the small table felt chill under my hand, and I whirled around angrily. “It’s Clarita who was wicked. What a dreadful thing for her to have done!”
“She had to make him understand why Doro had killed Kirk. He wouldn’t believe in their love until she showed him this.”
“Clarita has no business calling anyone else wicked!”
Eleanor’s smile was enigmatic and I didn’t like the way she looked, or the fact that she’d brought me here.
Apparently the house had two rooms, for a second door opened at the back. It was ajar and to help regain my composure I left Eleanor, to walk through it. There was a rusty enamel sink under a window, and ancient pipes, a bare wooden table and two rickety chairs. No effort had been made to fix up the kitchen and if there had been a stove, it had been removed.
In one corner stood a small battered trunk, and I went over and raised the lid. Only emptiness and a lingering odor of mothballs greeted me. Except for one thing. I leaned over in surprise and picked up the tiny bonnet made of yellowed satin and lace—a baby bonnet which lay in the bottom of the trunk. The uneven stitches told me that Doroteo had made this too, but if she had made it for me, how had it come to this place on which she’d never looked back?
When I’d closed the trunk, I carried the bonnet into the other room to show Eleanor.
“What do you make of this?”
Eleanor had no interest in baby clothes. She was watching me with something electric about her that made me uneasy.
“Amanda,” she said, “do you believe the old stories about the Cordova curse that came down from Doña Inés? Do you think there’s a strain of madness in all of us?”
Her eyes were alight with some excitement I did not like, and there was no kindness, no friendliness in her smile. Perhaps there was a little madness in all of us. Even in me, who had thought herself outside the reach of the Cordovas.
She went on softly, while I moved about the room again, trying to shake off the spell she was weaving.
“I wonder what she was really like—Inés? I wonder how she felt when she stood beside that bed in the middle of the night with the blood of her victim staining her hands and her gown. Was Emanuella afraid of her then?”
There was something insidious about her words, about the very tone of her voice. I had to face up to her and I mustn’t let her frighten me.
“It was you behind that fetish I found in my room both times, wasn’t it?” I said. “And you who put Doña Sebastiana in my bed? Was it you, too, who used the whip in the patio and—”
“And struck my grandfather down?” Eleanor cried.
“He wasn’t hurt. And perhaps you used the brass statue of Quetzalcoatl in the store?”
As she stared at me, her face looked utterly white beneath the frame of her long hair. “I haven’t been as clever as all that. The fetish, yes. And those tricks on Gavin with the stone head and other things. Aunt Clarita helped me because we both wanted him in wrong with Juan. But they were silly attempts and they never worked. I didn’t do any of the other things, and perhaps that was my mistake, Amanda.”
Her eyes were fixed upon me so intently that I felt myself held by her gaze. Yet I knew I must get away from her. Something was building. If there was madness, it was activated now, and I could believe nothing she said except that she meant me harm. I dared not turn my back to her, and I began to move stealthily backward toward the door, a step at a time. She didn’t seem to notice because she was looking around the room. Her attention fixed itself upon a narrow, splintery board that had fallen from the molding of a window, and with a quick, darting movement she sprang toward it, picked it up with both hands. I could see the rusty nails protruding from one end as she fixed me again with the bright excitement of her look.
“So you thought you would take my inheritance, Amanda? And now you want to take Gavin. But you aren’t going to, you know. There’s no place to run to. This will be worse than a disciplina, Amanda. If I choose, you may never leave this little house where your mother used to come. It might take them years to find you. And when they did, you’d look like Doña Sebastiana in her death cart.”
I couldn’t stand there and wait for her to come toward me, to strike me. I had to be quicker than she was—I had to get away. Whirling toward the door, I made a dash for it, tearing it open, flinging myself down the steps—and straight into the arms of Gavin Brand.
XVII
Gavin held me, steadied me, and for a moment I clung to him in helpless relief. There was no movement in the room behind me, and when I had control of my legs, I turned and stared at Eleanor.
She held the splintered board in one hand, and she was laughing. “Oh, Amanda! I really frightened you, didn’t I? You were such a sitting duck, I couldn’t resist. Gavin, where on earth did you spring from?”
He answered her coldly. “Juan saw you and Amanda taking off in your car with all that wheel squealing, and he was worried. When Amanda called out that you were going to Madrid, he had Clarita phone me to come after you.”
Eleanor flung down the board with a violent gesture. I could imagine her with the whip that she’d denied.
“Please—I’d like to go,” I said to Gavin.
He put an arm around me and walked away from that small, haunted house, leaving Eleanor to its ghosts. More than ever, she was my enemy now, and there was nothing I could do about it. In Gavin’s car I put my head against the seat back and closed my eyes. I could sense his anger with Eleanor as his hands grasped the whee
l and he turned about on the highway. But he was angry with me too.
“Why did you go with her? Why did you trust her?”
“She said she would show me something about my mother,” I told him. “And she did. Did you know that room existed? Did you know my mother used to come there with Kirk?”
“I didn’t know. Clarita told me where to look. But what good does it do for you to know?”
I was still holding the yellowed lace bonnet in my hands and I help it up for him to see. “Perhaps this is my Cordova madness. That I want to put together all the pieces about my mother.”
I folded the bonnet and put it away in my bag. Whatever I learned seemed to add more questions, never to answer them. I couldn’t even be sure whether Eleanor had meant me real harm, or only wanted to vent her spite by frightening me.
“The way never opens,” I said miserably.
Gavin didn’t answer, and I knew it was closed for him too as the wedge between us grew wider. He would be happy with me only if I went away, as would my grandfather.
As we neared Santa Fe, I thought again of the keys in my pocket. I must visit the collection before Clarita or Juan knew I was home, and now Gavin must come with me.
We entered the city with silence growing between us, and there was nothing we could find to say. When we reached Canyon Road, I asked him to come with me out to the collection, and told him something was troubling me about the picture. He parked the car and we entered the patio through the garage. If anyone saw us, at least no one called out.
When we reached the building with the peaked roof, I gave the keys to Gavin and he opened the door. We stepped into inner darkness and stood for a moment listening. There was no sound anywhere, not indoors or out. He led the way through dimness to the alcove at the back and turned on the switch for the lamp above the Velázquez. In an instant the painting was flooded with light.
Doña Inés looked down at us with her strange, demented eyes that now seemed a little like Eleanor’s eyes as I had seen them in a ghost town that morning.
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