“But this is just an undergraduate seminar.” Cesar blinked up at Grady through his wire-rimmed glasses. “You know all the basic stuff to teach us, right?”
Grady smiled. I have a PhD and eight years in the field, laddybuck. Eat a doughnut. She extended the box to him pleasantly. “Sure, I know the basics, and I’ve done a lot of research on the area the past few months. I’m excited about our project. I just want you all to know I’ll welcome your input in its direction.”
“It’s a full three credits for this paper we’re going to write together.” Janice spoke so softly Grady had to crane to hear her. “And it has to be on the folklore of the Mesilla Valley? That’s all I know so far.”
Grady nodded as she filled her tanker-sized mug. “We’ll want to narrow it down a bit, and that’s where we can start today. Did any of you grow up around here?”
“Cesar and I did.” Sylvia bumped Cesar gently with her shoulder. “We were born in Cruces, two weeks apart, not four blocks from each other. And we’re getting married in six weeks.”
Cesar looked down at Sylvia with unabashed adoration, and Grady locked her eyes to keep them from rolling. She really needed this coffee; she wasn’t ordinarily cynical in the face of young love. “Great, congratulations. You two give us the hometown advantage. What about you, Janice?”
“I grew up in Albuquerque.” Janice accepted the doughnut Sylvia offered her with a timid smile.
“So toss out some ideas.” Grady blew on her steaming mug. “The Fountain Theater in Mesilla has an interesting history. Lots of great characters in and out of those doors.”
“The San Albino Church in the plaza probably has some kicking folklore attached to it, too.” Cesar perked up a bit. “Have you heard, Dr. Wrenn? The Vatican named San Albino a basilica. A minor one.”
“Yes, I read about that,” Grady lied.
“Ooh, I think we should write about the witch!” Sylvia sat up and bounced lightly in her seat. “That’s like, vintage Mesilla folklore. It’s perfect.”
Janice brushed her lank blond hair out of her eyes. “What witch?”
“The witch all our mothers warned us about when we were little, to keep us in line. La Llorona…” Sylvia put her lips close to Cesar’s ear and emitted a low, menacing murmur. “Any night Llorona walks the river, is a night to stay indoors…bwah-ha-ha!”
Grady’s ears pricked up. She noted Cesar didn’t return Sylvia’s smile this time. He cast his eyes down.
“La Llorona, that’s this witch’s name?” Janice looked intrigued. “Spelled with a Y?”
“With a double L, which sounds like a Y in Spanish,” Sylvia said. “Yo-rone-ah. In English, it means ‘the woman who weeps.’” She seemed to register Cesar’s discomfort, and she patted his arm. “I’m sorry, baby. I know you don’t think she’s a joke.”
“She’s just a legend,” Cesar mumbled.
“La Llorona?” Some faint memory was tickling the back of Grady’s sleepy skull. She edged around her desk and consulted the bookshelves behind it. She flicked her finger across several titles, searching. “Llorona. Why does that sound familiar?”
“They also call her the River Walker. It’s just a local story.” Sylvia sounded more subdued now as she watched Cesar. “I shouldn’t laugh about her. They found another body this morning.”
“A body?” Janice looked from Cesar to Sylvia. “Whose body?”
“Some rich farmer, I don’t remember his name. They pulled him out of the river last night. We heard it on the news.”
“Wait,” Janice said. “What’s the dead farmer got to do with this River Walker witch?”
“It’s not just one dead farmer.” Cesar cleared his throat. “This is the fourth one. Four guys from Mesilla have killed themselves since last April.”
Grady turned from the shelves and stared at him. “Four suicides in a few months? In a town the size of Mesilla?”
“Yeah, and they were all healthy, and they came from good families.” Sylvia shrugged. “Well, the first three were. I don’t know about this guy today. But I think they were all pretty old men, in their fifties.”
Janice sat back. “I’m sorry, I still don’t see the connection between this witch and four guys who killed themselves.”
“Some people believe Llorona drives men to suicide.” Cesar brushed his palms soberly over his knees. “The legend says she lived a long time ago. She murdered her two babies to get back at her husband, who was sleeping around on her. Now she walks up and down the Rio Grande looking for her sons, and if she sees any living kids, she pulls them into the river and drowns them. And any man who hears her scream kills himself, the noise is so horrible.”
A screaming, weeping ghost-woman who haunted rivers. Grady settled carefully into her chair, an unbidden and unwelcome echo of last night’s wailing sounding in her head.
“She didn’t live all that long ago,” Sylvia said. “She’s buried in the old churchyard in Mesilla, and those graves only go back about a hundred and fifty years.”
“This witch is buried in a churchyard?” Grady wondered if Sylvia picked up her skepticism, but apparently not; she was nodding earnestly.
“Everyone knows where the witch’s grave is. It’s almost a rite of passage to go there in the middle of the night.” Sylvia squeezed Cesar’s arm. “We first saw it when we were in middle school, right, querido?”
“The witch is buried in San Albino Cemetery.” Cesar seemed certain of this. “The town fathers painted her portrait on her headstone, to keep her spirit trapped underground.” He smiled wanly at Grady, a handsome kid in spite of the acne scars marking his cheeks. “You should go there, Dr. Wrenn. You won’t have any trouble finding her grave, with that face painted on the stone. It’s pretty wicked.”
“Call me Grady, please.” Grady swiveled in her chair and gazed out the small window to the left of her desk. “Dr. Wrenn sounds like a character in a children’s book.” It was back, and Grady hadn’t been sure she would ever feel it again—that light flickering up and down her spine that went off whenever she heard a really intriguing legend. Her love of the past ran deep, and she cherished the folktales born of a community’s historic triumphs and tragedies. A culture’s legends revealed far more about its people than any dry book of dates and laws, and the story of this murderous witch was mesmerizing.
She had built her career—her avocation—on listening to long-silent voices whispering their stories. Her loss had robbed her of that pleasure for two long years. Perhaps some of the enchantment of that privilege was still within her reach.
“Does this sound like a go?” Janice reached into her backpack and pulled out a small notebook. “This La Llorona legend? It would be very cool to spend the summer researching a juicy ghost story like this.”
“It has possibilities.” Grady remembered the ghastly scream she heard last night, and a shiver went through her that had nothing to do with an appreciation of folklore. Her throat went dry, and suddenly her office seemed too confining. She slapped her knees and stood up. “Come on, it’s beautiful out there. Grab the doughnuts and let’s find a patch of grass on the quad to talk this out.”
Grady reached for her coffee mug and saw her fingers tremble slightly before they closed around it.
Chapter Four
Grady had never had problems sleeping in the past, even through the rigors of graduate school and other periods of high stress. Sharing a bed with her wife had offered long nights of sweetly peaceful rest. Since the tragedy that ended her marriage to Leigh, she often wrestled with stretches of wretched wakefulness. This one was a killer. Grady hadn’t caught more than brief, troubled naps in the week since her last visit to the river.
If it were just a matter of being awake all the time, Grady could live with that. But true insomniacs were never fully awake, or asleep. She passed entire days in a torpid haze of exhaustion, a twilight existence that drained all her energies. Grady had finally kicked off her sheets just after dawn, and pulled on her boots.
&n
bsp; Hours later, fortified by killer coffee, Grady stood at the edge of the Mesilla Plaza. Southern New Mexico was less conducive to insomnia than cloudy Oregon. The relentless cheer of the sun in that incredible blue bowl overhead defied any craving for sleep. Grady slipped on her extra-strength sunglasses and sighed in relief.
She stepped off the high, cracked sidewalk into the plaza just as the stately church bells tolled the end of Sunday morning Mass. San Albino kept queen-like watch over the north end of the pretty square, a dignified sentinel of the faithful.
If Grady had to meander by a Catholic edifice, San Albino was more welcoming than most, with its cream-colored statue of Mary beckoning all toward the arched doors. The young mother’s uplifted gaze seemed both hopeful and weary, as if she still saw good in the world, but she wasn’t getting enough sleep.
The plaza was coming alive around Grady as the church emptied in a colorful babble of mixed English and Spanish. She noted a fair share of tourists, drawn to the art galleries, jewelry shops, and restaurants lining the red-brick courtyard. She sidestepped a scrambling toddler, his mother in hot pursuit, and turned down a quieter side street.
She lifted her sunglasses, wincing, and checked the street sign and then the small map she’d sketched on a napkin that morning. The church cemetery would be found at the end of Calle de Guadalupe, an elegant name for such a humble little path. Grady followed it as the clamor from the plaza faded behind her, and she walked out of the new twenty-first century and back several decades.
No cars passed her on the narrow road, and only the shrill buzzing of cicadas in the high grass disturbed the morning’s stillness. Grady loved that about this desert valley—turn any given remote corner, and all vestiges of modern life seemed to disappear. Even the simple wrought-iron gates of the cemetery ahead recalled another time, appearing without fanfare at the end of the street.
Like any anthropologist worth her salt, Grady considered cemeteries among the most culturally rich acreage on earth. Exploring them had always been her pleasure, even the green-saturated, manicured hills of more modern yards. But a quaint burial ground like this, dating back a century and a half—she should have been in heaven.
But Grady couldn’t see death impersonally anymore, and she avoided the tree-shaded collection of small white crosses that likely marked the graves of young children. She made her way respectfully through a proliferation of lots marked by small plaster representations of Catholic saints, protecting the slumber of their devout.
The cemetery was almost empty of visitors, which struck Grady as odd for a mild Sunday morning. She saw only one family clustered by a wide headstone flanked with fresh flowers, and an older woman in a light shawl standing near a larger block monument.
The newer graves were closer to the entrance and fairly well kept. But as Grady walked on, the San Albino churchyard assumed a kind of genteel shabbiness that seemed more poignant than indifferent. The loved ones who buried these people so long ago probably rested beside them now, and there was no one left to pull the weeds or patch the cracked stones above their graves.
The monuments here were more ostentatiously pious than in the newer section. Many of the epitaphs were in Spanish, and Grady had only a rudimentary grasp of that language’s basic vocabulary. Descanse en paz was easy enough to translate, and Sueña con los ángelitos had something to do with dreaming with angels.
She wended through the graves, keeping carefully to the narrow dirt paths between them. There was nothing even faintly witchy about any of these headstones. Instinct drove her toward the elderly woman by the taller monument. The shawl that covered her head and her long skirt marked her as a local senior, and she might have a wealth of knowledge about an old graveyard.
“Hello? Excuse me.” Grady didn’t want to startle this grandmother into an early grave by yelling at her right in front of one, so she approached her carefully. The shawl shifted as the woman glanced her way, but Grady couldn’t see her face. “My name’s Grady Wrenn. May I ask you something?”
“I was surprised you could hear her, Grady Wrenn.”
Grady stopped. “I’m sorry?”
“I’m almost finished.” Her head dipped briefly before the grave in apparent prayer. Then she crossed herself and slid the shawl back from her abundant dark curls.
Grady’s mouth fell open. This woman was several decades too young to be anyone’s grandmother, and the musical Hispanic lilt of her voice was familiar. She wasn’t naked and she wasn’t dripping wet, but she carried herself with the same grace Grady had admired the night she stepped out of the moonlit Rio Grande.
“Grady…” It was all Grady could think of to say, and she extended her hand to shake although they were still a good ten feet apart. Her hand hovered lamely in the air as her mind galloped to catch up. “I thought you were…your clothes…”
The young woman sighed and turned back to the grave. Grady had assumed she was elderly because of her calico skirt and antique shawl, and the way her shoulders had seemed to hunch toward the double-block gravestone. Now it appeared she was hunched because she had been scrubbing the upper stone with a stiff wooden brush. She started doing so again now.
“Do you have a name?” Grady didn’t want to make any more assumptions.
“Elena Montalvo.” She swept her forearm across her damp brow and kept scrubbing.
“Elena Montalvo,” Grady repeated. She stepped cautiously closer. “Is this a bad time?”
“This is a disgrace.” Elena spat out the words, and now Grady was near enough to see the anger in her dark eyes. The bristles of her brush rasped over one corner of the granite block that stood upon a larger square foundation.
Grady edged around so she could see the front of the grave, and her knees locked in place.
It wasn’t a terrible face. It was a terrible portrait, but it wasn’t frightening in any visceral sense, except for its jarring oddity among the surrounding icons of serene saints. The flat stone surface bore the painted image of a woman’s head, with wild black hair and blunt features. Her dull eyes stared directly at Grady, with no more expression or humanity than the granite itself. The only splash of color lay in the woman’s heavy lips. They might have been scarlet when the paint was first applied, but years under this sun had aged them to a dingy brick red.
Grady watched Elena saw her brush across the graffiti marring the upper corner of the stone, just above the face’s Medusa-like hair. Elena bent and rinsed the brush in a small bucket of water that stood beside the grave, then scrubbed some more, the muscles in her forearm dancing. Grady waited until the last of the profanity was washed away.
“Is this Maria?” Grady asked quietly.
“What?” Elena glared at Grady over her shoulder. “Of course this isn’t Maria.”
“I was told they painted her face on her grave to trap her spirit.” Grady gazed at the crude image in fascination. “But I’ve never heard of that custom, among Catholics or any other—”
“Because such a custom doesn’t exist.” Elena dropped the brush into the bucket. She lifted her hair as if to cool the back of her neck and watched Grady silently. When she spoke again, the sharpness had left her tone. “This portrait has nothing to do with trapping evil spirits. It was painted by a girl of fourteen whose heart was broken by her mother’s death. She was a loving daughter, but not a very good artist. She meant this picture as a tribute to her mother.”
In a calmer state, Elena’s voice was musical, even soothing. She gestured at the lower block, and the words etched faintly into the stone.
ROSA ANGELINA DE LA FUENTES
1917–1951
“She wasn’t evil,” Elena said. “And she wasn’t a witch. She was my great-grandmother.”
“Your great-grandmother rests here, Elena?” Grady stepped closer and crouched by the stone. She traced the letters with respectful fingers. “Why is this known as a witch’s grave, then? Just because of the face?”
“Because kids around here are fed cruel lies.” Some o
f the bitterness had returned to Elena’s voice. “They get some kind of sick thrill out of defacing the headstone of a woman who never harmed a soul.”
“And it was your grandmother, then, who painted this portrait when she was a girl, to honor her mother? Do you think she would be willing to tell me about her?”
“You can ask her. She’s buried over there.”
“Oh.” Grady got to her feet. She wiped the palms of her hands on her jeans, looking at Elena uncertainly.
“Would you take those off?” Elena flicked a finger toward Grady’s sunglasses. “If we’re going to talk about such things, I need to see your eyes.”
“Oh. Uh, sure.” Grady dreaded the bombardment of sunlight, but she did as she was asked. Light drilled into her burning eyes, and she had to blink rapidly for several moments before she could see Elena clearly again.
The younger woman’s expressive face underwent subtle changes. She studied Grady closely, with keen interest, and then her features softened into contrition. “Thank you. It’s very bright out here. Please, put them back on.”
Grady did, and blew out a breath. “So you look after this grave now because this woman was family?”
“Because I am of Rosa Angelina’s line.” Elena nodded. “But also because my ancestor was a good person, and she doesn’t deserve to be mocked by children.”
“How often do you come here?”
“Often. Almost every day, the last few months.”
“Since the suicides started?”
Elena’s dark eyes glittered, and she folded her arms.
“My students tell me some people in Mesilla blame a witch for these deaths.” Grady paused. “They blame La Llorona.”
“You’ve asked lots of questions since the first time we met.”
“I guess I have.”
Elena picked up the small bucket. “Yes, the vandalism has gotten much worse since the suicides began. Mesilla wants to blame a bruja, a witch, for these deaths, but they punish an innocent woman here. Come with me.”
River Walker Page 2