“Okay,” she kept saying, quietly but aloud. Meaning, Okay, the Grande is a long river. Acuña and his thugs could search a long time without finding Elena. Okay, I’m sure she’s fine. The calm in Grady’s tone soothed her, kept her focused, and gave her some hope of holding her raw terror at bay.
She veered onto the narrow frontage road running beside the river. Just as the bridge came into sight, Grady’s headlights picked up a small horse trotting riderless off the road, reins trailing in the dust, shaking its head in agitation. Grady floored the gas.
The Rio Grande had witnessed more than one macabre death, and it took no particular interest in the violent events unfolding on its bank. Grady saw what was happening in surreal bursts, illuminated by the headlights of the large blue truck parked at a crazy angle near the water.
The rusty light washed over Elena, who was hissing with rage and fighting for her life. The three men must have found her just after she climbed out of the water and donned her clothes. Her blouse was unbuttoned, and her hair lay in wet ropes over her bare breasts. She held a long crooked stick over her shoulder like a bat, and when she swung it full-force at one of the two men closing in on her, he yelped and jumped back.
Grady caught a quick glimpse of the third man, who was younger—Manny Herrera, who had known Elena since he was a little boy, and who was now throwing a noose over a branch of a juniper tree at the edge of the wash of light.
Grady jammed one hand on her truck’s horn, sounding its strident alarm in a prolonged blast. She jerked the wheel and sped off the road toward the river, dust boiling into her lights. She ground to a fast stop and jumped out.
The men turned at the horn’s blare, but now they faced Elena again, feral dogs locked on cornered prey. Grady could hear Elena’s terror in her shaking voice as she screamed curses at them, her hands clenched whitely around the stick she wielded as a club.
That’s all Grady had time to see because she was running full-out, and she kept running even as the larger, uniformed man turned toward her—Acuña. Grady saw him yank a service pistol from his gun belt. He bellowed something, then backed a step because Grady just kept coming. He was able to raise the gun, but Grady ducked and plowed bodily into him, her shoulder hitting him hard and dead-center.
Her momentum was enough to knock him off his feet, and they crashed to the ground with an impact that drove the air from Grady’s lungs. She saw the pistol bounce off over the grass into the darkness, and that was a great relief, but she still had to deal with six feet of thrashing, intoxicated, pissed-off idiot. Grady was physically fit and sizzling with adrenaline, but she wasn’t Xena, and she grappled desperately with Acuña’s flailing arms. He was strong, but judging by the fumes, he was drunk enough to take the edge off his reflexes. He tried to buck Grady off, but she was able to ride him, until his hands closed around her throat.
Grady heard Elena scream her name. Elena ran toward her, but the other man jumped in her path and wrestled her to the ground, yelling for Manny to help him. Rudy Barela was smaller than the brute choking off Grady’s breath, but he was wiry and furious, and Elena’s desperate struggles couldn’t shake him off. Before the spots appeared in her eyes, Grady saw Manny run to Elena with another rope. The blood pounded thickly in Grady’s head and she knew, with sick despair, that she was starting to black out.
Incredulous, she realized the starlit sky overhead might be the last sky she would see, and Hector Acuña’s hoarse cursing, and Elena’s harsh sobs, the last she would hear—until a new sound drifted over the water. It began as a low, snarling cry.
Acuña’s hands loosened from around Grady’s neck. They stared into each other’s eyes, and Grady felt hers widening slowly, just as his did, with growing horror. She was faintly aware that Elena was still screaming, but the other two men had fallen silent.
The rush of blood from Grady’s head dizzied her even through the swelling wave of audible rage sweeping the river, and she fell off Acuña. She lay on her side in the sparse grass, gasping for breath, her arms over her head to try to block Llorona’s unendurable shriek. And then she felt Elena’s arms around her, pulling her into her lap, Elena’s hand pressing her face to her cool breasts.
“You c-can hear her, Grady? She’s here?”
Grady could only nod and wrap her arms around Elena’s waist and hold on. She thought she had heard Maria’s cry before. She thought it was fearsome then. It was the hymn of a church choir in comparison to this night.
“Dios mío!”
She didn’t know which of the three men cried those words, but he kept crying them over and over. She made herself lift her head to see their attackers, who seemed all but unaware of her and Elena now. Manny was crouched at the edge of the riverbank, looking around wildly, his hands pressed to his ears. Rudy Barela was inching toward the blue truck, his mouth gaping, his arms raised to defend himself. Acuña seemed frozen on his back like a crab, saliva dripping from his chin.
“Grady, we’re safe.” Elena had recovered her breath. She spoke to Grady quietly and she was shaking, but she held her with fierce strength. “Maria won’t hurt us, querida. Just hang on to me.”
Manny Herrera was sobbing now. He fell to his knees on the bank and clutched his head. Barela broke and ran for his truck, dropping his keys once, yelling incoherently.
The horrendous wailing went on and on. Llorona’s rage was undiluted by grief tonight, and that made her cry immensely more frightening. Grady made a conscious resolve not to wet herself. That was the best she could do, and that was only possible because she was in Elena’s arms. Now she could feel only the soul-shriveling terror this spirit inspired in men, but in spite of her fear, she preferred Maria’s anger to her wrenching bereavement. Her fury terrified Grady, but her grief broke her heart.
Hector Acuña scrambled to his feet and ran for the blue truck, but Rudy Barela was waiting for no one. He cranked the engine to life and spun out, skidding in a reckless circle. Acuña managed to catch up and hurl himself into the truck’s bed before it careened off for the frontage road.
“Elena!”
Grady sat up fast. Manny stood in front of them, shaking spasmodically, his hands still clenching his head. Elena kept her from rising, and Grady knew the kid presented no threat any longer. He stared at Elena, the whites showing clearly in his eyes.
“Save me, Elena!” Manny screamed, loudly enough to break through Llorona’s cry. “Fuck, she’s going to kill—” He ducked hard and staggered, then ran for the road, his gangly legs churning hard.
Grady watched him go, then let Elena pull her back into her arms, because the timbre of Maria’s voice was changing now. Her wretchedness and remorse echoed all around them, and Elena cradled Grady until it finally began to fade.
“Is she gone?” Elena whispered.
“Hey.” Sanity finally returned to Grady as blessed silence filled the night, and she pushed off Elena’s arms so she could see her. “Hey. Are you all right?”
“I am.” Elena touched Grady’s face. “What about you? That pendejo was choking you!”
“It’s okay. I’m good.” Grady sat up stiffly, marveling at the merciful stillness around them.
“You are? You’re sure?” Elena looked at her closely. “Because I need to do something.”
“I’m sure.”
Elena nodded, let go of her, and got carefully to her feet. Grady watched her walk over to the juniper tree on the riverbank. The rough hangman’s noose still dangled over one high limb. Elena reached up and grabbed the noose, her blouse falling open to reveal one breast. Her face grew dark with distaste, and she pulled the rope from the branch. She coiled it in her hands, then turned and threw it hard over the water. Grady joined her, and they watched the rope unfurl and drift slowly away on the Grande’s current.
Elena sighed and leaned against Grady, her full curves fitting so naturally against her side that they seemed sculpted together. Grady turned and took her in her arms, and Elena’s head rested on the curve of her shoulder
with the same light ease. Grady was grateful for her warmth; she was feeling a bit shell-shocked, and if Elena’s trembling was any indication, she wasn’t alone.
“They won’t come after you again.” Grady swallowed past the soreness in her throat, her lips in Elena’s hair. “They wouldn’t dare. You can tell your mother she’s safe now, and so are you.”
“Thank the Mother of us all for that.” Elena squeezed her waist gently. “How did you know to come, Grady? How did you find me?” Grady didn’t answer, and Elena lifted her head. “Grady?”
Grady closed her eyes, listening intently. The night wasn’t silent anymore. But this new sound wasn’t fearsome. It wasn’t even ghostly. It came from the river behind them—the quiet, mournful sound of a woman weeping.
A chill went through Grady. “Elena?” She swallowed painfully. “What did you tell me about Llorona’s cry? You said it’s loudest, most powerful, when she’s far away. And if her voice is very soft, then she…”
Grady opened her eyes, and Elena was looking past her, over her shoulder. Her eyes were enormous, and her voice was faint.
“G-Grady? I think you better turn around.”
Chapter Twenty-two
It was La Llorona’s banal normality that stunned Grady most, at least at first. That and the fact that she was a dead person floating above the Rio Grande, which made her normality discordant in itself. Grady hadn’t expected Maria to appear even remotely human, but she had so obviously been alive, once. She was small, almost delicate, her thin shoulders hunched beneath gray, shapeless robes that fell to her ankles. She wore a tattered hood that concealed her face, for which Grady was grateful. From the angle of her head and the stillness of her posture, Maria seemed intent on Elena. Her chest hitched with another long, low sob.
Elena stood beside Grady, holding her hand tightly. Grady risked a quick look at her face. Elena was watching her ancestor with fascination, and her eyes were filling with tears.
Maria hovered inches above the river’s mild ripples, about fifteen feet from the bank. Her body gave off a kind of murky luminescence, a dark, throbbing shimmer as different from the halo of an angel as it was possible to be. By that dim gray light, Grady could see Maria’s feet were bare. They looked bruised and scratched, as if they had walked riverbanks for centuries.
“Grady.” Elena grasped Grady’s arm. “Speak to her.”
Grady tried to clear her aching throat. Her voice emerged as a raw squeak. “Maria?”
“Dónde están mis niños?” La Llorona called softly, and Grady lost any fanciful notion that she was still human. It wasn’t just the metallic rasping of her voice, it was the flesh-chilling, alien tone of it, as if the wretched spirit was chanting a mantra from an ancient nightmare. Stammering, Grady repeated the phrase to Elena.
“Where are my children,” Elena translated. Her tears were falling freely now. “Go on, Grady. Give her my message.”
Grady closed her eyes and found the words. “Esta mujer es el último de tu línea. Ella le habla a través de mí.” This woman is the last of your line. She speaks to you through me.
And Grady would have remembered the rest of Elena’s message, she would have spoken all of it, but then Maria lifted her pale hands and pushed back her hood, revealing her face. The blood drained from Grady’s head and she fell to her knees.
Elena gasped too and knelt quickly beside her, but she wasn’t looking at Maria. “What is it? Grady, what’s wrong?” She seemed startled, but not terrified.
“Don’t you see her?”
“Yes, I see.” Elena stroked Grady’s hair, and turned back to the hovering specter in the threadbare robes. “She’s so young. Grady, she’s no older than me.”
Yes, Llorona was young, the age of all the women in the crude portraits lining the walls in Elena’s house, probably the same age her descendant, Juana Hidalgo, had been when she cut her wrists and died beside this river. But Grady knew with certainty that while she and Elena might be looking at the same dead witch, they were not seeing the same face.
Maria was deeply and irretrievably insane. Grady had little experience with psychosis, but she needed no formal training to recognize a soul so hopelessly lost in madness. The dead woman’s lunacy spilled through her sallow features. The corruption was in her eyes—the yellow, hollow abyss of her gaze, which seemed to stretch toward them as if to drag them into the river. Grady shook in Elena’s embrace.
“Tell me what’s happening,” Elena whispered.
“I’m connected to her.” Grady’s mouth was dry. “I don’t understand how. But I see what’s true in her. I see her, Elena.”
“All right.” Elena’s hand brushed soothing circles on Grady’s back. “What is she telling you?”
Grady made herself get to her feet, and Elena rose with her. She pushed Elena’s arms away gently and stepped closer to the river’s edge. The white skin stretched over Maria’s cheekbones looked parchment-thin. Small cords of muscle stood out in her throat, as if her teeth were grinding constantly. She turned her muddy, tortured gaze on Grady.
Grady summoned all of her courage. “Dίgame,” she called. Tell me.
After a moment, Maria’s bloodless lips parted and her rusty, abraded voice emerged again. She spoke in Spanish, a more antiquated dialect than Elena’s, but Grady would have understood her words in Swahili because images came with them. Their shared grief, their shared remorse, allowed Llorona to show Grady flashes of the last night of her earthly life.
It was a night very much like this one, beside a stretch of the river much the same as the water streaming now below the ghost-woman’s battered feet. The vegetation of this past riverbank was thicker, and the rain-smell of the creosote sharper and wilder. The Grande itself looked deeper and ran much faster. Unlike tonight, the moon was bloated and noxious overhead.
Grady reached blindly behind her and immediately felt Elena’s warm hand slide into her cold one. She pulled her closer, her eyes never leaving the floating apparition.
“Él vino por nosotros!” Maria whispered the words, then cried them, a heartbroken, frightened keening. Grady repeated the sentence to Elena.
“He came for us,” Elena said quietly.
Moonlight flashed on the weed-choked riverbank, on the water of the Grande as the terrified mother ran, panting harshly, struggling with her burden. Grady saw it happening through Maria’s eyes. Her lungs burned as Maria’s had, her heart pounded as hard in her chest. She heard the screaming of the young boy Maria dragged along by the hand, the fretful wailing of the infant she carried in her other arm. Grady felt Llorona’s head turn, and she caught a glimpse of a small girl stumbling far behind them, trying to catch up to her mother and brothers.
“Él vino por nosotros!”
“Elena.” Grady felt Elena’s arm slip around her waist. “She’s showing me the murders.”
“She’s trying to tell you the truth of what happened.” Elena held her close. “Easy, querida. Breathe slow and deep.”
Grady steeled herself. She would see him next, the man chasing them, the father of these three children. The man who planted the seeds of five hundred years of fear and death in this valley. She would have to watch him take the lives of his wife and sons.
What she saw next was unspeakable.
When it was over, Grady couldn’t move. She stared at Llorona’s terrible, mad eyes, at her mouth yawning open in grief, at her bony hands clutching each other endlessly. Then she forced herself to look away, to turn to Elena and take her in her arms.
Elena rested her hand on Grady’s breast, and she looked alarmed. Grady knew her heart was still pounding like a hot piston. “Grady, what did you see?”
Grady’s lips were numb, and it took her a moment to form the words. “I saw them die. All three of them, Maria and her two sons.”
“Are you all right? You look terrible.”
“I saw her little daughter climb the juniper tree. She watched what happened.” Grady swallowed. “Did you know that girl’s name
was Elena?”
“Yes. I know the names of all my grandmothers.” Elena touched Grady’s face. “Grady, are you sure you’re okay? We…we need to get on with this. I don’t know how much longer she’ll be here.”
“Of course.” Grady stared down at Elena, savoring the warm reality of her in her arms, knowing she must tell her that her life’s mission was based on a lie. She nodded toward the river.
Elena stepped to the edge of the bank. The two young women, one of them centuries older, regarded each other silently. The slump slowly left Elena’s shoulders and she stood taller, her hands relaxed at her sides. Maria’s features seemed incapable of portraying much besides a kind of poignant madness, but if Grady had to guess at a human emotion, she would have said Maria looked afraid.
“Do you know me, Grandmother?” Elena said. She glanced back at Grady and said the words in Spanish.
“Usted me conoce, abuela?” Grady repeated.
Maria’s slight form seemed to flicker in its murky nimbus of light. To Grady’s mingled dismay and fascination, that strange thread of understanding that connected her to the long-dead witch was still intact. “She knows you, Elena.”
Elena nodded. “I am the last of your daughters. Your line stops with me. You don’t have to protect us any longer. So the killings must stop, abuela. You must never kill again.”
Grady got most of the words out in Spanish, Elena only having to correct her once. She honestly didn’t know if Maria heard her message. The floating ghost kept repeating the same mournful word, over and over.
“She keeps saying perdóneme, Elena.”
“Ay. She asks my forgiveness?” A sigh moved through Elena’s body, and she looked back at Grady with real regret. “We must tell Llorona that her forgiveness is not mine to bestow, Grady. I cannot pardon her for taking the lives of so many men. Her redemption is a matter she must take up with her God.”
River Walker Page 19