8
“THEY MURDERED THE girl. They drowned her. Alejandro seemed to be amused by it when he described it to me.”
Colin O’Brian finished the coffee that Jeanette had poured into his porcelain teacup, and he sat for a moment looking blankly at the grounds in the bottom of the cup. His life so far had been spent being tempted toward monastic life while actually becoming a schoolteacher and falling in love with Jeanette. Murder and dark magic were utterly foreign to him and, he would have thought, foreign to the quiet ruralism of Orange County. “He was trying to irritate you,” Colin told her finally. “That’s what he finds amusing.” He had only known Alejandro for six months. The man’s superficial charm had worn thin after about three of those months. Still, he was surprised at what Jeanette was telling him.
She got up and went to the stove, taking up the coffeepot and pouring Colin and her friend May another cup. “He pretends to find everything amusing, but I don’t believe that the man has ever been honestly amused.”
“Perhaps Alejandro was making all this up,” Colin said hopefully. “What do you think, May? It would be typical of him to try to impress either of you with a lie.”
Colin regarded May’s face in the lamplight. She was three years older than Jeanette, more experienced, already slightly careworn, although she was only in her mid-twenties. “I wish he were lying, because there was a time when I considered him a friend.”
“Before you knew him,” Jeanette said. “Before any of us actually knew him.”
May nodded. “I’m certain he’s telling the truth. The mere fact that he lies doesn’t mean that he doesn’t do other despicable things. It makes it even more likely that he does. I believe now that the man is capable of anything. His charm is a veneer, Colin. Very thin.”
Colin found himself abruptly thinking that if he weren’t already in love with Jeanette, he could easily be in love with May. There were things in May’s past that she didn’t talk about, nor did Jeanette betray her friend by revealing those things to Colin, but in some regard that mystery simply made May even more appealing.
She noticed that he was looking at her now, and he looked away. A moment later, when he glanced at her again, she was looking down at her hands. He purposely stopped his mind from running and paid attention to Jeanette, who said, “Colin, I believe what he said about the crystal object. I saw it. I can’t explain it very well, but it had … ghosts. There was something of that little girl in the crystal. That much is certainly no lie. I don’t think he’s lying about any of it.” Jeanette’s cheek was shaded with a faint bruise where Alejandro had struck her. The idea of it made him furious, more furious than Alejandro’s being mixed up in an alleged murder. Jeanette had struck Alejandro back with a fireplace shovel. The blow to Alejandro’s pride would eat him alive, which would make him dangerous. What Colin would do about it, what he would do about any of this, was uncertain, but he would have to act quickly, before Alejandro was driven to some craven act of revenge.
“What do you mean, ghosts?” he asked. Part of him, he realized, waited with an unhealthy fascination for her answer, and he pushed his curiosity back down into the darkness.
“I could see something. At first like moving shadows, and then something more—a picture on the air. I could hear things, the neighing of a horse, a girl’s laughter.
“And it was from the girl’s memory, you think?”
“Only because there’s no reason to think anything else. He wouldn’t lie about that, would he? I had a sense at first of being in an open space. I could smell sage, wet vegetation. Then there was sunlight, moving grass. I even saw beehives. It was on a meadow. Then Alex put it away. It was absolutely haunting—frightening.”
Rain drummed on the roof now, and Colin glanced at the window and the darkness beyond, thinking about the weather. His coat and outer shirt were drying in front of the fire. The road outside was a muddy torrent. His horse was stabled in the barn, which is where he had planned to sleep tonight.
“We believe that he intends to sell it back to Hale Appleton,” May said. “He’s talked about little else but Appleton’s money for a month now.”
“I wonder if he won’t simply keep it,” Colin said. “Owning it would give him a certain esteem, wouldn’t it?” He wondered if he himself would sell it. Almost any man would have ambivalent feelings about giving up such an apparently magical object, money or no money. There was something enormously attractive about the idea of losing oneself in the memory of a child. He recalled places in his own memories of childhood where he might easily reside, perhaps forever. …
“It would quite likely get him shot,” Jeanette said.
“What?” Colin asked. “I’m sorry … what would get him shot?”
“Keeping the crystal,” May said. “Appleton will take a dangerously narrow view of this.”
Colin looked into the; fire, which had flared up. He could hear the wind outside, blowing through the eaves of the cabin. “Why would Alejandro care about Appleton’s money?” he asked. “His family owns thirty thousand acres.”
“Perhaps because he’s dependent on his father,” May said. “He’s a layabout, and everyone’s aware of that. It rankles him. And there’s very little risk, you see, of ransoming the crystal. If Appleton drowned his own daughter in order to save her, as Alejandro put it, then Appleton could hardly charge Alejandro with a crime. He wouldn’t go to the sheriff. And I don’t believe he would harm Alejandro in order to retrieve it, because that would be the end of him unless he fled. The Solas family is too powerful. Alejandro understands all of this. He knows Appleton will simply pay the ransom if it’s within his power to pay it.”
“You should have heard him talking,” Jeanette said. “He knows everything about Appleton—how much he’s worth, to the penny. He’s unbelievably smug and confident about it all, even though there’s already been a man murdered because of the theft. Alejandro had an associate inside the Societas. Surely you read about the murder?”
“The dead man in the river?” Colin asked. A man’s body had been pulled from the Santa Ana River near Placentia not even two days ago. He had been shot twice. The newspaper had said that his identity was unknown. “Appleton murdered him for helping Alejandro?”
“So Alejandro told me. He was very bold with the details. He had paid the man some small sum to steal the crystal, and shortly after that the man was murdered. Alejandro seemed to consider the man’s death simply a loose end tied up.”
At least a dozen oil lamps were lit around the room, and the effect of the lamplight and firelight and coffee was cheerful and sustaining, entirely at odds with what Jeanette had told him about the drowning of the child, about Alejandro’s stealing the crystal object that supposedly contained the girl’s cast-off memory, about the murdered man in the river …
“I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Alejandro himself shot the man,” May said after a moment. She looked seriously at Colin. Her suggestion was dangerously likely. Alejandro was no doubt capable of the basest sort of betrayal, including murdering his associate.
“Describe the object to me,” he said to Jeanette.
“It’s a bit of bluish crystal, like misty glass, shaped vaguely like a crouching dog. That’s what it immediately suggested to me, although I can’t quite say why. It was rather like a shape you see in the clouds and that sets off your imagination. But I still have the distinct notion that it had that shape, if I make myself clear.”
“How large?”
“You might hold it easily in the palm of your hand. The length of a pair of spectacles, I’d say. The thickness of a book of middling length. He was quite cavalier with it, swinging it on its drawstring as if it were a bag of rocks. He suggested that the crystal actually contained the girl’s soul along with her memory. The girl had apparently been baptized in the church.”
“I thought that Appleton was some variety of spiritualist,” Colin said uneasily.
“He’s apparently a lapsed Catholic,” Jeanette said. “Alejandro found that amusing, too. What he said was that he might not sell the crystal back to Appleton at all, that he might sell it to people who would put it to uses that would horrify Appleton no matter how thoroughly he had lapsed. That’s when I lost my temper. I told him what I thought of him, how insulted I was that he thought so little of me that he’d suppose this kind of evil filth would amuse me, too. He struck me in the face without giving it a thought, as if it were the most natural reaction in the world.”
Colin shook his head but remained silent. The enormity of the crime confounded him, and he was ashamed of his own curiosity for the crystal, although at the same time these added dimensions made the object itself all that much more fascinating. Who was to say that the girl’s soul wasn’t contained within the crystal? Evidently some living part of her had been preserved. He stood up and stepped across to the fire, where he stood for a moment to dry out. He had changed his decision to sleep in the barn. He had to do something, and whatever it was wouldn’t wait for clear weather, not in a rainy season like this one. But what would he do?
“I might just go on back down the hill tonight after all,” he said, gathering up his shirt and coat.
“Where?” Jeanette asked him. “You’re not intending to confront Alejandro?”
“No,” Colin said. “I thought I’d ride down to the mission, that’s all. Alejandro can’t be allowed to carry on in this manner, but I’m not sure what to do about it. I want to talk to a priest. You’ll be watching out?”
“I told Mr. Fillmore we’d had prowlers,” Jeanette said to him. “It was a white lie, but he gave me a bell to ring in case they came back. If I ring it, he’ll come.”
“It might have been better if he’d given you a shotgun,” Colin said, but immediately wished he hadn’t said any such thing. There’d been too much of that kind of talk tonight. There was no reason to believe that Alejandro would be out on a night like this, or that there was any possible profit in more violence. Why Alejandro had confided all this to Jeanette was difficult to say—possibly just a simple matter of sinister and misplaced pride. But his involving Jeanette had involved May and Colin. Alejandro might come to regard all of them as loose ends.
He stood for a moment looking out into the night. The rain had stopped, and he could see patches of stars in the sky, like a sign from the heavens. He knew that his desire to talk to a priest had as much to do with him and his reaction to the object as it had to do with Alejandro. Colin had already made up his mind to steal the crystal, and it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have help, or at least approval.