Lucas emptied his lungs completely, then sucked air in. “He was a ticking time bomb. I suppose this blackmail attempt put him through hell all over again. It meant the secret he’d been carrying with him all his life might be exposed. He must have been terrified. He asked álvaro for help, the brother who’d always defended him, and now, maybe as a direct result, álvaro’s dead. He’s been under tremendous stress over the last few days. He’s had sharp words with Manuel and even with his wife, the way Manuel tells it. He was very depressed. He had a similar serious depression when Fran died, and now what happened to álvaro has thrown him for a loop. A few days ago Manuel saw him weeping in the church, and Herminia heard him crying this afternoon a few hours before the child found him. And to top it off, he’s had at least a couple of confrontations with his mother. Herminia couldn’t hear what they were discussing, but she did hear the dowager laughing at him. All that, added to her humiliation of him in front of Manuel the other day . . . I assume that it was just too much.”
Nogueira had been nodding as he took all this in. His eyes were pensive. “You were his confessor, weren’t you?”
“What are you thinking of?”
“Of the fact that the people in this family are devoted Catholics. Right? Even got their own church and their own priest.”
“Don’t go there,” Lucas warned him, deadly serious.
“Take it easy, man!” Nogueira exclaimed, amused by the priest’s reaction. “What I’m saying is that after a suicide attempt, surely the guy’s going to want to make his peace with God. It wouldn’t be out of place for you to drop by the hospital for a chat. I want to know if this was because of all that accumulated grief or if maybe something specific set him off. It’d be interesting to know what his mother said to him this morning.”
“I’d been thinking of waiting till tomorrow morning. And you know, if he tells me something in confession . . .”
“Yeah, I know,” Nogueira said.
“I may seem like an imbecile to you,” Lucas went on, “but I think I was too hard on him. Now we understand he’s been dogged by horror since childhood and by the lies he’s been hiding all this time.” Lucas looked out over the parking lot but he wasn’t seeing the cars—memories overcame him. “He followed álvaro around like a little puppy, and now maybe I understand why. That may have been the origin of his violent temper, his tendency to destroy his toys, his things, even himself.” He turned toward Nogueira. “I accompanied him to the hospital when they told us of álvaro’s accident. They gave us the bad news there, and when he came out after identifying the body of his dead brother, he was in shock. He couldn’t believe it.”
The two stood there in silence.
“How does Manuel seem to you?” said Nogueira. “I’m worried about him.”
Lucas nodded. “So am I. He’s in agony. Given the circumstances, he’s holding up pretty well; he’s stronger than he looks. But even so he needs our support. Every new development turns up new complications. I think he’s starting to see that álvaro might have had very good reasons for keeping the truth from him. And now he’s trying to come to grips with the fact that when álvaro was only twelve, he killed a man. And wondering whether he was capable of doing so again.”
“My thoughts exactly.”
“Put yourself in his shoes and just imagine. If it’s confusing for us . . .”
Nogueira nodded. He stared at Lucas so fixedly that after a time the priest began to feel uneasy. “What?” Lucas asked.
“I’m going to tell you something, priest . . .”
“Priest?” echoed Lucas. He had to smile. “So now I’m ‘priest’?”
“You understand exactly what I’m saying,” Nogueira replied, deadly serious. “As a secret of confession. One that’s going to stay between the two of us.”
Lucas nodded with equal gravity.
“They didn’t call me to headquarters. They called me to where they found the body. To?ino’s vehicle, a white car, was half hidden in the bushes. The crime scene team was working on it, so I couldn’t get too close. But even from a distance you could see a number of dents. They’d already taken the poor bastard down from the tree, and the examiner was about to take the body away. I wasn’t the only one they’d called. The prior was there. I assume they wanted him to identify the boy. We found ourselves face-to-face. He grabbed my arm, pulled me aside, and said, ‘I told my nephew that with the marquis he couldn’t expect things to go on like this. álvaro was furious when he came to my office. I tried to warn him, but he didn’t want to listen.’”
Lucas’s eyes opened wide in amazement. “Do you think he’ll say that in his statement to your colleagues?”
“No idea. There was something in the way he separated me from the others. Like I said before, it gives me the idea he’s perfectly capable of clamming up to stay out of trouble. But I don’t know.” He clicked his tongue in annoyance. “Like I said, until we have the autopsy report and the investigation gets under way, it’s all speculation. I don’t want to upset Manuel with any more sloppy work.”
“But if To?ino ran álvaro’s car off the road, who killed To?ino? What was the sequence of events? I don’t understand any of this.”
“That’s exactly why I didn’t want to tell Manuel about the dents. And why you’re not going to tell him either.”
“Or you’ll take me behind a mountain and put a bullet in my head?” Lucas said and smiled.
“Like I said.” Nogueira returned the smile as he looked toward the windows of the inn. “This has been a terrible day for him. I don’t think he’ll get much sleep tonight. The writer’s no fool. He has to be thinking the same thing we are, that álvaro could have been a murderer, and God knows I’m not referring to what happened that night at the monastery.” He tossed his cigarette butt into a puddle and set off toward the inn. “Come keep me company. Aren’t you hungry?”
Lucas trailed after him with a disgusted expression. “Doesn’t anything ever rob you of your appetite?”
Nogueira paused to let the priest catch up. He put an arm around the man’s shoulders. “Didn’t I mention that my wife is starving me to death?”
Lucas laughed, thinking this was a joke. Then he saw Nogueira’s expression. “How about if you tell me about it over dinner?”
Manuel entered his room. He first turned on the light in the bathroom, which was opposite the door to Elisa and Samuel’s room. He brushed his fingers across the wooden surface of the communicating door with its dozens of layers of paint. He stood there listening for movement on the other side. His eyes fastened on the well-lubricated heavy dead bolt, starkly new upon the old door. He lifted a hand and touched it, but as he shifted his weight, a floorboard creaked underfoot. Embarrassed, as if someone had caught him doing something inappropriate, he stepped back, which made the floor creak again. He turned off the bathroom light, went out to the hall, and knocked gently on Elisa’s door.
She opened immediately. She was wearing thin socks and no shoes. She smiled and stepped to one side so he could see inside. The room was identical to his except for the double bed. Elisa had draped a blue scarf over the lampshade, so a melancholy light lay across the simple furnishings of the room. The television was on but the sound was scarcely audible. A cartoon sent bright bursts of color dancing across the pillows around Samuel’s sleeping face.
“He just dozed off,” she whispered with a smile. She stepped back in an invitation to enter.
He went to the bed with his eyes fixed on the boy’s completely relaxed face. The child’s eyes weren’t totally closed. He must have fought off sleep as long as he could.
“Was it hard getting him to sleep?”
“The hardest thing was calming him down.” She giggled. “I had him using the bed as a trampoline for the longest time, bouncing and pretending to be a circus performer. When I finally persuaded him to watch cartoons, he dropped off in less than five minutes.”
Manuel looked around. “Is this comfortable for both of you?”
She held out a hand. When Manuel did the same, she took his hand in both of hers and beamed. “Thank you, Manuel. We’re very comfortable here, really. Don’t worry. I think tonight any place in the world would be better for us than the manor house.”
He had an impulse to embrace her, but she anticipated him and threw herself into his arms before he could initiate a move. She was unusually tall, the same height as he was. He felt her face close against his and the fragility of the thin body in his arms. He remembered Gri?án mentioning she’d been a model—and a drug addict, the voice inside his head admonished him. When she disengaged from the hug, he saw her eyes were wet. She turned away, demurely drying her tears.
She gestured toward the door between the two rooms. “Manuel, I unlocked it. If you want anything, just call from your room. There’s no need to go out to the hall.”