I blinked in surprise. What on earth? Before I could ask what she meant by behaving that way, she handed me the unopened letter.
My own name winked up at me in Rodolfo’s elegant, sharp-tipped penmanship.
“He’s coming back for a short while,” Juana said, flat and unamused. “He’ll arrive the day after tomorrow.”
“What a surprise,” I said, for I had nothing else to say. Not to Juana, anyway. My mind was racing past her, up the path and to the house, the house where a witch’s circle still hummed with power and the shadows ripped themselves from the walls to prowl the grounds.
“Whatever charlatan’s game you have the priest playing up at the house, be done with it,” Juana said, her pale eyes fixed on my face with an intensity that made my skin crawl. “He was banished from San Isidro for a reason. Perhaps you’re amused by native superstition, but you know how little patience Rodolfo has for it.”
I nodded knowingly, though I did not know. Banished? There were many things I had not discussed with Rodolfo; banishment was one of them. Andrés had not mentioned it either. I did not trust myself to speak, not when a hot hum of anger coiled in my throat at Juana’s condescending tone.
Charlatan. Native superstition. Who did she think she was, to dismiss Andrés so? Couldn’t she see the way the people looked at him, how they needed someone like him? Or did she simply not care? Didn’t she know it was his own power that inspired Ana Luisa’s protective copal? His work was a gift. It might have the power to save lives in the battle we waged against the house.
A long, thin wail rose from the direction of Ana Luisa’s house.
My heart curled in on itself. Poor Paloma.
“What’s going on over there?” Juana asked sharply, as if only then noticing the heavy mood that hung over the courtyard.
“Haven’t you heard?” I asked. Her expression did not change. She was waiting for me to continue. “The Lord took Ana Luisa in the night.”
I wasn’t sure what I expected from my sister-in-law. I knew she and Ana Luisa were close—their camaraderie an easy, well-worn thing born from years of being in each other’s company. Did I expect her to break into Paloma’s sobs? To look as if the wind had been knocked out of her like Andrés?
“Well,” she said coldly. “Well.”
And that was it.
She turned sharply on her heel and strode to the stables.
* * *
*
THE FRONT DOOR OF the house was ajar, just as I had left it last night when I stumbled into the rain with Andrés. It gaped at me, a dark mouth, toothless and foul breathed. Darkness cloaked the hall beyond it.
It was morning, I told myself. Nothing could happen during the day.
But things had happened during the day. Temperatures shifted severely. I found the skeleton in the wall.
But that was in the north wing. I would be in the green parlor.
Sickness lurched in my gut at the memory of falling to my hands and knees, dark blood pouring over my chin onto the floor.
It was an illusion. The darkness could not harm me.
It killed Ana Luisa, a voice wound through the back of my mind. I thought of cold hands shoving me down on the stairs, how frighteningly corporeal they had felt. How very real their hatred was. It nearly killed Andrés.
Fighting the urge to shudder, I looked up at the red tiles missing from the roof, the brown bougainvillea hanging limp from the stucco walls. San Isidro was supposed to be my victory. My future. My home.
Now all I could do was hope that it wouldn’t be my tomb.
I inhaled deeply, curled my hands into fists to steel myself, and stepped inside.
The house sat differently on its foundations. Whereas before it had been slumped and rambling, the limbs of a hibernating beast curled around a central wing, now . . .
Now it was awake.
The feeling of being watched no longer brushed gently against me, coy and shy. It was brash, its gaze open and lurid, noting my every move, watching my every step toward the parlor with the naked interest of a dog eyeing a slab of meat.
All I had to do was tidy up the parlor. Andrés would handle the circle. We had to make sure that there was no evidence of what we had attempted—what we had failed at—before Rodolfo arrived.
The door to the green parlor lay in the hall like a corpse, blown off its hinges as if by an explosion. My shoes crunched over shattered glass as I entered the room.
The temperature dipped; I shuddered. It was merely that this room faced west, and the sun’s rays had not yet touched it after a long, cold night.
Everything was as we had left it: the candles were in their spots, the blankets piled neatly by the hearth, unused, for Andrés and I had not held vigil as we had initially planned.
My heart skipped against the base of my throat as I thought of Andrés going limp as a rag, flung against the wall. The wall was rough, white, plain. No sign of supernatural events. No blood slicked the floor. No copal filled the air.
I began to clean. I obeyed Andrés’s orders to not enter the circle. It was easy to remember the urgency in his voice when I drew near to the charcoal markings to collect the candles. There was a warmth to the ground near them, as if a living body was lying on the stone. As if life pulsed through it. It was so at odds with the chill of the rest of the room that when I first brushed against it, I snatched my hand back as if it had been burned.
It’s active, Andrés had said.
I had no intention of discovering what that meant.
As I tidied, I preoccupied myself with an equally pressing concern: how on earth I was going to welcome Rodolfo back into this home. The very taste of the air inside these walls had changed since he was last here. I could not be inside the house at night without the comforting shroud of clouds of copal smoke. I could not sleep in the dark, as Rodolfo would wish.
Maybe I could take the blankets I had just stowed away and run to the capilla. Perhaps I could sleep beneath the pews as Andrés had as a child.
Perhaps I could tell Rodolfo . . .
You know how little patience Rodolfo has for it, Juana said.
Whether that was true or not, Rodolfo had admonished me in his letter and told me not to seek help from the Church again. When he looked at Andrés, he would see a priest. He would see the Church. He would see someone who had been banished from San Isidro, though I did not yet know why.
He would see that I had disobeyed him.
I had never upset Rodolfo in our short marriage. Fear skipped down my spine, its steps uneven and discordant, at the thought of how he had snapped at Juana at dinner. How quickly could that same anger turn on me? What would it look like?
“Beatriz.”
Andrés filled the high doorway, a basket of something that smelled of warm masa in one hand.
I frowned. That was the first time he had said my name without Do?a, and it felt naked, almost profane.
He pointed at the wall, eyes wide in his gray face. The wall he had struck last night.
I turned my head.
Thick strokes of blood splayed across the white stucco, forming a single word, repeated over and over: