The arrival of the slim-skirted woman shouldn’t have worried them. They had seen women like her before, walking the paths in oyster-colored high heels, the points catching between flagstones.
But this one kept a leather folio in her arms. She made notes like an appraiser. She did not bother to introduce herself as Marjorie’s friends always had. Without warning, the woman ordered the brick house be cleaned and stripped of its older drapes, ones fraying to threads because Bay had loved rubbing the cloth between her fingers. She hired decorators who spent hours deciding on the right fabric to drape the ballroom. She brought in winemakers who laid out bottles for Reid to consider.
“A family friend,” Reid said. “She’s doing me a favor.”
This was his version of an apology for how the woman picked at every loose stone and stray vine.
The grandmothers cast their eyes toward Estrella and her cousins, each grandmother watching her own granddaughter, searching for five identical nods that would say, yes, they understood they had to obey.
They could grieve Bay. But they could not grieve her by defying this man who now held La Pradera and so held their lives.
We stay here or we die, Abuela Mimosa had reminded them the night before. That means we obey whoever rules this land.
From behind the trellises, they watched the woman. She waved a hand and told Reid they would need more flowers.
“We need so many we can cut all the ones for the arrangements without anyone noticing,” she said. “I want everyone to drop dead when they see this place.”
“You first,” Azalea whispered, and for the first time in days the cousins had to hide their laughs behind cupped hands.
Bay had vanished into the air like salt into water, and the only attention Reid had was for the plans of some woman he would probably take up to his room.
Or his car.
That afternoon Estrella passed the carriage house, and a shriek of laughter came through the wooden doors. “Reid!” in a girl’s voice, slipped between two full laughs.
Estrella edged toward the carriage house, setting her hands against its stone face. She was just tall enough to look into one of the glass panes that broke up the dark-stained barn doors.
Reid and the woman had stuffed themselves into his gleaming convertible. Not in the seats, but across them, lying on their sides. Reid kissed her hard enough that she backed against the dashboard, and she kissed him hard enough to press him against the seat. Estrella wondered how they weren’t catching the gearshift in their backs.
Reid clutched a bottle of whiskey, label gleaming gold. His arm trailed out of the front seat.
Their kissing, the spilling-out of their limbs, brimmed with mischief but seemed emptied of passion.
They weren’t in love.
They were just bored.
The woman’s shoe stuck out of the front seat, the kind of simple but precise heel that cost more than anything Estrella owned. And this woman was wearing it not with Sunday clothes but with a faded dress, no bra.
That was the thing about people with so much money. They could throw on dirty clothes picked up from their bedroom floor and still seem finished. They could wear expensive shoes with cheap shifts and look as though they were setting the dress code.
And Reid. He was two or three drinks in. Estrella knew for sure when he accidentally hit the horn with his elbow and collapsed into laughter as deep and real as the girl’s.
Estrella pushed herself off the barn door, calling Reid pendejo under her breath all the way back to the stone house. But the next afternoon, when she saw the woman crossing La Pradera in a different pair of shoes, pearl-colored this time, she felt a question twirling inside her like a curl of smoke.
How did that work? How did two people kiss and slide hands over each other’s shoulders without the specter of a vanishing curse watching them from the corner?
The question clung to Estrella’s skin, walking up and down her forearms with the lightness of a moth’s feet.
It distracted her later, when she put her hands into the dirt, the current from her palms stirring buds from the earth. It even distracted from the things that distracted her the rest of the time. Her cousins’ dahlias and morning glories, which looked so much like they were cut from silk her wonder over them never faded. The grandmothers’ trees bursting into bloom so full they looked like whirls of cotton candy. Her mother’s shape and shadow as she painted the wooden trellises in roses.
But that crawling feeling, the moth’s weight of that question, drew her until she was sneaking back toward the carriage house the next afternoon.
Estrella stood on her toes, peering through the glass and looking for the woman’s good shoes and Reid’s creased shirt. If she were a little taller, like her mother or Gloria or Calla, she could have stayed on flat feet.
Her thought of Gloria and her mother drifted away on the wind, but Calla.
Calla.
Her thoughts of Calla stayed, blazing in front of her.
Reid and the woman had not thrown themselves into the car.
The butterscotch leather of the seats had been darkened with handfuls and more handfuls of wet earth. Green stalks rose thick and bright, cracking the upholstery. Long leaves sheltered the stems.
And capping each stalk was the curving bell of a calla lily. Some grew orange, blushed with red, some so burgundy they look wine-stained. Others were deep purple edged in cream.
But they were all the work of her youngest cousin’s hands. Her youngest cousin, whose name had blessed her with a gift for growing perfect calla lilies.
It drew the breath out of Estrella’s throat. It was stunning and bright as the sky catching fire at sunset.
And it had ruined Reid’s beautiful car.
Estrella ran, catching Calla by the arm in a side garden.
The pressure of Estrella’s fingers must have warned Calla. She turned, her expression guilty but unashamed.
Estrella caught her breath. “I don’t want to jump to any unfair conclusions.”
Calla smiled, an acknowledgment that if Bay had not vanished, if Dalia did not walk the halls at night like some lost spirit, if Reid was not laying his claim to La Pradera, she would have laughed.
Estrella let go of her arm. “Why?” She had meant to speak a whole question. Why did you do it? Why would you risk yourself and all of us? But her weak breath cut the question down to one word.
Calla checked over both their shoulders. When she saw no one near the hedges and rows of azalea bushes, a clenched-jaw rage came into her face. “He cornered Dalia. I saw him.”
Estrella’s breath turned sour in her throat. “What?”
“Nothing happened,” Calla said. “I made sure of it. But he was trying to kiss her, and she was pushing him away, but she did it like she was flirting. She knows she can’t make him mad, so that was all she could do.”
“Then how did you make sure nothing happened?”
“I hid behind the bushes and I threw a rock,” Calla said.
Estrella nodded. “Good.”