Estrella stood, the floor cool under her feet. “So we don’t kill her.”
As her cousins traded glances, the feeling of standing filled Estrella. The sense of her own weight and will came back into her body.
She could not save Fel. Nomeolvides girls had been the death of him twice. But she and her cousins could warn the girl they had grown up loving.
“We have to tell her to get away from us before we kill her,” Estrella said.
“No,” Dalia said. “We’re not telling her to do anything. We’re giving her time to do what she needs to do.”
“You convinced us all that we lost her,” Estrella said. “Do you really want to know what that felt like for us? Do you want it to happen for real so you can know?” The force of her own voice shocked through her. “Is that a chance you’ll take with her?”
“This was her home,” Azalea said. “Where do you want her to go?”
“Anywhere,” Estrella said. “Away from us. Away from Reid.”
“We are not Reid,” Dalia said.
“We’re worse,” Estrella said, “because she thinks we’re safe.”
Dalia’s flinch was so deep Estrella felt it.
“Our love is her death,” Estrella said, “and you know it.”
Dalia looked like she’d fallen into water, floating and weightless, like she’d lost the feeling of standing on this floor they’d all worn with years’ worth of steps.
“If we don’t want to lose her,” Estrella said, “we have to let her go.”
When Dalia nodded, it was slow, like she was answering through a dream. That nod, the giving in of her heart, pulled the rest of them with her.
The five of them streamed out of the stone house, passing the iris beds and rose trellises and the courtyard of blossoming trees. With prodding from Azalea and Calla, Dalia gave up the room number at the hotel. Fifth floor.
Bay opened the door on the first knock. By the shift in her expression, Estrella knew she’d expected just Dalia.
The five of them rushed into the cloth-papered room.
Estrella shut the door behind them. She parted her lips to say what she had brought her cousins here for, to beg Bay to flee from them.
Don’t think you’re safe from us just because you grew up with us.
Don’t die because we love you.
Don’t let our hearts kill you.
But the words trailed off Estrella’s tongue.
Paper covered every furniture surface in the hotel room. The desk. The night table. Even the bed, papers strewn over the unmade blankets.
Estrella drew closer, so slowly that Bay didn’t stop her.
They were all copies. Reproductions of old photographs. Not just black-and-white but tintype, daguerreotype. And grainy copies of articles from newspapers that looked more than a century old.
The newspaper clippings were single column, the kind that got buried deep in the pages. They used words Estrella recognized, in some vague way that only came to mind when she thought of them together, as geological. Overburden. Striation. Berm. Shear. But she didn’t know what any of them meant.
“Calla,” Azalea said, handing articles to her youngest cousin.
The photos showed the low contrast of a scene that was all rock, a hollow in the ground that looked like it had enormous, ringing steps up the sides. Some showed the rings of that hollow as unbroken levels, like stacked bowls.
Others showed a wide ribbon of earth running from one edge down into the deep center, like a spilled liquid.
“What is all this?” Gloria asked.
Before Bay could answer, Calla said, “It’s the sunken garden.”
Estrella looked at it again. She studied the shape in different photos, the edges, the faint smudges of scrub grass and trees beyond.
Calla was right. She’d recognized it even without the flowers and vines and trees.
Bay’s breath out sounded like the walls were sighing. “I told you I was still working it out. I just need time.”
“Bay,” Dalia said, her voice gentle as the brush of petals she’d grown herself.
The draft through the cracked window lifted the ends of Bay’s hair and then let them fall back to her forehead.
“Bay,” Dalia said again, laying her hand on the side of Bay’s face.
In the way she said Bay’s name, there was not pleading but urging, the assurance that to her and her cousins, Bay could tell these secrets.
“I was looking for something to get Reid to back off,” Bay said, eyes flashing to all of them. “Unfiled taxes. Something like that. But when I started looking, I found out something happened at La Pradera. A long time ago. Before it was La Pradera.”
“What happened?” Azalea asked.
Bay shook her head. “I don’t know everything yet.”
“Then tell us what you do know,” Gloria said, matching Dalia’s soft voice.
Bay straightened her shoulders, like this story was a thing she had to stand strong against. Whatever it was, she was buckling under the guilt of it.
“From what I could find, everyone thought it would be the best quarry in the country,” Bay said.
“What quarry?” Gloria asked.
“Where the sunken garden is,” Bay said. “It wasn’t just some canyon. It was a quarry.”
With those words, Estrella’s memories of the sunken garden twisted and sharpened. The layers of petals fell aside. The pond streamed away. The wind stripped the trees. There was nothing left to imagine but the jagged stone beneath everything.
“They all said the overburden—the dirt and everything else covering the minerals—was thinner than they’d ever seen,” Bay said. “That’s why they were stripping the ground, to get at what was underneath. But they ignored how much of it wasn’t structurally sound. There were faults and they knew it, and they didn’t do anything to account for it.”
Bay said each word like she was forcing them out. Estrella wanted to tell her this wasn’t her fault. She didn’t own this. She’d caught the dates on the newspapers, and this had been well over a hundred years ago.
“See the striations here.” She set a finger against a photograph, the bands in the sides of the pit. “They’re called benches. The part that drops down is the batter, the flat part’s the berm. I don’t know if you really understand how big this thing was. It’s hard to tell with all the trees and the flower beds now.”
She handed photographs to Calla and Gloria. “The benches are supposed to prevent rock falls from going all the way down the wall. That’s to try to make it less dangerous for the miners and prevent damage to everything. Not always in that order though.”
Estrella and Azalea clustered around Calla and Gloria, studying the striped benches.
“There are angles you’re supposed to do all this at. Shallower angles. Especially if you have any structural weakness within the rock.” Bay said each word with such pain, like she was watching it happen and could not reach out to stop it. “Faults. Shears. Anything like that. But they didn’t do what the surveyors told them to do. They paid them off and just did whatever they wanted.”
“They?” Gloria asked.