“Now, that is a fine automobile,” Juan Pablo observed through the window of the bedroom, where he was giving Mark a hand with assembling Corinne’s wrought-iron bed. “Pues, I must quit to my work, if I am to finish this day.”
Mark finished with the last bolt and stood, wiping the sweat from his brow. Whoever had crafted this piece would never be accused of undercutting quality. It probably weighed as much as the vehicle he saw easing through the narrow courtyard gate of the hacienda—a new-model four-wheel drive, luxury—with Corinne Diaz sitting pretty behind the wheel.
This was the final straw. Tossing the borrowed wrench back to its owner, Mark headed out to the patio.
“You have a new SUV?” he demanded as the car came to a stop in front of the patio.
He’d wondered, when she left to get her things from the bed-and-breakfast, why she hadn’t taken Juan Pablo’s pickup, which she’d borrowed earlier to move the furniture out of storage at the orphanage. But he’d been too busy figuring out how to assemble the bed to say anything. Now he understood fully. Why ride in a junker when Miss Muffet could travel in style?
“Don’t tell me. Daddy insisted,” he drawled, still smarting over the new box spring and mattress set waiting to be put on the bed frame.
“That’s right.” She made no apology as she breezed past him with a box marked linens.
“And it has a CD player,” Antonio said, explaining his belated exit from the leather passenger seat. “I have never seen such a fine automobile.”
Mark had. But his had been “arrested.” He grabbed another box identified as curtains and rugs. It was easy to be a saint when Daddy saw to one’s every need.
“I don’t suppose your father would want to adopt a son?” he called after her, following her through the entrance at the juncture of the L-shaped building.
The corporation had funded his ticket to Mexico City and bus fare. The Acapulco switchover and stay had been on Mark’s own account, which was supporting his plush condo in Philly while he wasted away in Mexicalli-ville . . . with no margaritas.
No more. He was out of here—the hacienda; unfortunately, not Mexicalli.
Barging into the room to tell Miss Muffet where to stuff it, Mark slowed upon seeing Corinne and Soledad whispering in the kitchen doorway. By their distraught faces, they weren’t discussing the arrangement of the furniture.
“Antonio,” Corinne called out to the boy who came in behind Mark, carrying a rolled-up scatter rug. “Will you look in the car for me and see if you can find the Ricky Martin CD?”
The boy dropped the rug and, with an eager nod, scampered back outside.
“What’s up?” Mark asked, once Antonio was out of earshot.
“We were just discussing the funeral tomorrow and arrangements to get there,” Corinne told him, the mist in her eyes knocking the wind out of his peeve. “I guess we’ll have a minicaravan going around the lake to the family’s village.”
“But they just found the body yesterday,” Mark observed.
Corinne rushed into the kitchen and snatched up a tissue from a box on the counter.
“Pobrecita,” Soledad said in a hushed tone. “She has so much love it hurts her.”
Before Mark realized what the housekeeper was about, she shoved him into the kitchen after the young woman. “Go, go.”
Mark gathered his wits as Corinne turned, her face a mirror of wretchedness. “Come on,” he said, closing the distance between them. “Let’s take a walk.” He slipped his arm around her shoulder.
To his surprise, she leaned into him as he led her out the back of the house. The thought slipped inside him and filled him with a sense of awe: for one moment, someone actually needed—and trusted—him. For one moment, it felt as if he was born to fill that need, satisfy that trust.
This place was definitely getting to him.
“I love this time of evening,” she said, moving away from him as they meandered up the slope toward the orchard. Above the white-blossoming trees, the setting sunlight cast its last rays on the purple mist tucking in the mountains for the night.
“Yeah.”
Although he hadn’t noticed it before, it was a spectacular view, almost as grand as that of the pristine village with its red-tiled rooftops nestled next to the lake, which looked like a fire-glazed mirror from their vantage. Beyond the parsonage, Mark spied the farmer with the noisy livestock closing a gate behind his handful of cows. The crack of dark wasn’t nearly as annoying and noisy as the crack of dawn.
In the east, the moon, faint but stubborn, pushed its way into its rightful heavenly position in the face of the brighter, bigger sunset. Funny, that was all Blaine and Caroline could talk about, that Mexican moon. And the weird thing was that Mark, like the cows and the chickens, hadn’t been up and out long enough to even notice or appreciate it.
Beside him, Corinne drew in a shaky breath and let it out slowly, eyes closed as if drawing on an inner strength. At a loss as to what else to say or do, Mark followed her lead of silence, when snorting and pawing from the direction of the old compost bin gave him the answer.
“Want to go check on my pig before he knocks down the pen?”
A welcome chuckle bubbled up through her distress. “Sure.”
Since Toto hadn’t been in residence long, the air was still scented with the sweet orange of his surroundings.
Orange blossoms, a beautiful señorita, and a pig. What was wrong with this picture?
“You know, this is embarrassing,” Mark admitted as Toto became more excited. He gave Corinne a sheepish look. Corinne smiled, and something inside Mark lit up like a new day.
“I tell you, that pig isn’t normal . . . even by pig standards.”
Her laugh was worth being the brunt of her humor. Suddenly she sobered. “I know I’ve been testy of late, but . . .” She exhaled a shaky breath. “They haven’t even investigated Enrique’s disappearance, short of a brief search. Now there’s to be no investigation of his death. Everyone I’ve spoken to says that he wouldn’t have run off. He was happy at the orphanage . . . as much as an orphan could be. He didn’t care for his relatives.”
She pulled up some weeds and offered them to Toto. Momentarily distracted from Mark, the pig tugged them out of her hand.
“Kids run off to explore,” Mark ventured in explanation. “He could have become lost.”
“Enrique was not lost.”
Corinne spun around, as startled as Mark by Antonio’s appearance, the CD that she sent him for in hand. “How do you know, ’Tonio?”
The child looked around as if he expected to be overheard. “The caracol got him,” he whispered.
Mark looked to Corinne for a translation. “Some kind of native superstition?”
“A snail?” she said, skepticism knitting her brow.
“Sí, the caracol. It puts to lose all who touch it. I told Capitán Nolla that I feared the caracol that kill my mamá y papá kill Enrique, too.”
No matter how ridiculous it sounded, the boy obviously believed touching a snail led to his relatives’ demise. His chin began to quiver.
“The caracol, he is bad luck.”
Corinne shrugged. “It’s a new one on me.” She turned to Antonio, who was spinning the CD on his finger. “Where is this caracol, Antonio?”
“In the mountain, but I have never seen it. So I said to Capitán Nolla.”
“So the police captain knows of this snail?” Corinne was just as confused as Mark.
“He says that I make it up for the bad luck of my parents and brother.” Standing on one foot, he dragged the other against the inside of his leg, scratching. “Can I play the CD inside?” he asked, ending the subject as quickly as he’d started it.
Corinne waved him away, watching as he retreated past an overgrown herb garden into the house. “Maybe next week we can head for Cuernavaca and get you some decent furniture . . . as long as it will fit in my vehicle.”
Antonio wasn’t the only one adept at changing tracks. Mark straightened from leaning against the top ledge of the pen. “That’d be great,” he said, pulling a half-cocked grin. “Of course, I’ll have to check my calendar.”
“Do that.” Her knowing look all but pulled his socks up. She knew he was teasing and more. And judging from that sexy curl of her lip, she liked what she saw.
Just as Mark leaned in to see if orange lollipop was the flavor of the day, she turned her face away, staring at the hacienda as if it held the answer to the question that distracted her from the pleasant tension building between them.
“I know it’s not a snail,” she said, neutralizing the chemistry the same way her despair had shot down his earlier annoyance. “But I’m beginning to wonder if there isn’t more to that family’s tragedy than we know.”
“Why don’t we finish up here and head down to the Cantina Roja to unwind a bit? Maybe someone there knows—”
Corinne drew away from him as if he’d grown a second head. “I don’t think so. Contrary to popular belief, barhopping solves nothing. If anything, it contributes to one’s problems.”
“Barhopping? It’s the only one in this one-bar town.”
“I don’t drink.”
“They don’t serve soda?”
“If I wanted a soda, I wouldn’t go to a bar for it.”
“Do you schmooze?” Mark raised his hand before she could reply. “Wait, no need to answer that. I can see there’s no schmoozing up there on that tuffet of yours. What is it with you?” He spun away, facing the downward slope to the village where a few lights were beginning to show. “Are you afraid you’ll fall off or something?”
Under other circumstances, this could have been, pig aside, a romantic postcard moment. “I mean, what do you consider a good time?”
“Anything or anywhere without you and your booze.” Chin struck in an airy pose, she marched away.
“Well, if I didn’t need a drink before, I sure could use one now,” he called after her, dizzied by her personality seesaw and determined to get off.
He needed to go somewhere where the girls weren’t wrapped up in anything but guys. Somewhere where a come-hither look didn’t mean follow me to the next subject, which wasn’t closely related to what a man and woman should be thinking about on a night like this. He needed . . . Blaine’s disapproving face flashed in his mind. Well, the devil with his brother and Corinne. He needed a drink.
A small boat coasted toward the sandy beach of the sleeping village of Mexicalli, its engine puttering to a halt. All along the waterfront, fishing boats had been pulled up beyond the waterline for the night, the sand gutted by their hulls.
After finishing off a bottle of Corona, the older of the two men aboard hopped out of the craft and landed on unsteady feet, going to his knees in the shallow water. Swearing under his breath, he wrung out the fringe of the serape that held the cool night air at bay.
His companion, no more sober, bent over double laughing.
“Hey, amigo, only Jesucristo Himself can walk on water.”
“If you talk any louder, I will send you to see Him with my own two hands, chico. And don’t forget the paint.”
Sergio, his wife’s dimwitted cousin, made up in agility what he lacked in brains. He could climb the wall to the Hacienda Ortiz like a monkey and gain them entrance. Their boss, who fancied to call himself El Caracol, had said that the gringos would be moving in any day now. A handsome reward awaited anyone who might dissuade them.
Lorenzo felt inside his shirt to see if the magic doll that his mother-in-law had made for him had gotten wet. This would put the proverbial fear of Dios in the do-gooders, and much worse among any Indios they might hire to work for them. Lorenzo’s mother-in-law was a bruja, and he had seen the results of Malinche’s spells. She had cursed her sister’s only son, Sergio, before he was born, out of spite for the affair her sister had with Malinche’s husband. Her sister died in childbirth, and Malinche, who had no sons, took her nephew to raise as her own. But black magic was hard to reverse, and so Sergio remained a boy in a man’s body.
Sergio perched on the side of the small craft, waving his arms beneath his serape for balance, like a heron flapping its wings. Lorenzo grabbed his side of the boat before it tipped over, spilling his companion belly first into the water.
“Jump, you idiot! We need to pull the boat up on the beach.”
Lorenzo listened with impatience as the drunken Sergio floundered in the water. Perhaps he should just let the fool drown, overcome by a wet serape. After a few grunts and a belch that could have shaken the leaves in the trees along the lakefront, he showed his face over the opposite side of the boat.
Lorenzo glared at him. “Now grab the side of the boat and push it up on the beach like the others.”
“My arm hurts, I think.” Sergio always had some excuse.
“I should know better than to expect you to be able to do a man’s work after a few beers,” Lorenzo taunted.
Sergio would do anything to show his manliness. Sure enough, the young man drew himself up for the task.
“On three. Uno, dos, tres!”
The vessel’s bottom sliding over the damp sand made a shushing sound, as though to remind them that their mission was one of secrecy.
“Do you have the paint?”
Sergio dug inside his water-heavy cloak. After much more poking and flapping, he produced a can of spray paint with a big smile.
Lorenzo exhaled through his nostrils. At least the man’s job at the hardware store in Flores gave him access to numerous useful items at no cost . . . and Sergio had no conscience with regard to taking what he wanted.
“Good. Let’s get it over with.”
Accustomed to the hilly terrain, they reached the Hacienda Ortiz with no trouble. To Lorenzo’s surprise, the gate wasn’t even locked. Luck was surely with them, he thought, slipping through the wrought-iron entrance into the moonlit courtyard. All he had to do was open a few windows to see his way around inside.
A clang behind him nearly caused Lorenzo to jump out of his skin. He turned to see Sergio wrestling with his soaked serape, which had caught on one of the elaborate curves in the gate. With an oath, he returned to untangle his companion before he awakened the village.
As Sergio came loose, the can of paint he’d brought from the hardware store fell from his disheveled cloak. Lorenzo reached down and picked it up. It was empty. In disbelief, he shook it, the balls inside rattling with little resistance from side to side.
“You idiot,” he hissed through his teeth at the clueless young man watching him. “It’s empty!”
“No problem, jefe,” Sergio replied. After a lengthy search inside his cloak, he smiled and drew out a small plastic box.
Lorenzo had seen one like it before—among his children’s toys. “Crayons? You brought crayons?”
“So you said, something to write with,” Sergio declared in his defense. “These will write as well as the paint, no?”
In a mix of exasperation and desperation, Lorenzo tried the button on the paint can. To his surprise, paint came out. He let up on the valve immediately. He’d need every drop in the can to finish what he came to do. If it was enough, he might not drown his companion on the way home.