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“All things begin and end in people, we are capable of the best and the worst.”
“What do you mean?”
"That in a few minutes, the nurses will come in very angry and accuse me about what I have done to Félix. They think I'm a monster for attacking him, but my intention couldn’t have been more honest.”
"But what will happen to him?"
"God knows. We are all capable of the best and the worst, remember.”
Monday, November 13, 2006
"Kurt! I didn’t know you were at home. Were you... waiting for me? I've come to say goodbye.”
Sara's words were meant to be natural, but since she had just been scared to death, instead they trembled in fear.
The blue and oval eyes of the coroner, like two pearls, stuck unperturbed in his face.
"You're in danger, girl," he announced with his own peculiar tone of voice. “Keep your eyes open.”
Sara glanced sideways alternately, as if searching for a hidden camera on the landing. She didn’t know whether to laugh at the joke or start shaking. The second thing happened.
"Listen, girl, I have to warn you that this policeman calling himself Alfred Horner will not stop until he catches you," Payne explained with mocking seriousness. “And when he does, he will be ruthless.”
Sara was close to collapsing on hearing from the mouth of that weirdo that her nightmare was not over.
"Horner? The cop?”
“Yes. That arrogant bastard thinks he can always be so high and mighty. He treats people like cheap shit. Well, he can stick it up his ass.”
"But I don’t understand. Why are you helping me?” She said, making an effort to get information from the coroner hidden in the shadows.
"Because Alfred Horner is a bad person. I want to see him suffer, to pay for everything. He needs to pay!” He exclaimed, now without control. “Oh, girl, you are so young and beautiful.”
Sara thought she saw a lustrous gleam in his eyes as he spoke. Then came the memory of Charley Rubial catching her helplessly in her department and forcing her against the bed, so that when Kurt stepped forward, she gave another step back, and when the Buddhist cornered her against the corner of the landing, she didn’t hesitate to take her knife out of her purse. At any other time, one in which Sara could analyze the situation with the objectivity that used to characterize him, the movement of the forensic would have been interpreted as an innocent gesture of parental protection. Or maybe not. What simply happened, in short, was that Sara pointed at him with the edge of the knife.
“What the fuck, honey?” Payne spat, barely reacting to the sudden attack.
"Shut up, monster! Don’t you dare touch me or I'll slit your neck!”
“Stop, Sara, stop!” The coroner continued, shouting, in a voice, if possible, sharper than usual.
It happened in less than a second. Just as Kurt advanced his hand, Sara made a quick move with her wrist and sliced a large part in his palm. The blood began to gush, and an aberrant howl invaded the upper floor of the house. Then an inner force pushed Sara to run downstairs, open the front door and escape from that crazy house as fast as her legs allowed her. She had left her suitcase by the door of her room, but that didn’t matter anymore. She had to meet Diana and leave Oxford once and for all. She didn’t stop hearing the Buddhist's cry until she turned the corner.
That Monday afternoon, as Sara fled in terror from Kurt Payne, her faculty colleague, Jaime Vergara, was passing through with his Porsche the territorial boundary of Ámber. Devoid of a map, he was forced to drive through the inner walks of the village, relying more on his instinct than on his capacity for guidance. He rejoiced glimpsing the sea after crossing a paved plaza, because it meant that the crossing was finally over. Now he had only to cross the coast in search of the little house with the white painted fence that Aly had indicated to him in his farewell letter, so that he parked the sports car in the first free space he found and prepared to continue on foot.
Jaime's worn shoe stepped for the first time on the ground in Ámber, and an odor of moss and salt water quickly permeated his nostrils. He knew that he was being the victim of a paradox: so many years of friendship with Sara, and the only time he walked the streets of her hometown was not to see her (as he had so often promised), but to look for a stranger, instead a girl he had just met that had intrigued him. Jaime chose to take the search for Óliver Morales as a surreal experience that he would surely remember for the rest of his life. To his left, the tide was agitated; enraged by what looked like a storm, and for a second he erased from his brain Madrid, the Shapiro case and everything related to his life in the capital. He inhaled as much air as he could and allowed the sea to guide him to the next episode of this adventure.
When he had been walking alone for ten minutes and fighting the rising blizzard, out of the corner of his eye he saw the first manifestation of a human person to his right; a very comforting one. On one side of the road, where it widened to connect to a wild road that reached the top of a hill in the distance, a woman cried without comfort, motionless, and she was planted on the grass as if she were one tree among others. Even her hair, dull red, mimicked the deciduous leaves of autumn. While Jaime noticed with very little discretion, he found that the woman held an old photograph between her consumed hands. Consumed, as was her fixed grimace, which Jaime could see as she turned on impulse. Caught in flagrante, she wiped her eyes with her fists and hurried to put the photograph in the pocket of her coat. Her cheeks were soaked, and the clear under her eyes showed that her age was less than her wrinkled skin and her somber face made him believe it.
“Are you OK? Need any help?” Jaime asked, feeling the need to soothe the woman's pain. She seemed about to faint at any moment.
"Don’t worry and go your way.”
The woman was still talking in choked sobs. Whatever the cause of her regret, Jaime understood that it was something so serious, so he ignored the caustic tone with which his kindness had been answered and continued talking as if no one was crying.
"To tell you the truth, I wish I knew my way," he said, scratching his head. “I'm lost.”
“Where are you going?” She asked with the same interest as if she had none.
Jaime hesitated. How could he explain it, even if he knew his fate?
"I'm looking for a house on the beach front, with a patio surrounded by a white fence.” Jaime noticed that the woman frowned, as if his comment had suggested something. "I need to find Óliver Morales, owner of that house.”
For the first time, the dismayed woman showed her beautiful teeth in a smile as sweet as her grief.
"What do you want to find him for?" She said.
"I think we have a friend in common, and I suspect that friend is in danger. I need him only to clarify some doubts about her.”
The woman opened her eyes in a gesture of fascination. It was as if every word he said was news to her.
"What's that friend's name in common?"
"Alyssa Grifero.".
She took a step back and Jaime watched as she swallowed. She cleared her throat before answering, for now she was the one to launch the unexpected announcement.
"You see, Óliver Morales is not the owner of the house that you say with the fence, which, by the way, is no longer white, but blue.”
"Are you sure of that?"
"As sure as the house is mine, and Óliver Morales only lives there. He's my only son.” Jaime paled suddenly. “Come on, don’t look silly and come with me, it's about to rain. He’s at home.”
She took his arm in an endearing way, nothing to do with the harshness of her first answers, and Jaime understood that he had fallen into the hands of a good person. They continued the road to the east with great care not to be struck down by a gust of wind.
"By the way," she added, "nobody calls him Óliver. When you see him, call him Oli.”
The woman stopped behind the last step, in front of a closed door.
"He's in here, in his room. He has only been out once since yesterday, I don’t know what kind of bee stung him,” she explained, who had presented herself as Verónica on the way. She knocked with her knuckles on her son’s door.
A childish voice, however sharp, answered from the other end of the door:
“Come in.”
Jaime and Verónica went into the little boy's bedroom, who they found sitting on the bed with his legs crossed. He held in his hands a comic book of The Lord of the Rings, and when he turned his gaze to the door and saw the figure of Jaime, he couldn’t help showing surprise, anger and modesty with his expression. He only dedicated the newcomer half a second; then continued to devour his comic as if the man who had just entered his room had the same importance as a piece of lint.
"Son, this man wants to talk to you," Verónica said. “He assures me that he knows Alyssa.”
Oli gave Jaime a look of disgust when his mother said his friend's name. Jaime smiled as if he hadn’t noticed and sat on the edge of the bed, very close to the boy.
"Nice to meet you, Oli. You have a very nice room, you know?” Jaime, who had unconsciously adopted a strange childish voice, held out his hand. As the child didn’t reciprocate his greeting, he dissimulated by roughing up his hair. Then he turned to the mother. "Excuse me, can we talk only him and I?"
Crossing her arms by the door, her response was blunt:
“I prefer not. I hope you understand, but we just met.”
Jaime made a sympathetic nod. Then he confronted the child:
"Hi, I came to ask you about Alyssa. You know her, don’t you?”
"Yes, although I think not as well as you do," replied Oli Morales, with such aggressiveness that he surprised both adults.
"Anyway, it seems like you know things about her that I need to know. Will you help me?”
Oli shrugged and tossed the comic book on the pillow.
Jaime interpreted the gesture as yes.
"Let's see, you know Alyssa traveled to Oxford a few days ago, right?
“Yes.”
"And you know why she did?"
Oli watched him suspiciously. Then he made a snort with his mouth and immediately, out of nowhere, the largest German shepherd Jaime had ever seen climbed into bed. The dog huddled next to the boy without taking his eyes off the visitor.
“Are you a cop?” Asked the boy.
“No” Jaime's voice had broken, maybe because of the question, or maybe the presence of the animal. Why are you so intimidated to talk to this child? he wondered. “I’m a doctor. And also Alyssa's friend, so I'm trying to help her,” he explained.
"Okay, I believe you," nodded the boy with growing superiority. Verónica, for her part, hid a malicious motherly smile. “Alyssa went to England to collect a prize.”
"An inheritance," she corrected.
"An inheritance? Whose?” Jaime wanted to know.
"Charley’s," the boy answered.
"Who's Charley?" Asked Jaime, pleased that he had finally lit the wick of interrogation.
"You don’t know him," said Oli, who was now scratching the German shepherd's gut with rhythm. “The important thing is that Charley died, and since Alyssa was one of his two best friends, he gave her half of his inheritance.”
"And the other half he left it to his other best friend?"
"Yes, the rest was for Mom.”
Jaime looked at Verónica out of the corner of his eye, noticing that her whitish complexion was suddenly flushed. She was staring at the floor, as if she didn’t want to explain her son’s last answer.
"Okay, and then," Jaime continued the conversation with the child, "did she go to Oxford to collect the inheritance? Why?”
The doctor noticed that Oli was asking permission by looking at his mother to answer. She nodded, also in ceremonial silence.
"Charley's testament said that he had a brother living there, and that to collect the inheritance she had to go and meet him and ask him about a music box.”
Jaime scratched his head as he pondered the content of this last reply. At last he was getting some interesting information! He got up and began to prowl the room in silence; he needed to sort out his ideas. A music box... what can it mean? Various football posters that reminded him of his own childhood covered the walls of the room. In fact, for some reason he felt comfortable in the house. Next to the door where Verónica was still standing, there was a small wooden desk that held a personal computer.
It was equipped with speakers, a printer and a webcam. And on the white wall, just above the monitor, a picture of a beautiful mountainous landscape that he could not recognize. The foot of the image read: "JASPER NATIONAL PARK, CANADA".
So the version of the facts of the Alyssa team, he concluded for himself, was that she had traveled alone to Oxford to visit the brother of that certain Charley and thus receive her share of the inheritance, with the bad luck of which when she arrived, he had already been brutally murdered. Why then was all of Europe looking for her? Why didn’t she explain it to him from the beginning, instead of risking his call to the police? There were still unfinished holes in the puzzle, and without which the assessment couldn’t continue. Alyssa Grifero remained as mysterious as she was sensually addictive.
He turned to face mother and son again, and crossed his arms.
"What about your share of the estate?"
When Verónica was about to speak, Oli came forward:
"We didn’t want to go anywhere, so we let Alyssa pick up our share.
"Well, you do trust that girl." Jaime spoke to the room in general.
“You are right! We trust her a lot, more than you do!”
It seemed strange to Jaime the level of tension that the conversation had just acquired, so much so that even the dog had gotten up on the bed. Had he said anything inappropriate?
"It's okay, it's okay.” He turned to Verónica. “And what about your husband?”
The woman's reaction told Jaime that he had just asked an unfortunate question. Verónica shrugged and paled. Her eyes had begun to glow.
"We buried my husband fourteen days ago," she replied caustically, just as she had answered a while ago, by the causeway.
Jaime's stomach tightened, and then he remembered that Sara had told him about a family affair, the Morales family, in which one of its members had a brain tumor. Was it the family in whose house he was at that very moment? He would have sworn that Sara had told him that it was the woman who had the tumor, and not the man, but in the end, he might not be paying her too much attention. That was the kind of thing he regretted not paying attention about Sara.
He was tempted to question and dispel his doubts, but the mourning in Verónica's eyes told him that perhaps it was better to ignore it. Now he understood that this was why the woman cried in the midst of the blizzard before he appeared with his uncomfortable questions, and possibly the photo she wept was a portrait of her late husband. "I'm such an idiot!" He snapped.
He swallowed and apologized for the unfortunate remark. Then he looked at Oli and saw that his head was down, containing the weeping in silence. Hanging around his neck shone a strange, cylindrical-looking metal key, catching Jaime's attention. How many keys had he seen with that shape? It was obvious that none. He was so absorbed in contemplating the object that Oli realized that it was being analyzed. The child took the key as if it were a normal object and put it by inside his shirt. Then he gave Jaime a look he could not decipher.
Jaime put his hands to his face and prepared to continue. He did not yet have all the answers through which he had crossed half a country, and the mood in the child's room had become uncomfortable. He sighed heavily and addressed the lady of the house:
"Can I see that will?"
The testament that Charley had written before he died occupied less than one file page. In order to gain the right to look at it, Jaime had been forced to explain to Verónica why Alyssa was the prime suspect in the murder of Charley's missing brother, and how the young woman had ended up in his flat. He added that he was a doctor in La Paz when Verónica asked him, but he omitted the part in which he had been suspended from office and denounced after the death of a multimillionaire businessman. She seemed not to be aware of the news, so he saw no need to smear his image. Finally, Verónica invited him to sit down on the sofa in the living room, and disappeared into the kitchen to return seconds later with a tray holding two cups of fresh coffee. Among them, the will danced as if it were a simple napkin. He sat down in the opposite armchair, and Oli stood by the bookcase, where a few months earlier he had discovered the meaning of the word tumor. He paid attention to every gesture or movement that Jaime made while reading the text of the inheritance.
Charley began his writing with a brief message of thanks to the only two people he had ever loved: Vero and Alyssa. Then it went directly to the point. With a neutral style, far from what a normal person would adopt to reveal a secret like the one about to be revealed, he explained in the letter that he had a twin brother living in England, whom he had not seen for decades. His name was Miguel Rubial (although he apparently adopted Lennard's surname), and he had a nice musical box that one day he had sent him by post. Although Lennard did not know, that the box hid Charley’s most precious possessions (the true inheritance), and according to his will, the best part was that it couldn’t be opened until after his death. Jaime read the contents of the last line several times:
What's inside the box will be split between the two sides equally: half for Vero, and the other half for Alyssa. And then, an additional amusing surprise.
The testament ended in that indefinite way. The deceased had not reserved a single word for his farewell. Jaime dropped the sheet on the table and took a good sip of coffee. The taste comforted him.
"I confess I don’t understand anything at all," he said.
Verónica let out a short laugh.
"It would be strange if you had! There’s a mess in all this.”
"Yes, but..." Jaime leaned toward the hostess in an attempt to endow the conversation with more positive energy for example, “from what did the author of the will die?”
"Charley? He committed suicide.”
"Good Lord," his voice lowered. “Why did he do it?”
"He was a bad person and he lost everything by deception and manipulation," Verónica said. “I guess it went too far.”
Jaime was silent for a few seconds, as if searching for the meaning of the document now that he had this new information. Despite the naturalness with which both mother and son explained the future of the events that made Aly end up at Mike Lennard's house, the truth is that he now had more doubts than ever about her innocence. Anything could have happened the moment she knocked on Lennard's door! Would he refuse to give her the wonderful music box and that's why she killed him? In that case, would he already have in his possession the content of the entire inheritance? Jaime remembered that Alyssa had mentioned that Sara was in danger. Had she used them both, hiding in his house, and at the same time diverted attention to Sara? He rubbed his eyelids and returned to the real world. He needed more data.
"Forgive me for asking this, but how does a beautiful widow and mother, and an eighteen-year-old girl end up receiving the inheritance of such a horrible person?"
Jaime understood immediately that he had just asked an uncomfortable question, because the woman wanted to gain some time by taking a long drink of coffee. Her son glanced at her warily. Let’s see what you are about to say, their eyes seemed to say.
"Charley was my stepbrother, and he was madly in love with me," she muttered after a few seconds of waiting. “As for Alyssa, I know little.”
Jaime looked sideways at Oli. Something told him that the boy knew more than his mother about Aly. He looked away.
"She came to town a few years ago, when she was still a child," Verónica tried to remember. “She was alone and Charley adopted her. At that time we all thought that this was out of place, considering the poor life that my stepbrother had, but if we consider the violation that the poor child had suffered, it can be said that he saved her life.”
Jaime swallowed and suddenly he felt pity. He realized that he was falling in love with a young woman with a life so different from his own, a life that he could not even remotely imagine.
"Were they sleeping together?" The conversation was beginning to imply a powerful emotional damage, but he couldn’t stop now: something told him that he was about to reach the key piece in the puzzle that was the life of Alyssa Grifero.
"I can’t answer that," she said with a shrug.
"Yes they did, I saw them myself!" Oli's voice had sounded like lightning. The boy ran off down the stairs. Then, from above, he added in tears, "and you too.”
Jaime watched as the boy disappeared into the darkness of the landing. What had he meant by that remark? Aly and he had not gone to bed, and even if they had, how could he know? The young doctor had gathered inside a cocktail of sensations that led to something like fear, rage and anticipation, and he didn’t know how to interpret his feelings. He decided to continue taking time from the owner of the house. When she was about to speak, however, something sparked before it went off in his head. How could he have been so stupid?
“Wait a moment! What did you say an instant ago?” Jaime's pupils trembled inside his eyelids.
“What do you mean?” Verónica asked in disbelief.
"You once said that Alyssa suffered a rape?"
“Yes she did. When she was a kid. Few people know. My stepbrother told me one afternoon when he came home drunk as a skunk. How important is that now?”
Jaime set the empty coffee cup on the table and let his back sink into the sofa cushions.
"Madam, I must imperiously ask you to tell me everything you know about Alyssa Grifero's past," he pleaded firmly.