It’s funny how daylight could change her mind so utterly. At night, after her sleepwalking episode, Noemí had been scared, pulling the covers up to her chin. Contemplating the sky through her window, scratching her left wrist, she found the whole episode embarrassing and prosaic.
Her room, when viewed with the curtains wide open and the sun streaming in, was worn and sad, but couldn’t conceal ghosts or monsters. Hauntings and curses, bah! She dressed in a long-sleeved button-down blouse in pale cream and a navy skirt with a kickpleat, put on a pair of flats, and headed downstairs long before the predetermined hour. Bored, she once again walked around the library, pausing before a bookcase filled with botanical tomes. She imagined Francis must have obtained his knowledge of mushrooms this way, scavenging for wisdom among moth-eaten papers. She brushed a hand along the silver frames of the pictures in the hallways, feeling the whorls and swirls beneath her fingertips. Eventually, Francis came downstairs.
He wasn’t very talkative that morning, so she limited herself to a couple of comments and fiddled with her cigarette, not quite willing to light it yet. She didn’t like smoking on an empty stomach.
He dropped her off by the church, which, she gathered, was where they’d dropped off Catalina each week when she went into town.
“I’ll pick you up at noon,” he said. “Will that be sufficient time?” “Yes, thank you,” she told him. He nodded at her and drove away.
She made her way to the healer’s house. The woman who had been doing the washing the other day wasn’t out; her clothesline lay
empty. The town remained quiet, still half asleep. Marta Duval, however, was awake, setting out tortillas to dry in the sun next to her doorway, no doubt to be used for preparing chilaquiles.
“Good morning,” Noemí said.
“Hello,” the old woman replied with a smile. “You’ve come back at exactly the right time.”
“You have the remedy?” “I have it. Come inside.”
Noemí followed her into the kitchen and sat at the table. The parrot was not there that day. It was only the two of them. The woman wiped her hands against her apron and opened a drawer, then placed a small bottle in front of Noemí.
“One tablespoon before bedtime should be enough for her. I made it stronger this time, but there’s no harm in two tablespoons, either.”
Noemí held the bottle up, staring at its content. “And it’ll help her sleep?”
“Help, yes. It won’t solve all her problems.” “Because the house is cursed.”
“The family, the house.” Marta Duval shrugged. “Makes no difference, does it? Cursed is cursed.”
Noemí set the bottle down and ran a nail across the side of it. “Do you know why Ruth Doyle killed her family? Did you ever hear any rumors about that?”
“You hear all kinds of things. Yes, I heard. Do you have any more cigarettes?”
“I’ll run out of them if I don’t ration them.” “I bet you were going to buy more.”
“I don’t think you can buy these here,” Noemí said. “Your saint has expensive tastes. Where’s the parrot, by the way?”
Noemí took out her pack of Gauloises and handed one to Marta, who placed it next to the statuette of the saint. “Still in his cage under
his blanket. I’ll tell you about Benito. Do you want coffee? It’s no good telling tales without a drink.”
“Sure,” Noemí said. She still wasn’t hungry, but she supposed coffee might restore her appetite. It was funny. Her brother said she always breakfasted as if food was going to go out of fashion, and yet for the past two days she’d hardly touched a morsel in the mornings. Not that she’d had much in the evenings, either. She felt slightly ill. Or rather, it was the preface of an illness, like when she could predict she was about to get a cold. She hoped that was not the case.
Marta Duval set a kettle to boil and rummaged among her drawers until she produced a small tin can. When the water boiled, she poured it into two pewter mugs, added the proper amount of coffee, and placed both cups on the table. Marta’s house smelled strongly of rosemary, and the scent mixed with the scent of the coffee.
“I take mine black, but do you want sugar in yours?” “I’m fine,” Noemí said.
The woman sat down and settled her hands around her mug.
“Do you want the short version or the long one? Because the long means going back quite a bit. If you want to know about Benito, then you need to know about Aurelio. That is, if you want to tell the tale properly.”
“Well, I am running out of cigarettes but not out of time.”
The woman smiled and sipped her coffee. Noemí did the same. “When the mine reopened, it was big news. Mr. Doyle had his
workers from England, but those weren’t enough to run a mine. They
could oversee the work and others could work in the house he was building, but you can’t open a mine and build a house like High Place with sixty Englishmen.”
“Who used to run the mine before him?”
“Spaniards. But that had been ages ago. People were happy when the mine reopened. It meant work for the locals, and folks came from other parts of Hidalgo for the chance at a job too. You know how it is.
Where there’s a mine, there’s money, the town grows. But right away folks complained. The work was tough, but Mr. Doyle was tougher.”
“He treated the workers poorly?”
“Like animals, they said. He was better with the ones building the house. At least they were not in a hole beneath the earth. The Mexican mining crews, he had no mercy on those. Him, Mr. Doyle, and his brother, both of them bellowing at the workers.”
Francis had pointed Leland, Howard’s brother, out in the photos, but she could not recall what he looked like, and anyway, all the people in the family seemed to have that similar physiognomy, which she was dubbing in her head “the Doyle look.” Like the Habsburg jaw of Charles II, only not quite as concerning. Now that had been a case of severe mandibular prognathism.
“He wanted the house built quickly and he wanted a great garden, in the English style, with rose beds. He even brought boxes filled with earth from Europe to make sure the flowers would take. So there they were, working on the house and trying to mine the silver, when there came a sickness. It hit the workers at the house first and then the miners, but soon enough they were all heaving and feverish. Doyle had a doctor, who he’d brought along, just like his soil, but his precious doctor didn’t help much. They died. Lots of the miners. Some of the people working at the house, and even Howard Doyle’s wife, but mostly a great deal of miners dropped dead.”
“That’s when they built the English cemetery,” Noemí said.
“Yes. That’s right.” Marta nodded. “Well, the sickness passed. New folks were hired. People from Hidalgo, yes, but having heard there was an Englishman with a mine here, there also came more Englishmen who were working around other mines, or were simply trying to make their fortune, lured by silver and a good profit. They say Zacatecas is for silver? Well, Hidalgo does well enough too.
“They came and again there were full crews and by now the house was finished, which meant it had a large staff for a proper large house. Things went along well enough—Doyle was still hard, but he paid on time and the miners also got their little quota of silver, which
is the way it’s always been done around here—miners expected the partido. But it was around the time Mr. Doyle married again that things started to turn sour.”
She recalled the wedding portrait of Doyle’s second wife: 1895. Alice, who looked like Agnes. Alice, the little sister. Now that she considered it, it was odd that Agnes had been immortalized with a stone statue, while Alice received no such treatment. Yet Howard Doyle had said he hardly knew her. It was his second wife who had lived with him for many years, who birthed him children. Did Howard Doyle like her even less than his first wife? Or was the statue insignificant, a memorial created on a whim? She tried to remember if there had been a plaque near the statue discussing Agnes. She didn’t think so, but there could be. She hadn’t looked closely.
“There was another wave of sickness. Lord, it hit them worse than before. They were dropping like flies. Fevers and chills and quickly to their deathbeds they went.”
“Is that when they buried them in mass graves?” Noemí asked, remembering what Dr. Camarillo had told her.
The old woman frowned. “Mass graves? No. The locals, their families took them to the cemetery in town. But there were many people without kin working the mines. When someone didn’t have family in town, they buried them in the English cemetery. The Mexicans didn’t get a headstone, though, not even a cross, which I guess is why people talked about mass graves. A hole in the ground with no wreath nor proper service might as well be a mass grave.”
Now that was a depressing thought. All those nameless workers, buried in haste, and no one to ever know where and how their lives had ended. Noemí set her pewter cup down and scratched her wrist.
“Anyway, that was not the only problem at the mine. Doyle had decided to end the custom of letting the workers have a bit of silver along with their wages. There was a man and his name was Aurelio. Aurelio was one of the miners who didn’t like the change none, but unlike others who would grumble to themselves, Aurelio grumbled to the others.”
“What did he say?”
“Told them what was obvious. That the camp where they worked was shit. That the doctor the Englishman brought with him had never cured anyone and they needed a good doctor. That they were leaving behind widows and orphans and hardly any money for them, and on top of that Doyle wanted to fatten up his pockets more so he’d taken away their partido and was hoarding all the silver. Then he asked the miners to go on strike.”
“Did they?”
“Yes, they did. Of course, Doyle thought he could bully them back to work real easy. Doyle’s brother and Doyle’s trusted men, they went over to the mining camp with rifles and threats, but Aurelio and the others fought back. They threw stones at them. Doyle’s brother got away by the skin of his teeth. Soon after that, Aurelio was found dead. They said it was a natural death, but no one really believed that. The strike leader dies one morning? It didn’t sound right.”
“There was an epidemic, though,” Noemí pointed out.
“Sure. But people who saw the body said his face looked awful. You’ve heard about people dying of fright? Well, they said he died of fright. That his eyes were bulging and his mouth was open and he looked like a man who’s seen the devil. It scared everyone good, and it also ended the strike.”
Francis had mentioned strikes and the closure of the mine, but Noemí had not thought to ask him more about them. Perhaps she should remedy that, but for now she focused her attention on Marta.
“You said that Aurelio was connected to Benito, though. Who was that?”
“Patience, girl, you’ll make me lose my train of thought. At my age, it’s no easy thing to try and remember what was when and how it happened.” Marta took several long sips of her coffee before speaking. “Where was I? Oh, yes. The mine went on. Doyle had remarried and eventually his new wife gave birth to a girl, Miss Ruth, and many years later a baby boy. Doyle’s brother, Mr. Leland, he also had children. A boy and a girl. The boy was engaged to Miss Ruth.”
“Kissing cousins, again,” Noemí said, disturbed by this notion. The Habsburg jaw was a more apt comparison than she’d thought, and things had not ended well for the Habsburgs.
“Not much kissing, I think. That was the problem. That is where Benito comes in. He was a nephew of Aurelio and went to work in the house. This was years after the strike, so I suppose it’s not like Doyle cared that he was related to Aurelio. Or a dead miner didn’t matter to him none, or else he didn’t know. In any case, he worked in the house, tending to the plants. By that time instead of a garden the Doyles had settled on a greenhouse.
“Benito had a lot in common with his dead uncle. He was smart, he was funny, and he didn’t know how to keep out of trouble. His uncle had organized a strike, and he did an even more horrifying thing: he fell in love with Miss Ruth and she fell in love with him.”
“I can’t imagine her father was pleased,” Noemí said.
He’d probably given his daughter the eugenics talk. Superior and inferior specimens. She pictured him by the fireplace in his room admonishing the girl, and she with her eyes fixed on the floor. Poor Benito had not stood a chance. It was funny, though, that if Doyle was truly that interested in eugenics he’d insist on all these marriages to close relations. Maybe he was imitating Darwin, who’d also married within his family.
“They say when he found out he almost killed her,” Marta muttered.
Now she pictured Howard Doyle wrapping his fingers around the girl’s slim neck. Strong fingers, digging deep, pressing hard, and the girl incapable of even uttering a protest because she couldn’t breathe. Papa, don’t. It was such a vivid image that Noemí had to close her eyes for a moment, gripping the table with one hand.
“Are you all right?” Marta asked.
“Yes,” Noemí said, opening her eyes and nodding at the woman. “I’m fine. A little tired.”
She raised the cup of coffee to her lips and drank. The warm liquid was pleasant in its bitterness. Noemí set the cup down.
“Please, go on,” she said.
“There’s not much more to say. Ruth was punished, Benito vanished.”
“He was killed?”
The old woman leaned forward, her cloudy eyes fixed on Noemí. “Even worse: disappeared, from one day to the next. Folks said he’d run off because he was afraid of what Doyle would do to him, but others said Doyle had done the disappearing.
“Ruth was supposed to get married that summer to Michael, that cousin of hers, and Benito’s disappearance didn’t change that one bit. Nothing would have changed that. It was the middle of the Revolution, and the upheaval meant the mine was operating with a small crew, but it was still operating. Someone had to keep the machinery going, pumping the water out, or it would flood. It rains so much here.
“And up at the house, someone had to keep changing the linens and dusting the furniture, so in many ways I guess things hadn’t changed over a war, so why would they change over a missing man? Howard Doyle ordered trinkets for the wedding, acting as though nothing was amiss. As though Benito’s disappearance didn’t matter. Well, it must have mattered to Ruth.
“None can be sure what happened, but they said she put a sleeping draught in their food. I don’t know where she got it from. She was clever, she knew many things about plants and medicine, so it could be she mixed the draught herself. Or perhaps her lover had procured it for her. Maybe in the beginning she had thought to put them to sleep and run away, but afterward she changed her mind. Once Benito disappeared. She shot her father while he slept, because of what he’d done to her lover.”
“But not just her father,” Noemí said. “She shot her mother and the others. If she was avenging her dead lover, wouldn’t she have only shot her father? What did the others have to do with that?”
“Maybe she thought they were also guilty. Maybe she’d gone mad. We can’t know. They’re cursed, I tell you, and that house is haunted.
You’re very silly or very brave living in a haunted house.”
I’m not sorry, that’s what the Ruth in her dream had said. Had Ruth been remorseless as she wandered through the house and delivered a bullet to her kinfolk? Just because Noemí had dreamed it, it didn’t mean it had happened that way. After all, in her nightmare the house had been distorted and mutated in impossible ways.
Noemí frowned, looking at her cup of coffee. She’d taken few sips.
Her stomach was definitely not cooperating that morning.
“Trouble is there’s not much you can do about ghosts nor hauntings. You might burn a candle at night for them and maybe they’d like that. You know about the mal de aire? Your mama ever tell you about that in the city?”
“I’ve heard one thing or another,” she said. “It’s supposed to make you sick.”
“There’re heavy places. Places where the air itself is heavy because an evil weighs it down. Sometimes it’s a death, could be it’s something else, but the bad air, it’ll get into your body and it’ll nestle there and weigh you down. That’s what’s wrong with the Doyles of High Place,” the woman said, concluding her tale.
Like feeding an animal madder plants: it dyes the bones red, it stains everything inside crimson, she thought.
Marta Duval rose and began opening kitchen drawers. She grabbed a beaded bracelet and brought it back to the table, handing it to Noemí. It had tiny blue and white glass beads, and a larger blue bead with a black center.
“It’s against the evil eye.”
“Yes, I know,” Noemí said, because she had seen such trinkets before.
“You wear it, yes? It might help you, can’t hurt. I’ll be sure to ask my saints to watch over you too.”
Noemí opened her purse and placed the bottle inside. Then, because she didn’t want to hurt the old woman’s feelings, she tied the bracelet around her wrist as she’d suggested. “Thank you.”
Walking back toward the town center, Noemí considered all the things she now knew about the Doyles and how none of it would assist Catalina. Ultimately even a haunting, if you accepted it as real and not the result of a feverish imagination, didn’t mean anything. The fear of the previous night had cooled away, and now all there was left was the taste of dissatisfaction.
Noemí pulled her cardigan’s sleeve up, scratching her wrist again. It itched something awful. She realized there was a thin, raw, red band of skin around her wrist. As though she’d burned herself. She frowned.
Dr. Camarillo’s clinic was nearby, so she decided to stop by and hope he didn’t have a patient. She was in luck. The doctor was eating a torta in the reception area. He didn’t have his white coat on; instead he wore a simple, single-breasted tweed jacket. When she stopped in front of him, Julio Camarillo quickly set the torta on a table next to him and wiped his mouth and hands on his handkerchief.
“Out for a walk?” he asked.
“Of a sort,” she said. “Am I interrupting your breakfast?”
“It’s not much of an interruption, seeing as it’s not very tasty. I made it myself and did a bad job. How’s your cousin? Are they finding a specialist for her?”
“I’m afraid her husband doesn’t think she needs any other doctor.
Arthur Cummins is enough for them.”
“Do you think it might help if I talked to him?”
She shook her head. “It might make it worse, to be honest.” “That’s a pity. And how are you?”
“I’m not sure. I have this rash,” Noemí said, holding up her wrist for him to see.
Dr. Camarillo inspected her wrist carefully. “Odd,” he said. “It almost looks like you came in contact with mala mujer, but that doesn’t grow here. It’s a sure recipe for dermatitis if you touch the leaves. Do you have allergies?”
“No. My mother says it’s almost indecent how healthy I am. She told me when she was a young girl everyone thought it was very fashionable to suffer a bout of appendicitis and girls went on a tapeworm diet.”
“She must have been joking about the tapeworm,” Dr. Camarillo said. “That’s a made-up story.”
“It always did sound quite horrifying. Then I’m allergic to something? A plant or shrub?”
“It could be a number of things. We’ll wash the hand and put on a soothing ointment. Come in,” he said, directing her into his office.
She washed her hands in the little sink in the corner, and Julio applied a zinc paste, bandaged her wrist, and told her she should not scratch the affected area because it would make it worse. He advised her to change the bandage the next day and apply more zinc paste.
“It’ll take a few days for the inflammation to go away,” he said, walking her back toward the entrance, “but you should be fine after a week. Come see me if it doesn’t improve.”
“Thanks,” she said and placed the tiny jar of zinc paste he’d gifted her inside her purse. “I have another question. Do you know what could cause a person to begin sleepwalking again?”
“Again?”
“I sleepwalked when I was very young, but I haven’t done it in ages. But I sleepwalked last night.”
“Yes, it’s more common for children to sleepwalk. Have you been taking any new medication?”
“No. I told you. I’m scandalously healthy.”
“Could be anxiety,” the doctor said, and then he smiled a little.
“I had the oddest dream when I was sleepwalking,” she said. “It didn’t feel like when I was a kid.”
It had also been an extremely morbid dream and then, afterward, the chat with Virgil had not helped soothe her. Noemí frowned.
“I see I’ve failed to be helpful once again.” “Don’t say that,” she replied quickly.
“Tell you what, if it happens again you come and see me. And you watch that wrist.”
“Sure.”
Noemí stopped at one of the tiny little stores set around the town square. She bought herself a pack of cigarettes. There were no Lotería cards to be had, but she did find a pack of cheap naipes. Cups, clubs, coins, and swords, to lighten the day. Someone had told her it was possible to read the cards, to tell fortunes, but what Noemí liked to do was play for money with her friends.
The store owner counted her change slowly. He was very old, and his glasses had a crack running down the middle. At the store’s entrance sat a yellow dog drinking from a dirty bowl. Noemí scratched its ears on the way out.
The post office was also in the town square, and she sent a short letter to her father informing him of the current situation at High Place: she’d obtained a second opinion from a doctor who said Catalina needed psychiatric care. She did not write that Virgil was extremely reluctant to let anyone see Catalina, because she did not want to worry her father. She also did not mention anything about her nightmares, nor the sleepwalking episode. Those, along with the rash blooming on her wrist, were unpleasant markers of her journey, but they were superfluous details.
Once these tasks were done, she stood in the middle of the town square glancing at the few businesses there. There was no ice cream shop, no souvenir store selling knickknacks, no bandstand for musicians to play their tunes. A couple of storefronts were boarded up, with For Sale painted on the outside. The church was still impressive, but the rest was really quite sad. A withered world. Had it looked this way in Ruth’s day? Had she even been allowed to visit the town? Or was she kept locked inside High Place?
Noemí headed back to the exact spot where Francis had dropped her off. He arrived a couple of minutes later, while she sat on a wrought-iron bench and was about to light a cigarette.
“You’re quick to fetch me,” she said.
“My mother doesn’t believe in tardiness,” he said as he stood in front of her and took off the felt hat with the navy band he’d put on that morning.
“Did you tell her where we went?”
“I didn’t go back to the house. If I had, my mother or Virgil might have started asking why I’d left you alone.”
“Were you driving around?”
“A bit. I parked under a tree over there and took a nap too. Did anything happen to you?” he asked, pointing at her bandaged wrist.
“A rash,” Noemí said.
She extended her hand so that he might help her up, and he did. Without her monumental high heels, Noemí’s head barely reached his shoulder. When such a height difference presented itself, Noemí might stand on her tiptoes. Her cousins teased her about it, calling her “the ballerina.” Not Catalina, because she was too sweet to tease anyone, but cousin Marilulu did it all the time. Now, reflexively, she did that, and that little meaningless motion must have startled him, because he let go with the hand that had been holding his hat, and a gust of wind blew it away.
“Oh, no,” Noemí said.
They chased after the hat, running for a good two blocks before she managed to get hold of it. In her tight skirt and stockings this was no small feat. The yellow dog she’d seen at the store, amused by the spectacle, barked at Noemí and circled her. She pressed the hat against her chest.
“Well, I suppose now I’ve done my daily calisthenics,” she said, chuckling.
Francis seemed amused too and watched her with an unusual levity. There was a sad and resigned quality to him that struck her as odd for someone his age, but the midday sun had washed his melancholy away and gave color to his cheeks. Virgil was good looking, Francis was not. He had an almost nonexistent upper lip, eyebrows that arched a little too much, heavy-lidded eyes. She liked him nevertheless.
He was odd and it was endearing.
She offered him the hat, and Francis turned it in his hands carefully. “What?” he asked, sounding bashful, because she was looking at him.
“Won’t you thank me for rescuing your hat, dear sir?” “Thank you.”
“Silly boy,” she said, planting a kiss on his cheek.
She was afraid he’d drop the hat and they’d have to chase it again, but he managed to hold on to it and smiled as they walked back to the car.
“You finished the errands you needed to run in town?” he asked. “Yes. Post office, doctor. I was also talking to someone about High
Place, about what happened there. You know, with Ruth,” she told
him. Her mind kept going back to Ruth. It really should be no concern of hers, this decades-old murder, but there it was, the nagging thought, and she wanted to talk about it. Who better than him?
Francis tapped the hat twice against his leg as they walked. “What about her?”
“She wanted to run away with her lover. Instead, she ended up shooting her whole family. I don’t understand why she’d do what she did. Why didn’t she run away from High Place? Surely she could have simply left.”
“You can’t leave High Place.”
“But you can. She was an adult woman.”
“You’re a woman. Can you do anything you want? Even if it upsets your family?”
“Technically I can, even if I wouldn’t every single time,” Noemí said, though she immediately remembered her father’s issues with scandals and the fear of the society pages. Would she ever risk an outright rebellion against her family?
“My mother left High Place, she married. But she came back. There’s no escaping it. Ruth knew as much. That’s why she did what
she did.”
“You sound almost proud,” she exclaimed.
Francis placed the hat on his head and looked at her gravely. “No. But truth be told Ruth ought to have burnt High Place to the ground.”
It was such a shocking pronouncement that she thought she must have heard him wrong, and she would have been able to convince herself this was the case if they had not driven back to the house in a bubble of silence. That piercing silence more than anything affirmed his words. It underlined them and made her turn her face toward the window. In her hand she held her unlit cigarette, watching the trees, light streaming through the branches.
