have a different set of jewelry for every shade of eye coloring? Did she actually take them with her when she traveled?
“Hey, maybe we could get a private eye to look into it,” Tony said. “Preciosa, honey, you know any investigadores privados?’
“As it happens, amorcito -”
“Ah no,” Tony interrupted with a sudden wave of his hand. “What are we doing? What could a private eye find out now? Where would he even start? Why do we want to shake everything up again, upset everybody? What would be the point?”
“The point?” Carl cried. “The point? How about justice?”
“Carl, if the police can’t act,” Jamie said reasonably, “how are you going to get justice? What are you going to do, take the law into your own hands?”
Carl glowered down at his plate. “How about finding out what really happened? Doesn’t anybody care about that?”
Annie, her hand still on his, said, “We all care, Pop, but they’re right. It’s too late, too much water under the bridge. Let it go.”
Carl jerked his head in frustration. “Just drop it? Never know who did this terrible thing, or why, or exactly what happened? I mean, sure, Blaze had problems, she wasn’t perfect, but you know, she was barely twenty years old, just a kid, really. She was your mother, Annie. To just let it lie without doing anything at all, as if it never happened…”
Gideon hadn’t yet mentioned his plans to look at the skull in the museum and was unsure whether or not he should. Identifying the skeleton as Blaze’s had wound up providing more hurt than help, as far as he could see, and he wasn’t sure how this would turn out. Still, he thought he owed them the information.
“Well, actually,” he said hesitantly, “I am looking into it a little more, or at least there might be a connection.”
Six pairs of eyes swiveled in his direction.
“There was an old Zapotec skull found in the same mine some years ago. Anybody familiar with that?”
Head shakes all around, except from Josefa, who was concentrating on picking her teeth.
“And it occurred to me that maybe it wasn’t really ancient, that maybe it was modern.” He told them about his conversation with Sandoval and how he’d learned it was now in the Museo de Curiosidades in Oaxaca. “I thought I’d go look at it tomorrow afternoon.”
“I don’t understand,” Annie said. “What does that have to do with my mother’s death?”
“I don’t know that it does. For all I know, it really is a thousand-year-old skull. But if it’s modern, then we have the skeletal remains of two people found in the same mine. If this one shows signs of violence too, the possibility increases that they were killed at the same time.”
“That’s true,” Tony said. “They don’t get that many murders around here. Hell, till you showed up, I thought they didn’t get any.”
“All right, let’s say this one does show that there was a second murder,” Jamie said thoughtfully. “Let’s say it even seems to have happened at the same time. What would that mean? Where could you take it from there?”
He didn’t really have a good answer. The truth of it was that he wouldn’t be able to take it anywhere. There was that statute of limitations to contend with, and besides that, he would be leaving in a couple of days. The truth of it was that he was doing it for no deeper reason than curiosity. But of course he couldn’t say that. And if he told them he was motivated at least in part by wondering if it might be Manolo, there would be a new round of incredulous questionsManolo! Why would it be Manolo? How could it be Manolo? -that he didn’t feel up to contending with. By now he was deeply sorry that he’d brought the subject up at all.
“Well, you never know, it might turn up something,” he said lamely.
It was as anticlimactic as it deserved to be, and he could sense the energy going out of the atmosphere again. After a few seconds Carl sighed and spoke quietly. “I want her… her remains back. I don’t want her lying in a box in some warehouse.”
“Gideon, couldn’t you arrange that?” Julie asked.
“Of course,” Gideon said. “I’ll talk to Javier.”“OHO,” Julie said when the others had left. “I gather you don’t think it was such a blind guess on my part after all, about Manolo’s getting killed too? That’s why you want to look at the skull, isn’t it?”
“Well-” Gideon began from the buffet table, where he was pouring coffee.
“ Isn’t it?”
“Well, on having given your idea some thought,” he said, “I’m willing to upgrade it from blind guess to unverified supposition. Or, what the hell, even reasonable supposition, how’s that?” He came back with two fresh mugs and sat down.
“Oh, that’s big of you.”
“I’m going to go to Oaxaca to look at it tomorrow afternoon. Think you’ll be free? The skull business shouldn’t take up that much time.”
“I think I will, yes. Jamie says another couple of hours should wrap things up, so I should be done by then. And I’d love to go into town. We can have lunch, and I can look for presents for people while you do your skull thing. Maybe we can stop in and say hello to Javier.”
The Oaxacan night had come on by now, warm and fragrant.
Only along the tops of the hills on the horizon was there any remaining red glow from the sunset. Pockets of lights shimmered on the distant hillsides across the valley; tiny communities that were unseen in the daylight. From the village below came waves of radio music and laughing conversation-dinnertime at Samburguesas?-and from the opposite direction, off somewhere in the barren hills that rose immediately behind the Hacienda, they could hear the predators of the night at their work: the hollow, periodic hoo-hoo-hoo of an owl, the screee of a nighthawk, the woofing howls of a band of coyotes.
“Gideon,” Julie said, sipping at the steaming coffee, both hands around the mug, “does it seem odd to you that no one except Carl wants to pursue it? That they’re all content to just-well, to just forget about it?”
“Actually… no.”
“But you’ve always said that what the families in cases like this want more than anything else is closure. Why don’t these people want it?”
“But really, they’ve gotten it. They got it today, as much as they can reasonably expect to ever get. They don’t have to wonder about Blaze anymore. They don’t have to wonder if she’ll ever show up again. They know she didn’t run off with Manolo, they know she was killed and left in the mine. And now they’ll get her body back. That’s closure. Who killed her, and why-that’s unlikely ever to come out now, and they know it. They’re better off putting it behind them.”
The coyotes’ howling turned into increasingly excited barking, then frantic yawping, then, slowly subsiding, into silence. They’d run down their prey. They were feeding. Straining his ears, he imagined he could hear them tearing bone and flesh, and greedily wolfing down gobbets, and snapping at each other.
Julie shivered. “It’s getting cold. Let’s go in.”
EIGHTEEN
They were on the terrace again early the following morning, taking in the cool, fresh air and just finishing working their way through one of Dorotea’s breakfasts-hibiscus juice, cubed melon and papaya, a tender, perfectly cooked vegetable frittata, and toast, jam, and coffee-when Tony appeared, rumpled, yawning, and scratching at the stubble on his cheeks.
“Okay if I join you?” he asked, having already plopped heavily into a spare chair.
“Sure,” Julie said. “Where’s Preciosa?”
Tony snorted. “Preciosa’s not exactly what you’d call a morning person. Hey, mamacita,” he called in Spanish toward the open window of the kitchen, “the big boss is here and he’s hungry. How about some breakfast?”
“I see you, I see you,” was the mumbled reply. “It’s coming, it’s coming.”
“Coffee first.”
