grown man. You hadn’t seen him in almost ten years, right? He’d been only sixteen then. Do you really think you’d know one way or the other whether the man who showed up then was really the same teenager that had left back then… when you were just six years old?”
“Well-okay, maybe not, but my father certainly would have recognized his own-” His face fell. “No, dad had died a little while before.”
“And I’d never seen Tony before he showed up in 1979,” Carl added thoughtfully.
“And I was one year old in 1979,” Annie said, no less soberly.
The three of them were beginning to accept it even though they didn’t want to, but then Jamie perked up. “Wait, wait, wait-Blaze was older than me; she was only a year younger than Tony. There’s no way some stranger could come in and make her believe he was her brother. He’d never get away with it.”
“But Blaze never saw him. She was already gone when he got here,” Gideon gently pointed out. “She was dead by then, although as far as everybody knew, she’d run off with Manolo.”
“Sure,” Jamie said, “but he wouldn’t have known that. How could he take the chance…” The air went out of him. He sagged back in his chair. “Oh. He killed her?”
Gideon nodded. “That’s the way I see it. She was the only one left who could know for sure that he wasn’t really Tony. Well, Tony himself-the real Tony-would have known too, of course. So he got rid of them both, walked in in his place, took over, and was Tony Gallagher for the next thirty years.”
“And the reason he tried to kill you,” Julie said, “was to prevent you from finding out… well, what you found out-that he wasn’t who he said he was.”
Gideon nodded. “It fits, doesn’t it?”
“Yes. I see.” Jamie said miserably.
Annie flung her hands in the air. “Then who the hell was the guy whose hand I was just holding in the hospital? The guy that’s been Tony for the last thirty years?”
“Annie,” Gideon said earnestly, “I do not have a clue.”
“Nor do I,” said Marmolejo, who had been silent and ruminative for some time. “But I believe I know who can provide the answer. Where can I find the woman Josefa?”
“Josefa?” Annie said. “She’s probably in the Casa del Mayordomo, in her room. But what makes you think she would know anything? She’s just-”
“It was Josefa to whom this man willed your beautiful Hacienda, and not his brother, or his brother-in-law, or his niece, or the wife to whom he left everything else. Don’t you find this curious?”
“Well, she’s supposed to be some kind of distant aunt on my mother’s side,” Jamie said.
“Perhaps that’s it,” he said, rising and pocketing the little tape recorder that had been on the table, “but I expect there’s something more to it than that.”BY the time Marmolejo returned half an hour later, considerable inroads had been made into the pastries, and Dorotea had come out with another pot of coffee. Gideon had explained about the drifter’s being Manolo and answered, or tried to answer, a host of questions, but the overall mood was still one of dazed befuddlement.
Colonel Marmolejo, looking well satisfied with himself, took his former chair, daintily ate a cinnamon cookie, ate another cinnamon cookie, and poured himself some coffee.
“Excellent pastries,” he said. “So light, so fresh.”
“Now who’s being tantalizing?” Annie said. “Come on, Colonel, spill the damn beans. What did she tell you?”
Marmolejo, who found Annie amusing, laughed and wiped his fingers on a napkin. “The name Brax-it’s familiar to you?”
“Brax… Brax…” said Annie, frowning. “Yes, it is, but…”
Gideon had the same reaction. Yes, it is familiar, but…
“Josefa was unable to remember his last name,” Marmolejo said. “Something like Stevenson or Halbersam…”
Oddly enough, it was Gideon who got there first. “Faversham!” he exclaimed. “Braxton Pontleby Faversham- Carl, wasn’t that the name of the guy who Tony was going to replace you with back then, but never did? We were just talking about it the other morning.”
“That’s right,” Carl said, and Annie nodded along with him. “Braxton Pontleby Faversham.”
“Well, what about Braxton Pontleby Faversham?” Annie demanded.
“That’s who the person you’ve been calling Tony for thirty years was,” Marmolejo replied. “Braxton Faversham.”IT had taken very little effort to get the details out of Josefa-who was not exactly who they thought she was either, although Josefa really was her name. At first she had tried to stick to the cooked-up tale that she was Tony’s (and Jamie’s) aunt by marriage, the widowed wife of the brother of their mother Beatriz, but she had quickly gotten herself flummoxed in a maze of evasions and prevarications. And then the real story, as much of the real story as she knew, came tumbling out. In 1979 she had been a prostitute in Oaxaca “A prostitute!” Annie cried, delighted. “Our stodgy old Josefa, stumping around the place in her sensible shoes? Is that a hoot, or what? Can you just picture her-”
“Annie…” Carl said darkly.
“Oops, never mind,” Annie said.
Josefa had been thirty-eight in 1979, old for a hooker, even in Oaxaca, and she was facing a dismal future. Already she’d been reduced to street pickups of drunks and kids, when she’d run into Brax outside a bar. He was almost penniless, but charming enough-a real American cowboy-to talk her into putting him up for a couple of weeks in her fifty-peso-a-night room, in addition to providing him with her customary services. Both of them outcasts, they’d become close and Brax had admitted to her that he’d been released a month earlier from the Reclusorio Oriente prison in Mexico City, where he’d served five years on multiple petty crime charges, and was in Oaxaca waiting for his friend Tony Gallagher, who had been let out only a couple of days earlier. They had met as inmates a year earlier and had become friends, two lost gringos in a Mexican hellhole.
But things were about to change, Brax said. Tony had learned that his father, who owned a horse ranch near Teotitlan del Valle, had died a year earlier. He had left the property to Tony, so despite knowing next to nothing about ranching and not having been anywhere near Teotitlan for almost ten years, Tony was coming to take it over. And his best pal Brax, who had grown up on a horse ranch in Oregon, was going to manage the place for him. It was a chance at a new life, a wonderful opportunity for Brax, who couldn’t return to the United States because he was wanted for failure to pay child support. According to Josefa, he had pleaded with her to marry him and come live with him on the ranch, but desperate as she was, she had refused; she was almost fifteen years older than he was, and in any case, she knew marriage wasn’t for her.
“Do you suppose that part’s really true?” Julie asked. “About his wanting to marry her?”
“I don’t know,” Marmolejo said. “I have no doubt that at this moment she believes it.”
“Now is that weird or what?” Annie said. “Can you imagine Josefa married to Tony?”
“To Braxton Faversham, actually,” Jamie pointed out.
“That’s right, I’m still trying to get my head around that. I keep forgetting that I never even met Tony Gallagher.”
“Interestingly enough,” said Marmolejo, “Josefa did. But she despised him on sight. ‘Un hombre brutal,’ she called him. She also said-” (and this he accompanied with a deferential bow in Gideon’s direction) “-that he had horrible breath, horrible, rotten teeth.”
“That he did.” Gideon had his palm resting on the skull. “You’re lookin’ at ’em now.”
“She knew the ranch hand, Manolo Garcia, as well,” Marmolejo continued. “He had just been fired from the ranch, and his jaw was wired shut, and he had no place to go, so on Brax’s urging, she allowed him to use her room for a few days too, even though she was frightened of him-another rufian, just like Tony. He and Faversham talked and talked over bottles of tequila, secretive discussions from which she was excluded. And then, one day, to her delight, Manolo was gone, and so was Tony. They had vanished.”
“Killed,” Carl murmured. “By Faversham.”
“It would seem so, yes.” Marmolejo paused to slowly consume another cookie, anise this time, and to collect his thoughts before continuing.
Whether Faversham had planned it all ahead of time, or had come up with the idea in Oaxaca, Marmolejo was unable to say, but somewhere along the line he had formed an audacious new plan. He had learned a great deal about the ranch and about the Gallaghers from Tony during their years in prison. And Tony himself, after all,
