been partially stripped, leaving a patchwork of metal and cedar beam.
Barrera hesitated in the doorway.
He didn’t need to explain why. The place radiated a quiet malevolence.
Inside were three empty rooms, a fireplace, a doorway in back that probably led to the kitchen. A mildewed watercolor of a fly fisherman hung crooked over the mantel. Most of the living room floor had been stripped to beams, revealing a cellar below. That was unusual in a Texas house. In most parts of the state, the winters were too mild, the soil too close to bedrock to make a cellar practical.
Barrera stepped carefully across rotten floorboards toward a set of descending stairs. I’d never been a fan of underground, but I followed him down.
The back half of the cellar was stacked with building materials-slabs of Sheetrock and plywood, buckets of paint and caulking, all covered in plastic tarp, tied off with bungee cords. The stuff looked like it had been there for a while. The tarp was tattered, pools of rainwater crusting in the folds. Rats, or maybe cockroaches, had been chewing the labels off the paint cans.
Two black iron hooks protruded from the wall.
The limestone bore stains like rust or moss, but the streaks suggested spray patterns. I’d seen walls like that before-in a Hill Country abattoir that had served generations of deer hunters.
“The table was here,” Barrera said.
He stood in the center of the room, holding his palms out as if warming them over a fire. “McCurdy thought the room was soundproof. But up in the cells, they could hear the screaming.”
A raindrop hit my face. I looked up through the open squares in the roof. I reminded myself I was just ten easy steps to the surface. The floor beams above me were not prison bars.
I thought about the businessman who had bought this place after McCurdy’s suicide. I imagined his optimism as he started tearing up the house-thinking he’d gotten an incredible deal. This load of building materials would fix up the place, make it new and clean again.
I understood now why he’d never finished the job, why the materials were still sitting here unused and the ranch would eventually revert to the bank.
“Stirman knew what would happen to these women?” I asked.
Barrera picked up a small piece of metal, a broken link from a chain. “Stirman wouldn’t have cared.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
Barrera slipped the link of chain into his pocket. “Come on. Gloria will be waiting.”
He led me back outside, down toward the river. Under the cypress trees stood half a dozen cinder block sheds and a small cabin. The smaller structures might have been kennels. Each had a metal gate. In the center of each cement floor was an iron ring, where you might attach an animal’s chain.
Then I noticed the lidless steel toilets.
Barrera didn’t say anything. I didn’t ask.
After almost a decade, a cold acrid smell still hung in the air. Human misery, like old bloodstains, is hard to wash away.
The little cabin at the end was so different from the cells that it took a moment for me to realize it was part of the same row of buildings. Two cinder block cells had been built together, expanded, treated with stucco and painted dark gold. Rust-colored curtains trimmed the windows. Statues of saints lined the roof. River rocks marked off a little garden filled with oregano and mint. It could have been any dwelling on San Antonio’s West Side-poor but cozy, proud of its eccentricity.
Barrera knocked. The plywood door rattled in its frame.
The woman who opened it was probably no more than fifty-five, but her frayed white hair made her look decades older. Her face was deeply etched, her eyes milky. Her determined expression, and the shotgun held loosely across her waist, made her look as if she’d just charged the throne of God and been blasted by divine light. She was obviously blind.
She said, “ Senor Barrera.”
How she knew without seeing him, I wasn’t sure. Perhaps Barrera’s cologne was the not-too-subtle giveaway. She turned toward me, angling the shotgun in the general direction of my chest.
“?Quien es el gringo?”
I hadn’t moved or spoken, but she knew I was there. She knew I was male, and Anglo.
“We came to check on you,” Barrera said in Spanish. “This is a friend of Fred Barrow’s.”
I wasn’t sure why he introduced me that way, but the woman took her finger off the trigger, lowered the barrel.
“They want me to leave because of some rain,” she said. “I had to fire a warning shot at the deputy. Come in. I’ll make coffee.”
Inside, the tiny living room was painted cornflower blue, hung with dried garlic and chili ristras. On the stereo turntable, Lydia Mendoza sang “Dos Corazones,” her heartache cutting straight through the scratch and hiss of the old vinyl.
There was no air-conditioning. The windows let in a breeze from the river. The curtains were dappled with raindrops. With the shade of the cypresses, the room felt just warm enough for a nap.
Barrera kept speaking to Gloria in Spanish, simple questions-was she getting enough to eat? Did the locals bother her?
Gloria heated water in a pan on a gas stove. She knew exactly where to find her extra cups, her tin of instant coffee, her spoons.
“Does your friend speak Spanish, Senor Barrera?” she asked.
I said, “Si, senora.”
She turned to face me-a moment of adjustment as she let me into her linguistic world.
“Ya lo veo,” she said. “Then please tell Mr. Barrow I pray for him.”
I looked at Sam, who seemed to see nothing unusual in the request.
“ Senora Paz,” I said, “Will Stirman escaped from jail. One of the men who testified against him has been murdered.”
She poured boiling water into each cup. “You came all this way to tell me? I am sorry to have troubled you.”
“But, senora…”
An electronic riff of Mozart collided with Lydia Mendoza’s song. The new music was coming from Sam Barrera’s pocket.
Barrera frowned, fished out his phone. I was surprised he could even get a signal out here.
He said, “Yes?”
A moment of listening. He paled. “Alicia, I’m in Castroville… Of course I told you.”
He took the phone away from his ear, looked at us with embarrassment. “Excuse me.”
He took his call outside, leaving me alone with Gloria Paz.
“Would you like milk?” she asked. “It is goat’s milk.”
I glanced at the tin of Folgers Crystals on the stovetop. Plain, or with goat’s milk. The kind of rock-and-a- hard-place decision tough PIs must face. “Why not?”
She brought over a tray, sat next to me on the sofa. She passed me the blue metal cup. Her hands were rough and warm.
“ Senora Paz,” I said, “you realize you’re in danger?”
“No, senor. I am done with fear.”
This blind, prematurely aged woman, alone on a ranch, with the dam upriver about to burst and a killer on the loose, was telling me she had nothing to fear. The hell of it was, I believed her.
Her tone was confident, oddly familiar, though I was sure we’d never met.
“A warning shot won’t be enough,” I told her. “Not against Stirman.”
Her milky eyes seemed to stare past my shoulder, as if keeping tabs on an unruly spirit. “Con permiso.”
She reached out and touched my cheek. Her fingertips traced my jaw, my nose, my lips. “An honest face. Like Mr. Barrow’s.”
Erainya had used many adjectives to describe her late husband. Honest was not one of them.
“I’m not his friend, senora, ” I said. “Just a friend of the family.”
