“Tlichotl wasn’t much different. There was a mine near it, and just out of town was a bunch of drab new frame houses for the American engineers. Everybody in town worked in the mine—all pure Indians, with those chaste profiles straight off of the Aztec murals that begin to seem like the only right and normal human face when you’ve seen ’em long enough.
“I went to the doctor first. He was the government sanitation agent and health instructor, and the town looked like he was doing a good job. His English was better than my Spanish, and he was glad I liked tequila. Yes, he remembered Dr. Miller. He checked up his records and announced that Dr. M. died on November 2. It was January when I talked to him. Simple death: heart failure. He’d had several attacks in past weeks, and the doctor had expected him to go any day. All of a sudden a friend he hadn’t seen in years showed up in town unannounced, and the shock did it. Any little thing might have.
“The doctor wasn’t a stupid man, or a careless one. I was willing to take his word that the death had been natural. And maybe I ought to put in here, before your devious minds start getting ahead of me, that as far as I ever learned he was absolutely right. Common-or-garden heart failure, and that didn’t fit into any picture of insurance fraud. But there was still the inconsistency of the title, and I went on, ‘Must’ve been kind of nice for you to have a colleague here to talk with?’
“The doctor frowned a little at that. It seemed he’d been sort of hurt by Dr. Miller’s attitude. Had tried to interest him in some researches he was doing with an endemic variant of undulant fever, which he’d practically succeeded in wiping out. But the North American ‘doctor’ just didn’t give a damn. No fraternal spirit; no scientific curiosity; nothing.
“I gathered they hadn’t been very friendly, my doctor and ‘Dr.’ Miller. In fact, Miller hadn’t been intimate with anybody, not even the other North Americans at the mine. He liked the Indians and they liked him, though they were a little scared of him on account of the skeleton—apparently an anatomical specimen and the first thing I’d heard of to go with his assumed doctorate. He had a good short-wave radio, and he listened to music on that and sketched a little and read and went for short hikes. It sounded like a good life, if you like a lonely one. They might know a little more about him at the pulquena; he stopped there for a drink sometimes. And the widow Sanchez had kept house for him; she might know something.
“I tried the widow first. She wore a shapeless black dress that looked as though she’d started mourning Mr. Sanchez ten years before, but her youngest child wasn’t quite walking yet. She’d liked her late employer, might he rest in peace. He had been a good man, and so little trouble. No, he never gave medicine to anybody; that was the job of the senor medico from Mexico City. No, he never did anything with bottles. No, he never received much mail and surely not with money in it, for she had often seen him open his few letters. But yes, indeed he was a medico; did he not have the bones, the esqueleto, to prove it?
“And if the senor interested himself so much for el doctor Miller, perhaps the senor would care to see his house? It was untouched, as he’d left it. No one lived there now. No, it was not haunted—at least, not that anyone knew, though no man knows such things. It was only that no one new ever comes to live in Tlichotl, and an empty house stays empty.
“I looked the house over. It had two rooms and a kitchen and a tiny patio. ‘Dr.’ Miller’s things were undisturbed; no one had claimed them and it was up to time and heat and insects to take care of them. There was the radio and beside it the sketching materials. One wall was a bookcase, well filled, mostly with sixteenthand seventeenthcentury literature in English and Spanish. The books had been faithfully read. There were a few recent volumes, mostly on travel or on Mexican Indian culture, and a few magazines. No medical books or periodicals.
“Food, cooking utensils, clothing, a pile of sketches (good enough so you’d feel all right when you’d done them and bad enough so you wouldn’t feel urged to exhibit them), pipes and tobacco—these just about made up the inventory. No papers to speak of, just a few personal letters, mostly from his sister (and beneficiary). No instruments or medicines of any kind. Nothing whatsoever out of the way—not even the skeleton.
“I’d heard about that twice, so I asked what had become of it. The sons of the mining engineers, the young demons, had stolen it to celebrate a gringo holiday, which I gathered had been Halloween. They had built an enormous bonfire, and the skeleton had fallen in and been consumed. The doctor Miller had been very angry; he had suffered one of his attacks then, almost as bad as the one that gave him death, may the Lord hold him in His kindness. But now it was time for a mother to return and feed her brood; and her house was mine, and would the senor join in her poor supper?
“The beans were good and the tortillas wonderful; and the youngest children hadn’t ever seen red hair before and had some pointed questions to ask me about mine. And in the
