As I watched her stumble towards us, her sunken eyes fixed on the bloody mess on the ground in our midst, I realised that the sounds and smells of sweeping and cooking that normally echoed around an Aztec courtyard at daybreak had not been there this morning. Goose had not risen to do her customary tasks. She seemed to have forgotten about them.
We men watched her in stupefied horror, appalled at the change that had come over this woman. It was Lily who reacted, pushing me and Spotted Eagle aside and running to her side. ‘What is it?’ she cried, unthinkingly stretching her bandaged hands towards her. ‘What’s the matter?’
Goose stared blankly at her.
‘Yaotl!’ my mistress snapped, ‘stop staring at us like a five year-old watching his parents on their sleeping mat! Come and help!’
Torn from my reverie, I stepped over to them, taking Goose’s unresisting arm in mine. ‘We must go into the house,’ Lily told her firmly. ‘There’s food to prepare. Your children will be hungry.’
We led the stumbling, snuffling woman back into Handy’s courtyard. Handy, Kite and Spotted Eagle were left to follow.
2
Goose kept apologising. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. It was the shock, seeing him there. At first I thought...’ The words tailed off into a series of dry sobs.
Lily had made her sit against a wall in Handy’s courtyard, ordering me to lower her gently to the ground under the astonished gaze of her children, nieces and nephews. The youngsters had not been allowed to stand and stare for long, because my mistress had orders for them too. She set the boys to sweeping, ignoring their protests at being given women’s work, while the girls were told to make the tortillas. Finally she sent Handy indoors to make sure nobody spilled any hot coals or kicked over a hearthstone, which would be the worst kind of bad luck.
As the household bustled into life around us, Lily said gently: ‘You thought it was your husband?’
Goose wiped her eyes with the knuckles of one hand. ‘Until I saw him.’
‘You’re sure it wasn’t him?’ I asked. ‘How can you know?’
‘I just know. Even after what’s been done to him, there’s no way that could be Flower Gatherer.’ She let out a sound that was something between a moan and a wail. ‘I was doing so well, until then, wasn’t I? I knew someone had to keep it all together, and it had to be a woman, and with Star gone, that left me. Lily, you understand, don’t you? I got so tired!’ I remembered how she had been the day before, prostrated upon the floor while her parents and her brother-in-law argued around her.
‘I know,’ Lily confirmed, with the authority of a woman who, at various times, had lost her husband and her son and seen her father degenerate into an idle, drunken old reprobate. ‘I know how hard it is.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Goose mumbled once more. ‘I should be stronger.’
‘Can we get anyone to help?’ Kite asked. The policeman had been hovering awkwardly nearby, having apparently run out of useful things to do after sending Spotted Eagle back to the parish hall to summon assistance removing the body from outside the house.
Lily said: ‘Could someone fetch your parents? Your mother...’
‘No!’ Goose cried vehemently. ‘You can’t ask my mother. She’d bring my father, and then there's sure to be a fight.’
‘Over what?’
Goose frowned at Lily, as though unsure whether the question was a serious one. She forgot momentarily that my mistress had not seen or heard the clashes between Handy and Jaguar. Hastily, I tried to explain: ‘Goose’s father seems to blame Handy for what happened to Star. I got the idea they don’t exactly see eye-to-eye on a lot of things.’
‘My father didn’t care much for either of our husbands – mine or my sister’s. Hers especially.’ She gave a watery smile. ‘Odd, isn’t it? Star made a better marriage that I did. Flower Gatherer was never anything but a labourer. Handy was a warrior – for a time, anyway. But I suppose they thought they’d made a mistake with him. They knew she could have done better.’
‘How?’ I asked.
For some reason the question seemed to confuse her. Her face, that had been pale, darkened, and she looked away. ‘I don’t know,’ she muttered, almost inaudibly. ‘Maybe she ought to have married a rich merchant.’
Lily, the daughter and widow of merchants, laughed shortly. ‘Believe me, girl, she was better off as she was!’
‘I don’t understand, though,’ I said. ‘Last night they were arguing about Red Macaw. And this big secret that Jaguar was about to blurt out before your mother stopped him.’
Kite groaned and rolled his eyes. ‘Oh, that!’
‘Yes, that.’ Goose’s tone was earnest. She leaned forward, looking imploringly at the policeman. ‘You know we can’t talk about it. You know we can’t even say why, Kite. And you know we trust you.’
He turned to me and Lily with an apologetic sigh. ‘True enough. One of the first things you learn as a parish policeman is what questions not to ask!’
Avoiding Goose’s reproachful eyes, I said: ‘But it’s different now, surely? Red Macaw’s disappeared, Flower Gatherer’s disappeared, you’ve got monsters and what not tearing up the place and two unidentified corpses. Not to mention the theft of a woman’s body. Now when you know there’s a long-standing quarrel between one of your vanished men and the dead woman’s husband, how can you tell us you don’t want to know what it’s about?’
For the first time since I had met him, Kite looked ill at ease. ‘I didn’t say I don’t want to know,’ he said defensively, ‘but you’ve got to understand – I have to look after these people, but I’ve got to live among them too.’
‘Why don’t you ask his mother?’
We all three turned
