of Christ with his mother. There was a series showing the stations of the cross. Many of processions. And eight pictures in sequence of the same crucifixion. They looked like they were hastily shot, the frames not well composed, some of them askew. They were taken from a considerable distance-probably in secret, from behind a rock-and then seized later. A few onlookers, also dressed in black, appeared in several of this series, tiny and hard to make out. I scanned these. Then I saw the face.
It was a face I had seen in countless photographs, a face that, surprisingly, had remained very similar over the years.
I quickly began to unpack La Arca again. I removed the cuaderno-and the rosaries and silver cross-looking for what was beneath them. There! I picked up the cloth-bound ledger and scanned the most recent dates. I found what I was looking for:
“Kerry, get ready, okay? I have to go.” I carefully restored to La Arca all her treasures. All but one.
37
I asked Kerry and Jerry Padilla to wait at the bottom of the drive. “Promise me you’ll wait here for my signal.”
“I don’t feel right about it, Jamaica,” Padilla said. “How do I know you’ll be safe?”
I pulled my Sig Sauer pistol from its holster. I held it up to the deputy and raised my eyebrows at him. Then I tucked the pistol into one big pocket of my jacket, the photo into another. I patted my gun pocket. “I don’t think I’ll need this, but just to reassure you…”
I walked up Regan’s drive. The Toyota was in the garage. I went to the house and looked in the windows. No sign of life. I peered up the path to the casita. The Land Rover was not there, of course. There were big boot prints in the drifts leading from the rear
I could hear her voice as I approached. She was crying and groaning and singing under her breath, all at the same time. I came up the high side of the rocks and looked down at her back, her head draped in a black lace mantilla, which settled in folds onto her thick sweater. She was wearing some kind of soft pants and the same unlaced boots she always wore around the place. “Regan,” I said, my voice firm.
She turned around slowly. Before her, on the shrine, lay the rosary I had found by the corral-the one with the crucifix with the name
“He’s dead, isn’t he?” she asked.
“Andy? Yes. He tried to kill me.”
At this, she broke into a full-throated cry, “Ah-h-h-hhhh! My little Antonio! My baby brother! Look what they’ve done! Look what they’ve done!”
“Regan, I want you to come with me,” I said. I stepped aside, motioning her toward the path that passed by the rocks. She didn’t move.
“First they killed my father,” she said, shaking her head, the mantilla edging back off the crown of her head and sliding down her hair. “Now, little Antonio!” She began whining, as a nervous dog might.
“Your father was Arturo Vigil. Is that right?”
“Yes.”
“You saw him crucified, didn’t you? That wasn’t just some daring adventure you and your friend took, like that story you told me.”
“Yes!” she screamed. “Yes, I saw it happen! I was there! They tried to keep us at a distance. I didn’t know for sure that it was my father, but I found out the next day. They killed him! They killed him, and they killed my mother, too! She died of a broken heart within the year. No one would do anything about it. No one would even investigate it. I tried to talk to everyone, but no one would listen to me-I was a child!” As Regan’s facade-her tightly controlled persona-ruptured, and the terrible truth she had been concealing spilled out, it seemed to be taking her substance with it. Her large, bony frame and lean, sinewy flesh seemed more pronounced, as if she were slowly desiccating, becoming a skeleton. Her face was skull-like, with the thin tissue of her amber skin stretching over a pronounced forehead and jaw. She tore each word off with her teeth. “Then, Antonio decided to get revenge. It made him crazy, you see. It made him crazy! He was just a little boy, but the next year, he put the poison on the whips and two men died. It served them right-they killed our father!” Her voice was hysterical, breaking from low to high pitch, shaking. Her whole body was trembling.
“They held a council. They agreed to suppress the crime from the authorities, but made Andy go away; that was his punishment. He was supposed to go away and never come back. Our
“I want you to come with me now, Regan,” I said again, and I stepped back to offer her room to move onto the path.
She looked at me with pleading eyes. “It wasn’t supposed to happen like this, Jamaica. It wasn’t supposed to start all over again. Andy said he was just coming back to buy the icons. He said he could sell them and make a lot of money. It was a way of making them pay-you see? For what they did to him, to us. But once he was here, he said he had to find out where they buried him,” she said, looking back at the shrine. “He said he just wanted to know where our father was buried. I always knew it was here, at this shrine. But Andy said we had to find out for sure, to be absolutely certain it was here. He said the answer would be in La Arca. But that’s not really why he wanted it. Antonio still wanted revenge.”
Again, Regan looked at me. Her face looked like that of the girl child in the photograph I had brought in my pocket-a face full of horror and bewilderment and helpless vulnerability. Her eyes seemed to be looking to me for the answer to some unspoken question.
I had a question of my own. “Father Ignacio came here, didn’t he?”
“Yes.” She looked away and began to cry. “I had been cleaning my horse’s hooves,” she said softly. “I noticed there was a car parked down by the bridge. I knew I had another trespasser, so I came up to run him off. He was kneeling right there.” She pointed a long finger at the altar and looked as if she were watching the scene play out before her eyes. “He told me that he saw some sketch of yours or something and knew the shrine was being tended. He brought our father’s rosary.” Regan picked up the rosary and held it up to show me. “When I saw this, I was so furious, I took the farrier’s knife, and I stabbed him!”
“But why? What did Father Ignacio ever do to you?”
Regan’s voice trembled. “I thought I had put it all behind me, Jamaica. I thought I had closed the book on all that. But when Andy came back here, it reminded me of it again-of what they did to us, to our father, our mother. And Ignacio Medina, he used to be Andy’s playmate at school when we were children. How could he dare to show his face here at our father’s grave? He was trying to keep Los Penitentes alive! He even became one himself!” She shrieked, “I want them all gone, history!” She waved one arm wildly out to the side, as if to erase their memory. “That is why I was telling you all the terrible things they did. I thought you would tell the truth about them in your book. I thought, ‘Here is someone who will write about the foolishness, the horror, the brutality of their ways. Someone who is not bewitched by their archaic superstitions.’ ”
“But why did you crucify Father Ignacio?”
“That was Andy. Antonio went wild. He wanted to get the police to think it was the Penitentes that killed him. He wanted justice for our father!” She started sobbing.
“So he took the body somewhere and tied it on a cross?” I asked.
“He didn’t have to take it anywhere,” she said. “This place was the morada where our father was killed. But after Antonio’s…” Her voice trailed off.
“Yes, soon after that, they closed this morada. They said it was stained by what he had done and couldn’t be
