made pure again. Most of the Hermanos went to Boscaje. That’s where they took all the icons from here, and they left this place untended, forgotten, like junk they could throw away!” She gnashed her teeth as she spoke. “Andy wanted them to have to leave Boscaje, too, to drive them out of existence. He wanted to destroy La Arca like they destroyed our family.” Her face reddened, and tears began to stream down her face. She looked right into my eyes. “Andy wanted to kill you from the beginning, Jamaica! But I wouldn’t let him. I protected you. He was afraid when you found our father’s rosary, with all your research, that somehow you would find out.”
“You mean the day I first met him here? The day after you threw Father Ignacio over the bridge?” I asked.
She didn’t even blink at my mention of the incident at the bridge. She seemed caught up in her own replay of events. “Yes. He was sure you knew something.” The long strand of carved beads dangled back and forth in front of her body like a pendulum. “He even tried to find you after that, to find out what you knew. But when you came here after mass, it was obvious you didn’t know anything or you would have…”
She stopped talking for a moment and watched the beads swing back and forth. Then she began speaking again, forcing the words through tightly clenched teeth. “But that little thief Suazo! He was making plenty of money on those icons! But then he told us you almost caught him when he was photographing the Boscaje processions. And he said he lost the pictures he took, and maybe you found them. And then we saw Suazo with you…” She looked at me now, and her eyes looked clear and bright, as if what she were about to say was simple and obvious. “Well, we had to kill him. It never would have ended. You know how Suazo was.” There was a strange, mad certainty in her expression.
“Regan, I want you to come down the hill with me now.” This time I stepped forward, reaching for her arm.
“All right, Jamaica, I’ll come.” Her voice was suddenly childlike. “I know it’s over. I’m glad it’s over, I really am. I’ll come. Just let me pay my last respects to my father, would you, dear?”
I stood for a moment pondering all the possibilities. She wasn’t armed. She couldn’t get far in those floppy boots. I couldn’t see what it would hurt. “Okay.” I stepped back. “I’ll let you have a few minutes. I’ll meet you down at the house.” I turned to walk down the slope.
I had just begun picking my way over some snow-covered rocks when I felt the movement behind me. I whirled around to see Regan poised in midair like a hawk about to light on its prey. My eye caught the glimmer of a slender sliver of silver, and then I recognized the farrier’s blade she held raised in one hand as she made to plunge it into my back. The crucifix dangled from her other hand, the wooden beads swinging wildly. I lunged to the side to avoid her stab, and she wobbled briefly, then regained her balance and raised the knife again. This time, I caught her arm on the way down and felt the knife blade rip the shoulder of my coat as it went past. We struggled. Regan’s face was molded into tight ropes of corded flesh and muscle, so that it seemed a drape of skin had been pulled over her skull when wet and then dried into hard ridges. She was surprisingly strong, and her stance above me gave me a disadvantage. Her knife arm began to tremble violently, but I was losing my grip and my balance. The thick cotton strands of her sweater were all I could hold on to, and I dug my fingers into the woven spaces. The fibers began to stretch, I was still tottering, off balance, and then a hole opened up in the sleeve of her garment and Regan’s powerful shaking arm flew up, free of my grip. She curved her weapon down again toward me just as her hand reached the top of its flight.
I felt myself falling, so I grabbed for her, seizing her sweater with both hands-this time about the chest-and I pulled her over with me, on top of me, as I fell back and down the slope. In a kind of terrifying slow-motion pas de deux, we tumbled over and over, first me above Regan, then her above me, her mouth open in a perfect oval of surprise, the knife still clutched firmly in her hand, the tight cords in her neck giving way to slack skin and her expression moving from madness and anger to shock and fear. All this as we tumbled, still wrestling, my hands moving from her sweater to the ground to her arms above me to the ground again, my chest crashing into hers, then hers into mine, the two of us like a lopsided wheel bumping and collapsing down the incline, when finally we slid into a shallow level place and Regan was on top of me scrambling to gain her balance and strike again with the knife. I scrambled, too, and, failing to wiggle free as she sat on my hips, I could only roll to the side as the knife came down. “Regan, stop! Why are you doing this?”
She didn’t answer but drew back again, her weight still pinning me to the ground. My head was out over the edge, unsupported-and my neck strained to keep it from falling back. I reached for Regan’s arms but gravity gave her the advantage and the knife came down again, this time catching the top of my shoulder as it plunged into the ground beneath my left ear. I felt a searing pang shoot through my trapezius and up the side of my neck. Regan’s weight was full on me, and I shoved against her as she drew the knife back again and struggled upright. A stab of pain went down my left arm and I felt it weaken, felt the muscle tearing and the warm, wet blood pooling under my upper back. Once again, she raised the knife, but this time she pushed my right shoulder down with her free hand, to prevent me from rolling out of the blade’s path. Her face was a white mask with hollow eyes-nothing human, nothing of Regan there.
As the gleam of silver began to arc toward me, I could see in my peripheral vision the wooden beads from the rosary that she held against my right shoulder, and the carved form of the crucified body on the cross in the snow beside my neck. I closed my eyes for an instant, then opened them and did what I had to do.
I felt a rush of grief as I thrust my hand into the pocket of my jacket and pulled the trigger. I heard the bullet make a dull, wet connection just a split second after the muffled blast, felt a spray of moisture hit my face. In the center of Regan’s forehead, where a smudge of ashes had marked her just weeks before, a dark circle marked where the bullet had entered. On her face, a frozen look of disbelief. And then, lifeless as a rag doll, in what seemed like slow motion, she toppled forward and rolled past me down the hill, the tongues of her boots flapping at the snow as she went.
I turned over, my shoulder throbbing, and raised myself up. I looked at the pocket of my coat, singed with smoke and eaten through by the shot. I looked down the hill. At the bottom of the slope, Kerry and Jerry Padilla were already rushing toward me, their guns at the ready.
38
Before coming home to my cabin, after the paramedics had dressed my wound, I delivered La Arca to Tecolote for safe return to the Penitentes. Once I had seen the old cuaderno and the other treasures inside the ark, I realized that I didn’t need to preserve the fading history of the Penitentes-they had done so themselves, reverently, but privately. And some things were meant to remain private, even held in secret. Esperanza smiled with approval when I placed my book inside the box, its deerskin cover looking strangely new by comparison with the other treasures, in spite of all that my book had been through. I felt a small pang of sadness as I took my hand away.
Oddly enough, I had more difficulty returning the photograph I had put in my pocket before going to see Regan than I did giving La Arca my book. I studied the snapshot carefully before giving it back, something drawing me to look at it again and again. In faded black and white, it had captured Regan as a youth, dressed in black, clutching the hand of a small boy, their faces wide with horror as they watched five men in the distance struggle to raise the cross on which their father hung. The image troubled me in the way that something does when I’m about to receive an important life lesson. I told Tecolote as much, but she only smiled and nodded her head.
It was certain from what Regan had told me, and from the evidence in the shed at the Suazo place, that Santiago Suazo had been stealing icons for Andy Vincent. Investigators at the scene uncovered Santiago Suazo’s body, along with the nag Regan had put down, in the pit grave dug by her unsuspecting neighbors. And they found the bullet-scarred white Ford Ranger and an old beat-up cargo van locked in Regan’s barn, both registered to Regan and bearing New Mexico plates. I had to assume that Andy was almost certainly the one who had tried to wipe me out at Bennie’s, too, but hit Nora instead.
The next day, I was nursing the wound in my shoulder and the confusion in my mind by sitting in my big chair in my cabin with a cup of tea, trying to figure out how to occupy myself for the next month while I was on medical leave. I was surprised when I heard the sound of a vehicle coming up the drive. Eyeing the nightstand where I had
