Francis ran a hand through his fair hair. “It’s not that. The family is very particular about the cars.”
“And I’m very particular about driving on my own. Surely I don’t need a chaperone, and you’d make a terrible chaperone, anyway.”
“How so?”
“Who ever heard of a man playing chaperone? You need an insufferable aunt. I can lend you one of mine for a weekend if you’d like. It’ll cost you a car. Will you help me, please? I’m desperate.”
He chuckled as she steered him outside. He picked up the car keys hanging from a hook in the kitchen. Lizzie, one of the maids, was rolling bread upon a floured table. She did not acknowledge either Noemí or Francis even one bit. The staff at High Place was almost invisible, like in one of Catalina’s fairy tales.Beauty and the Beast, that had been it, had it not? Invisible servants who cooked the meals and laid down the silverware. Ridiculous. Noemí knew all the people who worked in her house by name, and they certainly were not begrudged their chatter. That she even knew the names of the staff at High Place seemed a small miracle, but she’d asked Francis, and Francis had obligingly introduced them: Lizzie, Mary, and Charles, who, like the porcelain locked in the cabinets, had been imported from England many decades ago.
They walked toward the shed, and he handed her the car keys. “You won’t get lost?” Francis asked, leaning against the car’s window and looking down at her.
“I can manage.”
True enough. It wasn’t as if one could even attempt to get lost. The road led up or down the mountain, and down she went, to the little town. She felt quite content during the drive and rolled her window open to enjoy the fresh mountain air. It wasn’t such a bad place, she thought, once you got out of the house. It was the house that disfigured the land.
Noemí parked the car by the town square, guessing both the post office and the medical clinic must be nearby. She was right and was quickly rewarded with the sight of a little green-and-white building that proclaimed itself the medical unit. Inside there were three green chairs and several posters explaining all matter of diseases. There was a receiving desk, but it was empty, and a closed door with a plaque on it and the doctor’s name in large letters.Julio Eusebio Camarillo, it said.
She sat down, and after a few minutes the door opened and out came a woman holding a toddler by the hand. Then the doctor poked his head through the doorway and nodded at her.
“Good day,” he said. “How can I help you?”
“I’m Noemí Taboada,” she said. “You are Dr. Camarillo?”
She had to ask because the man looked rather young. He was very dark and had short hair that he parted down the middle and a little mustache that did not really age him, managing to make him look a bit ridiculous, like a child mimicking a physician. He also wasn’t wearing a doctor’s white coat, just a beige-and-brown sweater.
“That’s me. Come in,” he said.
Inside his office, on the wall behind his desk, she indeed saw the certificate from the UNAM with his name in an elegant script. He also had an armoire, the doors thrown open, filled with pills, cotton swabs, and bottles. A large maguey lay in a corner in a yellow pot.
The doctor sat behind his desk and Noemí sat on a plastic chair, which matched the ones in the vestibule.
“I don’t think we’ve met before,” Dr. Camarillo said.
“I’m not from around here,” she said, placing her purse on her lap and leaning forward. “I’ve come to see my cousin. She’s sick, and I thought you might take a look at her. She has tuberculosis.”
“Tuberculosis? In El Triunfo?” the doctor asked, sounding quite astonished. “I hadn’t heard anything about that.”
“Not in El Triunfo proper. At High Place.”
“The Doyle house,” he said haltingly. “You are related to them?”
“No. Well, yes. By marriage. Virgil Doyle is married to my cousin Catalina. I was hoping you’d go check on her.”
The young doctor looked confused. “But wouldn’t Dr. Cummins be taking care of her? He’s their doctor.”
“I’d like a second opinion, I suppose,” she said and explained how strange Catalina seemed and her suspicions that she might require psychiatric attention.
Dr. Camarillo listened patiently to her. When she was done, he twirled a pencil between his fingers.
“The thing is, I’m not sure I’d be welcome at High Place if I showed up there. The Doyles have always had their own physician. They don’t mingle with the townsfolk,” he said. “When the mine was operational and they hired Mexican workers, they had them living at a camp up the mountain. Arthur Cummins senior also tended to them. There were several epidemics back when the mine was open, you know. Lots of miners died, and Cummins had his hands full, but he never requested local help. I don’t believe they think much of local physicians.”
“What sort of epidemic was it?”
He tapped his pencil’s eraser against his desk three times. “It wasn’t clear. A high fever, very tricky. People would say the oddest things, they’d rant and rave, they’d have convulsions, they’d attack each other. People would get sick, they’d die, then all would be well, and a few years later again the mystery illness would strike.”
“I’ve seen the English Cemetery,” Noemí said. “There are many graves.”
“That’s only the English people. You should see the local cemetery. They said that in the last epidemic, around the time the Revolution started, the Doyles didn’t even bother sending down the corpses for a proper burial. They tossed them in a pit.”
