“There was an epidemic, though,” Noemí pointed out.
“Sure. But people who saw the body said his face looked awful. You’ve heard about people dying of fright? Well, they said he died of fright. That his eyes were bulging and his mouth was open and he looked like a man who’s seen the devil. It scared everyone good, and it also ended the strike.”
Francis had mentioned strikes and the closure of the mine, but Noemí had not thought to ask him more about them. Perhaps she should remedy that, but for now she focused her attention on Marta.
“You said that Aurelio was connected to Benito, though. Who was that?”
“Patience, girl, you’ll make me lose my train of thought. At my age, it’s no easy thing to try and remember what was when and how it happened.” Marta took several long sips of her coffee before speaking. “Where was I? Oh, yes. The mine went on. Doyle had remarried and eventually his new wife gave birth to a girl, Miss Ruth, and many years later a baby boy. Doyle’s brother, Mr. Leland, he also had children. A boy and a girl. The boy was engaged to Miss Ruth.”
“Kissing cousins, again,” Noemí said, disturbed by this notion. The Habsburg jaw was a more apt comparison than she’d thought, and things had not ended well for the Habsburgs.
“Not much kissing, I think. That was the problem. That is where Benito comes in. He was a nephew of Aurelio and went to work in the house. This was years after the strike, so I suppose it’s not like Doyle cared that he was related to Aurelio. Or a dead miner didn’t matter to him none, or else he didn’t know. In any case, he worked in the house, tending to the plants. By that time instead of a garden the Doyles had settled on a greenhouse.
“Benito had a lot in common with his dead uncle. He was smart, he was funny, and he didn’t know how to keep out of trouble. His uncle had organized a strike, and he did an even more horrifying thing: he fell in love with Miss Ruth and she fell in love with him.”
“I can’t imagine her father was pleased,” Noemí said.
He’d probably given his daughter the eugenics talk. Superior and inferior specimens. She pictured him by the fireplace in his room admonishing the girl, and she with her eyes fixed on the floor. Poor Benito had not stood a chance. It was funny, though, that if Doyle was truly that interested in eugenics he’d insist on all these marriages to close relations. Maybe he was imitating Darwin, who’d also married within his family.
“They say when he found out he almost killed her,” Marta muttered.
Now she pictured Howard Doyle wrapping his fingers around the girl’s slim neck. Strong fingers, digging deep, pressing hard, and the girl incapable of even uttering a protest because she couldn’t breathe.Papa, don’t. It was such a vivid image that Noemí had to close her eyes for a moment, gripping the table with one hand.
“Are you all right?” Marta asked.
“Yes,” Noemí said, opening her eyes and nodding at the woman. “I’m fine. A little tired.”
She raised the cup of coffee to her lips and drank. The warm liquid was pleasant in its bitterness. Noemí set the cup down. “Please, go on,” she said.
“There’s not much more to say. Ruth was punished, Benito vanished.”
“He was killed?”
The old woman leaned forward, her cloudy eyes fixed on Noemí. “Even worse: disappeared, from one day to the next. Folks said he’d run off because he was afraid of what Doyle would do to him, but others said Doyle had done the disappearing.
“Ruth was supposed to get married that summer to Michael, that cousin of hers, and Benito’s disappearance didn’t change that one bit. Nothing would have changed that. It was the middle of the Revolution, and the upheaval meant the mine was operating with a small crew, but it was still operating. Someone had to keep the machinery going, pumping the water out, or it would flood. It rains so much here.
“And up at the house, someone had to keep changing the linens and dusting the furniture, so in many ways I guess things hadn’t changed over a war, so why would they change over a missing man? Howard Doyle ordered trinkets for the wedding, acting as though nothing was amiss. As though Benito’s disappearance didn’t matter. Well, it must have mattered to Ruth.
“None can be sure what happened, but they said she put a sleeping draught in their food. I don’t know where she got it from. She was clever, she knew many things about plants and medicine, so it could be she mixed the draught herself. Or perhaps her lover had procured it for her. Maybe in the beginning she had thought to put them to sleep and run away, but afterward she changed her mind. Once Benito disappeared. She shot her father while he slept, because of what he’d done to her lover.”
“But not just her father,” Noemí said. “She shot her mother and the others. If she was avenging her dead lover, wouldn’t she have only shot her father? What did the others have to do with that?”
“Maybe she thought they were also guilty. Maybe she’d gone mad. We can’t know. They’re cursed, I tell you, and that house is haunted. You’re very silly or very brave living in a haunted house.”
I’m not sorry, that’s what the Ruth in her dream had said. Had Ruth been remorseless as she wandered through the house and delivered a bullet to her kinfolk? Just because Noemí had dreamed it, it didn’t mean it had happened that way. After all, in her nightmare the house had been distorted and mutated in impossible ways.
Noemí frowned, looking at her cup of coffee. She’d taken few sips. Her stomach was definitely not cooperating that morning.
“Trouble is there’s not much you can do about ghosts nor hauntings. You might burn a candle at night for them and maybe they’d like that. You know about the mal de aire? Your mama ever tell you about that in the city?”
“I’ve heard one thing or another,” she said. “It’s supposed to make you sick.”
“There’re heavy places. Places where the air itself is heavy because an evil weighs it down. Sometimes it’s a death, could be it’s something else, but the bad air, it’ll get into your body and it’ll nestle there and weigh you down. That’s what’s wrong with the Doyles of High Place,” the woman said, concluding her tale.
Like feeding an animal madder plants: it dyes the bones red, it stains everything inside crimson,she thought.
Marta Duval rose and began opening kitchen drawers. She grabbed a beaded bracelet and brought it back to the table, handing it to Noemí. It had tiny blue and white glass beads, and a larger blue bead with a black center.
