Page 16 of An Immaculate Deception

“Does Leandro have guests over often?” I ask.

She gives a slight noncommittal shrug.

I suppose she is loyal to her employer and doesn’t want to cause trouble for herself.

“Has anyone visited recently?” I pry, thinking of the lavender-rose room filled with jewels.

Her face scrunches up. “Just Doctor Lobo…oh, and the police inspector.”

“The police?” My brows go up. “Why did the police visit?”

She looks instantly nervous, as though she regrets sharing.

“I won’t tell Leandro about our conversation,” I say. “Why did the police inspector come?”

“I don’t know, Sinhá Madalena.”

“When did they—”

“I don’t know.”

She won’t meet my eyes. She turns away from me as though I’m a leper. Even for a loyal servant, her behavior strikes me as excessively guarded. Does she know something incriminating about Leandro?

It is good, I suppose, that there have been no lady guests. But the police visited? That is concerning in its own right.

We come to the top of a sloping hillside disturbed by rough, uneven shattered stones. The air is quiet, and the sky is dense and cloudy, as though pregnant with rain. A dozen gravestones jut out from the ground, shrouded in a thin fog and low-lying mist. The gravestones look like tombs from the sixth circle of Hell where heretics lie in flaming sepulchers. Their tomb covers are lifted halfway, only to be shut on Judgment Day. No holy words are spoken on such eerie land, where lie in unrest the spirits of the damned.

“Did you say something, Sinhá Madalena?”

“No.”

“You must not go that way”—Maria das Dores points downhill, toward the cluster of weathered gravestones—“that way it’s dangerous.”

“Is the Santa Tereza very old?”

She shoots me a tight look. “Yes. They say it was built at the beginning of the century.”

We pass guava trees and Maria das Dores says that she makes guava jam from scratch. She shows me a modestly sized stable with a solitary grazing horse and a demure old man laying out hay. I notice the weathered door at the lower level of the casa grande, with battered bolts on the outside. The senzala. She says nothing about it. This reminds me that I haven’t seen any mill workers walking about.

“Are the men in the senzala right now?”

“What?”

“The senzala.” I point to the doors. “Are the men in there?”

She traces my fingers and gapes at the senzala doors as though only just seeing them for the first time.

“No one’s in there.”

“Then where are the men?”

“What men?”

“The men fixing the mill, tending the fields…”

She shakes her head, looking as baffled as I feel.

“Maria das Dores,” I say slowly. “Are there no men at work here?”