Bill Pronzini: Beyond the Grave

To me, Felipe Velasquez had been a strange man. We were of the same culture, descended from the same people, but his attitude of hatred and superiority toward Anglos was something I couldn't fathom-even for those times. Of course I'd felt some resentment of Anglos in my lifetime; it hadn't been easy growing up in Santa Barbara, where even the poorest of them seemed to have so much; I still hurt when I remembered running home from school in tears because a classmate had taunted me about my mother cleaning her mother's house for a living. But hate Anglos? Feel inferior or superior to them? No. Maybe the difference between me and Felipe Velasquez-besides the obvious one of time and circumstances-was that I hadn't been raised to hate.

In spite of my sadness and disappointment over the outcome of Quincannon's case, I also felt an even greater excitement than before. In his informal notes, there had been more richness of detail, and he had indulged in a fair amount of speculation; it was as if he'd used these notes to order his thoughts before setting down the bare and still-confusing facts for the final time. Reading them, it was easy to sense Quincannon's anger and frustration.

The question of the whereabouts of those artifacts remained as nagging and tantalizing as when the case had begun. It was clear from Tomas Cordova's letter that they had been buried somewhere near Maria Alcazar's-Don Esteban's first wife's-grave, but her headstone had never been located, and the rancho's pueblo had been thoroughly searched by the family in the years after Fremont's troops had destroyed it, with no trace of the treasure ever turning up.

Where was the treasure, then, if not somewhere in the pueblo? Had it been taken away by Luis Cordova or his mother? No, there was absolutely no evidence of that. And-unlike Quincannon, who I assumed was not Catholic from the way he had phrased certain things in his report-I was not surprised that the Cordovas had not used the knowledge passed along in Tomas's letter or turned the information over to the Velasquez family. Shame would have prevented both actions. As described in the detective's words, Luis and his mother were extremely religious, the staunchest of Mexican Catholics. They would no more have stolen religious artifacts than they would have spit on the statue of the Virgin Mary that Tomas had taken, and they would certainly not have desecrated a graveyard looking for them. Nor would they have allowed outsiders-especially the Velasquezes-to know of Tomas's crime. That was the reason Luis had lied to Quincannon, had been so frightened when the detective came asking about the statue. The gold figure had been a terrible burden to Luis all the years he had harbored it, and perhaps it had even been a relief when it was stolen.

My reasoning explained Luis's and his mother's behavior, but it still didn't answer the question of what had happened to those remaining artifacts. And the more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that nothing actually had happened to them. They had to be in their original hiding place even now; otherwise some of them would have turned up somewhere, at some time. There were too many of them, and most were too distinctive for them to have gone unnoticed and unrecognized.

Mas alia del sepulcro … donde Maria . Beyond the grave … where Maria….

I looked down at the picnic table where the other documents that had been in the package from the public library were spread: copies of the personal letters, the diaries, perhaps even photographs. But I'd save those for later, maybe for when Sam returned from wherever he'd gone; right now I was too restless and excited to go through them. I felt an urgent need to go to the ruins of San Anselmo de las Lomas once more, to stand in the graveyard as Quincannon had done, to try one last time to unlock the meaning of those haunting words.

I put the documents back in the big envelope and went around Sam's house to where I'd left my car. As I got into it, I thought briefly about leaving a note for the historian but decided there was no sense in that. I probably wouldn't be at the old graveyard long, and anything I needed to tell him would keep until I returned.

As I stood beside the remains of the church, the wind blew strong and chill. It rustled and moaned in the nearby grove of oak trees and made rain-dark clouds scud across the sky, their shadows moving over the ground and then vanishing. Today there was a sharp tang of eucalyptus in the air, as bitter as the knowledge of what had taken place here must have been to those involved. I glanced over at the oak-topped knoll where Quincannon must have kept his vigil and then been ambushed; I imagined how the shots must have sounded in the silence.

The desolation of this place not only took me into the past but also made me think of yesterday: someone had watched me here and then slipped away into these still-wild hills. Had it been the same person who had later broken into Sam's home? Or had that been mere coincidence? Whoever had stolen that report from Sam was probably just a treasure hunter, anyway. I doubted he would commit violence for the Velasquez artifacts; only Felipe's obsession had been strong enough for that.

I moved among the graves slowly, reading the markers more carefully this time, pulling aside the tall, tangled vegetation to uncover others. When I came to Felipe's plain stone, I stopped and contemplated it briefly. The fact that he had died a suicide explained both the lack of inscription and the way it was set apart from the rest. I allowed myself a moment of sympathy for this man whose heritage had both shaped and warped his life, then went on looking for Maria Alcazar's grave. In a short time, I had to concede failure. I straightened up and looked around, my excitement gone.

A hollow sensation settled in my stomach, and I turned from the graveyard. A rain-swollen cloud had blotted out the sun, and its shadow lay over the ruins of the church. I stepped over the crumbling foundation and began to walk down the nave to where the altar had stood, knowing I was doing this for the last time, silently saying good-bye. It was time I put a halt to my preoccupation with John Quincannon's search for the Velasquez artifacts, time I let go of the past. There were things I should do with the rest of my vacation: call a housepainter, mend my clothes, run errands, and-most important-make my peace with Mama.

But I didn't want to leave. Something held me in this lonely place, some indefinable but strong pull from the past.

I moved toward the front of the church to where the first rows of pews once had been, the leg of my pants snagging on the charred roof beam. Glaring at it as if it were an animal that had nipped at me, I kicked out irritably. A sharp twinge of pain in my sneakered toe reminded me I was being childish. I just didn't want to let go of the romantic past and immerse myself once more in a life that revolved around balancing the museum's budget, trips to the grocery store, and social obligations such as a shipboard wedding. Sternly I told myself that such mundane activities were the glue that held my life together, and that I'd better get on with them.

Before I left, though, I decided to allow myself one last self-indulgence. Apparently the church and the pueblo had gripped Quincannon's imagination as much as they had mine, because in his notes he had described them in greater detail than seemed necessary. And one of the things he had written of was finding another grave, that of the parish's first padre, in the floor in front of the altar. Many Catholic churches had allowed persons of importance to be buried within-although that practice had been more common in Europe than in the mission churches of California-and apparently the first priest of San Anselmo de las Lomas had been so honored. I couldn't help but wonder if the marker was still here.