Bill Pronzini: Beyond the Grave

But before I could get very far, he hurled himself forward and dived at my feet. His outstretched hands grabbed my right ankle. I bent my left knee, flailed my arms for balance, tried to kick out at him. There was a wrenching spasm in my back, and I fell heavily to the ground.

Gray was on top of me now, his knees on my back, intensifying the pain. His hands grasped my neck from behind, fingers reaching forward toward my throat. I tried to shake him off, but the pain prevented that. I screamed, my face pressed into the weeds, but the cry came out a mere gurgle.

Behind me Gray's voice was shouting: “Bitch! You'll never leave me!” The shouts were loud at first, then fainter, replaced by a buzzing in my ears. Tears were running down my face now. I tried to move my arms, but they felt numb. And there was the terrible, terrible pain in my back….

A second voice began shouting in counterpoint to Gray's. The words were in Spanish: “Basta! Basta! Hijo de puta!”

Gray's body began to heave up and down, as if something were shaking it. His fingers loosened on my neck. For a moment his hands clutched at my shoulders, pulling my upper body away from the ground. Then he let go, and I fell flat. I felt him being dragged from me, heard grunts and scuffling. Then someone crashed to the ground beside me.

I tried to roll onto my side, but hands grabbed me again. Terror and rage flooded me and gave me the strength to scream. This time it came out a keening shriek. Above the sound, a man's voice said, “Elena, Elena, esta bien! Esta Arturo. Esta bien, Elena!”

A hand, lean and long-fingered, touched my cheek. An arm supported me, helped me sit up. I cried out from the pain in my back, pressed my wet face into Arturo Melendez's rough wool shirt.

“Elena,” he said, “are you all right?”

I hiccuped, cutting off a sob.

“Elena?”

I pulled back from his chest, scrubbed at my face with one hand. “What happened to-”

“For now, he is unconscious.”

I opened my eyes. Arturo's face was directly in front of mine, made thin and pale by concern. He knelt beside me, one arm around my shoulders. Gray lay on the ground not three feet away from us, on his back, arms and legs splayed out. His eyes were closed, and blood trickled from a gash on his forehead.

“Elena,” Arturo said, “what happened?”

“You didn't see …?”

He shook his head. “I was walking on the far side of the hill, where I often go, by the ruins of the hacienda. I heard Gray shout. When I reached this side, he was chasing you across the field.”

I sighed and brought both hands to my face, blocking out the sight of the supine figure. “Gray killed his wife,” I said shakily. “That's what all this drinking has been about. She's buried over there under that pile of stones by the wall of the church. I found her.”

Arturo sucked in his breath. For a long moment neither of us spoke.

Then he said, “We must go for the police.”

“You go. I don't know if I can walk.” And then I remembered what I'd been about to do when I'd discovered Georgia Hollis's body. “When you come back, I want you to help me with something.”

“What?”

“Digging.”

“For what?”

“You'll see.”

Arturo looked puzzled, but merely said, “I will not leave you here with that hijo de puta . We will tie Gray up and both go for the police.”

“What if he wakes up?”

“He won't, but I almost wish he would before we go.” Arturo paused, and when he spoke again, his voice was low and ugly. “If he did, I would be only too happy to kick him in the head again. Or in the cojones , should you prefer that.”

It was midafternoon before the county sheriff's men were finished at the ruins of San Anselmo de las Lomas and later yet when Arturo, Sam, and I returned armed with a shovel, pick, and pry bar. We were curiously subdued for a trio of treasure hunters, shaken by the grim events of the past few hours.

Gray Hollis had been taken away immediately under guard in an ambulance, to be treated for a concussion and broken arm. Then the cairn of rocks had been opened, exposing the body of Georgia Hollis, wrapped in a tattered blanket. While investigators took statements from Arturo and me, technicians made their photographs and measurements, and finally Georgia was removed in a green body bag. The proceedings had a mechanical quality that chilled me; out of the improvised grave, into the bag, zip it up-and it was as if the woman had never existed. Even the horror and violence of her death had been negated by these routine and necessary actions.

In a way, I thought, the police procedure was very like the funeral ritual: a closing off, a signal that while one life had ended, it was time for others to get on with theirs. But there was one important difference: No one was here to mourn Georgia Hollis. As I watched the bag containing her body being bundled off through the grove of oak trees, I wondered if there was anyone who would claim Georgia and go through the formalities of grief.

When the investigators were done with us, Arturo and I had driven back to Sam's house. Earlier we'd called the sheriff's department from there, and the historian-who had just returned from mailing off the manuscript he'd been working on-had been left with the task of breaking the news to Dora Kingman. The ordeal had left him more angry than upset. Initially, he told us, Dora had gone into hysterics, but as she'd calmed down she'd begun to insist that Gray couldn't have murdered his wife. The more Sam had tried to convince her, the more adamant she'd become, and when he'd last seen her, she'd been on her way to the county hospital to try to help Gray.

“How can she do that?” Arturo had demanded. “How can she defend that bastardo? ”

Sam shrugged. “She thinks she loves him. And the human animal only sees what it wants to see, anyway.”

I had merely nodded, thinking of my affair with Dave-and of Mama's reaction to her illness.

But I had a more important concern than Dora and Gray, and as I explained to Arturo and Sam what I wanted to do, they brightened somewhat. At first Sam said that we would be tampering with a crime scene, but I assured him that I had already cleared it with the sheriffs department. There would be an officer on hand who would observe us and make sure we didn't destroy any evidence. Satisfied, Sam got the tools from the shed in his backyard, and the three of us returned to the ruins of the church.

The old pueblo seemed even more desolate than before. During the afternoon, the rain clouds had passed, but now the sky was dark once again, threatening a downpour at any minute. The sheriffs man had retreated to the warmth of his car, and he seemed sorry to see us; he donned a rain slicker before accompanying us to the ruins and sat down on the roof beam to smoke a cigarette.

As he set down the shovel he was carrying, Sam glanced at what remained of the cairn of rocks, and I saw a shudder pass through his body. Arturo was staring up at the sky; when he lowered his eyes, they met mine and I thought I knew what he was thinking: Let it rain; let it wash away the traces of this tragedy.

I shook my head, as if to clear it of such thoughts, and went directly to the foundation on the opposite side of the church from Georgia's makeshift grave. Lining my feet up against it where it turned at a right angle to form the apse, I paced off the distance: one, two, three, four, five feet. Then I went to the opposite side-ignoring the place where the body had been-and repeated the measuring in the apse whose walls were still standing. One, two, three feet. And a bit more. But not four feet.

I turned to Sam and Arturo; they were watching me intently. “Here,” I said, “this is where we need to break down the wall.” I stepped aside as they came forward with the pick and the pry bar. After a moment, Sam told me to move even farther back; the adobe wasn't yielding easily, and he didn't want to whack me with the pick. I'd already been injured enough for one day-Arturo had given me a muscle relaxant he'd had left over from when he'd hurt himself rock climbing last year, but my back still throbbed-so I retreated a few feet. But then I started moving closer again, excited now, sure of what they'd soon uncover.