Aaron Elkins: Skull Duggery

“Not one… damn… thing,” Carl said. “Hard to believe, especially after all the work Jamie put into this place to keep it afloat.”

“To say nothing of what you put into it, Pop,” Annie said. Carl was stunned, but Annie was angry. “I can’t believe it. What a miserable, ungrateful, lying creep. And then, what he tried to do to you!” She said to Gideon. “What was that all about?”

“Beats me,” Gideon said. “I’m hoping Marmolejo can figure it out, but I don’t honestly see much chance; not now, not anymore.”

“So Tony’s wife now owns the Hacienda Encantada,” Julie said. “How do you think that’s going to play out?”

“Oh no, he didn’t leave the Hacienda to Conchita,” Annie said, surprised. “What made you think that?”

“Well, you said she got everything-”

“I said almost everything. Not the Hacienda.”

“All right, then who owns the Hacienda? Don’t keep us in suspense.”

Carl managed a small smile. “Our new boss,” he said, “is la senora Josefa Basilia Manzanares y Gallegos.”

Julie frowned. “And who is that?”

Carl’s smile morphed into an easy laugh, in which Annie joined. “It’s Josefa-our Josefa!” She cried.

For a moment Julie and Gideon were speechless. “But why?” Julie finally said. “I mean, yes, she’s his aunt or something, but after all, Jamie’s his brother, and-”

Carl answered with a shrug. “Who knows? The will said something about years of faithful service… Something like that.”

“Well, how about that?” Gideon said with a slow smile. “Two hours ago she’s sitting there despondent about being thrown out, and now the whole place belongs to her.”

“She must be overjoyed,” Julie said.

“Au contraire,” said Annie. “She’s more miserable than she was before.”

“Miserable! Why-”

“The poor old gal’s scared to death,” Carl said. “She doesn’t want to own the Hacienda, she just wants things to stay the way they are. She asked if she could still keep her job if she owned the place.”

“We told her she could keep it or not keep it, or do any damn thing she wanted,” Annie said. “We told her we could run the place for her, if she wanted-which is what we’ve been doing anyway-and she could live like a queen and get waited on hand and foot. Or she could throw the bunch of us out, sell the place, and live like a queen anywhere she felt like-and get waited on hand and foot.”

“I’m not sure we got through to her, though,” said Carl. “We spent fifteen minutes carefully explaining everything to her, and she kept nodding her head and mumbling si, si, comprendo, like she understood, and then you know what her question was?”

Annie supplied the answer with an approximation of Josefa’s piteous wail: “But they gonna let me stay in my room, or I gotta move to Tony’s?”

At a few minutes after one, Gideon stood in front of the small, gated courtyard of the Museo de Curiosidades. The gate was closed and latched, but the padlock had been removed. He lifted the latch and entered the courtyard. Once it had probably been a graceful patio, rich with plants and perhaps a welcoming fountain. Now it looked like the entrance to a junk shop, all weeds, cracked cement paving… and junk. On second glance, however, the junk proved to be exhibits, each with a small, faded, foxed, meticulously hand-lettered placard in English and Spanish. To the left of the big oak door of the casa itself was a weathered concrete bust of Kaiser Wilhelm I, complete with spiked helmet: “From the residence of Friedrich Pflegholz, German ambassador to Mexico, 1883-1886.” To the right was the “sacred throne of Axayacatl, emperor of the Aztecs,” an ugly hunk of basalt that an imaginative mind might have construed as being shaped more or less like a chair. Further along, attached to the casa ’s wall by a chain, was a wooden “Chinese empress’s bench.”

If these were the guy’s come-on exhibits, Gideon thought, it was no wonder he doesn’t seem to be getting much in the way of visitors. Beside the door was a sign in English and Spanish that informed visitors that the entrance fee was thirty pesos and instructed them to ring the bell. Gideon did, and the door swung open to reveal a vestibule in which the man they’d seen yesterday sat at an old office desk, clacking away at a many-carboned document on an ancient, upright, manual Remington typewriter. Sr. Henry Castellanos-Jones, said the nameplate at the front of the desk.

“Yes?” he said, not pleased to be interrupted. He was wearing the same rusty suit, the same narrow black tie that he’d worn yesterday. Even sitting down, he had the suit jacket tightly buttoned.

“I’d like to see the museum.”

“It’s thirty pesos. I have no change.”

“That’s fine.” Seeing no receptacle, he laid the bills on the desk.

“Would you like me to give you a tour? The fee is two hundred pesos.”

“No thanks, I’d just like to wander, if that’s all right.”

“The choice is yours, but a tour would add a great deal to your visit.”

“No thanks.”

The man’s thin lips turned down. “Very well. Please start in the room to your left, the drawing room, and continue around. That is the established pattern for the traffic flow.” He returned his attention to his typing.

Gideon did as he was told, although he could see from the empty rooms ahead that traffic flow wasn’t going to be a problem. The place was much as Sandoval had led him to expect, reeking of mildew and mold, probably from the old upholstered furniture and grungy carpets that appeared to be leftovers from the last person to reside there. The plastered walls were cracked and dirty, the ceilings water-stained and sagging. Lit mostly with low-wattage Tiffany-style lamps in various shades of brown, it was like walking around under a mushroom. Or inside a mausoleum.

Most of the exhibits, and there were many, were on dark, Victorian-era tables or in glass-fronted bookcases, and whatever else Gideon might say about them, he was ready to admit that it was the most eclectic and idiosyncratic museum he’d ever been in. The shrunken heads (actually, goatskin fakes) that Sandoval had told him about were there, and the Aztec stone knives (knockoffs, and poorly done at that) as well. There was also the withered brown arm and hand of “The Assassin Pedro Mendoza, Who Killed Beloved Governor Ocampo in 1901.” This event rated an entire display case for itself. Along with the arm was the governor’s ruffled shirt, complete with holes and blood, and the dagger that did the deed.

In general, though, the exhibits were more pedestrian, if no less odd: a “letter cancellation machine made in 1848, in use until 4/4/1911”; a “metal hamburger mold, circa 1931”; an “1860 Ashley Archimedean Eggbeater.” If there was a pattern to the displays, Gideon couldn’t make it out. The eggbeater shared a case with a “Czechoslovakian machine pistol from the Great War.” The hamburger mold was housed with a porthole from a sunken ship and a “crystal ball used in crystal-gazing, late 1800s.”

His quarry was in a glass-fronted case in the second room he came to, the former dining room, on a shelf shared with a baby shark in a Mason jar and a three-masted schooner made of matchsticks. It was only the skull-no mandible-and it rested in a saucer filled with straw. The legend beside it said “sacrificed Zapotec princess,

1,000 years old.” Gideon had to kneel to look it in the eye, so to speak, and even when he did, there wasn’t much he could tell about it. It was male, not female-the supraorbital ridges and robust mastoid processes told him that much. There were streaks of green, blue, and red color here and there, probably the remnants of the colored candles that had once been mounted on its crown. The teeth, nestled in the straw, couldn’t be seen. Was it really old enough to be Zapotec? That he couldn’t tell.