Aaron Elkins: Skull Duggery

“You will see Tony,” Annie said. “He’s planning on coming down in a couple of days.”

“You mean Tony doesn’t live here?” Gideon asked. “He lives in Mexico City?”

“On the outskirts,” Annie said. “In Coyoacan. In this fabulous gated community surrounded by other rich Yanquis, assorted strung-out rock stars, and the occasional Colombian drug lord. He only comes down here once a month or so for a few days.”

“So who runs the Hacienda? I mean, who’s in charge?”

“Nobody’s in charge,” Julie said. “It’s a family affair. No boss, really. Right, Uncle Carl?”

“Well, yeah, I guess that’s true,” Carl said. “We just kinda get along, muddle through, you know? Jamie makes sure we get the bills paid, and Annie kinda keeps an eye on things around the place, keeps us all in line. Not that much to it, really.”

“says you!” Annie said, then loyally added: “And you do plenty too, Pop. The place wouldn’t even exist without you.”

“Aw, hell, I just look after the horses,” Carl said softly.

“But Tony does own it?” Gideon asked.

“Oh, Tony owns it, all right,” Carl said with a nod. “You got that right.”

“Okay, fill me in a little, would you, folks? Tony Gallagher is an American, isn’t he? How did he come to own the Hacienda Encantada?”

“Well, yes, he’s an American citizen, all right,” Annie said, “because he was born there, but he was raised on the Hacienda, although it wasn’t the Hacienda back then. See, his father-my grandfather-Julie, didn’t you ever tell this husband of yours all this stuff?”

“Of course I did. He just didn’t pay attention, although he did put on a pretty good act.”

Julie and Gideon both laughed, and she reached forward to give his shoulder an affectionate squeeze with just a little bit of a wicked twist at the end. The thing was, it was exactly the kind of thing he was always accusing her of when she failed to commit to memory some fascinating point he’d made about skeletal morphology or protohominid locomotion.

And the excuse he gave now was just about as lame as hers usually were. “I guess it didn’t seem to appertain to anything concrete at the time. Now that I’m here, it’s become highly germane.”

“ Appertain,” Carl said, appreciatively rolling the word around his mouth, trying it out on his tongue. “ Highly germane. Whoa. Does he talk like that all the time, sweetie?”

“I warned you,” Julie said. “He’s a professor.”

“Right,” said Gideon. “It’s what I do. Hey, I even know some better words than that. Wait till you get to know me. But go ahead, tell me about Tony.”

“You tell him, Pop,” Annie said. “Pop knows the whole story better than anyone.”

“Well, okay, sure,” Carl drawled. “Guess I better start with the place itself…”

A hundred and fifty years ago, the Hacienda Encantada had been a genuine hacienda, a real working sisal ranch, including a small factory where the sisal was made into rope. But by the 1940s the property, then an eccentric compound of decrepit nineteenth-century buildings surrounded by almost eighty acres of maguey plantings from which the sisal had been made, had stood, unused and moldering, for twenty years. It had been bought in 1947 by Annie’s grandfather, Vince Gallagher, a wounded Army veteran who had combined his military payout with his life’s savings to live out his dream of ranching in some sunny, warm place as far away from his home in International Falls, Minnesota (officially the coldest city in the continental United States) as possible. Knowing little about either ranching or farming-before the war he had worked as a steamfitter-he hired an “agricultural consultant,” on whose advice he tore out the exhausted old magueys, replacing them with tobacco plants and coffee trees, and invested heavily in stock for fighting bulls and fine Arabian riding horses.

Things didn’t work out as hoped, however. The consultant turned out to be a crook, bullfighting turned out to be illegal in Oaxaca (who knew?), and the plantings had a hard time of it in the rain-starved hills. Only the horses, against all odds, were a success, but only a modest one. Worst of all, his new Mexican wife, the beautiful, flashing-eyed Beatriz, decided after her first trip to the United States that she liked International Falls better than Teotitlan and began spending more and more time there with the Minnesota Gallaghers, who were glad to take her in, not only having taken a genuine liking to her, but relishing the chance to penalize Vince for having chosen to leave in the first place. And with medical care far superior to what was available in Mexico, she made sure to be in Minnesota for the birth of each of her three children. Eventually she would spend more than half the year there, almost always taking their children with her.

It made for a lonely life for Vince, who, underneath his romantic expatriate veneer, was really a family man at heart. Still, he managed to keep the place going-barely-by raising and selling his horses, and later on by boarding them and working with an Oaxaca tour agency that specialized in back-country treks. In 1975 he brought in Carl, the Montana-ranch-raised son of an Army buddy, to handle that end of the business, and there Carl had remained ever since.

In 1978, Vince, a two-pack-a-day man (three packs a day in his twenties) had died from complications from the emphysema that had plagued him for ten years, and Tony Gallagher, then about twenty-five, a year older than Carl was, had taken over the ranch.

“Tony was the oldest of his children?” Gideon asked.

Annie answered for Carl. “That’s right. Tony was the oldest, then my mother-Blaze was her name-and then Jamie. In fact my grand-mother died giving birth to him, do I have that right, Pop?”

“Well, not long after. Anyway, to go back to after Vince died and Tony took over… Whew, talk about a new broom…”

Carl paused to give his full attention to making a left turn from the highway. As with everything else, he was a focused, deliberate, unhurried driver-he took his time, patiently waiting a good twenty seconds for a rattletrap pickup coming from the other way to approach and get safely by. (“ Go, already,” Annie mouthed silently, rolling her eyes.) Finally, when the highway was clear for as far as the eye could see, he turned onto a narrow, potholed, shoulderless, utterly deserted, but more or less paved road. The rusted green sign read, 2 KM TEOTITLAN. In front of them the road crested a low rise, then disappeared into dry, gently undulating brushland dotted with small farms, with the stark brown hills in the distance. Carl took up the story again as they started down.

Tony Gallagher, young as he was, had a good head for business and was a natural salesman besides. There were a couple of Mexico City mining outfits that had been angling for mineral rights to the land-gold and silver concessions-but Vince had been turning them down in hopes of getting them to up their offers. Tony took a different, tougher tack: They wanted the mineral rights? Fine, but the only way they were going to get them was to buy the land itself. He maneuvered them into a bidding war and eventually sold off almost all of the original rancho, seventy-five of the eighty acres, for almost $500,000-this was in 1980 money-keeping only the hacienda complex itself.

The mining operations failed, but Tony had made out like a bandit. He used the money to restore the hacienda buildings and convert them to a high-end dude ranch/retreat/resort, and within three years the Hacienda Encantada was in the black. After that he’d made a lot of money in the markets. He’d made his primary home in Coyoacan since 1995, living there now with his fourth wife, the Miss Chihuahua 1992 second runner-up. But every now and then he liked to spend a few days at the Hacienda to see how things were going, make some simple repairs-he loved working with his hands “Ha!” Annie cried. “Working with his hands is right! He comes up here to get away from his nutball wife Conchita and make himself a sweet little love nest with whoever his current local sweet patootie is. The repair work’s his cover with Conchita.”