Aaron Elkins: Skull Duggery

“Annie,” Carl said, “that’s not the kind of thing I like to hear coming out of your mouth.”

“I thought I was being generous,” Annie said. “You guys will meet her, don’t worry; he loves to show them off. Who is it now, Pop? Is it still Preciosa the Pretentious? It must be a year now. Isn’t he about ready for a new one?”

“Come on, now, Annie,” Carl said, “that’s no way to talk about your uncle.”

“Hey, am I knocking it? More power to him, I say. I just wish he had better taste.”

“Annie-”

“You two will love Preciosa, she of the swanlike Neck,” Annie said. “I guess she’s some kind of international hotel management consultant. Tony met her at a conference in Mexico City where she was a speaker. Every time she shows up here, she’s got some new harebrained scheme that he makes us try.”

“Annie,” said Carl, “don’t you think you’re being a little hard on her?”

“What, swimming with the Fishes wasn’t harebrained?”

“Well,” Carl said, “it wasn’t a bad idea to begin with. It just didn’t work out.”

Annie emitted a honk of a laugh. “I’ll say! see,” she said to Julie and Gideon, “she was all worked up about the idea of putting in a kind of swimming with the Dolphins attraction?-like they have in Hawaii?-in a mostly dried-up pond we have out back, so we lined the whole thing with concrete-it cost a mint-but of course, dolphins can’t make it here, so she went to work to find a local fish that could, and that wouldn’t mind a bunch of humans floundering around with it. Unfortunately, the one she came up with, carpa cabezona, had an English name that seemed to turn off the Americans for some reason. Don’t ask me why, but swimming with the Bighead Carp just never caught on.”

Even Carl joined in on the laughter with a soft, throaty chuckle.

“But you know,” Annie said, “we’d put a lot of money into it-”

“ Tony had put in a lot of money,” Carl corrected.

“-on water flow control, and drainage technology, and so on, so the next year, Preciosa has an even better idea of how to recoup. ‘I know, let’s turn the pond into a therapeutic mud bath!’ So we did. Well, the problem there was that the people who put it in were pool people. They didn’t really know how to drain a mud bath properly or keep it clean, so within a couple of months, you didn’t want to be within two hundred yards of it.” She made a face. “Ooh, that was nasty.”

Carl had to agree. “That was pretty nasty, all right.”

“On the other hand,” Annie said, “Preciosa’s a hell of an improvement over the one before. Rosie was really -”

“All right, that’s enough now,” Carl said sharply. “Tony’s affairs are-” He corrected himself. “Tony’s personal life is not your affair. Not mine either.”

“Yes, Pop,” Annie said meekly.

Gideon thought a slight shift of subject was in order. He turned toward the back. “And your mother, Annie, did she-”

“We lost her,” Carl said curtly, closing down the conversation the way a slamming iron door closes down a corridor.

Now what did I step into? Gideon wondered.

It was a while before he found out. The rest of the drive was completed without further talk, other than work-related dialogue between Julie and Annie, and when they reached the Hacienda there were some difficulties to contend with. For one thing, there was a minor kerfuffle over their room. It seemed that Josefa, who supervised the housekeeping staff, had gotten things mixed up. (“I’m shocked. Shocked,” Gideon heard Annie mutter.) Josefa had followed instructions to have their room spruced up, but she had mistakenly thought that they wouldn’t be arriving until the next day. Thus, the room was presently in mid-sprucing, its floor strewn with cleaning supplies, touch-up paint, and bedding and linens fresh and not so fresh. It would be a while before it was usable.

In addition, two American women, in for a workshop to be conducted at the Hacienda, had been waiting there for twenty minutes, drinking coffee, impatient and angry, for somebody who spoke decent English to show up to register them and give them keys to their room.

“Oh, we don’t use keys here,” Annie said pleasantly, “unless you really want them. I’m so sorry you were kept waiting, ladies. If you’ll come with me to the office, I’ll get you set right up. I hope you’ll let me offer you a bottle of wine at dinner tonight to make up for the inconvenience?”

And off she went with the considerably mollified couple to register them. A twitch of the head brought Julie along too, presumably for some hands-on training. “We’ll see you in a few minutes,” Annie called back to Gideon. “Ask Dorotea to make me a quesadilla too, will you?”

Carl, still withdrawn and focused inside himself, mumbled something about tending to the horses and withdrew to the corral and stable, which were down the hill a little from the resort buildings via a dusty track. Gideon was left to himself at a table on the broad flagstone terrace of the main building, the Casa Principal. That was fine with him. The morning air was dry and fresh and agreeably warm-in the sixties-and the terrace, overlooking the village, was an altogether pleasant place for a still-sleepy man to be. He slouched happily in a comfortable wicker armchair, legs outstretched, face turned up to the December sun. Dorotea had wordlessly plunked down a steaming mug beside him, and the wonderfully aromatic cinnamon-and-chocolate-scented Mexican coffee slid down his gullet like honey.

The Hacienda Encantada, sitting as it did atop its own hill, dominated Teotitlan del Valle almost like a baronial castle in France dominated its feudal lands; almost like (this took a little more imagination) the far grander Monte Alban dominated its low-lying surroundings. Seen from where Gideon sat, the tranquil little village was laid out like a scene on an old picture postcard: two main streets, a covered market, and in the center a domed, turreted eighteenth-century church with two ornate bell towers. Red-tiled roofs. Stuccoed walls. Except for a parked yellow school bus and a few taxis in the squares in front of the market-the drivers lolled nearby, smoking and chatting in the shade of a tree-there was nothing to remind one it was 2008 rather than 1908, and not much to remind one that it wasn’t 1808.

The community was close enough that the sounds of village life drifted up to where he was sitting. Apparently, a morning market was in progress; he could hear the sounds of women’s voices and children’s laughter, along with the occasional dog bark and the cackling of poultry. There were radios playing somewhere too-Mexican pop music-and what sounded like a brass band practicing. And weaving in and out of the narrow streets a truck with a loudspeaker mounted on the cab traveled slowly along, braying its message, too far away for him to make out. Julie had told him that, in the absence of a local newspaper, this was the way the town got its community news. In the parched brown hills behind the Hacienda goats were doing some braying of their own. Interesting, he thought drowsily, so many different sounds floating on the air, and yet such an overall sense of quiet, of remoteness. He could understand why Julie liked the place so much.

All the same, he could sense the first intimations of restlessness already nibbling away at his contentment. What was he going to do for the next few days? Sitting out here, bathing in warm sunshine in the middle of December, was terrific… for an hour or so. And a horseback ride or two into the hills was inviting. And he did want to visit a couple of the nearby Zapotec ruins. Put all those things together and they would account for what, eight hours? Twelve, maybe, if he took his time? Then what? As usual, Julie had been right: he should have brought along some work. What had he been thinking? Why hadn’t he at least “Nice, isn’t it?” Julie said, slipping into a chair beside him and setting a manila folder on the table.