John Saul: Brain Child

But Lisa suddenly broke away from him and started pulling him off the dance floor. “Let’s find Kate and Bob. Maybe we can convince them to go up to Carolyn’s with us for just a few minutes, then the four of us can go out for hamburgers. That way we can see the place, and you won’t have to lie to your folks.”

As Lisa led him out of the gym, Alex knew he’d give in, even though he shouldn’t. With Lisa, it was hard not to give in — she always managed to make everything sound perfectly logical, even when Alex was sure it wasn’t.

The headlights of Alex’s Mustang picked up the open gates of the hacienda, and he braked the car to a stop. “Are we supposed to park out here, or go inside?”

Lisa shrugged. “Search me. Carolyn didn’t say.” Suddenly a horn sounded, and Bob Carey’s Porsche pulled up beside them, its window rolled down.

“Over there,” Bob called. He was pointing off to the left, where a small group of cars already stood parked in the shadow of the wall. Following Bob, Alex maneuvered the Mustang into a spot next to a Camaro, shut off the engine, then turned to Lisa.

“Maybe we oughta just go on home,” he suggested, but Lisa grinned and shook her head.

“I want to see it. Come on — just for a little while.” She got out of the car, and after a second’s hesitation, Alex joined her. A moment later Kate and Bob appeared out of the darkness, and the four of them started toward the lights flooding from the gateway.

“I don’t believe this,” Kate said a moment later. They were standing just inside the gate, trying to absorb the transformation that had come over what had been, only a year earlier, a crumbling ruin.

To the left, the old stables had been rebuilt into garages, and in the bright whiteness of the floodlights, the new plaster was indistinguishable from the old. The only change was that the stable roofs, originally thatched, were now of the same red tile as the house and the servants’ quarters.

“It’s weird,” Alex said. “It looks like it’s a couple of hundred years old.”

“Except for that,” Lisa breathed. “Have you ever seen anything like it?”

Dominating the courtyard, which until recently had been nothing more than an overgrown weed patch, was a glistening swimming pool fed by a cascade of tumbling water that made its way down five intricately tiled tiers before finally splashing into the immense oval of the pool.

Bob Carey whistled softly. “How big do you s’pose it is?”

“Big enough,” Alex replied. Then his eyes wandered to what had once been the servants’ quarters. “Wanta bet that’s a pool house now?”

Before anyone could venture an answer, Carolyn Evans’s voice rang out over the rock music that was throbbing from the huge main house. “Hey! Come on in!”

Glancing at each other uneasily, the four of them slowly crossed the courtyard, then stepped up onto the broad loggia that ran the entire length of the house. Carolyn, grinning happily, waited for them at the elaborately carved oaken front door. “Isn’t it neat? Come on in — everybody’s already here.”

They went through the front door into a massive tile-floored entry hall that was dominated by a staircase curving up to the second floor. To the right there was a large dining room, and beyond it they could see through another room into the kitchen. “That’s a butler’s pantry between the dining room and kitchen,” Carolyn explained, then raised her voice as someone turned up the volume on the stereo. “Mom wasn’t really sure it was supposed to be there, but she put it in anyway.”

“You going to have a butler?” Kate Lewis asked.

Carolyn shrugged with elaborate unconcern. “I don’t know. I guess so. Mom says the house is too big for María to take care of by herself.”

“María Torres?” Bob Carey groaned. “That old witch can’t even take care of her own house. My mom fired her after the first day!”

“She’s okay—” Alex began, but was immediately drowned out by the others’ laughter. Even Lisa joined in.

“Come on, Alex, she’s a loony-bin case. Everybody knows that.” Then she glanced guiltily toward Carolyn. “She isn’t here, is she?”

Carolyn giggled maliciously. “If she is, she just got an earful.”

At the top of the stairs, María Torres faded back into the darkness of the second-floor hallway, her black dress making her nearly invisible.

She had been sitting quietly in the large bedroom at the end of the corridor — the bedroom that, by rights, should have been hers — when the first of the cars had arrived.

No one, she knew, should have come back to the hacienda for hours, and she should have had the house to herself and her ghosts from the past. But now her reverie was shattered, and the pounding din of the gringo music, and the children of the gringos she had spent her life hating, filled the ancient rooms.

She had been in the house since seven o’clock, having let herself in with her own key as soon as Carolyn had left. She had spent the last four hours drifting through the house, imagining that it was hers, that she was not the cleaning woman — no more than a peón— but the mistress of the hacienda: Doña María Ruiz de Torres. And one day it would happen; one day, sometime in the vague future, it would happen. The gringos would be driven away, and finally the hacienda would be hers.

But for now she could only pretend, and be careful. The gringos were strict and never wanted her to be alone in their homes. She must leave the hacienda without being seen, and make her way back down the canyon to her little house behind the mission, and when she came back tomorrow, she must give no hint that she had been here at all tonight.

She glanced once more around the gloom of the bedroom that should have been hers, then slipped away, down the back stairs, the stairs that her ancestors never would have used, and out into the night. Then, as the gringo revelry went on — a desecration! — she kept watch, her ancient anger burning inside her.…

“Jeez,” Bob whispered. “Last time I saw this, it looked like the place had burned. Now look at it.”

The living room, across the entry hall from the dining room, was sixty feet long, and was dominated by an immense fireplace on the far wall.

The oak floor gleamed a polished brown that was nearly black, but the white walls picked up the light from sconces that had been wired into them at regular intervals to fill the room with an even brightness that made it seem even larger than it was. Twenty feet above, huge peeled logs supported a cathedral ceiling.

“This is incredible,” Lisa breathed.

“This is just the beginning,” Carolyn replied. “Just wander around anywhere, and make sure you don’t miss the basement. That’s Daddy’s part of the house, and Mom just hates it.” Then she was gone, disappearing into the mass of teenagers who were dancing to the rhythms of a reggae album.

It took them nearly an hour to go through the house, and even then they weren’t sure they’d seen it all. Upstairs there was a maze of rooms, and they’d counted seven bedrooms, each with its own bathroom, in addition to a library and a couple of small sitting rooms. All of it looked as if it had been built and furnished nearly two hundred years ago, then somehow frozen in time.

“Can you imagine living here?” Lisa asked as they finally started down toward the basement.

“It’s not like a house at all,” Alex replied. “It feels more like a museum. Hey,” he added, suddenly stopping halfway down the stairs. “I don’t remember this place ever having a basement.”

“It didn’t,” Kate told him. “Carolyn says her dad wanted his own space, but her mom wouldn’t let him have any of the old rooms. So he dug out a basement. Do you believe it?”