Avenue of Mysteries (47 page)

“There was a dog in the mix—a small one,” Pepe pointed out.

“That must have been quite a fire,” Vargas said.

“It was already burning when we put the bodies in it,” Juan Diego explained. “Rivera had started it—with whatever was around.”

“Just your usual dump fire, I suppose,” Vargas said; he was fingering the lid of the coffee can, but he still hadn’t lifted it.

Juan Diego would always remember how Lupe was touching the tip of her nose; she held one index finger against her nose when she spoke. “Y la nariz,” Lupe said. (“And the nose.”)

Juan Diego hesitated to translate this, but Lupe kept saying it, while she touched the end of her little nose. “Y la nariz.”

“The nose?” Vargas guessed. “
What
nose?
Whose
nose?”

“Not the
nose,
you little heathen!” Brother Pepe cried.

“
Mary’s
nose?” Edward Bonshaw exclaimed. “You put the Virgin Mary’s nose in that fire?” the Iowan asked Lupe.

“
He
did it,” Lupe said, pointing to her brother. “It was in his pocket, though it almost didn’t fit—it was a big nose.”

No one had told Alejandra, the dinner-party girlfriend, about the giant statue of the Virgin Mary losing its nose in the accident that killed the cleaning woman at the Jesuit temple. Poor Alejandra must have imagined, for a moment, the
actual
Virgin Mary’s nose in the awful fire at the basurero.

“Help her,” was all Lupe said, pointing to Alejandra. Brother Pepe and Edward Bonshaw managed to guide the dinner-party girlfriend to the kitchen sink.

Vargas lifted the lid of the coffee can. No one spoke, though they could all hear Alejandra breathing in through her nose and out through her mouth as she tried to suppress the urge to vomit.

Dr. Vargas lowered his mouth and nose into the open coffee can. They could all hear him take a deep breath. There was no other sound but the carefully measured breathing of his dinner-party girlfriend, who was struggling not to be sick in the sink.

The first conquistador’s sword was withdrawn from its scabbard and clanged against the stone floor in the foyer at the foot of the grand staircase. It was quite a loud clang, but far away from where the dinner par-tiers stood in the kitchen.

Brother Pepe flinched at the sound of the sword—as did Señor Eduardo and the dump kids, but not Vargas and Alejandra. The second sword clanged closer to them—the sword belonging to the Spaniard standing guard at the top of the stairs. You could not only hear the second sword
clang against the stone stairs, as it slid down several steps before its descent of the staircase halted, but they had all heard the sound of the second sword being drawn from its scabbard.

“Those Spanish soldiers—” Edward Bonshaw began to say.

“It’s not the conquistadors—they’re just statues,” Lupe told them. (Juan Diego didn’t hesitate to translate this.) “It’s your parents, isn’t it? You live in their house because they’re
here,
aren’t they?” Lupe asked Dr. Vargas. (Juan Diego kept translating.)

“Ashes are ashes—there’s little smell to ashes,” Vargas said. “But this was a
dump
fire,” the doctor continued. “There’s paint in these ashes—maybe turpentine, too, or some kind of paint thinner. Maybe stain—something for staining wood, I mean. Something flammable.”

“Maybe gasoline?” Juan Diego said; he’d seen Rivera start more than a few dump fires with gasoline, including this one.

“Maybe gasoline,” Vargas agreed. “Lots of
chemicals,
” the doctor added. “What you smell are the chemicals.”

“The Mary Monster’s nose was
chemical
,” Lupe said, but Juan Diego grabbed her hand before she could touch her nose again.

The third clang and clatter was very near to them; except for Vargas, everyone jumped.

“Let me guess,” Brother Pepe cheerfully said. “That was the sword of our guardian conquistador by the kitchen doorway—the one right here, in the hall,” Pepe said, pointing.

“No—that was his helmet,” Alejandra said. “I won’t stay here overnight. I don’t know what his parents
want,
” the pretty young cook said. She seemed fully recovered.

“They just want to
be
here—they want Vargas to know they’re all right,” Lupe explained. “They’re glad you weren’t on the plane, you know,” Lupe said to Dr. Vargas.

When Juan Diego translated this, Vargas just nodded to Lupe; he knew, all right. Dr. Vargas put the lid back on the coffee can and handed it back to Lupe. “Just don’t put your fingers in your mouth or in your eyes, if you’ve touched the ashes,” he told her. “Wash your hands. Paint, turpentine, wood stain—they’re poisonous.”

The sword came sliding across the floor of the kitchen, where they were standing; there wasn’t much of a clang this time—it was a wooden floor.

“
That’s
the third sword—from the nearest Spaniard,” Alejandra said. “They always put it in the kitchen.”

Brother Pepe and Edward Bonshaw had gone into the long hall just to have a look around. The painting of Jesus delivering the Sermon on the Mount was askew on the wall; Pepe fussed with it until it hung right.

Without looking into the hall, Vargas said: “They like to draw my attention to the beatitudes.”

Out in the hall, they could hear the Iowan reciting the beatitudes. “Blessed
are
—” and so on, and on.

“Believing in ghosts isn’t the same thing as believing in God,” Dr. Vargas said to the dump kids a little defensively.

“You’re okay,” Lupe told him. “You’re better than I thought,” she added. “And you’re not a penis-breath,” the girl said to Alejandra. “The food smells good—we should eat something.” Juan Diego decided he would translate just the last part.

“ ‘Blessed
are
the pure in heart: for they shall see God,’ ” Señor Eduardo was reciting. The Iowan wouldn’t have agreed with Dr. Vargas. Edward Bonshaw believed that believing in ghosts amounted to the same thing as believing in God; to Señor Eduardo, the two things were at least related.

What did Juan Diego believe, then and now? He’d seen what the ghosts could do. Had he actually witnessed detectable movement from the Mary Monster, or had he only imagined it? And there was the nose trick, or whatever one called it. Some unexplainable things are real.

•
21
•

Mister Goes Swimming

“Believing in ghosts isn’t the same thing as believing in God,” the former dump reader said aloud. Juan Diego spoke more confidently than Dr. Vargas ever had of his family ghosts. But Juan Diego had been dreaming that he was arguing with Clark French—though not about ghosts
or
believing in God. They were at each other’s throats, again, about that Polish pope. The way John Paul II had associated both abortion and birth control with
moral decline
made Juan Diego furious—that pope was on the everlasting warpath against contraception. In the early eighties, he’d called contraception and abortion “modern enemies of the family.”

“I’m sure there was a
context
you’re overlooking,” Clark French had said to his former teacher many times.

“A
context,
Clark?” Juan Diego had asked (he’d also asked this when he was dreaming).

In the late eighties, Pope John Paul II had called condom use—even to prevent AIDS—“morally illicit.”

“The
context
was the AIDS crisis, Clark!” Juan Diego had cried—not only that time but in his dream.

Yet Juan Diego woke up arguing that believing in ghosts was different from believing in God; it was disorienting, the way those transitions from dreaming to being awake can be. “Ghosts—” Juan Diego continued, sitting up in bed, but he suddenly stopped speaking.

He was alone in his bedroom at the Encantador; this time, Miriam had truly vanished—she was not in bed beside him while (somehow) managing not to breathe. “Miriam?” Juan Diego said, in case she was in the bathroom. But the door to the bathroom was open, and there was no answer—only the crowing of another rooster. (It had to be a different rooster; the first one had been killed mid-squawk, from the sound
of it.) At least this rooster wasn’t crazy; the morning light flooded the bedroom—it was the New Year in Bohol.

Through the open windows, Juan Diego could hear the children in the swimming pool. When he went to the bathroom, he was surprised to see his prescriptions scattered on the countertop surrounding the sink. Had he gotten up in the night, and—half asleep, or in a sexually sated trance—scarfed down a bunch of pills? If so, how many had he taken—and
which
pills? (Both the Viagra and Lopressor containers were open; the tablets dotted the countertop—there were some on the bathroom floor.)

Was Miriam a prescription-pill addict? Juan Diego wondered. But not even an addict would find the beta-blockers stimulating, and what would a woman want with Viagra?

Juan Diego cleaned up the mess. He took an outdoor shower, enjoying the cats who skittishly appeared on the tile roof, yowling at him. Perhaps a cat, in the cover of darkness, had killed that misguided rooster mid-squawk. Cats were born killers, weren’t they?

Juan Diego was dressing when he heard the sirens, or what sounded like sirens. Maybe a body had washed ashore, he imagined—one of the perpetrators of the late-night karaoke music at the Panglao Island beach club, a night swimmer who’d danced all night and then drowned with cramps. Or the Nocturnal Monkeys had gone skinny-dipping, with disastrous results. Thus Juan Diego indulged his imagination with diabolical death scenes, the way writers will.

But when Juan Diego limped downstairs for breakfast, he saw the ambulance and the police car in the driveway of the Encantador. Clark French was officiously guarding the staircase to the second-floor library. “I’m just trying to keep the kids away,” Clark said to his former teacher.

“Away from
what,
Clark?” Juan Diego asked.

“Josefa is up there—with the medical examiner and the police. Auntie Carmen was in the room diagonally across the hall from your woman friend. I didn’t know she was leaving so soon!”

“
Who,
Clark? Who left?” Juan Diego asked him.

“Your woman friend! Who would come all this way for one night—even for New Year’s Eve?” Clark asked him.

Juan Diego hadn’t known Miriam was leaving; he must have looked surprised. “She didn’t
tell
you she was leaving?” Clark said. “I thought you
knew
her! The desk clerk said she had an early flight; a car picked her up before dawn. Someone said
all
the doors to the second-floor rooms were
wide open after your woman friend had gone. That’s why they found Auntie Carmen!” Clark blathered.

“
Found
her—found her
where,
Clark?” Juan Diego asked him. The story was as chronologically challenging as one of Clark French’s novels! the former writing teacher was thinking.

“On the floor of her room, between her bed and the bathroom—Auntie Carmen is
dead
!” Clark cried.

“I’m sorry, Clark. Was she sick? Had she been—” Juan Diego was asking, when Clark French pointed to the registration desk in the lobby.

“She left a letter for you—the desk clerk has it,” Clark told his former teacher.

“Auntie Carmen wrote me—”

“Your woman friend left a letter for you
—not
Auntie Carmen!” Clark cried.

“Oh.”

“Hi, Mister,” Consuelo said; the little girl with the pigtails was standing beside him. Juan Diego saw that Pedro was with her.

“No going upstairs, children,” Clark French cautioned the kids, but Pedro and Consuelo chose to follow Juan Diego as he limped through the lobby to the registration desk.

“The aunt with all the fish has died, Mister,” Pedro began.

“Yes, I heard,” Juan Diego told the boy.

“She broke her neck,” Consuelo said.

“Her
neck
!” Juan Diego exclaimed.

“How do you break your neck getting out of bed, Mister?” Pedro asked.

“No idea,” Juan Diego said.

“The lady who just appears has disappeared, Mister,” Consuelo told him.

“Yes, I heard,” Juan Diego said to the little girl with the pigtails.

The desk clerk saw Juan Diego coming; an eager-looking but anxious young man, he was already holding out the letter. “Mrs. Miriam left this for you, sir—she had to catch an early flight.”

“Mrs. Miriam,” Juan Diego repeated. Did no one know Miriam’s last name?

Clark French had followed him and the children to the registration desk. “Is Mrs. Miriam a frequent guest at the Encantador? Is there a
Mr.
Miriam?” Clark asked the desk clerk. (Juan Diego knew well the
tone of moral disapproval in his former student’s voice; it was also a presence, a glowing heat, in Clark’s
writing
voice.)

“She has stayed with us before, but not frequently. There is a daughter, sir,” the desk clerk told Clark.

“Dorothy?” Juan Diego asked.

“Yes, that’s the daughter’s name, sir—Dorothy,” the desk clerk said; he handed Juan Diego the letter.

“You know the mother
and
the daughter?” Clark French asked his former teacher. (Clark’s tone of voice was now in moral high-alert mode.)

“I was closer to the daughter first, Clark, but I only just met both of them—on my flight from New York to Hong Kong,” Juan Diego explained. “They’re world travelers—that’s all I know about them. They—”

“They sound
worldly,
all right—at least Miriam seemed very worldly,” Clark abruptly said. (Juan Diego knew that
worldly
wasn’t such a good thing—not if you were, like Clark, a serious Catholic.)

“Aren’t you going to read the letter from the lady, Mister?” Consuelo asked. Remembering the contents of Dorothy’s “letter” had made Juan Diego pause before opening Miriam’s message in front of the children, but how could he not open it now? They were all waiting.

“Your woman friend may have
noticed
something—I mean about Auntie Carmen,” Clark French said. Clark managed to make a
woman friend
sound like a demon in female form. Wasn’t there a word for a female demon? (It sounded like something Sister Gloria would say.) A
succubus
—that was the word! Surely Clark French was familiar with the term. Succubi were female evil spirits, said to have sex with men who were asleep. It must come from Latin, Juan Diego was thinking, but his thoughts were interrupted by Pedro pulling on his arm.