The reason I knew of Las Lomas was that a local historian, Sam Ryder, lived there. Sam had been a student of my mother's professor friend, Ciro Sis aeros, and had finished up a book Ciro had been writing when Ciro was murdered last summer. If anyone would know about the Velasquez family and their missing treasure, it would be a historian who practically lived on the site of the old rancho.
I took out the county phone book and checked for a listing for Sam Ryder, but there wasn't any. That really didn't matter, though; Las Lomas was a tiny town, little more than a clearing in the vineyards for which the Santa Ynez Valley was becoming famous. I could drive out there to talk to him, maybe even take a picnic. It would be a good way to keep my mind off Mama and Dave….
But then I sat down in my rocker, my excitement evaporating as quickly as it had come. I didn't want to drive out there alone. Didn't want to pack a picnic just for myself. What I wanted was to share this interesting discovery. And who I wanted to share it with was Dave. We'd shared so many things, important and unimportant, in the time we'd been together. It didn't feel right….
Basta, Elena, I told myself. There isn't going to be any more sharing with Dave Kirk, so get used to it. If you don't want to go out there alone, get up and call a friend.
I went to the phone and dialed Tina Aguilar, who had been my amiga from grade school to this very day. Tina would enjoy the kind of excursion I was planning, and she was also someone to whom I could talk about what was upsetting me. But Tina's phone rang eleven times before I remembered she'd gone to L.A. for the weekend. Then I called Susana Ibarra, my public relations director at the museum. She was home but about to go sailing with Carlos Bautista, whom she grandly referred to as “my fiance.” It didn't raise my spirits to hear that; Carlos was chairman of our board of directors, very rich, fifty-three-years-old to Susana's nearly eighteen-and my former boyfriend. Never mind that I'd found him boring and stuffy and had failed to be impressed by his money; this was irritating in the extreme.
But surely there was someone I knew who would want to go on a picnic. My secretary, Emily Dominguez, and her husband and baby? No, Emily had decided to take her vacation week the same time I did, and they had all gone up to Lindsay to visit her parents. What about Jesse Herrera, the artist who was my closest male friend? No, not him, either. Jesse had recently fallen in love, and all his waking hours were devoted to his pretty Estella….
I could have continued down the list of my friends, but suddenly it seemed like a great deal of effort. Much more effort than it would take to simply throw some cheese and bread and a couple of bottles of Dos Equiis into a sack and set off for the valley alone.
The Santa Ynez Valley contains some of the finest vineyards and cattle graze in California. Flowers are grown there for seed, and all-year-round colorful fields stretch toward the softly rounded hills in wide stripes of red and yellow, blue, pink, and white. There are excellent recreation areas, such as the several-thousand-acre county park at Lake Cachuma, the reservoir that provides Santa Barbara's drinking water, as well as two restored missions, Santa Ynez and La Purisima. And of course there are the historical towns-turned-tourist-traps, such as Solvang. Labeled “Little Denmark,” Solvang outdoes Scandinavia with half-timbered buildings, windmills, and thatched roofs with fake storks perched on top; smorgasbords, pastry shops, and souvenir stands abound. Solvang is a must for the type of person who just loves to bring home little plaques for the kitchen that say such things as GOOD FOOD, GOOD MEAT, GOOD GOD, LET'S EAT! But you can't convince me that the people of Danish descent whose forebears settled the area really enjoy being surrounded by all that tackiness-any more than I would want to live in an adobe hut with pinatas hanging on the front porch. The tourist dollar that just keeps flowing in is another matter entirely.
Today I was able to avoid Solvang, turning east toward the hills between Santa Ynez and Los Olivos. The county road to Las Lomas rose gradually into rougher terrain-rocky outcroppings where chaparral gradually gave way to live oak and sycamore. Here and there I glimpsed delicate orange patches of the California poppy, and brown-and-white cattle grazed on the slopes, standing easily on an incline, as if their legs were shorter on one side than on the other. I smiled, remembering how I'd once advanced that fanciful theory to a rather serious, literal-minded man who had brought me out here for a picnic. He had looked at me as if I'd lost my senses, laughed nervously-and never asked me out again.
After about five miles, the road narrowed, its pavement becoming rough and pitted and crumbling away at the shoulders. It wound between rock-strewn hills on which only scrub vegetation and half-dead trees grew, then went up a steep rise. At its top was what remained of a great white birch that looked as if it might have been struck by lightning; its upper branches were jagged and torn, pointing toward the cloud-streaked sky like angry fingers, and on its trunk a weathered sign was nailed. I slowed the car next to it and made out faded green lettering that said Las Lomas was one mile ahead.
From there the road dipped sharply, and on the left, across a gully and through a clump of oaks, I saw a flash of white. I slowed once again, peering through the shadows beneath the trees. The white area was large and rectangular in shape-the wall of a building, perhaps?
It was too soon for me to have reached the village, but this land might have been part of the old rancho, which had spread over many thousands of acres. I looked around for a place to pull off the road, and left the Beetle in a clearing that-from the litter of beer cans and bottles-looked as if it had been used for parking and partying. After stumbling across the rock-strewn gully on the other side of the pavement, I followed an erratic path through the oak trees and came out in a level field of high grass and wildflowers. In the middle of it rose a tall adobe wall, once whitewashed but now begrimed by time and the elements. It was solid, about twenty-five-feet-high, with no doors or windows.
I waded through the knee-high wildflowers, sneezing a couple of times because of the pollen in the air, and went up to the wall. It was genuine adobe, not the stucco that is mainly used today, and I could see the outlines where the bricks had skillfully been joined together. When I touched it, the wall felt rough and sun-warm. I moved along it to the left, peered around, and stopped in surprise.
This wall and about half of the one perpendicular to it on the opposite side were all that remained of the structure. The rest was low weed-choked foundations, laid out in a rectangular pattern. Within them lay more of the kind of debris I'd seen where I left my car, as well as large pieces of half-rotten timber, shards of red tile, a scattering of adobe bricks. The rear wall was scrawled with graffiti, and over it all someone had arched a bright, spray-painted rainbow.
I stepped over the two-foot foundation and picked my way through the rubble and thick vegetation toward the far end of the ruins, stopping to examine a massive piece of wood that bisected the space. It was large enough to have been the main roof beam and was jagged and blackened at both ends. Glancing at the back wall, I noted that it was also black at its top; whatever this structure had been, it had probably burned many years before.
When I reached the foundation at the far end, I saw that it was divided in the center, as if for a wide door. Stepping through the opening, I turned and surveyed the ruins. The rectangular space was about forty feet in length; to my right was a square foundation-about ten feet on each side-that adjoined it. There was no way of telling if the side walls of the building had contained windows or not, but what remained of the one on the left was recessed on the interior. The recess reminded me of something. What?