Halfway there, however, I stopped, feeling a chill between my shoulder blades. It wasn't the kind of cold I'd felt before from the passage of the wind. This was an emotional chill, icy and striking straight to the bone. I whirled and looked back at the church, expecting to see someone there.
The church looked the same as before. There was no one, not even a bird, in sight.
I shook my head and kept going, but now the icy feeling intensified. I spun around, thinking someone might be hiding in the ruins, playing games with me. This time I thought I saw a swiftly moving shadow at the jagged corner of the rear wall. I waited, but there was no further motion. It could, I thought, have merely been the sunlight filtering through the leaves of the nearby trees.
What is this, Elena? I asked myself. Perhaps you're afraid of espectros. Ghosts. Don Esteban and the padre and Felipe. The men and women and children who died here during the days of los ranchos grandes, and those who fell before Fremont's troops. Perhaps, like Quincannon, they're trying to tell you something.
The idea of ghosts was one I would normally have dismissed as ridiculous. Ghosts belonged to el Dia de los Muertos, November second, when my people bring bread, food, drink, candles, and flowers to the cemeteries in honor of our departed loved ones. On that night the ghosts are supposed to come and feast, to visit their friends and relatives who have been left behind. But most people like me don't really believe that-any more than I believed that ghosts could stalk ruined churchyards in the middle of this bright spring afternoon.
But then, I reminded myself, people like me didn't normally hold conversations with a long-dead Anglo detective.
Forcefully, I pushed the idea of haunts from my mind and continued past the lavanderia, planning to look for more foundations, perhaps those of the stables, and-farther up on the distant hill-the hacienda itself. My problem, I thought, was that I was too sensitive to atmosphere, too easily swayed by my imagination-
Then I felt it again. The chill returned, this time spreading over my whole body, raising goose bumps on my arms and legs. I whirled once more and was sure I saw a shadow by the back wall of the church. Without considering what I'd do if I found someone there, I began running toward it.
The tall weeds caught at the legs of my jeans. I jammed my foot against some hard, protruding object and stumbled. I jumped over the foundation and skirted the massive charred roof beam. On the other side of what was left of the right-hand wall, my foot hit a patch of crumbled red tile, and I slipped to the ground. Pushing myself up with both hands, I lurched around the rear of the ruins.
No one was there. Not a blade of grass moved. Not a flower was trampled.
I scanned the area between me and the road; the grove of oak trees looked as if no one had passed through it in centuries; the fields and orchard lay similarly untouched. I listened, but the only sound was the shriek of a nearby jay.
I stood there for a moment, feeling foolish, ashamed at having let my overactive imagination panic me. The chill was gone from my shoulder blades. I was certain no one watched me now.
I continued looking around. Nothing moved, except for a few errant wildflowers. Then I lowered my gaze to the ground. There was a place where the grass was bent, as if someone had been standing on it quite recently. And in among the trampled green stalks lay a foreign object. A cigarette butt-or more accurately, a cigarette filter tip. It had been burned all the way down, singeing the white porous material.
I went over and picked it up; it was still warm. The paper that might have identified the brand was completely burned; this could be any kind of cigarette with a white filter.
I stood with the butt pinched between my thumb and forefinger, staring at the landscape, which once again seemed ominous. The chill I'd felt had not been a product of my imagination; it had not been caused by the wandering of ghosts. A very real flesh-and-blood person who smoked filter-tipped cigarettes had been hiding behind this wall observing me. A person who for some reason had chosen not to reveal himself.
Somehow, I thought, I'd have preferred a ghost.
FOUR
After my return from Las Lomas, I spent a restless evening prowling around the house. I went from room to room, straightening a picture here, pinching off straggly shoots of a houseplant there, feeling out of sorts and purposeless and, above all, a stranger in my own home. It wasn't the same kind of alienation that had assailed me the other day, when I'd felt like piling all the furniture in the middle of the room and then rearranging it. That had been a simple reaction of emotional shock and anxiety. But this: It was as if I were viewing my surroundings through someone else's eyes, seeing them as someone from not only another place but another time.
“And why not?” I asked aloud, stopping myself in the act of reducing my already-ailing Swedish ivy to a mere twig. “You've been living on close terms with John Quincannon for a couple of days now. Why wouldn't you begin to see things as he might?”
I pulled my hand away from the abused plant and went to sit on the sofa, propping my feet on the coffee table and crossing my arms over my breasts. There was a stack of books on the cushion next to me-illustrated volumes on old Spanish church architecture that I'd pulled off the shelves of my personal art library with the idea that one of them might contain a drawing of San Anselmo de las Lomas. I glanced at them and then looked away.
San Anselmo de las Lomas. The image of the ruins and the vestiges of the eerie feelings I'd experienced there that afternoon haunted me, haunted me almost as much as the phrase that still echoed in my mind:
Mas alia del sepulcro.
Perhaps, I thought, those strange feelings had been nothing more than the by-product of this uncanny identification I had developed with the long-dead San Francisco detective. Maybe all they proved was the power of suggestion upon an overactive imagination. Or if I were superstitious-and I am descended from an extremely superstitious people-I might say that I had picked up the vibrations from an unpleasant experience Quincannon had had on that spot. If the detective had gone to the pueblo, felt he was being watched, perhaps even encountered danger, as he had on the beach with Oliver Witherspoon and James Evans….
“You're not thinking clearly, Elena,” I said aloud. “What about the freshly smoked cigarette?” As I thought of it, I shivered-and realized I would greatly prefer any number of supernatural experiences to the very real and possibly threatening one of having someone watch me from among those ruins.
I'd faced much more disagreeable situations than that in the past year, however. And I knew that the only reasonable way to deal with them was with cool thinking and logic. I now made myself examine the problem more rationally than I had earlier on the drive home from Las Lomas.
The cigarette could have been smoked and dropped there by any number of persons-both known and unknown to me. The obvious assumption was that it was a stranger, someone who frequented the place and had been surprised to find me there. A hiker who lived in the area, perhaps; or one of the teenagers who used the place to party and had spray-painted the rainbow on the church's wall. A teenager would naturally have wanted to keep out of sight-why risk an encounter with an unfamiliar adult? A lone hiker probably preferred his solitude and wouldn't have seen the need for conversation with me-after all, it was more or less a public place, and I had as much right to be there as anyone else. But wouldn't a hiker or a teenager have merely gone away? Why wait and watch from behind that wall for the length of time I'd sensed someone's eyes on me? And why disappear when I approached?