“Yes.”
“It was the other one I had a crush on — Felipe. I don’t suppose anyone ever hears from him.”
“I wouldn’t know.” Devon remembered the three oldest Estivar boys only as a trio. When she used to meet them individually she was never certain whether she was seeing Cruz or Rufo or Felipe. They were uniformly quiet and polite, as though their father had spelled out to them exactly how to behave in her presence. There were rumors, passed along to her mainly by Dulzura, that away from the ranch the Estivar brothers were a great deal livelier.
Beneath the girl’s platinum wig a narrow strip of brown forehead glistened with sweat. “My old lady was supposed to meet me here, she promised to look after the kid when I go on the stand. Maybe she got lost. That’s the story of my life — people I count on get lost.”
“I’d be glad to help if I can.”
“She’ll turn up sooner or later. She probably wandered into some church and started praying. She’s a great prayer but it never does much good, least of all for me.”
“Why not for you?”
“I got a jinx.”
“Nobody believes in jinxes any more.”
“No. But I got one just the same.” Carla glanced down at the baby, frowning. “I hope the kid don’t catch it from me. He’s gonna have enough trouble without people dying all around him, disappearing, drowning, being stabbed like Mr. Osborne.”
“Mr. Osborne didn’t die because of your jinx.”
“Well, I feel like if it wasn’t for me he’d still be alive. And her, too.”
“Yes?”
“Mrs. Bishop. She drowned.”
Mrs. Bishop had had headaches and took long walks and drowned.
The table reserved for the press when court was in session had been vacated for recess. Across its polished mahogany surface Ford and Mrs. Osborne faced each other. Mrs. Osborne still wore her public face and her jaunty blue hat, but Ford was beginning to look irritable and his soft voice had developed a rasp.
“I repeat, Mrs. Osborne, Estivar talked more freely than I anticipated. No harm was done, however.”
“Not to you, nothing touches you. But what about me? All that talk about prejudice and ill-feeling, it was embarrassing.”
“Murder is an embarrassing business. There’s no law stating the mother of the victim will be spared.”
“I refuse to believe that a murder occurred.”
“Okay, okay, you have a right to your opinion. But as far as this hearing today is concerned, your son is dead.”
“All the more reason why you shouldn’t have allowed Estivar to blacken his name.”
“I let him talk,” Ford said, “just as I intend to let the rest of the witnesses talk. This Judge Gallagher is no dope. He’d be highly suspicious if I tried to present Robert as a perfect young man without an enemy in the world. Perfect young men don’t get murdered, they don’t even get born. In presenting the background of a murder, the victim’s faults are more pertinent than his virtues, his enemies are more important than his friends. If Robert wasn’t getting along well with Estivar, if he had trouble with the migrant workers or with his neighbors—”
“The only neighbors he ever had the slightest trouble with were the Bishops. You surely wouldn’t dredge that up again — Ruth’s been dead for nearly two years.”
“And Robert had no part in her death?”
“Of course not.” She shook her head, and the hat jumped forward as though it meant to peck at a tormentor. “Robert tried to help her. She was a very unhappy woman.”
“Why?”
“Because he was kind.”
“No. I meant, why was she unhappy?”
“Perhaps because Leo — Mr. Bishop — was more interested in his crops than he was in his wife. She was lonely. She used to come over and talk to Robert. That’s all there was between them, talk. She was old enough to be his mother. He felt sorry for her, she was such a pathetic little thing.”
“Is that what he told you?”
“He didn’t have to tell me. It was obvious. Day after day she dragged her trouble over to our house like a sick animal she couldn’t cure, couldn’t kill.”
“How did she get to your house?”
“Walked. She liked to pretend that she did it for the exercise, but of course no one was fooled, not even Leo.” She paused, running a gloved hand across the surface of the table as though testing it for dirt. “I suppose you know how she died.”
“Yes. I looked it up in the newspaper files. She was attempting to cross the river during a winter rain, got caught by a flash flood and drowned. A coroner’s jury returned a verdict of accidental death. There were indications that she suffered from despondency, but suicide was ruled out by the finding of her suitcase a mile or so downstream, waterlogged but still intact. It was packed for a journey. She was going some place.”
“Perhaps.”
“Why just ‘perhaps,’ Mrs. Osborne?”
“There was no evidence to prove Ruth and the suitcase entered the water at the same time. It’s easy enough to pack a woman’s suitcase and toss it in a river, especially for someone with access to her belongings.”
“Like a husband?”
“Like a husband.”
“Why would a husband do that?”
“To make people think his wife was on her way to meet another man and run away with him. The easiest method of avoiding blame is to cast it on someone else. That suitcase turned Leo into a poor grieving widower and Robert into an irresponsible seducer.”
“What was in it?”
“You mean exactly?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know. What difference does it make?”
“A woman preparing for a rendezvous with her lover wouldn’t pack quite the same things as a man would pack for her, even a husband. I presume the contents of the suitcase were exhibited at the coroner’s inquest.”
“I didn’t attend the inquest. By that time I’d stopped going anywhere because of the gossip. Oh, nothing was ever said in front of Robert or me, but it was there on everyone’s face, even the people who worked for us. If she hadn’t died it would have been laughable, the idea of Robert running off with a woman twice his age, a pale skinny little thing who looked like an elderly child.”
“What do you think happened to Ruth Bishop, Mrs. Osborne?”
“I know what didn’t happen. She did not pack a suitcase and start across that river in order to keep a rendezvous with my son. It was raining before she left the house, and she was well aware of the danger of a flash flood.”
“You believe that she walked into the river deliberately?”
“Perhaps.”
“And that Leo Bishop packed a suitcase and put it into the water so it would be found later downstream.”
“Again, perhaps.”
“Why?”
“A wife’s suicide puts her husband in a bad light, starts people asking questions and prying under surfaces. As it was, all the bad light was on us. I sent Robert on a trip East to give the scandal a chance to blow over. That’s where he met Devon and married her two weeks later. Funny how things repeat themselves, isn’t it? The first thing that struck me about Devon was how much she looked like Ruth Bishop.”
People had begun returning to the courtroom: the high school students; Leo Bishop and the ranchers; the Estivars, with Lum Wing shuffling along behind like a family pet that was currently out of favor; Carla Lopez, freshly groomed and without her baby, as though she’d suddenly decided she was too young to be burdened with a child and had left it somewhere in the corridor or the ladies’ room.
Ford’s only reaction to the people coming back in was a slight lowering of his voice.