Battleboro police told the Gazette that the cave people are orderly and are breaking no laws. “That hill is part of a huge national forest preserve, open to all Canadians,” said Chief Judd Nooson. “There’s nothing much we can do about them, legally.”
A professor of philosophy at the University of Saskatchewan, Stanley Nihlin, offered a possible explanation: “In these times of rapid change, when religious belief is at such a low level, people try on cults like new shoes. And discard them just as quickly.”
A curious postscript to that newspaper item and, indeed, to this entire investigation, is that the editorial assistant who first heard about the Hermit Genius of Marshville, and the reporter who covered the story for EQMM, have resigned. Reportedly she left her husband and children and he left his fiancée and friends behind to join the cave people. But this has not been confirmed.
One Hundred Candles
by Raymond Steiber
© 1998 by Raymond Steiber
On the book jacket of one of Raymond Steiber’s mystery novels, renowned mystery editor Joan Kahn wrote, “We’re not going to tell you anything about the author — because he’s not telling.” That was many years ago, but the retiring Mr. Steiber, who currently lives in North Carolina, hasn’t changed his view of self-promotion. We’ll let his work speak for him.
Her high heels were clicking along the sidewalk of a narrow street near the Plaza Municipal when she first saw them. They were in the front seat of a shiny black Jeep Cherokee and they both wore jet black sunglasses. The one on the right turned his head and stared at her. It was not the usual male stare, the kind that quickly slipped below the neck and appraised the body. It locked on her face and as the Jeep passed followed her, not to catch a glimpse of the dress twitching across her rear end, but to make sure — to mark her.
She turned the next corner as rapidly as she could, and only her own sunglasses disguised the fact that she was nearly in tears. Tears of fear, anger, and dismay.
The dogs have come, she thought.
But then Patricio had said they would.
But why now — when her mind was on other things? The dry heat of the Sonoran afternoon. The feel of her body against the fabric of her dress. The look of herself as she was reflected in this or that store window — good-looking, yet a little hard. Why now, when she’d managed to put the very possibility of them — at least for this day — out of her head?
She turned into a bar — a working man’s cantina — no place for a well-turned chica to find herself alone. It was dark after the glare of the street, and fortunately empty. She knew the bartender — that was why she’d sought refuge there. He was a friend of Patricio’s — assuming Patricio still had any friends in this place — anyone who could afford to be his friend.
She put her hands on the bar, and her gold bracelets jangled against the formica.
She said: “Do you want me to tell you what a madrina looks like?” Her voice was higher pitched than usual and sharp with sarcasm.
Justo, the bartender, gazed at her with eyes that seemed asleep.
“Tell me,” he said. He didn’t ask which sort of madrina.
“He has a black suit and a black tie and he wears sunglasses as dark as night. And he carries a fold-up cellular phone in his pocket and he drives an air-conditioned Jeep Cherokee with tinted glass all around. It must be like riding in an aquarium — hey? Or at the bottom of the sea.”
Justo raised his shoulders. “It could be anyone.”
“No. It was the madrinas. They looked at me and they knew who I was. That’s Barbara. See how she’s tried to make herself look like a norteamericana. But she’s one of us anyway and no amount of hair dye will hide it. What will you say if they come here?”
Justo took a limonada from under the bar. He popped the cap and put it in front of her along with a glass. The Jeep Cherokee cruised by on the street outside. She could see it reflected in the spotted mirror behind the bar — dimly because of her sunglasses and the dirty exterior window — like a vaguely threatening image from a dream.
The limonada fizzed in its bottle. Justo looked at her and said nothing, but his expression was infinitely sad.
“Just what I thought,” she said.
She turned on her heel and click-click-clicked her way down the bar and out the back.
In the street the glare of the sun seemed to leave her naked. They would know where she lived, and it was many hours till sunset. She took to the alleys. Once, passing the open back door of a coffee bar where the young gathered, she heard the blare of the latest narco ballad — how Juan Orozco had flown high on yanqui drug money and how in the end the white dress of the muy linda Maria had been spotted with his blood. She wanted to scream then — not with terror or anguish but with hot flowing anger.
She reached the wasteland at the edge of the town and removed her high-heeled shoes and stockings and stuffed them in her shoulder bag. Then she set out across the arid landscape.
There was a tienda along the dirt road that ran out to the fishing village beside the Gulf. She reached it in half an hour and filled a burlap bag with this and that from its shelves. Matches. Patricio had particularly insisted on matches. Then she drank a cola in the shade of the eaves and set off for the hills.
She was supposed to have brought the old Ford Fiesta — the one with one fender a different color from the rest and a cracked windshield. The key for it was on a chain around her neck. She could feel the metal of it against the skin of her breasts — warm now, almost a part of her, where in the morning it had been cool and alien.
There was a place where she was to have left the car, then gone on foot several miles across the hills. Now she’d have to walk all the way. Maybe the madrinas would know about the Fiesta. Maybe they’d watch it and not realize she’d already gone.
Madrinas, she thought, and spat. Bridesmaids. Bridesmaids of death. They were assassins of a special sort. Rogue members of the federal police who hired themselves out to the new breed of narco bandits as hit men. But that’s Mexico — hey? The poor get ground into the dirt and the police sell themselves to the drug traffickers. And the Big Pockets in the capital want everyone to respect them! But no one respects them — not even their new tame friends in Washington.
But how were she and Patricio any different? Hadn’t they also seen their chance and grabbed for it? As if they didn’t know how it always ended for people like them. With pretty Maria wailing over the body of her slaughtered bridegroom.
She emptied her mind and continued walking. When her mouth grew dry, she took an orange out of the sack and cut a notch in it and sucked on it. The sun climbed down the sky and threw her shadow before her and reddened the hills. Then a rusty orange dusk settled and she found the path she was hunting for. It took her into the hills, and at last there was the abandoned village. A dozen adobe houses, their roofs long gone, their walls pocked by ancient gunfire — bullets from the time of Villa and Zapata and the Revolucion.
He came out to meet her in the dusk. The white teeth showed in his sun-darkened face and the blue eyes — eyes she loved because they were so different from the other eyes she knew — seemed to smile at her.