“She’s horrid?”
Ximena didn’t get the quote and just nodded. “She is . . . delicate. My parents were both artists. Papa died when I was very young and then Mama fled Colombia for the United States with me and my brother—”
“Fled?” I asked.
“Yes. Papa was killed in an accident and that was when Mama started to go a little crazy. She said he’d been murdered by the police in Cali—we lived in an artists’ colony in the foothills and she thought of Cali as a wicked and filthy city, so of course Papa couldn’t just die in a bus accident there; he had to have been assassinated over his art,” she explained with a touch of eye rolling and hand waving. “She was sure someone would come to our door one day and kill us all. She had family who had come here and they said they could get her a job and so we ran away in the night like criminals.”
“Did you believe it was true?”
She shut herself down with a shrug and glanced away. “Sometimes. I stopped when I was in high school, but”—her eyes swung back to mine from under her lowered brow and falling hair—“the first time I met Rey and he said his father was a policeman in Cali . . . for just a moment . . . I thought that maybe it wasn’t just one of my crazy mother’s crazy stories.”
“She thought I had come to kill her,” Solis added from the doorway behind me.
I turned my head toward him. “Ximena or her mother?”
“Ximena,” he replied. He walked across the room and snuggled one arm around his wife. “Didn’t you?”
Ximena nodded, biting her lip. “It’s so stupid of me, but . . . you know. . . .”
He kissed the top of her head, which forced him up on his toes since Ximena was only an inch or so shorter than Solis. “I know.” He whispered in her ear and kissed her cheek.
She made a shy smile at the floor.
“So,” Solis started, giving his wife a little squeeze. “Pizza?”
Ximena giggled and finally looked up at him. “I don’t want to feed a guest pizza!”
Solis shrugged. “As you like, mi reina. But Blaine is not a guest.” He raised his eyes to mine and a momentary desperation flashed in his glance and sent a shower of anxious olive sparks into the Grey. “Are you?”
“Nope,” I agreed. “Just here to make the sergeant’s life harder.”
“Then you should go upstairs and get started,” Ximena suggested, stepping out of her husband’s arms. She made comic shooing motions at us both. “Marchaos. I can clean this up myself.”
Solis caught her nearest hand, his expression serious. “You are certain?”
“Of course,” she replied, but her voice was a touch brittle. “I’ll be fine. I’ll call you when dinner is ready.”
“And Mama?”
“I can manage Mama. I’ll pull the curtain over the door.”
Solis seemed reluctant, but he squeezed her hand a little before letting go and shrugged. “All right.”
He motioned for me to come along and headed out of the kitchen. I picked up the bag full of bell and followed, glancing back at Ximena for only a moment as I went. She stood at the sink with her back mostly turned to us and her hands covering her face. She wasn’t crying, but she seemed very close to it. I had the urge to turn back, but I didn’t because Solis didn’t and I know that the comfort of strangers is rarely appropriate when teetering between tears and rage.
ELEVEN
Solis led me back to the foyer with its polished wooden floor and up the stairs. He stopped at the top and glanced toward the back of the house. “The children are in the boys’ room. They should be all right until dinner. My office is in the attic; we’ll hear them if they misbehave.” I wasn’t sure he was talking to me as much as reassuring himself.
In a moment he opened the door to what I’d thought was a closet and started up a steep, narrow staircase to the attic.
The space under the roof was roughly divided by a partially finished wall that cut across near the back of the house. The much larger area in the front was plainly an artist’s studio with easels and drawing tables arranged to take maximum advantage of the light through the large dormer windows on three sides. Work in various stages of completion hung or leaned everywhere there was room. There was even a covered lump on a half pillar that I guessed was a small sculpture in progress—progress that had stopped long ago, judging by the accumulation of dust on everything. The floor was dusty, too, except for a trail leading to a door in the rough wall.
Solis unlocked the door with the ease of habit and waved me through as he stepped aside to fetch a chair from the studio.
His office was wide but shallow, taking up the whole width of the house at the back, but only eight feet or so of the depth. Unlike the studio, his office had only one dormer window and that was partially shaded by a huge old tree in the backyard. His desk—a pair of cheap folding banquet tables set at a right angle—took up the area under the large dormer. Piles of cardboard and plastic file boxes and a few battered two-drawer steel filing cabinets took up some of the remaining space on the floor at each side, but most of the area was empty. The walls, on the other hand, were covered with papers and photos so numerous it was difficult to see the surface on which they were pinned. I even saw scraps of fabric and small objects in plastic bags pinned, clamped, or tied among the pages. Various lamps stood here and there or were fixed to the table edges and exposed joists. I stared at it all, turning slowly, with the bell in its canvas sack swinging gently against my knees.
Where my office was carefully buttoned up—all files and notes put away and hidden from clients’ eyes—Solis’s private space was like a murder board for a serial-killer investigation. It looked as if every case he’d ever worked haunted the walls with paper ghosts.
He watched me until I stopped to blink at him, amazed and stunned. He gave a half shrug and quirked one corner of his mouth. “My wife’s family has their madness. I have mine.” He removed his coat and suit jacket and hung them on a hook at the back of the door before holding his hand out for my own coat. I gave it to him and he placed it on top of his. Then he turned back into the room and his close-hugging energy corona flushed a bright gold color as he seemed to brace himself or change mental gears. “Now let us take another look at the bell,” he added, dragging the spare chair up to the desk.
I followed him and he removed a small pile of file folders to a box on the floor to make room for our prize. I put the bag on the table and pulled out the bell, keeping it over the bag to contain any glop we’d missed earlier. Solis pulled one of the lights down closer and drew up the desk chair beside the other one. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket—I didn’t think anyone actually carried them anymore—and wiped the bell with care, clearing water and the last of the embedded goop off the engraving.
The bell was made of bronze all through as far as we could see, but nothing new was revealed by the wiping, except a small loop on the top for a lanyard to be threaded through. The lettering still read S.S. VALENCIA and nothing more.
Solis frowned in thought, murmuring, “Valencia. So, whatever the neighbor, Mr. Francis, thought he heard, it most likely was not about shipwrecks in Spain,” he added, shooting me a sly look from the corner of his eyes.
“Maybe the wreck of Valencia,” I suggested.
Solis nodded his head a bit, but I wasn’t sure he was conscious of it. “Ghosts . . .” he muttered, keeping his eyes on the bell. His aura pulled down to a thin line of cold blue for a moment. Then he abruptly swung the chair around and scooted it to face his computer, a boxy old desktop machine that squatted like an electronic gargoyle on the corner where the two tables met. He clacked away with his ancient keyboard and mouse and the printer made some grunting noises. “I’ll start printing the other case files while we search for Valencia,” he said, barely glancing up.