Beyond the Grave

THREE

It was midafternoon before the county sheriff's men were finished at the ruins of San Anselmo de las Lomas and later yet when Arturo, Sam, and I returned armed with a shovel, pick, and pry bar. We were curiously subdued for a trio of treasure hunters, shaken by the grim events of the past few hours.

Gray Hollis had been taken away immediately under guard in an ambulance, to be treated for a concussion and broken arm. Then the cairn of rocks had been opened, exposing the body of Georgia Hollis, wrapped in a tattered blanket. While investigators took statements from Arturo and me, technicians made their photographs and measurements, and finally Georgia was removed in a green body bag. The proceedings had a mechanical quality that chilled me; out of the improvised grave, into the bag, zip it up-and it was as if the woman had never existed. Even the horror and violence of her death had been negated by these routine and necessary actions.

In a way, I thought, the police procedure was very like the funeral ritual: a closing off, a signal that while one life had ended, it was time for others to get on with theirs. But there was one important difference: No one was here to mourn Georgia Hollis. As I watched the bag containing her body being bundled off through the grove of oak trees, I wondered if there was anyone who would claim Georgia and go through the formalities of grief.

When the investigators were done with us, Arturo and I had driven back to Sam's house. Earlier we'd called the sheriff's department from there, and the historian-who had just returned from mailing off the manuscript he'd been working on-had been left with the task of breaking the news to Dora Kingman. The ordeal had left him more angry than upset. Initially, he told us, Dora had gone into hysterics, but as she'd calmed down she'd begun to insist that Gray couldn't have murdered his wife. The more Sam had tried to convince her, the more adamant she'd become, and when he'd last seen her, she'd been on her way to the county hospital to try to help Gray.

“How can she do that?” Arturo had demanded. “How can she defend that bastardo?”

Sam shrugged. “She thinks she loves him. And the human animal only sees what it wants to see, anyway.”

I had merely nodded, thinking of my affair with Dave-and of Mama's reaction to her illness.

But I had a more important concern than Dora and Gray, and as I explained to Arturo and Sam what I wanted to do, they brightened somewhat. At first Sam said that we would be tampering with a crime scene, but I assured him that I had already cleared it with the sheriffs department. There would be an officer on hand who would observe us and make sure we didn't destroy any evidence. Satisfied, Sam got the tools from the shed in his backyard, and the three of us returned to the ruins of the church.

The old pueblo seemed even more desolate than before. During the afternoon, the rain clouds had passed, but now the sky was dark once again, threatening a downpour at any minute. The sheriffs man had retreated to the warmth of his car, and he seemed sorry to see us; he donned a rain slicker before accompanying us to the ruins and sat down on the roof beam to smoke a cigarette.

As he set down the shovel he was carrying, Sam glanced at what remained of the cairn of rocks, and I saw a shudder pass through his body. Arturo was staring up at the sky; when he lowered his eyes, they met mine and I thought I knew what he was thinking: Let it rain; let it wash away the traces of this tragedy.

I shook my head, as if to clear it of such thoughts, and went directly to the foundation on the opposite side of the church from Georgia's makeshift grave. Lining my feet up against it where it turned at a right angle to form the apse, I paced off the distance: one, two, three, four, five feet. Then I went to the opposite side-ignoring the place where the body had been-and repeated the measuring in the apse whose walls were still standing. One, two, three feet. And a bit more. But not four feet.

I turned to Sam and Arturo; they were watching me intently. “Here,” I said, “this is where we need to break down the wall.” I stepped aside as they came forward with the pick and the pry bar. After a moment, Sam told me to move even farther back; the adobe wasn't yielding easily, and he didn't want to whack me with the pick. I'd already been injured enough for one day-Arturo had given me a muscle relaxant he'd had left over from when he'd hurt himself rock climbing last year, but my back still throbbed-so I retreated a few feet. But then I started moving closer again, excited now, sure of what they'd soon uncover.

John Quincannon had solved one murder, back in the 1890s. I'd discovered another, here in the 1980s. And now I was about to make the biggest discovery of all. I was about to find the long-lost Velasquez artifacts….

Sam turned and glared at me. I was standing no more than a foot behind him. I gestured apologetically and went to sit next to the sheriffs man on the charred roof beam, annoyed that my back injury prevented me from helping. This was going much too slowly. Wasn't demolition supposed to be easy? Shouldn't that old wall just fall…?

There was a cracking sound. Arturo shouted, and Sam grabbed his arm and pulled him away from the wall. Adobe bricks rained down, one chunk landing on Sam's foot. He began hopping up and down, his hand grasping Arturo for balance. The officer and I both jumped up and ran over there. I peered through the gaping hole in the wall of the apse.

Inside, the space between it and the outer wall was dark. The air was dry and musty. I put my hands on the waist-high opening and hoisted myself up, ignoring a dull throbbing that told me I was doing further damage to my back. My eyes quickly accustomed themselves to the darkness, and I was able to make out a number of lumpy shapes on the ground below.

“Elena?” Sam said. “Are they-”

“I think so.” I let go of the opening and dropped back to the ground. “We've got to pull the rest of this wall down.”

Sam and Arturo attacked it with renewed energy. Even the policeman helped. Now that an opening had been made, the rest of the bricks pulled apart easily. Of course this false wall would not have been built as sturdily as those of the rest of the church; there had not been time. But it still had stood for a hundred and forty years, miraculously spared from cannonballs, fire, and vandalism.

When they had made the opening large enough for me to reach through, the three men stepped back almost ceremoniously. I looked at them, suddenly reluctant to step forward, feeling like a child who has lain awake all night in anticipation of Christmas morning and now can't believe it is really here. They seemed to share the feeling, because they remained silent, staring at the opening.

I shook myself, laughed nervously, then knelt beside the jagged hole in the wall. Extending my arm through it, I felt around until my fingers touched a slender piece of metal. Pulling it out, I saw it was a gold crucifix; the metal gleamed dully, and the jewels at the tips of the crosspieces shone with a deep red fire. Fibers of fabric clung to it, as if it had once been wrapped in cloth that had now rotted away.

My lips parted, but I couldn't speak. I held the crucifix up for the others to see.

Arturo said softly, “Jesus Cristo!”

I smiled at the aptness of the exclamation.

Sam said, “You were right.”

“Yes.”

“But how did you know?” I'd outlined the entire story of the Velasquez treasure on the way here-including the first part for Arturo's benefit-but time hadn't permitted me to explain why I thought the artifacts had been walled into the apse.

I said, “It was in the letter Tomas Cordova wrote to his wife.”

“But according to Quincannon,” Sam said, “the last page was never recovered.”

“That's true. And that was why he couldn't interpret it properly.”

Arturo said, “But if this detective couldn't, why could you?”

“Because I'm Catholic, and Quincannon wasn't. The words on the fragment he found in Luis Cordova's hand were ‘mas alia del sepulcro’ and ‘donde Maria.’ Beyond the grave, where Mary something-or-other. Quincannon and Felipe interpreted the grave to be that of Maria Alcazar, Don Esteban's first wife. But its location had been obliterated in the destruction of the pueblo.”

“And you found it?” Sam asked.

“I found a grave. Or actually, Quincannon found it.” I pointed to the slab of stone in the church floor that I'd uncovered earlier. “It's the grave of Julio del Prado, the first padre of this church. And seeing it made me wonder: What if the grave mentioned in the letter wasn't Maria Alcazar's? What if it was really this one-the most distinctive one in the pueblo? And what if Maria referred to someone else?”

Arturo said, “Who, then?”

“The Virgin Mary.”

Arturo began to smile, nodding in understanding. Sam and the policeman both frowned. Sam said, “I don't get it.”

“That's because, like Quincannon, you're not Catholic. If you were, you would know that the statue of the Virgin Mary customarily stands in this apse, to this side of the altar.”

Now understanding began to come into Sam's eyes, too.

“‘Mas alia del sepulcro’ actually meant beyond Padre del Prado's grave,” I said. “And on the next page of the letter, the phrase ‘donde Maria’ was probably completed with something like the word ‘stands.’”

Sam wasn't quite convinced, though. He said, “That's all very logical, but why didn't Felipe Velasquez realize it? After all, he was Catholic.”

It was the one point that had originally troubled me and made me doubt my reasoning; but while the sheriffs men had been following their routine at the grave of Georgia Hollis, I'd had plenty of time to consider the tragic events that had befallen the Velasquez family, and I thought I had the answer. I said, “Felipe was fixated on ‘Maria’ meaning the grave of Don Esteban's first wife; he never considered the Virgin Mary or Padre del Prado's grave. He had probably forgotten all about the padre. He seldom came here in his last years-Quincannon made that plain-and even when he did, he had no reason to go inside the ruins. Besides, the marker was half-hidden by weeds and grass even then.”

Sam's desire for historical accuracy was not yet satisfied, however. He said, “But why, in all the family's searches for the artifacts, didn't anyone notice that this apse had a false wall?”

That was another question I'd had to consider, and again I was reasonably sure of the answer. “For one thing,” I said, “the workmanship on the false wall was very good. Even though there wasn't time to do a perfect job, it resembles the other walls closely. And during the siege by Fremont's troops, the other apse was destroyed; the size difference between the two wasn't as obvious as it might have been had they both been standing. There was nothing left to compare this one with.”

Sam nodded, apparently accepting my explanation.

I turned back to the opening in the wall. The past had been dealt with; now I had a responsibility to the present, and-being a curator at heart-to these artifacts. They had lain protected in the wall for one hundred and forty years, but now the space was open to the elements, and a rainstorm was threatening.

“Come and help me,” I said to the three men. “Let's get these things out of here before it rains.” To Sam and Arturo, I added, “Later we'll go to Sam's house and call Sofia Manuela and tell her her family treasure has been found.”