Feliz Navidead Page 12

  “Where’d she go?” I asked. Josephina was gone. I sniffed the air and thought I caught a whiff of sulfur, the devilish stench I’d smelled the night of the murder. Just as quickly, the smell was gone, replaced by sweet piñon smoke and the delicious perfume of a nearby bakery. Don’t be silly, I chided myself. She’s an old lady with a bad back. The witching could be a rumor, or a hobby, or a perfectly acceptable belief system.

  “There!” Cass said. She pointed down the street, where the passenger door to a low-slung truck was closing. “Shoot! I think she got in that truck.”

  We jogged down the street. Cass held out her cell phone with the video function on. Here was something for Mom’s Christmas memories, I thought. I imagined the jiggly footage of dark sidewalks, our feet, and a blurry witch getting away.

  The truck pulled out, revved its motor in a throaty, sputtering roar, and then inched forward at a snail’s pace.

  “Dang,” Cass said, fiddling with her phone. “I can’t get the zoom to work. I wanted to get the license plate.”

  So much for our tailing. The truck had picked up speed. The best we could do was see which way it turned, not that it would tell us much. I hoped that Manny—or the Knit and Snitchers—could track down Josephina and her grandson. If one of them was the murderer, though, I didn’t have to worry. They’d have killed for revenge. They wouldn’t be going after my daughter and the other devils. Unless Josephina was really off her rocker. She’d certainly scared Gary the guard and she’d pointed to the devil actors.

  A horn blasted behind us. I jumped. Cass cursed.

  Miriam wrenched down the passenger window of Flori’s white whale of a Cadillac. “Get in!” Miriam said cheerfully. “We’re going tailing.”

  Cass jumped in the back before I could warn her off. Flori’s driving was scarier than any witch, especially at night.

  “Come on,” Flori said impatiently from the driver’s seat. She used a throw pillow to boost her height. Even with the pillow, her bifocals barely rose above the steering wheel.

  “Celia’s waiting . . .” I started to say. But that reminded me I was doing this for my daughter. I jumped in and buckled up. Flori stomped on the gas, belatedly released the hand brake, and accidentally slammed on the horn.

  “Woo-hoo!” Miriam yelled, without dropping a stitch.

  “Silver Purl, keep a sharp eye,” Flori instructed her friend. “If you see that truck turning, let me know. It’s awfully dark out tonight. I’m having trouble seeing far ahead.”

  I decided not to point out that nighttime was always dark and Flori probably shouldn’t be driving, regardless what her great-nephew the optometrist and the DMV told her.

  “Up there,” Cass said, after a few miles. “The truck’s turning off the main road. I bet I know where they’re going. I have an artist friend lives out here. The sign says dead end, but there’s a dirt track across private land and an arroyo that leads to some houses.”

  “Hang on!” Flori said. We bumped off road. Miriam cheered and held up her knitting like a roller-coaster rider. I clutched my seat and tried not to scream.

  Flori was unperturbed. “Good thing this arroyo’s dry or we’d be ice skating.”

  The track turned to even less of a road after we crossed the dry creek bed. In the beam of Flori’s headlights, rough tracks headed out to the left and right. Josephina’s ride had turned right, the taillights disappearing over a small hill. Flori swung the bouncing sedan in the same direction. At the top of the hill, a sign speckled with pot shots marked the track as Camino Sin Nombre, the “Lane with No Name.” A row of mailboxes, most dented or missing their fronts, clung to a rail fence, their numbers ranging from 201 to 207.

  “Good,” I said. “We know where they went now. We can look up the owners of properties out here in the morning.”

  Flori, however, had a different idea. “We should stop by for a little chat,” she said.

  “We came prepared,” Miriam said. “We have cookies. Bizcochitos.”

  Cass and I reached for our phones simultaneously. “I’m texting Sky,” Cass said. “If we’re late, he can drive Celia home. That is, unless she has your keys, Rita, and can drive herself.”

  The car keys were in my pocket, jabbing at my thigh. I thanked Cass and hovered my index finger over the tiny phone screen. What to say? Out on a drive with Flori? That didn’t sound like a good reason to desert one’s child at devil practice. Celia might find my sleuthing embarrassing, but she was used to it. I went with honesty. Following lead on devil killer. With Flori and Cass, I wrote. Then I gave the street name and mailbox numbers. Just in case.

  An emoticon shot back in return. A devil’s face frowning. Then, after a minute, another text flashed up. BE CAREFUL!

  From the front seat, Miriam held up a tiny knitted onesie, cute for any newborn wanting sophisticated all-black evening attire or aspiring to a career in spying.

  Cass complimented her stitches. I kept my eye on the gravel track, which had turned into a rutted path leading to a squat adobe cottage. A massive cottonwood towered over the little house, and two pillars of rain-melted adobe bricks flanked the entranceway to the driveway and dirt yard. I’d expected ominous. I was wrong. The cottage actually seemed quite homey. Real candles flickered in the front windows, and white lights, just like Mom used, decorated a scraggly juniper by the door.

  “Should we beep?” Miriam asked. “My mother grew up out in the lonely country, and she always said to beep to let folks get ready for company.”

  “We’re tailing and interrogating, Miriam dear, not social visiting,” Flori said to her friend. She unbuckled her seat belt, which promptly became stuck in the fluffy folds of her goose-down coat. I reached over the seat to help her out. In the process, Flori’s elbow leaned on the horn.

  “That’ll alert them,” Miriam said.

  The lace curtain across the front door twitched open, then fell. The candle lighting the front window went black. Great. We’d just alerted the witch. As we approached the front door, with its peeling red paint and misshapen plastic wreath, I rethought my feelings of homey. In a fairy tale, we’d be lured in, plied with food, and . . . well, I didn’t want to think what happened next.

  We stood on the porch of sagging planks raised a few inches off the ground.

  “Who dares knock?” Cass whispered.

  “We could draw straws,” Miriam suggested. “If we had any.”

  Flori settled the matter by raising her fist and rapping. The door creaked open on its own. The scene inside was straight out of a fairy tale, all right, but not the Grimm stories I’d been conjuring. No, this little cottage could have modeled for greeting cards. The front room combined a small kitchen and sitting area around a pretty kiva fireplace. Bite-sized empanadas rested on a rack set on an antique stove, and delicate lace doilies covered the headrests of the sparse but fine furniture. A slender young man with dark hair was lighting a log in the fireplace. The match caught a tower of twigs, sending smoke curling up the chimney and flames licking at the kiva’s plaster face.

  “Hi,” he said pleasantly enough, looking over his shoulder. “You’re here to see Nana? She said we’d be getting visitors.”

  I sipped warm, spiced tea and discreetly checked my watch. For the last half hour, Flori and Josephina had been reminiscing about their schooldays. Josephina had appeared after the young man introduced himself as her grandson, Angel. He didn’t seem like a killer, but I could have been swayed by his wonderful baking. I savored an empanadita, a bite-sized empanada filled with pumpkin.

  “These are wonderful, Angel,” I said, reaching for another. “What spices do you use?”

  He made a zipping motion across his lips, brushing the top of a scraggly goatee that needed another decade or so to fill in. He nodded toward his grandmother. “Family secret.”

  A secret I’d love to get my hands on. I nibbled some more and tried to detect the spice mixture. Josephina and Flori sat in armchairs by the fire. Angel, Cass, Miriam, and I were at the s
mall round dining room table. Miriam had come prepared with yarn and needles in her coat pocket and was humming along to the carols on the Spanish language radio station playing softly in the background. Cass had kept her coat buttoned, ready to go, and was studying a glass cabinet. The cabinet was filled with dusty medicine bottles and oddities suitable for a witch, or someone with extreme food tastes: pickled chicken feet, dried amphibians, and some unrecognizable bottled blobs.

  A few feet away, Josephina cackled that Flori had stolen her middle school beau. Flori countered that Josephina had put a curse on him.

  “That boy got a skin rash and would never leave the house,” Flori said. “Said he was allergic to sun, of all things. Did you know, he moved to Minnesota?” Flori shivered.

  Josephina cackled happily. “My abuela’s special curse.”

  My abuela, namely my grandmother Pat, had never cursed anyone. She also wouldn’t consider Minnesota one of the frozen circles of purgatory, and the closest she came to swearing was “oh me” and “sugar.” I leaned across the table and said to Angel, “I kind of met your grandmother the night a man was killed at the Inn of the Pajarito. Did she say anything about what she saw?”

  He glanced over his shoulder at the octogenarian schoolgirls. “Sí, she saw a devil. A dead devil.” He crossed himself and I noticed a skull tattoo the size of a quarter between his thumb and index finger. Some things are best homemade, like pies and cookies. Tattoos, not so much. The skull ink bled into his skin, blurring the lines. The same was true of blotted X marks below his knuckles and a wavering barbed wire band near his collarbone. However, the image on his forearm, I couldn’t fault. There, ink outlines showed two spoons in cross formation. Angel had told us how he worked in various restaurants in town and hoped to make his way up from fry cook to chef. He certainly had a talent for baking.

  “Did she recognize the devil?” I asked carefully.

  Angel’s voice fell to a whisper. “Nana has some troubles, ’specially at night. She remembers old times really well. New stuff?” He shrugged and shook his hand, palm down, suggesting that recent events were hit or miss.

  Cass dropped her voice to a whisper as well. “But why was your grandmother at the hotel? Why not stay down with the crowd watching the performance?”

  Angel tugged nervously on his spindly goatee and said he didn’t know. “Nana used to work at that hotel. Sometimes she gets confused, you know, about the year and how old she is. All she said, when she called to ask me for a ride, was that her curse finally worked. She was really happy.”

  Logs snapped in the fireplace, sending embers floating upward into the darkness of the chimney. I realized that Josephina and Flori had stopped talking. A smile stretched across Josephina’s wrinkled face, revealing a toothless gap. Her laugh came out with a whistle. “It worked,” she said.

  “Josephina,” Flori said calmly. “How did your curse work?”

  Our elderly hostess got up and bustled to the kitchen. “El diablo. I gave him the maleficio. I killed him.”

  “Nana, no!” Angel said sharply. “You did not kill that man or curse him. Please, stop saying that.”

  His grandmother chuckled and turned her hunched back to us to root through the cabinet of disturbing curiosities. When she turned, she held a small ceramic owl.

  “Tecolote,” she declared.

  “Oh dear,” said Miriam, crossing herself with her knitting needles.

  One of my favorite breakfast places was a café called Tecolote. I knew it meant owl, a bird I’m quite fond of.

  “Cute,” I said, since no one else was acknowledging Josephina’s treasure. “Nice owl.”

  Josephina waved the figurine across the table. Miriam and Cass recoiled. Angel tried to snatch the object from his grandmother but she was too quick.

  “An owl is a symbol of witches,” Cass whispered to me. “Like foxes.”

  “Josie,” Flori said gently. “You’re not cursing any of us, are you?”

  “I’m cursing the devil,” her school friend replied. “All the devils.”

  Now that wasn’t cute. “The devils in Las Posadas are only actors,” I said. To Angel, I said, “She knows that, right?”

  “Yeah, sure, sometimes,” he said, getting up from the table. “Nana’s tired. It’s way past dark.” He put a hand on his grandmother’s shoulder. “Time for sleep, Nana. No wandering tonight.”

  I didn’t need more hints to leave. Neither did Cass. She was already adjusting her scarf and thanking Angel for the empanadas. Flori approached her old friend, who was murmuring in Spanish I couldn’t understand. Flori spoke in Spanish first, then English. “Did you hear me, Josephina? We know your curse worked, but who acted it out? Who stabbed Francisco?”

  Josephina looked confused. “Florita?” she said. “Ah, Florita, we’re late for class.”

  Flori patted her old friend. “Yes, Josie. Let’s take our nap now. Lay our heads down. You go ahead with this nice young man.”

  Angel guided his grandmother to her bedroom. The rest of us stepped outside. The air was cold and dry. Overhead, constellations twinkled across the vast sky. I identified the North Star and the Seven Sisters. Those were the easy ones to recognize. So was another light coming across the horizon, this one not so festive.

  “Uh oh, the fuzz!” Miriam said, pointing to the blue and red lights of a police car barreling over the hill.

  Chapter 14

  Manny stepped out of the patrol car and stood with his hands on his weapons belt. I squinted into the flashing lights. The siren whirled on, then immediately groaned to a halt. Manny turned to glare at the driver. I recognized her as Deputy Davis, who’d tipped Mom off to my sleuthing and lost the bet about my body finding. She gave a “sorry” shrug to Manny and waved cheerfully to me.

  Manny opened the rear door of the cruiser, but instead of a criminal, a girl devil stepped out.

  “Hey, Mom!” Celia said, looking a tad chagrined. As they approached, she explained. “Dad came by practice and I told him we had cookies and that you . . . ah . . . had a lead.”

  Manny, to his credit, didn’t say something snarky about amateur sleuths. He let his glower do it for him.

  “We’re visiting a school friend of mine,” said Flori.

  Miriam added, rather belligerently, “That’s what we old women do around the holidays. It’s no business of the police.”

  Manny’s glower morphed into a skeptical smirk. “Now? Out here in the middle of nowhere?” In the distance, the lights of Santa Fe glowed.

  I weighed my options and decided to tell Manny the truth. “We found Josephina Ortiz,” I said. “You shouldn’t bother her tonight. She has some memory problems after dusk, but she could be an important witness. Perhaps she’ll be able to say more in the morning.” Or she’d wake up refreshed for more cursing.

  Manny’s elderly aunt suffered dementia and the mental shadows that set in at dusk. I knew he understood. He frowned, but nodded. “Did she witness the killing?”

  We on the porch shrugged. “Unclear,” I said. “But she was there. She thinks she cursed the devil to death.”

  “She’s a practicing witch,” Flori explained. “So were her mother and her grandmother before her. They cursed my first boyfriend and gave him skin problems. I forgave them. It freed me up to marry my old fool, Bernard.”

  Deputy Davis said that was a good curse, then. Manny turned to her. “Did you run the address, Davis?”

  “Oh yeah,” she said. “The office just sent the info. The property belongs to Josephina Ortiz. There’s no record of problems, ’cept her grandson who has a rap sheet. Manslaughter as a juvenile.” She held up a cell phone, presumably containing the information.

  “Let me see that,” Manny said, stepping back to take her phone.

  I felt bad. Angel had given us snacks. He seemed to take good care of his grandmother, and he’d barely known his deceased mother. Could revenge overcome the kind parts of his nature? “Angel’s here too,” I said wearily. “But he has his ha
nds full with his grandmother. He was putting her to bed.”

  Manny announced that Angel would be talking to him, bedtime or not. He ordered Deputy Davis to follow him, and told the rest of us, including Celia, to wait by the patrol car.

  “My, my, how thrilling,” Miriam said, not moving from the porch.

  Flori put up her feather hood, but otherwise didn’t budge. Cass nodded to the patrol car. I followed her. We climbed in the backseat with Celia, leaving the doors open so we could listen.

  “How was practice?” I asked Celia, who was sandwiched in the middle.

  “Fine,” she answered. “The vocal coach was cool. That guard Gary called the police when the old lady started acting odd. When Dad showed up, I told him about your text. I thought you might have followed her. Hope you don’t mind I told him.”

  I didn’t mind. Manny could be a pain, but I wanted the devil slayer nabbed, whoever he—or she—was.

  “Knock louder,” Manny ordered Davis, who was already pounding. “Here,” he said, pushing her aside. He thumped his fist on the wood and yelled, “Police! Open up!”

  “Try the knob,” Flori suggested.

  Manny twisted the knob and the door cracked open. He reached for his holster.

  “Hello?” Deputy Davis called out, peeking in the opening. “Hello? Anyone home?”

  Flori motioned for me to join them on the porch.

  “Go on,” Cass said. “Celia and I will hang out here.”

  I joined the crowd just outside the door and looked inside to an empty living room. “They were right in there,” I said to Manny. “Angel could be tucking his granny into bed.”

  “Go check,” Manny snapped.

  “What? Me?” Manny was usually pushing me out of investigations. He’d wanted me to wait at the car, for heaven’s sake.

  “Well, Davis and I can’t go bursting in without a warrant,” he said. “Aren’t you, the witch, and the manslaughter guy chums?”

  Ah, so I was to do his work for him. Part of me wanted to refuse out of principle. The other part of me was curious and kind of worried. I stepped inside.