A Death in the Family
 

The scream intensified as it burst through the upstairs door.  Then it seemed to form itself around the syllables of his name.  "Oh, Don Diego!  Ai, Dios mio, Don Alejandro! Jesus, María y todos santos!  Please come quickly, por el amor de Dios!"

His father had already emerged from his study, and Urbino, too, came out of his room and onto the veranda just in time for Crescencia to run squarely into him on her way to the head of the stairs.  She backed away, then tried to excuse herself as politely as she could while still urging Diego and his father to come quickly.  Diego took the stairs in a few strides and pushed past the startled Urbino to take her by the arm.  "Crescencia," he said, "what is it?"

"Oh, Patrón," she led him toward the open door.  "It is la morenita."

He stepped past her and stood at the threshold.  At first glance, nothing seemed out of place.  The doors of the wardrobe stood slightly open, but the bed was neatly made, and nothing had been tipped over or broken.  Then, as he stepped inside, he noticed, just off to one side of the dressing table, the crumpled white lace of a petticoat protruding from the smooth grey heap of a skirt.  A movement of her stocking clad ankle brought him instantly around the corner of the bed.

She lay curled up as if in pain, but her hands, wet with saliva, clutched at her cheeks and mouth.  Though her eyes were open, they looked wild, confused.  When at last they did seem to come to rest on him, they widened in horror, as if she were looking into the face of Satan himself.  She tried to scream, but no sound came out.  Diego noticed that she also looked deathly pale.  He tried to brush her hair back from her face, but she only grew more agitated.  Finally, scooping her off the woolen carpet, as his father and Urbino stepped past Crescencia, he laid Teresa gently on the bed.  Then he bent to listen to her chest.

"Send for the doctor," he said.  "Quickly."

But it wasn’t his word that made everyone in the room jump so much as it was the sound of a loud crash as the water pitcher on the nearby dressing table fell to the floor and shattered in a thousand pieces.  Oreana was the only one who didn’t seem to notice the sound, even though she stood nearest the table and had probably even knocked the pitcher over herself, accidentally, as she brought both hands up to cover a horrified gasp.  "Madre de Dios," she said.  Then she moved quickly past Diego, bent over Teresa and ran her hands down the sides of the woman’s face, covering the trembling fingers with her own.

The casual observer might have assumed she was simply hysterical, he thought.  But his scrutiny wasn’t casual, nor was he merely an observer.  His immediate proximity made him feel more like a participant as he saw her take a deep breath and felt an eerie calm envelop the three of them.  Everything else seemed to recede, just as it had earlier in the courtyard.  Then, slowly, she seemed to catch Teresa’s attention with her eyes, gently cradling her hands until somehow she finally slid her own fingers beneath them, directly onto the puffy mask of Teresa’s face.

For a moment, Teresa seemed calmer.  She stared at Oreana as if transfixed by some vision more comforting than the one he had evoked.  Then she shut her eyes as one of the girl’s hands covered her forehead, the other sliding down beneath the middle of her back.

Diego felt more than saw Oreana move back and forth, like a child rocking a doll.  Or perhaps she wasn’t rocking so much as her body itself was throbbing in time to what he somehow understood was the rhythm of a heartbeat.  For a moment, he imagined a faint flicker of violet light glowing in the palm of her hand, though he wouldn’t actually have said he had seen it.  He only saw Teresa’s eyes open on him in what seemed like recognition.  Then, abruptly, the rest of the world snapped back into focus around him as Don Urbino came around the side of the bed and yanked Oreana roughly to her feet.

"Leave her alone," he said thickly, his fingers closing a little tighter around her upper arm.  For once Oreana did not look away.  But the look that passed between her and Urbino said far too much for Diego to follow or even summarize.  He only knew that it ended in something like what he himself had seen on her face moments ago: the look of someone who had suddenly found herself the butt of some great cosmic practical joke.  Urbino looked angry, but he also looked just a little afraid.  "The doctor will take care of her, Mi Reina," he said, releasing his grip.

Oreana’s parting glance scanned him from head to toe.  Then she retreated to the other side of the room and sat down quietly in a chair.  Alejandro had already sent Crescencia to find Benito.  Now they stood in the doorway, Benito listening carefully to Alejandro, nodding, then bowing politely before he hurried off.  Urbino’s servant Silvio waited just outside as well.  As Urbino stepped out to talk to him, Alejandro walked over to where Oreana sat and patted her gently on the shoulder.

"There, there, my dear, I am sure that Teresa will be fine once the doctor arrives. We will do everything we can for her," he said.  He looked like he also wanted to make some apologia for Urbino’s behavior, though he hadn’t been quite able to fathom it either, and so said nothing.  Clearly, he had seen no more than an anxious woman hugging a servant, Diego thought—that and the tears on her cheeks.

And maybe that had been all there really was to see.  Maybe he himself had just imagined the rest.  As he stepped aside for a chamber maid who had returned to mop up the water and sweep up the shards of broken glass, he noticed that Teresa’s condition hadn’t really changed at all.  In fact she was worse, if anything, her face a mask of pain, her breathing labored, her eyes frozen now on some horror no one else could see.

Another maid came in with a fresh pitcher of water, a basin and a small cloth.  Diego nodded as her eyes sought his approval.  Then she bent to wash Teresa’s face, but somehow he knew that Oreana’s servant was already as good as dead. And he knew that Oreana knew it too.

Then, suddenly, it occurred to him that she also knew why.

And then, so did he.

The doctor arrived only a few hours later, but all he could do was pronounce Teresa dead and offer to send for a priest.  "I would guess it was her heart, he told Urbino and Alejandro, though, of course, since she had already passed on by the time I got here, it is difficult to say for certain."  They sat at a table in the sala downstairs, Silvio standing behind them, all three looking grim.  "It may simply have given out," the doctor went on.  "Sometimes these things happen."

"But she was not that old," Urbino protested.  "Why, she was only a little older than I."

"Hmm.  I thought you said that she had served your parents."

"She came to us when I was only a boy, but—well, I suppose it just doesn’t seem like so very long ago."

The doctor shook his head. "I am sorry," he said, "but I have seen it happen occasionally, even to those who are young and strong.  It may have just been her time, Señor Guzman.  There was probably nothing that anyone could have done."

Urbino nodded.  "It was God’s will."  Then he glanced over to where Oreana sat quietly near the piano, as far away from them as she could have gotten while still inside the sala, and added, "I do not know what my Oreana will do without her."

"It is most unfortunate," Alejandro agreed.  "Teresa seemed quite devoted to her."

Diego thought Urbino looked more relieved than saddened by the doctor’s diagnosis.  Oreana, on the other hand, looked just as miserable as she had from the moment Urbino had yanked her away from Teresa.

At the time, he had guessed that she wanted very much to talk to him privately again, probably almost as much as he had wanted to talk to her.  But instead, she had gone back into her shell, refusing even to look at him, until finally his anger had gotten the better of him and he had started to walk toward her.  It was time to stop playing these silly games.

Urbino had still been standing just outside her bedroom, talking to Silvio, and Alejandro had come to stand by the side of the bed.  But when Oreana had seen Diego walking across the room toward her, she had finally let her eyes connect—hard—with his.  And they had told him, in a language as clear as she could make it, that he was right.

In the hills behind the stables, along the banks of the stream where they had met the night before, he had sometimes seen growing the tall slender green spikes of a plant that bore drooping rows of elongated pink trumpet shaped flowers, the insides of which were speckled with tiny leopard spots.  They were beautiful, and some people had even cultivated them, using the tea they yielded as a tonic.  But the vaqueros were often kept busy uprooting and burning them, for, when left to grow wild on pastureland, they had been known to kill the livestock.  And in even lower concentrations, they could no doubt kill people as well.  The shattered pitcher told him the rest.

Was this the price she had paid to be alone with him?  He winced to think he had contributed to its sum by not insisting more forcefully the night before that Zorro would talk to Diego.  Yet how could he have known she would be capable of this?  Clearly she hadn’t meant it to happen.  But she had risked far more than she had a right to, and maybe Urbino was also right to be afraid of her.

Diego himself had found her glance frightening enough to stop him in his tracks, and then to send him out of the room to find Bernardo.  Not that he or Bernardo or even Zorro had been able to think what to do next, except to wait and see what the doctor would say.

Now it was clear that the doctor was not going to say anything that would help prove a crime had been committed.  Even if he had seen anything unusual, he had probably dismissed it, thinking the life of the old servant woman was not worth the trouble of upsetting everyone.  But Diego himself was not quite ready to let the matter drop.  "Doctor," he said, "I am curious.  Would a person whose heart was giving out be subject to delusions or hallucinations?"

"Well, no, not specifically," the doctor said, looking a bit puzzled.  "But the loss of blood to the brain can cause disorientation.  Did she seem to be seeing things, or was she perhaps just confused and frightened?"

"Quite frightened," said Diego, but he was beginning to see what a complicated business this could become.  "And she seemed to be clutching her face, not her chest, as if she were wearing some kind of painful mask."

"That is curious," the doctor said.  Then, with a shrug, he added, "Still overall, I would blame the heart.  Her ankles and feet were swollen.  Her face was puffy.  These are the signs of dropsy."

Diego nodded.  He saw where the conversation would go.  Even if he could get the doctor to consider another diagnosis, he would still have to go a long way to prove that Teresa had been deliberately poisoned.  And what would he say when asked about a motive?  Who would believe it?  All he had was a nonverbal confession that he alone had seen.

As Urbino and his father were paying the doctor and escorting him to his carriage, Diego found himself alone with Oreana again.  But she seemed far too miserable to talk, and he saw no reason why she shouldn’t be.  He knew what it was like to kill.  It left you feeling you had done something unspeakably arrogant—even if you were justified, even if it was an accident, even if you confessed and were absolved.

"I did not kill her," said Oreana softly, without looking up.

"Perhaps we both did," he said and left the room.