“Then you know what to do?” Tristán asked hopefully. “It’s been awful. I’ve seen my dead girlfriend.”
“Oh?” López replied. “Necromancy? I never cared for that trick. It makes people jumpy.”
“Sure it does. Ewers haunts Montserrat, which I guess is worse.”
López leaned forward, lacing his hands together, and looked her in the eye. “He loved grooming talent. Maybe he thinks he’s found his next eager pupil.”
“I was never much for formal schooling,” she said, trying to sound nonchalant, even if López’s words made her weary.
“How do we exorcise him?” Tristán asked with an anxious lift of his eyebrows.
“There’s a way. At least I think there’s a way.” López stood up, wincing. “I need to take a nap. My doctor says it’s good for my blood pressure.”
“Yes, but—”
“You should also take a nap. You both look like you haven’t slept.”
Montserrat had not. She had rolled to one side of the bed and closed her eyes tight, but she had not slept. She had been acting, pretending she was fine. She didn’t want Tristán to panic, but she also feared someone else might be watching her, someone might be hoping she would shiver in fear.
“Follow me,” López muttered, as he began shuffling his feet out of the living room. They went behind him, up the stairs until he pointed at a door. “That’s the guest room. There are wards in the house, so you’re safe. Now let me sleep, and we can talk later.”
Once inside the room Tristán fell upon the bed with its brown knit blanket, making the mattress’s springs squeak. There was a desk with pictures of a man and a woman in sepia above it and a brass lamp with a green glass lampshade. Montserrat pulled up a chair and took the book out of her purse, setting it on the desk.
“What are you up to?” Tristán asked.
“The dogs he mentioned…Ewers doesn’t talk about dogs specifically, but he has a section on manifesting animal—”
“You’re going to keep reading his book?”
“What do you want me to do instead?”
“Not read it. Nap. He’s right: we’re tired.”
“You’re scared.”
“But I’m also right.”
Montserrat sighed and sat on the bed. Tristán made a motion until she scooted closer to him, and he wrapped an arm around her shoulders.
“This is an old lady’s room,” Tristán said. “It probably belonged to López’s mother.”
“Maybe. Or a sister or a wife.”
“No, his mother. Everything is older here.”
The wooden headboard against her neck was mahogany decorated with a profusion of flowers. The guest room looked removed from the rest of the house and had been furnished by a different hand. López’s rattan furniture and his wallpaper with a pale green bamboo print in the living room had the whiff of the tiki craze of the early sixties. But Tristán was right: this room was from a previous era, and the doilies on the night table made her think of her grandmother.
“Maybe he was a surfer when he was young,” Montserrat suggested.
“Or played the ukulele.”
“He carved faces into pineapples.”
Tristán snickered, then paused, thoughtful. “You think we can trust him?”
“He hasn’t tried to kill us.”
His mouth twisted into a grimace. “That’s a low bar.”
“We could leave while he’s taking his nap if you don’t think he’s honest.”
“Alma also said she wanted to destroy the film.”
“But she pickled herself in magic, so she was lying.”
“You’re sure she was passing herself off as her niece? It might be a family resemblance.”
“There was something wrong about her. Didn’t you feel it?”
“When I met her the second time she looked older. I thought it was the light or the makeup she was wearing, but maybe she is finally aging. It could be the unintended consequences López talked about. Or maybe I’m going nuts.”
“No, you might be right.”
“I suppose,” Tristán muttered. “I guess Alma’s a dead end. And those dogs might be outside, anyway. I wouldn’t want to see those creatures again.”
Montserrat glanced at the window with lace curtains and wondered if that was indeed the case. Were López’s wards as strong as he claimed? She was not entirely sure what he meant by that term. Protective charms somehow tied to a building? He’d tattooed symbols on his arms; maybe he’d also carved them beneath the wallpaper or under the floor. The thought of hidden magic made her frown.
“What?” Tristán said.
“Spookiness,” she muttered, unwilling to elaborate.
The sleepless night and bizarre encounter with Bauer’s minions had drained her, and the pillows were soft. She curled up without another word and closed her eyes. Tristán must have had enough, too, because he was snoring after a few minutes. Montserrat figured that if López decided to walk into the room and murder them, he’d have an easy time accomplishing the deed.
23
Karina used to say Tristán slept like a starfish, limbs extended, attempting to take over the entire bed. It was hard to sleep with him because he tossed and turned. But Tristán must not have been terribly restless because when he woke up, Montserrat was next to him, and she remained fast asleep.
It was getting dark and it was Friday. The posadas had started. They ought to have been out, eating tamales, venturing forth to a party. They should have been planning a New Year’s celebration for the two of them, with champagne and streamers and a scary midnight movie. Black Christmas, perhaps, or Gremlins for something lighter. Instead, they were trapped in this odd house and a room that was filling with shadows.
He figured the best thing would be to nudge Montserrat and find their host, but he lay quietly for a while, slowly wrapping a strand of Montserrat’s hair around his fingers.
Hair that couldn’t belong to a human woman, it was more like a pelt than anything else. Never dyed, haphazardly cut, almost always tied back up in a practical ponytail and now undone. Quite wonderful in its own way, that hair. Quite wonderful Montserrat, too, with her t-shirt that had been washed too frequently, her eyebrows that were too thick, a nose that was too wide for any magazine to want to take a snapshot of her, the sullen, generous mouth that preferred to offer barbs rather than kisses. A mutable, witchy Circe rather than a demure, well-behaved Penelope.
You are pretty, sometimes, Momo, when it’s you and me at dusk, he thought.
“What are you doing?” Montserrat asked, blinking and looking at him, with his hand in her hair.
“Analyzing your split ends,” he replied, feeling embarrassed, his cheeks warming up as he conjured up a light laugh and tried to make fun of it. “You don’t condition your hair.”
“I don’t shave my armpits, either. Are you going to tell Cosmopolitan to arrest me?” she replied, sitting up and shaking her head, as if getting rid of a kink in her neck.