Skull Duggery (5 page)

“Aw, hell, I just look after the horses,” Carl said softly.

“But Tony does own it?” Gideon asked.

“Oh, Tony owns it, all right,” Carl said with a nod. “You got that right.”

“Okay, fill me in a little, would you, folks? Tony Gallagher is an American, isn’t he? How did he come to own the Hacienda Encantada?”

“Well, yes, he’s an American citizen, all right,” Annie said, “because he was born there, but he was raised on the Hacienda, although it wasn’t the Hacienda back then. See, his father-my grandfather-Julie, didn’t you ever tell this husband of yours all this stuff?”

“Of course I did. He just didn’t pay attention, although he did put on a pretty good act.”

Julie and Gideon both laughed, and she reached forward to give his shoulder an affectionate squeeze with just a little bit of a wicked twist at the end. The thing was, it was exactly the kind of thing he was always accusing her of when she failed to commit to memory some fascinating point he’d made about skeletal morphology or protohominid locomotion.

And the excuse he gave now was just about as lame as hers usually were. “I guess it didn’t seem to appertain to anything concrete at the time. Now that I’m here, it’s become highly germane.”

“ Appertain,” Carl said, appreciatively rolling the word around his mouth, trying it out on his tongue. “ Highly germane. Whoa. Does he talk like that all the time, sweetie?”

“I warned you,” Julie said. “He’s a professor.”

“Right,” said Gideon. “It’s what I do. Hey, I even know some better words than that. Wait till you get to know me. But go ahead, tell me about Tony.”

“You tell him, Pop,” Annie said. “Pop knows the whole story better than anyone.”

“Well, okay, sure,” Carl drawled. “Guess I better start with the place itself…”

A hundred and fifty years ago, the Hacienda Encantada had been a genuine hacienda, a real working sisal ranch, including a small factory where the sisal was made into rope. But by the 1940s the property, then an eccentric compound of decrepit nineteenth-century buildings surrounded by almost eighty acres of maguey plantings from which the sisal had been made, had stood, unused and moldering, for twenty years. It had been bought in 1947 by Annie’s grandfather, Vince Gallagher, a wounded Army veteran who had combined his military payout with his life’s savings to live out his dream of ranching in some sunny, warm place as far away from his home in International Falls, Minnesota (officially the coldest city in the continental United States) as possible. Knowing little about either ranching or farming-before the war he had worked as a steamfitter-he hired an “agricultural consultant,” on whose advice he tore out the exhausted old magueys, replacing them with tobacco plants and coffee trees, and invested heavily in stock for fighting bulls and fine Arabian riding horses.

Things didn’t work out as hoped, however. The consultant turned out to be a crook, bullfighting turned out to be illegal in Oaxaca (who knew?), and the plantings had a hard time of it in the rain-starved hills. Only the horses, against all odds, were a success, but only a modest one. Worst of all, his new Mexican wife, the beautiful, flashing-eyed Beatriz, decided after her first trip to the United States that she liked International Falls better than Teotitlan and began spending more and more time there with the Minnesota Gallaghers, who were glad to take her in, not only having taken a genuine liking to her, but relishing the chance to penalize Vince for having chosen to leave in the first place. And with medical care far superior to what was available in Mexico, she made sure to be in Minnesota for the birth of each of her three children. Eventually she would spend more than half the year there, almost always taking their children with her.

It made for a lonely life for Vince, who, underneath his romantic expatriate veneer, was really a family man at heart. Still, he managed to keep the place going-barely-by raising and selling his horses, and later on by boarding them and working with an Oaxaca tour agency that specialized in back-country treks. In 1975 he brought in Carl, the Montana-ranch-raised son of an Army buddy, to handle that end of the business, and there Carl had remained ever since.

In 1978, Vince, a two-pack-a-day man (three packs a day in his twenties) had died from complications from the emphysema that had plagued him for ten years, and Tony Gallagher, then about twenty-five, a year older than Carl was, had taken over the ranch.

“Tony was the oldest of his children?” Gideon asked.

Annie answered for Carl. “That’s right. Tony was the oldest, then my mother-Blaze was her name-and then Jamie. In fact my grand-mother died giving birth to him, do I have that right, Pop?”

“Well, not long after. Anyway, to go back to after Vince died and Tony took over… Whew, talk about a new broom…”

Carl paused to give his full attention to making a left turn from the highway. As with everything else, he was a focused, deliberate, unhurried driver-he took his time, patiently waiting a good twenty seconds for a rattletrap pickup coming from the other way to approach and get safely by. (“ Go, already,” Annie mouthed silently, rolling her eyes.) Finally, when the highway was clear for as far as the eye could see, he turned onto a narrow, potholed, shoulderless, utterly deserted, but more or less paved road. The rusted green sign read, 2 KM TEOTITLAN. In front of them the road crested a low rise, then disappeared into dry, gently undulating brushland dotted with small farms, with the stark brown hills in the distance. Carl took up the story again as they started down.

Tony Gallagher, young as he was, had a good head for business and was a natural salesman besides. There were a couple of Mexico City mining outfits that had been angling for mineral rights to the land-gold and silver concessions-but Vince had been turning them down in hopes of getting them to up their offers. Tony took a different, tougher tack: They wanted the mineral rights? Fine, but the only way they were going to get them was to buy the land itself. He maneuvered them into a bidding war and eventually sold off almost all of the original rancho, seventy-five of the eighty acres, for almost $500,000-this was in 1980 money-keeping only the hacienda complex itself.

The mining operations failed, but Tony had made out like a bandit. He used the money to restore the hacienda buildings and convert them to a high-end dude ranch/retreat/resort, and within three years the Hacienda Encantada was in the black. After that he’d made a lot of money in the markets. He’d made his primary home in Coyoacan since 1995, living there now with his fourth wife, the Miss Chihuahua 1992 second runner-up. But every now and then he liked to spend a few days at the Hacienda to see how things were going, make some simple repairs-he loved working with his hands “Ha!” Annie cried. “Working with his hands is right! He comes up here to get away from his nutball wife Conchita and make himself a sweet little love nest with whoever his current local sweet patootie is. The repair work’s his cover with Conchita.”

“Annie,” Carl said, “that’s not the kind of thing I like to hear coming out of your mouth.”

“I thought I was being generous,” Annie said. “You guys will meet her, don’t worry; he loves to show them off. Who is it now, Pop? Is it still Preciosa the Pretentious? It must be a year now. Isn’t he about ready for a new one?”

“Come on, now, Annie,” Carl said, “that’s no way to talk about your uncle.”

“Hey, am I knocking it? More power to him, I say. I just wish he had better taste.”

“Annie-”

“You two will love Preciosa, she of the swanlike Neck,” Annie said. “I guess she’s some kind of international hotel management consultant. Tony met her at a conference in Mexico City where she was a speaker. Every time she shows up here, she’s got some new harebrained scheme that he makes us try.”

“Annie,” said Carl, “don’t you think you’re being a little hard on her?”

“What, swimming with the Fishes wasn’t harebrained?”

“Well,” Carl said, “it wasn’t a bad idea to begin with. It just didn’t work out.”

Annie emitted a honk of a laugh. “I’ll say! see,” she said to Julie and Gideon, “she was all worked up about the idea of putting in a kind of swimming with the Dolphins attraction?-like they have in Hawaii?-in a mostly dried-up pond we have out back, so we lined the whole thing with concrete-it cost a mint-but of course, dolphins can’t make it here, so she went to work to find a local fish that could, and that wouldn’t mind a bunch of humans floundering around with it. Unfortunately, the one she came up with, carpa cabezona, had an English name that seemed to turn off the Americans for some reason. Don’t ask me why, but swimming with the Bighead Carp just never caught on.”

Even Carl joined in on the laughter with a soft, throaty chuckle.

“But you know,” Annie said, “we’d put a lot of money into it-”

“ Tony had put in a lot of money,” Carl corrected.

“-on water flow control, and drainage technology, and so on, so the next year, Preciosa has an even better idea of how to recoup. ‘I know, let’s turn the pond into a therapeutic mud bath!’ So we did. Well, the problem there was that the people who put it in were pool people. They didn’t really know how to drain a mud bath properly or keep it clean, so within a couple of months, you didn’t want to be within two hundred yards of it.” She made a face. “Ooh, that was nasty.”

Carl had to agree. “That was pretty nasty, all right.”

“On the other hand,” Annie said, “Preciosa’s a hell of an improvement over the one before. Rosie was really -”

“All right, that’s enough now,” Carl said sharply. “Tony’s affairs are-” He corrected himself. “Tony’s personal life is not your affair. Not mine either.”

“Yes, Pop,” Annie said meekly.

Gideon thought a slight shift of subject was in order. He turned toward the back. “And your mother, Annie, did she-”

“We lost her,” Carl said curtly, closing down the conversation the way a slamming iron door closes down a corridor.

Now what did I step into? Gideon wondered.

It was a while before he found out. The rest of the drive was completed without further talk, other than work-related dialogue between Julie and Annie, and when they reached the Hacienda there were some difficulties to contend with. For one thing, there was a minor kerfuffle over their room. It seemed that Josefa, who supervised the housekeeping staff, had gotten things mixed up. (“I’m shocked. Shocked,” Gideon heard Annie mutter.) Josefa had followed instructions to have their room spruced up, but she had mistakenly thought that they wouldn’t be arriving until the next day. Thus, the room was presently in mid-sprucing, its floor strewn with cleaning supplies, touch-up paint, and bedding and linens fresh and not so fresh. It would be a while before it was usable.

In addition, two American women, in for a workshop to be conducted at the Hacienda, had been waiting there for twenty minutes, drinking coffee, impatient and angry, for somebody who spoke decent English to show up to register them and give them keys to their room.

“Oh, we don’t use keys here,” Annie said pleasantly, “unless you really want them. I’m so sorry you were kept waiting, ladies. If you’ll come with me to the office, I’ll get you set right up. I hope you’ll let me offer you a bottle of wine at dinner tonight to make up for the inconvenience?”

And off she went with the considerably mollified couple to register them. A twitch of the head brought Julie along too, presumably for some hands-on training. “We’ll see you in a few minutes,” Annie called back to Gideon. “Ask Dorotea to make me a quesadilla too, will you?”

Carl, still withdrawn and focused inside himself, mumbled something about tending to the horses and withdrew to the corral and stable, which were down the hill a little from the resort buildings via a dusty track. Gideon was left to himself at a table on the broad flagstone terrace of the main building, the Casa Principal. That was fine with him. The morning air was dry and fresh and agreeably warm-in the sixties-and the terrace, overlooking the village, was an altogether pleasant place for a still-sleepy man to be. He slouched happily in a comfortable wicker armchair, legs outstretched, face turned up to the December sun. Dorotea had wordlessly plunked down a steaming mug beside him, and the wonderfully aromatic cinnamon-and-chocolate-scented Mexican coffee slid down his gullet like honey.

The Hacienda Encantada, sitting as it did atop its own hill, dominated Teotitlan del Valle almost like a baronial castle in France dominated its feudal lands; almost like (this took a little more imagination) the far grander Monte Alban dominated its low-lying surroundings. Seen from where Gideon sat, the tranquil little village was laid out like a scene on an old picture postcard: two main streets, a covered market, and in the center a domed, turreted eighteenth-century church with two ornate bell towers. Red-tiled roofs. Stuccoed walls. Except for a parked yellow school bus and a few taxis in the squares in front of the market-the drivers lolled nearby, smoking and chatting in the shade of a tree-there was nothing to remind one it was 2008 rather than 1908, and not much to remind one that it wasn’t 1808.

The community was close enough that the sounds of village life drifted up to where he was sitting. Apparently, a morning market was in progress; he could hear the sounds of women’s voices and children’s laughter, along with the occasional dog bark and the cackling of poultry. There were radios playing somewhere too-Mexican pop music-and what sounded like a brass band practicing. And weaving in and out of the narrow streets a truck with a loudspeaker mounted on the cab traveled slowly along, braying its message, too far away for him to make out. Julie had told him that, in the absence of a local newspaper, this was the way the town got its community news. In the parched brown hills behind the Hacienda goats were doing some braying of their own. Interesting, he thought drowsily, so many different sounds floating on the air, and yet such an overall sense of quiet, of remoteness. He could understand why Julie liked the place so much.