Chapter 1
A widow for twelve years, I knew all about sobbing with loneliness in the middle of a still night. That night, the loneliness was a haunting fabric that quivered in the desert air, each dry gasp set in it separately from all the others. A distant, quavering coyote cry wasn't as desolate, nor the uncertain chirp of a nearer cricket in the dust. And I could do nothing but lie silent, tense in the darkness, and stare with dry, aching eyes at the blackness where the ceiling must be. Coming disembodied through my open window, the desperate sounds could have come from any bedroom in the house-or from the sad old house, itself.
I knew better than that, of course, and I scolded myself for the fanciful notion as awareness seeped through me. I cursed my luck, too, for being awake in the first place. But it was one of those nights. Everybody has one once in a while. People who lie by themselves in man-less beds know a lot of them, though. They come with confused dreams and sweaty, prickling skin and a sense nothing will ever be right with the world again. They bring wide, burning eyes and an aching hunger of the body so intense it creates illusions of men almost real enough to fill the throbbing, pleading nest. Not quite real enough, though, and the throbbing grows and the soundless pleading sends its tendrils along helpless paths to tingling flesh, tightening muscles in frustrated spasms and making limbs writhe and twisting the torso and arousing surface nerves so the skin flames at the friction of the bedding.
In the moments before I'd wallowed free of my unremembered dreams and oriented myself, I'd already kicked away the perspiration drenched sheet and while I listened helplessly to the persistent sobs I wiggled resignedly out of my pajamas. Nakedness, itself, would stimulate and tantalize me, but it wouldn't pour sensations into me the way resisting cloth would.
With my flesh exposed to the sweat sucking desert air and my agony of desire slowly dulling, I focused my thought on the sobbing. After all, I wasn't making any noise, and that left only three other women in Casa del Gato. There was Rose Duncan, a translucent-skinned wisp of a woman with eyes that were great, dark pools and a sinuous grace to her curves that promised a fiery responsiveness I knew the poetess didn't permit herself. She certainly wasn't crying in the night! She was lying next to John Jacob Duncan, for one thing, and the thought was enough to send fierce tingles along my spine and tighten the ring in my pussy. Not that she'd take advantage of having the great, muscular body next to hers, of course. But she couldn't know real loneliness with it there, either. Besides, even if she had a nightmare and imagined for a moment she were lonely, John was too tenderhearted and compassionate to let her sob for more than a moment. He'd have cradled her in his arms and whispered reassurances and slipped nonsensical quips into his, words until even a damned female writer would have found her sobs turned to giggles.
It wasn't Kim Gamiski, either, I was sure. Not with her platinum-blonde crown and vigorous, goddess-like body and eager, sensuous movements. Blaine was in her bed. And however intensely I distrusted the darkly suave self-confidence of the man-or however much he reminded me of the defanged rattlesnakes he kept in the Painted Rock compound, Kim loved him. And if she'd awakened feeling lonely she'd have been astride him by the time he could have shaken off sleep.
That left Maria. Strange child, Maria. Full-sexed and all woman for her nineteen years, she might conceivably be lonely. In fact, she ought to be lonely, isolated miles from anybody but her relatives-rugged, bone racking, Jeep miles, at that. But she was as strong a child as she was vital and sexy, and long before loneliness could reach the depths those sobs came from she'd have set her jaw and thrown a demijohn of wine into her Jeep and found the company she wanted. Still, there was a little of the quality of her voice in the sobs and there was nobody else....
I awakened the next time in that brief, dawn chill that comes to the desert when night air stirs to yield to the coming of day. The thin film of a sleeping body's perspiration evaporated with the air's movement and I twisted petulantly before I remembered I was naked. Having cheated my alarm clock out of its chore by a half-hour, I took a more leisurely shower than usual. Slippery with lather, I even forgot myself long enough to arouse myself shamefully by my absent-minded rubbing before awareness rushed upon me. Tingling and raw with the desire that I'd come to know so intimately in the years the raising of my son had precluded the exercise of a woman's hunting instincts, I hurried to dress and left my room.
Rolf was coming out of his room when I stepped into the hall. Clear-eyed and vibrant, he showed no sign of sleeplessness.' But I asked, anyway.
"Did you hear anybody crying during the night?"
"Huh?" He stared. "Crying? Naw, I didn't hear anything, Mom!" And he grinned. "Sleeping's too good here in the desert for a guy to hear anything!"
I felt a rush of elation; it was incredible my son could have changed so in the few short weeks we'd been at Casa del Gato. From a moody, depressed fifteen-year-old with flat, unintelligible responses, he'd blossomed into an erect, eager boy with a ring of enthusiasm in his voice. The desperate gamble of tearing him away from the sour, disillusioning crowd in Cleveland had paid off, despite the absolute lack of companionship in his age bracket here. And I couldn't have expressed my gratitude to John Duncan at that moment.
A woman on her own has limited choices. When she's responsible for a healthy, growing adolescent boy, the limits shrink even further. John Jacob Duncan and Casa del Gato had sounded so nearly perfect I'd applied without hope; there had to be thousands of qualified secretaries who'd jump at the chance to work with one of the country's leading authors-and in the same house with another, Blaine Gamiski, and one of the hardest-hitting women in American nonfiction, Kim, Blaine's wife, as well as that poignant voice of poetry's neo-Renaissance, Rose Duncan. The very feature of the position that appealed to me most, though-a chance to isolate Rolf while he found himself-evidently decimated my competition. John actually flew Rolf and me to Phoenix and met us there and drove us in his carryall-"Can't make it without four-wheel drive," he'd said, half in apology and half in pride-the sixty or so miles into the desert mountains to Casa del Gato so we could get the feel of the ancient stronghold before my committing myself.
Rolf had been doubtful. But I'd seen a gleam of interest in the way he'd hung over Blaine's rattlesnake compound and the leaping pulse in his throat as he'd tilted his head back to gaze at a wheeling hawk. And I'd known. We'd gone back to Cleveland only long enough to close out our apartment and suffer the bitter, foreboding objections of my in-laws. And for nearly two months, now, I'd secretaried for John and filled my spare time "helping out" with typing and proofreading and correcting for the other three. And Rolf had substituted his prying into the secrets of the desert for geometry and English. He'd even begun to acquire a certain fluency in Spanish from Maria. But most of all, he'd lost his defensive, harassed look and straightened his shoulders and found there was a voice in his chest.
As we approached the dining room I knew I'd be willing to go to hell and back to keep him here rather than return to our Cleveland apartment. And going to hell and back seemed the last thing I'd be likely to have to do as we joined the Duncans and the Gamiskis. They greeted us warmly-even "soulful" Rose-as if we were their defense against some awful desert fate. Rose almost surrendered her ethereal manner for earthy exchange as she took in Rolf's air of eagerness.
Giving me only the quickest of glances, she appeared to be talking to him. "I can't imagine what we did before you two came to the Casa!" she exclaimed. "As if it weren't bad enough living and breathing publishers and schedules and word shadings, without having the house suck us into the past! You're today, thank God!"
Rolf didn't say anything. As if he were paralyzed, he simply drowned in those enormous, black eyes of hers. But I protested a little.
John silenced me. "She's right, you know." He glanced at the somber portrait between the windows-Lolita de Vasca with her simple robe and the delicate chain that wrapped twice around her tiny waist and supported the graceful, mysterious key-and then down at Margarita the cat, rubbing against his leg. "Everything about the house is like a one-way road into the past. Hell, even Maria looks back instead of ahead! And at her age-and as sexy a little firebrand as she is-she's the last one who ought to do that!"
The door to the kitchen swung open and Maria backed through. Black, luxuriant hair swung at her back, its tips brushing her waist. Her hips swayed with unconscious invitation and her miniskirt revealed long, tapered legs whose curves would have made any man hold his breath. She turned cautiously, the great, gleaming tray piled so high it almost hid the proud, full breasts behind it.
"Give me a hand, John?" she asked. "Heavy as hell!"
John and Blaine moved to her simultaneously, and in a moment they'd relieved her of the load.
"How come you didn't yell?" asked Blaine, his eyebrow lifting. "Who the hell appointed you waitress?"
She jerked her head and her hair leaped. "Since when have I gone around asking a man to do woman's work?"
That was Maria, I thought uncomfortably. And John was right; she did insist on perpetuating customs that had died with her grandparents. She was fierce in her one-woman revolution to turn time backward. I studied her for signs of weeping. Surely sobbing like that I'd heard would leave its mark! But her skin was clear and her eyes were unmarred by anything that could have dulled their beauty. Thick, heavy lashes swept her cheeks. There wasn't a trace of swollen tissue or redness, and her expression shouted self-control and composure. I couldn't detect a single symptom of loneliness about her. Of course, she did have that faintly wistful twist to her mouth when she looked at John, but I felt that way, myself, and I was thirty-three! Any nineteen-year-old girl would suffer from puppy-love around a man like John.
I realized I'd stared too long at her. With an effort, I turned my attention to Rose. With the kind of skin she had, she couldn't possibly have hidden the effects of a night of sobbing. She couldn't even have covered up if she'd cried for two or three minutes! But her face, too, was clear of that kind of sign. She was simply making "soulful" cow-eyes at Rolf, as if there were something poetic about his young-animal zest for living.
And Kim damn well hadn't cried! How she'd achieved such a live head of hair after all she'd had to go through to give it such a rich platinum sheen.
I'll never know. With her gray-green eyes and tawny complexion and tall, lithe figure, I doubted one person in a thousand would have guessed she could be Maria's older sister. Even their mouths were two utterly different shapes! But where Maria evidently stuffed her sex-hungry vitality into sterile dreams about John, whom she couldn't have, Kim obviously nourished hers by unstinting recourse to the suave, alert capacity Blaine offered. And in her seething glances there wasn't a trace of loneliness or sorrow.
Seeing the way she devoured John with one lightning, rapacious stare jarred me for a moment before I could readjust my balance; no one had said so, but I felt confident that the two couples weren't entirely innocent of doing some "cross-pollination". Whether they had affairs going they tried to keep secret or simply enjoyed some kind of swap arrangement, I couldn't guess. But I'd have put my money on swap, as frank and uninhibited as they were.
Rolf wolfed his food. I caught Maria's warm stare of delight at the way he made her food disappear and knew he'd scored again in that department. And she'd done her usual splendid job in the kitchen; every third day was a gastronomical delight with the three women observing their rigid schedule of rotation. She'd prepared an omelet, with red and green pepper chunks. There were thin-sliced beef and steaming refried frijoles and thick, light cornmeal tacos. And for Rolf, there was a pitcher of cold milk.
After breakfast, I went to the library; my first duty of the day was the ceremony of unlocking-a custom John privately admitted to me he kept up to avoid losing the habit, rather than because locking and unlocking had any practical function at Casa del Gato. "One lousy time of forgetting is one too many when I'm out somewhere else," he'd commented that first day. "Make it automatic and you don't forget." And while I dusted and checked the typewriter ribbon and the paper and carbon manifolds, I became conscious of Maria.
Alone with her I couldn't resist the impulse to play detective. "Kim's hash must have turned to a hard lump in my stomach last night," I remarked. "I swear, I was awake half the night!"
"Oh?" She laughed without enthusiasm. "She never was much of a cook. I ate her stuff so long I got immune, I guess. At least I don't lie awake over that!"
"Somebody else was lying awake," I said. I was careful to keep my head down, but I watched her reaction in a mirror out of the corner of my eye. "For the longest time I heard someone sobbing. It made my flesh creep, it sounded so lonely and forsaken!" I thought her eyes widened for an instant.
"Must have been Lolita," she murmured with a chuckle.
"Lolita?" She might as well have said Pancho Villa.
"Lolita. You know. The portrait in the dining room?"
"Hm? Oh! John's aunt? But she's-"
"Dead!" Her voice held a note almost of relish. "Forty years. Long time to cry."
"Oh, come on. A ghost?"
She shrugged. "I don't know. I've never heard it. But there's a legend...."
I hadn't heard it. In moments of relaxation John had given me the history of Casa del Gato and the generations of de Vascas who had peopled it; he hadn't mentioned ghosts.
Maria seemed amused. "They don't talk much about it. It's too depressing, I think. And then, Lolita's been quiet for a long, long time."
"Why should she start crying now?" It was idiotic conversation, but getting Maria to talk was something I hadn't accomplished often.
"Damned if I know. She stopped when Jennifer died. I don't see what would stir her up now."
"Jennifer! What did she have to do with it?"
"You wouldn't find anything like it today. But Lolita and John's mother-their parents were Eduardo and Consuela. Kim's and my father, Juan-well, he was their cousin."
"Okay. And he went away and came back with Jennifer Kimberly and Jennifer became your mother and Kim's."
She nodded. "He went away and brought back a wife-a gringo wife. And Lolita's sister Francesca married a gringo. But Lolita had grown up with Juan. She loved him and expected to marry him! The legend is she died of a broken heart-that she went to the Don of the mountain rattlesnakes and begged him to strike her so she could find peace."
It was true Lolita had died of a rattlesnake bite, I recalled. John had mentioned that to Rolf and me when warning us to be careful. Both Lolita-his aunt-and Jennifer had died that way.
Maria continued. "Only she didn't find peace. She haunted Jennifer-Mother-from that time until after I was born. And one day she coaxed the Don of the snakes to send a messenger to my mother's room. And Jennifer died the way Lolita had." She smiled. "Nobody heard Lolita's ghost again. She'd rid the house of the tigress who had stolen Juan's heart." She paused, then went on in a thoughtful tone, hardly more than a whisper. "Somebody said, when I was too young to understand, that Lolita's ghost would always protect Casa del Gato from any tigress who might come for a male of The Blood."
John's footsteps came to us from the hall and Maria shrugged again. "They say she walked from the family crypt to the house on dark nights-that Jennifer heard that chain of hers clinking-and the sobbing...." But her voice faded and she slipped from the room in time to bump into John on his way in.
There was a moment of stillness before she giggled briefly and excused her clumsiness. But she hadn't been clumsy-it would have been impossible for Maria to be clumsy-and she spent that moment pressed tighter to him than the collision would have warranted. Then she was gone and John came in to start work.
"Funny how little feeling Maria shows for her mother," I observed.
John glanced quizzically at me and nodded. "Talking about Jennifer, was she? Yeah, she identifies with Lolita, mostly. Got a thing about Mexican heritage. Likes to pretend gringo women are all predators, including her mother." He sighed. "I guess there was bad blood between those two. Lolita really hated Jenny for capturing Juan as neatly as she did. Never did forgive her!" With that quick shake of his head I found so endearing, he smiled and touched my shoulder. "But past is past, sugar. We've got manuscript to crank out. All geared up for another day?"
God help me, having him come into a room would have geared me up for anything any time! It seemed awful when I let myself look at it through conventional eyes, but I'd have become his mistress in an instant if he'd even hinted. I didn't have many illusions about myself, even then. And I knew I'd have taken my clothes off and made love to him right there in the library if he'd wanted that. And becoming his mistress while he continued to live with that "soul-filled" poetess of his wouldn't have disturbed me in the least.
But he didn't ask that; all he asked was another day's labor on the manuscript that was getting so close to its deadline. So we worked. I can't say there was a great togetherness in the work; he'd read and revised the previous day's output sometime late at night and was ready to show me what needed retyping. Then, while I did that, he paced and recorded, or slouched in the huge leather armchair before the window and gazed out at Maria's cactus garden and recorded, or wandered before the bookshelves and recorded. And when I'd finished the rework, he gave me the first tape for transcribing.
Once, he got agitated. "Oh, Christ!" He yelled at himself and paused to kick a footstool. "Dumb, muddle-headed bastard! Hey, love, is that tape I made Sunday before last where you can get your hands on it?"
"Sure. No problem."
"Look-I've got just a glimmer of an idea that's going to get away from me before I can nail it down. I've got to hear a piece of that tape!"
"I'll get it! Just take a minute!" I rushed out of the library while he resumed his pacing.
He wouldn't let me store his "source" tapes in the library. I haven't any idea what curious quirk established that kind of irrational requirement; maybe that was simply part of the eccentricity that constituted creativeness in him. But those, I stored in a case he'd brought to my room. He might have cut a hole in the library ceiling, I reflected as I hurried into the hall. With a ladder and a hole in the ceiling, I could have climbed directly into my own room. As it was, the main stairs lay at the end of that long, flag-stoned corridor. I hesitated at the niche on my right as I passed the end of the library projection, then entered and ran up the narrow, twisting stairway nestled there. And seconds later I ran down them and back to the library.
John looked up, his features a study in disbelief. "Forget your key? Good thing you thought of it before you got clear up there."
"No! Here!" I handed him the tape.
He gave me a puzzled frown, but he inserted the cartridge into his recorder and found the section he wanted. For a time, he listened and muttered. Then his expression lighted and he recorded excitedly into the other recorder. When he'd gotten the idea on tape, he turned to me and interrupted my typing again.
"Hey, love, you were hardly even panting when you got back here! What the hell?"
"What? I don't understand-"
"Hell, I know how long it takes to make that round trip! This goddamn house was designed for a cross-country runner! You just can't make it that fast! Nobody could!"
"John, I just took the shortcut!" Even as I said it, the cloud I'd been floating in all morning cleared. I bit the back of my hand while I stared into his incredulous face. "God, John! I know there's not one, but...."
The only thing he could believe was the source tapes were now hidden somewhere downstairs. But there had been a dark, twisting, dusty flight of stairs! Right at the end of the library!
"John!" I whispered. "John, let me show you!"
We went outside and along the corridor to the niche. Shadowed as it was, the dull black suit of conquistador's armor looked utterly evil as the empty visor seemed to stare out at us. Behind and on both sides of it the wall was solid and grimy, its adobe surface undisturbed.
I couldn't even raise my face to look at John. Shaken so badly I couldn't think, I stumbled the twenty feet to the next niche. But it was as innocent of stairs as the first. And my feet dragged as I turned back.
"John! John, they were right there!" I pointed past the armor. "I swear it!"
Very gently, he got his huge arms around the armor and tugged at it. "Concrete, baby," he muttered. "The old man had concrete poured in the legs and bolts set in the floor. Too damn many honorable people took a liking to antiques, he figured."
"But John! John, those tapes are locked in that cabinet in my room! Come with me so I can show you!"
"No. If you say they're up there, that's where they are." He smiled and squeezed me, and his voice was gentle as he continued. "So you're magic. Tell you what, let's take a break for a couple of hours. I've been killing you with the pace, and I know you've been doing stuff for the others when you should have been relaxing."
He might as well have sentenced me. For two hours I'd have to be away from the library and him. But I had no choice. It seemed forever to lunch, but I started to live again when I sat at the table and could look at him. I'd examined the niche as if my life had depended on finding a set of stairs. And I'd scoured the angles and recesses in the upstairs hall. I'd even used a magnifying glass in the desperate belief there must be secret doors concealing secret stairs. But of course, I'd found nothing.
I felt subdued during the afternoon, and John seemed to be watching me, worried. He thought I was cracking up, I told myself. He'd send Rolf and me away! And I was a total wreck by the end of our working day-frantic with self-doubt and consumed by lust for John that my preoccupation had kept me from suppressing as it had built. The climax came when Rolf failed to meet me at the door; of all days, he couldn't have chosen a worse one to stand me up! I'd counted on the buoyancy of his new enthusiasm to restore a measure of my stability.
I fretted. There were so many ways a fifteen-year-old boy could hurt himself around a place like Casa del Gato! But in an abrupt flash of insight, I recalled the way Rose had looked at him that morning.
Even a poetess as ethereal as Rose might sense inspiration in a vibrant young animal like Rolf!
Hardly aware of where my feet were taking me, I went to the southwest comer of the second floor, where Rose used a huge old sitting room for her composing. Entering through the arch, I hesitated behind the openwork stone baffle while I surveyed the shaded space before me. Only Rose's dreamy tones revealed her to me.
To my right, hardly visible in the gloom, she sat curled on a thick rug on the floor in front of an old couch. As my eyes grew accustomed to the lack of light, I saw the highlights gleaming softly on delicate, coned breasts and a gently swelling hip. And even as I knew she was nude, I saw my son's figure sprawled lazily on the couch, his young brush of pubic hair apparently supporting a majestic hard-on. Rose stroked the magnificent cylinder with dainty fingers and crooned to the boy while he grinned fatuously into space.