I padded down the hallway and found Ted already shoveling food in at the kitchen table.
He looked up a little sheepishly when I walked into the room. He washed down the bite he was chewing with a swig from the bottle of beer by his plate. “Sorry, babe. I couldn’t wait. It smelled too good.”
I put a hand on his shoulder. “I’ll forgive you if I can have a bite.”
“Have a whole plate.” Emilia set two plates down at the table and sat down at the one across the table from Ted, leaving me between them. I sat down, too. It did smell really, really good. I wondered if it was poisoned. I looked over at Ted. If it was, it didn’t seem to be having any ill effects on him.
I dug in.
You can order tamales at a restaurant. You can buy them at a store. But until you’ve had homemade tamales made by someone who knows what they’re doing, you have not had tamales. Emilia knew what she was doing with a corn husk. No one talked for a few minutes, although Emilia scratched at her leg periodically. I noticed a series of red angry bumps, like mosquito bites, marching up her calf.
Finally, Emilia pushed back from the table and said, “Let me explain to you why I killed those boys.”
I’M NOT SURE I’VE EVER SEEN TED MOVE THAT FAST AND WE spar together pretty often. He had pushed back his chair and leapt up from the table and had his hands out in front of him in a split second. “Don’t tell me anything that will make me have to arrest you, Emilia. I’m a cop. I’m duty bound. Get a lawyer. Turn yourself in. But, please, don’t make me have to arrest you right now. Especially right after I sprung you out of the county jail.”
Emilia leaned back in her chair, a rueful smile playing on her lips. “Nothing I tell you will lead to my arrest. My actions won’t be judged in your courts, Officer Goodnight. There are other places where I will be judged.” She dropped her head and wiped at her eyes.
I took one last bite of tamale and shoved my plate away. “So let’s hear it, then, Emilia. What’s your excuse?”
“My excuse?”
“We all know why you killed them. They killed your cousin. You wanted revenge. You’ve got it. Save the crocodile tears for someone who might buy them.” Good tamales will buy you some listening time with me, but not a lot of sympathy. I might be cheap, but I am not easy.
“You don’t understand how it was.” She looked up at me now, directly into my eyes. A tear or two still glittered there, but there was fire also. That was fine with me. I’d much rather play with fire than drown in tears.
Which explains a lot about me. I know.
“So explain it.” I turned to Ted. “Sit down. There is really nothing she’s going to tell you that you’ll be able to book her on.”
Ted sat down reluctantly. “Fine. But only if I can have seconds.”
Emilia took his plate and dished up more tamales, beans and rice. She pulled another beer from the refrigerator, but he shook his head. My Boy Scout. He’d be driving tonight. One beer was his limit.
“It was never my intention to kill them,” Emilia said quietly, as she sat back down at the table.
“You made voodoo dolls of them as special birthday presents? To commemorate their twenty-first birthdays?” Right. That’s how I celebrated all my friends’ transitions to adulthood, by giving them lethally cursed toys. It’s what all the cool kids were doing.
She shook her head. “Of course not. They were for me. They were like . . . therapy. A way to express my anger.”
“I think you expressed it pretty clearly.” I crossed my arms over my chest. This was going nowhere. “So if they were just for you, how did they end up sitting on top of my car for me to deliver, with carefully written addresses on their little boxes?”
Emilia’s brown eyes opened a little wider. “You delivered them? All of them?”
“Of course I did. It’s what I do. I’m a Messenger. I deliver things.” I leaned forward on the table. “But you knew that, didn’t you?”
Emilia shook her head again. “I knew there was . . . something about you. Something others probably don’t see, but that happens a lot with me. I see . . . things.”
My eyes narrowed. “What kind of things?”
“Some pretty run-of-the-mill things, I think. Auras, you would call them. By the way, I think I could help with yours.” She reached out a hand and placed it on my forearm.
I jerked back, but not before I felt a little zing. “What are you?” And what the hell was wrong with my aura?
“My people call me
bruja
. Or sometimes
curandera
. More the latter.” She put her hand back in her lap.
“Witch?” Ted asked.
Emilia shrugged. “Roughly translated, yes. A witch. But more of a healer.”
“You weren’t doing a lot of healing with those dolls,” I pointed out.
Her lips tightened. “Please, let me explain.”
I leaned back in my chair. “I am all ears.”
She smiled. “You Americans. You say the cutest things.”
I gave her a baleful stare.
“Fine. This is how it was. I moved to Elmville three years ago to take care of my aunt.”
“Rosita Lopez. The one who owned this house? The one who Jorge was living with when he was killed?”
Emilia nodded. “She was my mother’s sister. She had no children of her own. When she became ill, my mother sent me. I had already had some success in healing in Mexico and even if I couldn’t help her in that way, I could help with other things. Housework. Cooking. Shopping. I could help with the pain.” Her eyes clouded. I’d seen plenty of people dying of cancer at the hospital. I knew all about the pain.
“Three years ago, Rawley, Bossard and Littlefield were all locked away in a California Youth Authority facility,” I said.
“Exactly,” Emilia agreed. “They weren’t here. Very few people talk about what happened to Jorge around here. Some don’t want to stir up trouble. Others are ashamed. Most want to forget it ever happened and go on with their lives.”
“But not you,” I said. “You didn’t want to forget and you definitely didn’t want them to go on with their lives.”
She shook her head, her long dark hair spilling over her shoulders. “No. You still don’t understand.”
“I’m trying.” But my patience was getting very thin.
She looked at me, eyes narrowed. “No. You’re not. You are closed here and here.” She gently touched my forehead and my chest.
I snatched her hand and held it by the wrist. “Don’t touch me.”
“You don’t need to fear me.” Our eyes met, and I felt my hair begin to rise as if electricity flowed between us.
“Tell that to Bossard, Rawley and Littlefield.”
“So much anger. How can I get through to you when there’s this wall of anger between us?” she demanded.
“I’ve been used. That tends to piss me off.” Which might explain why I spent so much of my life angry. I stored that thought away for later contemplation.
“I was not the one who used you, Messenger.” Her eyes narrowed.
I countered. “Then who was?”
“I’m trying to figure that out.” She sounded almost as exasperated as I felt.
I turned her hand over. A burn stretched from the inside of her wrist nearly to her elbow. “What happened to your arm?”
“An accident at the stove.”
It must have been one heck of an accident. The burn looked nasty. “At the restaurant or here?”
Ted broke in. “Melina, maybe you should listen to her, hear her story and then ask questions. Otherwise, we’re going to be here all night.”
I scowled at him and then realized that Emilia was giving him a beatific smile, which made me scowl harder.
“You are not closed,” she said to him. “Not there or there or anywhere.” She pointed to his head and chest. Luckily, she didn’t touch him as she had me. If she had, she might be pulling back nothing but a bloody stump. He’s my man, after all.
Oh, great. Jealousy. How girly was I going to get?
“I’m listening,” I said, and sat back again in my chair. I took some deep breaths and stilled myself. Emilia was right and I knew it. My heart and head were closed to her. I tried to open them. If anyone knew better than to judge based on appearances, it should be me.
“I loved it here. My aunt was very kind. Her home was very nice. In America, there is so much of everything. Food. Clothing. You don’t know how grateful you should be. Then I met another woman, an older woman, a
bruja
who wished to mentor me. She recognized what I had inside me and started teaching me how to tend it and nourish it. I felt as though I came here and . . . blossomed.”
“Fabulous. Blossoming. It sounds terrific.” So maybe she had only paused to take a breath, but it seemed to demand a comment and I am pretty much always ready with a comment.
“I learned so much from my
mentora
. People began to come to me to be healed. I still have to work at the restaurant, but every day I come closer and closer to being able to make my living helping people.” Her face took on a glow.
“It’s an amazing feeling, isn’t it?” Ted said.
“Yes. Yes, it is,” she said.
I rolled my eyes. How had I gotten here in a room full of saints? Most days, all I wanted was to make it through without getting hurt or scratching the Buick.
“And exactly where in this blossoming healing thing did you start killing people who pissed you off?” I asked.
“Melina.” Ted put his hand on my arm and I quieted.
Emilia held up her hands. “It’s all right. I’m getting to it. It started when the first one came home. Rosalinda, my
mentora
, called me. She’d seen him downtown. She called to warn me to stay home. I wish I’d listened.”
“So you didn’t listen. You went to see him?” I asked.
She nodded. Her jaw tightened. “There he was, out on the streets, laughing with people his age. Walking with a girl. Drinking. And where was Jorge? He was where Rawley put him. Cold and in the ground, that’s where. Why was Rawley walking around while my cousin was food for the worms? Where was the justice in that? I became enraged.”
Ah, now we were getting somewhere. Rage. I knew that emotion, especially the pointless kind that rails against the universe with puny arms and weaker powers. It was one of my specialties. I also knew how desperate it could make someone. “So what did you do, Emilia? What did you do with all that anger?”
“I stared at him. I let the hatred I felt for him and his kind flow through me into the universe, into the world. As I watched, he stumbled and fell. For a moment, on the ground, it looked as if he could not breathe. It made me glad. Then, it frightened me. I had grown more powerful than I’d known. Maybe even more powerful than my
mentora
. But what good was all that power when a man like that could walk the streets when Jorge would walk no more.”
“Frustrating, isn’t it?”
“For two days, I screamed. I cried. I beat against the wall with my fists until my hands bled. And the worst part of it? I knew. I knew the other two would be coming out soon. They, too, would be walking down the street in the sunshine, girls on their arms, drinks in their hands, lives to live, while my Jorge, my sweet Jorge, lay buried in the cold, hard ground.” She turned her face from us, her shoulders heaving.
Ted and I exchanged glances. He raised his eyebrows. I shook my head. He stayed still in his chair.
A few seconds later, Emilia turned back to us, composed again.
“I went to my
mentora
. I cried to her. What should I do? Who could I heal with all the pain and hatred inside me? How could I move through it? That’s when she told me about the dolls and how to make them.” She sat back in her chair, as if reliving those moments had exhausted her.
“So your teacher, your
mentora
, put you up to this? She taught you how to kill those boys?” That was one hell of a mentor. What was the next lesson? How to smite people?
“She taught me how to make the dolls. They were never meant to kill. They were to be . . . cathartic. They were a place to pour my rage and pain and anger and hatred. The idea was that I could put all of it into the dolls and then we would bury the dolls and thus bury my anger. I would be free of it without causing harm.”
“Well, that didn’t exactly work out, did it? What made you decide not to bury the dolls?” I asked.
She threw her hands in the air. “Nothing. I did bury them. Under the full moon, with a layer of graveyard dirt over them.”
That made no sense. “So how exactly did they end up on the hood of my car?”
“That is what I don’t know and what I think I need to find out.” She stood up and began to clear our plates. Ted looked after his wistfully as she took it away. I felt another pang of jealousy. He’d never looked like that after anything I’d made him. Of course, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d cooked.
I sat with that for a moment and then asked, “Why? It’s over now. All three of them are dead.”
“I know. When Kurt Rawley died, I thought maybe, maybe it’s just a coincidence.”
I heard Ted growl a little next to me. I put my hand on his knee. I didn’t believe in coincidences any more than he did. But now wasn’t the time to bond over that. I could see why she would think that, though.
“Then Bossard died.” She swallowed hard. “I knew then. I knew it was not just a coincidence. I didn’t want to admit it, but I knew.”
“I saw you at the funeral,” I said. “Crying behind a tree. But I could still feel the hatred rolling off you in waves.”
Emilia put her face in her hands. “You don’t know. You just don’t know. I did. I hated those boys. I hated them for their hatred. How wrong is that? Still, for me to kill another? With my powers? It was never something I meant to do. Never something I wanted to do. And there are repercussions for doing things such as that. There are consequences.”
I took her hand again and turned it over. “Like this?” I asked, pointing at the burn.
“Exactly like that.” Her face grim, she went on. “As much as I didn’t want to know that it was I who caused the deaths of Rawley and Bossard, I knew I had. I knew I had to try to stop Littlefield from dying, too.”