The Last King of Texas - By Rick Riordan Page 0,38
in a painfully tight bun. Her feet were bare. Her face was as brutally sculpted as a Mayan pedestal - weathered and wide and flat, designed to withstand several thousand tons. She smelled pungently of cloves. She took Ines' arm and guided her into the house.
"This is Mr. Navarre," Ines mumbled. "I didn't have a box."
The woman cursed at her gently in Spanish, then looked back at me and said in a stern voice: "Stay."
"Arf," I said.
The woman didn't react. She and Ines disappeared down the hallway. I heard the sounds of minor protests, chastisements, orders to take off shoes. Miniblinds were snapped shut.
There was even less to see in the living room than there had been before. Most of the boxes were now taped closed. All the framed photographs had been removed from the end table. The broken window in the dining room had been covered with a piece of cardboard.
The Pope-shirted woman reappeared from the hallway, wiping her palms on her turquoise pants. Her squashed, disapproving eyes zeroed in on me. "Thank you, go."
"You're Paloma?"
The woman gave me a grudging nod, then brushed past and went to the front door. She opened it, looked at me expectantly.
I pointed down the hallway where Ines had disappeared. "You get her to sleep all right?"
"No Ingles," Paloma suddenly decided. She glared at me obstinately.
"No problema," I assured her. Then, still in Spanish, "We had to leave Mrs. Brandon's car at UTSA. The north visitors' lot. It'll be all right for this afternoon, but someone should pick it up by tomorrow morning."
Paloma continued glaring at me, letting me know that nothing could have insulted her sensibilities worse than a fluent gringo.
"Thank you, go," she tried again, in English.
"I bet you're great with solicitors. Those aluminum-siding guys from Sears."
She shoved the door shut, irritated. "You won't go. Why?"
"I'm curious."
"La policia." She scowled. "They were curious. The reporters, tambien. No more. Senora Brandon needs sleep."
"You've been with the family long?"
"Five years. Since Miguel."
"Since Michael was born - their son."
"Si."
"Is Michael here?"
"No."
As if on cue, a whirring toy sound wailed from one of the back bedrooms, then died. It sounded like one of those sparking ray guns.
Paloma's stone face darkened.
"Mira, Paloma," I told her. "I don't mean to pry. I've been hired to take Dr. Brandon's job. I'd like to know how he got himself killed. I don't want to follow in his footsteps."
Paloma's eyes drifted away from me and fixed on the fireplace. She scowled at the bullet holes in the limestone, as if remembering exactly where she had scrubbed, and how hard, and what the color of the water and the soap foam had been afterward.
"We're leaving this place," she mused. "For now, an apartment. Maybe later, out of town."
"And will that return things to normal?"
Paloma made a sound deep in her throat, like stone grinding. "You wish to see normal?"
She grabbed my wrist and tugged me down the hallway, past a closed door on the right, past an open bathroom, to a door on the left that was papered with foldout animal posters from various scholastic magazines.
Paloma pushed me into the doorway and held me there, her fingers digging into my shoulders. I was expecting to see your basic boy's room, like Jem's - buckets of Tinkertoys and Legos, miniature furniture, piles of little clothes and shoes. Everything in primary colors.
What I saw instead were sheets. At least ten of them - white, blue, daisy-patterned, brown - draped waist-level wall-to-wall, covering everything. The cloth sagged in canyons, rose here and there to peaks that were probably chairs underneath. Square outlines hinted of tabletops, a bed. Where the sheet corners met, they were weighted down by heavy books to keep them together. In some places they were tied off or safety-pinned. There seemed to be talcum powder everywhere - sprinkled liberally over the tops of the sheets, gathered in thick drifts where the cloth sagged, hanging in the air with a cloying scent. The room looked like it had been commandeered for a Christo art event.
Three feet from the bedroom door was a small triangular opening in the sheet tent. A toy ray gun lay on the carpet next to an empty plastic Lunchables tray and a Toys "R" Us circular with all the coupons cut out.
Paloma pushed past me and managed to lower herself enough to scoop up the trash.