story around these parts. I can tell it, but it’ll cost you a little.”
“You’re rather mercenary. I’m already going to pay for the medicine.”
“We’ve got to eat. Besides, it’s a good story, and no one knows it as well as I do.”
“So you’re a healer and a storyteller.”
“Told you, young miss, we got to eat,” the woman said with a shrug.
“All right. I’ll pay for a story. You have an ashtray?” she asked, taking out her cigarettes and her lighter.
Marta grabbed a pewter cup from the kitchen and placed it before her, and Noemí leaned forward, both elbows resting on the table, and lit her cigarette. She offered the old woman a cigarette and Marta took two, smiling, but she did not light either one, instead tucking them in her apron’s pocket. Perhaps she’d smoke the cigarettes later. Or even sell them.
“Where to begin? Ruth, yes. Ruth was Mr. Doyle’s daughter. Mr. Doyle’s darling child, she wanted for nothing. Back then they had many servants. Always lots of servants to polish the silver and make teas. The bulk of those servants were people from the village, and they lived at the house, but sometimes they came down to town. For the market, for other things. And they’d talk, about all the pretty things at High Place and pretty Miss Ruth.
“She was going to marry her cousin—Michael, it was—and they’d ordered a dress from Paris and ivory head combs for her hair. But a week before the wedding, she grabbed a rifle and shot her groom, shot her mother, her aunt, and her uncle. She shot her father, but he survived. And she might have shot Virgil, her baby brother, but Miss Florence hid away with him. Or maybe Ruth had mercy.”
Noemí hadn’t seen a single weapon in the house, but then they must have tossed the rifle. There was only silver on display, and she wondered, incongruously, if the bullets the murderess had used might not have been made of silver.
“When she was done shooting them, she took the rifle and killed herself.” The woman cracked a peanut.
What a morbid tale! And yet, this was not a conclusion. Merely a pause. “There’s more, isn’t there?”
“Yes.”
“You’re not going to tell me the rest?”
“One has to eat, young miss.”
“I’ll pay.”
“You won’t be stingy?”
“Never.”
Noemí had placed the box of cigarettes on the table. Marta extended a wrinkled hand and took another one, again tucking it in her apron. She smiled.
“The servants left after that. The people who remained in High Place were the family and trusted folks they’d employed for a long time. They stayed there, stayed out of sight. Then one day Miss Florence was suddenly at the train station, off on vacation when she had never set a foot outside the house. She came back married to a young man. Richard, he was called.
“He wasn’t like the Doyles. He was talkative; he liked to come down to town in his car and have a drink and chat. He’d lived in London and New York and Mexico City, and you got the feeling that the house of the Doyles wasn’t his favorite place of them all. He was talkative, all right, and then he started talking strange things.”
“What sort of things?”
“Talk of ghosts and spirits and the evil eye. He was a strong man, Mr. Richard, until he wasn’t, and he looked rather shabby and thin, stopped coming into town and disappeared from view. They found him at the bottom of a ravine. There’re lots of ravines here, you might have noticed that, well, there he was, dead at twenty-nine, left behind a son.”
Francis, she thought. Pale-faced Francis with his soft hair and his softer smile. She’d heard nothing of this long saga, but then she supposed it was not the kind of thing anyone would like to discuss.
“It all sounds tragic, but I’m not sure I’d call it a curse.”
“You’d call it coincidence, wouldn’t you? Yes, I suppose you would. But the fact is everything they touch rots.”
Rots. The word sounded so ugly, it seemed to stick to the tongue, it made Noemí want to bite her nails even though she’d never done such a thing. She was particular about her hands; ugly nails wouldn’t have done for her. It was odd, that house. The Doyles and their servants were all an odd lot, but a curse? No.
“It couldn’t be anything but coincidence,” she said, shaking her head.
“Could be.”
“Can you make the same remedy you made for Catalina the