Chapter 11 #3
“If both parties come to an agreement, then it would be settled,” she said. She was speaking so quickly she could hardly catch her breath. “If her husband and her niece divide it in two equal parts, then…then…”
“Then it’s done. Half and half.”
They stared at each other. The image of Perla’s death was sharp and vivid, leaping into her mind as clearly as a crime scene photograph, and, she was sure, into his at the same moment. At last, he shook his head.
Downstairs a door opened.
“Hurry,” he said, and gave her a shove. She stumbled inside.
—
She didn’t come out for the rest of the day. She imagined her aunt would say she was a lazy girl and chide her at length the next morning. She’d say she was bad.
Not that Perla was wrong, after all. Inés was bad because as she sat in her room, with her arms wrapped around her legs and her chin resting on her knees, thinking furiously and ceaselessly, few of those thoughts turned to the matter of damnation.
She did arrive at that, recalling how the professor had quoted Dante a few days before, but she could not feel any real terror for the condition of her soul.
She thought about murder, plain and simple. She thought it over and didn’t feel wretched about it.
When Inés fell asleep, she had that old nightmare of her mother at the foot of the stairs, staring at her. She extended a hand toward the girl, but the hand was bereft of flesh.
She woke up crying in the dark.
“Hey, hey, there,” a voice said, and she thought maybe she was still dreaming, but Ulises was there. He gently rested a hand on her shoulder. “Hey, it’s a dream.”
The words lulled her into silence, dried her tears. She thought of nothing for the span of a minute, then was reminded of his incongruous presence.
“Why are you here?” she asked.
He sat at the foot of the bed, making the springs groan with his weight. “I came to see how you were doing. They said you didn’t touch your food.”
“As if you care, you prick,” she said, though her tone had no animosity; the ribald talk simply served to shield her.
He smirked. “Clearly I don’t, I’m here because I like to be insulted late at night.”
“You better go. Aunt Perla’s probably looking for you.”
“She took her bath and drank a whole bottle of sherry while I combed her hair. She really behaves like she’s a queen, doesn’t she?”
“Marie Antoinette, except there’s no guillotine in sight,” she said.
He shook his head, but she still noticed the sudden glimmer in his eye. “What you’re thinking about…you better stop. You don’t want to see the inside of a jail cell.”
“Only if we get caught.”
“Stop it.”
She leaned forward, raised her hands, and tightened them on the lapels of his robe. “I’d kill her for nothing right now. I might as well do it for profit.”
For many years she’d dwelled in misery inside Aunt Perla’s house.
She was reminded constantly not only of her lowly status as a bastard child, but of the expense and effort it took to raise her.
Her aunt always found more faults than virtues in her behavior, her appearance.
Then, to make her life more unbearable, she was informed on many occasions that she would never be allowed to have an existence beyond the walls of this house, that she was to be the caretaker and nurse for Aunt Perla when she grew old, just as Perla had cared for her parents.
This was bad enough, but now she had discovered that her aunt had kept her from her father. True, he might not have been the most upstanding of men, married as he was and with another family, but to not even give her the chance to write to him if she wanted to, that was too cruel.
Ulises spoke of prison, but Inés had spent her entire youth incarcerated already.
“Inés, don’t.”
“What? You sure have scruples for a criminal.”
“I don’t have scruples. It’s too dangerous, that’s the issue. Anyway, I don’t even know how you’d manage something like that. You’d have to make it look like an accident.”
“Poison,” Inés said simply.
“Sure. Shall we order it from the pharmacy?”
“You don’t need a pharmacy if you know enough plants.”
“You really are something, you lunatic,” he said, and scoffed. But she detected a note of dry admiration in his voice.
Her hands were still tight around his lapels.
Underneath that, he was wearing a pair of loose pajamas.
The first button was undone, and she had a good view of the expanse of his throat, with the moon providing ample illumination to examine him.
He seemed to notice the steadiness of her gaze and swallowed.
“You know it’s a terrible idea,” he said.
“You’re telling me no?”
“I’m not telling you anything.”
“Fucking wimp.”
He chuckled. “God, you’re rude.”
He cupped her cheek, and her heart leaped in her chest. It scared her more than the thought of cops and prisons and hell; it scared her half to death.
“Listen, you’re not thinking straight—”
“I am. But you must go. It’s late, it’s much too late,” she said, shoving him away. “Go.”
He looked confused, yet he obeyed her and slipped out, closing the door softly behind himself. Then she fell back against the pillows, breathing in and out until she could feel her wild heart quieting down.