Desert Shadows (9781615952250) (13 page)

Chapter 11

Leaving Gomez and her prying behind me, I steered the Jeep toward Gloriana's Paradise Valley estate.

Most out-of-staters don't realize it, but for all Scottsdale's tony reputation, the real high-rollers live in PV, the hilly little burg which separates Scottsdale from Phoenix. There are probably more millionaires living in the shadow of Mummy Mountain than rats in Manhattan. Not that I'm drawing any comparisons.

I turned east off Tatum Boulevard, PV's main drag, onto Hogan Drive, then wound my way through a frou-frou series of imitation Territorials and Frank Lloyd Wright rip-offs until the street forked at Warpaint and Teepee. I followed Teepee halfway around the mountain until I ran out of asphalt. Glad of the Jeep's four-wheel drive, I crawled forward on gravel along the top of a steep-sided canyon teeming with chirping, hissing wildlife until I came to a massive iron gate. Behind it rose a Spanish hacienda that took my breath away.

Built of true stucco, rock, and wood—much of it in disrepair—the Hacienda appeared to be centuries old. Knowing the history of the area as I did, I guessed it had been built in the early 1900s as some business magnate's desert retreat. Gloriana's grandfather?

Although the Hacienda was partially hidden by lacy jacaranda trees and purple bougainvillea, not to mention the six-foot-high adobe wall that fronted the three-acre estate, the rambling wreck was gorgeous. Tall arched windows welcomed the light, while the balcony that wrapped all the way around the house offered spectacular views of Mummy Canyon. Through the gate, I spied a burbling fountain, its surround studded with handpainted ceramic tiles.

“Must be nice,” I muttered. Then I remembered that its owner had died a hideous death. No, not so nice after all.

I honked three times.

The gate rolled slowly back, and I pulled forward, circling around the saltillo courtyard and onto a fine gravel parking area in front of what appeared to be stables. But I could smell no horses. Then I remembered that they'd been altered to provide servants' quarters, and that Poor Sandra and her children now lived there.

As the Jeep clanked to a stop, a middle-aged Hispanic woman dressed in black opened the Hacienda's massive double doors and motioned me inside.

“Good lord,” I exclaimed, gawking at the house's interior.

The woman ignored my shock. “I am Rosa. Little Mr. Zach, he said to show the pretty blond lady everything she wants.” Her stiff face displaying no emotion, she led me along the two-story-high foyer, but not before I took a moment to study the exquisite stained-glass skylight that cast jewel-colored light onto the tiled floor.

“It is pretty, yes?”

I nodded, holding out my arms so that reds and blues danced along the tanned skin. “Not pretty. Beautiful.”

Rosa's face relaxed into a smile. My admiration of the house had won her approval. “Miss Gloriana, she drew the picture for that skylight, then my father built it.”

That such delicate beauty could emerge from Gloriana Alden-Taylor's hands surprised me. But I was here to learn more about her, wasn't I?

“I take you through the first floor now,” Rosa said, leading me past a double staircase that swooped gracefully up to a gallery lined with oil paintings. More portraits. I recognized the twelfth President of the United States, Zachary Taylor, but the other faces, many of them in military uniforms, one Confederate, escaped me. The man next to Old Rough and Ready, though, looked enough like him to be his son.

Rosa followed my stare. “Miss Gloriana's grandfather. He built the Hacienda when he come here from Louisiana. He was rich, but not so much as his father or his father's father, the President. After the war, the family did not do so well.”

“Which war?”

“The one between the states.”

I wondered what it must have been like, growing up in the shadow of those fierce-visaged men, having them stare disapprovingly down from the wall at you, as if assessing your life and finding it wanting.

Lucky orphans, who had no one to live up to.

Lucky me?

A child's voice broke through my thoughts. “Rosa, we've finished our homework. Can we play now?”

A somber blond girl of around eight stood in the doorway, holding a younger boy's hand. Although there appeared to be at least two years between them, with their Nordic features, they looked enough alike to be twins.

Poor Sandra's children.

“Yes, you may go to the playroom, but you must stay in there until your mother comes home,” Rosa said, her voice tender. “I will bring you some pop later.”

The little girl led her brother away, still holding his hand.

“Caroline and John,” Rosa explained. “They miss their great-grandmother.”

I wondered if little John was called John-John. Curious, I asked, “Was Gloriana close to the children?” It was hard to envision that stiff-spined martinet unbending for anyone, even a child.

“I believe that Miss Gloriana loves…loved children,” Rosa answered. “But she was not a demonstrative woman. She showed her love by giving them a beautiful home.”

Gloriana had certainly done that. While I had seen my share of gorgeous houses before, none came close to touching the perfect lines of the Hacienda. But as Rosa led me through the house's main floor, I began to see the skull beneath the skin. The place was falling down, the plastered walls crumbling, the wooden window lintels shot through with dry rot. The saltillo tile flooring cracked in a thousand places, and the ancient carpets were dangerously thin. Most of the furniture looked ready for the dump.

As we exited one particularly decrepit room—the library, with its myriad shelves of spine-split volumes—Rosa said, “Miss Gloriana, she put everything she had into the Hacienda. It is not so bad as it was.”

This was the
after
of the before?

The maid pointed toward the vaulted ceiling, with its massive dark beams. “Those are new. They are not for decoration, they hold up the roof. The old beams, they were no good, so Miss Gloriana had them replaced. You would not believe how much it cost.”

“So she was renovating.”

She nodded. “Oh, yes, always. Because of the cost, Mr. Michael, Miss Gloriana's husband, he did not like living here. He resented the money she spent on the Hacienda, and I heard him say many times that for what she spent, they could own three new houses. I think he was right, but Miss Gloriana did not want three new houses, she wanted only her Hacienda.”

Scarlet O'Hara and her Tara, I thought, trying to picture old Gloriana dithering in crinolines. Nope. Didn't work. Gloriana had probably never dithered in her life.

Rosa continued. “When Mr. Michael died, Miss Gloriana continued to fix up. When her business began to make money, she fixed up even more.” Here, she motioned to the beams. “A place like this, you must always be fixing. Old houses, they are like people. They get sick.”

And go on life support.

I wondered briefly about Mr. Michael's death, but pushed the thought aside. From what I'd heard, he had keeled over in public at the Phoenix Open. Little chance for murder there. Then I remembered how Gloriana herself had died. In public. By poison. What goes around comes around?

With uncanny perception, Rosa said, “Miss Gloriana loved Mr. Michael. She would not harm him, not even for her Hacienda. When he died, she did not speak for days. But it was even worse when Big Mr. Zach was killed.”

“Big Mr. Zach?”

“Little Mr. Zach's father. He died with his wife in a terrible wreck, right down the road from here. A tire blew, and their car rolled into the canyon and burned. The doors, they were smashed in and Big Mr. Zach and Mrs. Zach, the poor things, they could not get out. We heard the noise and we ran to them, but.…” She shrugged her shoulders. “Miss Gloriana grieved so hard I thought she would die, too. She walk around like a zombie for months, not caring about nothing.”

I remembered Gloriana's stern face. A buttress against pain?

Rosa continued. “When she start that magazine, I was so glad. It gave her something to think about, something else to love. Then it went wrong, like so much of what she do. But she could not see because she in the grip of the Fever.”

“The Fever?”

“That is what I called it, the Fever. It is when Miss Gloriana begin to do things that start off good, but keeps doing and doing until they turn bad. When Miss Gloriana in the grip of the Fever, she doesn't notice nothing. She was like that with this house, always the Fever for her Hacienda.”

Fever
was as good a word to describe obsessive-compulsive behavior as any other I'd heard.

“I'd like to see the storeroom where Owen slept, if I may.”

Rosa waved a hand. “Little Mr. Zach said show you whatever you want.”

Little Mr. Zach. I smiled, wondering if she called him that to his face, then decided that she probably did. Old habits die hard.

The storeroom was just that. A room to store things, mainly broken lamps, odd pieces of china, and boxes. A cot had been shoved into one corner, a set of barbells in the other, which might explain Owen's buff bod. Considering his complaints about overwork, I thought it odd that Gloriana would allow him the opportunity to work out.

I poked around in the room for a few minutes, finding nothing more of interest, then had Rosa lead me to the second floor.

The upstairs rooms proved in little better shape than those on the first. Stucco crumbled, windows rotted, carpets frayed. Several of the bedrooms had been turned into display rooms for Gloriana's various collections of Revolutionary pewter, film noir posters, miniature tea sets, and Route 66 memorabilia. One room, not yet filled, held sketches and paintings of Thomas Jefferson and his home at Monticello, as well as several objects I couldn't put a name to. I did admire, though, the large soup tureen which stood in lonely glory on a gilt-edged table.

Farther down the hall were two more rooms housing an extraordinary collection of Barbie dolls, most of them still in their shiny cardboard and cellophane boxes. What a pack rat. Everything from the sublime to the absurd.

Turning away from the dolls, I said to Rosa, “Had she always collected like this?”

“Not so much before Mr. Michael died. This Fever came after.”

A reaction to grief, then. Apparently even monsters could feel sadness. “I'm ready to see Gloriana's personal rooms now.” The lair of the dragon was preferable to this.

Gloriana's bedroom would have suited Queen Elizabeth, if the Queen had been down on her luck. The canopied poster bed in the middle of the huge room looked like it was about to collapse, and a tall oak wardrobe canted sharply to one side.

But the view was a killer. Standing at one of the three matching floor-to-ceiling windows, I could see acacia, creosote, and saguaro rolling all the way to the sage-stippled rise of Mummy Mountain. A veritable Eden. Gloriana must have enjoyed the view, too, because to the side of one of the windows stood a tripod with a Pentax Spotmatic fitted with a long lens perched atop it. As I looked around the bedroom, though, I saw only one photograph, that of a handsome, silver-haired man with lines of humor bracketing his mouth. The picture stood on the nightstand in an antique silver frame, angled so that anyone lying in the bed could see it.

“Mr. Michael,” Rosa said. “She never forget him.”

Studying the photograph more closely, though, I thought I saw a trace of cruelty in the man's eyes. What had been the true relationship between Gloriana and her husband? But since he was long dead, it hardly mattered.

I turned back to the window. Directly below, someone had been in the process of constructing a patio, the centerpiece of which was a conical adobe fireplace. It seemed odd to me that Gloriana would begin a new project when there was so much work to be done to keep the old house from collapsing around her ears.

I pointed to the camera. “Was Gloriana into photography?”

Rosa didn't answer right away, choosing instead to smooth the ancient velvet spread on the canopy bed. But the spread couldn't possibly have been made any smoother, not even if she whipped out a steam iron. Obviously, my question made her uncomfortable.

“Tell me about the camera, Rosa.”

She straightened up and gave me a nervous smile. “Miss Gloriana used it to take pictures.”

Well, duh. “Pictures of what?”

“Things.”

“Such as?”

“Deer. Coyotes. You know, animals. They come out of the canyon, right up to the house.” She began smoothing the bedspread again.

Then where were the photographs? I hated to bully the woman, but I needed to find out what she was hiding. “Don't you remember what Mr. Zach said, Rosa? Show me Miss Gloriana's photography. All of it.”

The hands smoothing the bedspread began to tremble. “Little Mr. Zach, he don't know about this. If he did, he not let you look.”

What was the problem? A collection of photographs so poorly done that they made Rosa cringe in embarrassment for her employer? I left the window and strode toward the double doors on the other side of the room. I had taken it for granted they led to a master sitting room, but perhaps I'd been wrong.

Rosa followed closely behind. “Miss Gloriana no let me clean in there, she do it herself. She say it her private place!” She sounded breathless, frightened.

“Calm down, Rosa. I won't damage anything.”

I opened the well-oiled doors to find not a sitting room, but a photography studio mounted with surprisingly expert black-and-white prints. No embarrassment for Rosa here. On one wall were landscapes: large, sun-splashed images of giant saguaros, roiling storms above the Grand Canyon, eagles caught in mid-flight.

The prints on the facing wall at first didn't appear to have any theme at all, until I remembered Gloriana's interest in genealogy: a large stone with the numbers 1620 carved into it—Plymouth Rock, probably; the houses and outbuildings of Monticello; and a host of graves, graves, and more graves, most of them situated in cemeteries framed by huge oaks dripping with Spanish moss.