With Bronco bringing up the rear and Gina leading, they set out in separate groups, walking a few yards apart to see Heck’s Cuban family’s past property. All wore sunglasses Gina had bought from the man on the bus. Nick carried a map of this area called El Vedado that Heck had bought. “El Vedado, that means ‘the forbidden,’” Heck whispered to Jace, “but don’t know why.”
“Let’s just hope we don’t find out and don’t like the answer,” Jace told him.
* * *
As tired and wary as she was, Claire thought the Vedado was lovely. Some of the mansions dated back to the 1860s, but most were from the 1920s. Many were still kept up, though some were in total disrepair. It was hilly and windy up here, a lovely day that partly lifted her spirits.
Heck, though, she noted, was a mess. He was finally so close to his heritage, one he shared with the now-deceased grandfather he still cherished. Gina was as good as a tour guide—that was, until she led them to a break in an iron fence behind a bougainvillea bush and said, “We cut through here. Good shortcut and beautiful inside. We never stop to pay at the gate—too much.”
Heck said, “But it’s a cemetery. What if we get caught without a ticket? We don’t need to be reported.”
“Is okay,” Gina said with a quick downward slice of her hand. “We cut through here all the time, to university. Berto, it closer to your family house too. The guards at the gate know my friend Francesca, ignore us even if they see us. Come on, everyone through.”
Maybe it was her narcolepsy meds speaking, but once inside, Claire felt she had actually stepped into a city of the dead. She was stunned to see so many life-size stone statues of long-gone people. Several had their arms outspread as if to welcome them. Again, she felt that strange, shivery sense that they were being watched or followed, but it was surely just the marble eyes on them and the blank darkness peering through the grates of elaborate crypts. Even in the warm afternoon sun, she shuddered again. Shadows seemed to reach out, trying to touch them or snag their steps. She took Lexi’s hand and ignored what the child was whispering about someone named Lily.
“Famous Cubans, big monuments here,” Gina told them, pointing this way and that. “Over that way, old-time independence leader General Gomez and Eduardo Chibas’s tomb back there. To protest the cruel government, he killed himself during a radio broadcast before the revolution, so bold and brave!”
Claire saw Nick’s head snap around. Any mention of suicide shook him up.
“When he was buried here,” Gina went on, “a young university student, Fidel Castro, did jump on his grave and make a big speech, started the revolt against the old ways. But we going by the one I want you to see, ’specially you, Jenna, since you have little Meggie,” she said, turning to look closely at Claire.
And maybe not only little Meggie, Claire thought. She was still obsessing over her missed period but tried to tell herself that all this upheaval could have made her body skip it. She still hadn’t told Nick, since he didn’t need another distraction right now.
“Was it someone famous who had a daughter?” Claire asked as they skirted around the site Gina must be referring to. Again, the raised tombs were crowded so close together it felt oppressive, as if all that stonework was leaning in. They seemed to be pretty much in the center of the massive cemetery. Ahead of them loomed the marble figure of a woman clinging to a tall cross with one arm and a baby in her other. Claire gasped. But for a slightly rounder face, the statue looked like her. Nick and Jace both gaped at it, then her.
“Look, Mommy,” Lexi said, tugging on her arm. “It’s you! But you don’t have a baby. And the statue of the little girl with her head bowed standing over by the flowers—that could be me!”
“That’s really somethin’!” Bronco said when the others seemed suddenly voiceless. Nita kept crossing herself. The flowers strewed or carefully placed around the statue reminded Claire of the photos of the floral excess when Princess Diana died. It was almost as if this woman had just died yesterday.
Jace cleared his throat and put in, “They say there are doubles for everyone somewhere. But this lady lived and died a long time ago. Look, Jenna, she was your age now.”
Gina pointed out the woman’s burial vault nearby, one with four huge iron rings.
“This my favorite place in all this Necropolis Cristobal Colon,” Gina said, her voice so solemn. They all stopped, gathered around her. “This the tomb of Senora Amelia Goryi, called La Milagrosa, the miraculous one. She died giving a birth in 1901. Her husband so sad, he devious.”
“Devastated?” Nick prompted, his deep voice shaky.
“That’s it. He have a broken heart and visit the grave many times a day. Always, he knocked with one of those iron rings to wake her up and backing away to keep her grave and statue in sight longest he can. But here’s the thing,” she added, turning to Claire. “When her body exhumed years later, it not one bit decayed. And the dead baby which was buried at her feet was in her arms! So she was holy, not a saint yet, but a special help, a miracle. Many people come here, knock on the tomb and back away, like her husband did, praying she solve their problems.”
Nick put his arm around Claire’s shoulders as if he had to protect her, and Jace stepped closer. She couldn’t help it but still stared into the stone face of the statue. The slant of sun made it look as if her lips were moving. One of Claire’s professors had always made his students memorize that being a forensic psychologist meant “The dead still talk if you know how to listen.”
Claire prayed this statue would not haunt her, not talk to her in dreams. She’d had narcoleptic nightmares in which the dead clutched at her in the night. Her doctor had said that was typical of the disease—and maybe her chosen career—and she’d managed to deal with it. But now, with all this...
Nick’s voice cut through her agonizing. “So, Gina, are you thinking we could rely on this long-dead woman’s favor to get us safely out of here?”
“I hope and pray so. If not, we, the living, we must find the way.”
Nick had never seen Heck cry. The guy was usually all business, rational and unemotional, his no-nonsense tech adviser, and for five years he’d relied on him for that. But seeing the small, once-elegant hotel his grandfather had owned and that had been taken away from him in the Cuban revolution moved Nick’s friend to tears. Luckily, it was still named La Rosa, so that and the street name had been enough for Gina to locate it without giving out his family’s real last name.
“It’s a mess,” Heck choked out, glaring across the avenue at the splotchy exterior of the building where blue paint had peeled away like huge scabbed sores. The intricate metal balconies overhanging the Quinta Avenida were rusted and looked dangerous, although laundry hung from some like mismatched flags, and a few had people leaning on the railing and smoking, just watching life go by—and watching them.
Gina put her arm around his waist, and Heck leaned into her. “Many once-grand places like this now,” she told him, her voice soothing. “Lots of families live there, so that helps that they have shelter, yes? Place like this, so many of them, called ciudadelas, like a little city to many people. Best we not go in, yes, Berto?”