Ramón Selene, seated in the seat beside Alyssa, immediately scooted forward for a better look at circling birds in a patch of cloudless blue sky off to one side.
Ramón was the foreman of the ranch Alyssa now owned. He’d met her at the airport in Madrid. They had been driving since morning, except for a short break for lunch.
Never very talkative with his new employer, perhaps logically made ill at ease by the presence of a young American woman who probably didn’t know a bull from a heifer, he had lapsed into complete silence long before the car passed through Toledo en route to Trujillo. He wasn’t silent now, though, even if his animated conversation was with the driver and not with Alyssa.
The birds, obviously the subject of conversation, continued their downward helix over something probably dead.
“…go for days without seeing even a bird,” Karen had said. But, surely, a few buzzards shouldn’t be cause for such excitement.
Alyssa strained to catch segments of the conversation. After all, she did speak the language, forced into it by obligatory foreign language lessons heaped upon her by a long line of tutors and teachers in private schools. But as she had discovered in France, on her first visit, there was usually a period of transition needed, wherein it was necessary to recognize the language spoken by the natives wasn’t the same sterile language taught in classrooms far removed from the countries in question. Flavio and Ramón were simply speaking too fast for her to translate.
The car came to a sudden stop. Ramón opened his door and got out.
Alyssa realized there were several horsemen approaching from one side. Once abreast of Ramón, who was standing beside the car, the horses stopped. Ramón talked several minutes with the riders before getting back into the car.
“Is something wrong?” Alyssa asked as he again joined her. The riders were reigning for a turn-back the way they’d come.
“Some difficulty,” Ramón admitted, obviously reluctant to continue with an explanation. He wished she weren’t around to ask questions. He would have undoubtedly been more at ease if—whatever the present problem—he were able to handle it himself, without having the new owner right there to look over his shoulder.
“Whatever it is, I’m sure you can handle it,” she said, deciding she really wasn’t up to pretending she could even begin to be in charge of the situation. She had come here to escape and think, not become involved in playing enthusiastically at ranching. “I’ve been informed that you continue to do an excellent job in overseeing the property.”
If she had assumed her ready delegation of authority would relieve her of the problem, she was sadly mistaken. As much as Ramón might have preferred relieving her of it, there was no way he would be able to keep any of this from her if she decided to stick around for any length of time.
“Another bull has been killed,” he said finally.
Flavio put the car into gear, and they again started moving.
“Another bull? Killed?” Her curiosity was aroused in spite of herself. “Some disease killed them, you mean?”
“No,” he admitted reluctantly. “Someone killed them. With a gun.”
“A gun? Some one? For heaven’s sake, how many did this someone kill?”
“We’ve found four.”
Outside, there wasn’t a cloud (only buzzards) in the sky. Shimmering bands of heat lifted from the plain. Dust rose with the heat, stirred by God only knew what, since there was hardly a breath of breeze to be had anywhere. Trees, whenever making their occasional appearance, were either the gnarled limbs and trunks of olive, or some other low, squat trees which Alyssa wasn’t able to identify. The latter had dull silver trunks and twisted branches that extended to all sides. She couldn’t help being reminded of pain-distorted souls stretching arms upward for relief from Hell’s blast-furnace heat.
Karen had been right when she described the landscape as “more suited to a man’s tastes”. It definitely lacked the slightest feminine touch—at least at this point in Alyssa’s observations of it.
“Who?” she asked. “I mean, any suspects? After all, who goes around shooting helpless animals?”
“Yes, who?” Ramón echoed, though he, unlike Alyssa, had his suspicions. “Whoever, we’ll find him. The ranch is large, but nowhere is it so big as to hide a person like that forever. That I promise you.”
Why did Alyssa shiver? How could she chill in heat so long having penetrated the car, despite the air-conditioner on at full blast? Was it something to do with the revelation that, somewhere, out there, was someone with a gun, who might decide humans were worthier targets than stupid, four-legged beasts?
Or, was she letting her imagination run rampant? Certainly, Ramón had never said anything to insinuate that whoever killed the bulls might soon be looking for two-legged victims. Possibly, it wasn’t all that big of a deal after all. Despite vast economic improvements, Spain still had a moneyed elite and an extensive population of poor; one of the latter possibly just found him or her brought to the point of killing for.…
“Food?” she suggested. It was more than apparent, by the look Ramón gave her, that he hadn’t been anywhere near following her mental conjecture. She hurried to clarify. “The bulls, I mean. Did someone, perhaps, kill them for food?”
“Oh,” he responded, finally getting the gist. “No.”
So, Alyssa left it at that, hoping he would be able to take care of it after all. Frankly, she couldn’t imagine what difference a bull or two made in the long run. She had seen the figures that indicated the presence of over a thousand of them on the Montego Hacienda.
Once again, the conversation jolted to a complete stop. Alyssa pushed herself back into the leather seat and dreamed of arriving at the ranch where she could, hopefully, surrender herself to the unadulterated luxury of a long bath.
At least a dozen more miles were eaten up by the speeding car, and Alyssa began to wonder if she was ever going to see a bathtub before nightfall. She still had no real concept of the size of the ranch she’d inherited and found it hard to register how it had been well over an hour since Ramón had indicated they’d just passed over the eastern edge of her property.
Finally, the car turned right into a lane that bisected a grove of olives. The trees betrayed their age by displaying gaping holes that often formed tunnels from one side of a tree trunk to the other. A novice would have insisted such trees had likely seen their last days. However, the trees’ full canopies of delicate leaves, silvery-gray on the bottom and dark green on top, parenthesizing clusters of small black fruit, proclaimed otherwise.
After the barrenness of the land through which she’d just driven, Alyssa found this bit of visible green decidedly refreshing.
The grove gave way to a coppice of old and impressive oaks, attractive as only those particular trees can somehow be. Suddenly, in amongst them appeared the first evidence of well-manicured lawn, and—yes—water spurting rhythmically from a sprinkler system. Alyssa’s dreams of a bath were suddenly resurrected.
The hacienda sat amongst more oak, olive, and fruit trees. It was a large house, in the Spanish style, with white-washed adobe and red brick, the latter echoing the ferrous content of the soil in the area. The windows, large and overhung by balconies, were lined with lattices of iron grillwork seemingly so insubstantially delicate as to remind Alyssa of a lace mantilla she’d seen in the duty-free shop at the airport in Madrid.
Also, suddenly, there were flowers, complete carpets and tapestry-like cascades of them, gold and red, blue and white, able to survive within the parameters of this small oasis where they would quickly have perished beyond the availability of life-giving water.
When the car door opened, and Alyssa stepped out, the first thing she smelled was how the perfumes, exuded by the many blossoms, hung so heavily—almost palatably—within the air.
“Flavio