Cactus Heart (David Mapstone Mystery 5)

“I’m here. I do care, Heather. That’s why I’m asking these questions. I just can’t figure out what would have caused Frances to keep silent.”

Heather said, “I can think of one thing.”

Chapter Thirty-eight

The rap on the door was tentative, almost like someone made a mistake. Still absorbing the news from Heather Amis, I wanted to let them walk on. Whoever it was couldn’t want me that bad. But I set aside my notes and went to the door.

Before me stood a small, dark man in a starched white shirt and a bola tie. His face looked as lined and cracked as the desert itself, but his hair was vividly black and slicked back on his scalp. He carried a Stetson in one hand, a large, powerful-looking hand for such a small man.

“I am Luis Paz.”

I invited him in and sent Carl down to the marriage license bureau to get him a cup of coffee. Carl wouldn’t like it, but I was afraid the old man might walk out if I kept him waiting. Or he might just disappear like the apparition he seemed to be. I led him to one of the straight-back wooden chairs and invited him to sit. He put the Stetson on my desk.

“My son gave me your card.”

I told him that I appreciated that.

“He didn’t want me to come here. To open up things that should have been closed so long ago.”

“But you came anyway,” I said. I sat cautiously behind my desk. He regarded me in a long appraising glare.

“You work for Chief Peralta?”

I said I did.

“He’s a good man. I knew his father, the judge.”

“Mr. Paz, you worked as gardener…”

“I worked for Mr. Yarnell for nearly twenty years.”

“Hayden Yarnell?” I coaxed.

Paz stiffened. “There is only one Mr. Yarnell,” he said. “His older sons were…” He let the sentence hang between us, as if only a fool would not understand.

“After he died, I started my own lawn business.” He relaxed a millimeter, no more.

“Sir, may I ask how old you are?”

“Ninety-three,” he said.

“You don’t look it.”

He smiled a little. “I feel every year,” he said. “But I am not here about me.” He sighed and looked across the desk, then met my eyes. “What happened in 1941, all those years ago, I’ve carried it in my heart.”

We fell into quiet that seemed endless. It was a taste of the silence the Yarnell twins must have felt, an absence more frightening than their cries for help, the silence of Jack Talbott before the executioner did his job, or the endless years for Frances Richie. But I didn’t dare break it. Finally, Paz did.

“At first I could tell myself stories, that maybe I was mistaken about what I had seen and heard. And then it didn’t seem to matter, so much had gone wrong it couldn’t be made right.”

I spoke into the next long gap. “What couldn’t be made right?”

“You don’t understand. They were so powerful…”

“The Yarnell family?”

He nodded slowly. “First they told me to keep my mouth shut, that Mr. Yarnell wanted it that way. I couldn’t believe that, but he became so sick, and I couldn’t talk to him.” He sighed heavily. “I was afraid. I had my own family, and I was afraid. Later, when the Yarnells offered me money to start my own business, I took it.”

His hands bunched into gnarled, hard-time fists that sat on his knees like holstered weapons. “Do you know what it is like to hold something terrible in your heart for so many years?” he asked. “Do you know how heavy it becomes?”