The arrival of the slim-skirted woman shouldn’t have worried them. They had seen women like her before, walking the paths in oyster-colored high heels, the points catching between flagstones.
But this one kept a leather folio in her arms. She made notes like an appraiser. She did not bother to introduce herself as Marjorie’s friends always had. Without warning, the woman ordered the brick house be cleaned and stripped of its older drapes, ones fraying to threads because Bay had loved rubbing the cloth between her fingers. She hired decorators who spent hours deciding on the right fabric to drape the ballroom. She brought in winemakers who laid out bottles for Reid to consider.
“A family friend,” Reid said. “She’s doing me a favor.”
This was his version of an apology for how the woman picked at every loose stone and stray vine.
The grandmothers cast their eyes toward Estrella and her cousins, each grandmother watching her own granddaughter, searching for five identical nods that would say, yes, they understood they had to obey.
They could grieve Bay. But they could not grieve her by defying this man who now held La Pradera and so held their lives.
We stay here or we die, Abuela Mimosa had reminded them the night before. That means we obey whoever rules this land.
From behind the trellises, they watched the woman. She waved a hand and told Reid they would need more flowers.
“We need so many we can cut all the ones for the arrangements without anyone noticing,” she said. “I want everyone to drop dead when they see this place.”
“You first,” Azalea whispered, and for the first time in days the cousins had to hide their laughs behind cupped hands.
Bay had vanished into the air like salt into water, and the only attention Reid had was for the plans of some woman he would probably take up to his room.
Or his car.
That afternoon Estrella passed the carriage house, and a shriek of laughter came through the wooden doors. “Reid!” in a girl’s voice, slipped between two full laughs.
Estrella edged toward the carriage house, setting her hands against its stone face. She was just tall enough to look into one of the glass panes that broke up the dark-stained barn doors.
Reid and the woman had stuffed themselves into his gleaming convertible. Not in the seats, but across them, lying on their sides. Reid kissed her hard enough that she backed against the dashboard, and she kissed him hard enough to press him against the seat. Estrella wondered how they weren’t catching the gearshift in their backs.
Reid clutched a bottle of whiskey, label gleaming gold. His arm trailed out of the front seat.
Their kissing, the spilling-out of their limbs, brimmed with mischief but seemed emptied of passion.
They weren’t in love.
They were just bored.
The woman’s shoe stuck out of the front seat, the kind of simple but precise heel that cost more than anything Estrella owned. And this woman was wearing it not with Sunday clothes but with a faded dress, no bra.
That was the thing about people with so much money. They could throw on dirty clothes picked up from their bedroom floor and still seem finished. They could wear expensive shoes with cheap shifts and look as though they were setting the dress code.
And Reid. He was two or three drinks in. Estrella knew for sure when he accidentally hit the horn with his elbow and collapsed into laughter as deep and real as the girl’s.
Estrella pushed herself off the barn door, calling Reid pendejo under her breath all the way back to the stone house. But the next afternoon, when she saw the woman crossing La Pradera in a different pair of shoes, pearl-colored this time, she felt a question twirling inside her like a curl of smoke.
How did that work? How did two people kiss and slide hands over each other’s shoulders without the specter of a vanishing curse watching them from the corner?
The question clung to Estrella’s skin, walking up and down her forearms with the lightness of a moth’s feet.
It distracted her later, when she put her hands into the dirt, the current from her palms stirring buds from the earth. It even distracted from the things that distracted her the rest of the time. Her cousins’ dahlias and morning glories, which looked so much like they were cut from silk her wonder over them never faded. The grandmothers’ trees bursting into bloom so full they looked like whirls of cotton candy. Her mother’s shape and shadow as she painted the wooden trellises in roses.
But that crawling feeling, the moth’s weight of that question, drew her until she was sneaking back toward the carriage house the next afternoon.
Estrella stood on her toes, peering through the glass and looking for the woman’s good shoes and Reid’s creased shirt. If she were a little taller, like her mother or Gloria or Calla, she could have stayed on flat feet.
Her thought of Gloria and her mother drifted away on the wind, but Calla.
Calla.
Her thoughts of Calla stayed, blazing in front of her.
Reid and the woman had not thrown themselves into the car.
The butterscotch leather of the seats had been darkened with handfuls and more handfuls of wet earth. Green stalks rose thick and bright, cracking the upholstery. Long leaves sheltered the stems.
And capping each stalk was the curving bell of a calla lily. Some grew orange, blushed with red, some so burgundy they look wine-stained. Others were deep purple edged in cream.
But they were all the work of her youngest cousin’s hands. Her youngest cousin, whose name had blessed her with a gift for growing perfect calla lilies.
It drew the breath out of Estrella’s throat. It was stunning and bright as the sky catching fire at sunset.
And it had ruined Reid’s beautiful car.
Estrella ran, catching Calla by the arm in a side garden.
The pressure of Estrella’s fingers must have warned Calla. She turned, her expression guilty but unashamed.
Estrella caught her breath. “I don’t want to jump to any unfair conclusions.”
Calla smiled, an acknowledgment that if Bay had not vanished, if Dalia did not walk the halls at night like some lost spirit, if Reid was not laying his claim to La Pradera, she would have laughed.
Estrella let go of her arm. “Why?” She had meant to speak a whole question. Why did you do it? Why would you risk yourself and all of us? But her weak breath cut the question down to one word.
Calla checked over both their shoulders. When she saw no one near the hedges and rows of azalea bushes, a clenched-jaw rage came into her face. “He cornered Dalia. I saw him.”
Estrella’s breath turned sour in her throat. “What?”
“Nothing happened,” Calla said. “I made sure of it. But he was trying to kiss her, and she was pushing him away, but she did it like she was flirting. She knows she can’t make him mad, so that was all she could do.”
“Then how did you make sure nothing happened?”
“I hid behind the bushes and I threw a rock,” Calla said.
Estrella nodded. “Good.”
Calla allowed a little pride into her face. “They thought it was a rabbit or a fox or something. It distracted him enough that she just said good night and left.”
The perfumed sweetness of the roses and the lily magnolias filled Estrella. Most days, she liked it, the smell of these gardens so strong it seemed liquid. But now it made her forehead ache.
“Throw all the rocks you want,” Estrella said. “But you can’t do this. Do you know what he could do to us?”
Calla bit her lip. “It’s not fair.”
“I know,” Estrella said.
To Marjorie Briar, Estrella and her cousins had been las haditas, garden fairies who promised rich men magic held in seeds and bulbs. Marjorie taught them to trick men with too much money in their pockets, to part them from the contents of their billfolds. And if they ever came back complaining that the bulbs did not take into flowers as grand as those on La Pradera, they convinced them the only answer was to buy more.
But Reid just wanted them to grow flowers that could be stuffed into vases. He wanted a ball not so the Nomeolvides women could sell their sewn burlap bags of iris bulbs and hydrangea seeds but so he could impress rich men. So he could work out how to wring enough money from La Pradera to pay his debt.
And Bay. Reid had taken the loss of Bay no harder than misplacing a fountain pen.
Reid’s reign had seeded in all of them, for the first time, the idea of leaving. They wouldn’t do it of course. They knew it could cost them their own lives and their mothers’ broken hearts. But the thought was new, and enough to frighten Estrella as she lay in the dark at night. She dreamed of La Pradera striking her sick as soon as her nightgown hem crossed the property line.
“I promise you,” Estrella said. “The minute we can get rid of him, we will.”
“No,” Calla said. “I mean”—she shook her head, shutting her eyes—“yes, I want that. But it’s not that. It’s his shirts.”
“What about his shirts?”
“They’re wrinkled,” Calla said. Her lips pressed together tight, a guard against tears. “He wants our cousin, and he has all that money, and he can’t even put on an ironed shirt.”
A little piece of Estrella cracked. She loved Calla for how this small thing bothered her. She felt Calla’s rage and frustration so sharply tears burned at the corners of her eyes.
“Listen to me,” Estrella said. “We’ll fix this.”
“I don’t want to,” Calla said. “I want him to see it.”
She could not let Reid come down on Calla for this. Not Calla, not brilliant, vindictive little Calla. She might have been taller than Estrella, but she was all thin limbs and round eyes. Sometimes, when Estrella was not close enough to have to look up at her, Calla still seemed ten.
“You’re not taking the blame for this,” Estrella said. “I am.”
“No,” Calla said. “I’m not letting you.”
“You have to. Because you catch things before any of us do. We need you. Reid doesn’t know how much you notice and I don’t want him to. Let him keep underestimating you.”
“But then what’s he gonna do to you?” Calla asked.
“Don’t worry about me,” Estrella said. “Worry about Dalia. Take care of her.”
“How?” Calla asked.
Estrella thought of Calla folding up her thin arms and legs behind a bush, making noises that sounded like the skittering of a deer or rabbit.
“Keep throwing rocks.”
Estrella sifted through her thoughts for the way out of this, how to rub out any trace of what Calla had done.
The bottle of whiskey in Reid’s hands, the gleam of the gold label, drifted back to her.
Estrella combed out her hair and put on her best dress, a blush-colored one she’d worn to a midsummer party last year. The bodice was sewn with ribbons and satin flowers. The straps, thick pink ribbons, fastened in bows at each shoulder. The skirt brushed her calves, and the memory of how Marjorie used to pick out their dresses with their mothers stung.
Liquor crates had been coming in for the ball, stacked high in an unused shed. Estrella stole bottle after bottle. Aged whiskey. Imported grappa. Champagne wrapped in pink foil. Absinthe the bartenders would serve by lighting sugar cubes in slotted spoons, the liquor burning blue green.
She slipped through the carriage house’s side door, popped the bottles, and soaked the interior of the car. Grappa flooded the consoles and rained down over the calla lilies’ leaves. Absinthe left the steering wheels stained and sticky. Scotch dampened the dark soil. Champagne filled the flutes of the calla lilies, foaming over the petaled rims.
She poured out liquor and wine onto the chrome and leather. The fragrance of sugared grapes and bitter wormwood filled the carriage house. The fumes made her body feel light.
From the last few bottles, she poured out enough to soak a few rags, and stuffed one in the neck of each. She held a lit match to a rag. The soaked cloth went up, and she threw it into the car. She lit the next, tossed it in, and again until they littered the inside.
On the way out, her foot kicked green glass. A half-empty champagne bottle she’d missed. She grabbed its throat before it toppled, and took it with her.
By the time the bottles blew, Estrella had climbed one of La Pradera’s grass-covered hills. It gave her a view of the flash and the fire lighting the carriage house windows.
She sat on the grass, drinking straight from that bottle of champagne that probably cost more than Reid would ever pay her family. The windows in the carriage house doors showed ribbons of fire jumping up from the car.
In every flick of light, the fire swallowed any evidence of Calla and her lilies. The bells and stems caught and went up, disappearing into the flames.
It didn’t take long for Reid to notice, and for men to arrive in their red trucks.
Fel appeared in a smoke-filled doorway.
He coughed into the bend of his elbow, his shirt grayed with smoke.
Panic prickled her. She hadn’t seen him go in. She’d been so set on burning any evidence that Calla had touched the car, she hadn’t thought about Fel, quiet and so unknown to them that he was unpredictable.
He spoke to the firemen, gesturing inside and telling them, Estrella guessed, that no one was in the carriage house.
Her heart settled and slowed. He was okay, this boy who cooked for her family when they could not cook for themselves, this boy who searched the thick gray of liquor-filled smoke to make sure they were not lost in it. His clothes and hair were smoke-dulled, and he was coughing to clear it from his lungs, but he was okay.
And Estrella had turned to ashes anything that could damn Calla.
There was nothing for Reid to do but stand, try to deaden the horror on his face, and look around at who was there to witness it.
The men threw open the barn doors, letting the bitter smoke billow out. They had the fire out with a few snowy arcs of the extinguishers. But it had done its damage. The car was ruined, and the carriage house would smell like smoke for weeks.
Reid’s eyes moved in Estrella’s direction. They missed her at first, passing over her.
When they snapped back, she knew he’d seen her.
His mouth stayed open. But even from this distance she could see the rage, the disbelief, boiling down into one expression.
She held his stare. She didn’t want anyone else blamed for this. Not Calla. Not Fel. And for one reckless minute she wanted him to throw her out of the gardens. She didn’t want any part of the little kingdom he meant to make out of La Pradera.
With the glow from the carriage house, and the warmth of the champagne spreading through her, there was nothing to fear in the whole world. He could kick her out if he wanted to. She’d die a legend. She’d be a story Dalia could pass on to the next Nomeolvides daughters.
Estrella would be the girl who went out in the light of all those flames.
She raised the bottle in Reid’s direction, the pink foil label peeling under her fingers, and she swallowed the last of the champagne.