Chapter 3
The beach was much lonelier without the daily chinchón game with Jimena, who was still in shock from everything they had gone through the previous night. Before heading to the beach, she had left a palo santo burning, knowing it would calm her down, and retreated, with the smell of santería, witchcraft, Lavanda, to continue reading under the sun at the beach.
By noon, her stomach twisted with hunger, so she suddenly closed the book and turned to ask her friends what they wanted to eat.
"Order some fried squid, don’t complicate things." Fede said seriously, seeing the group's lack of energy. The Uber they were in had passed by the scene just a few minutes earlier and hadn’t seen any dismembered bodies. Which indicated that the animal or human who had done that had barely had time to leave between the passage of the two cars.
"Do you guys want anything else?" She asked one last time to Ron and Javier, who were sitting down under a beach umbrella with their heads lowered.
"I think I’ll go check on Jime." Javier said, suddenly standing up.
"Okay, let’s go together, the rotisserie is on the way." She said softly. "Let’s walk for a bit."
Being friends with Javier was easy. He was a guy with no major complications, with sharp humor picked up from the darkest corners of the internet, who could always make you laugh, and if he needed to defend you, he would literally do so with his fists.
"Hey, I saw Jime looking bad." She began, trying to ease into the conversation. "Is this the first time she’s seen an accident?"
Javier furrowed his brow.
"Yeah, I think it’s the first time for all of us. Or have you seen something like this before?"
"Honestly, not in real life. But in Judicial Practice, yes, I had to pick up a file for damages once. We were handling one of the victims. They were claiming a hip prosthesis from insurance, I think. The thing is, there had been deaths in the accident, they weren’t in our file, of course, but the insurance presented all the information, the full folder of the incident, and I saw everything. The geometry of our humanity is horrible."
Javier smiled.
"Well, thanks for handling the arrangements, talking to the cops, for everything. It’s pretty reassuring to have a 'friend-mom.'" He smiled. "Someone who looks out for us."
She didn’t know how to respond to that. Was she the 'friend-mom'? Did Ron see her that way too? Like an extension of Mónica? She grimaced in disgust. She wanted to be liked for who she was, not for what she could give.
It wasn’t the time to think about that, she told herself, there were more important things.
The streets were flooded with sand, and as they passed, the wind pressed against their skin, eroding it. The line for the rotisserie signaled the end of her journey with company. Javi told her something like "we'll meet up later" and continued walking, his short figure disappearing around the corner.
She put in her headphones, estimating that standing in line would take at least twenty minutes. But just as the sweet piano of Serú Girán announced the start of the song, she noticed that further ahead of her, a tall and elegant figure stood out from the rest.
"Tom?" She called, and the guy turned around, his indifferent face turning to surprise upon seeing her. "What are you doing here?" She said, walking towards him and greeting him with a kiss on the cheek, for which she had to stand on tiptoe. He was dressed in a light white shirt and formal black trousers, looking so much different from the rest, with a simple elegance, his beauty standing out as a natural consequence of the stature he held. He carried a leather bag in his left hand, the kind that doctors and lawyers carried.
"It got late when I closed the shop." He said, smiling and narrowing his eyes at the same time. "I didn’t have time to cook."
"Ah, what a relief. It’s not like you’re following me." She replied, smiling. "Because I’m going to return the book, you don’t need to spy on me." Tom smiled too.
"I know you’ll return it." He answered. There, under the rays of the sun, Herminia took in his full presence. He had barely plump lips, the kind you felt when kissing, when the flesh met the flesh and explored it in its dimensions before parting to the rest of his mouth. His square jaw was tense. His nose was straight and perfect, and if only she could… But no. She was here to buy food for her boyfriend in shock and the family that was hosting her.
"Can I wait in line with you?" She asked, glancing at the huge crowd that separated them.
"Of course." He agreed and then pointed to the headphones. "What are you listening to?"
She handed him one of the earbuds, so he could also appreciate the music. He took it, to her surprise, since he seemed like one of those who would look at the offer to share something that goes in your ear with disgust. She pressed play again, and the melody of Cinema Verité united them in an intimate gesture.
Tom nodded, smiling, and handed the earbud back to her.
“It would seem like an appropriate song to describe our interaction today,” he told her, amused. “But I don't have a Mercedes Benz, and you're not a silly girl.”
Herminia smiled, and Tom added with a charming whisper, “But you could be a sunscreen commercial”.
Herminia laughed and turned to look at the beach.
“And the beach does look like a chessboard,” she mentioned, pointing to the squares made by the shadows of the beach umbrellas lying on the sand.
Tom nodded, smiling, and placed his hands on the girl's lower back, urging her to move forward in the line.
“How's the reading going?” he asked. “Did you manage to find the answers you were looking for?”
“The only thing I found is the signature of your nerve,” she replied. “Do I have to return the book to you or to the National Library?”
“Ah, what an unforgivable crime, not returning a book on time,” his playful voice surrounded her, and Herminia could only hope that the line would be eternal.
“What will you do when Justice comes for you?” she asked, joking. The boy looked at her through those slit-like eyes.
“I’ll have to find a good lawyer to represent me,” he answered. “I hope she doesn't charge me too much, so I might have to do some favors to balance my accounts.”
Herminia looked at him, her mouth slightly open in surprise at the boy's boldness.
“Favors, I mean, like offering her my spot in line or lending her books. Don't misunderstand me, miss.”
He smiled and shook his head.
“You're a case. Well, to answer your question, I was going to start reading the book last night, but things happened.”
“What things?” he wanted to know, furrowing his brow slightly.
She bit her lip, unsure. Did she want to ruin the conversation that seemed to be flowing so well between them? Well, she had to talk about it with someone. Maybe he would understand the coldness with which she had acted without labeling her a heroine.
“Yesterday we were going to Mar del Plata, but on the way in the Uber we had to stop because someone or something had thrown a human body on the road. It was horrible. I had to take charge, my friends were kind of losing it. I get it, because the body was dismembered. It looked like an animal had gotten to it, but they don't rule out that it was a human. All the organs were scattered on the ground, a mess.”
“I don't understand, what do you mean you took charge?” he asked, without a hint of horror or surprise in his voice, which was a relief, considering that all the adults had acted in a way that she ended up consoling them.
“I called the police, went to get interrogated…” she started to list, counting on her fingers each of the tasks she had handled while Jime cried and Javi comforted her. “…I helped determine the time when the body was left on the road, for that I coordinated with the other friends who had passed by the place just a little while ago, and I brought them to be questioned. Well, the issue wasn't just dealing with all the bureaucracy of the moment, or with the cops, but also with the emotional deregulation of the others.”
“I understand,” Tom conceded, nodding slightly. The line moved forward a little. “Well, the good thing is that it’s a new day, and you’ll be able to rest. If they’ve already finished the interrogation, they won’t have much more to act on. At most, if you were just passengers in an Uber, they might call you in five years, when this is just an anecdote, for the trial if they ever manage to determine it was a human who did it and they could identify and blame them,” he commented. The line moved a bit more. The smell of roasted chicken was crawling up her nose and scratching at her stomach.
“Yeah. That's what I was explaining to the guys, but well, the image was really strong.”
“How lucky they are to have you in their lives, Herminia,” he pointed out. “They're very fortunate.”
She smiled, puzzled. Tom had that way of speaking that seemed to come from a previous century. It was the kind of language of a very well-read and very strange man.
"Yes. But my plans are tied to them. So, it looks like I’ll have a boring afternoon."
She affirmed the last part with a hint of hope that he… might take the initiative. Although she had deceived Ron in the past, the infidelity had happened only at the beginning of their relationship, when the end of her previous relationship and the beginning of the new one overlapped, blending together with transparencies, so really, had it been cheating? Had it been a sin?
"It’s a shame I’ve already made plans for this afternoon, Herminia. I would have been happy to brighten a piece of your day."
The modesty with which he had rejected the offer almost seemed sincere. Herminia wondered if it was the fact that she had told him she was in a relationship that made him reject it.
"Yes, well..."
She started, but Tom interrupted her.
"If you’ll allow me... I believe our paths will cross again. And when that happens, I look forward to showing you certain hidden places around here, in Mar de Ajó. Maybe I’ll tell you a little more about the unwritten history of my home."
Herminia nodded, unable to stop the smile that formed on her lips with the excitement of anticipation.
"I’m a serious person." She replied. "I like to organize my days."
Tom shook his head as the line came to an end and they were called to the counter.
"There’s no magic in chronology." He assured her. "Let destiny tangle us up."
Once she ordered the fried squid and the fries (she had already forgotten the exact order of the twins), and after Tom picked up his simple vegetable pie, they said goodbye with barely a kiss on the cheek. He took her hair in his hands before separating from her, and she allowed herself to inhale his bergamot and rosemary scent.
"Until next time, Herminia."
He said with a low, grave voice, a voice that didn’t quite seem like his own. And then, as she waved goodbye to her sweetheart that disappeared around the corner, the trance made her forget important things: that she should be heading to the beach, not to the apartment, and that she had never told Tom that she was about to graduate as a lawyer.
Before reaching the cabins, she knew something bad had happened. The ambulance was there, parked like a bad omen, and Mónica, Arturo, and Javier were running around, shouting, nervous.
"What happened?"
She shouted, trying to catch a word as she passed, murmuring incomprehensible things.
"My God, Herminia, move to the side, I'll explain later."
Javier told her nervously, as he grabbed a bag and finished getting into the ambulance.
"Mónica? What happened?"
She asked, scared. Mónica didn’t bother to respond, shouting something about the twins and their weird stuff, and got in the ambulance too. Arturo stayed outside, and she approached him almost magnetically.
"Arturo, what…?"
"It’s Jimena, Herminia."
He answered, his voice barely holding together with the little composure he had left.
"We found her choking in her own vomit, she had taken a bunch of pills."
"Is she…?" She asked, surprised and scared.
"She’s alive. But they’re taking her to intensive care."
"What did she take, Arturo? She wouldn’t…"
"I know my daughter would never kill herself."
Arturo replied.
"I think she took some pills that were lying around because she thought they were something else."
"Do you know what she took?"
She asked weakly.
"Yes. It was alprazolam." Arturo replied, showing her the blister of pills that the veterinarian had prescribed for Crookie.
She spent the next three days at the Dr. Macías Municipal Hospital. Only two people could go per shift to care for Jimena, and while Mónica spent the whole night on guard, the twins took turns in the mornings to relieve her. The afternoon was hers. Javier, however, stayed all day.
They had talked at length about the pills. The kids had agreed to say that they were some pills Jimena had bought, because if Mónica found out they were from Herminia’s cat, the vacation would probably end right there for everyone.
So, united by an invisible truce, the girl took her books and spent the afternoon hours waiting for the redhead to wake up, or for the nurses to give any news about her progress to immediately inform the family group, which she had started to be part of since the incident.
Well, she thought with some distaste, there it was—the irrevocable connection to Ron’s family. Mónica didn’t seem to hate her, appreciating the genuine concern for Jimena, and everyone had agreed to add her to the WhatsApp family group Mónica had titled “Wake Up Lions - Today is The Day!!!”
She hated hospitals. She hated the smell of bleach and the way, despite the floor cloth being soaked in disinfectant, everything still seemed dirty, infected, filled with bodily fluids and suffering. It was strange, because she hadn't been shocked by the dismembered body crushed on the road, but the first morning she saw a guy all tied up with one arm missing, she had needed to sit down to recover.
She wrote in the corner of Volume II of the Apocryphal Gospels: “It is not death but life that makes me uncomfortable.” Then she closed the book’s dead pages to open the one of San Bernardo’s history.
The truth was that the stories were written with a special focus on the work of the company that founded the city, EAREC, with the writer being heir to one of the businessmen. There was little prose and little poetry in the book, and, above all, none of the fantastical elements Tom had mentioned about the Duhau family and the curse that had fallen upon them, forcing them to sell the acres at a good price.
In fact, the only interesting part of the book were fragments of the deeds that founded the company. She could use them as models for contracts when she opened her law office, in case she didn't manage to enter to work at the Public Ministry. She was thus engrossed in reading the corporate constitution of EAREC when a little piece of paper fell from the middle of the book. At first, she thought it was a bookmark, but then she saw what it was and smiled. With the stress of the past few days, she had ended up forgetting about Tom and his promises of destiny. But there it was, his handwriting, signing the library card. He had borrowed the book a few months ago, at the beginning of the year—what a coincidence, she thought. And yes, she had been hard on him. Barely a few months’ delay didn’t justify...
But then she realized his signature, just his initials printed in an elegant, blue scribble.
T.M.R.
She touched the path of the pen with the tip of her fingers, as if to convince herself it was real. T.M.R. What could those initials mean? She bit her lip. The R appeared in her mind as an affirmation. Riddle, Riddle, Riddle!
Her heart beat furiously in her chest. No, it could be Rodríguez. Romano. Romero. He told you it was a foreign surname, a mocking voice in her head reminded her. Well, it could be Rizzo, Rossi, Romagnoli. But no, it wasn’t an Italian surname. In Italy, there were no Toms. In Italy, there were Tomassos, in Spain, there were Tomáses. Tom, the name cut short, devoid of further twists, with an elegant simplicity, came from the same place as her treacherous great-great-grandmother. From an Anglo-Saxon country.
Well, even if she was right and his surname was Saxon, there was a range of possibilities. Riddle was not a common surname. Richardson, Riley, Rogers—all those were options she had to discard.
She closed her eyes, fearfully, and opened her phone. It wasn’t betrayal if she had a goal in mind.
She opened the archived chat with Draco.