you, Señorita,” Mara apologized, but.…”
“No apologies necessary,” Alyssa interrupted, threw back the lone sheet which covered her, and came to a sitting position. Her toes sought out, and found, the slippers that Mara had put beneath the bed earlier. “Certainly, I didn’t come all of this way to spend all of my time in bed.”
Her slippers on, she stood and snatched her robe from the back of the nearby chair. She walked to the windows to throw back the drapes and let in sunshine which, somehow, seemed less hostile than it had during her long drive to get there.
It was only when she turned back to Mara that she realized the Spanish woman was concerned about something.
“Whatever is the matter?” Alyssa asked, moving closer to Mara. Now, there was no mistaking the anxiety written in the expression on Mara’s matronly face.
“Ramón wanted to see you, whenever was convenient,” Mara informed. “I told him you were sleeping; but he now insists that what he has to say really won’t wait.”
And, that sounded more than a little ominous!
“Do you know what he wants?” Alyssa asked. At the same time, she wondered what she should wear, until she realized Mara had already solved that problem by having laid out a white blouse and a light blue skirt.
Mara answered by delivering an exaggerated shrug.
Alyssa suspected the woman knew what Ramón wanted but probably wasn’t talking. Alyssa contemplated giving her the third-degree, but, then, rejected that as being out of hand. Whatever it was Ramón had to tell her, she would find out soon enough.
“Tell Ramón I’ll be down shortly,” Alyssa said.
“I did keep telling him you were still resting,” Mara mumbled under her breath as she exited the bedroom and pulled the door shut behind her.
Alyssa hurriedly dressed and spent a quick few minutes at the vanity table getting her hair and face back into presentable shape. Then, she left the bedroom and headed along the hallway to the stairs that descended to the living room.
Ramón was standing, not sitting, as if he were uncomfortable inside the big house and would have far preferred sitting a horse somewhere out on the plain.
“Ramón?” Alyssa greeted as soon as he’d spotted her. “Mara said you have something urgent to tell me.”
“Urgent, yes,” he agreed. He held his hat in both hands, twisting it along its brim.
“Would you like to sit down?” she suggested.
He shook his head, obviously wanting none of that.
She waited while he continued to say nothing and look extremely ill at ease.
“There’s a problem?” she ventured, thinking that the way things were going, the two could very well end up standing there all night.
“The bulls,” Ramón said finally.
Alyssa decided he was quite charming in his nervousness. He was probably younger than she originally suspected. The sun had a capacity for aging people beyond their actual years.
He had shiny black hair that looked as if it would soon need trimming. He had large black eyes, full mouth. His nose looked as if it might have been broken once—even twice; the slight misalignment, though, didn’t detract from his overall good looks.
Consciously, she brought her mind back to whatever the problem at hand. It certainly wasn’t the time to be appraising the help’s physical attractiveness.
“What about the bulls, Ramón?” She wondered how he could be persuaded to just come out with whatever it was he had to say. She was beginning to fear that she might have to extract the information piece by piece, like a dentist pulling a cracked tooth.
“The dead bulls,” he obliged, finally, before stammering to yet another silence.
“The bulls that were shot…by someone, you mean?”
“Yes,” he affirmed.
“Why don’t you simply tell me what you have to say, Ramón?” she suggested, trying to be patient. “At this rate, we’re liable to be spending this day and the next rooted to this very spot.”
“The men,” he said, paused, and then continued, “brought in somebody. He’s out in the barn.”
“Brought in whom? Out in what barn?”
“They were angry,” he explained cryptically. “Understandable, yes?”
“I see,” she said, really not sure she was seeing anything at all but hopeful she was making progress of sorts. Eventually, the pieces of the jigsaw were bound to fall into place.
“It’s the son,” Ramón said so lowly that Alyssa almost missed what he said.
“The son?” she jumped in on the faintly delivered cue. “Whose son?”
“Señor Montego’s—Adriano.”
“Lalo Montego’s son, Adriano? Where?”
“Out in the barn.”
“He’s the someone who has been killing my bulls?”
“I think you should come,” Ramón said. “The men are upset. You understand.”
“Certainly, I understand,” she said, knowing intuitively that, come what may, it was an owner’s position to take the side of employees. Why was Adriano Montego killing her bulls with a gun? And, what was he doing back here, now, in that he had dropped out of sight during the time period in which the will was going through probate, surprising Alyssa’s mother to no end when he hadn’t protested the delivery of the Spanish property into her daughter’s hands? The way Alyssa came to understand it, Adriano would have had every reason to be upset by the share his father had left him, compared to what was left a young woman Adriano had neither met nor seen. For some reason, Lalo and his son were on the outs at the time the elder Montego met his death in the afternoon.
“If you think I should see him, then, of course, I shall see him,” she said. “As a matter of fact, why don’t you take me to him now?”
“Yes,” he agreed, obviously relieved. Had he actually assumed that she, as a woman, would break down and become hysterical?
They headed for the door where Mara magically appeared with a scarf for Alyssa’s head.
“You don’t want to get sunstroke your first day here,” Mara said.
Alyssa thanked her and followed Ramón outside, around the house, and off toward the stables and the barn in the distance.
She looked for indications of her other employees and saw none. It seemed strange that, since her arrival, she had seen only four people: Ramón, the foreman; Flavio, the chauffeur; Mara; and, the young boy who had delivered the tray of sandwiches and lemonade to her bedroom.
After all, the ranch had a permanent payroll
