Brain Child Read Online Free PDF Page B

the four of them started toward the lights flooding from the gateway.
    “I don’t believe this,” Kate said a moment later. They were standing just inside the gate, trying to absorb the transformation that had come over what had been, only a year earlier, a crumbling ruin.
    To the left, the old stables had been rebuilt into garages, and in the bright whiteness of the floodlights, the new plaster was indistinguishable from the old. The only change was that the stable roofs, originally thatched, were now of the same red tile as the house and the servants’ quarters.
    “It’s weird,” Alex said. “It looks like it’s a couple of hundred years old.”
    “Except for that,” Lisa breathed. “Have you ever seen anything like it?”
    Dominating the courtyard, which until recently had been nothing more than an overgrown weed patch, was a glistening swimming pool fed by a cascade of tumbling water that made its way down five intricately tiled tiers before finally splashing into the immense oval of the pool.
    Bob Carey whistled softly. “How big do you s’pose it is?”
    “Big enough,” Alex replied. Then his eyes wandered to what had once been the servants’ quarters. “Wanta bet that’s a pool house now?”
    Before anyone could venture an answer, Carolyn Evans’s voice rang out over the rock music that was throbbing from the huge main house. “Hey! Come on in!”
    Glancing at each other uneasily, the four of them slowly crossed the courtyard, then stepped up onto the broad loggia that ran the entire length of the house. Carolyn, grinning happily, waited for them at the elaboratelycarved oaken front door. “Isn’t it neat? Come on in—everybody’s already here.”
    They went through the front door into a massive tile-floored entry hall that was dominated by a staircase curving up to the second floor. To the right there was a large dining room, and beyond it they could see through another room into the kitchen. “That’s a butler’s pantry between the dining room and kitchen,” Carolyn explained, then raised her voice as someone turned up the volume on the stereo. “Mom wasn’t really sure it was supposed to be there, but she put it in anyway.”
    “You going to have a butler?” Kate Lewis asked.
    Carolyn shrugged with elaborate unconcern. “I don’t know. I guess so. Mom says the house is too big for María to take care of by herself.”
    “María
Torres?”
Bob Carey groaned. “That old witch can’t even take care of her own house. My mom fired her after the first day!”
    “She’s okay—” Alex began, but was immediately drowned out by the others’ laughter. Even Lisa joined in.
    “Come on, Alex, she’s a loony-bin case. Everybody knows that.” Then she glanced guiltily toward Carolyn. “She isn’t here, is she?”
    Carolyn giggled maliciously. “If she is, she just got an earful.”
    At the top of the stairs, María Torres faded back into the darkness of the second-floor hallway, her black dress making her nearly invisible.
    She had been sitting quietly in the large bedroom at the end of the corridor—the bedroom that, by rights, should have been hers—when the first of the cars had arrived.
    No one, she knew, should have come back to the hacienda for hours, and she should have had the house to herself and her ghosts from the past. But now her reverie was shattered, and the pounding din of the
gringo
music, and the children of the
gringos
she had spent her life hating, filled the ancient rooms.
    She had been in the house since seven o’clock, having let herself in with her own key as soon as Carolyn had left. She had spent the last four hours drifting through the house, imagining that it was hers, that she was not the cleaning woman—no more than a
peón—
but the mistress of the hacienda: Doña María Ruiz de Torres. And one day it would happen; one day, sometime in the vague future, it would happen. The
gringos
would be driven away, and finally the hacienda would be hers.
    But