A Stranger in My Grave by Margaret Millar Page B

She seemed sure of her facts. He thought, So she’s familiar with the place, she’s been there often. The dream didn’t just come out of nowhere. The locale is real, perhaps even the tombstone is real.
    â€œYou’d better let me come along,” he said.
    â€œWhy? I’m not afraid anymore.”
    â€œOh, let’s just say I’m curious.” He touched her sleeve very del­icately, as if he were directing a highly trained but nervous mare who would go to pieces under too much pressure. “My car’s over on Piedra Street.”

8
    Right from the beginning, she has been ashamed, not only of me but of herself, too. . . .
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    The iron gates looked as though they had been made for giants to swing on. Bougainvillea concealed the twelve-foot steel fence, its fluttery crimson flowers looking innocent of the curved spikes lurking beneath the leaves, sharper than any barbed wire. Between the street and the fence, rows of silver dollar trees shook their money like demented gamblers.
    The gray stone gatehouse resembled a miniature prison, with its barred windows and padlocked iron door. Both the door and the lock were rusted, as if the gatekeeper had long since vanished into another part of the cemetery. Century plants, huge enough to be approaching the end of their designated time, lined both sides of the road to the chapel, alternating with orange and blue birds of paradise that looked ready to sing or to fly away.
    In contrast to the gatehouse, the chapel was decorated with vividly colored Mexican tiles, and organ music was pouring out of its open doors, loud and lively. Only one person was visible, the organist. He seemed to be playing to and for himself; perhaps a funeral had just taken place, and he had stayed on to practice or to drown out a persistent choir of ghosts.
    There was a threat of darkness in the air, and a threat of fog. Daisy buttoned her jacket to the throat and put on her white gloves. They were pretty gloves, of nylon net and linen, but they looked to her now like the kind that were passed out to pall­bearers. She would have taken them off immediately and stuffed them back in her purse if she hadn’t been afraid Pinata would observe the gesture and put his own interpretation on it. His interpretations were too quick and sure and, at least in one case, wrong. She thought, I know no person called Juanita, only an old song we sang at home when I was a child. Nita, Juanita, ask thy soul if we should part. . . .
    She began to hum it unconsciously, and Pinata, listening, rec­ognized the tune and wondered why it disturbed him. There was something about the words. Nita, Juanita, ask thy soul if we should part.... Nita, that was it. Nita was the name of the waitress in the Velada Café, the one Fielding had “rescued” from her husband. It could be, and probably was, a coincidence. And even if it wasn’t a coincidence, and Nita Donelli and Juanita Garcia were the same woman, it meant nothing more than that she had divorced Garcia and married Donelli. She was the kind of woman who would ordinarily seek employment in places like the Velada, and Fielding was the kind of man who frequented them. It seemed perfectly natural that their paths should cross. As for the fight with the woman’s husband, that certainly hadn’t been planned by Fielding. He’d told the police when he was arrested that she was a stranger to him, a lady in distress, and he’d gone to her assistance out of his respect for womanhood. It was the type of thing Fielding, at the euphoric level of the bottle, would say and do.
    They had come to a fork in the road at the top of the mesa which formed the main part of the cemetery. Pinata stopped the car and looked over at Daisy. “Have you heard from your father?”
    â€œNo. We turn right here. We’re going to the west end.”
    â€œThe waitress your father got into a fight over was named Nita. Possibly