A Thorn in the Bush by Frank Herbert

Chapter 1
    “But what if the young man is innocent?” asked Don Jaime. He spoke in Spanish with a lisping Castilian accent, an affectation that marked him as a man of some daring among Mexican politicians.
    “Innocent!” Mrs. Ross put all the scorn of her seventy-one years into the word. “I tell you he is precisely like the other one!” Her Spanish lashed at him, full of overtones from countless kitchen maids and with hardly a trace remaining of her native English.
    “But … but …” Don Jaime sputtered at her as only the mayor of a small town can sputter at a rich land owner and valued confidante. “You cannot come here and ask me to imprison a tourist simply because he reminds you of someone out of your past! Please? You cannot.” His shoulders hunched in a Latin shrug. “Emma, my dearest friend, we must remember that times change.”
    “But young men don’t!”
    They sat in Don Jaime’s upstairs parlor, a plaster and blue tile room of austere furnishings. It looked out on Mexico’s Lake Chapala from the waterfront of San Juan. Afternoon sunlight, reduced to narrow ribbons by venetian blinds, wove a tapestry of glowing yellow across the room.
    An immense black upholstered chair enfolded Mrs. Ross, dwarfed her. She had presented this chair to Don Jaime on his Saint’s Day ten years ago because she could not endure sitting in any of his other furniture. Every other chair in the house presented unexpected corners, painful edges and sloping planes that kept you ever on the alert against being slid off onto the floor. She was convinced that none of these pieces had been designed for human beings.
    Mrs. Ross wore a blue silk dress and a small blue-feathered hat over her grey hair. She looked like a shriveled dowager duchess: sharp-eyed and slightly sunburned so that the effect was a little horsey. Her face presented balanced planes that still revealed some of the beauty that age had covered.
    Don Jaime held himself severely upright in a high-backed teak throne. He was a lean figure in a black business suit of European cut. His face—long, narrow and with pinched-in cheeks—looked like the face of the crucified Jesus that hung in San Juan’s church. Although two years older than Mrs. Ross, he still retained the glossy charcoal hair of his youth.
    On this afternoon there had been the long, slow ritual conversation: the inquiries about health, about mutual friends, the state of the weather, of the crops (both agricultural and tourist), and a discussion of a recent fishing tragedy at Solas farther down the lake in which a father and son had drowned. The son had been known to Serena, Mrs. Ross’s current maid of all work.
    During all their talk there had been persistent mouse-like sounds in a nearby room: one of Don Jaime’s serving girls making work there to eavesdrop.
    But now Mrs. Ross was down to the object of her visit. “I know this young man’s type,” she said.
    “What do you really know about him?” asked Don Jaime.
    Mrs. Ross’s nose twitched in irritation. “His full name is Francis Andrew Hoblitt,” she said. “He comes from St. Louis. He is twenty-eight, unmarried, speaks little Spanish … and that poorly. I’m certain you’ve seen him around: a blond young man, always frowning.”
    “And always carrying the drawing pad.” With two motions of his hands Don Jaime hung the squared-off pad shape in the air between them.
    “The same. He lives in that little guest house that the Friesmans rent out. He drinks too much. He throws things … and he doesn’t like the new tax on foreign artists. He said vile things to the tax collector.”
    She did not add that Hoblitt, while in wine, had pinched Lolita Veras on the bottom. Hoblitt was altogether the kind of tourist who made Mrs. Ross ashamed of her countrymen.
    Don Jaime nodded, averted his eyes. He had been a widower for thirty-six years, and his manner betrayed a certain watchful caution with women (although he had courted Mrs. Ross