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And a guide, of course. She was still desperately in need of one of those.
A pair of simple French doors opened onto the veranda. Ellie stepped through them, drawn outside by the warm air and the smell of living things from the garden below.
Her room was on the upper floor of the hotel’s wing. The high walkway on which she stood granted her a lovely view over the abundant sprawl of the yard, which was framed by a high wooden fence. Beyond that barrier, she could see the rooftops of more houses. They grew lower and more humble the further they were from the waterfront.
Against the horizon, Ellie could just make out the misty gray haze of the mountains. The soft, distant line of them hadn’t been visible earlier in the day when the light had been higher. They looked very far away, lying as they did across miles of flat, tangled swamp—but they werehere. They were real, and somewhere within them lay the destination marked on her map.
The thought was both thrilling and desperately intimidating.
Ellie’s hand rose to the medallion. The artifact could still be part of an elaborate hoax—but if it wasn’t, then somewhere out among those distant peaks, an extraordinary secret awaited discovery.
Her reverie was interrupted by the chirp of bright, feminine voices carrying across the air from below. They were speaking Spanish.
She moved to where the veranda ended at the frame of the original house and peered down. The voices were coming from a small area separated from the rest of the garden by a high wooden privacy fence. The space backed onto the hotel’s kitchen.
Ellie thought of the rose-scented soap in her bath that afternoon. Adding it to the tub certainly hadn’t been the notion of a sixteen-year-old boy—nor did she imagine that Mr. Linares would have thought of it.
The bubbles spoke of a woman’s touch.
A spark of inspiration made Ellie’s pulse jump. She wasn’t a fool. She knew that a lady traveling alone could be vulnerable to rascals. She considered herself to be a person of reasonably good judgment… but no one would know the worth of the various men in the colony as well as a local woman.
Quietly, Ellie slipped down the stairs that led from the veranda to the ground floor. Stepping into the garden, she followed a slender dirt path toward the privacy fence.
A gap in the barrier opened at the end nearest to the house, half-hidden by a stand of young thatch palms. Ellie squeezed herself past the stiff fronds and risked a peek around the corner.
The little yard was obviously a space meant for work rather than for show. Most of the ground was packed earth, except at the fringes where green things came stubbornly springing up.
A fragrant flowering vine meandered cheerfully along the inside of the fence. A few heavy pots of herbs flourished by the steps that led into the kitchen.
A big vat of steaming water squatted in the center of the space. A girl of perhaps sixteen stood by it with her skirts tucked up to expose her shins. Her dark hair was pulled into a messy bun, and her elegant eyebrows were angled crossly. She jammed a polished wooden pole into the vat with a mulish expression on her face.
An older woman sat in the first of a pair of wooden chairs positioned nearby. Her feet were plopped comfortably on a stool as she sipped a glass of something that looked refreshing. Her brightly colored skirt had also been pulled up to expose the lower portion of her legs, but this appeared to have been done for ventilation rather than for work. Her hair was streaked with threads of silver above a markedly lovely face. There was an obvious similarity between her sun-warmed features and those of the girl standing next to the vat.
“Con más fuerza,” the older woman ordered, waving a hand at her daughter.
The teenager flashed her a murderous look before whacking at the contents of the vat with her stick more forcefully.
The woman with her feet up had to be the wife that Mr. Linares, the hotel proprietor, had mentioned when Ellie checked in. Ellie felt a flash of guilt at disturbing the lady in a place where she was obviously not expecting any guests. She attempted to creep back to the path, but the heel of her boot slipped, spinning out a little tumble of pebbles.
Mrs. Linares sat up in her chair, suddenly alert.
“Hoo deh?” she called out in Kriol.
Steeling herself against the now-unavoidable embarrassment, Ellie poked her head back around the fence.
“I, er… My apologies. I was just… ah, looking for the…” She cleared her throat, giving up. “I was snooping.”
Mrs. Linares’s face cracked into a smile. Her eyes twinkled.
“Were you? There is nothing like a good snoop, but I am afraid all you have turned up is two ladies doing laundry.”
“Más bien a una,” the teenager at the vat muttered under her breath.
Mrs. Linares took another sip of her drink, giving it a little slurp. “Pound it, Rosalita. You are washing, not making soup.” She winked at Ellie. “This is the part you guests are not supposed to see.”
“I’m terribly sorry for interrupting you,” Ellie replied.
“It’s no trouble. Was there anything you needed?” Mrs. Linares asked.
