Free Puzzle for Pilgrims by Patrick Quentin Page A

hole.
    We reached him. Down in the Zocalo the steampipes of the carrousel were sobbing. The words of the song were so familiar to me that they jogged along with the music in my mind.
     
    Voy a aumentar los mares con me llanto
    Adiós, mujer…
     
    Jake heard us coming. He turned sharply. In the moonlight his face was utterly changed. The blandness was gone. He looked grim and tough as a gun. He grabbed my arm. He pulled me toward the gap in the balustrade. Beyond it there was a sheer drop of over thirty feet into a dry, rocky stream bed.
    “Get a load of that, Peter,” he said.
    I saw it, of course. First I saw the strip of broken balustrade where it had fallen. Then I saw the hair—hair gleaming, metallic, almost white in the moonlight. I saw the hair and I saw the little white hands, flung up. I saw the tiny body sprawled there below on the jagged rocks—limp as a doll tossed away by a bored child.
    The words of the song were still pounding in my ears, running with the carrousel music.
     
    Adiós, mujer, adiós para siempre adiós.
     
    The parallel between the mournful words and the thing below made me feel sick.
    Jake said, “She’s as dead a dame as I’d care to see. Back’s broken, you can tell from the position. Who is it? Mrs. Haven?”
    I became conscious of Iris then. She sagged against me, and her voice rose, shrill, jagged, over the lamenting music.
    “She was lying there all the time. Sally was lying there and I didn’t know.”
    At first that remark, wrenched out of her, seemed completely without sense to me. Why should she say she hadn’t known Sally was lying there? Of course she hadn’t known Sally was lying there.
    Slowly Jake turned to her. His eyes were bright in the moonlight.
    “You didn’t know it, eh?”
    “I didn’t,” said Iris. “I didn’t. I didn’t.”
    The hysteria of that repetition was bad enough. But suddenly I felt as if Sally’s terrace was dissolving beneath my feet.
    Iris was my wife. I had loved her for five years. I knew every in and out of her mind, every inflection of her voice.
    And I knew then that her voice was false. She was lying. She had known Sally was there.
    All the time she had been with me, in the living room, she had known that Sally was lying there—dead.

Nine
    I led Iris to one of the porch chairs. I made her sit. I said, “Jake and I’ve got to go down to Sally.”
    I didn’t know if she was listening. She had folded her hands and was looking at a ring on her finger. It was a new ring. From Martin? In the darkness her face was white as the tuberoses scattered behind her. I was scared of what she might say or do. I leaned down and whispered like a conspirator, “Be careful. For God’s sake, be careful.”
    Jake had swung himself down through the gap in the balustrade. I hurried after him. Jake with his gun, his swaggering impudence, his possible connection with Sally, was an unknown quantity. He was bright, I knew. He was also potentially hostile. I couldn’t afford to have him discover whatever there might be to discover without my being there.
    When I formulated that thought, I didn’t let myself admit what it implied.
    The drop to the dry stream bed was almost sheer. I started clambering after Jake, clinging to jutting stones and crevices. He had reached the stream bed and was bending over Sally. I joined him. The edge of the broken segment of balustrade was lying over her legs. Jake pushed it aside. I noticed at once that one of the little feet was bare. On the other, a silver slipper gleamed.
    The moonlight was strong, blue like the moonlight in Swan Lake. The slight body seemed to have no substance. The metal hair poured over a rock. Her eyes were open. They stared up at nothing. Her lips were parted too. I could see the white teeth. There was no blood. But the position of the body told the story. A body couldn’t be hunched backward that way unless the spine was shattered.
    I took her thin, cold wrist with its sagging silver