“If he hurt those girls”—a light flashed on, blindingly bright—“no one will ever find your body.”

That was enough. Vernum ducked his head and sprinted . . . made it four quick strides before he hit a trip wire strung at thigh level. He was struggling to get up when a hand snapped his head back, then sought his jugular.

•   •   •

A WILLOW’S MIST floated a candle toward the Santero. She materialized from the earth beyond the chimney. Female, translucent as ice.

Vernum smiled in a dreamy way. The child-like ease with which she moved triggered the first carnal stirrings within him. Comparisons sparked through his brain. A ballerina on tiptoes, a flame carried on butterfly wings. A prima dancer not yet soiled by the inevitable—adolescence, confidence, contempt. A girl who possessed fire in her fingertips.

Vernum tried to focus, anticipating the child’s beauty. But it was the flame that hammered through his eyelids, a searing, thumping pain. The pain radiated, scalded his arms, his wrists, his head, until he lifted his head, finally conscious.

What happened?

His eyes did a slow inventory. He was strapped to a tree, his hands cuffed behind him. No . . . wired to a tree. He tried to speak, attempted to force his tongue through the stench of epoxy—his lips, once again, sealed with glue.

He gagged and coughed through his nose. His nose couldn’t pump air fast enough to stem the terror building inside.

Don’t leave me alone.

In his mind, Vernum called out to the gringo, or the Russian, anyone who might hear, but the sound that exited his nose resembled a howl. He inhaled to try again but caught himself.

Don’t frighten the child. Another howl might send her running. The child was his only hope—if she was real.

Vernum braced his head against the tree to steady his vision. And there she was, a willowy creature clothed in white—Santería white, a virgin initiate—tiny, fluid in her movements. Yes . . . and dancing, but with an invisible partner, a lantern in one hand, her partner’s hand in the other. They did a slow waltz: one, two, three . . . step . . . one, two, three . . . glide . . .

His eyes widened. Exquisite, the hope this girl aroused in him. But when she lifted the lantern higher, he saw her face, and the light went out of Vernum’s world. It wasn’t a girl and she wasn’t dancing. It was an old woman, shuffling toward him, using a cane.

One, two, three . . . the woman stabbed at the ground for support. One, two, three . . . stab . . . Then she dragged her back foot.

Over and over she repeated the process until she was close enough to crane her head and look up. In a voice tinted with lavender and decay, she said, “Who are you? You have no right to be here.” She looked him up and down. “Fool. Do you have any idea who I am?”

Vernum made a mewling sound of apology. The Castilian accent of Cuba’s noble class had gone extinct after the Revolution. Just from her voice, he would have known, even though he had never actually seen the woman. Few in the village had. Just a glimpse or two, a silhouette through the mansion windows. At night, sometimes, music from a phonograph. Duke Ellington, tunes too aged to recognize. Old vinyl records scratched from use that popped and snapped like meat sizzling or a broken clock.

The rumors about Imelda Casanova were known to all who could hear or whisper. Only the Dowager lived alone in a mansion while most Cubans lived jammed together in tenements. Only Señorita Casanova was permitted to have maids and a housekeeper, while, even in Havana, neurosurgeons and attorneys competed for bartending jobs to make a little extra money.

Señorita Casanova. On the streets, gossipers stressed that maidenly prefix in a biting way because she had never married, yet the woman had raised a retarded cane cutter and handyman who claimed to be her grandson.

The most dangerous rumors concerned a child—or was it two or three?—who had been aborted during her trips abroad. Others said she had given the newborns away before returning to Cuba. Or worse.

The most dangerous rumor of all was a truth no one doubted. This withered old woman peering up at him had been Fidel’s mistress. And she still lived under the protection of Fidel’s ghost.

Only a powerful woman could have saved that simpleton Figuerito from a death sentence. Vernum despised the Dowager for that. Despised her even before the incident in the cane field. For years, he had been searching for a way to topple the bitch from a station so lofty that even a Santero had reason to fear her.

Now here she was, but it was Vernum who was at her mercy.

The lantern was a tin box with glass, a candle in the middle. She raised it high as if curious about the stitches in his face, then placed it at her feet. Tiny leather shoes . . . legs of onionskin within a robe that suggested the body of a much younger woman.

I’m hallucinating, he thought. She’s an Egun, the spirit essence of a young girl that I . . .

Murdered.

Rather than complete the thought, he turned away and closed his eyes.

“You,” she said. “You’re the filthy Santero who had my maid’s bastard child arrested. I know you. I’ve seen you before. Had him arrested for murder, didn’t you? Yet, it was you who killed those irritating peasant girls.”

Vernum made a groaning sound of helplessness—a play for sympathy—but cut it short. The maid’s bastard? Was she talking about Figuerito? Yes, because then she said, “Thanks to you, they took him away to the insane asylum.”

Thanks to you? My god . . . it sounded as if she actually meant it. Was that possible? He opened his eyes. The woman’s face was a mosaic of shadows and candlelight, her hair a rope of woven silver. A cameo seen out of focus. Real but not real. Like some women shrunken by age, she had regressed to the dimensions of childhood. Slowly, phonetically, Vernum moaned through sealed lips, “I . . . am . . . sorry.” He blinked with remorse to hide the frail hope he felt.

She understood. “I bet you are.”

Her inflection told him nothing. “Very . . . very . . . sorry,” he repeated.

Beside the lantern was a bag. Much too nimbly for a woman her age, she knelt and spread a cloth on the ground, then began removing objects and arranging them as if preparing a picnic.

That frightened him. An Egun, as the essence of a child who had died too young, possessed the power to inhabit a youthful body, but only for short periods of time. Something else: she hadn’t mentioned the American killer who had vanished. Surely she had seen him from her hiding place.

The woman kept her head down as she worked. Paused only once to look at something lying at the base of the tree—his satellite phone. The American had left it behind for some reason. He couldn’t deal with what that meant, not while he was staked out like a sacrificial goat.

The old woman . . . He still hadn’t gotten a clear look at her face. Vernum waited, hoping the truth would be revealed by her eyes.

“Figuerito had the brain of a turtle,” she said finally. “At night, he fouled my father’s house with the smell of marijuana, and he would rather play baseball than eat. Not that I cared—there’s been no cook in my home for thirty years—but, come time to pay his rent, he had no money. The ungrateful son of a slut. A filthy slut who bedded baseball trash and . . . and others above her station. And what good is a man if he has no money?” Bitterness required her to look up for understanding . . . but Imelda Casanova did not look up.

Vernum felt a chill.

She reached into the bag and placed a thimble next to three tiny cups. “I loathed Figueroa. All through his whining childhood, then his pimple-faced teens, I loathed him. I would have put him in an asylum years ago, but for one thing”—her head tilted, but then she reconsidered—“Figueroa knew . . . something about me. So I tolerated the brainless bastard. But . . . I suppose even stupid boys have useful qualities. He did whatever I told him to do. Very obedient, that child. He protected me, my personal privacy, which is important to someone like myself. Tell me”—she dealt four small white shards onto the cloth as if dealing cards—“do you know what these are?”