Drowning Pool (Miss Henry Mysteries) by Melanie Jackson Page A

intrigued Juliet in equal measure. It was something of a relief when a lone bird hidden in the grass broke the silence with a short, drowsy song. At least they knew that they were not the only corporeal creatures at the poza.
    “This p lace would be eerie enough without the legends of the water ghosts,” Juliet said softly as the melancholy atmosphere wound its way through her brain and brushed against her heart.
    “But with them?” Raphael shook his head. “I am not superstitious but I feel an intruder here.”
    “That’s because we are. This is a place of apparitions.”
    “Yet you needed to come.” This was an invitation for her open up about what she was thinking.
    “I think so. Though not to call on the dead. My story last night was just window dressing. Von Hayek said something and I want to puzzle it for a while and see if it makes sense. If you don’t mind?”
    “Not at all. I think I will nap.”
    “I’ll tell you one thing, We are seeing this place in transition. Klaus and the Renaissance are on the way out and Henrik and modern art are taking charge. And Henrik doesn’t like Quatros Cienegas .”
    Juliet found a flat stone and they sat in silence while the sun shifted over. Juliet finally remembered to pull out her sketchbook and drew a few of the flowers in case anyone examined her book while she was away from her room at dinner. She had already removed the maps and hidden them in the secret compartment of her purse. To get a more complete view of the poza, she climbed to the top of a boulder and looked down at the darkening water. It spoke to her morbid state that she half expected to see some Mexican Ophelia—maybe her Cora—floating in the pond.
    The lilies were pale though instead of red, help up on stiff stems where they floated above the green pads, and in the light they looked almost metallic and gleamed in the sunlight which had netted the flowers in wisps of ephemeral gold that would soon be gone. They made Juliet think of a stained glass window in a cathedral. Here and there bits of tarnished gold darted among the living, emerald tiles that almost paved the pond in places, and she noticed a few tiny turtles enjoying the last of the sun around the edge of the pond.
    “What do they call those round church windows?” she asked Raphael , finally breaking her silence. “The ones with the mullions.”
    “The rose window? Or the old name is the Catherine window,” he suggested.
    “Yes, that’s it. That is almost what this is like.” Juliet chose not to think about how the saint the window was named after had died.
    She drew quickly , wanting to watch the last of the light to make the location of the dark hole in the lakebed. As the shade stole over the poza, first one and then another lily closed their parasol petals, shutting so quickly that they trapped any unwary critters inside. She watched in fascination as a small frog had to fight free of the delicate winding sheet. It plopped into the water and disappeared.
    “ I am beginning to feel haunted by these lilies and I don’t think I will actually paint them. It would be like inviting the Smoking Mirror into my life and I don’t want that door opened. I want to go home and leave the ghosts here.”
    “There are lilies at the castle?” Raphael asked.
    “ There are lily paintings all over the plaster walls out in the gardens—which are going to wrack and ruin. And there is one on the old well by the temple which van Hayek says connects to these lakes through underground aquifers. By the way, the pyramid temple is real and the locals objected to Klaus von Hayek building on it, but of course he did it anyway. But then, after taking the place over and landscaping it like something out of the Arabian Nights, he suddenly just stopped caring about things outside the castle and they have let the gardens rot. Maybe Klaus got ill and Henrik doesn’t care enough to expend the effort to keep up the gardens. Or maybe the locals remember the