Petra's Ghost Read online

  “It was,” he says, proud of her for knowing. “He murdered his sister for going to Santiago instead of getting married. Then felt such the maggot, he became a devout hermit and died destitute in a cave.” He had learned all this from the Spanish guys, who spoke good English when they weren’t laughing at him. “Every year they take his skull out and parade it down the street on a stick for the annual passion play.”

  “Let that be a warning to you, Danny boy.”

  They both laugh. God, he loves his sister. She’s the only person who can call him Danny boy without getting a pop in the jaw. Daniel is fairly close to his two older brothers, both now living in England, but it’s just not the same as with Angela.

  Still smiling, he looks over at another table and sees a woman from last night’s albergue putting her hair in a ponytail. It reminds him.

  “I walked with someone yesterday,” he confesses. At least, it feels like a confession.

  “Really?” Angela says, drawing the two syllables out with interest. “Did the someone have a name by any chance?”

  “Virginia,” Daniel says. “Ginny.” He’s not sure why he’s telling Angela about her. “She’s from California.”

  “Where is she now, then?”

  Daniel thinks about the figure he thought he saw come out of the trees, his frantic run up the hill believing he’d heard Ginny scream.

  “She ditched me,” he says.

  “Well, then she cannot be a woman of any appreciable taste,” Angela pronounces. “Or perhaps you told her that bit about the skull on the stick. Not all women like a good tale of saint decapitation. You could scare a girl away with that sort of shite.”

  Daniel should laugh, but he goes quiet instead. He doesn’t like this talk of scaring Ginny away. It sounds too much like he was trying to attract her in the first place. He’s not ready for that.

  “Are you sure you’re all right, Daniel?” Angela asks him.

  “I am,” he says. He’s not about to tell his sister about what happened at the Templar church, or how he mistook Ginny for Petra on the Alto del Perdón. She’d be calling the Spanish guardia to have him committed.

  “Have you been taking the pills the doctor gave you, for your nerves?”

  Daniel flinches at the question. He doesn’t like to think of himself as a man with nerves. Plus, he has the eerie feeling she was able to see into his thoughts just now.

  “I have,” he says, quickly recovering. “Every day with my coffee.” He raises up his coffee cup so she can see it on the Skype feed. “I reckon it balances out with the stimulant effect of the caffeine.”

  Daniel had been having a tough time just before he left for the Camino. Nightmares like the one he had last night. Awakening to screams like he thought he heard yesterday. He’d search the house for Petra, convinced it was her calling for him. After he checked every room, he’d collapse on their bed, remembering that all that was left of her was settled in the bottom of the ostentatious urn on the top shelf of his closet. He hated the look of that urn. Once he had even taken the ugly little ceramic down from its hiding place and thrown it against the wall. He’d been drinking. It hadn’t broken, but the incident frightened him enough to go see a doctor. Thus, the pills his sister was on about. Daniel doesn’t like pills. A friend had given him some Ambien when he suffered from insomnia during Petra’s first hospital stay. At two in the morning, he awoke to find himself in his elderly neighbour’s backyard wearing nothing but a barbecue apron. Ever since, the old girl had been regularly baking him muffins and leaving them on the front stoop.

  “Have you spread Petra’s ashes yet?” Angela asks, getting to the point. Damn it, this is a subject he wants to avoid even more than Mrs. Boddis’s muffins.

  “I think we have a bad connection,” he shouts at the phone, as you do when you can’t hear the other person properly. Angela’s eyes narrow on the video display. She knows when she’s being played. He grabs the sugar dispenser off the table and starts pouring the white granules out above the screen like snow. “Sure, you’re breaking up, Angela. I think I’m going to have to sign off.”

  “Just spread the feckin’ ashes, Daniel. It’s been long enough.”

  “Talk to you soon.” He smiles back broadly, ignoring her, then presses the disconnect icon.

  They may be close, but Angela doesn’t understand about Petra. He needs just the right moment to let go of her. For Christ’s sake, he’d written that woman a poem every day they were apart during their long-distance courtship. He’d found them after she was gone, tied up with a red ribbon in a shoebox under the bed. You just don’t spread the ashes of a woman like that lightly. Even if it has been long enough and your dad is waiting for you to come take over the farm of your ancestors. There is a time for everything, and Daniel will not be pushed.

  He picks up the phone from where it was propped on the table and slips it into the side pocket of his backpack. Right next to the pill bottle with the prescription he had dutifully filled before he left home but has never touched.

  It is only the second time in his life he has ever lied to his sister. He finishes the last gulp of coffee and gets ready to walk.

  The first time, of course, was the day Petra died.

  Daniel bumps into the Dutchman just outside of Puente la Reina, a fairly built-up town with a cathedral and lots of bars and restaurants. All of them were closed when he had walked through, unfortunately. Too early in the day, particularly for Spain. The urban centre has now given way to vineyards and olive trees, all barren and asleep until next spring.

  “Hellooo, Daniel,” Rob calls to him from where he has stopped ahead on the path to take a picture of a grotto. People have left stones and pieces of paper, along with ribbons and medallions. All this spiritual flotsam surrounds a ceramic blue-and-white figurine of the Virgin Mary, giving the unfortunate appearance that the saint stands atop a garbage dump.

  Daniel waves. The Dutchman waits for him and they fall in walking together.

  “Did you enjoy your albergue in Obanos, Daniel?” Rob asks him.

  “I did,” Daniel says, then corrects himself. “Not really, no.” He notices dark circles under the Dutchman’s eyes. “How was your night?”

  “I stayed in Puente la Reina in a large albergue with many sleeping places,” Rob tells him. “I am very tired this morning.”

  By “sleeping places,” Rob means beds. Pilgrims often judge the albergues laid out in the guidebook by the number of beds and try to stay away from those with larger volumes. Daniel had stayed in one albergue where ninety people were housed in one room. The combined snoring alone was enough to break a man’s eardrum.

  “That’s a shame,” Daniel says. And then, “I wasn’t after sleeping very well either.”

  “Too many dreams of the pretty Ginny from California?” Rob asks him with a knowing look.

  “No,” Daniel protests. “I mean, it’s not like that.” Geez, will people just lay off him with the romantic innuendo.

  Rob holds up his open palms toward him in the universal gesture of no harm–no foul. “Don’t worry, Daniel. I understand. I have a woman friend on the Camino like this, too. A Canadian.”

  “Where is she?” Daniel asks.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Nearby, I am sure. We walk together sometimes and sometimes alone. It is a relaxing relationship, but we are very close.”

  “Did you know her before you came on the Camino?”

  “No,” Rob laughs. “You are like my wife with this question.”

  Daniel is not surprised that Rob’s wife would ask such a question. He doesn’t think Petra would have much appreciated it if he had gone around getting close to other women while away for over a month in another country.

  “But it is like sister-love, I explain to her.” Rob turns and looks at Daniel to see if he gets his meaning. “The Camino, it is like what you Americans have, what is it called, summer camp?”

  Daniel didn’t grow up with the American experience of summer camp, but he knows w
hat the Dutchman means.

  “You get attached to people fairly quickly,” Daniel says.

  “Yes,” Rob replies, pleased to be understood. As they crest the top of the gradual incline they’ve been walking, he cries out like a man on a ship sighting land, “And there she is!”

  Daniel looks out across a flat bowl of a valley. He can make out the small village of Cirauqui perched on the other side of it on the next hilltop. From this vantage point, he can see the groove carved by the winding narrow road as it makes its way into the village and then back out into the countryside going west. At the base of the elevation, a tall woman with a red-and-black backpack sits on a bench at the side of the trail sipping from a water bottle. She waves, and they both wave back. The Dutchman is grinning with such intensity that Daniel thinks it must hurt his face.

  “Only sister-love, so?” Daniel asks, raising both eyebrows.

  “Yes, well. I love my wife,” Rob tells him. “But sometimes she asks too many questions.”

  Daniel leaves Rob behind with his Canadian sister-friend at a café in Cirauqui. The relationship appeared to be no more than platonic affection, despite the Dutchman’s bravado. He hadn’t struck Daniel as the philandering type anyway, whatever that type was. Daniel always got the term mixed up with philanthropy, as if benevolence held ties with infidelity, both giving till it hurt.

  The woman seemed pleasant enough, though, even if she hadn’t said a word to him as they walked up the hill to the village. To be fair, the steep inclines could make conversation tough. It was hard enough to regulate your breathing as you hiked up to some of these medieval hillside towns without adding talking to the mix. The villages had been built that way so the inhabitants could see an enemy coming from a long way off. Daniel wonders if the real trick was that half of their enemies dropped dead of a coronary before they reached the top. When they were climbing the last bit, Daniel had made a nervous sideways glance at Rob, remembering what he’d said about his heart. But the Dutchman didn’t even seem to breathe hard with the effort.

  After leaving the couple, Daniel passes through an arch off the main square and exits the village onto a single-span Roman bridge, curved and solid. The engineer in him admires these classically built-to-last structures. The poet in him appreciates the irony that they long outlasted the Empire for which they were built.

  Daniel has been walking for a while on his own when he sees another example ahead, this one spanning two arches over a limited river. Some low-lying brush sits on either side, including those bushes with the dried-up yellow flowers that, even this late in the year, overwhelm him with their sweet fragrance. He saw flowers like these before coming to Spain, in France in early spring, his honeymoon spent with Petra. The scent was so intense through the window of the broken-down pension where they stayed, that his new wife had thought her floral body wash had exploded in their suitcase.

  It had been so easy then. Lying under the sparse bedspread, exploring each other over long days and endless bottles of French wine that somehow never made them drunk. Instead it fortified them just enough to get up out of their rumpled bed by evening to go out in search of dinner. “Look,” she had said, on the way to the restaurant, pointing out the yellow arrows that would lead a person all the way to Spain and Santiago. They had made love so often his hips twinged when he walked.

  “I know I took off and everything, but that doesn’t mean you have to hunt me down like you’re some kind of bloodhound.”

  Ginny is sitting on the grass at the riverside, twisting a small branch with yellow flowers in her hand. It takes Daniel a moment to process her presence as well as her comment. He had been standing there with his eyes closed, sniffing the scent of the fading flowers like a dog. He decides he could make a living out of looking like an ass in front of women.

  “The flowers,” he says in weak explanation.

  Ginny nods, glances down at the ones she holds in her hand.

  “Listen, I’m sorry about the way I left things.” She stands up and walks over to him, dropping the branch on the ground. “But that old woman and that place. It just freaked me out.”

  “Sure, I understand,” Daniel agrees, remembering the flies and the gnarled finger punctuating foreign Spanish words in the air. “The old girl at the desk.”

  “Now there was a weird one,” Ginny says, turning away to squint into the sunlight.

  “What harm, but she told me we were being followed,” Daniel tells her. “Then she made the sign of the horns.”

  “Are you serious? Did she consult her Ouija board or her magic eight ball for that information?” Ginny asks. And then that smile again, and he can’t help but return it.

  Is it sister-love, like the Dutchman said? Maybe. He finds himself no longer wanting to talk about yesterday. They walk over and stand on the middle of the Roman bridge together. The shallow water moves lethargically beneath them.

  “Do you know what this river is called?” he asks her, bursting at the seams.

  “Rio Salado,” she says, not missing a beat.

  “That’s right,” Daniel says, turning to her surprised and more than a little disappointed. “How did you know?”

  “It means Salt River. It’s toxic,” she says, wrinkling her freckled nose a tiny bit.

  “Sure, but do you know what they were after doing here?” he says, trying to out-fence her with facts. Then feeling a tad self-conscious, adds, “Sorry, I’m what you might call a trivia junkie.”

  “That’s all right. I want to know. Tell me.”

  “Okay,” Daniel says, encouraged. He extends his arm out toward where she was just sitting. “In the Middle Ages, the Basques would wait for pilgrims to come and water their horses here. After they died, they would skin them for the meat.”

  “The pilgrims or the horses?” Ginny quips.

  “Funny girl.”

  They stand on the old stone bridge and watch over the side together.

  “You already knew the story, now didn’t you?”

  “Yeah.” She giggles. It’s a sound that has always delighted him in women.

  Ginny raises her eyes from the slow-moving water, starts scanning the other side of the riverbank. She turns when she sees he has noticed.

  “Just making sure I didn’t forget anything,” she explains. “I hate when that happens.”

  “Aye,” Daniel agrees, remembering how he got lost in Pamplona and had to retrace his steps. When you’re walking twelve miles a day, you don’t want to add even a dozen yards due to stupidity. “Nobody wants to go back on the Way,” he says.

  Ginny looks down at the water and nods slowly in agreement. The sluggish current gurgling over the rocks is the only audible reply. He has hit a nerve, it appears. Daniel stands and waits for the pensive moment to pass. When it does, they cross together to the other side of the bridge and start back on the trail without comment.

  “So, are you a history teacher, or just well-read?” he asks after a few minutes, trying to draw her out. He is also curious. Not many people know about things like the Salt River.

  “I’m a librarian,” Ginny tells him.

  “You’re having me on.”

  “What, you expected the bun, the glasses, a pair of sensible shoes?”

  It is a very warm day for the fall, and Ginny has rolled up the sleeves of her fleece and zipped off the bottoms of her pant legs, converting them to shorts. He can see the sleek defined muscles of her calves, the tautness of her forearms. She holds her body with a sinewy strength, not unlike the horse his sister kept during her Black Beauty phase. Not the type of body he’d expect to see behind a returns desk.

  “You’d have to be fairly thick to come on the Camino without sensible shoes,” Daniel tells her. He’s trying to be funny, but has ended up sounding like a maiden aunt. He moves on to something else, hoping she didn’t notice. “Sure, but your knowledge seems a bit skewed toward medieval barbarism. Massacred knights, skinned horses, and the like. Why is that?”

  “Well, it mig
ht have to do with the library I work in,” she says as she reaches her hands behind her back and lifts and lowers her pack from the bottom in an effort to redistribute the weight.

  “Really now,” Daniel says. “Where is it that you work?”

  “San Quentin.”

  “The prison?” Daniel almost chokes on the beef jerky he was snacking on.

  “Well, it’s not the all-inclusive resort.” She pauses. “Although, maybe it is. But I’d give it a really bad review on TripAdvisor.”

  “No doubt. What’s it like working there?”

  “I have to wear a pendant with a panic button around my neck, but other than that pretty much the same as other libraries,” she says, taking her aluminum hiking poles from the little loop on her backpack and extending them to be used for the upcoming incline. “The thing is, we get quite a few requests for books about murder and mayhem, if you know what I mean. We don’t like to give them the more modern stuff. Too stimulating. So we bring in a lot on the Spanish Inquisition and other medieval history. Sometimes I get bored and read them.”

  “I’ll keep an eye on my horse.”

  They walk for a while without speaking, their paces well-matched, but soon the conversation between them begins to flow with the current of the trail. They move up the inclines ending in hilltop villages and down again into the surrounding countryside, remarking from time to time on architecture or the natural beauty surrounding them. Each tries to one-up the other with albergue horror stories of snoring and stinky feet. They compare notes on what they packed for the trip, how much weight they carry, and the status of blisters: Daniel still without any; Ginny admitting to a minute one between pinky toe and the one beside it. He tells her a bit about growing up in rural Ireland, how he left the farm to get his engineering degree at Trinity College in Dublin. She owns up to a suburban childhood in Orange County, where her parents were neither divorced nor former hippies, making her the odd girl out among her peers.