The Stirlings and the Missing Statue

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Gimme Back My Shiny Stuff!

There were more notices about the missing children plastered at the mouth of the cave where the girl said they'd be going. Cerro Gordo, Mr. Steach came to find out, not only had so many small rock formations on its face that it had been impossible for him to guess where they were headed after each bend in the trail. It also proved further treacherous for his choice of expensive footwear, since the leather had been shredded on the sides and the soles ripped at both heels.
"Desaparecida," Mr. Steach read with his Catalonian accent. He thought about calling the girl that.
Mustn't get too familiar.
She'll be fully desaparcida in a few short
minutes.
The girl ran ahead, into the cave. The angle of the sun, now fully risen and shining brightly through a clear sky, allowed Mr. Steach to see far inside the entrance, but there was no hope that he'd go much further than where the light touched.
"Here," the girl said, waving him over with her knife-wielding hand to the place just beyond the light.
"You found him?" Mr. Steach excitedly pushed off of one foot and it slipped in the loose gravel. He nearly face planted for the second time in as many hours.
She came back into the light shaking her head incredulously. "This is where I found the painting. Where Declan dropped it."
"The painting again," Mr. Steach sighed. "Statue, girl. I'm here for the statue."
This time, the girl laughed.
What's she playing at, then?
Have I said something funny?
"If you'd had the painting, you'd understand what to do. What I thought I had to do," she explained, although not helpfully.
"What you had to do?" Mr. Steach was growing more and more impatient with the girl's cryptic responses. The fact that he was also surrounded by numerous rocks that were skull-crushing size was beginning to fill his scheming mind.
"Declan had the painting. We all read the words, but he was too stupid to translate them. Four years we spent in classes together. Two in middle school and the rest in high school. I'd be heading into my senior year by now. A whole year of school. Oh, I counted. I knew the number of days. The months. The seasons changed. I wanted to go back. I wanted to find them. They stayed. For a whole month. Dad for three. Mom and Dad came back for another month after that. They probably forgot me by—"
Steach slapped her hard across the face. There was no time for the ramblings of a half-crazy teenage girl. And Steach never had any time for sympathy.
"What. Did. You. HAVE. To. Do?" He shouted each word as its own boom and the darkness ate the echo.
Dazed and rubbing the red mark Steach had left on her cheek, the girl at first didn't respond. Steach hadn't thought about the knife as he struck her but it remained at her side. A small tear welled and then rolled down her soon-to-be bruised face and then another, then another, and then still more.
"Sickening whelp," Steach mumbled, not feeling sorry for having hit the girl, but for the fact that it had only served to delay further whatever she had tried to tell him. "You tell me now, what you had to do, or I crack your skull open for the coyotes."
He'd not used that tone with the girl before, the gravel to it becoming heavier with the threat behind it. Instead of fear he saw a fury not unlike his own build in the girl's weathered features.
"Aurelio stole something from the statue," she said. Her teeth were set on the edges.
"The jewels. The gold. What?"
"The jewels," she confirmed. "But he learned that they were much more than just jewels to San Luis."
"Blah, blah. The jewels corrupted the sacred statue meant to be ordinary, blah blah."
"We took the jewels from the cave. We took gold from the cave too, and some other relics," the girl went on.
"And you were cursed by the thieves whose treasure you pilfered," Mr. Steach added. "I've read it all before and I don't believe a single word."
A long, low howl came from down the tunnel and echoed off the walls. He couldn't believe it, but a shudder trickled down his spine and tensed his shoulders.
The girl laughed again. "You would believe. If you'd been there. If you'd seen it too."
"Seen what, girl?" Mr. Steach had feigned an interest in his shoe, broken and battered as it was, and bent down to inspect it beneath an outcropping in the wall. He placed his hand on a palm-sized rock and prepared himself to end his grievances with the annoying and cryptic girl.
"The combination was on the back of the painting. For the safe," the girl said quickly.
She saw what you were planning, Gideon.
"Oh? And I suppose the location, too?"
"I don't remember getting to Aurelio's...whatever that place was."
"His vault."
The girl bent down and used the knife to dig a tiny hole in the ground near her feet and then stuck the tip of the blade into the hole. She stood up, a curious smile on her bruised face, and pushed one of her filthy hands into the largest pocket in her cargo pants near her right knee. From the pocket she retrieved a small stone that was even dirtier than her hands or clothes. She wiped the surface against her pant leg and the smallest bit of glinting crystal shone through the muck and seemed to wink at him.
"Aurelio took the statue and secured it in the safe because of the madness it brought upon the townsfolk," the girl said as she held the jewel up next to her eye.
She wasn't offering it to him, but Steach knew he could take it off her with little effort.
"Did you know that as many as fifteen people tried to take the statue from its place of honor and all fifteen disappeared instead? No trace. Poof. The statue returned, all gilded and draped in these," the girl flicked the jewel between her grotesque fingers as she spoke.
"So it didn't just walk away, then?" Mr. Steach said with a smirk.
"No, probably not. But it got back on its own."
The rock in Steach's hand was becoming sweaty and the rough edges made painful imprints on his palm and scratched at his manicured nails.
"But Aurelio trapped him," the girl continued. "He may have said that he was keeping his fortune from his wife, but it was all to trap the statue and encase him forever in that vault."
"Why not bury it. Melt it down. Encase it, as you say, in concrete?"
The girl closed her palm around the jewel and looked over to Steach with a calculating, analytic eye. There were still wet tears on her face and they'd made tracks in the dirt that covered nearly every inch of her.
"Aurelio was like you, I think," she explained. "You wanted the painting and the statue just to have it. Just to brag about it. To say you'd been the one to steal it and keep it."
"I don't need validation. And I don't think I had much in common with an artist. Especially not with one buried in an abandoned church, forgotten by everyone.
"So you want to be remembered, too? That's what Aurelio wanted. He wrote all about the statue on the back of the painting. How people had succumbed to the curse and fallen to greed. How the statue was corrupted. How it corrupted the people around it."
Is she buying time for something?
I don't know.
I think I'm with you on this one. Bash her
brains in.
Mr. Steach moved to strike but the girl fell away and brought up the knife between them. Steach changed his blow mid-swing and busted the rock against the girl's knuckles. She screamed and dropped the knife and the jewel spun out of her other hand. It fell and clattered off the collection of rocks.
"Aurelio also wrote," the girl continued between gasps of agony, "should the statue be released it could be summoned."
Steach held ready another blow with the rock at the level of his ear. "Summoned."
"Summoned. With his own stolen property," she said between heavy breaths.
He might have broken her hand or at least a knuckle or two. He didn't care, just as long as it didn't cause him yet another delay.
"And that's what you had to do?"
She nodded. "My brother was missing. I thought, maybe, someone had let him out. The statue. And he took him. Declan."
"But no one had let him...IT out," Steach said. He shook his head in aggravation. "Not that it matters. Whether he was kept or not...he..."
The girl ignored the chaotic way Mr. Steach was fighting against believing any part of the supernatural. "I left my family that night...well, I don't really know why I didn't just tell one of my brothers."
"You have more idiot brothers?"
"Yes," she said without argument. "But then, I didn't really..."
"Turn out that smart?" The rock in Steach's hand slipped from his sweaty grip but he caught it.
The girl flinched and tried to pick up the knife. Steach swung a foot on top of the blade and nearly stomped the girl's only uninjured hand.
"You want the stupid statue or what?" Her voice cracked. "I just want to go home."
Mr. Steach squinted at her and he felt his upper lip spasm into something between a snarl and a smile. The idea of getting the statue at last pleased him, but that of letting the girl go home made him—
Uncomfortable?
Wary. She could describe him to the police.
She has to go.
The girl moved quickly with youthful grace. She snatched up the jewel where it had fallen and then scrambled back to the hole she'd dug.
"¡San Luis!" she cried out as she slammed the jewel into the hole and scratched the loose rubble and dirt over the top.
Mr. Steach watched with amusement and when the girl appeared to be done, he launched into a full fit of laughter. "And just what will that do?"
The girl had closed her eyes and kept her broken hand close to her chest while the other was cupped over the hole with the jewel. She opened her eyes in time to see Mr. Steach's second blow with the rock come down just across her temple. She crumpled and lay still. Mr. Steach didn't bother to check for breathing.
"What a waste," he spat as he pulled himself up and attempted to dust the smears of dirt he'd collected on his trousers. The girl's blood had splattered the underside of his shirt sleeve and as he raised his arm to inspect it, he caught another whiff of his own putrid odor. "What a waste."
Inventory time: no painting, no statue.
Ruined clothes, ruined shoes. A worthless
key left back in the vault. No car. No way
home.
There is the jewel. It could be worth some.
Oh, oh, oh. I forgot about the jewel that's
probably paste anyway. Good point,
Gideon.
What have I told you about even thinking about
my old life? No names, no same places. It's
Steach. Just Steach.
Get the jewel, would you, oh master thief,
oh super-criminal...
I think I might be a supervillain after this. There
is another body, after all.
You don't deserve it. Do something super.
Get away with this. Then we'll talk.
Mr. Steach used his toe to roll the body of the girl away from the hole and watched, critical of his own work, as her head flopped lifelessly to the side, exposing the bloody wound and the bruised cheek below it. With the fleeting thought that the kill could have been cleaner, he scraped away the dirt and felt around for the jewel. His very highest hope was that underneath all the grime, a truly unique stone was waiting for him. The hole she'd dug was perhaps, at most, two inches deep but after he'd scraped and scooped out all the dirt for approximately four inches more, his hands were still empty. The jewel was gone.
As the sun rose higher, the shadow that consumed the inside of the cave grew. It began to creep over the girl's legs where they lay at odd angles. Mr. Steach searched the girl's clothes, pulled open her clenched fist, rolled her over completely so she was sprawled a few feet from the hole and on her back. Still, no jewel. Stumped, Mr. Steach again began an internal argument regarding the possibility that the jewel had somehow been reclaimed by the statue. As the shadow grew to cover even him, an anxious lump began to build in his chest.
I don't believe it. I'm not an idiot.
Yes you are. You're the biggest idiot. Dumber
than that dead girl. So much dumber than
her idiot brother.
Idiots believe in myths. Miracles. Spooky things.
Ghosts.
Do idiots believe that there's a gilded statue
standing right over there?
Over where?
Over there, Gideon.
Stop using that—
San Luis didn't care about Mr. Steach's true name. Or that the man who claimed to be a thief unmatched in skill and rarity of finds was standing there, filthy as a dog, bloodied by his own and that of others, and arguing with himself about whether or not the little statue was indeed standing right next to him where the girl had fallen.
In later years, Mr. Steach, when retelling his story into the voice recorder he would use to write his memoir, he left out the terrified scream that left his lips when he laid eyes on the statue. As the recording went, he simply saw the statue and chided himself with a surprised laugh, saying, "Oh there you are, San Luis." But in truth, Mr. Steach, when recovered, walked out of that cave with stained trousers and carrying the little statue that had caused him so much grief. He left his unmentionable attire in the rocks after finding his way down the hill and back to some semblance of a civilization and a pair of coveralls left on the floorboards of an agave farm-truck. The howls of Cerro Gordo, however, never left him.