One Way to Succeed (Casas de Buen Dia Book 1) (16 page)

“He moved to L.A.”

“Oh, no! Are you going to lose her now? Here I thought you two had something more than work going on between you. I’ll have to tell you, I’m very disappointed.”

“So am I, Mom. So am I.”

As she walked down a narrow sidewalk from her hotel in the town square to Marlena’s house early Wednesday morning, Amy still wasn’t sure how she was going to introduce herself. Despite a round of roleplaying with Katie and a sleepless night, she hadn’t settled on anything that sounded right.

From the street, Marlena’s house was indistinguishable from its neighbors. An unbroken stucco wall ran along the sidewalk the entire length of the block, and the only thing that marked the beginning of one house from the end of another was a change in color. The flat façade gave no indication of the relative plainness, beauty, meagerness, or splendor of what lay beyond it. A simple carriage light hung next to the door of Marlena’s house, the street number—88 San Martin—painted below it.

The air was sticky with the possibility of rain, and just as she rang the bell at the plain wood door, the cloud above the city burst. With nothing but her small purse to protect herself, Amy was relieved when a thin arm that looked like it belonged to a young Mexican woman reached out the door and pulled her into a narrow entry way lined to the sky with vines and trees.

Without a word, Amy followed the woman into a covered hallway between the roofless entry and a huge roofless atrium. She swiped the water off her clothes and shook her hair as she looked around. The young woman looked at her expectantly, wiping her wet hands on her apron. Amy thought she was probably a maid.

“
Norte
americana
?” she asked Amy, pointing at her.

“
Sí. Está Sra
—” She started to ask if Senora Benavides was in, but she was quickly interrupted.

“
Un momento
,” the maid said. She ran through the atrium to what looked like a central foyer and disappeared around a corner.

Despite its pedestrian appearance from the outside, the house was grand and huge, Amy realized, peering into the atrium. Rain was collecting on big banana-tree sized leaves, and dripping off huge palms that stood in the atrium. They must have been growing in there for at least a century, Amy thought, marveling at the lush greenery.

In less than a minute, the maid returned, followed by an older woman who walked with a cane. Despite her Hispanic features and coloring, the older woman was dressed in what would pass for typical U.S. street fashion: jeans, a neat tee-shirt, and a tangle of a patterned scarf around her neck. She shuffled through the dripping atrium, as if she hadn’t noticed it was raining.

“Did you get caught in that downpour?” The old woman reached out and took Amy’s elbow. “You poor girl. Come into the kitchen and have some coffee. Or would you rather have tea?”

Amy had expected that she would have to drag out her rusty college Mexican vernacular to talk with Marlena, but it was instantly clear that older woman’s English was far better than her Spanish. Amy could barely discern an accent.

“Your English is impeccable!” she said, dodging the water cascading off the plants in the atrium.

“I lived in the U.S. most of my life,” the woman said over her shoulder as she led the way. “I was married to an engineer in California. When Andrea here told me you were North American, I couldn’t wait to meet you. Tell me you’re from California!”

“Yes I am,” Amy said as they reached a small kitchen with a huge gas stove and exhaust hood, an ancient refrigerator, a long free-standing stainless steel sink on wooden legs, and a tiny wooden table with two chairs.

“Well, what a red-letter day this is! Andrea, put on some hot water!” The old woman reached out her hand to shake Amy’s. “I’m Marlena Benavides de Pascal. And you are?”

“Amy Prentiss.” Amy considered adding more, like that she was from Palm Springs or that she was on a mission for her employer, but she was so pleased to have gotten inside the house so easily, she didn’t want to mess it up. “
Mucho gusto en conocerlo, Señora
.”

“Oh, no,” Marlena said. “First names only!  And English! I’m almost as American as you are.”

“Okay,” Amy said, smiling. “Then I’m pleased to meet you, Marlena.”

“Good! Now sit! Sit!” Marlena ordered. “And tell me why you are wandering around our streets in the rain.”

Amy wiped more rain drops off the back of her slacks and sat down across the table from Marlena. She folded her hands on the table in front of her and launched into an unpracticed explanation of her trip. She started with how she found the lot, why she liked it, what Rick had said about it, who Rick was and what she did for him, and finally, her interest in seeing if Marlena would be willing to sell it. She looked up at Andrea as she handed each of them a cup of coffee made with Nescafe.

“
Gracias
, Andrea,” Amy and Marlena said in unison. The maid nodded humbly and left the room.

“So that’s why I’m here,” Amy said, concluding her short monolog. “I want to see if you would consider selling your property to us, or perhaps partnering with us to build something special and beautiful.”

“Oh dear,” Marlena frowned, closing her dark eyes for a moment. “And here I had such high hopes we could be friends.”

“Why can’t we be?” Amy asked.

“Oh, because you are going to offer me an outrageous sum of money that will only embarrass us both, and I’ll turn it down, and you’ll have to leave,” Marlena said, looking down at her knobby hands with sad eyes.

“I don’t have the authority to do that,” Amy said. She realized how weak that sounded. If men with money in their pockets couldn’t talk Marlena into selling, how was she going to? She didn’t even have Rick’s permission to come to Mexico to talk with her. “I have no authorization to offer you anything. I’m just here to find out what your story is, and maybe see if there’s something I can do for you.”

“Well, I like you because you didn’t lie to me,” Marlena said. “You have no idea how many shysters have come here, worming their way into my home on some false pretense, and only after they’ve gone on and on about how wonderful my paintings are or my home, they try to bully me into selling.”

Amy blanched. “But why don’t you?” Amy said. “Do you have plans for the land? Heirs you want to pass it along to? It’s such a beautiful piece of property, it’s sad to have it sit with nothing but sand and dead mesquite trees and dying desert willows.”

“What are you talking about?” Marlena sounded surprised. “Is that what it looks like now?” Then Amy remembered that Frank said she hadn’t been back in town since 2011.

“Pretty much,” Amy answered sympathetically. “Did you think someone was taking care of it?”

“Well, yes. I pay this man, a second cousin once removed, every month to irrigate and trim trees and keep the place looking nice,” Marlena said. “You don’t have a picture of it, do you?”

“I think I do.” Amy pulled her cellphone out of her purse and turned it on. She had left it off all the while she was in Mexico, as she didn’t have an international plan with the phone company. But she didn’t need phone service to look at her photo gallery. “While I’m looking for it, maybe you can share with me why you haven’t sold it.”

Marlena looked away, her eyes landing on the top fronds of the huge palm trees in the open atrium. “It’s a long story,” she started.

“I have a long time. I came a long ways to see you, and I’m not rushing back in an hour.”

“Well, then already you’re different from those other developers. They are always in such a hurry, even as they’re playing their little games of hide and seek. Of course, they’re all men, so maybe they’re made that way.”

Amy laughed. “Yes, it seems like impatience is delivered on the Y chromosome, doesn’t it?”

“So let me tell you how I ended up with that lovely piece of Palm Springs,” Marlena said. Her story was longer than Amy’s, but Amy found herself mesmerized by Marlena’s delivery. The sounds of the rain falling through the trees in the atrium seemed to match the rhythm of her speech, punctuated as it was by Spanish words and Mexican surnames every now and then.

Marlena and her husband, Ernesto, moved to California in 1958, she said. He was an engineer working on the design of the Oroville Dam project east of Sacramento, and Marlena stayed with an old schoolmate in Palm Springs. Ernesto came down to the desert valley to spend every weekend with her.

“Oh, those were the days!” Marlena said with a glint in her eye. “The celebrities were everywhere, and so approachable. It was nothing like they are today, hiding behind those big fences in those country clubs in La Quinta. Back then, we’d see them out at dinner at night, driving around in their convertibles, flirting with all the local girls.”

“Like you?” Amy asked with a wink.

“Oh, most definitely!” Marlena reciprocated her wink. “You wouldn’t know it now, but I was quite the looker. Even though I was married. They didn’t know that, though.”

The property Amy was talking about had been one of several the couple bought over the years. They sold most of them back in the early 1980s when her husband became ill and they came back to Mexico. The only land they kept was the property Amy had seen.

“This house here was in my husband’s family,” she said, looking up and waving her arms at the huge interior. “When Ernesto got cancer, he gave up on building a home in Palm Springs. I wish we had stayed up there, though. I think he would have had much better medical care, but you couldn’t convince him. I think his decision had nothing to do with that. He just liked the comfort of being back home.”

“When did he die?” Amy asked gingerly.

“In 1988. You see, he was ten years older than me, so I figured I’d outlive him by ten years or so. But here it’s been, what, twenty-seven?”

“But you’ve been back to California quite a bit since then, I hear.”

“Yes, I started going back to Palm Springs about two years after he died. So many of my good friends were there, and they had all been so much more active than Ernesto’s friends and family down here. I didn’t want to get old any sooner than I had to. But this was our home in the end, and I’ve now stopped travelling much. I may go back once or twice more, but it’s so much harder than it used to be.”

“Yes,” Amy said, “on everyone.”

“Damn terrorists,” Marlena said, surprising Amy. Most people she talked to about the miseries of modern-day travel blamed it on the TSA without recognizing where all those miserable rules originated.

“Right.” Amy agreed. “So you aren’t going to build on that property now?”

“No,” Marlena said. “I don’t have the energy for it.”

“What would you like to do with it, then?” Amy asked softly.

“Yes, you asked me that before,” Marlena said. “I don’t know. The problem is I want it to be something special, something tasteful, something that Ernesto would be proud of. He was an engineer, but despite that, he had quite an artistic eye. As you can see, he and his family had exquisite taste.”

Amy looked out the kitchen door at the terrazzo floors in the main foyer and beyond into a wood-floored living room with dozens of museum-worthy paintings.

“Yes, I can tell,” Amy said. “So what were some of things Ernesto would have liked to do with his home?”

“Terrazzo floors,” Marlena started, following Amy’s gaze. “Stucco exterior. Nothing else makes sense in Palm Springs. Except maybe concrete block, but let’s focus on good ideas. Nice talavera tile, warm colors, warm leather furnishings, some beautiful Aztec and Mayan touches.”

“All of that is possible.”

“But I don’t want the property eaten up by a huge mansion built by some billionaire with homes on six continents,” she said. “I want someone to live in it, enjoy it.”

“Is that what the other developers wanted to build?”

“Oh, no. They were talking big hotels, like forty rooms or something. I didn’t want that either.”

“Well, I’m afraid if someone buys it for a home, they will be rich and they’ll want a big mansion,” Amy suggested. “What would work for you, other than a small house?”

Marlena looked up and smiled. “I think that you just might have an idea,” she said. “And I think you’re going to share it with me, right?”

“How about a small hotel?”

“How small?”

“That depends on how much the land costs. But if it’s not too much, maybe fifteen rooms?”

“Tell me more,” Marlena said.

Amy quickly laid out a plan, thinking back to the projects that Rick had already done, as well as some of the nicer boutique hotels she had seen in Palm Springs. Off the top of her head, she described desert landscaping, a shady courtyard, a small relaxation pool, benches set up to encourage conversation.

“I like it,” Marlena said when she finished. “I would love to help. But I’m afraid I can’t sell the land cheap enough for that to work. No way would you ever get your money back.”

“True,” Amy said. Suddenly she realized all her words had been a waste of time. Realistically, the project could never pencil out. Whoever built on that property would either have to be a one-percenter building a dream mansion or a large hotel chain that would have to tear down all of the trees and cover the lot corner to corner with asphalt and building.

Amy’s realization must have shown on her face. Marlena reached across the table and patted her on the hand. “Let me think about this, Amy,” she said. “Maybe there’s a solution we haven’t thought of yet.”