Catalina stepped back, dizzy, sickened. She didn’t know who this person was, how they had ended up there, or who had chained them. But she knew she had discovered something meant never to be found. As she tried to process it, she heard something above—footsteps, heavy footsteps coming from the house.
Several people were coming down the tunnel. Catalina swatted out the torch and pressed herself against the wall, disappearing into the shadows. Footsteps were approaching, accompanied by voices, voices she recognized. One was Jacinto’s, the foreman’s; the other was deeper, more authoritarian. It was Don Erasmo Villarreal’s voice. They entered the chamber with rose-tinted lanterns that illuminated everything. Don Erasmo was an old man with a hunched back and sunken eyes, but he still commanded respect.
He wore a wide-brimmed hat and a dusty suit. Jacinto followed closely behind, rifle in hand. Don Erasmo stopped in front of the chained corpse and looked at it with a mixture of contempt and satisfaction. He said, almost to himself, that after so many years he still enjoyed seeing that wretch rotting there as he deserved. Jacinto asked if it wasn’t time to take the gold, now that the widow and her brats were snooping around.
Don Erasmo shook his head. He said not yet, that they needed to wait longer, for people to forget the old stories about the Medina treasure. He said that gold had cost many lives and he wasn’t going to risk someone coming to claim it. Now, Catalina listened to everything from her hiding place, her heart pounding so hard she was afraid they would hear her. She understood then what had happened. Don Erasmo had stolen that treasure, had killed for it, and had left someone—probably the original owner or a witness—chained down there to die slowly, making sure no one knew the truth.
