Issy Castillo Series Prologue
Here’s the original prologue to the Issy Castillo Murder Mystery Series. Couldn’t come at a better time because I just got the Advanced Raeders Copies for Book 2, which means it will be released in July. Please email me and tell me what you think.
SCENT OF MURDER
Prologue
By Carolina Dow
Que el Universo te cobije en su manto de estrelas
E te abrigue alma con su eterno amor.
May the Universe shelter you with its starry cloak
And warm your soul with its eternal love.”
Angelica Olivera
Wrapped tight as a mummy in a threadbare orange blanket, Doña Isabella’s body hunched stiffly over the long-extinguished ashes of her kiva. The icy wind from the sudden spring storm that had dumped heavy snow on the Pueblo of the Red Willow People to the depth of a third of a full-grown pine tree moaned outside the window. Little fingers of frost crept down the walls from cracks in the closed ladder opening in the roof. Except for the wailing wind, all lay still, both inside and out. Not a crow, jay, or magpie, let alone a human being, was foolish enough to venture forth in this blizzard. Mountain Lion waited out the storm with her pride. Black Bear, snug in his cave home, had not yet awakened from winter’s slumber.
The bleak afternoon changed to night and plunged the adobe into darkness. Neither the blanket nor the gray ashes warmed the old woman’s body, which looked purplish-brown and wrinkled like a dried-up plum. But Doña Isabella, famed healer of her Pueblo and beyond, didn’t mind because the revered herbalist was dead. Dead as the flies that had hatched around the remains of her last meal, only to be frozen by the sudden drop in temperature.
Doña Isabella hovered near the ceiling and observed the scene with an air of detachment. She no longer felt involved with the withered, contorted shell. Nor was she engrossed with the familiar dwelling and its hard-packed dirt floor that smelled of Mother Earth. Even the Pueblo and its brown-faced people had ceased to engage her. The fabric of emotional attachments had separated from her essence along with her life like fluff from a cottonwood. Without a body, she no longer felt pain, only lightness and buoyancy. If she had a mouth she would have giggled like when as a child, her mother tickled her.
Still, an uncomfortable thought persisted somewhere in the depths of her being. She remained suspended over the scene instead of moving on, as she knew she should.
Life in the Pueblo had been good, where she had lived as a child of the earth. She knew every plant, animal and particle of soil, from the red clay of the riverbanks to the smoky candle-gray rocks of the canyon walls and the yellow dirt of the cornfields. Her mother, also an herbalist, had taught her daughter the basic properties of botanicals—what could cure and what could harm. Always inquisitive, Isabella experimented, and soon became adept at healing her people of their physical and emotional ills. Over time, she also contemplated the larger questions of life, death, and the role humanity plays in the world.
Isabella had lived most of her life as a hermit except for her animals and clientele. Yet she had also known love—the love of her parents who died too soon, and the brief but passionate love of a man—a stranger and a Spaniard, who had passed through the region searching for gold. From their union was born her daughter, whom she adored beyond all else, and to whom she expected to pass her accumulated herbal wisdom.
The atmosphere around her trembled imperceptibly. She found herself outside her home, above the red-tiled roofs, eye-to-eye with the foam-capped mountains. Below, the rutted mud road that tore around the Pueblo and the stream that separated the north and south halves of the settlement glittered under a pale moon traveling across the midnight sky. Nearby, she sensed the rustlings of another world subtly urging her to merge with it.
But the niggling thought still shimmered in her mind like too much sparkling snow on a sunny day. She needed to tidy this loose end before she could leave. What had she been thinking? Oh yes, her daughter. Sagrario had shown no interest or aptitude in the healing arts. She grew up, married, and moved away—not even to a neighboring pueblo, no, but far away to a place called Colorado, where her family sought farm work in the fields.
The herbalist remained in the Pueblo, increasingly isolated by the reverence of her people. They had held her aloft with respect like the statues of the saints they paraded in front of the church on festival days. Without anyone on whom to confer her knowledge and continue the healing, her bloodline would die out.
“Isabella,” the stars twinkled a message, “it is time to come with us.”
If she had a chin, it would have jutted out stubbornly. “No, it is not ended. I must stay!”
One of the stars glimmered bigger and brighter than the others, and she became aware of a voice pulsating from its glow.
“Isabella, you who so often have witnessed the flux and reflux of life, know that the time has come for transformation. This does not mean that all is finished, for in our endings we find beginnings.”
The light swelled and pushed away the black night from the sky. “Come, Isabella. All is not over. Your inheritor, who will carry on your name and traditions, is yet to be born and you will play a key role in saving her life. You will see. Come, into the Light. Now!”