I furrowed my brow. “Does this legend have anything to do with the Island of the Dolls? You mentioned the hermit who used to live there, Don Juan—”

“Don Javier Solano.”

“He found a body of a little girl in the canal?”

Pepper nodded. “The locals around here believe there is a connection, definitely. Because on nights when the chinampas are shrouded in fog, La Llorona is believed to roam about, kidnapping other children who resemble her missing children, drowning them in the hope she can take them to heaven instead of her own.”

“I don’t know if you can really pull the wool over God’s eyes like that, you know, with Him being omniscient and everything.”

“It’s a legend, Jack. But that’s what the locals think happened to the little girl.”

“La Llorona drowned her?”

Pepper nodded again. “You know how superstitious Mexicans are.”

I did. And this didn’t apply to only the poor and uneducated. Superstition seemed to be built into the collective unconsciousness of the entire country. Pita, for instance, was about as Americanized as you could get, but she one hundred percent believed in ghosts.

“What about you, Jack?” Pepper went on. “Are you superstitious?”

“Hardly.”

“I’m not surprised,” he said. “You look like an atheist.”

“What does an atheist look like?”

“Like you. They have a hard edge. How should I say this...always looking a bit pissed off.”

“I’m not always pissed off.”

“I didn’t say that, Jack. I said, looks pissed off. I know you’re a very nice guy.”

“Thanks, I guess.” I finished the beer, set the empty bottle aside. “So I still don’t see how all the dolls work into the story? Why did this guy, this Solano, begin stringing them up all over his island? Were they some sort of offering to the drowned girl’s spirit?”

Pepper nodded. “She began contacting him at night, communicating with him in his dreams. She told him she was lonely. So the dolls were his gift to her, to keep her spirit at peace.”

“This might sound like a stupid question, Peps, but where did he get all these dolls?”

“Didn’t your teachers ever tell you there’s no such thing as a stupid question?”

“Only because they were the ones always asking the stupid questions.”

“An atheist and a pessimist—oh joy.” Pepper beamed a smile at me. “To answer your question, Jack, Solano got most of his dolls from Mexico City. He would go there occasionally to search the trash heaps, or the markets. But then later in his life, about ten years ago, Xochimilco was designated a national heritage site. A few years after that a civic program to clean up the canals was implemented, and the island was discovered. At first the locals thought Solano was an old crackpot and steered clear. But then a few of them began to trade him dolls for produce he grew.”