“Hardly anyone likes them. My father says they look like vampires. Most people are frightened by them.”

“That’s why I like them,” said Alicia.

* * *

Mercedes observed that curious presence intently. For a second she thought the stranger had something in common with the pieces in her collection, as if one of them had not become frozen in an ivory childhood and had grown up to become a woman of flesh, blood, and shadow.

The woman called Alicia smiled and held out her hand. “Mercedes, right?”

Mercedes nodded and shook her hand. Something in those cold, penetrating eyes calmed her and gave her confidence. She reckoned the woman was not quite thirty, but like the dolls in the display cabinet, the closer Mercedes looked at her, the more difficult it was to determine her age. She had a slender figure and dressed the way Mercedes herself would secretly like to dress, had she not been certain that both her father and Doña Irene would never have allowed it. This woman exuded that indefinable air that Valls’s daughter knew could captivate men and make them behave like children, or lick their lips like old men when she went by. She’d seen her arrive with that policeman and go into the house. The very idea that somebody high up could have thought of that creature as the ideal person to find her father seemed to her both incomprehensible and hopeful.

“You’ve come about my father, haven’t you, miss?”

Alicia nodded. “There’s no need to be all formal and call me ‘miss.’ I’m not much older than you.”

Mercedes shrugged. “I was brought up to address everyone politely.”

“I was brought up to behave as if I came from a good home, and look at me now.”

Mercedes gave a little laugh, slightly embarrassed. She wasn’t used to laughing, Alicia thought: she laughed the same way as she observed the world, like a child hiding in the body of a woman. Or a woman who had lived almost all her life in a children’s storybook, peopled by servants and dolls with glass hearts.

“Are you a policewoman?” Mercedes asked.

“Something like that.”

“You don’t look like one.”

“Nobody is what they seem.”

Mercedes considered those words. “I suppose you’re right.”

“Can we sit down?”

“Of course.” Mercedes rushed over to a corner to grab a couple of chairs and placed them within the pool of light coming through the door. Alicia sat down with care and when the girl noticed the agony in her face, she helped her. Alicia smiled weakly, cold sweat covering her forehead. Mercedes hesitated for a moment but then dried Alicia’s forehead with a handkerchief she carried in her pocket. Alicia’s skin was so fine and soft that she wanted to stroke it with her fingers. She banished the idea from her thoughts and felt herself blushing without really knowing why. “Are you better?”

Alicia nodded.

“What is it?”

“It’s an old wound. From when I was a little girl. Sometimes, if it’s raining or there’s a lot of humidity, it hurts.”