Inside, in the musty gift shop, Hook paid the receptionist a dollar and he and Liz started through the five or six rooms that once had been the living quarters of the missionaries and their guests. He found the place oppressive, the thick dank walls and airless rooms with their doll-like crucifixes and old chalices and psalters. And his reaction must have shown on his face.

“I imagine all this violates your wasp soul,” Liz said, smiling.

“Not at all,” he lied.

There were about a dozen other visitors going through the rooms with them. One, a frail old woman wearing a black coat with a ratty fox pelt draped around her neck, kept glancing at them, especially at Liz. In a room displaying old cookware the woman touched Liz on the arm.

“Don’t I know you from somewhere?” she asked. “Were you at my husband’s funeral?”

Liz looked at her in bewilderment. “No, I don’t think so.”

“What’s your name, dear?”

Liz told her, and the old woman shook her head and wandered off, muttering that it was odd, she could have sworn they knew each other. A few minutes later, in the church, a long dark narrow room painted and gilded like a Babylonian brothel, the old woman struck again.

“Perhaps it was in the hospital, when he died. Are you a nurse?”

Liz said no, she was not a nurse. Then abruptly she headed out of the church into the walled cemetery next to it, and they moved along quickly now, with Liz setting the pace. The circular walkway passed in front of vaults and mausoleums and a few small slabs, the only ones left to mark the graves of some four thousand Indians the chapel brochure estimated had been buried there.

As they walked along, Liz kept glancing behind them. “I think we got away from her,” she said. “At least I hope so.”

“I imagine you hear that more often from men.”

“What?”

“The don’t-I-know-you routine.”

She looked at him in confusion. “No, not really. I guess I’m forbidding.”

Hook could not determine if she was being ironic, so he said nothing.

As they came to the end of the cemetery walk, Liz drew Hook’s attention to a metal plaque on the wall at the exit. It read:

Juana Maria

Indian woman abandoned

on San Nicolas Island

eighteen years

found and brought by

Capt. George Nidever

in 1853

Santa Barbara Daughters

of the American Revolution

1928

As they walked on to the car, Liz told him the story of the Indian woman, one of a ragtag tribe barely eking out a living on the small and bleak San Nicolas Island, the outermost of the Channel archipelago. In 1835 the captain of an American schooner offered to carry the tribe to the mainland, and they accepted, gathered all their possessions, and boarded the schooner. But as they set sail, the Indian girl discovered that her younger brother was missing, and despite every effort to prevent her, she leaped overboard and swam back to the island to take care of him. The ship continued on its way, and no other came for eighteen years, until a Captain Nidever visited the island in 1853. His crew found the Indian girl dressed in cormorant feathers and living alone in a crude hut. At the Santa Barbara Mission, where she was taken, and later buried, it was learned that her brother had been killed by wild dogs soon after the first schooner had set sail.