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.”They stared at her.“What is Grandmother saying, Auntie Marina?”“I have no idea.She speaks gibberish.”“Is it a language she speaks? It’s not at all like Spanish.”“You must remember this place,” Angela said, not realizing she was speaking Topaa, the language she had spoken when she was a child and her mother had called her Marimi and told her she would someday be the clan medicine woman.“You must tell others about this cave.”Angela took Marina’s hand, and said, “I named you Marina.I misunderstood the message in my dream.It was meant to be Marimi.”“Mother, we do not understand what you are saying.Let us take you out of this place.Let us take you home.”But Angela thought: I am home.“Mother, please, you are frightening us.” Angelique and Marina reached for her.But Angela’s thoughts were now upon the First Mother, who had trekked across the desert alone, outcast from the tribe, and pregnant.Yet she had endured.Angela looked at Marina, who had undergone rigors in China and endured much adversity yet had found the strength to work at her husband’s side, and Angelique, who had suffered a great ordeal in a mining camp up north.And Angela herself, no matter what Navarro did to her, she kept her pride and self-respect and dignity.We are the daughters of the First Mother.This is her legacy to us.Angela knew now why she had brought Marina and Angelique with her.Both would have, in another place and time, been clan medicine women for their tribe.But now they were married to Americans and had children named Charles and Lucy and Winifred.She closed her eyes and saw the silhouette of a raven against a blood-red sunset.He was flying to the land of the dead, where the ancestors had gone, and where they were waiting for her, Marimi, to join them.Chapter SeventeenShe never used tricks.The ghosts that appeared were neither illusions nor the products of chicanery and hocus-pocus— or so Sister Sarah claimed.She always welcomed psychic debunkers to come to her Church of the Spirits in Topanga and run any analysis on her séances they wished.They would arrive with their cameras and recording equipment, heat sensors and motion detectors, the most sophisticated scientific devices of the day, hoping to catch her in a fraud.But they never did.Psychiatrists and men of the Church claimed the apparitions were the result of mass hysteria— people seeing what they wanted to see.But Sister Sarah maintained that her spirits were real and that she was the human conduit through which they passed from the realm of the Beyond to that of the living.Erica was glued to the TV set in Jared’s motor home.When she had found the documentary video on the 1920s’ spiritualist, she had had no idea what a rich mine she was about to tap into: rare archival footage of Sister Sarah’s sermons where audiences of six thousand were brought to their feet in ecstasy as they saw deceased loved ones materialize, with the charismatic Sister Sarah onstage in her flowing robes, arms outstretched, head back, eyes closed, quivering with spiritual energy.She had been an astounding beauty.Film clips from the few movies she had made prior to being discovered showed a sultry, sloe-eyed siren who had been variously labeled vamp, goddess, seductress, femme fatale.Audiences loved her.Footage also included home movies made by Edgar Rice Burroughs on his Tarzana Rancho, where Sarah was a frequent visitor, along with Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford.It was in those early days that her talent had been discovered, when she told fortunes to friends, counseled them on important decisions, and even helped the police locate a child that had gone missing in the Baldwin Hills.Word of mouth had spread, and she became more and more in demand for private séances.Sarah moved to larger venues, finding that she was just as able to summon numbers of ghosts as easily as one.People worshiped her.She reunited them with the dear departed.She was also the living promise of life after death.While Sarah lifted her arms and eyes heavenward in the video, her audience breathless with spiritual anticipation, Erica consulted her watch.What was keeping Jared?He had left hours ago for an urgent meeting with the Confederated Tribes of Southern California, hoping to dissuade them from putting a stop to DNA testing on the Emerald Hills skeleton.Their surprise move, resulting in a court order suspending all archaeological and forensic work in the cave, could ruin all possibilities for identifying the skeleton once and for all.Temporarily restrained from working in the cave, Erica had decided to take the time to pursue her search for the source of the painting in her dreams.If Mrs.Dockstader was not her grandmother, and if Erica had never before set eyes on the painting over Mrs.Dockstader’s fireplace, then her childhood dreams must have stemmed from another source.It seemed logical that since Sister Sarah bought this property and filled in the canyon, someone might have taken a photograph inside the cave and published it somewhere.But Erica was having a hard time concentrating.All she could think about was she and Jared making love beneath the stars.Was this what it was like to be in love? No wonder people wrote songs about it! She felt giddy and silly, happy and delirious.But scared, too, that it might all be just a dream, or that she might lose him before she even had him.Maybe that was all part of—She suddenly stared at the screen.Restored film footage, taken in 1922, was showing Sister Sarah going inside the cave.Erica shifted to the edge of her seat.The camera was on the south ridge and focused down on the cave entrance.Sarah, in her trademark white robe and hood, disappeared into the darkness while her entourage and reporters waited dramatically outside.When she emerged minutes later, her expression was transfixed.The voice-over said, “Did Sister Sarah experience a spiritual revelation in this cave as she later claimed, or was she acting”? Shortly after she purchased the property, she had the canyon filled in, burying the cave so that we will never know what she saw in there.”The closing film clip of the documentary, shot in 1928, showed a distraught Sister Sarah in front of microphones and journalists saying farewell to her followers.The news had come abruptly and unexpectedly, when the Church of the Spirits was at its peak popularity.Sarah did not explain why she was dropping out of public work, only that it was “God’s will.” She then vanished from view and although efforts were made to find her— newspapers ran contests, reporters vied for the big story— Sister Sarah was never heard from again.The documentary ended, and as Erica turned off the TV, she thought: It all comes down to the cave.It was the painting that brought me here in the first place, and others over the centuries were drawn to the cave— the people who left behind the spectacles, the reliquary, the crucifix, the braid, the spirit-stone, the Aztec fetish, the deed to the rancho.Sister Sarah
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