Missing White Girl

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  “I need more than that, Nellie. If I’m going to look at these guys I need to know where to start.”

  She rested her hand on his arm, lightly, surprising him with its casual intimacy. His own wife hadn’t touched him like that in longer than he cared to remember. “I wish I could help, Buck. If I had the slightest idea where to send you, I would. But I can’t really keep track of all those groups, you know? I’m a little busy trying to make sure those who do come over don’t get brutalized by them or anyone else, and don’t die of thirst or exposure out in the desert. The more the state talks about absurd ideas like building a big wall between us and Mexico, the more time I have to spend writing letters and talking to the press and the legislature to try to stop it. Has everybody forgotten Reagan already?”

  Buck didn’t follow. “What does Reagan have to do with it?”

  Nellie lowered her voice and mimed speaking into a microphone. “‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’ The Berlin Wall became a symbol of oppression, and tearing it down was the ultimate act of freedom. Have we already turned from the country that championed freedom into one that wants to surround itself with its own walls? Doesn’t that just make us into one big prison?”

  Buck didn’t think she sought an answer, so he didn’t try to provide one. He didn’t have any to give. He agreed that the wall idea sounded like a pointless waste of taxpayer dollars. On the other hand, one reason the immigration problem had got so out of hand in Arizona was that Texas and California had clamped down with walls of their own.

  “Anyway,” Nellie continued, saving Buck from having to respond, “do the people advocating a wall even realize what the financial impact of Mexican migrants is on us?”

  “You mean from school costs, hospitals, that kind of thing?”

  “I’m talking about the positive financial impact,” Nellie said, her voice raised in agitation. Her cheeks had flushed, and her head bobbed as she spoke, setting her long hair aflutter. “I don’t have the articles in my pocket, but I can show them to you in the office. It’s been estimated that undocumented workers cost us about fifty-five grand each for a lifetime of menial labor. But against that you have to stack the reduced cost of goods, like fruit and vegetables and chicken, and so on, that are unrealistically inexpensive because of the cheap labor they provide. Then you add in the fact that many, many of them don’t get paid in cash anymore. They’re paid by check, and taxes are withheld from those checks. If they don’t file, that full withholding remains with the government. Some use phony Social Security numbers—they’ll never get back what was withheld or collect benefits. Undocumented workers buy groceries, sundries, clothing, gas, and they pay sales taxes on those things. They pay rent, heat their homes, pay for power and water, maybe cable TV. I’ve seen a reasonable estimate that they add three hundred billion dollars a year to our gross domestic product. Of what they do get paid, some of it is sent back to family in Mexico, but even these remittances generate funds for U.S. banks and financial service companies.”

  “So you’re saying they’re a net positive for us?”

  “From an economic perspective, a huge positive. They could build a wall tomorrow and deport every noncitizen worker. You know what would happen? Our crops would rot in the fields. Those that did make it to market would cost four times as much. Same with our meats and beverages. Dishes would pile up on restaurant tables, with no one to bus them. Those same politicians might find it hard to get their houses cleaned, and if they get fed up at home, they’re not going to be able to get a clean room in a hotel. There’s a huge economy that operates largely through the labor of undocumented workers, and if they were gone, not only would that economy dry up overnight, but that part of the mainstream economy that is fueled by their spending would as well. A billion dollars for a wall wouldn’t look like such a great deal then, would it? We’d be better off decriminalizing the border, allowing Mexicans to come here legally to work, and putting our resources toward keeping out the real criminals, drug dealers and terrorists.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever heard those statistics,” Buck admitted. He didn’t exactly feel dumb, faced with her barrage of facts, but he couldn’t deny that she was better informed than he was.

  Looking at her, he noticed something else. Not only had her cheeks flushed, but her lips were moist and parted, her green eyes wide and liquid. It was almost as if ranting about an issue about which she cared so deeply was an erotic experience for her. Watching her as she sucked in deep breaths, causing her chest to swell with each inhalation, was surely one for him.

  He looked away quickly, into the distance. That dust devil was long gone. High winds had spread out some of the clouds so that they looked like tread marks on the sky, but others, bunched and glowering, came behind them. He couldn’t understand exactly why he was having such thoughts about Nellie, whom he had known for years, without ever being attracted to her in the least.

  He had to get out of here.

  “Thanks for the insight, Nellie,” he said, aware even as he did how thin it sounded. “If you think of any border watch types you suspect might have violent tendencies, or would have had some occasion to run across Lulu, let me know, okay?”

  “I’ll do that, Buck.” She examined the ground beneath her feet, as if she had realized how uncomfortable she’d made him. They shared a couple of meaningless words, and he headed back to his truck, determined to make some actual progress on this case before the afternoon rain came.

  9

  Oliver Bowles sat at a table screened from the ocean breeze by a thick wall of Plexiglas. A few hundred feet down, the waves splashing up against the La Jolla coastline threw shards of sunlight like sparks from a welding torch. At mid-afternoon, lunchtime should have been over, but the patio was crowded with diners and drinkers enjoying the view and the balmy air. A family with two young children had the table next to Oliver’s; a towheaded boy in a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles shirt (They never go away, Oliver thought, or they do but then they always come back.) kept bumping Oliver’s table, sloshing his Sprite, as he darted back and forth from his own table to the transparent wall to watch seals heaving up onto the beach at the Cove. The kid bumped the table yet again, and his eyes met Oliver’s, a shy and repentant look on his face.

  “Cowabunga, dude,” Oliver said with a smile.

  The kid brightened, clapped a hand over his mouth and dashed back to his table, where he whispered the tale of the old man who knew turtle-speak into his mother’s ear. She laughed and raised her glass toward Oliver, who returned the gesture with his own.

  Stan Gilfredson had agreed to meet Oliver in the Ocean Terrace Bistro at George’s at the Cove, which seemed like a more comfortable place to get together than on campus. As Oliver waited, sipping his Sprite and putting off the waiter, a college-aged kid in a white shirt, black tie and black shorts, he wondered if Stan was dodging him after all.

  When twenty-five minutes had passed with no sign of him, Oliver fished his cell phone from the inside pocket of his navy blue blazer, which he had draped over the back of his chair. He flipped it open and was scrolling for Stan’s office number when a shadow passed over the table. Oliver looked up into Stan’s unsmiling face.

  “Thanks for coming, Stan,” he said. Stan tugged back one of the black metal chairs and sat down, blinking into the sun. In his mid-fifties, he had long, fine red hair that had mostly gone silver and a ruddy complexion. He wore a white shirt, sweat-stained below the armpits and straining to reach across the bulk of his vast stomach. It was open at the neck and rolled over a belt that held up wrinkled khakis. Stan had never been known for sartorial elegance, but his mind was quick and held within its gray folds incredible stores of knowledge. He had published two books and dozens of papers on Latin American anthropology.

  “Sorry I’m late,” he said as he settled his bulk into the chair. The arms were on the tight side for him, but he managed. “Traffic.”

  “I know what you mean,” Oliver said. “I rented a car at th
e airport, and by the time I hit the Ardath exit I realized how much I love it where I’m living now. Out there, if there are three cars at any given intersection it’s a major event. Coming into La Jolla, remembering how horrible it can get on that stretch, I thought my head would explode.”

  The waiter swept in, and Stan ordered a salad and a Coke without consulting the menu. The waiter nodded his assent and vanished again.

  “I’m only here because you said somebody’s life might be at stake,” Stan said. He still had not smiled. His expression seemed fixed on general disapproval, indicated by a wrinkling of the forehead and a grim frown on his thick lips. “I hope you were being honest with me.”

  “Absolutely,” Oliver replied. “I’m actually here because our local sheriff—well, the lieutenant who’s investigating the case—asked me to try to find out some information about some things the missing girl wrote in her blog.”

  “Who is she?”

  “Her name is Lulu. Lulu Lavender, melodiously enough. She lives down the road from Jeannie and me, and she’s one of my students. Whoever took her killed the rest of her family, her parents and little brothers.”

  Stan gave a brief nod. “A student? You’re not…?”

  “No,” Oliver said firmly. “Nothing like that.”

  “All right.” Stan stared off toward the water for a few long moments. “And this local yokel thinks there might be something in her blog that can help find her?”

  “It’s pretty strange stuff,” Oliver said. He had printouts in a briefcase underneath his chair. Before he got them out, though, he briefly described what Buck Shelton had told him about the incidents Lulu had described being reported as fact—after she had written about them—in Mexican newspapers.

  As he talked, he saw Stan’s expression finally soften a little. He had hoped the man’s intellectual curiosity would overwhelm everything he felt about Oliver. When he was done, Oliver took a sip of his Sprite. Stan’s salad had come and sat, ignored, while Oliver spoke.

  “That’s all very hard to believe,” Stan said.

  “Tell me about it. Lieutenant Shelton gave me printouts from the Mexican news sites, so if you can read Spanish, you can compare them.”

  “My Spanish is fine.”

  Oliver bent forward at the waist and grabbed the handle of his leather briefcase. Pulling it into his lap, he worked the clasps. When he saw the papers inside, printouts of Lulu’s blog, he was reminded of how much he missed his student’s laugh, her sharp, inquisitive mind. He tried to speak, but his voice caught, and he downed a big swallow of his drink to clear it.

  “Sorry,” he said after a moment. He passed over the sheaf of papers. “Here’s her blog.”

  Stan’s thick fingers closed over the printouts, and without comment, he laid them on the table next to his plate. He worked on his salad as he scanned them. He took about fifteen minutes, flipping page after page, eyes scrolling rapidly down each one. When he reached the end, he stacked them neatly, lining up the edges, and put them back on the table.

  “I can tell you a couple of things, right off,” he said. “Some of it will need a little research, but not all of it.”

  “Okay. What’s it mean? Do you know what the ‘white girl’ is?”

  “No idea,” Stan said. “That’s one of the areas that will require some further investigation.”

  “What about that name, or word? Aztlán?”

  “That’s an easy one, and something you could have Googled instead of having to fly out here to ask me.”

  “I did,” Oliver admitted. “But I’m the earth sciences guy, remember? There were a lot of different links with different meanings, so I wanted your take on what it is and how it relates here.”

  “The traditional definition of Aztlán is that it’s the place from which the Aztecs came to the surface of Earth,” Stan explained. “They traveled from underground, through Chicomostoc, the seven caves, and came out in Aztlán in the Aztec year 1 Tecpatl, roughly corresponding to AD 1168. From there they migrated south into Mexico, where they were when Europeans came. That’s one take on it. Anthropologically speaking, it makes sense in that the migration of the human race began in Africa, sweeping up through Asia and into Europe and down into Australia. From Asia we crossed the Bering Strait, or the land bridge that existed there at the time, into what would become Alaska, and then came south along the west coast, or just off it in boats, into Mexico and on into the rest of Central and South America. Since the Aztecs had no cultural memory of the whole journey, they settled on a mythical starting point. Complicating this was that they were not the first settlers in the region, but a group who came from the north into the region already inhabited by the Toltecs, with their civilization of great antiquity.”

  “Is there a physical place that corresponds to it?” Oliver asked.

  “That depends upon whom you ask. Different scholars locate it at different spots in northern Mexico, possibly on the coast or an island on a long-gone inland sea. More recent folk traditions place Aztlán in the United States—it is a place, these traditions insist, that belonged to Mexico before the United States annexed the west and southwest and took it away. Again, there is a reasonable basis for this interpretation, as there are linguistic links between the Aztecs and western Indian tribes like the Pima, Yaqui, Hopi, Paiute, Shoshone and a few others.”

  He stopped talking long enough to fork another chunk of salad into his mouth. “One more thing you should know about Aztlán,” he said when he had swallowed it, wiping his mouth with a napkin as he spoke. “Not only did the Aztecs—and by extension, the indigenous Mexican people as we know them—believe that they came from Aztlán, but they were certain that one day they would return. They would reclaim Aztlán, their traditional birthplace, and occupy it forever.”

  The meaning of his words took a few seconds to dawn on Oliver. “Which would be a problem for the U.S., if Aztlán is somewhere within our borders.”

  “Indeed it would.” Stan looked almost amused by the idea. “People think immigration is out of hand now. There have already been calls for Mexico to re-annex California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, and parts of Nevada, Utah and Colorado.”

  “Surely they don’t think they could attack us with their army.”

  “They don’t need to. The Hispanic population of the border states is booming. To those who give credit to this theory, the whole migration thing is part of it—people coming north so they’ll be in place when the takeover happens. The theory—and I’m not saying I agree this is happening, but if you’re inclined in such directions you can certainly imagine it—is that they will win all the state offices in the four border states. It’s already widely believed that the borderline is just a figment dividing two Mexican populations—it didn’t exist, after all, until the Gadsden Purchase in 1854—and that when the Hispanics have control of those states the line will shift, with Aztlán being the name given to the new border territories.”

  “So if there’s some connection between this miracle-performing ‘white girl’ and a return to Aztlán…”

  “More likely it’s just some strange dreams your student’s been having, after coming across the story of Aztlán, or maybe some of the controversy about the border state annexation, in one of her other courses.”

  “Sure,” Oliver agreed. “I’d go along with that, if not for two things. The seeming miracles reported in the Mexican press—”

  “Not always the most reliable source—”

  “Combined with the fact that someone really did kill her family and kidnap her,” Oliver finished. “To me, that’s the really relevant part. I don’t know if the dreams and this Aztlán business are related to it, but by sheer proximity—that’s what she was thinking about, and blogging about, in the days just before the incident—it seems that there might be a link.”

  Stan tapped the papers again. “It could be. I’m certainly not saying there’s not. I would point out one other thing, and then I should go—I have a late class this af
ternoon.”

  “What is it?”

  “She mentions some other names, in passing. Names she isn’t familiar with, she says.”

  “Right,” Oliver said. “I don’t remember what they were.”

  “Alvar, Estevanico, Alonso. Those are all members of the Cabeza de Vaca party. You’ve heard that story?”

  “Good old ‘head of the cow.’ Refresh me on the details?” The waiter buzzed by like a bee around a flower, and Oliver waved him away. Stan regarded his now-empty salad plate mournfully, as if he would not have objected to another course, but he went on.

  “A Spanish expedition was destroyed by hurricanes off the coast of Florida in 1527. The men took refuge on rafts, which were separated in heavy seas. Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca wound up alone and was captured by local Indians who kept him as a slave. Showing some magical healing abilities, he was released and managed to hook up with three other members of the expedition, Alonso del Castillo, Andrés Dorantes and Estevan, Dorantes’ Moorish slave. Together, healing as they went, they crossed Texas, finally meeting other Spaniards again in Mexico, eight years later. They were the first Europeans—and African—to visit the American Southwest. Really, the first to travel through any of what would become the continental United States.”

  “So in addition to learning about Aztlán, she was exposed to Cabeza de Vaca. And she didn’t remember hearing about any of it, except as names in a dream.”