None of us was very good, and most attempts didn’t even come close. We weren’t allowed to use our hands, just our feet and hips.
I was the best, and often managed to bounce the ball on the end of my foot, sending it higher and higher into the air until it was finally high enough to stay in limbo for a few seconds, finally falling toward the ground, but just before it bounced I would try to hit it with the side of my foot through the stone ring. Usually, though, it went flying over the stone wall into the neighbor’s garden, forcing us to seek another ball. Luckily, we had lots of them in a small basket under the ring.
I recognized the girls but didn’t have a clue who they were. One had light skin, the other was darker. Both were beautiful.
“Let’s go upstairs,” one of them said to me. Then they vanished.
Back in present time, I looked around to find the girls, without success though I saw Ismalda sitting on a stone bench near the doorway we had come through from the house.
I finally returned to the house and climbed the stairs, using my flashlight to avoid tripping. I felt a little strange walking around in a house that no one lived in anymore, but I felt the girls had invited me.
Besides, Ismalda wasn’t stopping me.
The second floor was essentially a large dance floor, the wooden planks old and splintery. A couple looked broken. I moved on. Reaching the third floor, I found that it contained what looked like a number of bedrooms. I could hear the girls chatting in a room down the hall, but I didn’t understand what they were saying. Mayan? Probably. Certainly not English, and it didn’t sound like Spanish either.
I walked toward their voices.
But when I arrived, the voices vanished and the room was empty. I walked into it anyway.
Toys were all over the room, as if scattered by a tornado. And there was a large photograph on the wall showing four adults and three children.
My heart froze as I looked more closely.
I knew everyone in the photo, and it was the first picture of myself as a child that I had ever seen.
I was in the center of the picture, in the front row. On either side of me was a girl. The girls were the ones I’d seen in my hallucination down in the garden. My heart froze again.
Carolyn and Eve. There was no doubt in my mind.
I had known them as children!
I studied the photo more closely.
Eve’s mother stood behind Eve and me, as if she was trying to separate us, with Carolyn beside me on the left, her mother on the far side of her. Eve’s mother looked almost the same except for a few more lines on her face in present time. The same frown was there, the haughty look of disdain, even though she wasn’t looking at me. The face of Carolyn’s mother wore a smirk as she stared down at Carolyn and me.
I was holding Carolyn’s hand, though the expression on my face indicated that I wasn’t thrilled to do so.
But it was the couple of young adults directly behind me that really seized my attention. They were tall and dark, with both a Mayan and a Spanish look to them. The woman had entirely black hair and a beautiful face, while the man was a little lighter in skin color and chiseled in his build, tall and muscled.
Both had a number of rings in their ears, and they were holding hands as well, also gazing down at me.
My parents!!
I waited for memories to come flooding back after I recognized them, but none appeared. Had we all lived here together in the same house: Carolyn, Eve, and my parents, as well as the two mothers? But what had happened? How had I ended up in New York as a ward of Anthony Simone?
“So this is your house?” I asked Ismalda.
“Not officially—it belongs to the Family,” she replied, “but I’m the only one who ever comes here.”
Now I knew two things about the house: one, no one came here very often, which was why it looked half occupied, and two, I had lived here with Ismalda, Carolyn and Eve, as well as my parents.
What was going on here?
What had happened to my parents?
A scene floated through my mind.
A gloomy day, rainy and cold. I stood next to Carolyn and her mother under my small umbrella and watched men lower my mother’s casket into the wet, soggy ground. The priest waved his arms over her and mumbled a prayer. I was crying, matching the intensity of the rain.
Another scene entered my mind, one of my mother’s body under an old car, with me staring and screaming. I couldn’t tell who was driving the car but I knew the car had killed my mother.
I would miss her terribly.
My tears doubled as I walked over and threw a handful of dirt on my mother’s grave.
Where was my father? He should be here.
Then I saw the tombstones in my mind. There were two, one with my father’s already on it. Strangely, I could tell it was my father’s even though I couldn’t see the actual writing on it.
“Are my parents buried near here?” I asked Ismalda.
“Yes.”
“I would like to see their graves,” I said.
She took me to a nearby cemetery, the Panteen Florido, a small cemetery for the wealthy on Calle 81.
There was an eerie quiet when we arrived, as though not another living creature was here, not another person, not a bird, not a squirrel, not even a cricket. The silence was overwhelming, and I covered my ears as though that would help.
It didn’t.
We walked through the tombstones and mausoleums, staring at the names. Near the end of the first row on the north side, we arrived at two tombstones that sent shivers down my spine.
Itzel Balam, 1960–1989, and Babajide Balam, 1959–1988.
Born of love, died of anger.
Balam, the name for jaguar in Mayan. In my dreams I was of the jaguar family. And I would have been eight years old when my father died, nine years old when my mother died, about the time of the photo I had seen.
I didn’t understand how I could know my age in the picture, but I did. I was nine.
I had no doubt that these were my parents’ tombstones.
But how had they died? More to the point, why had they died?
CHAPTER THIRTY
I stared for a while at the tombstones, but I could tell Ismalda was getting tired, so as much as I hated to leave, I knew we had to go back to our hotel. There was a restaurant in the lobby so we stopped for a bite, even though it was late.
The expression on Ismalda’s old, very weary face was a combination of sorrow and shame.
“They died in an auto accident,” she said.
“My father died a year before my mother,” I said.
“Yes. The accidents were separate.”
“But they were not accidents, right?”
“The police investigated and felt they were.”
“Do you agree?”
“No. I think they were murdered, both of them.”
“Why?”
Ismalda was silent for a moment and took a sip of her coffee. She hugged herself but avoided my eyes.
“I will tell you everything I know. But first a little background,” she said.
I downed a large swallow of my tequila, something I rarely drank but I had the feeling that I was going to need it.
She started talking as soon as I put my glass down.
“I don’t know why I never told you the truth before,” she said. “Maybe I was afraid of Anthony Simone and Anna Milanic, maybe I didn’t quite know how to tell you. It’s not a very believable story.”
“Try me.”
&
nbsp; “You were born to the Balams, two members of the jaguar family, one that goes back hundreds, probably thousands of years. It was a respected family, but not one of any major consequence in Mayan history. Not like the other families who lived in the house you grew up in. Your family were the servants; in this generation the Xiu were also servants, while the Cocom owned the house.”
“Carolyn and her mother are Xiu, right?”
“Yes.”
“And Anna Milanic is a Cocom?”
“As are Anthony Simone and I.”
I closed my eyes. I felt that this was all lifted out of one of my dreams.
“Anthony Simone was the equivalent of the Godfather to the family. He had certain plans for them that he kept to himself, but they involved you. He and Anna ran the family business, linked to her previous family members that extended back hundreds of years. They had been in the human slavery business forever. And Simone wanted everything to stay as it was. Unfortunately, your parents felt the family should become more legitimate and that you would be a better person to direct the new goals of the family, and were raising you in that manner, even though in actuality, you were only a servant boy and not equal to Simone. They wanted you to eventually marry the daughter of the Milanics, not Eve.
“Simone especially felt that you shouldn’t marry Eve. He believed that together, the two of you could potentially wrest control of the family from him and lead it in another direction. Whether he killed your parents himself or had a thug kill them doesn’t matter—they died, and you were alone, left in his care. The police investigated, thought he was suspicious but couldn’t confirm it. Still, he was worried enough about it that he left for New York and started his empire there, taking you with him. He left the house to Carolyn and Eve and me, though Eve never comes here. Carolyn and her mother come here once in a while, and, as you now know, I keep the house clean. Simone never dreamed you would accidentally run into Carolyn and Eve and their mothers on a cruise.”
I was in shock mentally. Anthony Simone killed my parents?
Ismalda could tell I was upset, even though I was good at hiding my emotions. She said nothing for a while, knowing it was better just to let me contemplate this new knowledge, but finally said, “I’ve never known you to just take something like that without an issue, so what are you going to do?”
“Kill him,” I said as I walked to the door.
She said nothing more—obviously, she had no objections.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
I had no plan yet.
During the entire flight to New York I was consumed by grief and anger as I stared out the window at the ground and clouds below. It destroyed any attempt at rational thought, so when we landed at Kennedy, I was no closer to deciding the details of my attempt than when I’d left Argentina.
I took a cab to Simone’s office empire in Brooklyn. I’d thought of using Uber, but knew that some of my acquaintances made extra money as Uber drivers, and I didn’t want anyone to know I was back in town.
After staring up at the building for a while, I walked two blocks to a small hotel that I’d passed many times but never entered, so I figured it should be safe to stay there. They shouldn’t know me. Of course, you never knew when you might run into an acquaintance in New York, but the odds were slim.
I rented a room and took the elevator up to the fourth floor and lay on the old bed. It wasn’t comfortable, but it was better than the airplane seat.
After a few minutes I fell asleep.
It had been years since Raxka killed us. My bones were lying in the tunnel between the two cenotes. I wondered how long I had been lying here after I died. It had been a long time, because my bones were bare. Though I was dead, I was completely aware of my surroundings.
My daughter’s bones lay beside me. No one had found either of us.
I stared at the small set of bones that were hers.
We would have had a completely different fate had I drowned in the Sacred Cenote. Our bodies would have been recovered, taken to the center of the plaza, and placed on a bonfire, where we would have been consumed by flames.
Raxka, too, if she had died and her body had been found. But I suspected that she had survived, had crawled back through the tunnel to the Sacred Cenote and been found, because I didn’t see her bones.
Now I was drifting through darkness, and I could sense the years passing. Which way was I going? Forward or backward in time?
I awoke to a sense of someone in the room with me. Many years before, I’d learned how to pretend to be asleep in such situations, so I kept my eyes closed and listened.
The intruder was big, and clumsy. Light of foot he was not.
Michael? The goon from Anthony Simone’s office?
As I listened, I became more and more convinced that’s who it was.
Somehow Simone had learned of my presence in New York and had sent Michael to take care of me. Had Ismalda told him? I couldn’t conceive of that. The Uber driver must have informed him, though how did the guy know who I was? Or maybe someone at this hotel, where I’d thought I’d be safe.
But Simone knew everyone, so I guess I wasn’t surprised that he’d found me.
I lay still on the bed until I heard his steps start to move closer to me. I pictured the layout of the room and rolled off the side of the bed he was near, darted to the desk beside the window, picked up the chair under it, and swung it at the intruder’s head. Yes, it was Michael. A loud crack ensued, and he went down.
Too easy.
But it wasn’t so easy.
He wasn’t out, just down.
Climbing rapidly to his feet, he charged me. He was fifty pounds heavier than me, though I certainly wasn’t small, and he slammed into me, propelling us to the bed. We rolled together over the bed to the other side and bounced against the wall, with me landing on top.
I slammed my fist into his chin. Though his eyes rolled and his head fell backward, he still wasn’t out. He tried to push me off him, but he was jammed between the wall and the bed and moving was hard. I hit him again.
And a third time. And a fourth.
The fourth one did it. His eyes rolled to the right and his head stopped moving, as did the rest of him.
I slowly stood up, a bit sore from hitting the wall as we rolled over the bed. I looked for something to tie him up with, but found nothing. Oh well. Just leave him.
Exiting the room, I stuffed a chip of wood I found in the hallway under the door to make it harder to open. I doubted that it would take long for him to get out, but I wasn’t going to make it easy for him.
I walked to Simone’s building and paused outside. What to do now? Since Simone obviously knew I was in town, I realized that it didn’t matter if one of his friends saw me now.
If I entered the building, though, I would be quickly surrounded by other thugs.
Wait for Simone?
No, that wouldn’t work either.
But there was another way. It was late afternoon, so he would be leaving soon to eat. He was too smart to eat at the same restaurant every evening, but he did have a group that he especially liked.
Which one tonight?
I would have to take my chances. But it was Friday, and he had always attended the Catholic Church, as long as I could remember, so he would probably eat fish today. There was only one place he went for fish. Edwardo’s Brooklyn Fish House, about two blocks away.
I would go there. But first I stopped by a drugstore and bought some eye drops, making sure they contained tetrahydrozoline.
Edwardo, of course, knew me, but luckily, he wasn’t there that day, and it had been a while since I had come i
n with Simone, so none of the waiters recognized me. I requested a seat in the corner and sat, using the large menu to hide my face. I was next to the door the waiters used to go to the kitchen.
Simone came in at six o’clock, earlier than he used to eat. Perhaps he now changed his times around, just like his restaurants, to try to keep his many enemies off balance.
With the menu hiding my face, he was unaware of my presence in the corner.
I had thought long and hard about how I was going to kill him. At first I didn’t want any evidence, or even any signs that he had been murdered. But then I’d reconsidered. If I just killed him, it would be over, but if I proved that I could kill him anytime I wanted, he would live with that fear for the rest of his life, however long or short that would be. So I had the bottle of eye drops in my pocket that I would pour into his drink. Ingested eye drops are not usually fatal if the victim is rushed to a hospital quickly, but they certainly could be, particularly if mixed with alcohol.
After the waiter took his order, I slipped up to the bar from my table, and when the bartender turned around after making Simone’s drink, I poured the whole bottle of eye drops in it. He usually ordered a whiskey sour, with a double shot, so hopefully the flavor of the add-on would not be noticeable to him.
Apparently, it was not, because he downed the drink quickly, then asked for another. I continued to hide behind my menu and managed to order a calamari appetizer, which Edwardo’s did well.
After it arrived, I ate some of it, watching Simone as I did, no longer concerned about whether he saw me. After a few minutes he began to rub his stomach and look a bit sick.
It was time.
I walked over to his table. The two thugs with him stood up quickly, but Simone waved them down.
“There’s no point,” he told them. “He took Michael apart; he would leave you guys in a puddle on the floor.” Then he turned toward me. “You always were the best,” he said. “What did you give me? Or are you going to tell?”
The Hauntings of Scott Remington Page 16