The Lemon Orchard

by Luanne Rice

  He nodded, and made the call with Julia Hughes looking on.

  “Latham Nez, it’s been a long time. This is Jack Leary.”

  chapter seven

  Julia

  Latham Nez couldn’t see her till the next day, so she checked into the Sonoran, a motel a few miles from Jack’s house. Jack invited her for dinner, but she was exhausted and said she’d meet him in the morning.

  The motel had a southwestern theme, cactus plants in the lobby and all the walls painted soothing adobe colors of brick, sunflower, and dusky blue. She turned up the air conditioner in her room and lay flat on the bed.

  She stared at Roberto’s number programmed into her phone. She wanted to call, but there was a lot to explain. There could be news about Rosa—should she tell him now or wait till she’d met with Latham Nez?

  Her mind was flooded with thoughts and ideas about Rosa, but her heart was remembering the trip to Mexico she and Jenny had taken. They had stayed in motels just like this one. Jenny had loved the colors, the warm décor. In spite of her objections to leaving Black Hall that summer, she had taken this style back home, painted her room to resemble a pueblo, sunset colors, the stately elm framed in the big window in the middle of the ochre-colored wall.

  Jenny called her father nearly every night. Julia would say hello at the end, but mainly the conversation was Jenny telling him about what she had seen, new foods she had eaten, how much she missed the beach. Julia’s stomach would tighten when she took the receiver. Peter sounded indulgent, as if he were letting her spend time away from home, on an adventure vacation. It made her blood boil.

  Jenny, always vigilant, picked up on it. She would watch Julia on the phone with Peter as if trying to figure out her parents’ marriage.

  “Alice’s parents are getting divorced,” Jenny said one night, in a motel room strikingly similar to this one. There were two double beds, and although they’d turned in for the night, neither of them could sleep.

  “I know,” Julia said.

  “It’s sad when parents get divorced,” Jenny said, her voice thin.

  “Very sad, I know,” Julia said, understanding exactly what Jenny was getting at.

  “I wish we were all together this summer.”

  “We will be soon.”

  “When are we going home?”

  “In three more weeks,” Julia said. “There’ll be lots of summer left.”

  “We can all go to the beach together and do what we always do,” Jenny said.

  “Yes.”

  “This is not my favorite summer,” Jenny said quietly.

  “I know, Jen,” Julia said.

  In return she got an exasperated sigh, and the sound of Jenny tossing in her bed. That week Jenny began deciding what her own life would be like when she fell in love. On a piece of beige motel stationery, Julia found a list Jenny had made. The fact she’d left it on her bedside table instead of tucking it into her journal made Julia realize the list was intended for her benefit as well.

  Love is everything.

  No secrets from each other

  If you say I love you, it can never be taken back.

  Never spend the summer apart.

  Never spend a night apart, unless one of you has to be in the hospital or something equally urgent.

  Talk on the phone every day.

  NOTHING is more important than taking your husband’s (or wife’s) phone call.

  Eternal closeness

  Meals together EVERY NIGHT

  Now, eleven years later, Julia closed her eyes and thought of how thoroughly Jenny had followed her own plan. She had loved Timmy with everything she had, and for at least a year, he had loved her the same way. Maybe her passion and intensity had scared him off—just as Julia’s had created its own distance between Peter and her.

  Holding her phone, heart beating fast, she stared at Roberto’s name. She pressed Dial, and after a few rings the call went to voicemail. She felt both relieved and disappointed.

  “Hi, Roberto, it’s Julia. I just wanted to thank you for taking care of Bonnie. Lion told me.” She paused, overflowing with things to say, knowing she would say none of them. “Please pet Bonnie for me and tell her I’ll be home soon, in a day or so. I miss her . . . and I miss you. Good night, Roberto.”

  Roberto

  Roberto, staying at the Casa, didn’t get Julia’s call, because he was taking Bonnie for her evening walk. Cell reception was unreliable at best, and the farther he went from the Casa, the worse it was. When he returned to the house and gave Bonnie a fresh bowl of water, he listened to the message. Her voice was beautiful and gentle, and he listened to the message again, especially the part where she said she missed him.

  He wanted to call her back, but she hadn’t asked him to, and she clearly said “Good night.” So perhaps, wherever she was, she had gone to bed. He didn’t want to disturb her, but it moved him that she’d called.

  He sat in the kitchen chair and petted the old dog between her ears for a long time. She rested her chin on his knee, looking up at him with her big two-colored eyes. He remembered seeing her that first day, thinking his grandmother would have called her a bruja. But after getting to know Bonnie, he knew there was nothing witchlike about her.

  He walked through the house, leaving a few lights on for the dog and to make it look occupied. He didn’t think anyone would dare break into the Casa with his staying on the property, but robberies in the hills and canyons of Malibu were not unknown.

  When he got to the room Julia was staying in, he paused in the doorway, then entered. Her suitcases stood in the corner, but she’d unpacked the bag of books and arranged them on the desk. There was a framed photo beside them, and feeling like an intruder, he walked over to look at it.

  There was Julia, her arms around a girl who had to be Jenny. They stood on the porch of a house, beaming at the camera. Roberto saw the mother-daughter similarity in their eyes, the shape of their faces, their smiles. He touched their faces. Then he couldn’t help himself—he pulled out his wallet and removed a photo of Rosa. He couldn’t have explained why he did this, but he tucked Rosa’s photo into the corner of the picture frame—he wanted them to be close, Julia and their two daughters. He would remove it before Julia returned to the Casa, but for now he left it there.

  Leaving the room, he paused by the bed. He gazed down at it and pressed his hand into the pillow. Although he wasn’t religious, he wanted to bless Julia, and her travels, and her dreams, and he couldn’t think of any other way to do it.

  Then he walked away.

  Jack

  As Jack Leary drove Julia Hughes to meet Latham Nez, he gave her a little background on the elite group of trackers.

  “Shadow Wolves are expert at cutting sign,” he said. “They have to have at least one-quarter Native American blood, and they patrol the eighty-mile stretch of Tohono O’odham reservation along the border.”

  “Why are they so good?”

  “Skills passed down through the generations. Some smugglers are almost equally good at disguising their routes. But a Shadow Wolf will notice one pebble out of place, no exaggeration, and ten miles later he’ll capture his quarry.”

  “They work for the reservation?”

  “No. They’re ICE, U.S. Border Patrol agents—hey, there’s Latham’s Jeep up ahead.”

  Julia seemed wide-eyed, driving through the desert. Hearing about this place was one thing, but seeing it and feeling the heat on the truck windows, no matter how much air-conditioning was blasting inside, was a humbling experience. Jack pulled over behind Latham’s vehicle, and called his radio to let him know they were there.

  While they waited in the cool truck, Julia turned to him.

  “Jack Leary,” she said, and then, seemingly out of the blue, “Are you Irish?”


  “Hell yes. Could there be any doubt with a name like Leary?”

  “Before I was married, I was Julia Riley.”

  “Ha, I knew I liked you. What part of Ireland are your people from?”

  “Connemara,” she said. “My uncle’s over there now, researching an ancestor. Have you ever heard of John Riley?”

  Leary beamed, and went through his center console, came up with a CD and pushed it in. Tim O’Brien sang about John Riley coming from Galway to fight in the U.S. Army.

  “That’s him.”

  “Every Irishman who finds his way to the border learns about John Riley pretty fast.”

  Latham walked over to the truck. Stepping out into 103-degree heat, Leary made the introductions.

  Latham wore traditional camo clothes and a wide-brimmed hat. His dark skin was sunburned, and his features were strong and proud. He was mainly Tohono O’odham, but Leary remembered hearing he was part Navajo, too. Shadow Wolves came from several tribes, including Sioux, Blackfoot, Lakota, and Yaqui.

  “What can I do for you, miss?” he asked.

  “I’m looking for information about a girl who was lost five years ago. Jack told me you might know something about her,” Julia said.

  “I told you,” Leary prodded him. Latham was closemouthed, especially about agency matters, and he would be careful about what he gave up. “The six-year-old from Puebla, we took her father into custody, she was left by the boulder in Sector 34, May 12, 2007.”

  “Uh-huh,” Latham said.

  Leary glared at him. If he was going to be a dick and treat him like an outsider, Leary was going to be pissed.

  “Rosa Rodriguez,” Leary said. “We talked about this.”

  “What do you want to know, miss?” Latham asked.

  “What happened to her?”

  “We don’t have that information.”

  “For chrissakes, Latham—tell her what you told me.”

  “It’s hot out here,” Latham said. “Especially if you’re not used to desert heat.”

  “There’s an Applebee’s up the road. My treat,” Leary said.

  “We can talk there,” Latham said.

  chapter eight

  Julia

  They sat in a booth and ordered lunch and iced tea, and when her salad came she couldn’t eat a bite. She listened intently to every word Latham spoke.

  “That rock where Rosa’s father left her,” Latham began. “That was the source. Right away my colleagues and I determined she’d been taken, shortly after her father was picked up, by a different group.”

  “Group?” she asked.

  “Border crossers,” Latham said. “They most often travel in groups.”

  “But who would take Rosa and not report it? Maybe not right away, but once they got safely to where they were going?”

  “People have different reasons for being in the desert,” Latham said matter-of-factly. “The coyotes are smugglers. Yes, they help innocent people cross. But there are ugly stories, too.”

  “That’s true,” Jack said. “But there could be many reasons they didn’t report Rosa. They might have tried, and not known who to contact. They are vulnerable themselves, here illegally, and they might not have wanted to get themselves—or Rosa’s family—in trouble.”

  “Anyway,” Latham continued. “We tracked this one group before the boulder, and again after. Footprints tell us everything: height, weight, sometimes nationality depending on the footgear, whether they’re weighted down with backpacks or whatever they might be carrying.”

  “One of the walkers picked Rosa up?” Julia asked, unable to contain her excitement.

  “Yes. From the footprints, we saw that a man traveling with a group of twelve others began carrying an additional forty-eight-pound weight. That’s small for a six-year-old, but assuming she came from poverty in Roberto’s town of Santa Cruz Tlaxcala, it fits.”

  “How far did you follow them?”

  “A ways. They seem to have gotten lost before reaching the main road. They veered off into the foothills.”

  “But they made it?”

  “Some may have,” Latham said. “We found four bodies.”

  “Oh,” she said, feeling her stomach knot.

  “The terrain became rocky, more difficult to follow. Eventually the path intersected a road where some may have been picked up by their contacts.”

  “And Rosa?”

  “We didn’t find her body,” Latham said. “But we found these.”

  He had carried a file with him, and opened it, and pushed two separate photos across the table to Julia. Each showed a single small dust-covered lime-green sneaker.

  “They were half a mile apart. Neither was on the trail where we tracked the group. They were in rough mountain terrain. That’s not a hopeful sign.”

  “She might have lost them,” Julia said. “They could have come off while the man was carrying her. Or if she walked, she could have gotten them stuck in the rocks. That happened to Jenny, my daughter, when we were crabbing at low tide, all those rocks, and they just caught one of her sneakers in the wrong way and it came right off . . .”

  “See that?” Latham asked, pointing to a brown patch covering the side of her right sneaker. “That’s blood.”

  “It could be mud.”

  “We tested.”

  “Maybe she had a blister that got rubbed raw—or she fell down and scraped her ankle.”

  “It’s more likely her body was dragged from the scene by animals,” Latham said.

  “When did you determine that?” Jack asked, sounding angry, offended that he hadn’t been told.

  “Look, you’re retired—I looked up the file as a favor to you. And this case is five years old, Jack. I followed the trail, but the rest was done in the lab.”

  Jack spread the photos across the table, starting at them.

  “It’s a theory, Jack, that’s all. But it’s our best working theory. If we could spend one hundred percent of our time on Rosa Rodriguez, we’d know for sure. But you know how it is. How backed up we are. Those hills are full of coyotes and mountain lions. We think one of them dragged Rosa off, that her bones are scattered over the rocks.”

  “But you don’t know for sure,” Jack said. “Why don’t you get your fellow Wolves and go find her remains?”

  “‘Remains’? You don’t know that’s what you’d be looking for. She might have made it,” Julia said. “There’s no proof of her death!”

  “Julia, proof of death is rare in the desert. We do our best, but do you how many people we identify? A small percentage,” Latham said.

  “Needle in a haystack, Julia. Don’t get your hopes up,” Jack said.

  “But without a body . . . even bones . . . If any had been collected, they would be in a morgue, and Juan would have found the data,” she said.

  “We consider the sneakers to be a strong indication that she is dead,” Latham said.

  “Did you find her doll? Maria?”

  “No. But we matched the blood with her father’s. We DNA-tested him when he was arrested.”

  “Then why didn’t you tell him?”

  “Where would we find him?” Jack asked. “He’s undocumented. The last thing he wants is for his address to be known by ICE. Forget about this, Julia. It’s very sad; I know it’s not what you hoped for. Try to let it go.”

  “That is wise advice,” Latham said. “As hard as it is to accept, she’s just another border casualty.”

  “She’s also someone’s daughter,” Julia said.

  Roberto

  Julia had left him that phone message, and he’d saved it and listened to it many times. The sound of her voice, speaking just to him, so soft and beautiful, saying his name. He wanted to save it forever.

 
She didn’t come home until two nights later. He heard her car come up the cobblestoned driveway. The car door slammed, and she let herself into the house. He lay on his narrow bed, hypervigilant for any sound. He stared out the open door toward the barn because he knew when she turned off the house lights, he’d see their reflection on the weathered red boards disappear.

  But the house lights stayed on. Soon the door opened again. He thought she must be walking Bonnie, and he considered joining her. But would it be an intrusion? She had left that phone message. Did that mean anything? He felt that she respected him, but he’d also heard something else in her voice, a closeness different from anything he had in his life.

  Before he had the chance to walk out and meet her and Bonnie, her footsteps came down the hill toward his cabin. By the time she knocked on his door, his heart was racing.

  “Roberto,” she said. “I’m sorry it’s so late.”

  “That’s okay, Julia. Are you all right?”

  She didn’t reply. He stood there in his work jeans and T-shirt. There was a square table and two chairs in the corner. He held one out for her, and she sat down. He turned on a lamp and sat across from her. Maybe he should offer her coffee or tea, but he couldn’t take his eyes off her.

  She was right here, in his cabin. Her blue eyes were on fire, she seemed agitated, so he reached across the table to hold her hand.

  “Hola, Julia,” he said.

  “Hola.” Finally, a smile. But it was fleeting, here and gone.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “I wanted to wait until tomorrow,” she said. “Let you have a good night’s sleep . . .”

  “I don’t need sleep.” And holding her hand, he felt he didn’t need anything—food, air, water, sleep, if he could just stay here like this.

  “I took a trip to learn about Rosa,” she said. “I should have told you before I left, but we had that talk, and I know you were very upset.”

  “I’m sorry for how I acted,” he said. “My feelings—they weren’t because of you. They had to do with Rosa. I never talk about her the way I do with you.”