“This is going to sting, baby,” he said before applying the ointment to the bottom of her foot. Isabella didn’t mind the sting. She easily breathed through the sensation, knowing it was just one more thing that was required. Leif raised his eyes from her foot, giving her a sharp look. “Isabella, are you hurting?”
“It’s all right.”
“That wasn’t my question. You will answer me.”
“It doesn’t matter. It is what it is.”
The grip on her foot tightened infinitesimally. “I will ask you once more. Did. That. Hurt?”
“I do not know,” she answered honestly. She knew that her feet had hurt on the asphalt outside, but here, with Leif holding her foot, applying the ointment, the sensation was different. She looked down into his light blue eyes and spoke again. “I’m sorry, Mr. Johansen, I don’t know,” she answered softly. She watched as his eyes softened ever so slightly and his expression turned thoughtful. He opened his mouth, and then the door rattled.
“Isabella?” The door rattled again. “Isabella, are you all right?” It was Shirley Pierson, the school director.
Caleb pulled up the shade and unlocked and opened the door. “Everything’s fine, Shirley. We were just performing a little first aid, and we didn’t want the kids coming in. Unfortunately, Isabella’s stockings had to go,” Caleb said with an easy grin. Shirley Pierson looked up at the big man with an assessing look. Then she looked over at Isabella as she sat on the desk, obviously being administered to by Leif. She gave a crisp nod, and walked over to the desk.
“I think I can take over from here, gentlemen.” Isabella looked into the kind eyes of her superior and breathed out, letting loose all of her butterflies to follow the men as they filed out of the classroom.
Chapter 1
“Just leave us, and get our children out,” the man whispered to Isabella in Spanish. His wife nodded, tears streaming down her face. Isabella was fighting back tears as well. She couldn’t bear the thought of breaking up this family. But she knew that the only way to ensure the children’s safety, especially Carmen, was to get them out tonight. It was the whole reason she had started out on this crazy journey.
“I’ll come back for you,” she promised.
“We’ll be gone. As soon as they find our children gone, they’ll move us. You know that. Please don’t get caught! We need you to protect our children. Don’t let them get sent to Mexico. We have no family left there. Promise us. They were born here in the United States. You must find their papers.”
“I promise to find their papers.” Isabella Camarena wasn’t quite sure how she was going to keep that promise, but she knew she would find a way. She wasn’t even positive she could get them out of the camp, but tonight was their best bet, and she wasn’t going to let the opportunity pass them by.
In less than an hour, the overseer was going to come by with what they passed off as food for dinner. The families were rarely given meat. Instead they subsisted on flour, corn, beans, rice and sometimes some milk for the children and babies. Providing enough food for only one day was just another way to ensure that nobody tried to escape, that and the barbed wire around the camp, Isabella thought bitterly. There were over twenty families with only three port-a-potties and two showers between them.
* * * *
She thought back to how she had come to this place. Four nights ago, she’d gotten a call from eight-year-old Victor Velarde right after dinner. He was one of her best students at the school for the homeless and displaced. He and his family lived in a motel in Snoqualt and his parents were itinerant farm workers picking raspberries. His oldest brother Pedro had recently run away, having become more involved with gangs. Besides Victor and Pedro, there were four other Velarde children, all girls. They all attended the Cesar Chavez School with Victor, but in different classes.
Victor was calm for such a little boy. He explained to Isabella that men had come to their motel and demanded that their entire family go with them at once, or they were going to kill his older brother. They were waiting outside in a van while the family packed their meager belongings. He didn’t know who else to call. When Isabella said to call the police, the boy started crying and speaking in Spanish, explaining how his brother Pedro was a member of a gang and would go to prison. He couldn’t call the policia. Finally Isabella was able to talk to Victor’s father, who just sounded tired and resigned.
“Thank you, señorita, but we must go. They just want us to harvest fruit elsewhere,” he explained in Spanish.
“You can’t just leave with them in the middle of the night, when they are forcing you by threatening your son. You know that nothing good will come of this.”
“Thank you and the other teachers for what you have done for our children.”
“Mr. Velarde, I need you to stall, can you do that?”
“But why?”
“Maybe I can help. I’m not sure, but if I can see where they take you, maybe I can get help. Please stall, okay? What is your address?” She took it down, and rushed out her apartment door.
When she followed the Velarde family from Snoqualt to Wilama in the middle of the night, she recognized that they were victims. The situation had all the earmarks of the family having been kidnapped into forced labor that amounted to slavery. It took her five hours and one stop to drive to Wilama, Washington state’s major apple-producing area.
At one point during the long drive, they pulled over for gas. Isabella pulled over as well, but stayed well away from the van, ensuring that nobody could see her. She was worried that the younger children would see her and call out her name. When the van finally pulled off the highway in Wilama to take the back roads, then farm roads and finally dirt roads, she was thankful for the “breadcrumb” app on her phone that would lead her back to the highway. She stayed well back from the van and eventually turned off her headlights, as well. Thank God it was a full moon, otherwise she couldn’t have seen to keep the car on the dirt paths.
The van finally stopped at a huge gate, where there was a man with a rifle outside the entrance that unlocked it. She took the opportunity to get out of her car to find the best place to hide her car off the path. She found a spot where the trees and foliage overhung the dirt road, parked her car within the green camouflage, and then watched to see what was happening. The Velarde family disembarked, the parents holding some of the children, while the older siblings held the youngest on their laps as they slept. Isabella considered getting out of the car to get closer so she could hear what was being said, but realized there was really no point. She understood enough. This was a forced labor camp. The Velarde parents, and likely all their children, would be working in the fields for little to no money tomorrow morning.
Isabella was exhausted by the time she reached the center of town in Wilama. Finding a good parking place at the police station should be easy at this hour, since it was well past midnight. She was trying to do anything to find a way to keep her spirits up. She really liked some of the older towns like Wilama. They had the old town squares, and the diagonal pull-in parking in front of the municipal buildings like the sheriff’s office and courthouse. There was a big statue in the square that she was looking at, so she missed the sheriff’s office on her first pass, and she had to go around again. But as she approached the second time, she saw the paneled van outside the sheriff’s office with two deputies, a civilian, and the two men who had been in the van on the sidewalk talking and laughing.
They hadn’t noticed her or her car, so she continued driving, and parked her car directly across from them at the post office, so that the statue in the middle of the square was separating them. She rolled down her windows to try to hear them, but only the sounds of their laughter wafted toward her. She watched in horror as another man in a deputy uniform came out of the building and shook hands with the two kidnappers. She pulled a notepad out of her glove box and took down the license plate of the van. She waited, and as each of the deputies got into cars, she took down those
license plates as well, hoping that these men were permanently assigned certain cars.
This unexpected development made her very angry, but she was also extremely tired, and could no longer think. She had seen a motel close by on the highway with a vacancy sign. She would go there and sleep. Her hope was that by morning she would have a plan.
The next morning she called the state police and reached the dispatcher. Isabella explained she had an urgent matter that involved itinerant workers being exploited. The dispatcher informed her that there was a specific person who handled those cases, and she would take down Isabella’s contact information so that the officer could get in touch with her. With that taken care of, Isabella showered and then put on the same clothes from the day before.
She made her way to the small shopping district downtown and found a low-end department store where she could purchase clothes that allowed her to blend in with the locals. Next she went into the electronics store and bought a phone charger, then proceeded to the drug store to get some personal items. She was disappointed that she still hadn’t received a call back by the time she completed all of her errands.
She thought about calling Shirley Pierson, the school administrator where she worked. She decided against it when she realized that when she told her Shirley what she was doing, she would just be concerned that Isabella was putting herself at risk. No, Isabella did not want to concern the very caring lady, nor could she bring herself to lie to Shirley while actually talking to her. It had been hard enough to lie when she had left a voicemail saying that she had wasn’t feeling well and wouldn’t be coming to work for a couple of days. As for her other job, she knew that by now, she had already been dismissed from the truck stop. Once she had not shown up for work yesterday evening without calling in, that was the end of her employment. They had made that very clear when she had been hired on. Luckily, Isabella knew that she could easily find another job to replace that one.
She put on a change of clothes, used the toiletries she had purchased, and then called the dispatcher at the state police to see if the person assigned to handle the itinerant labor cases was available to speak yet. The dispatcher told her that he would be getting in touch with her, that he had received her message. Isabella again stressed the urgency of the situation. The dispatcher reiterated that the person in charge would return her call. Isabella could not help but wonder if her Hispanic accent was once again a detriment to the situation.
After eight hours of waiting with no call, she determined that the best course of action was to return to the camp to try to discover the fate of the Velarde family. It was obvious to her that she was not going to hear from the state police officer today. Using the “breadcrumb” app on her phone, she made her way to the camp and parked her car in the same secluded spot. She had purchased a flashlight at the same store where she purchased the phone charger.
As she crept up to the camp’s edge, she once again noticed the barbed wire along the top of the fence. Obviously, they were prisoners. She had assumed as much when she saw the men with the guns, and the man at the gate with the rifle, but somehow the barbed wire crystallized her realization of the Velarde’s desperate circumstances. She waited outside the fence for two hours. Nobody walked by. She was afraid to call out, in case there were guards. She had purchased a denim jacket, and she remembered a movie where a jacket thrown over barbed wire facilitated an injury-free escape for the hero. Maybe she could climb over that way.
She climbed the fence, and as she reached the top, Isabella swung her jacket over the top of the fence, covering much of the wire. She then grasped her jacket a few rungs up, and it seemed to be working. She continued up. When she reached the top, Isabella put her right leg over the fence and then felt the barb wire rip through the jacket and her jeans, from the pressure of her weight, digging into her flesh. She tried to lift her leg off of the barbs, but it didn’t work. She bit her lip until it was bleeding, too. She couldn’t do anything but pull her leg back, ripping the flesh of her upper ankle. She managed to stifle her scream of pain.
She didn’t fall. She held onto the fence trembling, and pulled the jacket off the fence, knowing that leaving it there would attract the attention of the guards. She climbed down. The pain was very bad, but she had to bear it. She had done a foolish thing, but she knew the Velardes were depending on her. She was bleeding profusely. She ripped the jeans the rest of the way, pulled off her flannel shirt and took off her tank top. She used that as a bandage. She then sat down and waited for another two hours, until she finally saw a woman walking by. By then she was in agony, but she willed it away.
She whispered to the woman in Spanish and the woman rushed over to her.
“Ay Dios mío,” the woman exclaimed in hushed tones. “What are you doing here?”
Isabella explained that she was looking for her friends.
“Can you help us?” the woman beseeched. “We are being held prisoner. I have four children. My husband has been told that we have to work in the fields. The overseers claim that we owe their bosses money, and each week it is more money. We will never be able to leave.” The woman began to sob.
“Yes, I will get help,” Isabella promised.
“We barely have enough food. My baby has no milk,” the woman sobbed even harder, and Isabella was finding it difficult to understand her. “I am afraid we will die here.”
“It is going to be all right. I will find help, and we will make sure you are taken care of,” Isabella put her fingers through the fence and the women grasped them tightly.
“Do you promise?” she begged.
“I promise you. Now, you must go and find my friends.” Again she explained who she was looking for, and the woman slipped away to find the Velardes.
As she waited for the woman to return with the Velardes, she considered what she had just been told. Isabella had heard about such schemes, but this was the first time that she had met somebody who was a victim to them. She was determined to help the Velardes and this woman as well.
Mr. Velarde soon arrived with his son Victor.
“Victor, it will be all right. The policia will soon be here to help.”
“I am scared, Miss Camarena. They are very bad men.”
“Señorita Camarena,” Juan Velarde said in Spanish, “two men came to our house with pistols. They threatened to kill my oldest boy, Pedro, if we did not leave with them. Pedro is in a gang. A rival gang captured him and is holding him for ransom. The cost to get him back was for me to work in the orchard here in Wilama. It’s a price I was glad to pay. I would do anything for my children. But, the conditions are very bad, and they expect my wife, Carmen, and Victor to pick pears as well. I think you are right to be calling the policia. Thank you very much for saving us.”
“I promise, I will be back here tomorrow with help.” Isabella would make the state police officer listen to her. She waited until they walked away from the fence, before she turned to leave. She didn’t want them to see her limping away. She was their only hope, and if they saw that she was injured, they would just become more frightened. She was already frightened enough for all of them. It took her a long time to drag her shredded leg back to her car.
She drove away that night determined to go to the state police office in the morning, and not wait for a call back. When she got to the motel that night, she carefully unwrapped her leg, again biting back sounds when she had to pull the shirt from the wound, where it reopened the cuts. The wire had cut very deeply. She thought she might need stitches, but she didn’t want to go to the hospital. She knew her tetanus shots were up to date. But that still didn’t mean she couldn’t get an infection. Isabella went to the bathtub and cleaned the cuts as best she could. Under the sound of the water, she could actually moan without anyone hearing, and she couldn’t stop the flood of tears. She prayed that the state police officer she’d been waiting to hear from would be there tomorrow morning.
* * * *
She was up early the next morning, havi
ng had little sleep because of the pain. She had called and the automatic message on the phone had said that the office did not open until 9:00 a.m. She left the motel at 7:30, arriving in the parking lot at 8:00 a.m.
She had washed her school clothes in the motel washing machine, so that she looked more professional, hoping that would help her case. When she got to the reception desk, she worked hard to speak without an accent. Occasionally, she could do so for short periods, especially if she spoke slowly. The receptionist didn’t even bother to ask what Isabella needed. She just called the man and asked her to have a seat. Isabella waited for over a half hour, and by that time she was looking at a magazine.
“Is that her?” a man asked the receptionist, jerking his thumb toward Isabella.
She almost gasped, but she refrained. Oh God. It was the man she had seen in front of the sheriff’s office, talking to the two men who had kidnapped the Velarde family.
He made his way over to her and she just sat there, pretending to read the magazine while trying to come up with a plan.
“Miss, my name is Detective Harding. I believe you wanted to talk to me?” Isabella looked up and gave him a confused smile, holding out her hand. He looked at it, and finally shook it.
“Is there something I can do for you?” he asked.
“Si, my uncle has been missing for over a week, and he picks pears in one of the fields. I am from Spokane,” Isabella said with a heavy Spanish accent. The man gave her an irritated look.
“This is not in my jurisdiction. This is a missing persons case that you should handle with the local sheriff’s department.” He turned toward the receptionist and said loudly, “You’ve both wasted my time.” Then he stormed back the way he came. The receptionist glared at her.
Isabella's Submission [Fate Harbor 4] (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour) Page 2