“Look, Luna, I can almost do a cartwheel,” said Dulce. The seven-year-old raised her hands high above her head and spun head over heel, leaving off the last part of the maneuver with two feet thudding to the earth. It was a good first effort. Adele applauded. Luna’s smile looked like the corners of her lips each weighed a hundred pounds. Was this sadness over her father? Or something more? Adele tried to remember how she had behaved after Señor Trejo’s advances. Whatever she’d felt, she must have been good at hiding it, the same way she could hide things now. To their dying days, her parents never suspected a thing.
“We’re working on getting your father back,” Adele told Luna, hoping that was the cause of her sadness. “You mustn’t lose hope.”
Esme stroked the top of Luna’s head. “You see, mami?” she said, using the term affectionately the way some Spanish mothers do to their children. “Everyone is worried about you. You don’t want to make them sad or make your papi sad, do you?”
“I brought something for you,” said Adele. She pulled out the book, a paperback called Esperanza Rising. “Remember this? You said your copy was destroyed in the fire. I found this copy at a garage sale. I know how much you always loved it.”
Adele placed the paperback in Luna’s hands. On the sky-blue cover was a drawing of a windswept girl in a flowing, mustard-colored dress, her bare feet above the green croplands and twilight-colored hillsides of California. Like Luna, the title character was a teenage Mexican girl struggling with a parent’s death, family separations, and hardship as an immigrant in the United States. The book was set in the 1930s, but for a girl like Luna, the story was as relevant now as it was in the character’s day.
Luna stared at the cover. Adele felt a sudden panic that the fictional character’s circumstances might be the last thing the teenager wanted to be reminded of right now.
“Say thank you to Doña Adele,” Esme scolded. Luna mumbled a thank you, but that only made Adele feel more embarrassed that she’d done the wrong thing.
“I also brought this,” Adele added quickly, pulling the envelope with the collection money out of her purse. She handed it to Luna. “Everyone at La Casa pitched in some cash for you and Mateo and Dulce to be able to buy things you might need. We raised a hundred and fifty dollars.”
“Wow,” said Dulce. “Can I have a phone?”
Adele grinned. That girl would survive a nuclear war.
“Please thank everyone there for their generosity,” Luna mumbled woodenly. She inserted the envelope inside the cover of the book. There was no spark to her. Nothing. Adele had always been able to read her before. Now she had no idea what the teenager was thinking.
“My cousin Yolanda is coming to visit this afternoon,” said Esme. “Maybe that will cheer Luna up. I’m hoping. Right, mami?” Esme turned to Adele. “Let me walk you out.”
Adele looked over at Luna. There was a fraction of a second when the teenager lifted her gaze and Adele saw something push through the fog. Panic? Anger? Fear? Dulce and Mateo seemed fine—well, as fine as any child could be who had just watched the government wrench their father away from them.
But Luna? Esme seemed so kind and loving. And yet—
So had Señora Trejo.
Adele grabbed Luna’s hand. She squeezed it hard enough for the sensation to register. She waited for Luna to look up at her. “You know La Casa’s number, right?”
Luna nodded. Adele took out a business card and scribbled her cell on the back. She shoved it inside the book.
“You need to talk, call me at La Casa or on my cell anytime. Day or night. I’ll call you back right away. You understand?”
“You worry too much, Doña Adele,” said Esme. “Luna will be just fine.”
Luna’s demeanor made Adele more anxious than ever to get Manuel returned to Lake Holly. As soon as she got back to her house, she dialed Judge Hallard’s cell phone herself. Hallard picked up on the third ring. He sounded out of breath.
“Oh my goodness, Judge. Thank you so much for answering.”
“I’m at the gym, Miss Figueroa. But if this is when Schulman wants to talk, okay.”
“He hasn’t called you yet?”
“No.”
“There must be some mistake. He told me he was going to call you.”
“I’ve had my cell phone on since I spoke to you yesterday, young lady. There are no missed calls from Schulman on it.”
“Perhaps he dialed wrong. Can you call him?”
Silence. Damn. She’d overstepped her bounds. She heard him take a long pull of water.
“Look, Miss Figueroa,” he exhaled. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but a man eyeing a seat in the U.S. Senate will promise a lot of things he has no intention of delivering on. I have no idea whether that’s the case here or not. But I can’t stick this Serrano guy at the front of the line without a say-so from Schulman. That hasn’t happened.”
“But he promised,” said Adele, well aware of how much she sounded like her nine-year-old daughter at the moment.
“In my long experience in Washington, I can tell you that the words ‘I promise’ have about as much weight as a college freshman’s sobriety pledge. Maybe he’s sincere; maybe he’s just dodging a bullet. The only way for me to know is if he calls. I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful than that, but if Schulman doesn’t want to stick his neck out for this Serrano, I most certainly cannot.”
Chapter 32
Doña Esme set Luna to work making lunch for the younger children before she left to fetch her boys from their sports activities. She ordered Luna to make grilled cheese sandwiches, but then complained that her tomato slices were too thick.
“You think if you do a bad job, you won’t have to do it again—is that it?” asked Doña Esme.
“No,” Luna insisted. Already this morning before Doña Adele came, Luna had done two loads of laundry, mopped the upstairs, and wiped down the toilets. “I’m trying my best,” she said.
“This is your best?” Doña Esme held up a lumpy slice of tomato and flung it back at her. “This is not a free ride here, chica. You’re a woman. Not a child. You stay, you help.” She folded her arms across her chest and regarded Luna with narrowed eyes like she’d stolen something. “You certainly seem to be helping yourself in every other way.”
Luna wasn’t sure what she meant. All she knew was that she barely slept last night. She awoke cotton-mouthed, a metallic taste lingering at the back of her palate. Her hair had turned stringy here. She hadn’t had a chance to wash it, but that wasn’t the reason. Her whole body felt like it was carrying the scent of something decayed. Fear. That’s what this was. She couldn’t make her mind forget last night, the blood-soaked mattress, the raw evidence of something indecent and secretive in that basement. She knew, too, that if she didn’t do everything Doña Esme and the señor told her to do, she’d never see Papi again. And so she kept her head down and tried to slice the tomato more evenly.
Mateo and Dulce came inside and helped her make lunch the moment Doña Esme went to pick up her sons. They took the plastic off the American cheese slices. They poured milk into glasses. They didn’t fight like they usually did. They didn’t say anything at all. Luna tried to pretend they were just making a normal lunch together, but even they knew something was wrong.
“We should call Alirio and Maria José,” Mateo suggested softly. Luna shook her head, no.
“Papi is still in Pennsylvania,” she reminded Mateo. “Mr. Schulman is the only one with the power to help him. The Gonzalezes are the only ones with the power to convince Mr. Schulman. If we leave, Papi will lose his chance.”
“But Doña Esme isn’t very nice to you,” said Mateo. Dulce nodded in agreement.
“Maybe things will get better,” Luna said. She wasn’t sure even they believed that.
The atmosphere improved a bit in the afternoon. Christian, Alex, and David came home. After lunch, they kicked a ball around with Mateo. Doña Esme let Dulce pet one of her parakeets. After Luna stacked t
he dishwasher, she was allowed to go up to her room to do some homework.
She stared at her biology textbook, but her mind was a blank. Her mother’s begonia sat on the windowsill. A few of the pink petals had dropped to the dirt. The leaves were yellow in the center and starting to brown and crinkle at the edges. Mami’s begonia didn’t like its new home. Luna understood.
She couldn’t get herself to concentrate, so she took out Esperanza Rising and tried to read the opening paragraphs about Mexico that she had liked so much when she first read them in sixth grade. But all it did was fill her with sadness, thinking about Papi going to this place she didn’t remember, this place he couldn’t leave. She forced herself to answer some biology questions in preparation for her test Monday, but most of the review material she needed was on Mr. Ulrich’s webpage. To access it, she needed a computer. Luna and her siblings used to use the computer at La Casa since they didn’t have one of their own. Luna didn’t know if the Gonzalezes would let her use one of theirs.
Before she could get up the nerve to ask them, exhaustion overtook her and she fell asleep. When she woke up, the house was quiet. There was a note shoved under the door in big, bold print that she recognized as Mateo’s: Doña Esme’s cousin Yolanda took us all to the movies. See you later—Love, Mateo and Dulce.
Luna walked downstairs. The house was empty and quiet save for the parakeets. She figured no one would mind if she used one of the computers to access her science teacher’s webpage. There was a laptop on a small table in the corner of the kitchen. A Mac—much nicer than the boxy old desktop she used at La Casa. Luna turned it on. The screen lit up instantly with some kind of purplish space galaxy in the background and a row of icons below.
Luna knew she was supposed to be accessing Lake Holly High’s website, but she ended up typing Lords Valley PA into Google just to see what the area looked like that Papi was in. It was silly, she knew, since Papi would never see any of it. Still, it comforted her in an odd way to see that it was an area in the Pocono Mountains full of wooded hills and streams. She wondered if perhaps he got to take a walk outside in some fenced area. Maybe he could see the trees. He’d always loved nature.
She closed out of the images and typed in her school’s website, then clicked on Mr. Ulrich’s webpage. Some of the study materials needed to be printed out. Luna didn’t see a printer, but the information was simple enough that she could copy it by hand. She searched the kitchen drawers for a pen and scrap paper. Doña Esme was so fanatically neat that even scrap paper and pens were hard to find.
She finally located a few pens in one drawer, along with one crumpled piece of paper. One side was blank. The other side was a flyer of some sort with several photographs of a girl. A dead girl.
Luna stared at the pictures. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t tear herself away. On the bottom of the flyer, the police listed a phone number to call if anyone knew the girl or had information on her.
She had information.
She wished she didn’t.
She wished she’d never seen the blue room in the basement with the slide bolt on the door and the bloodstains on the mattress.
The overhead kitchen light flicked on behind her. Doña Esme stood in the doorway, staring at Luna, staring at the flyer in her hands.
Chapter 33
The envelope that Charlie Gonzalez had given Adele would be easy to test for DNA.
The problem wasn’t the test. The problem was the paperwork.
“I’m sorry, Detective. I need an authorized signature and case number before I can test this envelope,” said Dr. Chang when Vega walked into the medical examiner’s office on Saturday morning. Dr. Chang was a tiny Chinese woman with flawless skin and the iron disposition of a tank commander at Tiananmen Square. She refused to budge without the required signature.
Dr. Gupta would have. She knew Vega and bent the rules for him occasionally. But Gupta was in Virginia at her son’s college for the weekend. Vega tried Dolan, who was off this weekend and visiting his in-laws at the Jersey Shore. Dolan agreed to give Vega the authorization over the phone. (“This better be good, Jimmy. No way am I putting my head on the chopping block over this.”) But when Vega waved his cell in front of Dr. Chang with the good news that Dolan was on the line and would give the authorization, Dr. Chang just shook her head.
“I’m sorry, Detective. I need an original signature on the forms submitted by the investigating detective.”
“Ay, puñeta! That’s ridiculous!”
“Rules are rules,” said Dr. Chang. “Surely, the DNA test can wait a day or two until an investigating detective can submit the request?”
But it couldn’t. Vega already knew it couldn’t. He had only to think of Adele last night, the way she shrank from his touch at the memory of something so dark and deep she wouldn’t talk about it, not even to him. And he knew that the damage was too great, too permanent, to chance it on another girl.
He left the ME’s office and went back to his own. He needed a warm body to sign the authorization, but it was hard to find one on a weekend. Captain Waring was at a police conference in Albany. Vega tried to hunt him down without luck. Greco’s home and cell phones went straight to voice mail. Vega left vague but insistent messages on each (he couldn’t commit anything confidential to a recording). He could already picture Greco cursing yet another false lead—on his free time, no less. Vega wasn’t surprised when Greco didn’t return the call.
He couldn’t spend his whole workday chasing after people. He had reports to finish, emergencies to field. A husband had shot his wife in a domestic dispute last night when Vega was off-duty. She was clinging to life, but it was anybody’s guess whether the attempted murder charge would turn to murder. Vega needed to read through the arresting officer’s report and witness statements. He had to hunt down the neighbor who’d made the 911 call and reinterview her on a few key points.
By early afternoon, he’d made little progress on any front. Waring and Greco hadn’t called him back, and the neighbor/witness on this new case was now backtracking, saying she hadn’t seen everything she’d claimed the night before.
Vega was at his desk, picking at a soggy sandwich, when his cell phone rang. The caller ID said it was Joy. That surprised him. He hadn’t spoken to her since Thursday afternoon on the Gonzalezes’ driveway. He’d wanted to call since their argument, but he was afraid that anything he said right now could jeopardize the fragile house of cards he was trying to assemble around Charlie and Esme. If she needed him, however, that trumped all other considerations. He picked up.
“You haven’t called,” she blurted into the phone. She sounded hurt. It felt like a punch to the gut to think he was the source.
“I’ve been up to my eyeballs in work, Chispita. I’m at work now.” He wanted to remind her that she was the one who told him to “back off,” but he didn’t think this was the time to bring it up.
“You could have called to apologize.”
Vega sighed. “I’m sorry if you feel I was rough on you. But everything I did was to protect you. And I succeeded. You’re not a suspect anymore—”
“That’s not an apology, Dad. That’s a rationalization. Don’t you see the difference?”
“You’re in the clear. That’s what counts.”
“Because you’ve arrested someone else, I’m guessing. Not because you finally believe me.”
“I do believe you.”
“Huh. Now.”
“No. Always. But I needed to protect you. That’s what a father does.”
Except when he can’t, thought Vega. Who was protecting Luna Serrano now that her father couldn’t?
Me. I have to. There is no one else.
“Listen, Joy, I’ve got to go. There’s something important I have to do. Maybe we can grab dinner sometime this week? My treat?”
“No pizza. I can’t eat gluten. Or meat. Or—”
“I’ll rustle up a place that only serves free-range broccoli—”
“Daaa
d—”
“Okay, okay. Deal.”
Vega hung up and dialed Greco’s phones again. His cell phone still went to voice mail, but a woman picked up his home phone. Vega wracked his brains to remember Greco’s wife’s name: Joan? Joanna? Joelle? Greco always just referred to her as “the wife.” Vega identified himself and explained that he needed to speak to Greco right away and that he wasn’t picking up his cell.
“He went fishing,” she said. “He always turns his phone off when he goes fishing. That’s half the reason I think he goes out there.”
“And where does he go?”
“He keeps a rowboat at the Eastlake Reservoir. If you’re willing to drive over there, I’ll bet you can find him.”
The Eastlake Reservoir was about forty minutes away by car. It was almost three in the afternoon by the time Vega parked on the shoulder of the road next to the reservoir. Already the sun was eking out its final blast of warmth for the day.
Vega scanned the parked cars until he picked out Greco’s big white Buick. Good. He was here at least. He trudged down a path of loose gravel until he came to what looked like a graveyard of steel-gray boats all turned over like turtles retracted in their shells. This was a reservoir, so only metal rowboats were allowed. Vega cupped a hand across his brow to block the glare and skimmed a glance across the water. There were several boats bobbing in the distance, all of them parked far away from one another like shy kids at a dance. Greco was easy to spot. He had a little beige fishing cap on his head with a couple of feather lures pinned to it and a red stick in his mouth that even at this distance Vega recognized as a Twizzler. Vega called out from the shore and waved his arms furiously.
“Grec! Turn on your phone!”
Greco ignored him at first, then squinted, then threw the licorice out of his mouth and gave Vega the finger. But he picked up his phone at least, and for that, Vega was grateful.
“What did you do?” Greco demanded. “Plant a GPS up my ass? I swear, Vega, there are venereal diseases that are easier to get rid of than you.”
A Blossom of Bright Light Page 26