“Morning,” She greeted a perky blonde sitting next to her.
“Buenos días,” The girl said with a smile. “You look like you’re feeling better.”
“Of, for sure. But the trip over was rough on me!” Jane sipped her coffee and hoped the idea of prolonged travel sickness would help the other teammates forgive her for her snobbish seeming attitude.
“You and your boyfriend seem to be hanging out with Chase McBane a lot.” The girl said his full name with a note of awe. “Have you known him long?”
“Er, my husband and I, we just met Chase and Tory.” She wasn’t sure how the marriage was supposed to fit into her fake backstory. Probably Flora hadn’t wanted them to pretend to be single. That would be a weird thing to lie about. Christians got married in college all the time.
“Husband? That’s cool. How long have you been married?”
“Just a couple of months.”
“Wow! And you are already on a mission. You guys rock. I hope I can have a husband like that someday.”
Jake was on the other end of the table trying to balance an orange on his thumb. Jane laughed. “He’s fun, that’s for sure.”
“What job did you have yesterday?” the blonde asked.
“Cafeteria duty, you?”
“I was in the preschool, but you know what was weird?”
“What?” Jane only gave the girl half an ear. Tory and Chase were secluded in a back corner and she could almost make out what Tory was saying, but not quite.
“Well, see the little boys and girls were kind of fighting, play fighting, I think, I can’t be sure because they kind of talk baby talk Spanish and while I’m basically fluent there are like, subtleties, you know? Things you don’t really learn in a classroom. But they were arguing and one of the little boys pushed one of the girls, the teacher saw it, and she punished the girl.”
“Oh, that’s too bad.” Jane had almost deciphered Tory’s last sentence while the blonde rambled on. Something about . . . congestion, probably.
“I thought it was odd since the boy pushed her, but it got weirder. When the house parents came to take the kids home for the afternoon, the teacher pulled aside the parents of the little girl and there was a big lecture between the teacher and the parents. The dad put the little girl in the corner, on her head, like for a headstand. She was bawling, and her face was turning red and she couldn’t really keep herself upright. And every time she fell over they gave her a spanking. I’ve never seen anything like it. It was . . . I don’t know. I didn’t like it.” The blonde’s face drained of color. “But it was the housefather, you know? So it must have been okay. Then again, boy was the one who pushed the girl and he didn’t get into any trouble at all.”
Jane turned her full attention back to the blonde. “They spanked her when she fell over?”
“Yeah. That’s not normal, is it?”
“No, it’s not. Did they do this in the classroom?”
The girl blushed. “No . . . I followed them home, at a discreet distance, and watched through the window.”
“So they did this in private . . .”
“It kind of looked like that.”
“I think you need to tell someone. I don’t think that sounds healthy.”
“But who would I tell? And what would I say?”
“Let’s go to the head office, and . . . just say everything you said to me.”
Jane was late getting to her job for the day.
The blonde, who introduced herself as Riley, repeated everything she had said for the director of the orphanage, Dr. Ben Rodriguez.
Rodriguez an older man, and American, but he had lived in the small village near Ensenada for three decades running the orphanage. He seemed tired. “I will look into it.”
“But it does seem strange, right? Like, he shouldn’t have been hitting that little girl, and making her stand on her head while she was bawling and her face was turning red? That seems like psychological abuse. All the blood rushing to her head, and the snot, you know how it is when you are crying hard, right? I bet she couldn’t even breathe. It was scary to watch.” Riley was leaning forward, almost aggressively, eager to make her point understood. “It can’t be okay that he did that. Do you want me to bring him in here? I can go get him. I would recognize him really easily.”
“I said I would look into it. You’re excused.” He closed his mouth, his lips a thin line, his deep-set eyes half closed.
Jane hooked her arm in Riley’s and walked her out.
“How could he act so calm about it?” Riley asked. “That poor baby girl. It’s hard enough to be an orphan.”
“I’m sure he’ll look into it,” Jane soothed. “He said he would.” Of course she didn’t believe him, but she would look into it, that was for sure. “Let me know if anything else like that comes up, will you?”
“Yes. Absolutely. One hundred percent!” Riley headed off to work in the preschool again, and Jane finally made her way to the bathrooms.
The dorm showers that the men were using was surprisingly clean, if you didn’t count the overwhelming odor of body spray that the male youths had left behind. Other than that, it was an easy job. Spray and wipe and a little polish.
The ladies’ room was messier, if only because long hair tended to shed and bits of toilet paper and tissue from teenage girls’ makeup routines didn’t always make it into the garbage can. But, overall, also an easy clean.
Jane had a list of bathrooms that needed their daily cleaning. It was long. She brushed her hair out of her eyes and wished she had her trusty kerchief to tie it back with. And her own cleaning caddy. The next bathrooms were the “everyone” bathrooms outside the dining hall. Single stall toilets that seemed to attract a line before meals. She had low expectations for their cleanliness.
She propped open the first door with her hip and dragged her mop and bottle of all-purpose cleaner in with her. The man sitting on the floor wasn’t nearly as embarrassed as she was when she realized the room was occupied.
He wasn’t embarrassed at all, in fact.
He was dead.
6
The body in the bathroom was that of the middle-aged Caucasian man. At least that’s what Jane surmised. The gray hair gave him the look of an over-fifty. His skin was pale, his eyes open, startling blue, and very, very dead.
This wasn’t her first time at the dead-body rodeo so she sucked in the disgust that toyed with her gut, and examined him. There was no blood. There was also no obvious sign of a struggle: no ripped clothes, holes in the wall or other torn and broken things in the bathroom with him. His hands were not clenched in fists, but were curled loosely. It might just have been because he was dead, but it was possible he had been attempting to make a fist.
The bathroom door had not been locked. Perhaps he had gone in to be sick and then died instead.
He didn’t stink, neither like a decomposing body or like barf. It was November, so it wasn’t hot enough to make a body decompose fast. Also, the body was stiff with rigor mortis so he couldn’t have been dead that long. She patted her cell phone with a shaky hand, ready to call 911, but remembered she was not in America and had no idea what the protocol in Mexico was when you found a dead body.
While in the bathroom taking stock of the death scene, she had managed to stay cool and controlled. A professional private detective. But when she stepped into the sunny fall day in Baja California, with voices of children playing on the playground and birds singing in trees, she shivered. The contrast was too much. In sympathy with his final illness, she was stricken with the urge to be ill and to collapse, but she had to keep herself together.
If Tory and Chase had brought the drug cartel to the orphanage, her job had just gotten a lot more dangerous.
She ran across the orphanage campus to the main office buildings, her lungs burning and legs shaking and mind swimming. She had come to this country to discover why Tory Trives was working a mission trip, not to stumble over a dead man.
Th
e door to the office building was locked.
“Hello, hello, hello?” she cried out, hoping that Miguel, the staff person she was most comfortable with, was inside.
No one answered.
She turned around and leaned against the hard steel door for support and prayed to God. She was here to prove a kid had reformed herself, not for murder.
Mr. Rodriguez ambled up the path, hands in his pockets, whistling. He looked happy.
How could he be happy?
“Mr. Rodriguez! Please, you’ve got to come with me.”
“Slow down, what’s the matter?”
“A horrible thing, really horrible. I’m so sorry. In the bathroom. There’s a man, a body, I mean…” She didn’t usually ramble like this. Maybe she was too much in character of youth missionary.
“I don’t understand. Who is in the bathroom? What happened?”
“Just come with me!” She turned and ran. Fortunately, Dr. Rodriguez kept pace with her.
She pulled open the bathroom door and waved her hands at the body. “See? Here. He’s dead. I found him.”
Dr. Rodriguez put a comforting hand on her shoulder. “Thank you for coming to me.” His voice was low, the happiness gone. He had reverted to the tired old man she had met that morning. “Sit down over there,” he turned her to a bench, “and wait. I will take care of everything.”
What followed was a rapid fire of sounds and images flashing like gunshots all around her.
Sirens.
Police.
Fast, loud Spanish conversations swirling over her head.
A small man in a dark uniform with a big gun.
An ambulance.
A tense conversation in Ben Rodriguez’s office where a translator helped her explain to two policemen how she had found the body.
It was the Twilight Zone version of the body-finding scenarios she had been in before, the fear of corrupt police and cartel retribution making her dizzy.
When it was over, Ben gave her a platonic side hug. “You did okay. Don’t worry. That was all routine.”
She nodded. “But who was he?”
Ben wiped his eye. “Pat Bromfield, one of our housefathers.”
“Oh no!”
Ben sat down at his desk. “He’d been with his family for seven years. Seven years. Those poor kids.”
“But he wasn’t Mexican.”
Ben smiled sadly. “He came on a short term trip and fell in love with one of our local ladies. He and Olivia had been so happy. They married and he stayed on as maintenance. Kept begging to be houseparents. We had so many kids we couldn’t say no.”
“He spoke Spanish?”
“Very well. He had been a Spanish teacher in L.A. before he came here.” He picked up his phone. “If you don’t mind, Jane, I have some phone calls to make.”
“Of course.” She let herself out and ran to find Jake.
“Slow down!” His voice came from behind her. “I’ve been waiting outside that office door for two hours.”
She stopped, panting. “Jake, what’s going on at this orphanage?”
“We’re going to have to get an insider who likes to talk. You’ve got two bodies and an abuse case so far.”
“Two bodies?”
“You didn’t forget the big traditional funeral happening this evening, did you?”
“I wasn’t counting that, but maybe I had better.” Jane bit her lip. Who was it Miguel had said was dead? A maintenance man?
“And I think you’d better call Flora and find out what she wants you to do.”
“Good idea.”
Jane locked herself in one of the single stall bathrooms farthest from the hubbub of the orphanage to make her call.
“SCORI, how can I help you?” Flora’s assistant answered the phone.
“Miranda, this is Jane. I need Flora immediately.”
“Sorry Jane, she’s undercover right now.”
“What about Rocky?”
“Nein. He’s golfing with some donors.”
“I’ve got a serious problem in Mexico. Two suspicious deaths.”
“No kidding.” Miranda didn’t sound impressed.
“I came here on a drugs case—one that we are pretty sure isn’t real in the first place. Now two dead men. What would Flora want me to do?”
“Take notes.”
“Of course, but what else?”
“What else is there? Observe and deduce, Jane.”
“Can you have her call me back when she’s free? I really want to talk to her.”
“She’s in deep right now. I have no idea when I will see her or hear from her, but I’ll put a Post-it on her desk.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“Chin up, Jane. You’re a real detective now.”
Jane hung up. The conversation had not been worth the international charges.
Jake was waiting on the other side of the bathroom door.
“Let’s take a walk.” She looped her arm through his. “I think we need to talk.”
“Yup.”
They wandered over to the orchard where they could walk between the almond trees in privacy.
“I have no reason to think that Chase is selling drugs,” Jake began. “But something is fishy.”
“I can’t decide if Tory is using or not. She has the look, and she went missing yesterday, and she actually wanted to clean the bathrooms. But it could still be jet lag and allergies.”
“And now this man is dead. Did you learn who he was?” Jake asked.
“Yeah.” She repeated the story of the only Anglo house father.
“Two kind of young-for-dying white guys dying of non-violent causes in the same week That’s fishier than Chase’s fan hangout.”
“I want to shadow Tory. I need to find her now, and not let her out of my sight. You never know, this Pat fellow might have seen something he shouldn’t have seen.”
“Then again,” Jake said, “the other fellow died before we got here.”
Jane tugged her hair into a tight ponytail. “Sure. If this place is a regular delivery site for drug mules who have a perfectly legal reason to be here, any number of people could have been killed through the years. In fact, Flora warned me that if this was a real drug situation it could get pretty dangerous.”
“I’ll buddy up to Mr. Ben while you shadow Tory. We might be able to learn the cause of death early that way.”
“Okay, babe.” She gave his arm a squeeze.
The funeral was canceled. Claude Marshall would stay in the cooler at the funeral home for a little while longer. Nothing had been said about the death of Pat being suspicious, but the volunteers were sequestered in their dorms and all of the resident families met in the Bromfield home to comfort the bereaved. Only Miguel, the volunteer coordinator, and Ginger, the permanent preschool volunteer, stayed with the teams—Ginger in the ladies’ dorm and Miguel in the men’s.
“What did the body look like?” Riley, the girl who had reported the possible abuse, asked Jane.
Jane described him, leaving out the staring, dead eyes and the body stiff with rigor.
“That was him.” Riley’s voice was a low, dramatic whisper. “That’s the guy that was hitting the little girl.”
“I thought you said he was spanking her,” Jane clarified.
“Hitting, spanking, same thing.”
“No, it’s not. You have to be really clear when you talk about things like this.”
“He was spanking her really hard, with an open hand, sometimes on her bottom, sometimes on the back of her legs, and a few times on the shoulder. I call that hitting.”
“Hmm. That does sound a bit like a gray area.” They were huddled on Jane’s bunk together, across from Tory’s bunk.
Tory was lying down with her eyes closed and her earphones on.
So far Jane had managed to keep an eye on her. Being confined to their dorms had helped. “Can you be sure we are talking about the same guy?”
“Yeah. It was the white dad, in house
four.”
“Ginger,” Jane called out.
Ginger was sitting on the floor with some of the high school girls, having an emotional talk about the fragility of life. She stood up. “Yeah?”
“Got a minute?”
“Sure.” Ginger laid a comforting hand on the shoulder of a girl with braided black hair, then joined Jane and Riley.
“I just wanted to know what house the Bromfields live in.” Jane patted the bed, inviting Ginger to join them.
“They’re in house four.” Ginger crouched on the floor in front of them.
“How many kids do they have?”
“Ten, just like everyone.”
“That’s sure a lot of kids. How do they keep them from fighting?” Riley jumped right into the hot topic, though Jane would have preferred to ease her way in.
Ginger tilted her head. “Depends on the family, but there are some guidelines the families all adhere to. Very cultural. Traditional.”
“Rules about things like spanking and so on?” Jane asked.
Ginger frowned. “I heard about the complaint that was made.” She gave Riley a stern look. “Annabella is a bully. Yes, little Ezra hit her, but it was after many months of constant abuse. Girls can be bullies, too.”
“Of course. Poor Ezra.” Jane nodded in sympathy. Girls and boys had equal opportunity to be brats and bullies.
“Pat doesn’t—didn’t—abuse the kids. He was a great father.” Ginger’s chin quivered. “He was very creative.”
Jane tried to picture the headstand situation.
Creative?
That was one word for it.
Then the picture that the preschool girls had drawn came to mind, and the headstand game in the playground. “Did he come up with the idea for headstands as punishment?” She tried to sound interested and impressed rather than horrified.
“Yes. Such a clever idea. He said he wants them to turn their attitudes around. It’s like . . .” She paused to think. “It’s like a tangible application of an abstract idea. It helps the kids understand.” She nodded vigorously.
Jane nodded, but only to keep Ginger talking. “If the boys and girls are anything like I was, I bet they become very good at headstands.”
Killer Calling: A Plain Jane Mystery (A Cozy Christian Collection) (The Plain Jane Mysteries Book 7) Page 4