Killer Calling: A Plain Jane Mystery (A Cozy Christian Collection) (The Plain Jane Mysteries Book 7)

by Traci Tyne Hilton

  “Sort of.” Jane nodded. “Do any of you do that? Or your mothers?”

  Pillow-thrower stood up and nudged a girl who had been sitting at her feet. “Venga, Mami.” The two girls left the room.

  Dimples bit her lip. “I don’t.”

  Esperanza laughed. “Of course not, Maria. You aren’t old enough yet.” Esperanza’s posture improved, her shoulders straightened. “Eva is teaching me. Very interesting work.”

  “Very cultural?” Jane asked.

  “Exactamente. Very cultural. Making stories in string. Keeping records with knots. Very cultural, very beautiful.”

  “Ahh, I think that is a little different than what I do. Can you tell me about it?”

  Dimples shook her head, subtly.

  Esperanza smirked. “It is only for women. The men don’t understand it. It is like…our language. A way we can . . .” She scratched her head. “A way we can tell our stories and yet be safe.”

  “Do you have many stories that would put you in danger?” Jane tried to control her nerves, but she had difficulty, so she tucked her shaking hands under her legs.

  “No, no.” Esperanza laughed. “It is of the past, si? From before. Now we just do it to . . . remember.”

  “No es de México.” A girl who had been quietly reading in a glider rocker on the other side of the room frowned.

  “It’s not Mexican?” Jane asked.

  “It’s older. Ancient,” Esperanza said. “Maybe Peru? But it is good to learn, and who knows, maybe we are de Peru also? Orphans have no history.” She crossed her arms and sat back, satisfied.

  The glider rocker girl let off a long monologue in fast, quiet Spanish that Jane couldn’t follow at all.

  Dimples responded in English. “Esperanza shouldn’t have said anything about it, but it will be okay.” She looked at Jane. “This is not for men, or visitors. At an orphanage, where people come and go and never come back, where we kids are a . . . tourist thing . . . we need something that is just for us.”

  “Ah. I’m sorry. I won’t ask any more questions about it.”

  Esperanza frowned. “Secrets are not safe. When I am in charge someday I won’t let there be any secrets at the orphanage.”

  The girl with the dimples didn’t acknowledge Esperanza, and left.

  The girl in the glider rocker resumed her reading.

  Esperanza looked at the book in Jane’s hands. “Keep it. Read it. And make sure no one in your church reads it. For the kids.” She got up and left, too.

  Jane tucked the book under her arm and went back to her dorm to read. She’d need her Spanish-English dictionary if she wanted to really understand what it was about, but from the conversation she had just had, it seemed well worth understanding.

  9

  The book seemed to espouse a minority opinion that women were less than men because Eve had caused the Fall, and that their purpose and role was to forever be apologizing to men for it. At least that was what Jane gathered.

  The family discipline was highly biased against girls; family roles were highly biased against women.

  It was an ugly book.

  She tucked it into her pillowcase and went to the chapel, hoping to find Jake.

  He was there, and alone. Jane caught him up with her news on the book, the strings and knots, and everything else she had learned from the girls.

  “Interesting.” He sat close to her on one of the wooden pews, his hand wrapped around hers. “The boys tell a similar story. Of the seven families, three have been swept up in the philosophies of the book, and the boys that have graduated out of those homes are very mad about it. They do not approve of their sisters being blamed for all of the problems in the homes. They were really clear about it, in fact, going so far to call it out as abuse and a sin.”

  “Wow.” Jane gave a silent prayer of gratitude for the wisdom of the young men. “So they haven’t been brainwashed by it.”

  “Nope, but it looks like the little boys are eating it up.”

  “Of course they are, little kings in their own houses,” Jane said.

  “The teen guys aren’t having it. They have taken to their own kind of justice.”

  “So, they beat their little brothers up a bit?”

  “I don’t know how far they take it, but the amount of anger I heard got under my skin. They sound like they are overcorrecting. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear they had really hurt some of these little guys.” Jake sounded depressed, which caught his wife off guard.

  “Or maybe killed the father who had introduced the idea to the orphanage.” Jane spoke low, the implications that the children, supposed to be in a safe place where they could flourish and learn about the Lord, turning to murder was horrific.

  Jake was silent, one vein in his temple throbbing, his jaw twitching.

  “If they had done it, would their mothers and sisters cover for them? Could this have been a whole community-inspired uprising?” Jane asked.

  “What if it was?”

  “What if that is the secret being communicated in those bundles of string?” Jane gripped Jake’s hand. “If so, they will never report it to the police.”

  Jake furrowed his brow. “Then again, the widow and the other two women who support this philosophy probably also know the secret knot code, right? It doesn’t seem like they could plot to murder someone’s husband using a secret code the women are all in on.”

  “Maybe they have a secret set of secret code strings that she never saw.” Jane was quiet. The reality that a good work could be undermined so thoroughly by bad teaching was hard to swallow. It wasn’t how she wanted the adult world to work.

  “That could be. And anyway, if the heart medicine theory is right, his widow had to be in on it.”

  “Do you think any of this could have anything to do at all with Chase and Tory?” Jane brought the issue back around to her job. “They’re hiding something, and the murder happened now, not last month or next month. Could they have been the assassins? Did they bring a poison to Mexico and use it to kill this guy?”

  “How would they have known him? Tory is an Oregon girl and Chase is a Midwest boy. Pat Bromfield was a Southern Californian living in Mexico.”

  “Don’t forget that Chase’s little sister came from this orphanage.”

  Jake stood up and began to pace up and down the middle aisle. “I had forgotten. Sorry. So they do have strong ties, and maybe a reason to dislike the turn things have taken here.”

  Jane was on the edge of her pew. “Yes. Then again, Chase said his sister hasn’t kept in touch with the orphanage at all, and this was his own first visit, so how would they know about a subtle cultural shift like this?” She sat back again and crossed her arms, chewing on the problem.

  “He told us that he had never been here and that his sister hadn’t kept in touch. But don’t you remember how smooth and polished the conversation had been? Like a professional interview. He knew what he was going to say when asked, and he said it.”

  “So he lied.” Jane stated it as fact.

  “Or he only told as much as he felt necessary.”

  “I disagree. If he had been keeping in touch and knew about what you called a weird cultural shift, then saying he didn’t have connections was a lie.”

  “Okay, let’s go with he lied.” Jake gave in.

  “He also lied about meeting fans.”

  “What if he didn’t?”

  “Don’t be naïve. That was a lie. He’s lied twice to us now. Do you think he’s one of those musicians who signed with a Christian label just to get famous?” Jane was disgusted by this version of Chase, and hoped it wasn’t true. But what were the alternatives?

  “No comment.”

  “You can’t no comment at this juncture. You must comment. One thing in my life with you I have always been able to count on has been your comments.”

  He remained silent.

  “Please comment.” She gave him a come hither look.

  Jake stopped pacing for
a moment and faced her. “Remember the midwives at the beginning of Exodus? They told the authorities that the Hebrew babies came too fast so they couldn’t drown them.”

  “They lied to save the babies.” Jane reflected.

  “Chase and Tory suspected us all along. To them we are paid spies lying about our faith on a mission trip. If they are on some kind of crusade they could justify telling us whatever they wanted to satisfy us.”

  “We’re Pharaoh’s thugs.”

  “And her dad is the Pharaoh,” Jake agreed.

  “But what does Mr. Trives have to do with all of this?” Jane dragged her hands through her hair. As usual, Jake’s commentary had been both enlightening and bewildering.

  “That’s probably one step too far. I don’t think he would have hired us to catch Chase in a crime if he was the man secretly behind the crime.”

  “Or would he?” Jane shook her head, as though sort her thoughts out. “Nah. He wouldn’t.”

  “We’re back to square one,” Jake said.

  “What on Earth is Tory Trives doing at an orphanage in Mexico?” Jane leaned back in her pew and closed her eyes. She needed miraculous intervention, and she needed it in the five days before her plane left for Portland.

  As if on cue, but not at all Jane’s idea of a miracle, Riley swept into the room and dropped to the floor at Jane’s feet. “We need to talk somewhere private.”

  Jane sat up “It’s just me and Jake in here.”

  Riley looked from side to side eyeing the open windows. “More private than this.”

  “We’re completely alone.” Jake sounded impatient.

  “I just need Jane for a few minutes. Come with me.” Riley jumped up again, not looking to see if Jane followed, and led her across the campus to a small pantry at the back of the cafeteria.

  “There are more people around, which means it’s louder, which means we’re less likely to be overheard. Plus, tucked away in here, no one can read my lips. I didn’t like the looks of all of those open windows. People could be hiding just on the other side, listening to anything. Or they could have come in at any minute.” She grinned with pride.

  “Good idea.” Jane had to give her props, it had been good thinking. It irked Jane some that these ideas didn’t pop into her head, too. She was the professional, after all.

  “I’ve spoken with five of the housemothers. Not one of them is pro-Bromfield.”

  “How did you manage this?” Jane sat on a crate of potatoes, ready for a long conversation.

  Riley sat on the concrete floor. “I just went from house to house and asked them if I could do anything for them. I meant it, so it was all good. And the police didn’t care. Lots of them saw me, but I don’t think we’re in the kind of danger that Miguel made it sound like.”

  “Please don’t take any dangerous risks, Riley. I would never forgive myself if something happened to you.”

  Riley waved away Jane’s concern. “I was totally fine. But here’s the thing. Some of the mothers were cool, but didn’t need anything, and weren’t in a chatty mood. But five of them were really easy to get into conversation. While they were definitely showing signs of grief—bloodshot eyes from crying and that kind of thing—none of them said that Pat was a friend. And three of them said it was for the best, for the kids.”

  “That’s wild. Are you sure that’s how they said it?”

  “Oh yes, I’m fluent in Spanish. Went to an immersion school in L.A. before I moved to Kelseyville. That’s what they said and that’s what they meant.”

  “Did they elaborate? Explain why, or anything?”

  “Maria Paloma Hernandez-Vega from house three did. She was the Bromfields’ next door neighbor. It took a few minutes for her to warm up, but once she did—WHOO-boy! She called him, well, in English it would be a misogynist. She said he wasn’t even a Christian, not a real one, but a power-hungry man. She said his book disgusted her, and that her dear friend Olivia had changed after her marriage. Had turned from a fun, happy girl to a sad, quiet old person.”

  “Maria Paloma thought Pat was abusing his wife.” Jane stated it, disgusted that her worst fears were probably true.

  “Yes. That’s what she thinks. And she thinks he was abusive to the kids, but sneaky, though I guess most abusers are. Never hit them in the face, or anywhere a bruise would show. Used humiliation instead of violence. Nothing dirty, of course. Just power hungry. And always the little girls were punished and the little boys were rewarded. This, of course, is what Maria-Paloma said. The other two women who weren’t pro-Pat didn’t give nearly the same amount of details. They were certain, though, that the death was God’s will, and that God knew what he was doing. But Maria Paloma . . . she had a lot to say.” Riley’s voice got louder as she spoke, and she bounced on her heels. “What can I do now?”

  “You’ve done great, but you scare me. Seriously. If someone killed Pat, I don’t want you running around alone.”

  “Phooey. No one would hurt me. No reason to. I’m just some flighty California girl trying to help the sad people. I’m playing innocent and stupid. It always works.”

  “I bet.” Jane smiled. Riley wasn’t that much younger—maybe five years—but she was so happy and optimistic and excitable. Like a puppy. It was the first time Jane had seen what she probably looked like to her mentors, and it wasn’t flattering. Youth and enthusiasm were fine in their place, but a bit overwhelming when adults had work to do.

  On the other hand, Riley had done a great job and had gotten farther than Jane felt like she had, in a much shorter time. She couldn’t fault her for that. Enthusiasm went a long way.

  “Okay, you got away with it this time, but if you were to get arrested, or get yourself in the eye of the killer, you’d be in trouble I couldn’t help you out of. So listen carefully, and follow directions, okay?”

  Riley nodded, face flushed.

  “There is a teenage girl named Esperanza, who lives in the girls’ teen house. Make friends with her. I’ve already asked too much about a certain thing they want to keep secret. But Esperanza hates both Pat Bromfield and secrets. So see if you can crack her on the code of the strings.”

  “The code of the strings?” Riley showed enough sense to repeat the phrase with some disbelief. “That can’t be real.”

  “It is, and I think it holds the key to the killer.” Jane gave her voice a dramatic hush. If she could keep Riley engaged with Esperanza she’d keep the kid safe, and maybe even get the information she needed.

  “You think Esperanza will spill to me?”

  “I don’t know. You’ll just have to try and find out.”

  “You’ve got it.” The gleam in Riley’s eye was something to behold. Jane wondered if yet another future missionary was being led away by the siren song of investigation.

  10

  Jane recognized great gaps in her store of information as she ran through the things she had learned, discovered, or inferred. And one bit related directly to Tory, who had to be her main concern, in the end.

  Did Tory really have terrible allergies?

  Jane gave her nose a vigorous rubbing until it looked red and roughed up, and then made her way to the nurse’s office.

  The nurse was a sweet, round, local woman in a clean white uniform. “Buenas tardes,” she greeted Jane kindly. “What can I do for you?” Her accent was beautiful, like a woman used to speaking English, but in no hurry to lose her own voice.

  “I’m out of my antihistamines. I guess I didn’t pack enough.” Jane clasped her hands and hoped to look embarrassed. “I think my friend Tory came here the other night and you helped her.”

  The nurse frowned. “No, no girls have come in the night.”

  “Oh, I must have been mistaken.” Jane sat on the edge of the exam chair.

  “But how could you be mistaken about something like that?” The nurse flipped through the pages of a spiral bound desk calendar. “Did she say she came here in the night?”

  “I thought she did.”
<
br />   “Then she lied. There isn’t any other place she could have gone. I lock up at eight, and nobody called me.” She frowned at her calendar. “And I have the only key to my clinic.”

  “She’s not really the kind of girl who would lie. Maybe she meant she went to see someone else. Someone who had some medicine. Maybe Ginger,” Jane said.

  “No. She couldn’t have done that. Ginger wouldn’t give out medicine. We have to be very careful here so the government doesn’t catch us breaking rules. It is a difficult balance to always be pleasing the government but taking care of the children with donations. We don’t always have enough, but we can’t possibly break the rules.”

  “Would they shut you down?”

  “We could not afford the official and unofficial fines they would impose on us. We must always be above board . . . No, your friend lied.” She looked up at Jane and made unflinching eye contact. “I don’t like liars.”

  Jane rubbed her nose instinctively. “She must have meant she got some from our leader, Owen. I’m sorry I bothered you. I’ll go ask him.”

  The nurse relaxed back into her chair. “She went to the men’s dorm at night? She is a bold girl, if she’s not a liar.” The nurse pursed her lips. “Go ask her again what she said, but if she says she came to me, don’t trust her. In this world, you must be very careful who you are friends with.” A light knock on the door interrupted her.

  “Bienvenidos,” She welcomed the newcomer, a preteen boy with a scrape on his forehead. “Been climbing in the orchard again?” she asked him in Spanish.

  He grinned ruefully.

  “Gracias.” Jane thanked the nurse quietly and left.

  The nurse confirmed her suspicions about Tory. She hadn’t spent an evening there, and probably didn’t have severe allergies. She was sneaking around, day and night, to do something she wasn’t willing to admit.

  But the nurse had revealed something else in her surprisingly intense talk. She was paranoid, and doing her best to teach people to be wary.

  Probably a result of the abuse she was seeing and treating. If she had been reporting it to Dr. Rodriguez, she had to trust him to take care of it. And it sounded like she couldn’t dare report it to the police for fear that she would bring down a punishment to the orphanage that they literally couldn’t afford.