Heart of the World

by Linda Barnes

  “I’ll help you,” I said.

  “Just go away.”

  “It’s your choice,” I said.

  She turned and reentered the flat without meeting my eyes.

  I waited, but I didn’t hear raised voices much less the sound of physical blows. The wiry man didn’t venture into the hallway, so I didn’t get to hit him. Instead, on the way downstairs, I made the choice for Senora Parte, using my cell to phone the cops. I told them to send a unit to check out a minor in need of protective services. I told them to use extreme caution because the perp was on the premises. Then I jammed my hands back in my pockets and trudged downhill to my car, thinking I’d hit a dead end, another dead end, the last dead end. Thinking that now I didn’t know where the hell else to look for Paolina.

  I barely felt the cold.

  CHAPTER 2

  In a homicide investigation the first twenty-four hours are crucial. A missing persons case takes as long as it takes; there’s no cut and dried rule, no drop-dead critical time frame. Small children stumble home unharmed after two days and nights in a snowy forest. A teenage boy moves into the garage and his parents don’t realize he’s living there until he starts a fire in the charcoal grill. Middle-aged adults discover their grown siblings living down the block after a bitter separation of twenty-seven years and wonder why they ever stopped speaking in the first place.

  Delay didn’t mean defeat, I told myself, but the knowledge didn’t lessen my growing panic. There are plenty of other tales, grim tales, brutal tales: a sixteen-year-old lifeguard never returns from a sunny morning at the beach; a three-year-old wanders from a campsite and is never anything more than memories and smudgy photographs.

  I leaned against the rusty fender of the rental, suddenly exhausted, deflated as a leaky tire. The search for Diego, the conviction that finding him would yield Paolina, had sustained me thus far. Now I felt hungry, hollow, scared. I fumbled for the car keys in the pocket of my coat and wished Josefina Parte had found the courage to call the police herself.

  Back in the car, I tried for some heat. A few gulps of chilly air coughed through the vents as I veered off Route 9 onto Harvard Street. Rush-hour-heavy traffic headed mainly in the other direction, so I counted my blessings: Traffic was moving; the child-beater hadn’t pulled a gun.

  Why didn’t all my previous experience with missing persons cases help me now? Why were there so many questions and so few answers? Was Paolina involved with some new boy? Would Diego have known if she were? Why didn’t I know? Why couldn’t I read her mind after all these years? Why did she remain so stubbornly other, so difficult to understand?

  Sometimes I thought all my questions about Paolina boiled down to one: Had I made her life better or worse? I’d taken her on as a Little Sister when she was seven, hoping to improve her life, but the fact was she’d improved mine. The trips to Franklin Park Zoo would have been empty without her game of naming all the animals. The sunlight on New Hampshire ponds was brighter shared with a kid full of wonder at the fish and frogs. Maybe I’d pushed her too hard, maneuvering to keep her playing in the band, trying to give her a dream better than the dream her mother pushed so constantly: marriage and motherhood, marriage and motherhood. Nothing wrong with that dream, I’d told her. It was all the things Marta’s vision didn’t include that made me see red, like success in school and a good job, like stretching yourself and using your talent. And all the things it did include, like the marriage and money trade-off: Paolina’s youth and beauty for some older man’s bank account.

  Marry, I’d told her, as though I had any right to preach. Raise great kids. But first be a person, a complete package, so that when you find a guy it’s not a matter of molding yourself into the person he wants you to be, but a blending of souls. Don’t be the one who compromises all the time. I’d thought she was doing fine, growing, learning, starting to emerge on the other side of a sullen adolescence, beginning to accept herself for who she was, strengths and weaknesses included.

  At the Cambridge Street traffic light, I wriggled my toes inside my boots. They moved reassuringly; no frostbite. A green Pontiac, lights flashing, blocked the right lane, engine dead from the cold. I’d been so sure I’d find her this morning, retrieve her, entrust her to a social worker at the high school, go home to deal with the due diligence and the suspect clerk. Instead I took a right, then a left, and turned into the driveway of Marvin’s Magnificent Cabs, also known as Black & Blue due to the unfortunate color of the cabs, pulling the nasty rental right into the cab garage, thinking maybe Leroy could take a peek at the heater, tell me what the hell I had to do to get some heat. “Buy something decent,” he said.

  That was another problem. I’d put off buying a replacement car, first waiting for the slow as molasses insurance settlement on my old Toyota, then relying on a great used-car deal that fell through at the last minute. Now I was debating between a Crown Vic ex-cop car I could afford and a brand new Mazda from a dealership recommended by Sam. The guy at the dealership had offered me the car at way below invoice, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to get involved with a business that was undoubtedly a Mob front.

  Gloria, my friend, as well as the chief dispatcher and owner of the cab company, was busy at her console, but she picked up the sound of my slushy footsteps and lifted her head. Her face grew somber when she saw the expression on mine.

  “Nothing?”

  I shut the door quickly to conserve the heat. The new office is a hundred percent better than the old one, but the cold spell was a challenge to any heater.

  Gloria wore a dress, a robe more like it, of bright printed cotton, like an African tribal gown. Over that, a sweatshirt and a shawl, and the whole thing looked right on her somehow, as right as a dress can look on a 250-pound wheelchair-bound woman with a round pretty face and bright inquisitive eyes.

  “Worse than nothing.” I peeled off my gloves and scarf. “Wrong trail.”

  “You found the boyfriend?”

  I unzipped my parka. “Dammit, Gloria, it seemed reasonable. She disappears; he disappears. I thought they’d be together. It seemed logical, goddammit.”

  “Don’t get mad, Carlotta, for what I’m gonna say, but do you think this is some kind of challenge? I mean, lost kids are something you do. You think she got tired of waiting for you to look for her?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How much time you spent with her lately?”

  I started to reply, hotly, then shut my mouth. Why get mad at Gloria for telling me the same stuff I’d been telling myself?

  “She’s a smart girl,” Gloria said, eyes narrowing. “Maybe she went somewhere she knows you’ll find her.” “Gloria, this isn’t a scavenger hunt.”

  “Maybe she told you about it, sometime when you weren’t listening. Maybe she said she had a favorite place or a secret dream or a hideaway.” “I did listen to her occasionally.” “How was she with Sam?”

  “She adores Sam. You know that. What are you saying, that she’s jealous of him?”

  Gloria shrugged her massive shoulders. “She knows you always have time for work. Maybe she’s making herself your work.” Hit by a car when she was a teenager, Gloria moves fine from the waist up.

  I sat on a rickety stool in the corner. “I hear what you’re saying, Gloria. I know I haven’t been perfect here, but if Paolina’s playing some game with me, I don’t know the rules.”

  “Sorry.”

  The phone rang and she took a minute to send cabs buzzing around the city. Then she said, “Roz is checking out more of her classmates over at Rindge.”

  “Yeah, I’m going to meet her there later.”

  Roz, my tenant and assistant, a punk twenty-something, doesn’t look like a grownup, so I’d decided she’d be the one to investigate Paolina’s classmates, a non-threatening interrogator. She’d ferreted out the news that Diego had gone missing at the same time as Paolina. I’d fastened on that too quickly, leaped to the wrong conclusion.

  Gloria said, “None
of my cabbies picked her up.”

  “What about other companies?”

  “I put the word out and sweetened it with a C-note. For a C-note, most cabbies will turn in their mothers, their sweethearts, and their best boyhood pals.”

  In other words, she hadn’t heard anything.

  “You eat breakfast?”

  I shook my head impatiently.

  “You gotta eat. Want a bite?”

  I considered the assortment of bags and jars on Gloria’s desk. “What are these?”

  “Those? Sheer heaven. They’re like potato chips made outta chocolate. You know, I been complaining about a lack of imagination in the junk food industry for years, but now I take it all back.” She took a wavy dark shape from a can and used it to scoop up a gob of Marshmallow Fluff. “Strong enough for peanut butter,” she said admiringly.

  “Did you check the hospitals again?” I asked.

  She chewed, swallowed, and nodded.

  “Nothing from the cops?” I was spinning my wheels; if Gloria had found any leads, she’d have gotten in touch. We both knew the drill. I hadn’t even tried to tell the Missing Persons detail in Cambridge that this was different, because up till now, I hadn’t felt it was different.

  Paolina hadn’t run off with Diego. A chasm had opened under my feet, and it seemed as though I couldn’t stop myself from falling, careening down a rabbit-hole Wonderland that wasn’t wonderful at all, that was scary and dark as a mine shaft.

  “You got a last sighting yet?” Gloria’s voice brought me back.

  “Aurelia Gutierrez saw her Friday night at the Macys’ party, around eleven o’clock. Nobody saw her leave with anybody.”

  “But she left.”

  “She’s not still there, Gloria, that’s all I can say.”

  It was hurting Gloria, too. She’d never have left the last row of Fig Newtons in the bag if Paolina hadn’t been gone. I reached over and took one. It tasted like straw and I quickly swallowed some water from the cooler to wash it down.

  Steps out into the frigid night and disappears. It was like I could see the words in print, a huge black headline in a giant newspaper.

  My little sister is a street-smart girl. Central Square, where the Macy twins had held their party, is an urban center jammed with people. The party had broken up by one in the morning, and no one recalled seeing Paolina after 11:15. Eleven fifteen isn’t 3:00 A.M. Central Square is still active at midnight. The porch lights are on; the houses and apartments are close together and close to the street. If someone had attacked her on the street she’d have screamed and kicked up one hell of a fuss. She doesn’t get in cars with strangers. She doesn’t walk alone at night. She carries a whistle.

  God, I went over and over it in my head. You don’t just step out into the frigid night and disappear. She’d tried to run away before.

  Gloria said, “I read in one of my newspapers about all these Mexican girls got kidnapped as sex slaves.”

  She reads grocery-store tabloids, alternates them with romance magazines.

  “Who’s on the airport?” I asked, hoping to avoid the sex-slave stories, aware that I’d known who went out to Logan at one time, but forgotten, what with all the people I’d mobilized in the last two days.

  “Paolina didn’t cab there,” Gloria said. “That was one of the first things I checked. And Lemon went airline to airline, showing her photo.”

  Lemon is one of Roz’s many, many boyfriends. I used my cell again.

  “Did you question the screeners?” I asked him. “The Homeland Security guys?”

  “Tried to, but I got in trouble, interfering with their duties and shit. Thought I’d wind up in the can. I mean, isn’t it their job to help?”

  I hung up without answering. I’d have to do it myself. I’d have to split myself in tiny pieces and go over everything myself.

  Gloria said, “Carlotta, calm down, okay. He’s trying. We’re all trying.”

  “I know.”

  “What are you gonna do now?”

  “It’s time to check her room. Nobody saw her with a suitcase, but it’s the next step.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Marta give the okay?”

  “No.” I should have forced the issue, demanded entry, but I’d been convinced my litle sister was joyriding with Diego.

  “Good luck.” Gloria pressed her lips together.

  “What?” I said. “Spit it out.”

  “If you find her, don’t smack her.”

  “Gloria, I would never—”

  “You look like you want to hit somebody.”

  I felt like punching my fist through the wall. I felt like grabbing the next stranger I saw and throttling him. I felt like running a red light.

  I used to have this neighbor, as proper an elderly Brahmin lady as ever you’d want to meet. One evening, well-lubricated by gin, she’d confessed her cure for frustration. When she wanted to maim and throttle her kin, she crept into her backyard in the wee hours and hurled ice cubes over the fence, punctuating each throw with a curse.

  “Drive carefully,” Gloria said as I zipped my parka and left.

  CHAPTER 3

  Before heading to Marta’s, I drove to my place, listening attentively to the kind of all-news AM sludge I never bother to tune to, an “If it bleeds, it leads” nightmare station, aware that in some recess of my brain I was waiting with dread for the tale of the unidentified corpse of a teenage girl found in an alley. Instead I got a fatal fire, Big Dig leaks, and political corruption hearings. At my Cambridge home, a quick shower in a steamy tub took the place of a night’s sleep. I changed automatically into clean clothes—navy slacks, white turtleneck, navy zip-front sweater— forced down a breakfast more ample than the single Fig Newton, got back in the car, and sped down Mt. Auburn Street while the radio brayed. Mega-mergers: GSC swallows BrackenCorp; will Mark Bracken be forced to retire? Celebrity weddings: Will this superstar’s nuptials trump that one’s in cost, security, and elaborate paparazzi avoidance? When did this drivel become news? I switched channels: Iraqi war casualties, corporate scandals, a crop-spraying plane downed by gunfire in Colombia. While judging whether or not to speed through a yellow traffic light, I glanced in my rearview mirror and braked abruptly, transfixed by the desperation in my eyes, the same look I’d seen in the eyes of clients, parents or guardians of runaways.

  My beautiful girl, gone. Seven-year-old Paolina, with her red knit hat tied under her chin; nine-year-old Paolina, huddling under a blanket on the living room sofa, solemnly counting the seconds after each lightning strike, scared of sudden thunder. Anyone seeing her now, on a bus, on a street corner, in her form-fitting clothes, with her world-weary pose, would see only the hardening shell of the teenager, nothing of the past that had shaped her. No wonder my clients had trouble describing their kids to me. Kids are layered, filled with hidden aspects, with mood-swinging smiles that change their entire faces. A self-contained banker once wept when I asked the color of his son’s eyes.

  The light changed and I hit the gas. Pity didn’t help a damn thing; sympathy didn’t help. Fear didn’t help. I had skills and I needed to use them, dispassionately, coolly.

  For all intents and purposes I presented a professional appearance when I rang the bell of Marta Fuentes’s small white house in Watertown. No one could hear the refrain humming through my mind: Should have come at once, should have come earlier. I tamped down the admonition. How could I have known that two whole days after Marta’s phone call I’d be back at the starting gate, searching for a trail, sniffing the frigid air? I’d done it by the book, tracked down the leads one at a time. What else could I have done? What else could I do?

  The house looked sad and weathered, a tiny single-family in a two-family neighborhood, the servants’ dwelling for a grand Victorian that had burned years ago. Not a great location, but miles better than the old apartment in the East Cambridge projects. Even Marta admitted it was better for the kids, a pocket yard, a basketball hoop with a real net instead o
f hanging chain, a swing set that wasn’t routinely vandalized.

  I rang the bell. I knocked. I waited. I was contemplating a little breaking and entering by the time Marta finally opened the door, her dark hair tousled and her eyes swollen. She wore tight gray sweatpants and a matching tank top. She didn’t say a word, just stared at me and crossed her arms protectively over her chest.

  “Marta, sorry if I woke you.”

  “You don’ wake me,” she said. “But I don’ got no time.”

  “Marta, I need to look at her room.”

  “I’m goin’ out, soon as I fix my face.” She was a small, curvy woman, still attractive, I supposed, still sexy, provided you liked your women predatory. I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’d seen her without heavy-duty makeup. “You know as well as I know, she goes with some boy,” she went on. “Always the same thing, some boy.

  She don’ care about me, about her family. She don’ care about you, neither. We can die from worry, she don’ care.”

  It didn’t look like Marta was going to die from worry any time soon.

  “I’ll just take a look.” I pushed the screen door open a little harder than I needed to and stepped inside. “You go ahead with whatever you have to do.” I didn’t want her company, didn’t want her hovering over me, detailing Paolina’s failures as a daughter. If she insisted, I’d be tempted to detail her failings as a mother and then I’d get kicked out of the house.

  She stared up at me, taking a moment to decide that this was a fight she couldn’t win. “Go on, then. Go ahead,” she muttered.

  I didn’t need directions. I’d been there often enough, picking up Paolina for Saturday volleyball followed by our continuing search for the perfect ice cream cone, a quest that took us out to Kendall’s in Littleton in summer, to Toscanini’s in Cambridge, and Herrell’s in Brighton. The hunt was less fervent in winter, but we soldiered on, my little sister in search of the ideal strawberry; me, mocha, sometimes mocha chip.