Esperanza

by Trish J. MacGregor

  “Maybe that’s exactly why you returned from the dead with this ability.”

  Maddie immediately powered up her skinny MacBook and went online. She interrupted periodically with some piece of information about Esperanza, the brujos, the myth and legend versus the reality, filling in gaps in their knowledge. Her mother asked about Ian. But about him, Tess could offer hardly anything at all, even though he seemed to be pivotal to the story. Ian who? From where? What did he do? Nothing specific came to mind. “I remember walking somewhere with a man, a dog, and a cat. He may be the guy.”

  “Do you think he was dead, too?” Maddie asked. “Or in a coma?”

  “That feels right. But I haven’t found those memories yet.”

  “What’s his last name?” her mother asked. “Where’s he from? What’s he look like?”

  Tess remembered her reaction to George Clooney’s picture on the cover of the Michael Clayton DVD. “I think he looks like George Clooney, but I can’t remember anything else.”

  “Shit, he looks like Clooney?” Maddie exclaimed. “Wow, Tesso. You’re making death sound better and better.” She glanced at her screen. “Okay, I just shot off an e-mail to someone who’s going to help us figure everything out.”

  “Yeah, who’s that?” Tess asked.

  “A psychic. I asked if you could get in to see her tomorrow. She’s really good. I met her and her daughter at one of those college fairs last year and had a reading with her. That’s what convinced me to move down here with you guys.”

  “A psychic?” Tess wiggled her fingers. “As I come into your vibration . . . shit, that kind of psychic? No, thanks.”

  “She works with your people,” Maddie said. “The Feds. Her name’s Mira Morales.”

  “Never heard of her.”

  “Ever heard of Agent Sheppard?”

  “Wayne Sheppard?”

  Maddie nodded, her sly little smile hinting that she was fully aware of Sheppard’s reputation. He was practically legendary in the Bureau’s southeast division for cracking serial cases—murders, abductions, rapes. “They work together?”

  “And live together,” Maddie added.

  “Okay, I’m game.”

  Lauren sat forward, her voice softer, as if she thought someone—or something—might be listening. “How do we protect ourselves from something we can’t see or hear, Tess?”

  “I did see it. As it left the lawn man’s body. It looked . . . like smoke. And I think that when one of them gets close to me, my arm starts to burn and itch. So if that happens, we’ll know.”

  “And then what?” Maddie asked. “That voice said it can’t take you, that you’re shielded, but it can take me, Lauren, Dan, all of us.”

  “Maybe you two should stay in Key West for the night. Or in a different room. Or . . .”

  “We’re staying together.” Lauren pressed her palms together, fingertips touching her chin. “And if they come, you’ll know it and Maddie and I will leave. Don’t bother trying to convert Dan, Tess. His mind is made up. The three of us will figure this out together. We’ll go back to the house tomorrow and get the mess cleaned up. I’ll take the day off from work and—”

  Dan interrupted as he returned to the table and announced he had to shove off. “Double homicide over on Miami Beach.”

  “Where on Miami Beach?” Tess asked. Before she was shot, Miami Beach was an area she and Dan covered together.

  “Outside Club Martinique. Celebrity murders. The local guys are trying to keep it under wraps, but already the press smells a story. The woman was on the cover of Vogue a month ago, the guy was her photographer. There were security cameras in the alley where the bodies were found and the owner is sending me the video stream. He claims it shows their bodyguards attacking them.”

  “May I see it?” Tess asked.

  “Sure, if he sent it already.” Dan flipped open the lid of his laptop and went online.

  “Wait a minute,” Maddie said. “Vogue? I read Vogue. And last month’s issue had Barbara DeLinno on the cover. Is that who got murdered?”

  “I don’t know her name. Okay, here’s the stream.” He motioned for them to take a look. “Is this her?”

  They all gathered around, watching the images—a striking Asian woman and two men stepping out of a rear door into an alley. The light wasn’t good, so Dan brightened the images.

  “That’s her,” Maddie exclaimed. “The bald guy looks like a bodyguard, so the other guy must be the photographer.”

  On the video, a dark Expedition pulled up in front of them and the photographer opened the door, said something to the driver, and he got out. Behind them, the model suddenly stumbled and Tess leaned in closer. “Pause it, Dan.” She could hardly speak around the pulse pounding in her throat. “There. See it?”

  “See what?” Dan asked.

  Tess tapped the screen, pinpointing a thin, almost watery discoloration, similar to the mist or smoke she’d seen drifting out of the lawn man just before he died. “That. Right there.”

  “I don’t see anything,” Dan said.

  “Me, either,” said Maddie.

  “What about you, Mom? Do you see it? Like thin puffs of smoke?”

  “Nope, I don’t see it,” her mother replied.

  “It’s probably a flaw in the video,” Dan said.

  As he put the stream in motion again, the mist disappeared into the top of the bodyguard’s skull. Seconds later, the bodyguard slammed his elbow into the bridge of the model’s nose and she fell back, blood pouring from her nostrils. The streaming images lacked sound, but Tess knew the woman was screaming. The bodyguard snapped her head from one side to the other and she dropped to the ground. Simultaneously, the man who had been driving the Expedition punched the photographer in the jaw, then sank a knife into his side.

  Jesus God, the brujos were in the model and photographer, jumped into the driver and bodyguard, and . . . Bile flooded the inside of her mouth. She barely made it to the railing before she vomited.

  Dan’s hand, cool, certain, and gentle, touched the back of her neck. His knees cracked as he crouched beside her on the edge of the porch where she now sat. Her stomach kept bubbling like a witch’s cauldron, her head spun. He pressed a sweating can into her hand. “Sip slowly. It’s ginger ale. My abuelita used to give me this when I was a kid with an upset stomach.”

  She tilted the can to her mouth, sipped, rolled the can across her forehead and cheeks. The wind that kicked in off the Atlantic smelled of salt and distant places, of mystery and unexplored depths. “Dan, whatever I brought back from the dead was inside the model and the photographer and jumped into the bodyguard and the driver. I saw it happen. It was the same stuff that drifted out of the lawn man as he died. That essence, whatever it is, now possesses the bodies of the bodyguard and the driver. If you find them, it’ll seize you, too.”

  He didn’t laugh, but he exhaled loudly, as if to mask his exasperation. “Look, Tess. I believe that something happened to you while you were dead or in a coma. But possession is a real stretch for me.”

  She looked over at him, Dan the blond, blue-eyed Cuban. Curious, that he came from a family where his grandmother and father were both practitioners of Santería, a Cuban mystery religion that involved trance states and possession by guardian spirits. “Every time your dad and abuelita see clients they’re possessed by their santos. Why is this any different?”

  He rolled his eyes. “C’mon. There’s a huge difference. Santería is a religion. You’re talking about devils, demons, brujos, mala sangre. Crazy shit.”

  That phrase, mala sangre, blew open yet another door in her memory. A bus. A man making the sign of the cross on his forehead and murmuring mala sangre. And Ian Ritter from Minneapolis was saying, There were other Americans out there. Why did he target us?

  Tess went completely still inside. She felt as if she had broken out of a prison of utter barrenness into a place lovely and rich with color and life. Ian Ritter. A breathtaking memory surfaced—and it was a
full memory, complete with audio, visuals, emotions, textures, mood—of herself and a man who resembled George Clooney making love by a fireplace. A black dog was curled up nearby, she heard logs crackling, smelled the pine-scented smoke.

  It happened.

  Dan regarded her as if she were an alien who had suddenly appeared in front of him. She desperately wanted him to go away so that she could mull over this breakthrough in her memory. But he seemed to be waiting for her to say something. “Someone who has never heard of Santería could watch your abuelita working with a client, Dan, and think she’s bat shit.”

  He thought about it for about five seconds, then shook his head, hard, vigorously. “It’s not the same thing.”

  “Oh, please. Your grandmother’s eyes roll back in their sockets, she froths at the mouth, she twitches and jerks, and then she might as well be speaking in tongues.”

  “That’s a goddamn exaggeration.”

  Bottom line: Dan Hernandez couldn’t move beyond his cultural conditioning. Fine. She got it. “Whatever, Dan. I’ve warned you, that’s all I can do. And thanks again for getting us the suite here.”

  He seemed surprised that she backed down and sat with her a few minutes longer, hands grasping the lower railing, feet swinging like those of a kid fishing at the edge of a pond. “I don’t understand what happened to us, Tess.”

  She’d been expecting this remark for weeks. The topic of their relationship had come up several times, but not as a genuine plea that begged for an honest answer. Tess gazed out over the crashing waves, the white foam visible in the spill of lights from the pool area.

  “What happened was that I died and fell in love with someone else.”

  Everything today had shocked her, but not like this, not with the same certainty she felt now, that the man she had met when she died was the man with whom she would spend the rest of her life.

  Dan’s face, usually so easy to read, now looked closed, hard, like metal. “You mean, someone you met while you were dead?”

  “Yes.”

  His expression cracked open, his incredulity shone through. “This is real to you, isn’t it. Like, you know, real in the sense that you believe it happened.”

  Nuance. He hadn’t said that it was real to her because it had happened but that she believed it had happened, suggesting she was delusional, that dying had broken her mind. Her mother was right. No point in trying to convince him of anything. She suspected she would be hearing from her boss tomorrow, informing her that she had been reassigned to a desk job or fired.

  Tess touched his arm. “Be careful, Dan.” Then she pushed to her feet and walked back to the table where her mother and niece were huddled around the MacBook. “I’m whipped. Let’s call it a night.”

  “I call first on the shower,” Maddie said, and bounded ahead of them like some creature corralled too long.

  “Maybe you should go to Esperanza,” Lauren said. “To resolve this.”

  “That’s exactly what I was warned not to do, Mom. It would put you and Maddie at risk.”

  “We’ll go with you.”

  “You’ve got a job, Maddie’s in college.”

  “Hey, I’ve got eight months of leave. Maddie’s free for the summer. That aside, I’m sixty-three years old, healthy, reasonably happy. I did acid and DMT with Terrence McKenna. I smoked pot with Ken Kesey and Jerry Garcia. I rode around on that silly bus of Kesey’s for months. And you know what I discovered, Tess? That fear of death is what drives us. Now McKenna, Kesey, and Garcia are dead. I’m not. And I’m not afraid to die. Whatever we are, it’s more than this.” She flung her arms out. “I need some time to work on my book and Ecuador may be exactly the right place at the right time. So when you’re ready to return to Esperanza, I’m with you all the way.”

  She clearly remembered reading a text message from her mother when she had been in a bus climbing through the Andes. “You texted me when I was dead, Mom. You said you were ready for some great adventure—not for fifteen more years at the hospital, working alongside Doc and his issues. Something to that effect.”

  Lauren’s eyes teared up, she slipped an arm around Tess’s shoulders. “You want to hear something really weird? While you were in a coma, I spent hours by your bed talking to you, texting you, e-mailing you, begging you to come back. You’re not slipping away from us again, Tess. One way or another, we’re going with you.”

  Tess wrapped her arms around her mother, neither of them speaking or moving until Maddie called, “Hey, ladies, we should pick up a bag of groceries in the store here.”

  Tess didn’t know if the brujos would arrive in the bodies of the two bodyguards they’d seen on the security video or if they would arrive in their natural forms, as whiffs of smoke. They had to be ready for either eventuality. So once they were inside their suite, they sealed the cracks under the doors with towels, taped the edges of the windows and the sliding glass doors. Tess felt like she had done this before, against the same enemy. The feeling didn’t come with images or sound bites, but she accepted the emotion as a different kind of memory, every bit as valid.

  Lauren made a pot of Cuban coffee in the suite’s tiny kitchen. They sat around the butcher block table for hours, talking quietly, and came up with a plan. But it was predicated on Tess’s belief that the bruise was a kind of alarm that would itch and burn if a brujo was nearby. “It’ll buy us a little time,” she said. “As soon as I feel anything, you two get out of here. Go to Tango Key. I’ll meet you there.”

  “Nope.” Lauren shook her head. “Maddie and I agree we’re not going anywhere without you.”

  “Mom, it can’t take me. The only way it can hurt me is by seizing either of you. So let me be the decoy. We’ll stay in touch by cell phone.”

  Maddie pressed her hands between her knees and looked around uneasily. She whispered, “They could be here now, Tesso. Listening to what we’re saying.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Her mother pushed back from the table and went over to the coffeepot. “Refills. We’re all staying up. I’m going to make omelets.”

  She went to work, browning mushrooms, whipping up eggs, folding in cheese and diced tomatoes. Watching her, Tess found another memory, of Ian creating culinary delights that had reminded her of her dad, not of her mother.

  “Mom, when I was growing up, who cooked dinner most of the time?”

  “Your dad. He was a fantastic cook. Since Charlie died, I’ve gotten better. But nothing I cook will ever equal the kind of stuff he could concoct.”

  “I remember Ian cooking meals.” And I fell in love with him. “Ian Ritter. He’s from Minneapolis.”

  “Fantastic, hon. It’s a start. With Google, anyone can be found.”

  By two, her mother’s eyes were pinched with fatigue and Maddie kept nodding off, chin dropping toward her chest. Tess convinced them to move into the bedroom and promised she would wake them if her wrist acted up. Once Tess was alone in the kitchen, with fresh coffee in her mug, she used Maddie’s laptop and went online.

  She brought up the reverse phone book for Minneapolis. A query for Ian Ritter produced numerous links at the University of Minnesota and the Minneapolis Tribune. She clicked that link first, a piece from 1978 about the inauguration ceremony for the Ian Ritter School of Journalism Award. One paragraph in particular seized her attention:

  The award, named after journalism professor and Tribune columnist Ian Ritter, brings a $10,000 prize to a journalism student for investigative skills. Named after the professor and Pulitzer-prize-winning columnist who vanished under mysterious circumstances in April 1968, the prize is funded by a special trust established by Ritter’s ex-wife, Louise Ritter Bell, and their son, Luke Ritter, and his wife, Casey O’Toole Ritter, the Minneapolis Tribune, and the Department of Journalism.

  “What the fuck,” Tess whispered. 1968?

  And did her Ian have a son?

  How old is your son?

  Twenty-one. He’s a senior at the University of Minne
sota.

  This conversation took place outside a store, in the fog, while she and Ian waited for a bus. Which bus?

  Thirteen.

  Apparently the key to unlocking her memories was to ask the right question. She clicked the link and it led her to Professor Luke Ritter’s university Web site in 2008. It provided mundane info, like the classes he would be teaching in the fall. Tess clicked on his bio.

  Born in 1947. She pressed her fists against her eyes, struggling against the dreadful possibility—the likelihood—that if Luke Ritter was her Ian’s son, it meant that she and Ian were separated by forty years in time. Luke would be in his early sixties now, nearly Lauren’s age, and Ian might be dead. Tess clicked his campus e-mail address:

  Dear Professor Ritter,

  My name is Tess Livingston. I met your dad under unusual circumstances and would be most grateful to know what, if anything, you can tell me about his location now. Did he return to Esperanza? Thank you in advance for anything you can provide.

  She included her cell number and two e-mail addresses, but by three, Luke Ritter had not responded, her eyes ached and throbbed with fatigue. She slipped Maddie’s computer into its pretty fabric case and set it next to her bulging pack in the bedroom. As she headed for the door, her niece whispered, “Tesso?”

  In the spill of light from the hallway, she could see Maddie sitting up, hugging a pillow against her chest, dark hair wild. “I put your MacBook against your pack.”

  “We have to get out of the country,” Maddie said. “You know that, right?”

  “Right now, we just need to get through tonight.”

  But it was as if she hadn’t spoken. Focused on her bottom line, Maddie rushed on. “Lauren and I have our passports with us. Do you have yours?”

  “Yes. Go to sleep, Maddie.”

  “What time does the sun rise?”

  “A few hours. Don’t worry. I’ll wake you if there’s trouble.”