Forty-Four Book Eleven (44 series 11) Page 12

  Kate spoke before I had to answer.

  “That’s what I was afraid of.” She cleared her throat. “The only other possible explanation I could come up with was that someone else murdered him. But I couldn’t think of anyone who would do such a thing.”

  “I don’t think he ever got over what happened on that island,” I said. “Killing his brother.”

  “I think you’re right. And I think that, deep down, I knew that all along but refused to see it. He was really hurting. The drinking. That sadness he carried with him. I should have put it together and done something, Abby. I feel in a way that it…”

  “It’s not your fault, Kate. A lot of people drink and a lot of people are sad. You can’t always see these things coming.”

  Her face broke for a moment, but then she regained her composure.

  “Did he say anything, you know, at the end?”

  I could have told her that he had said how much he loved her and that he was sorry. And maybe I should have. I was sure Ben would have said those things if he could. But I didn’t want to lie. As it was, I was already leaving out enough of what really happened.

  “No,” I said. “He didn’t say anything.”

  She wiped away a tear. I glanced over at the supervisor and saw that he was looking my way.

  “I’m sorry, Kate. I’ve got to get back soon,” I said, nodding toward the field.

  “Just a few more minutes.”

  “Just a few more minutes,” I repeated.

  “I want you to know I’m not giving up, Abby. I’m going to find the missing piece in all this. The thing that will prove your innocence. And David’s already interviewing criminal defense attorneys. He says he’s going to put together a legal team that will make the O.J. Simpson lawyers look like amateurs.”

  “That sounds about right,” I said.

  But even as she said these things, I knew I’d never be able to go home again.

  “We’ll figure a way out of this,” she said.

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  She reached into her purse. I thought she was going for a tissue but instead she pulled out a large envelope.

  “Here.” She handed it to me. “I brought you something. It’s from David and me.”

  “What is it?”

  “Some cash, a credit card,” she whispered. “And some new identification.”

  “Identification?”

  “You know, fake IDs. Driver’s License. Social Security. David knew someone.”

  “I didn’t want you getting involved like this, Kate. This is illegal. ”

  “You let me worry about that,” she said.

  I peeked inside. They looked like the real thing. But the picture on the license sent a wave of sadness through me.

  “It’s from the engagement party, isn’t it?” I said.

  She nodded and I took in a quick breath to stop the tears.

  “How is he?” I asked.

  Kate shook her head.

  “Ty’s about as messed up as you can get. I’m not going to tell him about this, Abby. I don’t think he could handle it right now anyway. Not in the state he’s in.”

  “What’s—”

  The rest of the sentence stalled and sputtered to the ground like a defective firecracker. I wanted to ask her more but there wouldn’t be any point. It would just pile more pain on top of what was already there, leaving me buried under a mountain of sorrow.

  She reached into her purse again.

  “Take this,” she said, handing me a cell phone. “It’s activated and I entered my number. I have one too and I’ll only use it for you. Call me when you can and let me know that you’re all right. Or if you need anything.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I love you. I wish…”

  “I love you, too, Abby.”

  She reached over and gave me a hard hug, losing her face in my muddy hair.

  When I finally pulled away I didn’t look back at her. She wasn’t even gone and I already missed her. I missed the way it used to be, when most problems could be solved with a kettle of boiling water and a tea bag. As I went back to my spot in the field and kneeled down among the chiles, the tears blurring my world, I wished I could just step back into my life again.

  I ached for it all, more than ever.

  CHAPTER 54

  I could hear it again. The terrible sobbing.

  I wrapped the blanket around my shoulders and quietly stepped out onto the porch. It was a clear night, no clouds, no fog, the moon lighting up the field. But I couldn’t see anything. There was only the weeping.

  Just the crying in the dark, full of anguish and grief, echoing in the cool air.

  I sat down and listened, not completely sure that the sound wasn’t coming from me.

  CHAPTER 55

  The old woman continued to ignore me. Her mind was made up about Samael and there was nothing I could say to her. During the day she worked at the opposite end of the field from me and at night I made it easier on her by keeping my distance, staying out on the porch when she was inside and going inside when she was out there.

  Abuelita might have been wrong about Samael, but she was right about one thing. That we all needed to have a purpose in life. For her it was work. Right now my job was to stay one step ahead of the law, but that wasn’t enough. Ghosts were my real work, my purpose.

  I turned my attention to the little girl.

  I had to come up with a way to help her. And I only had a few days left in which to do it. As I worked, I went over what I knew.

  What I knew for sure was that I had seen a ghost of a young girl three times and I had heard the sounds of a crying woman. There were also the bodies in the lake I had seen in the vision, which included that of the little girl. Beyond that was where the guesswork began.

  The girl seemed to be looking for her mother and the woman I heard at night might have been crying for her dead daughter.

  I thought back to other ghosts I had met. With the exception of Charlie Modine, who was on the run, they were pretty much all anchored to a particular place or attached to a specific person. So the chances were good that the girl had died somewhere nearby, maybe somewhere close to Hatch, close to the park.

  And then I suddenly remembered something. What Samael had said back at the church. That the mother had died recently. With everything that had happened, I had forgotten. So I had one more fact to add to the mix.

  They were both dead.

  From the vision, with the woman crying above the water’s surface, I had to conclude that the little girl had died first and the mother’s recent death had probably set the whole thing in motion or at least brought it to a head.

  I also knew from experience that ghosts, at least the ones I had encountered, could be as confused as the living. Maybe the mother was in a similar state, as confused as her young daughter. And maybe that’s why they couldn’t find each other. Perhaps, too, the mother’s sorrow was getting in the way.

  I wondered if that terrible place was somehow close by, the lake of my visions, the one with the bodies raining down.

  Maybe someone knew something.

  I looked up and saw the old truck driving toward the corral.

  I had nothing to lose.

  CHAPTER 56

  I approached him after work.

  “Hola, José.”

  “Buenas noches, Señorita Dolores,” he said, tipping his hat a little. “How was your day?”

  I was relieved. The old woman clearly hadn’t warned him about me.

  “Hard,” I said. “And yours?”

  “Not so hard,” he said, smiling.

  Aside from Abuelita, José had been here the longest. If anyone would know, he would.

  “I’ve been having this dream,” I began.

  “¿Sí?”

  I told him about the bodies in the water. He listened but I wasn’t sure how much he understood or how much of what I was saying sounded like it was coming from a sound mind. When I finished he took off his hat and stared of
f toward where the sun had gone down just a few minutes earlier.

  “Do you know somewhere nearby where something like that might have happened?”

  He looked somber and didn’t answer right away.

  “It was a long time ago,” he said finally. “It was a sad day.”

  My heart raced suddenly.

  “Where? What happened?”

  “They found the many bodies in the lake. Cordero Lake. It is maybe ten miles north of here.”

  I looked at him, my mouth open, and he read my mind.

  “I will take you there,” he said. “If that is what you want.”

  CHAPTER 57

  We drove away from the farm, through some back roads, and then onto I-25. The light had almost completely left the sky. Even knowing where I was going, it felt good to be on the road again. I looked forward to getting back out here soon and far away from the chile fields of Hatch.

  José was quiet. He had told me the little he knew before we had reached the highway. He didn’t know how they had died, only that the bodies of eleven people, including that of a young girl, had been found at the lake almost forty years earlier.

  “People go there for swim,” he said. “But it no rain for long time, many, many months. The farms use much water for crops and the lake go down more and more. One day they find body at top of water. It was in bad shape and the bones come out. They close the lake and search and find ten more at the bottom.”

  “So they were all murdered and dumped in the lake?” I asked.

  “Murder? No se eso. But it was no accident. How could that be? Eleven dead together? No. No accident. That is all I know.”

  After a while I saw a sign for the lake. The moon was just coming up when we turned off the interstate and onto the road that led down to the water. José parked in a small lot near a boat ramp and turned off the engine.

  “I will stay here, Señorita Dolores,” he said. “I do not wish to disturb los muertos.”

  I nodded and got out.

  I walked over near the water and scanned the shore, but even with the moon it was hard to see too much. It didn’t take long for me to feel stupid. What was I doing here? People died here. The little girl died here. But what was I expecting to find? What was I hoping to accomplish by coming to this sad and terrible place?

  But then I heard it.

  Coming in off the water.

  That terrible sobbing.

  CHAPTER 58

  I couldn’t see her at first but then her outline came into view. She was standing in the water, dressed all in black. She slowly turned toward me.

  Her tortured pale face glowed in the moonlight as she swayed there like a reed at the edge of the lake, still crying. She had dark hair and sad eyes.

  I expected her to be much older, but she was a young woman, maybe in her early twenties. But that wasn’t so hard to understand. Even though she outlived her daughter by several decades, part of her had died out here that day, too. She was a prisoner of this place.

  I took a few shaky steps toward her.

  “¿Señora?” I said. “I have come to hear your story. I have come to help. Señora, please.”

  She kept crying and I couldn’t tell if she could hear me, but then she opened her mouth.

  “No one can help,” she said. “I see her die over and over and over again. Mi Rosita. I see her sink down in the water and disappear. No one can help. No one…”

  “Please, tell me how it happened,” I said.

  She sighed deeply and dropped to her knees in the water.

  “We paid them all the money we had. Every last peso we had saved for two years to take me and my daughter across the border, where every day would not be a struggle for survival. Where children could have a better life than their parents.

  “But Rosita didn’t want to go. She didn’t want to leave our family. Her father, her brothers, her grandparents. I promised her that they would come soon and join us. I told her that in el norte she would eat ice cream and spoke of the toys I would buy for her. I told her she had to be strong. She said she would try if she could bring her old teddy bear along on the journey. I said yes.”

  I was surprised by how much English the woman’s ghost knew. But it made sense. She had probably lived in US all these years.

  “My husband paid the money to the coyote and Rosita and I boarded a train with other people and we traveled for several days. When we got out I thought we had arrived in the United States but the man said we still had to walk some more. There were more than twenty of us and Rosita was the only child. They gave us each a gallon of water and we walked and walked through a burning, scorching desert, mi querida Rosita dragging her bear the entire way.

  “And then, finally, just past the border, we were loaded onto a truck. Rosita and I were supposed to go to the state of Washington to pick strawberries. I would tell her that when we arrived she could eat as many strawberries as she desired.

  “But in the back of the truck we had no ventilation, no air conditioning, no air. And it was hot, hotter than the desert. We were locked in there mile after mile after mile and then the truck began to go faster and faster. I heard a siren in the distance, getting closer even as the truck sped up. The driver turned sharply, two, three times, sending us bouncing into one another and into the walls, and the sound of the sirens began to grow fainter until we could no longer hear it.

  “Only then did the truck stop. The heat and the bouncing around made many people sick. Many vomited. We waited for the doors to open. But they did not open. We waited and we called out and we pounded and we screamed, but the doors did not open.

  “It was like an oven in that truck and we had no water.

  “I don’t know how much time went by. I sang to Rosita when she cried, and when she stopped crying I prayed. And when her little body shook with fever, when she lay limp in my arms barely with a breath, was when I started to cry.

  “She died in my arms, but I never let her go. Not until they ripped her from me.

  “Eleven people died, including my little Rosa. When the men saw what they had done, they would not allow us to get out. They slammed the doors closed again and drove us to this lake. Here, we were allowed to get out.

  “The coyotes argued over what to do. There were some who spoke Spanish and some were gringos. Finally, they brought out a large spool of wire and cinder blocks from the back of a pickup truck.

  “Then they made us tie up the dead and bind their arms and legs. Two coyotes stood over me with guns pointed at my head, yelling at me to wrap the wire around my Rosita’s tiny hands, her little waist, around her stick legs. I tried to tie the bear with her but they tore it from my hands and threw it in the water. A large man then tied one of the blocks around her and lifted her into the air and threw her in.”

  She looked at me with the saddest eyes I had ever seen and pointed at a spot out in the water.

  “No one can help,” she said again. “No one…”

  CHAPTER 59

  “I wait for her here,” the woman said. “But she does not come. She blames me as I blame myself. I killed her. I promised her a better life. And then I killed her.”

  She began to sob again and I swallowed down the urge to do the same. It was the worst thing I had ever heard in my life but I fought to stay focused. My tears wouldn’t help.

  “Señora, Rosita is not here.”

  “I will wait for her,” she wailed. “I will wait for her forever.”

  “You don’t have to wait any longer. I think I know where she is. Come with me.”

  CHAPTER 60

  As José and I drove back toward Hatch and the park across the street from the church, I hoped that the little girl would be there. I checked from time to time to see if the mother was still in the back of the pickup. She sat between bales of hay, her head bowed.

  “You were there a long time,” José said. “Did you find for what you were looking?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I hope so.”

&n
bsp; But the closer we got, the more my hopes turned to doubts. I hadn’t seen Rosita in several days and the last time was out in the fields, not at the park. There was no guarantee she would be there and even if she was, it didn’t mean that mother and daughter would be able to see each other. It wasn’t like I could just snap my fingers and make it happen.

  José parked in the vacant lot and I let out a long breath.

  “I will come with you this time,” he said.

  “Good,” I said.

  We walked over to the play area with the teeter-totter and the slide and the swings.

  I didn’t see either of them.

  “C’mon,” I whispered. “Rosita, there’s someone here to see you.”

  Still nothing.

  “Es tu mamá, Rosita,” I said. “Tu mamá esta aquí.”

  I hoped that what I was saying was true. That her mother was really here.

  “¿Mamá?” a tiny voice suddenly called from out of the darkness. “Mamá, ¿dónde estás?”

  There was another silence that seemed to go on forever. And then, finally, finally…

  “¿Rosita? ¿Mi amor?”

  I looked around but still couldn’t see anything.

  “¿Mamá?” the little girl said again before crying out, “¡Mamá! ¡Mamá!”

  “Rosita, ay, Rosita, mi amor. Ay, Rosita…”

  I still couldn’t see them, but I didn’t have to.

  The little girl’s laughter was enough.

  CHAPTER 61

  For the first time in a long time, I was able to sleep through the night.

  When I awoke in the morning, I thought about how much I had in common with Rosita’s mother. Like me, she was weighed down by terrible sorrow and grief. And the combination had blinded her to the point where she had failed to see what was in front of her, the thing she loved most.