No Witness But the Moon(23)

James O. Vega. Detective James Vega.

Marcela stood frozen at the screen with a wet rag in her hand. This couldn’t be the same man who drove her home several weeks ago when she babysat for Sophia. It was raining that night. He walked her to her door under his umbrella and waited until she’d made it safely inside. How could a man like that do something like this?

How could Se?ora Adele be involved with such a man?

Marcela’s cell phone rang, interrupting her thoughts. She picked it up, expecting Yovanna with a question. Or Byron on one of his fifteen-minute factory breaks.

“Marcela?”

Marcela heard the sharp drawn-in breath, that familiar aggrieved tone that was always there, even before this happened. Of all her father’s mysteries, none was more puzzling than why he’d chosen to settle down with Alma, a woman who defined her loyalties more by the people she held at bay than the ones she embraced. Loneliness and guilt can make you do strange things, Marcela supposed. She had only to look at her own life to realize that.

“Listen to me,” said Alma breathlessly. “If you and your father made some kind of deal, that’s your problem. Not mine! Don’t drag me into this.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know what I’m talking about: your daughter!”

“Yovanna?” Marcela’s heart hammered in her chest. “What about her?”

“Don’t play dumb. I just got a call from the man you were dealing with. I gave him your cell phone number.”

“What man, Alma? I don’t know who you mean.”

Alma’s voice got soft and steely. “It’s your fault this happened, you know. My Hector would never have gotten into this mess if not for your daughter.”

“You’re not making any sense.”

“You think he broke into Ricardo Luis’s house for no reason?”

“I don’t know what to believe.” Ever since Marcela had gotten that call from the detective last night, she’d tried to convince herself that the police were mistaken. Her father was no thief. But Alma’s words gave her pause. She’d been apart from her father for too many years to say for sure that she really knew him. He’d lecture her on the importance of family and then go for weeks without calling. He’d complain that he couldn’t afford new sneakers for Aaron and Felix, his sons by Alma—and then for no reason at all mail Marcela fifty dollars. Sober, he blamed Marcela’s mother—whom he’d never divorced—for his terrible, fateful journey to the United States. After a few beers, he always blamed himself.

“Abuelita hated him,” said Yovanna last night after they got the news. Marcela’s mother had been raising the girl and no doubt Yovanna had gotten an earful about her grandfather and how he’d abandoned the family. But Marcela had come to realize that her father’s actions were more complicated than she’d believed as a child. She was a parent herself now. She’d seen how the border could slice families in two. No one ever came out of it the same.

The coyotes and moneylenders always told you it was easy. So easy. Go to the United States! Make lots of money! Everywhere in San Pedro Sula when Marcela was a girl, there were symbols of families with someone doing well in El Norte. New concrete homes with big American flags painted on their exteriors. Cell phones. Electronics. Stylish clothes with brand-name labels. She was ten when her father made his fateful journey. She didn’t see him again for eighteen years. No one told any of them what the real cost would be. They were still paying it.

They would forever be paying it.

“This man who called you,” Marcela said to Alma. “Did he give you his name? A phone number?”

Alma tossed off a bitter laugh. “Do you think this was one of your father’s friends from the neighborhood? Someone he played dominoes with? Wake up, Marcela! This was not that sort of call. This man knew my address. He knew where Aaron and Felix go to school. We may live in New York. But even here, there are people who play by the same rules as the ones we left in Honduras. You don’t say no to them.”

“Did he say what he wants from me?”

Alma seemed to be weighing her words. “He called your daughter—‘collateral.’” Marcela heard the tightness in Alma’s voice. As cool as the woman had always been toward Marcela, she was still a mother. She understood the gravity of what she was saying.

“ ‘Collateral’? Like for a loan?” asked Marcela. “But I didn’t make any deal!”

“Then I guess you’d better make one now. If Yovanna’s the collateral, I would hate to think what happens if you forfeit.”





Chapter 8


Vega lived in a former summer cottage overlooking a wooded natural lake. When he bought his place after the divorce almost six years ago, friends told him he was crazy to bury himself in the middle of nowhere, a whole county north of where he worked. But there was one terrific thing about living in a summer lake community in December.

There was no chance of being followed by the media.

Vega’s home address and phone number were unlisted. Even if someone tried to find him up here, it would be difficult. The mailboxes were at the entrance to the community. The streets were barely marked and his tiny cul-de-sac had only three houses.

Vega collected his mail at his mailbox—bills mostly. Then he drove his pickup truck along the main community road. He was still in the same clothes he’d worn since the shooting. He was dying to step out of them and into a hot shower as soon as possible. Through the trees to his left, he could see the lake, soft and milky like a pearl. It soothed him to see it. Nature always soothed him—which was funny in a way, when he considered that he lived his first eleven years of life in a Bronx tenement where the great outdoors consisted of a makeshift ball field in a garbage-strewn lot and a water view meant hanging out his mother’s fire escape above an uncapped hydrant.