No Witness But the Moon(42)

“I am fine. Thank you.” Marcela perched herself on the corner of one of the kitchen chairs and blotted her tears. Adele took a seat across from her. There was a heaviness in Marcela that Adele had never seen before. Her shoulders looked weighted down. Her hair, dyed auburn for the fall, was growing out at the roots. She usually wore makeup, but not tonight. Her eyes carried an intensity that didn’t need any embellishment.

“I need to borrow eight thousand dollars.”

The words sprang from Marcela’s lips so suddenly, Adele wasn’t sure she’d heard correctly.

“Eight thousand dollars?” Adele repeated. “Dios mío, why?”

Marcela shook her head. “I can’t say. Not to you. Not to anyone. But I promise you, I will pay you back. If it takes the rest of my life. If it takes the rest of my children’s lives—”

“Does this have anything to do with why your father was at Ricardo Luis’s house?”

“My father was not a thief!”

“I didn’t say he was.” Adele put a hand on her arm. “But you have to tell me what’s going on. Is someone threatening you? Threatening Yovanna?”

It was a smuggler, Adele decided. It had to be. Yovanna had been in Lake Holly—what? A week? After probably a five-or six-week journey from Honduras. That sort of trip didn’t come cheap. And now the smuggler was demanding repayment.

No. That didn’t make sense, thought Adele. Smugglers always got paid up front. They disappeared as soon as a deal was completed—often before. This wasn’t money to pay for the journey. It was money to pay someone back for the journey. That sort of borrowing only comes from two places: family and loan sharks. If Marcela was coming to her, then it wasn’t to pay back family—unless family was the reason she was in this mess in the first place.

“Marcela, did your father borrow money from someone that he couldn’t pay back?”

“Please, se?ora. There is nothing you can ask that will help me. It will only cause more trouble.”

“Have you spoken to the police?”

“After what they just did to my father?”

Adele had a sudden panicked thought: was it possible that Marcela had no idea Vega was the man who shot her father? Adele didn’t want to be the one to tell her. She didn’t want to leave something like that unspoken, either.

“Marcela,” she began slowly. “You do know—that is—the police officer who confronted your father—” Adele still had a hard time saying “shot” or “killed.”

“I know about el detective, se?ora. I know what he did.”

Marcela held Adele’s gaze. Her eyes were hard. She had always been timid before this but anger had sharpened her resolve. “Now you understand how hard this is for me to come to you. But you are my only hope. I need to repay this money my father borrowed, or this man—he will kill my daughter.”

“How did he contact you? By phone? The police can run a trace.”

“They will never find him,” said Marcela. “These sorts of people, they have a way . . .” Her voice died in her throat.

“Maybe in Honduras, that’s true,” said Adele. “But this man is probably here. In the United States. I’m sure the police—”

“Can do nothing!” Marcela shook her head. “It doesn’t matter if he’s in Honduras or Lake Holly or anywhere in between. If he loaned my father money, then he has the power to make my family pay. You cannot fight a man like that. You can only pay him or worse things will happen.”

Adele got up from her chair and paced the kitchen floor. “Marcela—you’re not seriously asking me to give you eight thousand dollars, are you? I don’t have that sort of cash just lying around. I’m a single working mother.”

“But you have important friends and donors. They do.”

“Do you realize what you’re asking? You’re asking me to approach law-abiding citizens and prominent people in the community and ask them to contribute funds to pay off some gangster to aid in the smuggling of an undocumented—”

“But she’s already here in Lake Holly. You aren’t smuggling her anywhere.”

“As far as the United States government is concerned, I’m engaged in facilitating the funding of an illegal enterprise involving the transport of an undocumented minor. That’s a felony, Marcela. It doesn’t matter whether I stick her in my car and drive her over the border or pay off someone who already got her here.”

“But you’d only be doing it to help me. Not for profit.”

“Which means I’d get five years in prison, not ten. That’s the only difference.”

“You could say you gave me money to go to school. You had no idea what I was using it for.”

“That would be a lie. Under oath, that would be perjury. I could be disbarred as a lawyer. I could go to jail and lose custody of my own daughter. Not to mention the fact that I’d be drummed out of La Casa and the entire immigrant services community for asking such a thing of others. There are people in this country who already believe that the humanitarian work we do should be illegal. How would it look if I do something that really is?”

“But I wouldn’t tell anyone. Please, se?ora. She’s my daughter. And this man—he will kill her if he doesn’t get his money. He gave me a week. A week! I have no other way to raise eight thousand dollars in a week.”