Rebel Island (Tres Navarre #7)(59)

“You need to rest,” I said. “We’ll get you back upstairs. Safer up there.”

She stared at the rain as it practiced pointillism on the window. “I’m tired of lying down. Tres, I think you should talk to her.”

“Imelda?”

“She wanted to tell me something, but she wouldn’t. Or couldn’t. You should talk to her.”

“I’m not leaving you by yourself.”

“Please. I’m a big girl.”

I looked at her belly.

“That’s not what I meant, Tres. Find Imelda. See if she’ll talk to you.”

“Maia—”

“I’m perfectly fine. Besides, I’m not sure upstairs is any safer.”

“Meaning?”

She gave me a reproachful look: the same look she always gives me whenever I try to protect her.

“Tres, we both know that wire is a timing mechanism. What if Calavera wasn’t interested specifically in Lane? What if there are other bombs?”

By the time I caught up with Imelda, she was in the kitchen, salvaging linen from the floodwater. It seemed a hopeless task. She’d made a mountain of soggy napkins in the sink. Now she stood with her back to me, spreading out a tablecloth that looked like the Shroud of Turin.

My eyes drifted to the freezer room, then to the cellar door. I didn’t know if Chris Stowall and Jesse Longoria’s bodies were still in their respective places. I couldn’t see…or smell any change. That was fine by me.

“Imelda,” I said.

She turned toward me with a soft gasp. Her apron was sprinkled with brown stains. Her hair was tied back in a bun, but strands of it were coming unraveled, like a yarn ball a cat had been playing with.

“Señor, I didn’t hear you.”

I pulled myself up on the butcher block counter. “Maia thought I should talk to you.”

Imelda folded the tablecloth over her arm. “Is Señora Navarre well?”

“She’s worried about you. She thought you might have something to tell me.”

“Please, señor, if you wouldn’t sit on the counter. Jose is very fussy—”

“How did you lose your children, Imelda?”

Silence. She picked up a knife and set it in the sink. “It was five years ago. In Nuevo Laredo.”

“You lived in Nuevo Laredo?”

I tried not to sound surprised. These days, living in Nuevo Laredo was like sailing on the Titanic. For the past decade, the border town had been tearing itself apart as rival drug lords fought for control. Police, journalists, judges—all were gunned down on a regular basis.

“It was a repriso,” Imelda murmured. “Jose did nothing wrong. He was a simple cook. But…someone believed he told the police something…It isn’t important now. So many killed for no reason. A wrong look. A wrong word.” Her voice was heavy with old grief. “They killed my children. When we came here, we had nothing. Mr. Huff took us in. We owe him everything.”

“Which would make it hard to speak against him.”

She held my eyes. She seemed to be struggling with something even heavier than the death of her children, some burden she was not sure she could carry.

“I understand you found a staircase,” she said at last.

“You knew about it?”

She set down her tablecloth. She smoothed the flood-stained linen. “You can live here for many years, and still the walls surprise you. Now you must excuse me, señor.”

After she’d gone I stared at the pile of wet napkins in the sink for several minutes before I realized what was bothering me.

The walls surprise you. I got up and headed for the collapsed bedroom that Alex Huff had cordoned off on the first floor—the bedroom that would be catty-corner below Lane’s, at the bottom of the secret stairwell.

34

Garrett found Lane in Chris Stowall’s bedroom, which didn’t make him too happy. She was sitting on the bed, looking through a journal. She’d changed clothes: jeans, a white T-shirt, slip-on shoes. A lot more practical for a hurricane, but Garrett didn’t remember anything but dresses in her closet upstairs. Then it occurred to him she’d borrowed the shirt and jeans from Chris Stowall’s wardrobe. She was wearing a dead man’s clothes.

“His diary?” Garrett asked.

Lane seemed to have trouble focusing on him. “Yes. It was just lying here.”

He wheeled himself over, feeling like an intruder. He’d hardly known Chris Stowall at all, but he was jealous of the way Lane ran her hands over his diary pages. Chris and she had a long history together. Garrett had known her only one day. That was the hardest part, whenever he met a woman—getting past the ghosts.

“I was thinking about taking the journal,” she said. “I don’t know what I’d do with it, but…it’s all that’s left of him.”

“Give it to his folks?” Garrett suggested.

Lane winced. “His mother would shut the door in my face. Or worse.”

“Then leave it. Somebody found my diary after I was dead, I hope they’d burn it.”

“That incriminating?”

“I don’t keep a diary, darlin’.”

She looked down at the last page of writing, traced her finger over a drawing of a wave. “Chris wanted to do so many things. None of them ever happened.”