“Let me take the child,” he snorted. “And you get the toy out of the boiling water.”
While the priest held Grace, Dragon Helga took a giant wooden spoon, stirred the pot a second time, and scooped out Hideous Amarillo. He landed with a plop on the grass, his furry body steaming like a Chinese dumpling. He really did look yellow again. But soaking.
“Is he still alive?” Grace asked, her curiosity breaking her tears mid-flow.
“Quite alive, and hopefully, the creatures nesting inside it quite dead,” the Dragon said.
The Padre let go of his grip and Grace raced over to the teddy and picked him up.
“Careful, it’s still hot,” the woman warned. “It could scald you. Now, leave it on the grass to dry and we can wash you girls. Hurry up or the buckets of water will get cold.”
“It’s alright,” the priest said. “I can take over now. Have a break. Have a cup of coffee. I can do the girls.”
“With pleasure, Padre. Be careful of that one,” she said, pointing to Grace. “She’s a cat. She scratched me with her sharp little nails. I’ll be trimming those dangerous little weapons later, I can tell you.”
Padre Marco took one of the buckets and knelt beside María on her stool. “It won’t hurt,” he assured in his singsong accent, “I’ll be gentle. We just need to clean the dirty bits.” Grace watched him as he lathered up a big sponge with soap. He carefully rubbed it on María’s back, making it frothy and bubbly and white. “See?” he said, “I’m not going to bite.” He frothed the sponge around her neck, her chest, and her arms. Slowly. Softly. “Now I’m going to pour some warm water over your head. Close your eyes.” María closed her eyes tight and giggled when the warm water gushed over her skinny body. The priest took a bottle and spilled out a glob on his fat sausage fingers. It was shampoo. He massaged his hands into María’s head, whipping it up like cream on a cake.
“This is lovely,” María said to Grace. “It’s all warm and clean and smells yummy.”
Grace relaxed on her stool. She felt her itchy head and thought it would be nice to have her hair washed too. She loved it when her mom washed her hair. But then Ruth cut it all off and now she hardly had any hair at all. She’d seen her face in a mirror and knew she looked like a boy.
María was giggling now. “That tickles,” she tittered. “That feels funny down there.”
“But we have to wash in between. In those secret places,” the priest panted. “We have to make it all clean and smell like roses. Now I’m going to rinse your lovely long hair with clean water. Hold still and shut your eyes again.”
Grace waited for her turn. It didn’t seem so bad. María was enjoying it.
“You see how pretty you are now?” he said. “Like one of Christ’s little angels.”
Grace wanted to be one of Christ’s Little Angels, too. María was getting all the attention. But then, like a tornado, Extra Tall came by and surprised the priest with her heavy footsteps. Padre Marco stood up in a jolt, knocking the bucket over which splashed all over his pants.
“How are we getting on here, Padre?”
“All finished now,” he said. Grace noticed his face had burst into an even redder Strawberry Red than before, and drops of sweat were dripping from his forehead. He quickly knelt down again, grabbing the now empty bucket and holding it against him as if he was trying to hide the zipper on his pants.
“I’ll finish this, Padre. I’m sure little Adela has calmed down by now, haven’t you?”
Grace managed a smile and watched as the woman stomped over in her white wooden clogs, the big, soapy sponge in her giant hands.
“Little girls?” the Padre said. “Do you have a home? Because if you don’t, you can stay tonight for dinner. We can set you up in a crib. Do you have anywhere to go?”
“Not really,” María lied. She was standing by Grace now, naked, dripping wet, as the Father wrapped her in a clean white towel. She skipped next to Grace and whispered in a hiss, “We can have a yummy dinner here.”
“But what about the tourist girls? The American girls?”
“Never mind about them, we’re staying here tonight.”
“But we promised—”
“No, we didn’t.”
“They said they’d buy us shoes, they—”
“I can buy you shoes,” the Padre interrupted. “For good little Catholic girls like you,” he said, looking at Grace’s cross, “the least I can do is buy you shoes. And then tomorrow we’ll organize your school uniforms.”
“See?” María said. “Told you it was better here.”
“Can we start school tomorrow?” Grace asked.
The Padre raked his eyes over her little frame. “Yes, Adela, you can both start school tomorrow. But before that, I’ll want to see you tucked up in bed nice and early so you can get a good night’s rest. I’ll be coming in personally to read you both a bedtime story.”
María giggled and asked, “What will the story be about?”
He paused and thought about it for a minute and then said, “A story about Jesus, of course.”
Sylvia
T
his time it wasn’t Agent Russo that called Sylvia, but the FBI attaché in Panama. Sylvia and Melinda had caught a taxi from the unappealing capital of Managua and finally, after getting out of the entrails and endless suburbs of the city, they were heading north toward Chinandega. It was now five pm. The attaché had bad news. Grace had been reported missing by this young man, Lucho Reynes, the day before. The Chinandega police had swept the area by the beach. There was no sign of her having drowned, and there was a lot of morning activity there—somebody would have spotted her, they said.
But Grace had not been seen for thirty-six hours, since before dawn the day before. The man in question—this Lucho Reynes, a twenty-four-year-old Columbian surfer—was being held for questioning. He was a suspect, obviously, the local police assured the attaché. Just because it was he who had reported Grace missing didn’t make him innocent, didn’t let him off the hook. Casebook, they told him. Often the most helpful person at the scene of the crime turns out to be the perpetrator. Sylvia listened as carefully as she could to everything the attaché said but her heart was hammering in her ears, her breath short. It was happening again. Every time there seemed to be hope on the horizon, some outer force dragged them backwards through the dirt again.
“What’s wrong now?” Melinda asked with a look of fear in her eyes.
Sylvia’s body felt numb as if something had sucked out the nerves in her hands and limbs. She sunk into the corner of the taxi and looked out the window as they sailed past colorful buses belching out black fumes, dodging chickens and dogs, forcing bicycles to go wobbling into the verges of the road. In the distance, she could see a smoking cone-shaped volcano, the white clouds steadily climbing from its crater. It looked as if it could explode any minute.
“Just as I thought we were finally getting somewhere,” Sylvia murmured.
Melinda held her cousin’s trembling fingers in her hand. “What did they say? Grace isn’t
there
?”
“She
was
there. Quite happily, it seems. Hanging out with this surfer guy, Lucho, and his French girlfriend—living in the cabin by the beach where Ruth left her. This Lucho has sworn to the police that he has nothing to do with her disappearance. Apparently, he was even in tears. Said Grace’s
mother
left her with him and said she was going to return in a couple of weeks. Left him some money, the cabin paid for in advance. He met Ruth in El Salvador; she was acting as a kind of cougar cum sugar-mommy, it seems. She was going under the name of Rocío and he thought Grace’s name was Adela. Can you imagine? Poor Grace not only has had to deal with getting kidnapped, but has had her name changed and been given a whole new identity, a new mother.”
Melinda’s eyes welled with tears. “Oh my God. That is so fucked up!”
“Tell me about it. I just feel sick. That’s bad enough, but
disappeared
?”
Melinda wiped her face and her voice took on a fake cheery tone. “I’m sure Grace is okay. Somewhere. Maybe she’s even looking for you, poor thing.” Then she added, “If Ruth was passing herself off as her mother, where does Grace think
you
are?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why didn’t Grace say something to this Lucho, tell him her story?”
“I don’t
know
,” Sylvia shouted to herself as much as to her cousin. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to snap. I’m . . . just . . . I really can’t imagine, Melinda. Your guess is as good as mine.”
“We need to see Lucho. We need to talk to him,” Melinda said, more softly, “Where is he?”
“The police have detained him. He’s at the station in a town called El Viejo, only a few miles from Chinandega. I’m not saying he’s innocent but it just seems to me that if his plan was to do something nasty to Grace he could have done it ages ago.”
“We just don’t know till we see him. I want to look into his eyes. You can always tell a person by their eyes.”
“Well that makes me and Tommy really dumb then, doesn’t it? Both of us were hoodwinked, on different occasions, by Ruth.”
Melinda flinched and said, “I’m sorry, putting my foot—”
“No, you’re right,” Sylvia went on, “you
can
tell who someone is by their eyes—if you’re smart enough. We weren’t, and look where it got us.”
Melinda began to surf on her iPhone. “We’d better tell the driver, then, that we need to go to El Viejo, to the
Policía Nacional
and not straight to the beach.”
Sylvia wiped the back of her hand across her face. She realized she’d been drinking her tears that were trickling into her mouth. Sometimes, she was unaware she’d even been crying. She was squandering her energy, she needed to focus.
“Look, I’m just thinking. Both of us going together is a waste of our resources—it would be frittering away precious time. Melinda, is your Spanish still pretty good?”
“Not too bad. I used to have to talk to the Madrid lot at work quite a bit. It’s not great, but I can still recite bits of Pablo Neruda.”
“I don’t think poetry is going to get you very far with the police here.”
“Sylveee, I was just kidding. We have to keep ourselves going with a
little
sense of humor or we’ll just cave in.”
“I’m sorry. I just don’t find
anything
funny right now. Look, why don’t you go to the police and I’ll go straight on to the beach? See if you can persuade the police to let you talk to Lucho, and I’ll find the cabin and anyone nearby who knows something. I want to get there before sunset—it’s always early in the tropics—I don’t want to be flailing about in the dark.”
Melinda put on her glasses and typed on her phone. “Okay, let me see. Sunset in Nicaragua . . . Managua . . . in June, six pm. Managua’s only a little further south,
mas o menos el
mismo
, don’t you think?”
“Tell the driver we need another car. If he could drop me off with a taxi friend of his somewhere. You go to El Viejo and I’ll go to the beach—we’ll meet later, depending on who has more info and where we need to be.”
Sylvia looked down at her thumb and saw she’d ripped the cuticles with her teeth—she had blood on her dress. “And would you send Tommy a message?” she asked her cousin. “He needs to know what’s going on.”
SYLVIA WAS GLAD to get out of the car. Several times she’d closed her eyes—the possibility of a head-on collision with a truck, swerving to avoid some poor pedestrian or a split in the road, was terrifying. The passing scenery was like going back in time. She observed cream-colored oxen pulling carts with wooden wheels, buses that looked, for the most part, like old American school buses from the 1960s, aluminum with long noses, but top-heavy with baskets, bundles, and great sacks, accompanied by passengers clinging onto the roof rack. She feared they might topple over with the weight. Sometimes a child waved and cheered at her; she heard the word “
rubia
” –the obvious tourist, as she was, in her clean dress (despite the blood marks), leaning out of the window, letting her blond hair blow in the warm wind. There had been a dash of intense rain, too, and potholes had filled up in a matter of minutes, turning into ponds of brown mud-water, soaking poor bicyclists quivering by; the goose-bumps on their arms almost visible as they swerved the flooded, scarred road.
They’d hit the beginning of the rainy season. Sylvia was begging to whoever was listening, that Grace was dry. Alive. Safe. And that somebody could offer a clue as to her whereabouts.
By a stroke of luck, the new driver was familiar with The Boom and dropped Sylvia halfway down a dirt track, which apparently led to the cabin, which he also knew about. This was the countryside—the locals must know each other, she surmised. The driver was acquainted with the American surfer who owned the cabin, said they sometimes shared a beer together. He informed Sylvia that a woman lived next door, local to these parts—he couldn’t remember her name—but that she looked after the cabin when nobody was there.
Sylvia walked along the muddy path, the earth gurgling beneath her, squelching and sucking—a sound like several children simultaneously slurping sodas through straws. The sun was preparing itself for bed, casting golden dapples through the high coconut palms. She passed a hut, its thick straw roof toppled and cockeyed from the rain. A few chickens were pecking about in the fenced-in yard and she observed a small boy staring at her, barefoot, shirtless, holding a bleating kid in his arms as if it were a baby. She approached the gate, set her backpack down and took out a photo of Grace from her wallet. The child retreated.
“Hola,” she offered tentatively. “Estoy buscando mi hija.” She could hear the clumsiness of her accent. The inquisitive boy continued to watch her. She pulled some candy from her pocket and a biro. She’d heard how children were feverish for pens. The little boy stood stock-still. “Venga,” Sylvia beckoned, “para tí.” Then she remembered she needed to use South American Spanish, not Castilian Spanish. “Para
vos
.”
The boy, still clutching the animal, came forward. She handed him the pen and he inspected it like an artifact. She wondered if he even had any paper at his simple farm—probably not. She showed him the photo of Grace and said, “Conoces esta niña?” He shook his head and looked at the candy, which she handed over. He smiled coyly and ran back to his shack, giggling.