Tres Leches Cupcakes (27 page)

“My crew’s getting ready to inflate it right now. It will be up in fifteen minutes, but you can’t miss it. It’s bright yellow, with three eagle feathers wrapping around the circumference. Will you come?”

“Let me see if I can get away,” she said before she’d properly evaluated the question or her answer to it. Was she seriously going up in a balloon with a man she believed was connected both to bodies found in the desert and to Margo’s disappearance?

“I’ll wait,” Ethan said, his eagerness curious but not necessarily disturbing. He stepped out of line, and Sadie rang up the next person in line before finding Lois at the back of the booth talking to one of the Fiesta officials. She waited for them to finish their conversation, which ended with Lois giving the man a complimentary cupcake. Sadie explained the invitation and asked if she could leave for about forty-five minutes, fully prepared to take “No” as a sign that this was a bad choice.

Lois smiled instead. “You’re going on a balloon ride with Ethan Standage! How exciting!”

When she relayed Lois’s blessing to Ethan a minute later, his face lit up with relief and he nodded quickly. “Great, I’ll see you soon, then.”

“Thank you, Mr. Standage.”

“Please, call me Ethan.” He put his hand out, and Sadie shook it.

What questions did he have for her? What questions would she ask him in return? Nerves made her stomach flutter at the possibilities. She’d turned everything over to the police, but sometimes people told her things they would never say to an officer of the law. She had to do this, for Margo’s sake, if nothing else.

She focused her thoughts and turned to the next set of customers—a young couple debating on whether to share one cupcake or each get one of their own. Sadie was against the sharing of baked goods; it wasn’t good for any relationship, especially a new one. She was about to offer such advice when she caught Caro looking at her, a question on her face.

“What?” Sadie asked automatically.

“Ethan Standage is taking you up in his balloon?”

“I guess so.”

“Huh.” She turned to her next customer, leaving Sadie no choice but to do the same, though she kept glancing at Caro, wondering what was behind her question. She wanted to think that one of these days, she and Caro would be friends again and that they would overcome this difficulty, but Caro’s mood today didn’t seem to forecast that very well.

Chapter 26

Have you heard of the Albuquerque box?” Ethan said half an hour later when he pulled the door of the balloon’s basket closed and nodded to his crew to let go of the ropes holding the balloon on the ground.

“No,” Sadie said as he reached past her and secured the door. There were benches built into either end of the rectangular basket, which was about eight feet long and five feet wide—bigger than she’d have expected. The burner hovered overhead, and she stared up into the envelope of the balloon, catching her breath at all the space inside the silken panels. She was seriously trusting her life to a wicker basket connected to a glorified parachute? She closed her eyes and prayed until the burner roared, and she opened her eyes to see that they were rising. Just like that.

Her stomach dropped, and she hung onto one of the leather loops positioned at intervals along the inside of the basket. Ethan pulled the burner cord again, and Sadie looked up to see the fire and heat waves distort her view for a few seconds. She felt the increased speed as the balloon lifted even higher. “What’s the Albuquerque box?” she asked, though her voice squeaked. She cleared her throat and wished she had anticipated this experience better.

“It’s the name coined for the wind patterns in the Albuquerque valley. Northern winds flow at the lower levels, and southern winds are higher. It allows balloonists to use the wind patterns to take off and land from the same location. It’s why ballooning is so popular here.”

“I’d heard the valley was ideal for ballooning, but I didn’t know why. That’s very interesting.”

“It isn’t always available, and it’s most common in the mornings, but today is a perfect box. You’re lucky to have your first balloon ride under such ideal conditions.”

“Lucky me,” Sadie said, but she was feeling a little green.

He smiled, then pulled the burner cord again, taking them higher. She could see nothing but sky and a few other scattered balloons. They went higher and higher, but Sadie managed to contain her panic and instead let her eyes focus on the valley with the goal of appreciating the amazing view. It
was
lovely, but she was still queasy.

When Ethan let several seconds lapse between pulls of the burner cord, Sadie realized they were level with another balloon several hundred yards to their left, but moving in the same direction—south. She’d left her jacket at the booth and hugged herself for warmth. The temperature had dropped quickly.

Now that they weren’t going higher, she focused on Ethan and why he’d invited her here. He took a deep breath, held it a moment, then let it out. Sadie often did the same thing when she needed to calm down or to do or say something difficult. She waited him out, and a few seconds later he looked toward her. “Shel told you.”

“Told me what?”

Ethan crossed his arms and looked at the bottom of the basket, covered with a piece of plywood. He took another breath and then said quietly, “About the bodies.”

He’d inadvertently answered her unasked question. “I saw the bodies myself. You told Shel they were there, didn’t you?”

He blew out a breath and ran his fingers through his long hair while nodding his head.

“How did you know?” she asked when he didn’t automatically explain himself.

He sidestepped her question by asking a new one of his own. “Did you tell the police?”

“I told them everything I knew,” Sadie said. She almost apologized before catching herself. There was something about Ethan that made her feel protective of him, but it bothered her to respond to him that way. “Have they contacted you?”

“I had a message from a detective this morning saying they needed to talk to me. I’m really freaked out. They think I had something to do with those guys being at the dig site, don’t they?”

“You tipped off Shel. You knew they were there.”

“But I didn’t put them there,” Ethan said with a pleading tone.

“Then how did you know about them?”

“I
didn’t
know for sure.”

“Okay, so you had a strong suspicion, and you were right—there
were
two bodies buried right where you told Shel they might be. It’s going to be hard to split hairs on that.”

Ethan looked at her for a few seconds, then busied himself with pulling the burner cord. They lifted again, but this time Sadie’s stomach didn’t roll. After a few seconds, he asked, “Who are you? Why are you even interested in all this?”

“My friend is missing, and I’m trying to figure out what’s happened to her,” Sadie said. She nearly told him about Margo’s disappearance and her suspicions that it was connected to the ranch, but decided to hold onto that for the time being. Her goal was to determine what Ethan Standage knew, not show her hand. “She asked Shel a bunch of questions Monday night, and she hasn’t been seen since.”

“This is that Margo lady?”

“You know her?”

“No, Shel told me about her when I called him after listening to the message from the detective. I don’t know anything about why your friend is missing, though. I don’t even know who she is.”

“But you knew the bodies were at the site.”

“I
hoped
the bodies
weren’t
there,” Ethan said with more force than anything else he’d said.

“But you feared they were. Why?”

Silence. Was he already regretting saying too much? Yet, they were in a basket hundreds of feet above Albuquerque—surely he wasn’t going to stop now.

“Look, my friend’s life is on the line here,” Sadie reminded him. “And the two men from the site are already dead. Holding back now isn’t going to do anyone any good. You brought me here for a reason—why?”

“I just . . . I need someone to believe me. Shel says you’re working with the cops but that you listen.”

Sadie was touched by the compliment, and she hoped she could live up to it. “I’m listening, and I’m willing to advocate for you, but you’re not telling me anything they don’t already know. If I’m going to help you, I need to know what happened.”

Ethan took a breath and a pained expression crossed his face before he relaxed just a little bit. “About six months ago, I received an anonymous tip, a letter mailed from Albuquerque that said my assistants were buried at a burial site in the desert northwest of Santa Fe.”

“Your assistants?” Sadie said.
What assistants?

“On my expeditions, I take a single assistant with me to help pack my gear and catalogue information. Teodor had worked with me for years, but he disappeared a few weeks before last year’s fall expedition. I figured he’d gone back to his family in Mexico—I’d recently paid him well for his help. I hired Raphael, the nephew of one of the ranch hands to take his place. He had climbing experience, and he went on the fall and the spring expeditions with me. But then he disappeared a month after our return.”

“You reported these disappearances, right?” The papers had said the bodies didn’t match any missing person reports.

“No,” Ethan said. “I hire . . . illegal aliens as my assistants.” A look of justification leaped into his face as he continued. “They are good, hardworking men who have families they want to bring to the States the right way. They need money, and they need a good immigration attorney. I give them both in exchange for their secrecy and loyalty, both of which are essential to my work. Since I began these expeditions, I’ve helped two men bring their families here and begin the citizenship process. I’ve had a few others who ended up going back home once I paid them.

“When Teodor and Raphael disappeared, I assumed I was just having a string of bad luck with the men I chose. I had no reason to expect foul play, and because they’re illegal, I couldn’t go to the police even if I
was
worried about the circumstances. When I got the tip that they were . . . buried, I hoped it was some kind of sick joke.”

“The tip told you they were at a burial site in the northwest desert. You could have looked for them.”

Ethan looked south, but Sadie suspected he didn’t see the amazing view laid out before them. “I could have,” he said quietly. “But I didn’t want it to be true. I tried to forget all about it.”

“How did Shel get work on
that
site?”

“When I heard about the newly discovered burial site in that area, I asked Shel to transfer to D&E and be my eyes and ears. I couldn’t tell anyone official, you understand, and I couldn’t connect myself to the site, at least not directly.”

“You got him the job that quickly?”

“Frank Delam—the D in D&E—is a friend of the family. They’re usually the company used for digs found by Parley Excavation; they’d discovered the site when they were excavating for a road. I called in a favor, and Frank was happy to employ a friend of mine in need of work.”

“And all that effort was worth getting a phone call as soon as the bodies were discovered instead of when it hit the evening news?”

“Teodor and Raphael were my friends,” Ethan said, a pleading tone in his voice. The balloon had started to sink again, and he pulled the burner for several seconds so they would rise back into the southern air currents.

“But you didn’t report them gone. Even if they were here illegally, you didn’t take the tip to the police even though you had reason to think it was true.”

He looked past her toward the West Mesa. “Yes, I left them there because I hoped they weren’t there at all. Part of me still hopes it isn’t them, but everything in the papers seems to be supporting the fact that it is them. I hired someone to look for them in Mexico about the same time I asked Shel to work with D&E. I was in Mexico City following up on the investigation when Shel called me about the bodies being found. A few days later, I spoke to Raphael’s mother—it was my last hope to prove that the tip really was a sick joke.” He crossed his arms over his chest and stared at the floor of the basket again. “She hasn’t heard from him in six months, since a few days before he went missing. I couldn’t bring myself to talk to Teodor’s wife after that. They have three children, and I don’t know what she’s going to do without him. He’s been gone for over a year. I sent her some money through the investigator that I hope will help, but I’m just sick over this. I can’t sleep, I try to make sense of it and I can’t. They were good men—family men with goals and ambition. I don’t understand what happened.” He cleared his throat and turned away, attempting to hide his emotion.

“I’m sorry,” Sadie said sympathetically. “I can see you truly cared about them and their families.”

His back was still toward her, but he nodded, took a breath, and then turned around to face her.

“Why would someone kill your assistants, bury them in an old burial site, and then tell you where they were?” Sadie asked.