No Witness But the Moon Read online

  Diablo strained at the leash. His floppy triangle ears were on alert. His tail was curled like a giant question mark. His nose glistened in the moonlight. His whole body seemed poised and ready for action. But what sort of action?

  They left the pavement and stepped onto the gravel at the end of the cul-de-sac. Diablo jumped over a fallen tree limb. His leash snagged on a branch and Vega undid it. Adele wondered if the dog would just run off but he waited while Vega tucked the leash in his pocket and pulled out a small flashlight.

  “Stay here. I’ll find her.” Vega began scrabbling over the limb.

  “I’m coming, too.”

  “Adele—”

  “She’s my daughter!”

  He held out his hand and helped her over the limb.

  “Sophia!” she called out. Her voice felt tight and raw. No answer. A montage of frightening possibilities flashed through her head. Sophia had been abducted. She’d fallen and hit her head. She’d been struck by a car crossing the street. She was lying in a ditch bleeding. Her baby. Her life. There was nothing she wouldn’t do to save her.

  Nothing.

  Diablo continued to push on. There were no real trails back here. Just uprooted trees, skeletal bushes, and thickets of dead limbs that tore at their clothes. Vega could barely keep up with the dog. Adele could barely keep up with Vega.

  “Sophia!” Vega called out. His voice was deeper and stronger. It seemed to rattle the darkness. There was a note of desperation in him, too. She could hear it.

  And then she heard something else. A child’s soft whimper.

  “Sophia!” cried Adele. “Where are you, lucero?”

  Vega waved the flashlight in an arc before him. Thorny bushes and dead limbs absorbed the yellow haze. Beneath an overgrowth of dormant vines was an overturned metal shopping cart. A wheel stuck up out of the dirt, rusty and bent. Sophia was here somewhere. Why wasn’t she walking toward them?

  The dog raced down an embankment and then backtracked to Vega. Adele followed them both until she could make out the silvery thread of a stream. It had the viscous glow of liquid mercury under the haze of moonlight. And then she saw it. On the other side of the stream. A purple coat and a pair of mud-streaked fuzzy pajama bottoms.

  “There!” she said.

  Sophia was curled into a ball, rocking back and forth, rubbing the ankle of her muddy snow boot.

  “Mommy!” At the sight of her mother, Sophia burst into tears. “I dropped Diablo’s leash! He ran when I tried to pick it back up. So I chased him. I’m so sorry!”

  “It’s okay, lucero. We’re coming!”

  “My ankle hurts.”

  “Call nine-one-one,” said Vega. “Ask them for an ambulance and fire truck response. Tell them to meet you at the entrance to the woods on Spring Street.” He handed her his flashlight.

  “Don’t you need the flashlight?”

  “I’m not sure I can carry Sophia back up this muddy incline.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “If I can’t move her? Stay with her. What else?”

  Diablo panted beside Vega. He turned and rubbed a knuckle against the dog’s head. “Good dog.”

  “Good dog? Are you kidding?” asked Adele.

  “He found Sophia.”

  “He’s the reason she’s in this mess in the first place!”

  Vega frowned. Even in the pale glow of moonlight, his dark eyes registered the truth: We’re the reason she’s in this mess. Not the dog.

  Adele watched Vega’s shadow fade into the blur of darkness, the dog at his side. The embankment was steep. Even in heavy-soled boots, it would be hard for anyone to negotiate at night. Adele took out her cell and dialed 911 and gave them the information Vega had instructed. On the other side of the embankment, she heard loose stones scatter like rice down the rocky, crusted hillside. Branches cracked and snapped in the darkness. There was a quick, deft splash of water—likely Diablo—followed by a heavier sloshing sound that was likely Vega. She heard her daughter’s soft, panicked cry and Vega’s soothing voice.

  “It’s okay, mija. I’ll wrap you in my jacket. Put your arms around my neck and I’ll see if I can get you out of here.”

  Adele pointed the flashlight down at her feet and maneuvered through the broken branches and tree limbs until she found her way onto the street. The pale yellow wash of street light felt glaring after the darkness of the woods. The trip into the woods had seemed so long. The trip out, so short. What felt interminable now was the wait. She bobbed up and down on the curb to stay warm, her breath clouding up before her, and waited for the sound of the sirens.

  Sophia would be all right. Adele knew that. Despite the adrenaline coursing through her veins, the nervous pins and needles draining the feeling from her limbs, her logical mind knew that Sophia was not in mortal danger. Even if the child’s ankle was broken, she was with Vega. They would get her to the hospital. Sophia would be fine again in a few days or so with a great story to tell her friends. This wasn’t anything like what Marcela’s daughter, Yovanna, probably just experienced on her 2000-mile trek from Honduras to here. This wasn’t anything like the terror that Marcela and her family were experiencing now.

  And yet in those moments before Adele and Vega found Sophia, Adele’s pain had been as acute as any of the women in Las Madres Perdidas. Her heart blew up in her chest until it felt like it was going to explode in desperation. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t feel cold or dampness or hunger. At that moment, she would have struck any bargain, risked any punishment, and paid any price to assure her daughter’s safety.

  Just like Marcela.

  She heard the sirens before she saw the red flashing lights. The police arrived first. Two young officers whom she knew by face, though not by name. She could barely form the words but they knew what to do. The ambulance came next. Then a fire truck. The firefighters helped Vega and Sophia up the embankment. Sophia was lost in the folds of Vega’s jacket. She wasn’t crying anymore. She was holding tight to Vega’s neck while Diablo danced around his feet.

  Vega was shivering. His shirt was muddy. His boots and pants were soaked to the shins.

  “She’s gonna be fine,” Vega told Adele. He gave her a wink. “She’s brave like her mother.”

  The EMTs loaded Sophia into the back of the ambulance. One of them handed Vega back his jacket. He slipped into it gratefully.

  “Thank you,” Adele said to him. Those words didn’t begin to cover her gratitude.

  “You ride over to the hospital with Sophia,” said Vega. “I’ll take Diablo back to your house, grab your car, and meet you there.”

  The EMTs were closing the doors of the ambulance. Adele needed to hop inside.

  “Jimmy—” There was so much she wanted to say and no time to say it.

  “I’ll be over as soon as I can.”

  Chapter 23

  Marcela pulled her hood tightly around her face and slipped into her father’s building. Darkness fell early this time of year. In the Bronx, the concrete canyons ate up the natural light, replacing it with the glare of streetlights and hallway CFL bulbs that offered neither warmth nor clarity.

  Marcela desperately needed both at the moment. Alma wasn’t expecting her. Alma would not be happy to see her.

  For ten years, Marcela had lived about fifty miles north of her father and his second family. But it was only two years ago that she and her father were finally able to come to a truce. His priest had brokered it. Father Delgado. He was one of the few people her father had ever told about his trip across the border.

  “I know you’re angry that your father abandoned you,” the old priest had told her. “But your father wants your forgiveness.” By then Marcela was well versed in what the border does to parents and children. She was a parent, too. So she swallowed the anger and tried to turn her thoughts to their early years together in San Pedro Sula. The cornhusk doll her father once made for her. The time he bought her a bag of cotton candy at a street fair—a memory so st
rong that even now, the smell of that sugary confection brought back that day, the sun on her shoulders, her hands and face covered in sticky sweetness that melted into every pore of her being until even her toes curled with delight.

  They did not talk about that last morning together in Honduras—the one when she said good-bye to her father and sixteen-year-old brother under the broad canopy of a huanacaxtle tree. Marcela could still see Miguel waving good-bye from the back of that truck overloaded with people and backpacks. He would always be that gangly young prince who hefted her over deep puddles in the streets after it rained and spoke with hope in his chest of what he would do in El Norte. He seemed so old when she was ten. He seemed so young now. Three years, it was supposed to be. Only three years before they would all be together again.

  Of all the lies people tell you about journeying to El Norte, this was the biggest lie of all.

  “I want to make it different for you and Yovanna,” Marcela’s father told her one day a few months ago. All of a sudden. With no pretext. That was Hector Ponce. Marcela could never read his mind. She didn’t question why or how. She didn’t want to know the details then.

  She knew too many now.

  Marcela stepped inside a black-and-white-tiled hallway that smelled of roach defogger, chili powder, and cooking oil. She walked down a flight of stairs to her father’s basement apartment. Her father’s sons, twelve-year-old Aaron and fourteen-year-old Felix, were standing outside the front doorway, huddled against a wall with friends, trying hard to look defiant and tough, though Marcela could see the freefall in their eyes. She could feel their loss like a magnet, drawing her in. She wanted to comfort them. She knew that was impossible—even dangerous at the moment.

  “Marcela,” Felix called softly. He was a stocky teenager with his mother’s square chin. He had a tendency to stutter when he got excited. “I can’t believe this is h-h-happening.”

  Marcela gave the boy a hug. She wanted to feel her father’s blood coursing through his veins but all she could feel was Alma. These boys, they were not like Miguel with his cougar grace or Reimundo with his dark liquid eyes. She could never look at either of them without thinking of what Miguel and Reimundo might have done with their lives had they been born here instead of Honduras. At the very least, they would be alive.

  The front door of the apartment was open and packed with Alma’s relatives and men in suits. Lawyers. Here it was, twenty-four hours after the shooting and Alma was still surrounded by people while Marcela had to pretend like nothing had happened.

  She was getting very good at pretending.

  Alma was propped in a chair, surrounded by people hovering protectively over her and holding her hand. She was a short, stocky woman who favored bright red lipsticks and tweezed her eyebrows until they were just slash marks across her brow, which gave her a harsh look. She came here from Honduras when she was sixteen and had had the good fortune of squeezing in under the amnesty so she was legal, unlike Marcela and her father. She worked at a bakery off the Grand Concourse. Between Marcela’s father’s job as a dishwasher and building handyman and her job in the bakery, they squeaked by. Without Marcela’s father’s wages, it would be a struggle—which was why Alma had wasted no time in securing an attorney and filing a lawsuit.

  Alma sat up straight when she saw Marcela. Her eyes narrowed suspiciously.

  “Marcela. You came.” Nothing in that greeting sounded like a welcome. Marcela noticed others eyeing her so she bent down awkwardly and hugged Alma. Then she leaned into her ear.

  “I need to talk to you,” she whispered in Spanish. “Privately.”

  Alma pressed her red lips together and dabbed her eyes. She rose unsteadily. One of her friends patted her hand. “I’m okay,” Alma assured the woman. Then she turned to Marcela. “In the bedroom, yes?”

  Marcela followed Alma down a short, overheated hallway with framed photographs of Aaron and Felix on the walls. There were no photos of Marcela, her two dead brothers or her sister who now lived with her husband and children in Costa Rica. It was as if none of them had ever existed.

  The basement apartment had two bedrooms at the end of the hall. Felix and Aaron’s bunk beds were in a room on the right. On the left was a bedroom that looked out on a concrete retaining wall. The only light came from the harsh ceiling fixture overhead. The room had barely enough space for a queen-sized bed and a chest of drawers. Alma closed the door and sat on the bed. She began speaking as soon as she sat down.

  “Why are you here? The wake and funeral, I understand. But that has not been arranged yet.”

  “My father told me a while back that he left an envelope for me in his bedroom. With some old family pictures and mementos inside. He wanted me to have them if something happened to him.”

  “Mementos? What kind of mementos?”

  Marcela gathered her words carefully. “I really don’t know. I’m just wondering if you’ve seen the envelope?”

  Alma narrowed her gaze. “Did that man call you today? The one who was asking for money?”

  “No,” Marcela lied. Besides, it wasn’t money he wanted anymore. He had his eye on something more valuable—at least to him.

  Alma frowned. “He seemed pretty insistent about getting his money.”

  “Maybe he changed his mind.” Or circumstances changed it for him. Marcela tried to keep her voice as even as possible. “Perhaps my father tucked this envelope in a drawer?”

  “Everything in this apartment belongs to me!” Alma said sharply. “There is nothing here that concerns you.”

  Marcela leaned against the dresser drawers. There was barely any floor space left in the bedroom. She nodded to the hallway. “Those lawyers out there? What would they say if I told them you aren’t Hector Ponce’s legal wife?”

  “I am the mother of his two sons!”

  “Yes. That’s true. But you aren’t my father’s legal wife. I’m his blood relative. Maybe you aren’t entitled to any money at all.” Marcela didn’t know if that was true, but she knew it would scare Alma—scare her enough to make her think twice about chasing Marcela out of the apartment when it would be easy enough to hand her a bunch of old pictures and mementos that Alma would just throw out anyway.

  Alma reached into the cleavage of her blouse and pulled out a hanky. It was hot in the bedroom, the old steam radiators hissing and clanking. Slowly she got up from the bed and opened one of the chest drawers. She poked around underneath some of her father’s clothes. They smelled of his spicy aftershave. She pulled out a book. It was Ricardo Luis’s recently published memoir: La Canción de Mi Cora-zón. Song of My Heart, the Spanish-language edition. On the cover was a picture of the sexy Mexican pop star in a black unbuttoned shirt.

  Marcela frowned at the book. “What was my father doing with Luis’s autobiography?”

  “I don’t know,” said Alma. “But whatever it was, he was up to no good. Your father had no interest in Luis’s music.”

  “He wasn’t stealing.”

  “Well, he was doing something illegal. That ID he was carrying in his wallet when he was shot? I’ve never seen it before. Your father’s middle name is Mauricio. Why would he have fake ID in the name of Antonio—ID from Georgia, a state he’s never even been to—unless he was doing something illegal?”

  “Have you shown the book to anyone?”

  “Of course not,” said Alma. “The police came this morning asking for his comb and toothbrush and a few other things. I gave them what they asked for but I’m not giving them an excuse to wash the blood off their hands. Maybe your father did some things he shouldn’t have. Maybe he borrowed money from someone he shouldn’t have. But he didn’t deserve to die.”

  Alma opened the book now. Inside was a manila envelope addressed to Marcela. It had been torn open. Alma handed it to her.

  “You—opened this?”

  “I didn’t know what was inside.”

  You wanted to make sure there was no money, thought Marcela. But it served no purpose to sa
y what each of them knew. Marcela reached into the envelope and examined the contents. She saw a jumble of grainy and yellowed photos of her and her sister hugging, of Miguel posing with Reimundo by a corrugated fence, Reimundo smiling through two lost baby teeth. She pulled out the photo she’d seen on the news of her father, his brother Edgar, and Miguel posing by a fruit stand as they began their journey north.

  So there were two copies of that photo the police confiscated. Of course. It made sense.

  And then she saw it. A thick religious tract about Jesus in Spanish. It was inside a clear plastic envelope. It looked like some free piece of literature one of the religious societies might give away. She could feel the hard press of something tucked inside the tract. Something round and flat. The size of a saucer. A disc. Yes. This was what she was looking for. This was where her father had stashed it. Marcela nearly wept with relief to think she’d found it.

  She carefully folded up the envelope and tucked it into her bag. “Thank you,” she said to Alma. She meant it for once. Without knowing it, Alma had just turned over the one thing that would wipe out her father’s $8,000 debt.

  And more importantly, it would spare her daughter’s life.

  Chapter 24

  “Her name is Yovanna,” said Adele as she handed Vega a cup of coffee from the emergency room vending machine. Vega took the cup gratefully just to feel the warmth in his hands. His pants and boots had mostly dried but he’d been so cold out there in the woods with Sophia that he couldn’t shake the chill.

  “You mean the Honduran girl you were telling me about earlier?”

  Adele nodded. Her gaze shifted to the emergency room doors. It would be a while before Sophia’s ankle got X-rayed. Adele’s ex was in with the child now. Vega got the impression Peter blamed Adele for what had happened tonight.

  “Would you like me to speak to him?” asked Vega, nodding to the doors. “This whole situation is really my fault.”

  “He’ll blame me no matter what you do,” said Adele. “And let’s face it, I blame myself.” She stared down at her blue silk dress. Splotches of mud covered the front. Her makeup had gone blurry around the eyes. Vega squeezed her hand. He didn’t know what else to do. He’d started out the evening determined to keep his distance from both Joy and Adele, to spare them the pain of his association. Yet somehow he’d loused things up anyway. But even so, for a moment tonight, when Sophia was wrapped in his jacket and they were making their way up that muddy embankment, he’d felt a great sense of purpose. He saw himself as the man he used to be—the man he wanted to be again. He just didn’t know how anymore. So he sipped his coffee, which tasted like sweetened water, and tried to hang on to the notion that he could still do good in the world even if he’d done something bad.