by Jeff Miller
“My name is Juan Sanchez,” he said. And then he spoke louder to her, but for the group to hear. “On behalf of the families gathered here, I want to thank you for coming. We’re a community in despair, as you can imagine. The people here are missing sons and fathers and brothers and friends. We are accustomed to living in darkness, but nothing like this. You are the only light we’ve seen. Thank you for coming.”
The assembled throng applauded. Some of them were crying. An elderly woman rose from her seat and carried a brown paper bag to Dagny. She spoke a few words in Spanish, and Diego translated. “In case you are hungry, she has made you these tamales.”
Dagny nodded at the woman. “Thank you. Gracias.”
“Auténticos,” she said.
“They’re authentic,” Diego said.
“I got that,” Dagny muttered. She walked toward the center of the front row and scanned the faces of the crowd, which ranged in ages from fifteen to eighty, she guessed. All had dressed in their Sunday best. The women wore makeup, and the men wore ties. Hair was brushed and combed and parted in neat, straight lines. Even their posture seemed formal.
“I have a short amount of time—”
A young woman stood up. “I . . .” She paused, unsure of the word she wanted, and then lifted a knitted sweater from her tote and extended it toward Dagny. “For you. Thank you.”
She walked toward the woman and took the sweater. “Gracias. But this really isn’t necessary.”
An older gentleman stood. He smiled, then reached down to the floor and came up with a vase full of roses. “To brighten your room, while you stay,” he said.
Dagny took the vase and set it and the sweater next to the bag full of tamales. She looked at Diego, but he shrugged. Turning back to the crowd, she began. “When people are missing, time moves fast, so I need information, and as much of it as you can give me, as quickly as possible. So, for each of the missing, I’d like to get the following—”
“Please,” Diego said. “You need to slow down so that I can translate.”
“Lo siento,” Dagny said. She repeated her introduction with appropriate pauses, and he translated each portion. “We need to talk about each of the missing, one at a time, and I don’t want to move on to the next person until we’ve exhausted everything about the last,” she said, and then he translated. “Let’s start with Emilio Garza. Who can speak about him?”
A middle-aged woman rose. “My name is Rosa Garza,” she said in perfect English. “I am Emilio’s mother. He is my boy.”
Dagny opened her backpack and pulled out her iPad, a tool neither issued nor sanctioned by the Bureau. Diego fetched her a chair and small table, and she sat to type. She opened a notebook program, turned to a blank page, and typed Emilio Garza and underlined it, skipped two lines, and typed Rosa G.—Mom. “What is his date of birth?”
“June 3, 1998.”
Dagny typed it into her iPad. “Did you bring photographs?”
Rosa nodded and handed a small stack to the man in front of her, who passed it through the crowd to Dagny. There were eight photographs in all. Emilio was a handsome young man, with hair that curled and a thin frame that seemed to contort. Dagny placed the photographs on the table in front of her and used the iPad to take pictures of each of them. She dropped the images on Emilio’s page in her digital notebook, then looked back to the woman. “Tell me about him, Rosa.”
“His father died when he was thirteen, so we moved here to be closer to my brother, who supported us until he was deported. I work part-time jobs where they can be had, but Emilio is the breadwinner. He supported his little sisters and me working for Arden Masonry for a couple of years, and when that dried up, odd jobs here and there. He’ll work two or three jobs a day if he has to. He has no time for girls or fun. I tell him he’s working too hard, but he says he’s young, and that there is time for fun later. He wants to make sure his sisters are cared for.
“When he would work late, I would lie in bed awake until he came home. One night, I heard the lock on the door flip, and Emilio tiptoed inside. ‘I love you, Mama,’ he said, and then he went to his room to sleep. That was the last I saw of him. The next morning, he left before sunrise to search for more work.” She started to cry. “I never saw him again.”
It was a moving story, but only Arden Masonry warranted inclusion in Dagny’s notes. She needed specifics and asked Rosa for them. The date of his disappearance. Other employers. The names and addresses of his friends. His phone number and the service provider. When Rosa ran out of answers, Dagny turned to the rest of the crowd. A young woman noted that Emilio had been dating her friend—the kind of thing that mothers sometimes don’t know. Dagny took the friend’s name and contact information. Another noted that Emilio had run up a gambling debt. There was probably more that couldn’t be said in front of his mother. Normally, an agent would never conduct interviews in a group setting like this, but there were twenty-five people missing, and she had only two days to do something about it.
After Dagny exhausted all of the information she could get about Emilio, she asked about other missing boys. It took several hours, but she was able to amass a pretty impressive compendium of photographs and data. The oldest missing was twenty-seven; the youngest was sixteen. Nine of them were married. Eleven were fathers. Most of them had graduated from high school. All of them had worked as day laborers. None of them seemed to have a criminal record. All of them had cell phones, but to her dismay, only three of them were iPhones, and that would make things difficult. She understood what to do with iPhones.
She noticed that thirteen of the men had disappeared on the same day, about a week and a half back. Another ten of them had disappeared four days earlier. It seemed likely that they had vanished in groups.
When there was nothing left to be said, Dagny thanked the group for their time and started to pack her things. No one rose from their seats. She looked at Diego, and he stepped forward and said a few words in Spanish too quickly for her to catch any of them. Still no one rose. Diego walked over to her and whispered, “I think they need more.”
Dagny set down her backpack and surveyed the crowd. Their eyes studied hers, looking for something. She had misjudged them. It wasn’t only sadness and despair that filled them—it was also fear. They were looking for hope.
“The information you’ve provided will be a significant help,” she said. A woman in the front row began to cry. Dagny needed to try harder.
“I’ve worked many successful cases where we had less to go on than this.” Even as she said it, she knew these words were of little comfort. Others began to cry, too. “These boys will be found.”
A man rubbed his eyes; another lowered his head into his open hands. The first woman to cry was now sobbing.
“I will find these boys,” she said. “I will find them.”
It was a terrible thing to say. She couldn’t find them in two days. And then she’d be off the case, and no one would find them. She had given them hope, but it was false. So when they swarmed to hug her, it felt like the tightening of a noose.
After the meeting, Dagny and Diego corralled the families of the three men who used iPhones. One of them had no computer. They visited the homes of the other two, and she inspected their laptops but did not find what she had wanted. She dropped Diego at his home and started to drive to her motel. Her iPhone chirped. A text from Victor said: Met my points. He sent this text every evening. Though it was disguised as a marker of his own progress, it was really a gentle nudge to ensure that she continued hers.
In 1961, a woman at a grocery admired Jean Nidetch’s belly and asked when she was due. She wasn’t pregnant. Feeling fat and frustrated, Jean started to diet. Lonely in her struggles, she invited similarly frustrated friends to her house in Queens, and they talked about their problems with weight and their efforts to lose it. The meeting was a hit, and those who attended came back the next week, and the next, with more friends in tow each time. When the crowd outgrew her living ro
om, she rented a room above a movie theater and charged a two-dollar admission. Those brave enough stood on a scale she brought to each meeting, so that progress could be measured and celebrated. Since everyone was watching her weight, she called the group Weight Watchers. After two years of meetings, she partnered with a businessman named Albert Lippert to monetize the concept of communal weight loss. Ten years later, they sold the business to H. J. Heinz Company for $71.2 million. As a result of the program, Jean Nidetch lost seventy pounds and became a multimillionaire.
In the 1990s, Weight Watchers developed its signature points program, which it refined over the years. Every food was assigned a point value, derived by a formula that took into account its fat, carbohydrates, protein, and fiber content. Members were assigned a maximum number of points they might consume each day based upon their age, height, and desired weight. Keeping track of these points was tedious but effective. By logging everything they ate, members ensured that they remained on target for their weight-loss goals.
The Weight Watchers point system was designed to help people lose weight. It was not designed to ensure that anorexics kept their weight, but that’s how Dagny was using it. Victor, who needed to lose a few pounds, was her willing accomplice. While he worked the diet from the top, she worked it from below. They kept each other honest, but mostly, he was doing the keeping.
She wanted to weigh 125 pounds. To maintain this weight, she had to eat twenty-six points of food each day. If she ran, and she usually did, she needed another twenty points. It was a scientific way to monitor her weight. Or, at least as scientific as the program would let her be. Because Weight Watchers didn’t consider 125 to be a healthy weight for a woman who was five-nine, she had entered her height into the Weight Watchers website as five-five. This threw everything off a bit.
A Weight Watchers iPhone app helped her look up the point values of foods and keep track of her points on the road. She opened the app on her phone and glanced at the zero on the screen. Surely, she had eaten something that day, right? The bag of peanuts on the plane. She looked up its value: two points. That left her twenty-four points short for the day. A bag of tamales would do it, but she’d left them at the car dealership.
She pulled into the lot of a Shell station, parked Diego’s car, and walked into the store. The freezers had three shelves of ice cream. She grabbed Ben and Jerry’s Chubby Hubby and looked at the nutritional information on the side. At 330 calories and 20 grams of fat per serving, it would do. She paid for it, grabbed a plastic spoon from a bin, and drove to the Bilford Motor Inn. After checking in, she lugged her suitcase and backpack up the steps to the second floor and found her room. Once inside, she climbed into bed, turned on the television, and ate nearly the entire pint. It was a fitting end to an emotionally draining day.
CHAPTER 13
Adelmo Fox sat on a blanket, deep in the woods, waiting for a girl. He pushed the button that lit the face of his watch. Twenty past midnight, which meant that she was twenty minutes late. A breeze blew through the trees, and he shivered, wishing he’d brought his jacket. His mother would have made him bring it, if she had known where he was, and if she had allowed him to be there. Of course, she never would have allowed it—not on a school night, not with this girl, and not when so many people had gone missing over the last few weeks.
At sixteen, Adelmo was sure of a few things. He was sure that Kurt Vonnegut was the best writer in the history of American literature. He was sure that his mother’s empanadas were infused with all of the joy of heaven. And he was sure that he was deeply, madly in love with Jessica. He knew this because he called up her Facebook page thirty times a day to see her face, because he replayed her voice mails twelve times in a row, and because he felt a thousand volts of electricity surge through his body each time she grabbed his hand.
As the wind picked up, it whistled through the trees. He opened his thermos, poured a cup of hot chocolate, and took a sip. It kept him warm, but not as warm as a sixteen-year-old girl could. Where was Jessica?
His mother had warned him against American girls, but she didn’t understand that he was an American boy. When she’d brought him across the border, he was only two. Every memory he had was of the United States. Only his skin and name were Mexican—everything inside him was all USA. This drove his mother crazy. She tried to force Mexican culture, music, and language on him, but none of it took.
“Why even move here if you still want to live there?” Adelmo would ask her.
“Why have a mirror if you won’t look at yourself,” she’d reply. It made no sense.
He sipped the chocolate again. It was now twelve thirty. She was always late. It was a quirk, like the way she missed the top three buttons of her blouse or how she forgot his birthday, even though he’d been talking about it for a week. He smiled at the thought of these things, but then the smile washed away. Yes, she was always late, but this was later than usual. Maybe her father had caught her sneaking out—the thought of this filled him with panic. He checked his iPhone. No texts. He didn’t dare text her—that had been the reason for her grounding to begin with. Tapping the Facebook icon, he loaded her page. No updates since the afternoon.
The sound of footsteps in the distance brightened his mood. He reached into his pocket and found the ring. The half-carat diamond on a gold band had cost him two months’ earnings, which was customary according to the woman behind the counter. It was a dozen mowed lawns, thirty painted walls, and two weekends at a moving company.
In the dark dead of the woods, nothing shimmered off the angled side of the diamond, so he ran his fingertips around its smooth edges to make sure it was real. It felt . . . small. Smaller than a pea. Smaller than a tick. It felt like a speck of dust or a microbe. Jessica deserved a bowling ball; he was going to give her an atom. It was the best he could do. His love would have to do the rest.
He kneeled on one knee and called through the dark, “Jessica?”
The footsteps stopped.
“Jessica!”
She began running toward him. Galloping, even—each foot clattering against the leaves faster than seemed possible. Snarling, then growling. Leaping at him with teeth and snout. It smashed into his chest and knocked him to his back. The dog dug its fangs deep into his right upper arm. Adelmo screamed in pain, then threw his left fist into the dog’s belly until it released him. The dog darted a few steps away, but then came back at him, clawing at his legs. He gave the dog a swift series of kicks that did little to deter it and screamed the most menacing, crazed cry he could muster, which did the trick. The dog ran away.
Feeling a rush of adrenaline, Adelmo jumped and pumped his fist. This sent a searing pain through his arm. He put his left hand over the wound to try to stem the blood, and when that didn’t work, he tore a strip of his blanket and tied it around his arm. Sitting down, he buried his face in his hands and closed his eyes. This was supposed to have been the most magical night of his life, and now he was bleeding, probably had rabies, and Jessica was an hour late.
Then he remembered the ring.
Where was the ring? Adelmo dropped to the ground and lowered his face to try to find it, but it was too dark. He combed his fingers through the grass, frantically at first, and then, after a calm moment of reflection, methodically, like a combine rolling through cornstalks. That didn’t help, so he took out his iPhone and turned on the flash, lay on his belly, and held the light low to the grass, looking under each tangled blade for the diamond’s shimmer. It took such concentration that he didn’t notice Jessica until he heard her voice.
“What are you doing?” she said, standing above him.
He screamed and rolled over. “Jessica?”
“What do you have wrapped around your arm? Is that some kind of gang thing?”
“No.” He shook his head. “There was this dog—”
“Adelmo, I can’t stay. If I’m not back in a half hour—”
“Your father?”
“I wasn’t even going to come,
except I wanted to tell you in person.”
“Tell me what?” He sat up but kept moving his hands behind his back in the grass, still feeling for the ring.
“Jesus, Adelmo, is whatever you lost more important to you than this conversation?”
“No, of course not.” He brought his hands forward and folded them into his lap. “Sit down, Jessica. Please.”
She did not sit. “Look, I just wanted to tell you that it’s been fun and all, but we both know it’s not working, so—”
“No, Jessica, it’s working. We’re working fine.”
“You think my treating you like shit is fine?”
“You don’t, Jess. I mean, it’s all okay because I love you.”
She laughed. It hurt more than the dog bite.
“I let you feel my boobs. And you think that’s love? Jesus, Adelmo.” She turned and walked away, disappearing into the dark.
“Jessica?” he said meekly, to no one. When the sound of her steps was gone, he spun around and began searching the grass again for the ring.
And there he was—alone in the dark forest with a bloody arm, looking for a ring he’d spent his savings on, so that he could propose to the girl who had just dumped him. He started to cry and laugh at the same time. It was impossible for things to be worse, and there was something funny about that.
He stopped laughing when the shovel hit his head.
When Adelmo woke, he felt dizzy. Slowly, he became conscious of his condition. He was blindfolded, it seemed, and hanging upside down from a rope tied around his ankles. His wrists were bound behind his back. A finger kept tapping him, making him sway away from the man’s voice and then back toward it.
“You,” the man’s voice said, “have had a bad day.”
Adelmo tried to talk, but the ball gag in his mouth prevented it.
“That day is about to become worse.” The man pushed him now with his palm, and Adelmo swayed higher. “Let me describe the situation. You are at the top of a sixty-foot concrete silo, suspended over a round hole that drops down to a hard floor covered in decaying bodies. Some men in my position would make this a sport and give you a fighting chance. I’m not that kind of man. There is no way that you will escape. You will die.”
