“Daniel was always a bit of a rebel,” she said through gasping sniffles.
I nodded and maintained eye contact. I would withhold my comments for now. I heard a raspy cough from the back room, letting me know that Raul was still upset. I wondered if he’d soon join us.
“He wasn’t a bad kid. More curious than anything.” Consuela, for the moment, had stopped crying, but the stress lines on her face had hardened into deep trenches. “But, dear Lord, he tried to push our buttons. He questioned us on every topic, from taking out the trash to politics to the price of a school lunch. At times he crossed the line, was argumentative. Raul…” She paused, glancing to the back. “Raul would get really upset when Daniel was disrespectful to us. It only made me sad, though. You know why?” She looked at me as if I were her psychologist. I wasn’t unfamiliar with the role.
“Why?”
“Because I knew that he’d passed that innocent age. I’d forever lost my little boy, and it was impossible to get him back.” She dropped her hand into her lap, taking in a heavy breath. “What kept me going was the hope…no, the belief that one day he would continue the evolutionary process until he came out on the other side of being a teenager and became a responsible young man. Even if he would never again lie on my lap and allow me to rub his head as he read a book, I’d be able to feel a sense of pride in seeing his maturity. Know what I mean?”
I’ve never given birth, so I couldn’t claim to have felt a maternal attachment to a child. But I’d felt connections with dozens and dozens of kids in my life work. So, in many respects, I could imagine the feeling Consuela was relaying. “I sure do.”
“Unfortunately, his attitude only got worse from there.” She swallowed hard.
While I knew generally where the conversation was going, a feeling of dread crawled up the back of my neck. I wanted to alter the course of our discussion back to Mia—today’s tragedy—but I sensed the path to Mia was blocked by the story of Daniel. I nodded to Consuela, hoping she could see my compassion for all of her heartache, while signaling to her it was okay to continue.
“Like most teenage boys, he lost his innocence in a major way. But that lost innocence…it grabbed him by the throat and dragged him into a dark place. I think he felt like he couldn’t cope, even with Raul and me trying our best to talk to him, to surround him with a loving family and caring friends. It never seemed to work. I even took a second job to pay for a psychologist, but he never connected with her. He was too stubborn, too much of a manipulator to open up and just be a real person, to share his fears and his fallacies. And then—” She choked on a sob, unable to continue.
Raul walked back into the room, and he finished the statement in a low, shaky voice. “And then, after experimenting with heroin, he hanged himself in the school locker room.”
Consuela burst into tears. Raul, thankfully, picked her up from the chair, and they embraced. I swallowed back some emotion, but I knew the difficult part was still ahead of us.
2
Consuela and Raul Romero didn’t let go of each other until the front door to ECHO opened. Metal scraped concrete, and I flinched. I shouldn’t have, because I’d heard the cringe-worthy sound a thousand times since we moved into the office space a few months earlier.
“Did I miss the funeral?”
The Romeros slowly peeled apart, each wiping tears off their faces. I just stared at my lone ECHO employee, Cristina. Young and a bit brash, she had a habit of saying whatever was on her mind, sometimes before thinking. Like now.
My jaw clenched. “Oh,” she said, sliding her backpack off her shoulder and shuffling toward me. “I was just joking.” She looked at me as she parked her backpack next to the desk, her brown eyes wide. She knew she’d crossed the line.
I apologized for her insensitivity, then made brief introductions. She was just seventeen, but Cristina recognized the error of her ways and quickly tried to recover. She looked each of the parents in the eye, apologized again, and shook their hands.
I was about to sit in my chair, when I noticed Consuela not releasing Cristina’s hand. She was just staring at Cristina.
“I’m sure you understand what Cristina said was just a flippant teenager thing,” I said, hoping to lighten the mood.
Cristina tried to pull her hand away, but Consuela’s grip was firm. Cristina glanced at me as Raul touched his wife’s shoulder.
“I’m fine. I’m not having a nervous breakdown or anything,” Consuela said. “It’s just that Cristina’s eyes remind me of Mia’s.” She let go and took a step back, inspecting Cristina from head to toe. “Mia doesn’t dress like that, though.”
I chuckled inwardly, since Cristina’s preferred fashion destination was the Goodwill store, even though I paid her a fair wage. Enough for clothes and shelter anyway.
“And Mia’s hair is always styled,” Consuela continued, “but they could be cousins.”
Cristina rocked side to side, sticking her hands in the pockets of her tight jeans. I could tell she was feeling awkward. So was I, for both Cristina and Consuela. It just hit me that Cristina’s school day was about to start. After dropping out for almost a year, she was now just a few months away from graduating. It was a miracle that I’d been able to convince her how much a high school diploma mattered to her future. Not that I was looking for credit. I just didn’t want anything, including ECHO business, to serve as an excuse for her not making it to school. Even something as important as a missing teenager.
I was about to whisper in Cristina’s ear when Raul glanced at me and tried to smile. He never quite got there. Then he helped his wife take a seat. The Romeros stared at me, as if they were waiting for me to veer the Q&A session back to its original intent. I’d have to quiz Cristina later about why she wasn’t on her way to school.
“At the beginning of your visit, you said Mia had disappeared. Can you tell me more?” I clasped my hands on my desk.
Raul said, “Not a lot to tell you. She went to school, but never made it to basketball practice apparently. Never came home last night.”
“Last night.” I don’t know why, but I’d expected this was some type of cold case, where their daughter had been missing for weeks, if not months, and that the police had not been able to find any clues as to where she might be or what might have happened. Those were the types of cases we were used to seeing. Parents who were downtrodden, at their wit’s end. We were the last resort, not the first.
“Have you not been to the cops?” I leaned forward, my palms flat on my desk.
Raul and Consuela looked at each other, then returned their gazes to me. I saw something in their eyes, and it didn’t sit right with me.
“It’s not a trick question,” Cristina murmured.
“Cristina. Inappropriate,” I said, shaking my head at the comment, although I was thinking much the same.
Raul held up his hands. “That’s okay. No offense taken.”
“I can see why you asked that question, Ivy,” Consuela said. “Anyone would.” She put a hand to her chest. “We live a quiet life. We try to make very little waves.”
I tilted my head. I had an idea where she might be going with all this, but I wasn’t going to suggest it.
She glanced at her husband again, then back to me and Cristina. “I clean houses for a living. Raul is a janitor in an office building. We don’t make much money; it’s just enough to get by. But we are still appreciative to live in a land that gives us opportunity, especially for our children.”
I wondered if she had more kids than just Daniel and Mia, but that could wait. “If you’re asking if I’ll cut you a price break, the answer is yes. But I really think you should go to the cops. If they can’t help you, or they don’t have much luck, then feel free to—”
“You don’t get it. We can’t go to the police.”
“Why not?” Cristina said. “It’s not like they’ll charge you a fee.”
Consuela pressed her lips shut, then Raul said, “We came here together, almost
eighteen years ago. We are from Guatemala. Consuela was pregnant with Daniel. We couldn’t keep living there. Too much poverty. Too much violence in our small town. The kids in our town rarely got their education, and if they did, then most ended up in crappy jobs. We wanted a better life. For us. For our family.”
“You’re afraid to go to the cops,” I said, finally understanding their apprehension.
“You think they’re going to send you back after all these years, with kids who were born here and everything?” Cristina’s voice jumped a half-octave.
Raul shrugged, releasing a deep breath. “We can’t take any chances. Not with Mia missing. No matter where we live, or are forced to live, we have to be together. We have to find Mia.” He gasped, but brought a hand to his face to stifle it, at least for now. “Will you help us?” He took his wife’s hand and squeezed it.
I’d been asked to take part in countless missing children cases, and almost every time the parents’ grief made my heart ache. But the Romeros took that to another level.
“Consuela, Raul…I want to help you. I want Mia to be found, alive and well. But I just don’t want to overpromise my capability. It’s just me and Cristina, and she works part-time around her school work.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Cristina arch an eyebrow. She always liked to think of herself as being ten years older than she was.
“We will pay you, just like any client.” Raul pulled a wad of cash out of his pocket. “Our money is just as legitimate as anyone else’s.”
“I understand. That’s fine.”
Consuela inched up in her chair. “Then what is it?”
“I’m not sure I understand your question.”
She touched her arm. “Is it the color of our skin?”
Cristina raised her hand. “Uh, I’m half-Hispanic. So, I’m not sure what you’re implying.”
“We are…” She formed quotes with her fingers. “Illegal immigrants, okay? There, I said it. To some, we are not at the same level as other American-born citizens. We are wetbacks. Spics.”
Now Raul moved to the edge of his chair, his nostrils flaring. “Greaser, berry picker, chile shitter…”
“I get it.” I had to cut him off. I could see their pain, hear it in their tone of voice. It was made all the worse by hearing the inflammatory words that so many others had used on them. I had a flashback to my childhood, when I was called every derogatory name in the book because I was a foster kid, made fun of for the way I looked, for always being the new kid at school, and for being a loner. The horrors I experienced at many of my seventeen foster homes was something no kid should experience. But as I’d grown older, I knew I wasn’t the only person who’d been made to feel subhuman.
The Romeros had entered the country illegally eighteen years ago. I’d heard people, politicians mainly, argue whether families like the Romeros should be sent back to their original country or allowed to stay. To a degree, both ends of that argument could be convincing. But there was only one thing that I’d never waver on—the Romeros were every bit as human as me, or the man in my life, Saul, or my cop friend, Stan, or my best friend, Zahera, or anyone else. And they deserved to be treated with respect. But I also knew there were always a few people who were paranoid about having families like the Romeros in our country, as if they were substandard, as if all of them were criminals sent here to destroy the fabric of our nation. Those people were nuts. And then there were some who were simply filled with hate. Those were the ones that I couldn’t deal with on any level.
“Ivy.” Consuela put her hand on my desk, her voice surprisingly calm. “We know your reputation, the lengths you have taken to find missing kids. Our Mia is just as special to us as those kids were to their families. If I could give you my left arm, I would. Anything for you to help us. We don’t know where else to turn.”
“I’m so sorry, I—”
“You still refuse us?” Raul began rattling off a line of Spanish to his wife that I’m sure wasn’t flattering toward me.
“No, no, please don’t get upset. I never meant for you to feel like you had to beg me. I will take the case.”
“We will take the case,” Cristina said, nudging my arm.
Consuela dipped her head as her husband rubbed her back. “Thank you,” he said in a raspy whisper.
I looked over at Cristina, who was smiling. “Get us some waters, and then you can tell me why you’re not at school.”
3
Cristina retrieved bottled waters for all of us. During our brief break, she told me that today was a teacher in-service day. No school for the students. I asked if she was still passing all of her classes. She reached a hand in my direction. “Do you need me to put my hand on a Bible?”
“This isn’t a court of law, sassy ass.”
“I don’t know, sometimes it feels like you’re judge and jury.”
A wave of heat crept up my neck. “Seriously? You’re going to say that?”
“Okay. Maybe I overdid it a little.”
“A little?
“A lot. Sorry. You know me,” she said with a cheesy grin.
Boy, did I.
Raul, who’d been on his phone the last five minutes in an animated conversation in Spanish, finally pocketed his phone. He had a dejected look on his face. “What did they say?” Consuela asked, a hand on his arm.
He shook his head. “They haven’t seen her.”
I cleared my throat. “Who are they?”
“I spoke to the father of her good friend, Elsa. He quizzed his daughter numerous times, and she has no clue where Mia might have gone. She last saw her in fifth-period chemistry class.”
“Do we know if she was in sixth or seventh period?” Cristina asked.
“Seventh period is athletics, basketball for her. We got word from two of her teammates that she wasn’t there. Not sure about sixth period.”
“Which is?”
“AP history.”
“You haven’t called the school?” Cristina asked.
“It all just happened last night. And school is opening in the next few minutes, right?”
Cristina checked her phone. “Five minutes from now.”
“So when we get to the bottom of the hour, you can call and ask if her sixth-period teacher marked her absent. But for the next couple of minutes, I need to ask you a few questions.”
“Fire away,” Raul said.
“Is Mia dating anyone right now?”
“Not right now. She did have a boyfriend, but they broke up in August, right after the school year started.”
“Name?” I picked up a pen and put it to a sticky note.
“Brandon McCarthy. He’s a good kid, though,” Raul said.
“Why would you say that?”
“Honor student, just like Mia. Goes to church. A good Catholic boy,” he said with a hint of a smile.
“You were fond of him?” I asked Raul, then I glanced at Consuela. She offered a single nod.
“He treated Mia with respect,” Raul said. “He is a responsible young man, works at a garden center. Always positive. And he’s not into drugs.”
“How would you know that?” Cristina asked. She was blunt, but that was my next question.
“Well, I, uh…” Raul looked at his wife, then to Cristina.
“I don’t mean to be rude, but I’ve known plenty of kids who gave the appearance they were perfect little citizens, but they were on coke, selling coke, or just involved with some shady characters.”
Raul shook his head. “We know why you’re asking. But you don’t know Brandon like we do, like Mia does. She had nothing but good things to say about him.”
“Do you know why they broke up? And who did the breaking up?” I asked.
“It was Mia, but it’s not like he was overly possessive or anything crazy. She was…” Raul closed his eyes momentarily. “She is serious about her schoolwork and all of the extracurricular activities. She just didn’t have time for Brandon. And if you ask me, she�
��s not going to let some innocent high school crush disrupt her plans. She always has a plan, always looking ahead. Very confident and mature for her age.”
“Which makes this disappearance even stranger,” I said, wondering if I’d get an agreement.
“Without question,” Raul said.
Consuela nodded. For a quick second, I thought I saw a flicker of hesitation. But about what? Raul’s assertion that Mia’s disappearance was is in no way connected to Brandon? Or was it something less sinister? Maybe she hadn’t bonded with Brandon like Raul had.
“It’s time to call the school,” Cristina said.
I held off my second round of questions, hoping there would be nothing to investigate.
4
His breathing was deep but even, a steady snuffling of air through his nose. He rolled his eyes toward the back of his head, found his place of tranquility, then recited the words that he’d spoken more than a thousand times.
“…forevermore,” he stated, ending the first paragraph.
The chant had, at one time, filled his heart with a calming, peaceful love. Over time, though, he’d grown weary of the ritualistic mantra. And not for the typical reasons. Most who had listened to the words usually ignored their true intent, because that was just how people were—easily distracted, mentally lazy. They went through the motions because everyone else did. It was as though they were living life on an assembly line. His aversion to the chant was at a more fundamental level. He simply believed he’d evolved and, thus, unlike the sheep, sought a deeper meaning to his life and everything that was part of it.
So how did he cope? He looked beyond the surface-level explanations provided over the last two centuries. And what he’d found altered the significance of his existence. Through intense study and scrutiny, he found context and substance where he’d previously thought there was none.
The Ivy Nash Thrillers: Books 4-6: Redemption Thriller Series 10-12 (Redemption Thriller Series Box Set) Page 52
