“Hello?” I said. My voice sounded muffled, like I was speaking through a cloth.
“I’m calling for Katie Kovacs.” The voice—male, Mexican—sounded familiar.
“Speaking.”
“Hola, this is José Ramirez.”
“Oh, thank you for calling me back, Mr. Ramirez. I know it’s late. Past your working hours,” I said, opening my eyes wide and nodding for Kurt’s benefit. “Did you get my message that Nick is missing?”
“I did. Dios mío! I am so sorry to hear that. I hope that he is all right.”
“Me, too.”
“How can I help you?” he asked.
“The police told me that Nick flew his private plane to Mexico yesterday. I am not sure if this is true or not, but I wanted to ask if you knew anything about where he went, or could think of a reason why he would go to Mexico?” I showed my crossed fingers to Kurt and realized I was holding my breath. I forced myself to exhale.
“Hmmmmmm.” He paused. “No, Nick didn’t say anything to me about going anywhere. Reasons he might go to Mexico, you ask? Let me think.” He paused again, longer this time. “I’m sorry, I can’t think of any.”
I didn’t know whether this news was good or bad. “What about Elena, Eddy’s wife? I was at the refinery gate a few minutes ago. I tried to visit her, and the guard said she went to Mexico. Did you know this?”
Ramirez spoke so sharply that the phone crackled. “What? No, I did not know that. As the spouse of a Petro-Mex employee, she could return to Mexico at our expense, but I feel certain she did not contact anyone here at the refinery to do so. I am handling all matters related to her and Mr. Monroe personally, and I heard nothing about this. That is most odd, most distressing. I will contact her as soon as we hang up.”
My thoughts turned back to Jiménez as I listened to Ramirez. Why was Jiménez intercepting questions about Elena if everything about the Monroes was to go through Ramirez? This didn’t feel right—at all.
I had an idea.
“Since I’m not sure of anything at this point, could I ask that Petro-Mex check their security records to see if Nick came onto the property in the last two days, too?”
“Of course,” he said. “If I learn anything, I will let you know. Please, if you discover anything else about Nick, will you do the same for me?”
“I will,” I said. “Oh! And can I get Elena’s mobile number from you?”
“Certainly, but it is in my office. I will call you with it tomorrow.”
We said our goodbyes and hung up.
Odd, everything was odd, odd, odd. And painful. I studied the floorboard in the fading light, as if the dirty rubber mats would reveal a hidden message. And they did: a scrap of paper near my feet caught my eye. I leaned over to pick it up and bumped my head on the steering wheel. It was a receipt for parking at the St. Marcos International Airport.
A sign? If not a sign, it was at least a call to action.
“Let’s stop by the airport on the way home, Kurt. You’ve been asking about Nick, but maybe someone there knows how and when Elena left for Mexico.”
He nodded, ever the good Mainer. Kurt never wasted a word. We drove the ten minutes to the airport, parked, and walked to the terminal without speaking. I approached the ticket agent at the first open counter, Cape Air, and gave him my best smile. Trust me.
“Good day, sir.”
“Good evening,” he replied.
“I’m sorry to bother you, but I need to ask you a question. A friend of mine flew out of St. Marcos yesterday, and she asked me to pick up something she left at the ticket counter. I forgot which airline she told me she flew. She’s short, Mexican, and looks like,” I fumbled for words, “well, she looks like Eva Longoria, but curvier.”
The agent pursed his lips and said, “I don’t remember her. But you see that skycap fella over there? He know everybody and everyt’ing what goes on ’round here.”
“Thank you so much,” I said.
Kurt and I hastened over to the skycap, whose open face radiated good cheer and a jovial “tip me” helpfulness. He hustled travelers right and left.
“Oh, let me help you with those bags, ma’am, right up here and then step this way,” he was saying to a fiftyish white woman who was struggling with two large suitcases and several carry-ons. “What airline you taking today?”
She dropped her bags and answered him in a New York dowager accent. “American Airlines, and please hurry. I’m running late.”
We fell in behind them as he ferried her bags then collected her tip with a deep bow. When he turned around, he almost bumped into us. I held out a ten-dollar bill and said, “We’re looking for some help, sir.”
He pocketed the bill and bestowed an ear-to-ear smile on me. “Certainly, ma’am. How can I assist you today?”
“Yesterday, a woman came through the airport, a very sexy young Mexican woman. I wanted to see if you remembered someone like her.” I hated asking this question and knowing I might get an answer I really wouldn’t like.
“Very sexy? Oh yeah, I remember a very sexy Mexican girl. She short, right? With her mama? Mama looked like Charo?” He did a cuchi-cuchi wiggle, which normally would have made me smile. Instead, I nodded, queasy. “Yah, mon, I see them. Good-looking women dem. Impossible for a man not to notice them, unless he an anti-man.” Anti-man was the local term for homosexual.
I replied, “Oh, great. Did you see what airline they flew out on?”
“Sure, but it not an airline. Some man pick them up in a Jeep and drive them over there.” He pointed toward the private hangar where Nick and Kurt kept their plane. “It real early in the morning. I just gotten in and no customers yet, so I watch them.” He nodded and smiled in a satisfied way, like someone remembering a really good scene from a movie.
Shit. “Are you sure it was a Jeep? Could it have been a Montero?”
“Montero, Jeep, whatever. It maroon or red. Old. And the man, he a dark-headed white guy. About your age,” he said to me.
I turned to ask Kurt if he had any questions, but the skycap said, “You late, though.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Other men here asking these same questions yesterday, right after the Mexican cutie leave,” he said.
My knees felt weak. “How many men? What did they look like? Who were they?”
“I don’t know who they were. They black local guys, two of them. That all I know.” The older man bowed at the waist and wheeled his hand truck back to the curb to solicit more business.
As we turned to go, I saw someone standing at the curb watching us. Mr. Jiménez, the angry human resources manager. What in the world was he doing following us? As I stared back at him, he turned and walked to a car waiting for him at the curb.
“Wait!” I yelled after him.
He looked up at me, shook his head no, and got in the car. It drove off into the night.
Shit.
“That the Jiménez fellow we ran away from at the refinery?” Kurt asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Strange,” he said. Yeah, understatement. “What do you make of the skycap’s information?” Kurt asked.
I bit my lip, holding back tears. Now I would almost rather believe that Derek or Bobby was the reason Nick was missing. Even though it looked bad, I was certain Nick could explain when we found him. Still, it hurt. I could feel my heirloom gold band icy and hard around my finger. Had my mother’s faith in my father ever been tested like this? What about my grandmother? And if so, how had they survived this pain, this fear? I motioned toward the car and Kurt and I began to walk.
“Sounds like Nick had passengers with him and they were headed to Mexico,” I said. “And that someone was following them.”
Chapter Eleven
I sat at Nick’s computer in our office less than an hour later, my blue notebook on the desk to my right. As the machine booted up, I noted the time: 9:55 p.m. Nick had left our house forty hours ago. By now, he could have made it ne
arly around the world, if he so desired. I wondered what it was he had desired, though. I couldn’t tell from the few clues I had, and I was fighting to remain positive that the main thing he wanted was me.
I knew he believed in me, and I would believe in him. Period. If he’d gone to Mexico with Elena and her mother, there had to be a good reason, a reason related to the Petro-Mex case. And I would figure that reason out, by God.
I typed in his password and accessed his email. I had read everything stored in his account during my initial panic the previous night, but I wanted to look again. What had I missed?
I saw a new message in his inbox, its header marked in bold. The name of the sender read “A. Friend.” How clever. I took a sip of my cinnamon spice tea for courage and opened A. Friend’s missive.
“We arrived safely but are still scared. I think you were followed. Thank you for delivering the package to Punta Cana. Good luck.”
What the hell? “We arrived safely”? We? Could “we” refer to Elena and her mother? And “they,” whoever they were, were still scared—of what? Who would have followed Nick—the guys that talked to the skycap?
And “Thank you for delivering the package”? Between ferrying passengers and packages, Nick sounded more like a FedEx deliveryman than a P.I. Where the hell was Punta Cana? I couldn’t even remember if I’d heard of it before.
I opened Google Maps in a new tab and clumsily typed in a search for “Punta Caba.” I corrected my spelling and tried again: Punta Cana.
Punta Cana was a city on the east coast of the Dominican Republic, one of two countries on the island just west of Puerto Rico. Haiti covered the western half of Hispaniola and the Dominican Republic was to the east, closest to Puerto Rico and St. Marcos.
I forced myself to slow down and go through the logic, step by step. To think like Nick would if he were investigating this for a client. To think like I would, when I wasn’t in this much emotional distress. Today someone had sent an email to Nick thanking him for delivering a package to Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic, and that person was scared and thought someone had followed Nick. If this person was correct, Nick had gone to the Dominican Republic yesterday. I knew that didn’t rule out flying to Mexico afterwards, but even if he’d just stopped over in Punta Cana, it gave Kurt and me a lead to follow. It gave us our first glimmer of hope. With printouts of the email and the Google map in hand, I dashed down the stairs to the main floor.
“Kurt? Kurt?” I called softly as I neared the bottom step, hoping he hadn’t gone to bed yet. I couldn’t yell with the three young ones asleep in the house.
Kurt’s head and shoulders rounded the corner and I nearly crashed headlong into him. Julie and Ruth, Taylor’s old nanny, nearly ran into his back. Julie had called for reinforcement while we were gone earlier. Three grandbabies and one tired, worried grandmother needed an extra set of hands, and who better than Ms. Ruth?
Kurt grabbed my upper arms to stop my forward motion.
I raised the papers in my hand and shook them in the air. “I have a lead. Nick went to the Dominican Republic. To Punta Cana.”
Everyone spoke at once. When we regained order, I explained the email from A. Friend to Nick. By silent accord, we walked into the dining room and sat around the glass-topped table that not so long ago had been piled high with a dead pig and a dozen bags of ice.
“You going to Punta Cana? You better book tickets and hotel. Morning soon come,” Ms. Ruth said.
“You’re right,” I said. I didn’t think my stress level could rise any higher, but it was climbing like a candy thermometer in Karo syrup. I added her suggestions to my to-do list in the notebook.
“For me, too,” Kurt said. “I’m coming with you.”
I nodded. “Absolutely, and thank you.”
“Did you answer the email?” Julie asked.
“No.” What a miss on my part. I felt a nauseating surge of adrenaline. Another add for the list. “I will, though. As soon as we’re done talking.”
“Maybe you can build some trust and get a real conversation going,” Julie said.
That gave me another idea. “I think I can set up Nick’s email account to send and receive on my phone. That way I can read his email as soon as it arrives and keep up the dialogue with whoever A. Friend is when we go to Punta Cana.”
“Can we read the texts on Nick’s phone?” Kurt asked. “On the internet, I mean.”
To hear my father-in-law talking about texts would have entertained me on a normal day, but today it barely registered as novel. “I have no idea. But we should try.” Another thing to do. My neck tingled, announcing the certain appearance of red stress splotches.
“Whatever we do, we can’t assume he isn’t on St. Marcos and quit looking for him here,” Kurt said. “He could have gone missing after he got back from Punta Cana. Or maybe this email is a hoax, and he never left the island.” His voice was nearly an octave higher than usual.
I looked around the table. Kurt was ripping at his cuticles. Julie was biting her lip. Ruth was rocking back and forth, ever so slightly. They looked as close to a nervous breakdown as I felt.
And then Julie worked her magic. She’d always been able to round off sharp edges and soften hard knots. Her words were slow, and her voice was almost deep. “Let’s work together on this. I know I can’t sleep anyway, and it will make me feel better to do something. I’ll book the travel. Kurt, can you get on the AT&T website and research the texting issue?”
“I can.” Kurt might eschew the personal use of cell phones, but he was very computer savvy and had logged thousands of internet hours on call as a ship pilot.
Ruth chimed in. “I make some tea and a little bite to eat for we.”
My redlined pulse slowed to a survivable level. “I’ll work on the email issues with A. Friend and set up Nick’s email on my phone. And I’ll ask Rashidi to mount an exhaustive land search here, door to door and shore to shore, while we search in DR. And oh God, I almost forgot this one: I’ll make sure our cell phones have service in DR.”
Heads nodded. Ruth disappeared into the kitchen, Julie and Kurt headed downstairs to their computers, and I went back up to the office. I tackled the phone/email issue first. I knew it would be doable, but it wasn’t a task I could complete without finding and following step-by-step instructions. Fifteen minutes later, I had succeeded in messing up the process three times. Before I could try again, Ms. Ruth appeared with tea and chocolate chip cookies.
“Bless you,” I told her.
“Ah, child, bless you,” she said, and placed her hand lightly, briefly, on my shoulder. I tried to recall a single time she had touched me in the year she had worked for us, besides shaking my hand when she met me, but I could remember none.
“I’ve missed you, Ruth,” I said as she left the room.
She turned her head and smiled at me, then kept walking to the kitchen.
I threw myself back into the email issue, and within three minutes, I had done it. When I’d satisfied myself that I could receive and send email from Nick’s account on my iPhone, I opened A. Friend’s message again and hit Reply.
Dear A. Friend: This is Nick’s wife, Katie. I am checking Nick’s email from our house because he never made it home from Punta Cana. He is missing. Please help me find him. Email, text, or call with whatever you know. Anything. Please. Thank you, Katie Kovacs.
I added my cell phone number and email address at the bottom and hit send. Then I prayed.
Next, I got online with AT&T and scanned the countries included in their international call, texting, and data plans. Thank God—they covered the DR.
Finally, even though it was late, I called Rashidi, who promised to put together a team of trusted friends and relatives and scour the island for any sign of Nick and the plane. Then I told him about Tutein.
“Katie, we gonna have to take care of he when this over,” Rashidi said, his voice deep and clipped.
“Yes, he is a problem. But one thing at a time right no
w,” I replied.
Rashidi asked, “What you want me to do? Remember, I specialize in ‘who you know.’”
This, I could vouch for. Who Rashidi knew had resulted in most of the permits and laborers I’d needed for Annalise in my first year—much of it pre-Nick—on St. Marcos. Whenever I had trouble at Annalise, it was Rashidi to the rescue. He’d even camped on her floors armed with his machete after she was burglarized when Ava deserted her.
“We have to figure out the truth of what, if anything, lies below Annalise,” I said.
“Irie,” Rashidi said. “I have two old grade school partners that will help. Rob works for the museum as curator, and his wife Laura the librarian at U.V.I.”
“I also want to know what happens to someone who breaks this law? I’m really just worried about my responsibility from the Day of the Dead forward. I don’t think I can be held responsible for what the first owner did—I didn’t have any knowledge of it—so even if the government hassles me about it, I’m not concerned. Let’s just pray he wasn’t a desecrator and robber of graves in addition to his other illegal pastimes, though. You don’t remember any talk of old bones, do you?”
“Nah, meh son. I didn’t hear a thing,” he replied.
“OK. So, Rash, I need to know the penalties. Are they monetary? If there’s a cemetery, do I have to move it? Could they do anything to Annalise? I know you told me they can do anything they want to me, according to your lady friend in the government, but I can’t imagine this could result in any long-term jail time.”
“Yah, mon, I take care of it. But I gonna focus on Nick. I get Rob and Laura to help on finding out if there anything below Annalise. Now, you may not like this, but I need more help. I bring Ava in, too.”
He was right; I didn’t like it. Singing together was one thing, but I hadn’t been able to count on her before when I needed her. I didn’t argue, though. “Do what you have to, Rash. I trust you.” I thanked him, and we hung up.
I walked downstairs to check on the others’ progress. Julie reported in detail on the itinerary she had arranged, as was her way.
Finding Harmony (Katie & Annalise Book 3) Page 9
