A Blossom of Bright Light

by Suzanne Chazin

  Doña Esme threw the zippered bag in the glove compartment of the CRV and slammed it shut. “Get in,” she ordered.

  Luna hesitated. Her insides felt like she’d swallowed glass.

  “Mami,” Doña Esme said in a soothing tone. “The señor is a bad man. We both know that. He tried to hurt you. He’s trying to hurt me too. He’ll be looking for my Escalade. If he finds us in it, we’re both in trouble. I want to take you to see your father, but I need to do it in a different car so he can’t find us. Do you understand?”

  Luna nodded slowly. Did she trust her? Oh God, oh God. She closed her eyes and offered a silent prayer. All her years in church hadn’t prepared her for this moment. She was so lost and confused. But she wanted more than anything to go to Lords Valley and see her father, so she climbed in.

  Doña Esme pulled the Honda out of the garage and parked her Escalade in its place. Then she locked everything up again, and they drove off.

  “That wasn’t so hard, was it?” She smiled her fake white smile. Luna took no comfort from it.

  They headed west again. Luna could tell this because the sky was a little less dark in this direction. Her confidence returned a little. Up until now, it had felt like they were traveling in circles.

  The weather got colder. Doña Esme kept her hat and gloves on all the time in the new car. Luna sat on her hands to try to keep them warm.

  “Go into the glove compartment,” Doña Esme instructed her. “There’s a small bag in there. I want you to zip it open and see what’s inside.”

  Luna hoped it was food. Her stomach was growling. The bag was heavy, the contents wrapped in thick cloth. She pushed the cloth aside and touched something cold and smooth and mechanical feeling. A small gasp escaped her lips. Doña Esme laughed.

  “It’s not loaded or anything, chica. I have the cartridge separately. Go ahead. Take it out.”

  “No.” It made Luna nervous. She put it back in the glove compartment without even zippering up the bag.

  “We need to protect ourselves, mami.”

  The gun felt like a wild animal sitting in a cage just inches from her body. Luna shook all over. Doña Esme didn’t seem to notice. They were traveling on yet another wooded two-lane. Luna kept waiting for her to get onto a main highway and cross the bridge. They were eating up precious time. If they didn’t make headway soon, the jail’s visiting hours would be over before they arrived.

  They came upon another shopping center, this one much smaller. Doña Esme turned in.

  “Where are we going now?” Luna couldn’t hide her frustration. It seemed to overshadow even her fear.

  “It won’t take long.”

  This shopping center was just a concrete block of stores, all one-story, all joined together. An insurance broker’s office. A breakfast diner. A computer repair shop and a secondhand clothing store. There were no cars in the lot. All the businesses were closed for the evening—maybe for the whole weekend. The entire center was surrounded by woods. The lighting was half the wattage of the other shopping center.

  In the far corner was a car wash with a FOR SALE sign over the windows. The drive-through area was shuttered with big roll-down metal gates. The little front office was locked up tight. There were planters by the office, but they were overgrown with weeds. The rainbow sign with the crown on top that Luna saw at the Lake Holly Car Wash King was missing here.

  “Charlie’s worst investment,” Doña Esme muttered. “That was all I had to tell him and he knew where to come.”

  Where to come?

  Doña Esme parked the CRV behind the car wash. Then she reached across Luna to the glove compartment and pulled out the zippered bag.

  “Come on, get out,” she said.

  “I want to go see my father.”

  Doña Esme slapped Luna hard across the face. Her skin felt like it was on fire. Her jaw tingled.

  “Well, I wanted a lot of things, chica. And they didn’t happen. Life is tough. Maybe if your mami and papi hadn’t protected you so much, you’d know that. Now get out.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Shut up and you won’t get hurt.”

  The full measure of Luna’s predicament hit her all at once. She started to run, but Doña Esme grabbed her by her hair and pushed her down onto the pavement. Something hard smacked her skull. The world went dark and silent.

  Luna’s last terrible thought was that her family would think she’d abandoned them.

  Chapter 39

  Colored floodlights lit up the long driveway beyond the wrought-iron gates of the Wickford Country Club. Adele had never driven inside before. She’d seen some of the grounds from a distance—the lush green of the 120-acre golf course, the bright blue of the swimming pools, the striped mustard-colored awnings over the windows of the sprawling white turn-of-the-century clubhouse. But this was the first time she’d pulled around the front oval, handed the keys of her Prius to a parking attendant, and stepped inside.

  She hadn’t been this nervous and unsure of herself since her first year at Harvard, when she felt like she was walking around with a sign on her forehead that read: I don’t belong here. Somebody made a mistake. She grew into Harvard. She grew into being a lawyer and then starting La Casa. Could she grow into being the Hispanic affairs adviser to a U.S. senator?

  More importantly, did she want to?

  She stepped inside the front entrance, a massive hallway with two flowing staircases and a large chandelier in the middle. A man in a tuxedo directed her to a room on the right with French doors, more chandeliers, and a parquet floor the color of maple syrup. Waiters walked through the crowd with trays of hors d’oeuvres and fluted glasses of champagne. All the men wore tuxedos. All the women wore full-length evening gowns, most of them black and glittery. Adele’s knee-length, teal-green fitted satin dress made her feel like a bridesmaid who’d stumbled into the wrong event. She had plenty of black dresses, some of them long enough to qualify as full-length. Was she, on some level, sabotaging herself?

  She had dressed in a fog, her thoughts buzzing around in her head like a fly that never seemed to land. Jimmy’s call had unsettled her. Where was Luna? Why hadn’t she called if she was in trouble? Adele had the awful sense that being here tonight amounted to fiddling while Rome burned.

  She felt a hand on her shoulder and turned. Steve Schulman held out a glass of champagne to her. He wasn’t the sort of man who wore a tux well. The shirt pinched his neck and made it sag like a turkey’s. His skin looked sallow in black and white. The padding on the jacket shoulders for some reason made him look even more hunched than usual.

  “What did you think of the speech I’m going to give?”

  Adele took the glass from him. “Good. I think it’s good.” Could she even speak in full sentences tonight?

  “Well?” He opened his arms. There was no mistaking the context of the question. This was her moment.

  “Did you speak to Judge Hallard? About Manuel?”

  Schulman’s face darkened. “This is not the time or place, Adele.”

  “Is that a no?”

  “I couldn’t reach him.”

  “Bullshit, Steve! He’s been by his phone all weekend. You never even tried to call!”

  Several conversations around them faltered. A waiter set to approach them with rolls of sushi ducked away. Schulman forced a chuckle like Adele had just told a good joke. He kept a broad smile on his face, but he spoke through clenched teeth.

  “If you’re going to screw me over, at least have the decency to do it behind closed doors.”

  “Got a door you care to close?”

  He kept the fake smile on his face and glad-handed his way through the crowd with Adele in tow. They found a small mahogany-paneled library on the second floor stacked with gold-bound classics no one ever read. The Queen Anne wing chairs, brass lamps, and dark furniture looked as if they’d been there since the house was built. Schulman escorted her into the room and closed the door. Neither of them sat.

>   “You are so goddamned myopic, Adele!” Schulman smacked the back of one of the Queen Anne chairs for emphasis. Adele had never seen him so mad. “Do you realize that in Washington, you could help a hundred Manuel Serranos?”

  “I don’t know a hundred Manuel Serranos. I know one. His children need him, Steve. Especially his oldest, Luna. If ever there was a girl who needed her father’s protection right now, it’s her.”

  Schulman sighed. “I’ve heard the rumors flying around this evening about the Gonzalezes. I want you to know that I knew nothing about Charlie’s private life.”

  “Where are they?”

  “The Gonzalezes?” He shrugged. “I don’t know. Charlie was with me at the campaign headquarters when he got a call and left. I haven’t seen either of them since.”

  “You know what he’s been accused of?”

  Schulman held her gaze. “Yes. He’s off my campaign, needless to say. But we’ll regroup and survive.”

  Adele pulled her cell phone from her bag and held it out to Schulman. “It’s seven p.m., Steve. Judge Hallard will accept a call until nine tonight. Give these children back their father. Please. As a favor to me.”

  “Why is this so important?”

  “I encouraged Manuel to put his children with the Gonzalezes. And now it’s my responsibility to make things right.”

  Schulman sighed. “I’m sorry, Adele. Really, I am. But I can’t.”

  “Why?”

  Schulman pulled out one of the gold-bound books and absent-mindedly thumbed the pages. The title on the spine was Huckleberry Finn. Injustice, Adele had to remind herself, was not a new thing.

  “As I understand it, no one knows where his teenage daughter is at the moment,” said Schulman.

  “I think that’s true.”

  “So—we have my chief campaign adviser missing and possibly guilty of sexual crimes against a number of teenage girls. And we have a teenage girl in his care missing. Do you see what I’m driving at, Adele?”

  “No.”

  “I bring Manuel Serrano back, I get implicated in this whole mess.”

  “But you’re helping the family!”

  “It looks like I’m helping myself out of guilt.”

  “No one would claim that.”

  “John Sawyer’s people would. That’s how politics works, dear lady.” Schulman slammed the book shut and returned it to the shelf. “And if you don’t get that, then maybe you don’t belong in D.C.”

  “Maybe I don’t.” She put her hand on the doorknob.

  “Think long and hard about what you’re doing, Adele. This is not a decision you should make in the heat of anger.”

  “The problem isn’t that I’m angry, Steve. The problem is that I wasn’t angry sooner.”

  She walked out of the library and slammed the door. She was shaking as she stumbled down the hallway and back out into the cool dark of the evening. She was conscious of people watching her from the banquet room, conscious of Schulman’s voice greeting supporters as if nothing had just transpired.

  She’d just blown her career. But that wasn’t what brought her to tears as she drove away from the Wickford Country Club.

  What really made her cry was the thought that she’d just blown the Serrano children’s chances of ever seeing their father again.

  Chapter 40

  Luna woke up shivering on a concrete floor. Her head throbbed. It was so dark, she couldn’t see anything. The first sensation that returned to her was smell. She was in a place that was cold and damp and musty. Her mouth was bound with duct tape. Her wrists were bound behind her back. Yet another length of tape was wrapped around her legs and tethered to what felt like a pipe on the wall.

  Gradually her eyes adjusted. Luna was inside the car wash. She made out a puddle by the closed garage door. The edges glistened like oil, but the center reflected back the filmy light from a street lamp beyond the door. She tried to maneuver her hands behind her to claw at the tape but without a knife or scissors, she couldn’t unravel even a tiny bit.

  Far off, she could hear the occasional whoosh of a car on a roadway and the white noise of a plane traveling through the sky. Her head felt like it was being held together by rubber bands. Her tongue tasted metallic. She tried to scrape her mouth against the concrete floor to rip off the duct tape, but it wouldn’t budge.

  She managed to get up on her knees, but her ankles were bound so tightly she couldn’t rise to her feet. And besides, she was dizzy. So she sank back onto the concrete and curled herself into a ball to try to stay warm and figure a way out of her situation. To the right of her were the grooved metal tracks of the car wash. Behind her, her hand rubbed against strips of spongy cloth on some kind of spinning brush.

  At first Luna thought she’d been abandoned here, but then she heard Spanish somewhere in the parking lot. Two voices—a man’s and a woman’s. The woman was Esme—Luna could never think of her as “Doña Esme” again. Her voice sounded angry and accusing. The man murmured, his voice as thin as cheap socks. He was no match for Esme’s rage.

  “She was my daughter, Carlos! My only daughter!”

  There were two quick pops. Like firecrackers exploding. The sound felt so huge and final, it seemed to suck every other sound from the landscape. Luna no longer heard the distant whoosh of cars or the rumble of the plane. She heard only the pounding of her heart. Esme had shot the señor. Luna was sure she was coming next for her.

  Yolanda took the Gonzalez boys to relatives for the night. Manuel Serrano’s cousin Alirio drove up from Queens to take Mateo and Dulce and their black garbage bags of belongings to his family’s apartment. Vega’s heart broke to look at the two Serrano kids. They’d lost their father and now Luna in the space of forty-eight hours. No one would ever be able to put the “child” back in their childhoods.

  The evidence had been bagged and carted out of the house. A uniformed Lake Holly officer would remain stationed at the residence to protect the site and alert the police if the Gonzalezes returned. There was nothing either Vega or Greco could do but wait and hope that a state trooper somewhere would spot Gonzalez’s silver Mercedes sedan or Esme’s black Escalade.

  Greco, still in his flannel shirt and fishing boots, got a lift to the ME’s office to fetch his Buick and drive home. Vega was sitting in his unmarked, typing some final paperwork into his computer when he noticed a pale green Prius approaching the Gonzalez house. Adele. He thought she’d be at the Wickford Country Club all evening discussing her future with Schulman and his coterie of admirers.

  Vega got out of his car and put a hand up to stop her. She pulled next to him and powered down her passenger-side window.

  “What are you doing here?” He leaned in. “You’re supposed to be—”

  He stopped when he saw her smeared mascara and bloodshot eyes.

  “Whoa. What happened?”

  “Did you find Luna?” She sounded as desperate as he felt.

  “Not yet. I thought you’d be at the gala all evening, making plans with Schulman.”

  “I thought so too.” She shook her head, but the words wouldn’t come.

  “Park your car and come sit with me,” said Vega. He didn’t want to be out of radio contact in case something broke.

  Vega’s police radio was on when Adele slid into his car. They were both quiet for a moment, listening to the chatter over the department radio. She caught him eyeing her teal-green dress beneath her coat.

  “You look really pretty, Nena,” he said softly. “So what happened?”

  Adele told him about her conversation with Schulman, the way he dismissed Serrano as collateral damage in the campaign. “Judge Hallard said if Steve didn’t call by nine tonight, he wouldn’t intercede.”

  “Can’t you call?”

  “Hallard already told me it had to come from Steve. It’s going on eight, Jimmy. I don’t have a prayer of helping Manuel now.” Adele stared across the Gonzalezes’ lawn to the house—dark except for security lights. There was something already
spent about it, like a tent being taken down after a party. Whatever had once been there—good or bad—would soon be reduced to memory. “I came to check on Dulce and Mateo. I felt I owed them that.”

  “They’re gone already. Their father’s cousin drove them to Queens.”

  “You have no idea where Luna is?”

  “We’ve got an Amber Alert on her. We’ve got troopers checking every road and rest stop between here and Lords Valley. I’ve even requested a patrol at all of the Gonzalezes’ car washes. So far, nothing’s turned up.”

  “Do you know which franchises the cops checked?”

  Vega shrugged. “All the ones listed. Why?”

  “Back in the summer, Steve had a campaign stop at a breakfast place off I-84 about twenty-five minutes’ north of here. It was in a little shopping center with a car wash Charlie was trying to sell. I don’t think he sold it. It’s not in operation anymore, so it probably wouldn’t show up on a list of his businesses.”

  Vega opened his car’s laptop search engine. “Do you remember the name of the breakfast place? I could drive up and check that car wash out myself.”

  “I want to come with you.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Jimmy, listen to me. The only way I can get Schulman to make that call to stop Serrano’s deportation is if I can find Luna.”

  “Why would that change anything?”

  “The last thing Steve Schulman needs is for a fifteen-year-old girl to tell voters what she’s endured at the hands of his chief campaign adviser. He’d do anything to keep that from happening.”

  Vega stared at his laptop. “I need a name of the breakfast place, Nena. Without a name, I’ve got nothing.”

  Adele massaged her forehead. “I’m drawing a blank.”