by Pam Withers
“Not very original by the six hundredth baby,” I say dryly. “So I know why Dr. A was so willing to loan his clinic for the meeting. All four of you were in on this. How many people are working for you, anyway, Mr. Vargas?”
No response from the boss.
“It also explains why no one was at the shack when you first drove us up there,” Raul addresses Colque bitterly. “You’d tipped them off in time for them to leave. And it’s no wonder you never phoned the police like you said you were going to—then or now.” So why is Ferreira in Torotoro? I wonder. For Raul and me? If so, they won’t know to check out the shack, let alone this cave.
Colque and Vargas smile. Vanessa, frowning, has returned to her knitting as if to avoid everyone’s eyes. With each furious stitch, the thick blue hat is coming off her needles, like she’s done with it.
Memories are racing through my mind: Colque breezily informing us there was no charge for his services, and that we didn’t need our adoptive parents’ permission for him to help us. His e-mailing me that Vanessa was born in a small village near Cochabamba, but not replying to my question, What small village? His not knowing—or pretending not to know—that Vanessa and Vargas were married. And his assurance that Vargas would never hurt Vanessa.
“So all those times you asked whether my adoptive parents might be willing to testify,” I say, my blood pumping as fast as Vanessa’s needles, “you were just double-checking that they weren’t. And all those questions about our race route were to keep track of us. You must have been pretty nervous when you learned it went through Torotoro.”
“It wouldn’t have been a problem if you hadn’t hooked up with Ardillita somehow,” Colque replies evenly. “Release Raul, Hugo, and let him fetch the notebook if he doesn’t want his friend to get hurt.”
“I won’t let them hurt you, Andreo,” Raul says soberly before crawling into our vent.
Things go quiet after Raul disappears down the tunnel—deadly quiet as we wait. Vargas, Vanessa and the detective are all sweating like they’re in a sauna, if my powers of observation are worth anything. Long after my friend should have returned, Vargas orders Vanessa to move to the hole and shine their lantern down it. She does as he asks.
“Gone,” she says resignedly. “I told you we should have burned the notebook earlier.” She returns to the suitcase as if awaiting the next order.
“He has run off. Is that what you think too, Andreo?” Colque asks me, voice rising. “Maybe he doesn’t consider you such a good friend after all.”
I hang my head like I’m devastated and back away like I’m frightened.
“Hugo,” Colque directs calmly, his stare at me icy, “get your suitcase and your wife in my truck and get the hell gone. I’ll cut Jorge free, take care of Andreo and get back to town somehow.”
“Don’t you hurt him,” Vanessa’s voice floats across the cave.
“Shall I shoot him?” Colque asks Vargas, ignoring her.
“Whatever you think is best,” Vargas replies indifferently as he picks up the suitcase and lantern. “The other boy has nothing but a half-burned notebook. We’ll be safe before anyone can do anything with it.”
Vanessa walks over to me, her skirt swishing, her low-heeled silver sandals making hollow clicks on the stone floor. She lifts the thick blue hat from her knitting bag and offers it with outstretched hands and something like warmth in her eyes.
I accept it with trembling hands. “Thanks,” I whisper. “I’m glad we met, even if—”
She places one of her manicured fingernails on my lips to stop me from finishing. Then she goes on tiptoes to kiss the top of my head. “Lead a good life, my son, and love your adoptive parents.”
In my suddenly blurred vision, she steps in front of me and faces Colque, deliberately blocking the aim of Colque’s gun.
“Put the gun down, Diego,” she commands.
“Vanessa!” Vargas objects.
“Hugo, I’m not moving until he does.”
“But Vanessa, sweetest …”
“Put it down,” she repeats, louder.
Colque looks from Vargas to her, finally receiving a reluctant signal from Vargas to do as Vanessa says. Slowly, he places it at his feet. Vanessa moves quickly to pick it up, stuffs it into her knitting bag and marches over to her annoyed husband. Then, without a backward glance at me, she trails Vargas and their muddied suitcase out into the rain.
“Thanks, Mom,” I mumble, and recall something Ardillita said: Remember, no mother can forget or stop loving, even if she’s forced to hide the pain deep in her heart.
Without taking his eyes off me, Colque produces a knife from his pocket and leans down to cut Jorge free. While I fondle the new hat, I mentally measure the distances between me and the main cave entrance and me and the tunnel.
Colque, after inspecting Jorge’s head, slaps him hard across his cheek.
“Don’t!” comes a drunken wail.
“Wake up, you useless borracho,” Colque says—Spanish for “drunk.” “I need your help to corner this devil.” He turns toward me and wields his knife. Jorge rises, the patch of dried blood on his forehead a perfect match with his angry, bloodshot eyes.
I lean down to pick up a loose rock and, taking careful note of where the two men stand, fling it full force at Colque’s lantern. As it shatters, I shut off my own headlamp.
Though all three of us are now blind as bats, I’m betting only one of us has something close to a bat’s finely tuned senses and echolocation navigational skills. The sound of the rain identifies the cave’s entrance. Subtle air currents point me toward the vent. Jorge’s stumbling and the reek of beer proclaim his movements. And Colque, however stealthy he thinks he’s being, is betrayed by his cologne.
For five tense minutes, we circle each other in the humid blackness like wrestlers at the start of a match. At one point, Jorge lunges and lashes out with extended fists, catching me in the right eye as I spin away. It stings like hell, will be a real shiner, but I dodge Colque’s follow-up attempt to corner me. Instead, I make my break for it, sprinting for the vent and diving down it. Like an adventure-race pro, I flick my headlamp on, grab my backpack and wriggle down the length of the shaft to leap on my bike. Then I head up in the hammering rain toward the road that ends at the shack.
Giving my instincts full rein, I pedal through dripping, scratchy brush as fast as I can. I’m aiming for the darkened shack, after which I’ll look for Colque’s vehicle—and hopefully find Raul—while remaining on alert for Vargas and Vanessa’s lantern. I’m so intent on my mission that I fail to identify a solid object before slamming into it: a tall, strong body that wraps its arms around me and flops me forcefully to the ground.
“Good evening, Andreo. You seem to be in an awful hurry. You may remember that we’ve met. I’m Police Chief Ferreira.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“Police Chief Ferreira, I’m so glad to …,” I begin.
“We have Raul.”
“You have Raul? What do you mean?”
“You’ll see.”
He takes me firmly by one shoulder, allowing me to haul my bike beside me with my other hand, and hustles me up the hill, lecturing me along the way: “… got in over your head … frightened your parents half to death … caused a scandal for the adventure-race organizer.”
As we near the hut, the lights of two police squad cars and a police van pierce the falling rain. Ferreira maneuvers me toward one of the cars. Inside, I see a cop in the driver’s seat and three figures in the screened-off backseat. A rear window rolls down as we approach. Raul, his dreadlocks a wet mess, sticks his head out.
“Hey, Andreo. Glad you could join the party.” His cheerfulness sounds a bit forced. I move closer and my jaw loosens when I see that he’s squished back there beside Vanessa and Vargas, whose eyes refuse to meet mine. Silently, the couple are studying the handcuffs that lock them together.
Ferreira’s grip on me remains firm.
Raul’s driver opens his do
or, steps out and nods at Ferreira.
“Andreo, meet Torotoro Sheriff Benito Savedra,” Ferreira says. “Benito, this is Andreo.”
The sheriff sticks his hand out; I grip it weakly. “Um, hola,” I say. “What’s going on?”
That’s when Raul decides to fill me in. “So, first the sheriff here jumps out of nowhere and arrests me for trying to siphon gas. Then he locks me in the back of this cruiser for being the handsome mug on one of his WANTED posters.”
I flash a look at Savedra; he doesn’t look amused.
“And as if that’s not bad enough, ten minutes later he stuffs Vanessa and Vargas in the back of the car with me. Luckily they’re handcuffed or they’d be seriously pummeling me to get the notebook I’ve still got.”
Raul’s grin lights up his rain-soaked face. Vargas scowls, but Vanessa keeps her eyes on her lap.
“That’s enough, Raul,” Ferreira says. “You two can talk back at the station. In fact, you’ll be doing plenty of talking. Andreo, load your bike in the police van beside Raul’s bike, please.”
Sheriff Savedra pushes the button on his door that rolls up Raul’s window, then positions himself back in the driver’s seat and closes the door. After I’ve stowed my bike, Ferreira guides me to the second squad car, opens the rear door and directs me in. There’s an officer at the wheel who eyes me sullenly in his rearview mirror.
“Buckle up,” Ferreira instructs, then slams my door closed and disappears into the wet night. I try the handle—locked. My driver makes no move to drive off; I can hear Raul’s car also idling.
“Why aren’t we going?” I ask my driver in Spanish.
“More people joining us,” he says.
We don’t have long to wait. In the car’s headlights, I soon see Ferreira and two more officers stride past my car, Colque and Jorge in cuffs between them and David at Ferreira’s side.
David? What’s he doing here?
Through the rain-streaked windshield, I watch Ferreira and the officers load Colque and Jorge into the back of the police van and the officers climb in after them.
The two far doors of my car creak open.
“Hey, bro,” David says casually as he plops into the seat beside me.
“Let’s go,” Ferreira directs the driver of our car as he takes the front passenger seat.
“What are you doing here?” I ask my brother, unable to disguise my shock.
“Helping the police find you,” he answers evenly. “You want the whole story?”
“Um, yeah,” I say as our car bounces down the road.
“Well, back at the caves, after you and Raul jumped into that shuttle truck without us, Mom, Dad and I cut in line to get on the very next ride. At the bike vans, when we found your note, Mom and Dad wanted to chase you down, but I said if your birth mother lived in Torotoro, you’d lied and were headed back there, not to Cochabamba.”
“You guessed right,” I say, lowering my head.
“Obviously. Anyway, Dad told one of the bike-van drivers that this was an emergency. He asked him to drive ahead, check if you guys were on the road, then phone us on our satellite phone.”
“Dad broke open our satellite phone?” I ask.
“Yup, thereby disqualifying our team. When the guy phoned and said there was no sign of you, Mom, Dad and I biked to Torotoro at breakneck speed. We met Maria coming from the other direction. She had no idea what you were up to, but lent us her map when she found out we didn’t have one.”
“Sorry, I figured you didn’t need it to bike back to Cochabamba,” I say sheepishly.
“At the Torotoro police station, Mom downloaded photos of you two—”
“And they put up posters,” I fill in.
“I’d just arrived at the Torotoro police station,” Ferreira speaks up, “because of an earlier tip about Vargas. Sheriff Savedra and I were about to head out to check on suspected hideouts when David insisted on coming along.”
“I’d noticed two Xs on Maria’s map by then,” David says. “I thought maybe they might be a clue to where you were.”
“The cave and tunnel, I’m guessing,” I say. “Raul made the same Xs on our map the morning he and Maria went caving.”
“So David rode up here with us,” Ferreira says, “and his map-reading skills led us toward the cave, which is how we found Jorge’s Jeep and Colque’s 4×4 down the road from the shack. Also Raul’s note confirming that that was where you were. Then David did some pretty impressive navigating in the dark and rain to lead us to this Caverna Refugio place, which even Sheriff Savedra had never heard of.”
“Way to go, David,” I say with genuine pride.
My brother’s smile is just visible.
“He kept making us stand ahead, one at a time, to take compass bearings off us and count out paces for some kind of mathematical formula,” Ferreira said.
“Learned from the best,” David mumbles as our car pulls up to the Torotoro police station.
“And now,” Ferreira says, “it’s time for some debriefing, Andreo, before you and Raul rejoin your family.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Two hours later, we’re sitting on some overstuffed red sofas in the Torotoro hotel lobby: Dad, Mother, David, Raul, me, Police Chief Ferreira and Sheriff Savedra. Raul and I have recounted our stories to the officers at the Torotoro police station—who’d actually been pretty decent while grilling us—and now we’re filling in my family.
“So, this Detective Colque,” Dad addresses me. “How was it that Raul figured out he was part of Vargas’s operation and you didn’t?”
Raul answers before I can: “When Andreo dozed off in the tunnel, I overheard Vargas say to Vanessa, ‘Colque should be here by now.’ I was shocked for a minute, but then I started to think about all the things that hadn’t been adding up about Colque, especially his not calling the police the time he drove us to the shack. Vargas started burning the notebook before I got a chance to tell Andreo. I tried to stop Andreo from handing Colque the gun, but Andreo can be a bit slow at times,” he says, making a face at me.
“And not slow at times,” David pipes up. “He was faster and smarter than Colque and that Jorge guy at the end, or he might have gotten knifed. And his navigational skills got you to the secret tunnel entrance in the first place.”
My brother is actually sticking up for me? Even sounding proud of me? I swallow and look from my parents to David. “Mother, Dad, David, I am really, really sorry for putting you through all this. All we ever meant to do was a bit of research on our birth parents, if we could. I shouldn’t have stolen documents out of the safe—”
“We should never have kept them from you, Andreo,” Dad says, hanging his head. “Nor the hat. I told your mother that, years ago.”
“It was my fault,” she says, moving a hand slowly, hesitantly toward mine. I grasp it and lean in to kiss her cheek. She looks so startled, she doesn’t speak for a moment; then she lifts her other hand to her face to wipe away a tear. “When we first adopted you,” she says in almost a whisper, “I had a feeling something wasn’t right about it. The cost, the way Mr. Vargas did things, his overly smooth manner. But we’d wanted a baby for so long, and there were too few babies to adopt, too much demand in North America. We were convinced this was the only way.… ”
“I’m afraid I bought into Vargas’s business—hook, line and sinker,” my father says, frowning. “I never suspected it was an illegal operation; I thought your mother was being overly paranoid.”
“When you cried so much, I thought maybe you knew …,” Mother says.
“Knew?” I echo when she pauses.
“Knew you’d been stolen, if you were. Knew I wasn’t your real mother. Hated me for what we’d done.”
“Hated you?” I turn to face the mother who has raised me, the mother I now realize has loved me fiercely all my life. “Seriously, Mother, Dad, David, I’ve learned this week who my real family is. It was stupid to go chasing after some fairy-tale mom. Who turned out to be worse th
an an evil stepmother.” I grin weakly.
“Told you so,” Raul inserts helpfully.
“Not so evil,” Mother says, stroking my hair. “First of all, she gifted us with you sixteen years ago. Second, she tried to save your life in the cave. Third, she made you a nice hat. She’s quite a talented knitter. Maybe I will have to take up a new hobby.”
She fingers my new blue hat thoughtfully. “I’m sorry for heaping so much guilt and blame on myself that I’ve never been much of a mother to you, Andreo.”
“That is not true, Mother—er, Mom. Can I call you Mom instead of Mother? Mother is so formal.”
She laughs and says, “Of course, Andreo.”
I turn and wrap my arm around her with a force that surprises both of us. I lean my wet face into her wet face and whisper, “I love you. And I’m so, so sorry for all this.”
“Hey,” Dad pipes up. “What about me?”
I wrap my other arm around him, and we have a bear hug. A grizzly bear hug. David says, “Family love-in, huh? Well, guess I’d better jump in.” And he does.
The skinny girl serving as the hotel receptionist gawks, but I don’t care.
“Okay, this is getting way too soppy for me,” Raul states.
“About that note you left on the bikes,” Dad says as we release one another.
I feel my face flush red. “I flat-out lied,” I admit. “I’m really sorry. I lied in order to buy Raul and me more time in Torotoro while you finished the race. I knew how important it was for you to finish. I figured unranked was better than nothing.”
“You thought finishing the race was more important than being a family?” Dad shakes his head in disbelief. “You thought finishing was so big a deal we’d still do it after you had run away?”
“I—I guess I did.”
Dad looks devastated. “Andreo, Andreo, my son. I know I was angry earlier, but only because I hadn’t had time to think it through. I should have realized how wrong it was to act like you weren’t adopted and hide your birth information from you. I thought I was protecting your mother’s feelings. But surely you know that neither David nor I meant what we said about time-outs and going unranked.”
