Heart of the World

by Linda Barnes

  HEART

  OF THE

  WORLD

  Also by Linda Barnes

  A Trouble of Fools

  The Snake Tattoo

  Coyote

  Steel Guitar

  Snapshot

  Hardware

  Cold Case

  Flashpoint

  The Big Dig

  Deep Pockets

  Linda Barnes

  HEART

  OF THE

  WORLD

  St. Martin’s Minotaur New York

  HEART OF THE WORLD. Copyright © 2006 by Linda Appelblatt Barnes. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.minotaurbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Barnes, Linda.

  Heart of the world / Linda Barnes—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-312-33287-4

  AN 978-0-312-33287-7

  1. Carlyle, Carlotta (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Women private investigators— Massachusetts—Boston—Fiction. 3. Missing children—Fiction. 4. Teenage girls— Fiction. 5. Kidnapping—Fiction. 6. Boston (Mass.)—Fiction. 7. Bogotá (Colombia)— Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3552.A682H43 2006

  813’.54—dc22

  2006041708

  First Edition: May 2006

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Monica

  Aquí, no pasa nada.

  Nothing happens here.

  GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ,

  A Hundred Years of Solitude

  Everything was complicated; nothing was clear.

  It was Colombia.

  MARIA DUZAN,

  Death Beat

  Cuchacique, the Tairona chieftain who had led the uprising in 1599, was condemned “to be tied to and dragged by the tails of two wild colts, then quartered, the parts to be set on the pathways and the head placed in a cage, from whence none shall remove it, or be sentenced to death penalty…”

  GERARDO REICHEL DOLMATOFF,

  Arqueologia de Colombia: Un Texto Introductorio

  HEART

  OF THE

  WORLD

  SIERRA NEVADA DE SANTA MARTA

  The small man wore white from the tip of his pointed hat to the rolled-up cuffs of his baggy trousers. His shapeless tunic hung to his narrow hips. His feet were bare, and his mochila, the hand-woven bag slung over his shoulder, was broadly striped in brown and white, with a touch of bright yellow, like an unexpected flower. He was less than five feet tall, and young, but his brown skin was lined, so he didn’t look like a young man. His pace was slow, which added to the impression of age, but that was because his outer vision was poor. His inner vision was keen and he progressed with a steady gait, his feet firm on the rocky ground. He knew how to walk; he knew the right way to walk, the old way, the way the Mother had taught the first people. He knew how to dress, in white like the snow, with a hat like the peak of the snowy mountain. As he walked, he chanted in the old tongue, in the simple language of the Elder Brother, now known by only a few.

  It did not make him sad that so few Elder Brothers remained in the great world. Everything was how it should be. He had brought the sacred offerings, the white potatoes, the white grubs, the special things that nourished the spirits of the Mothers of the Lost City. He had brought food for the Mother of the Jaguars and the Mother of the Water Spirit and the Mother of the Green Plants, and he spoke the proper words of offering as he walked the proper way.

  “There are all things in Aluna; in Aluna there are all things.”

  The repetitive chanting brought him to his center and gave him peace, but the words of Mama Parello still rang in his ears. He had little outer vision, but the other mamas saw like great hunting hawks, and they said the snow on the highest mountain peak was not as it should be, the small tundra trees dead or dying, the grasses of the páramo turning yellow and dry. That was very bad. If the snow was not deep, as it should be, then the icy water in the streams would not be as it should be. If the water was not good, the maize, the plantains, and the potatoes would not be good. If the plants were not good, the Kogi could not thrive. All these things were connected as all things were connected on the great earth. “In Aluna there are all things.”

  He used his poporo then, as a man does, taking the coca leaves from his mochila and placing them in his mouth the right way, the way the Mother taught since time began, using his stick to add the ground lime from the gourd. As he chewed, mixing the lime with saliva and leaf, he thought about the Mother and why she had allowed the Younger Brother to come back from his exile across the Great Sea.

  Once, he knew, the Elder Brother and the Younger Brother lived in harmony here in the heart of the world. Much was known then, of spirit and sky; all the ceremonies were new and fresh. The people traded their crops up and down the mountain, fish and salt from the sea, monkey and alligator meat from the jungle, sugar cane from the wooded savannah. The mamas taught the right ways and the people prospered. The spirit was strong then, and the mamas danced—how they danced!— with the holy gold.

  But the Younger Brother took the wrong turning. He fell in love with his machines and forgot the old ways. He hurt the Mother’s body with his machines, and for his carelessness, and for the protection of the Older Brother, he was banished to the far side of the world.

  Peaceful were the years of his banishment, but he had returned. He had come back to the pain of the Elder Brother, to the diminishment of the true people. He had brought grief then. And now, now, what had he done? Had the Younger Brother, in his folly, made trouble even with the snow on the holy mountaintop?

  The coca leaves were fresh and the lime strong. As he chewed, the tiredness passed from his body like a wave passes through the sea, and he walked the earth refreshed and smelled the good smells of the spicy grasses and the crisp thin air. He chanted to keep his thoughts on the right things to do when approaching the Great City of the Mother. “There are all things in Aluna; yes, in Aluna there are all things.”

  Aluna was the place of creation, where all things began, where time was stilled and everything that was or that would be existed in the garden of the Mother’s great and eternal mind. He tried not to worry about the melting snow, but it was a thing to bring trouble. Still, if he nourished and cared for the good Mothers of the City as he always did, as the Elder Brothers had always done, then it would go well. There was much lost, yes, much lost, but much remembered of the Old Ways. The Elder Brothers knew how to keep the good in the world, how to keep the snow deep, how to make the rain fall, how to make the plants grow. The Elder Brothers would not falter. “There are all things in Aluna.”

  When he crested the high ridge, he heard the low hum, the pesky sound of the great moth, a troubling angry buzz. There are all things in Aluna, so even the ugly iron moth of the foolish Younger Brother was there, an idea before it had a form, an idea in the mind of the Great Mother. This moth was hard to see, fuzzy and far away, but it grew closer and bigger and louder, a great black moth hovering near the City of the Mother, an ugly iron moth that came singing out of the sky, out of the pure white blanket of the clouds. The moth was black like night and gray like ash. The Younger Brother made the moth, but he did not build it from sticks or weave it on a loom. He did not create it with the proper spirit in the proper way, with humility and prayer and guidance.

  The small man’s feet hurried on the stones and he had to remind himself to do the thing right, to approach the city in the correct frame of mind, in the righ
t way, so that his holy offerings would be good. Things had to be done right, or they were no good. There was a way to do things. This was what the Younger Brother had never learned. As the buzzing faded away, the small man slowed his pace and spoke the words carefully, remembering to say them the way Mama Parello said them, remembering the right melody and the right rhythm, remembering the way that was the one right way.

  Another steep path led to a flight of stone steps. The steps, edged in emerald moss, were not slippery to bare feet. The small man thought they looked like the petals of a great flower. He knew how to walk them. He took deep breaths as he climbed, and he thought how short the long journey had been, how many good things he had smelled along the way, how many strong steps he had taken.

  What was that noise, that rhythmic pat-pat-pat? It wasn’t the echo of his own climbing steps; no, his feet traveled as silently on stone as they did on sand and earth. The sound was one he knew, a melody of planting time, the steady thud of the iron spade digging the earth, but there were no people in the City and no crops to till. He tried to keep the right thoughts in his head, the right words on his tongue. He quickened his pace, and when he’d climbed every step, when he stood on the flat holy ground, his eyes did not have to see well to see that this was wrong.

  The ancient words dried on his tongue. What were the words for this new and terrible thing? Unbidden, they came to him, the words the mamas of the Sierra Nevada sang long ago when the Younger Brother first returned from across the sea, words he had known in darkness and in light. He chanted them with all his breath, with grave concentration, as though they could make this wrong thing right:

  When Columbus came, they took the things that were ours.

  They took our golden things, all our sacred gold.

  They set dogs on us and we had to flee.

  We ran in fear from the sea to the jungle,

  from the jungle to the mountain.

  We ran in fear, and as we ran we left everything behind us.

  They took our soul. They took everything.

  Before then, everyone knew how to dance,

  All the Indians, all of them, all of them,

  Every Indian knew how to dance.

  He knew the next words, the next lines, but the words would not come. On the rise of a ridge, strangers worked the holy ground. Men in uniform raised iron tools and cut into the thin soil. They were laughing, drinking, even using the black picture boxes of the Younger Brother to create unholy images of the desecration. This was evil beyond carelessness, evil beyond thought. They were digging the very bones of the Mother. They were tearing out her lungs. They were tearing out her liver and her heart. Here in the Holy City, they were digging up the last good Mothers, stealing them from the great earth.

  The snow would fail; yes, it would fail. The life-bringing rain would fail. The cooling river would fail. The root crops and the cotton and the maize would fail. The Elder Brother could not protect them from their folly now. If the Younger Brother stole all the Mothers from the earth, everything would die. Everyone would die. The earth would die.

  The small man stood still as the iguana stands, stunned by the heat of the sun. He watched as though his eyes were the eyes of a swooping condor instead of the weak eyes of a half-blind man. He felt the violation of the Mother in his stomach, in his liver, and in his heart.

  Never before had they come to the sacred mountain. He did not know what to say. He did not know the right thing to do.

  PAOLINA

  She moved down the hallway in a gaggle of other teens, but she traveled in a lane of her own. She wasn’t with the three blond girls a step ahead, and she wasn’t with the two Goth kids who lagged behind. The boy nerd beside her was beside her for only a second, and that instantaneous brush was due to the two arrogant jocks that gave him a shove in her direction as they passed.

  She moved with grace, with a rhythm all her own, like she was dancing to a syncopated beat no one else could hear. Oh, she wasn’t as slim as she wanted to be, but who was? The way she put it, she had a butt like a Latina, and who’d want to have one of those flat-ass Anglo butts anyway? She wasn’t very tall either, just five-two, and that was a disappointment, but a lot of the boys liked short girls better and it gave her more options in the boyfriend department, because the short boys didn’t want beanpole girlfriends. Not even the harshest critic could find fault with the shiny dark hair that brushed her shoulders in the front and hung two inches longer in the back. When she flipped it away from her face, the way she did while bent in concentration over the drums, her dark brown eyes sparkled.

  Paolina Fuentes. Paolina Rolddn Fuentes. She didn’t use the name “Roldan,” not ever, but she had started thinking of herself as Paolina Roldan Fuentes, using “R” for a middle initial instead of leaving the line blank. Paolina Roldan, that had a rhythm. Her mother hadn’t given her middle name, and Paolina thought it was because coming up with two names for an unwanted child would have been twice the chore. Children who were wanted had middle names, beautiful, lyrical names like Melissa or Guinevere, names you could sing. She didn’t like the name Paolina, didn’t like its harsh choppy syllables. None of the teachers even pronounced it right, and Fuentes, well; she wasn’t a Fuentes at all. She didn’t have anything to do with Jimmy Fuentes. He was the father of her brothers, not her own father at all.

  Roldan was her true name, and that’s why she’d decided to take it as her middle name. In Colombia, she would have three names: her own name, Paolina, followed by her father’s name, Roldan, and then her mother’s maiden name, Silva. Three names, but her father’s would be the most important. He had three names, too: Carlos Roldan Gonzales, but most people simply called him Roldan. Everyone in Colombia knew who you meant when you said Roldan. She smiled as she came to her locker. It was like a magic word. He was like a movie star, a man who needed only one name.

  She knew what they said he’d done, but she didn’t believe it, and anyway, she didn’t care. He was handsome; she knew that. He was good-looking and probably kind, too. He was a legend; he was important, somebody like the men they read about in world history. She wondered if he was thinking about her, thinking about his daughter the same way that she was thinking about him, wondering what she was really like the same way she wondered about him. When she imagined him thinking about her, it made her feel as warm as one of the baby chicks that waddled under the heat lamps of the biology lab. He must think about her a lot, because he sent her presents.

  She glanced quickly right and left, considered reaching toward the back of the high shelf where she kept her latest treasure hidden. She wanted to feel its smooth surface, to touch it and wonder where it came from, but there wasn’t time to do the thing justice, to appreciate the magic of the gift. Somebody might stop and ask questions. Where’d you get that? You steal it? Lemme see it. She didn’t want anybody else touching it, smearing her father’s fingerprints with greasy cafeteria hands.

  After swapping her biology text for her history book, she banged her locker shut, spun the dial on the lock, and hurried through the second-floor hallway of Cambridge Rindge and Latin, the buzz of fellow students echoing in her wake. She didn’t hear it really, because she didn’t care what Karlene whispered about Jimmy B. or what Gigi shrieked about the goddamn test in biology. She didn’t even care what Gigi said about Diego, and what anybody said about Diego used to be vital. Now, with so much going on in her head, so many possibilities circling each other like caged animals, she couldn’t be bothered about Diego. He was such a child, really, always thinking about who to hang out with, and who he could con into buying him a beer, like it was important.

  She touched the pocket of her low-slung jeans, tracing the outline of the letter, and felt a secret shudder of anticipation. She could ask Diego what he thought about it, but why should she? It wasn’t like he was going to make any decisions for her. She absolutely hated that, the way everybody thought they could boss her around. At home, her mom, and here, any guy you called boyfriend t
hought he could tell you what to do like you were some kind of slave. Maybe the Anglo boys weren’t like that, but the Latino boys, man, they took pride in it: If I tell my girl to jump off the roof, she better jump off quick, she knows what’s good for her.

  Now she wished she’d taken the time to touch the secret talisman in her locker. It would keep her safe; she knew it would. Following the letter’s instructions wasn’t a bad thing. It wasn’t like these people were strangers. It wasn’t like she was doing something she’d promised she wouldn’t, like drinking Diego’s stupid beer or smoking pot or taking one of Andrea’s hyper pills. And, besides, in every adventure there was some level of risk. You don’t work up the nerve to audition for the band, you never make it. No pain, no gain. It wasn’t like she couldn’t walk away.

  Probably it was just another letter or another present, a new and different method of delivery. She’d say thank you to whoever brought it, and maybe she’d have time to write a thank-you note. That’s what she told herself walking down the hall, but there was another hope inside her, that her father would be there in the flesh, that he’d come and fetch her, that he’d carry her away to some new existence she couldn’t even imagine, some fairy-tale-princess world where she’d be in charge. She remembered the dark, high-ceilinged rooms in Bogota, the elegant home of the man who was her grandfather, a house with carved mantels over blazing fireplaces, with more rooms than she could count, with hushed, cool hallways, and a garden fragrant with pink roses. Captivated by memory, she must have slowed her pace.

  The thin voice sounded right in her ear. “Hurry up now, you’ll be late.”

  Jesus. Everybody thought they could boss her around. Even the dried-up prune of a gym teacher, thin as a stick, no breasts at all, with a stupid whistle hung around a neck as scrawny as a chicken’s. Even she could boss Paolina Fuentes around.

  Paolina Roldan.

  She gave the gym teacher her sweetest, most submissive smile and raced down the hallway to her last class of the day.

  CHAPTER 1

  Cold.

  It was as bitter a January morning as New England could spew. Gray clouds blocked the weak sun like heavy curtains and I smelled snow that had yet to fall, an unseen edge of white in the icy sky. Numb gloved fingers tugged my scarf so high it touched the tip of my nose. Breath fogged the air. Cold. But the exterior iciness was nothing compared to the chill I felt inside.