Lives Undone

by Aitana Moore

  Why hadn't the magazines that covered their affairs with David gloated about their downfall or photographed their distress? The business of gossip was democratic: it would record anyone's misery for the delight of others.

  "Tienes hambre?" Eduardo asked. "We'll have a good breakfast now that we've breathed some fresh air."

  Los Felices had sheds, but all the ones they passed seemed busy, with workers going in and out; the servant quarters were equally busy. It was hard to imagine that Luz and the other girls could be kept in them. Lee was losing the last of her hope.

  The ranch also had three houses in different spots. The main house, where Eduardo lived, looked colonial with curved arches, a pink façade and a red porch. Another house had an air of rustic luxury and was currently occupied by Miguel and Paloma. David, Diego and Lee were staying in a contemporary construction of wood and glass, ten minutes away from the pink house.

  "Are those boys still sleeping?" Eduardo asked a maid as they rode by the glass house.

  The woman was hanging sheets in the sun and said, "Sí, están dormidos."

  "Pendejitos perezosos," Eduardo said affably. Lazy little bastards. The maid laughed with him.

  When they reached his house, a boy ran out and set a stool before the horse, helping the old man off. Another boy handed him his cane.

  "Now I'm going to look a lot older." He winked at Lee. "The horse is a good trick, isn't it?"

  "It's amazing how well you ride."

  He gave a laugh like a bark as they climbed the tiled steps to the porch. "At my age, you mean. I love to ride too much to give it up, even if it hurts like hell."

  A lavish table had been set for them in a corner. The linen and china were impeccable, as were the silver dishes with food and the pots with long snouts bearing fragrant coffee.

  "We can sit in the sun," Eduardo said. "Always a good thing to do in winter. In summer you can hardly walk through this porch."

  Lee sipped her coffee, fighting the layer of nausea over her appetite. Eduardo’s birthday party would take place the next evening, and Los Felices would fill with guests who might make it more difficult for her to get the proof she needed. There would be young cousins staying with David and Diego in the glass house, and more servants moving about, although she might find a way to profit from the overall confusion.

  One thing was clear: this was the only chance for her to discover what had happened to Luz. She only had two and a half days.

  "Tomorrow will be a big, big party," Eduardo said with another cackle. "My next important birthday will be ninety. I'll be a wreck by then. Tomorrow I want fireworks, piñatas, mariachis and the works. Isn't that what you say, 'the works'?"

  She nodded. "That's right. Or you can say, 'the whole enchilada'."

  His laughter rang out again. "For sure we'll have enchiladas too." He leaned a little toward her to make a confession. "Do you know, if everything had gone right in my life, I would have married a girl from Philadelphia."

  "Really?"

  "Beautiful girl — I learned English to speak to her. But her family didn't like the idea and mine liked it even less. Romeo and Juliet, eh?"

  "You met your wife after her?"

  "Yes, but I didn't love her like the Philadelphia girl. It's what we did, at those times: we married the right people. Even Miguel did, and that wasn't so long ago." He threw her a glance. "Do you think that Paloma is lovable? She's like the Catrina Skeleton."

  Eduardo laughed with such childish mirth that Lee couldn't help laughing with him.

  “Maybe the boys will find someone they really like. Times are different. I'd be happy if my grandson Diego el pendejito married a girl as beautiful as you. You're brave too, I can tell by your eyes, and he needs that." Looking away, he sighed. "Every man should have a brave woman by his side."

  After breakfast, Lee walked around the house and took the phone from the pocket of her trousers. Reception was only good near the pink house, but not very good even there. Eduardo wanted his family to stop looking at their screens when they were with him.

  No messages. Nothing from James. She almost shook her phone; instead, she shook her head at her own inconstancy. What did she expect from him? She had pushed him away as hard as she could, and he had shoved her back.

  She hadn't meant to say forever; nothing lasted that long. He had mocked her because she had made him angry, and she was ashamed. She was always ashamed of wanting him.

  Sticking the phone in her pocket again, she got into the jeep she had been given to shuttle around the estate. At the glass house the brothers were having their breakfast on their more modern porch.

  "Mi amor, you're a redhead!" Diego cried.

  Lee ran a hand over her hair. "I went riding with your grandfather. There was a lot of dirt."

  "What did he show you?" David asked her with a wide smile.

  It was almost as if he were provoking her; or it would be, if he knew what she suspected.

  "The cattle and—"

  David laughed into his coffee cup. "Cows, dirt, rocks, grass, dirt, rocks."

  "Going to wash my hair," Lee snapped. It was rare that she should dislike someone as intensely as she disliked David.

  Diego grabbed her hand as she went by him and squeezed it. The brothers looked like two lazy dogs in the sun, and inside the house Lee took long strides toward the den that contained the most interesting thing about the whole ranch: another safe.

  The night before she had dared to place another motion-activated DVR camera above it. She took the camera and locked herself in the bathroom of their suite, connecting it to her phone to watch the feed it had recorded: and there was David opening the safe. His movements in the feed were quick, and she couldn’t see inside the safe, but now she knew the combination and bid her time until she could open it.

  She had to wait all day. The family did everything together, from lunch to afternoon coffee to evening drinks and dinner. Like a flock of testy birds, they often bickered, yet seemed not to tire of each other's company.

  "You're not wearing black tomorrow, are you dear?" Paloma asked suddenly, arching perfect eyebrows at Lee.

  "Blue,” Lee said.

  "Ah, good. It's not a funeral."

  Eduardo let out a guffaw. "I hope not mine, anyway."

  The men laughed with him. Paloma frowned slightly, as if the men bothered her, and wrapped the pashmina more tightly around her bony shoulders.

  David became expansive after a few beers, and Lee’s eyes followed him when he left the table. He stood on the porch helping a girl hang lanterns from the arches.

  "Warn David that she's off limits," Eduardo told Diego in Spanish.

  Diego joined his brother. The old man looked upset for the first time that day, but Miguel kept talking and sipping his wine, as if he were unconcerned by what his eldest son might get up to, and Paloma seemed oblivious to the whole exchange.

  Did they suspect that their golden boy, David, was a monster?

  Wouldn't David know better than to play with the girls at Los Felices? Lee watched him jerk his chin at his brother as he threw a resentful look toward his grandfather. He shrugged and turned away, but Diego followed him.

  Eduardo had switched his eyes to her. He gave something like a small sigh, then smiled at whatever his son was saying. Lee shouldn’t let even a funny old man know that she was interested in his uncontrollable grandson. Eduardo was no fool; neither were Miguel and Paloma.

  Blood was thicker than water. Those people would protect each other, and they would protect the family from scandal.

  "She's sleepy, Miguel," the old man said. "She woke up before dawn to ride.”

  Lee realized they were talking about her and smiled. "I'm fine."

  "The boys have walked off somewhere. Jorge will drive you back," Miguel said.

  They wanted her gone, perhaps to discuss family things, or to reprimand David. She wished them goodnight and climbed into the jeep with Jorge.

  In ten minutes, she was at the safe
again, in the dark, because even though the den faced the mountains at the back, a light through the glass of the house could betray her to a passing servant or to David, if he returned sooner than she expected.

  She typed the combination. A long howl outside made her start as the door clicked open. It must be a coyote, and it probably sounded closer than it was. They wouldn't let coyotes roam free in the ranch with Eduardo's prized cattle there. The sound gave her the creeps.

  Lee pulled at the door of the safe. There was one single phone inside — probably Luz's; but it was something else that called her attention, something that gleamed even in the dark. She shone the light from her cell phone on a row of jewelry neatly arranged on the bottom shelf of the safe.

  There was no need to pull it all out and risk messing with David's precision. A large gold medal was right on the center of the shelf, and the light from her phone showed her the Virgen de la Luz etched on it.

  David might be a shit who took back the phones he gave to his girlfriends; he might carry them around to answer messages and toy with people. But there was absolutely no reason for him to have a necklace from which Luz would never have been parted.

  Not if she were alive.

  NINETEEN

  Lee moved through the house, crying.

  "I lost them," she said. "I don't know where they are."

  "But they've never been here," James told her.

  "Where are they?"

  The house multiplied into many other rooms, and they got bigger and bigger as she reached them. They looked like the rooms in Deerholt, but different.

  "There are more than nine rooms," she said. "Please, help me look!"

  All the rooms were empty, and when he reached the last one, it was full of sand and she was standing on a stone wheel, scratching at her own face. The flesh came out in her nails. Her skull had started to show, teeth first, in a mad smile.

  "Lee!"

  He opened his eyes.

  This time the dream had been vivid. James could still feel his pain at her pain and, unlike the bad feeling left by other dreams, this one didn't dissipate as the minutes went by. It only increased.

  "What can happen?" he wondered as he sat up in bed.

  Lee was no fool; she knew what precautions to take when looking through people's things. She had done this before, many times.

  She hadn’t known with Robert.

  What can happen? he wondered again. She can take care of herself.

  But the image of her distress wouldn't leave him. She had been on a search by herself. She had asked for his help in the dream, although she would never ask in real life. She would never think it was his business, if he didn't want it to be.

  It struck him that she had gone north to make sure a girl was safe — and that if she could not find Luz, she would try to catch the man who had hurt her so that other girls would be safe.

  Her thieving, conniving persona was the lie; the truth was infinitely more complicated, and it was the truth that had fascinated him. She had been buried alive because she had wanted to find out the truth about Mia so that he would stop feeling guilty.

  Then, as now, she had thought that he wouldn’t believe her, and she had gone ahead on her own.

  She’s doing the right thing, and I’m not with her.

  James made himself a cup of tea, took his laptop and opened it in the garden. It wasn't hard to google David and find the names of his girlfriends: Luz Guadalupe Flores, María Jimena Hernandez, María Rosa Morales, Susana Araceli Sanchez. Their trail on internet, however, disappeared after David broke up with them.

  Lee had said that Luz spent time looking at her posts on Instagram and at some of the hateful reactions to them. James was not on social media, but the only way to look for the disappeared girls would be to track them on Facebook and Instagram. He opened accounts, swearing at every step.

  Once he was inside Facebook, he wondered how many people in the world could have the same name, even compounded names like "Luz Guadalupe" and "Susana Araceli.” There was a basketball player called James St. Brice, and many James Bryces. He scrolled through faces until he found the four girls.

  María Jimena Hernandez had last posted thirteen months ago.

  María Rosa Morales: eight months ago.

  Susana Araceli Sanchez: five months ago.

  Luz Guadalupe Flores: November 2nd.

  All of them had stopped posting around the time David had left them, although they had been prolific with their messages and photos before. Their last posts were all about being in Los Felices, the grandfather's ranch in the north.

  Only Luz and María Rosa had Instagram accounts, at least under anything resembling their names. Rosa's last image had been posted around the same time as her last Facebook message. It was a photo of her booted feet on rocky ground with a lizard next to them. Found life in the Sonora Desert. Don't worry, I don't plan to cross it! she had written in English.

  Luz had taken a selfie with blue hills as a background: Open space, open hearts! There were emojis of hearts, stars and moons to accompany the message. Lee was right: Luz was just a girl; she was almost a child.

  The hair on the back of James' neck started to rise.

  Too many coincidences. David Aguirre was doing something to those girls, and the last place any of them had been seen was Los Felices — probably because if he killed them there, he could easily dispose of their bodies in the desert.

  And Lee was at the ranch with him.

  James stood so fast that he almost overturned the table. He dialed her number. El teléfono marcado está fuera de cobertura ...

  Her phone was out of coverage area. Lee was in a ranch in the middle of nowhere, and her damned phone didn't work, at least not all the time. He texted: I know you found the truth. I'm coming — but if you see this, PLEASE get out of there NOW.

  He dialed Pete as he ran up the stairs. "Can you get me a gun?"

  "Can I get you a what?"

  "A gun."

  "What the hell, James?"

  Throwing a duffel bag on the bed, James began filling it with clothes. "I don't have time to explain, but it's not about Diego anymore. This is something else."

  "What, for example? What have you done?"

  Te matan por nada. They kill you for nothing. Or you killed them, if you had to.

  "Will you please trust me for a second, Pete? Can you get me a gun? I'll buy it, loan it, whatever."

  "Of course I don’t trust you, everyone knows you’re mad. I've got one for self-defense but—"

  "Am coming by to get it."

  James hung up despite Pete's protests and rummaged through his desk. Where was that thing again? Running down to the kitchen, he looked through the papers on the counter until he found an envelope he had tossed aside when it arrived: a gilded invitation to a party that he had never meant to attend.

  Until now.

  TWENTY

  Faces in Mexico could seem sculpted into stillness, as inscrutable as the masks in the museum.

  All Lee had to do was mention Luz, and the faces of the employees at the ranch shut down. Jorge, the foreman, the maids: they didn't look scared, worried or guilty when Luz was mentioned. They answered Lee politely, but they didn't remember where she had gone when she left the ranch; it was better to ask Señor David. Didn't Señor Diego know where she was from? She had never spoken of her family. She hadn’t spoken to the staff much.

  Beyond a certain number of questions, Lee's inquiry would cease being casual. If she kept interrogating people, she would begin to sound like a detective in hot pursuit of a criminal. The staff might lie to avoid the wrath of the Aguirre family, and perhaps it was true that Luz would have kept to herself and to the big houses, distancing herself from the workers at the ranch.

  It was Eduardo's birthday and the glass house had filled with Diego's cousins the night before. Nevertheless, Lee had gone out to ride with her host in the morning and paid closer attention to what he showed her: the garden, the watermelon patches a
nd the corn Eduardo grew to feed his animals. Agriculture in Sonora sometimes meant using too much water in a place that had too little, but it was still the most important economic activity in the state.

  Lee looked at the beds of disturbed earth and thought that if girls had been killed, David would most likely use the vast desert beyond Los Felices to bury them where they would never be found. Why would he hide them in his grandfather's garden or plantations — except that he was a sick bastard who liked to play pranks on people? He would probably enjoy sitting with his family and gazing at the graves of four girls. The cruel Aztec forefathers that were not even his had sacrificed human beings five hundred years before; it must make David feel like a god to do the same, and the heroin would increase his certainty that he would never be caught.

  You're going to get caught, you shit, Lee thought as she watched him during breakfast at the pink house.

  The phone pinged in her pocket as soon as the meal was over. She took it out and read: Sorry ive been quiet. Did you go to the abuelo party?

  David's feet were within Lee’s field of vision as she looked down at her phone. He had just been texting and was standing right there. She couldn't make the mistake of looking up at him — he would probably laugh at her and she would throw a pot of hot coffee in his face. She moved away a little as she texted back: Yes, I am at the ranch. Wish you were here.

  She hit "send" and heard the beep coming from David's phone. You bastard, I'm going to nail you to the wall so hard you'll never laugh again.

  "Aren't you going to look at your damned message?" Eduardo asked his grandson in Spanish, pointing at his pocket with the cane.

  Lee turned in time to catch David shrugging. "It's such a pain, abuelo. I feel like burying this phone in the desert."

  At lunch the family was together again, having incorporated the recently arrived members to the table, and Lee could only think of the jewels inside the safe. They were the proof she needed, but when could she get them? David might still open the safe and find the jewels gone, and he might try to silence her then.