Lost and Found Groom

by McLinn, Patricia

  The first year she’d fought both the dream and the memories. Now she knew fighting did no good, especially not against the dream.

  It lifted her out of herself, carried her against her will from her orderly, practical life in Far Hills, Wyoming, taking her back . . . back to Santa Estella . . . back to those fear-drenched hours . . . back to him.

  She opened the packet of pictures in front of her with a show of examining them.

  “I didn’t sleep very well.”

  Ellyn shook her head, dismissing that excuse. “I remember that look from when the kids and I stayed with you.”

  “What dream?” Marti repeated.

  Ellyn turned to her. “The one that made her cry out during the night and look like this in the morning. It happened a couple times in the week we stayed here during the work on Ridge House.”

  With troubled eyes, Marti stared at Kendra. “A nightmare?”

  Kendra put her hand over the older woman’s. “Not really.”

  During her childhood visits to Far Hills, Kendra had seen Marti as a distant figure, as remote from her as her mother. Kendra had known Marti through Amy’s eyes then–how Marti had taken over the ranch and raised Amy when their father and Amy’s mother had died. Amy had later been Kendra’s college roommate and closest friend. When a car accident killed Amy, grief brought Marti and Kendra together in a bond that endured even as the grief eased.

  When Kendra’s life shifted irrevocably three years ago, it had seemed right to turn to Marti.

  Their new relationship was cemented when Kendra helped Marti adopt Emily from an orphanage on Santa Estella, a small island off the coast of South America, shortly before Matthew’s birth.

  Since she’d returned to Far Hills, Kendra had come to an even greater appreciation of Marti’s strength, generosity–

  “So what is this not-exactly-a-nightmare about?”

  –and tenacity.

  Kendra sighed. “It’s . . . the hurricane.”

  “That’s all?” Ellyn said. “The hurricane?’

  “Don’t you think that’s enough? I could have been killed. It was the most frightened I’ve been in my life.” Her laugh grated on her own ears. “And it was the stupidest I’ve been in my life. I should have left with my crew instead of hanging around trying to get a scoop on Taumaturgio.”

  “Taumaturgio?” Ellyn stumbled over the pronunciation.

  “It means miracle worker. A legend on Santa Estella. Sort of a cross between the Scarlet Pimpernel and Robin Hood. Some authorities there were incredibly corrupt, lining their pockets with proceeds from aid meant for the island’s children. Taumaturgio ‘liberated’ supplies before the officials could sell them, and he took them to the children. He also flew kids who desperately needed specialized medical care into the United States–highly illegal. But the doctors who treated the kids weren’t about to turn him in.”

  “Sounds like someone worth knowing,” Ellyn said.

  “Certainly someone worth doing a story on,” Kendra said dryly. “Oh, how I wanted to do the story . . . But that’s a pretty weak excuse for being stupid.”

  “Some stupid things have good results.” Ellyn glanced toward the spread of snapshots taken at Matthew’s birthday.

  “Yes.” Kendra looked at the laughing face of her son, caught by the camera as he stood on a chair contemplating the possibility he could defy nature and fly. He was a miracle in every minute of her life. She would never–could never–regret having him.

  That didn’t change her stupidity. Barely two days of madness had turned her practical life upside down.

  “So, what are you going to do about it?” Ellyn asked.

  “About what?”

  “The dream.”

  “Not sleep?” Kendra suggested.

  “Looks like you’ve tried that. I should have said about making the dream stop.”

  “Believe me, I tried. I’ve given up. So I lose some sleep. I’ll survive. I was tired when Matthew was a newborn and when he was teething and God knows I’ve been tired since he started walking–”

  “I told you to enjoy the peace when he was crawling,” said Ellyn. “Wait until he goes to school and comes home with his first bloody nose.”

  “Hellfire, wait until he goes on his first date,” added Marti, who’d gone through that phase as surrogate mother to Amy.

  Kendra groaned, then they all shared a grin.

  “But I suspect that doesn’t have anything to do with this dream,” Marti said. Oh, yes, she had tenacity to spare.

  “It’s not–”

  “You should go after him.”

  Ellyn’s pronouncement surprised Kendra into an unguarded, “What?”

  “You should go after Paulo.’

  “Who’s Paulo?” Marti asked.

  “I don’t know,” Ellyn admitted. “But I’ve got some ideas.”

  They both turned to Kendra, who said, “He’s no one.”

  “Okay,” Ellyn said. “You have no reason to tell me who Paulo is, but I know he’s not no one, because that’s the name you call out like your heart’s breaking right before you wake up. But I do understand if you don’t want to talk abo–”

  “No, Ellyn, you don’t understand. He’s really no one. He doesn’t exist. I mean, the man exists. Or he did. The man who . . . Let’s just say Hurricane Aretha brought us together, and when it passed, there was no reason to stay together.”

  “Wasn’t there?” Ellyn asked with a significant look toward the den doorway where Matthew and Emily were visible.

  “You’re right. He was Matthew’s father. But Paulo doesn’t exist.”

  “I don’t understand.” Marti said.

  “I’m not sure I understand myself,” Kendra admitted. “He rescued me, he kept me safe–” He gave me Matthew. “And afterward, he took me back to the American consulate and disappeared.”

  “He just disappeared?” Marti’s voice was harsh.

  “I asked at the consulate–but no one knew him. I was evacuated from the island as soon as they repaired the runways. When I got back to the States I tried to forget. It should have been easy, because the ironic thing is my reports on the hurricane did for my career what I’d hoped the Taumaturgio story could do. Then, I found out I was pregnant . . .”

  She remembered shaking as she’d dialed Marti’s phone number. Marti had simply said to come home to Far Hills.

  “I tried to contact him. I advertised he had a reward coming. I called the consulate and asked for help finding a man named Paulo Ayudor. The storm killed a thousand people, and more died afterward, and I wondered . . . But he wasn’t on any of the lists. Nothing.”

  “You mean you told the consulate you were expecting the man’s child, and they didn’t help?”

  “I didn’t tell the consulate official. It was none of his business, besides . . .”

  “You weren’t sure if Paulo would run even further,” Ellyn filled in softly.

  Kendra didn’t answer. She didn’t have to. So many times she’d wondered if Paulo had seen her efforts to contact him . . .

  “You feared he would turn his back on his child.”

  Marti’s voice sounded a little odd to Kendra, but Ellyn didn’t seem to notice, asking, “What happened?”

  “The man at the consulate shunted me off to local officials. One told me Paulo Ayudor was the name of a character in island folklore. Santa Estella’s Johnny Appleseed. Only he planted miracles–helping people in their direst hour of need. A close relation,” she said with a twist to her mouth, “of Taumaturgio.”

  Ellyn’s eyes widened. “Oh, my . . . You mean Paulo was–”

  “I don’t know. I’ve wondered. From the little description I got of Taumaturgio, it could have been. How would that be for irony? The man I’d sought all over Santa Estella was the one who ended up–”

  Sound erupted from the small room off the kitchen.

  “Mermaid!” declared Emily.

  “No!” responded Matthew with his new favorite word. �
��No Mermay! No. No!”

  Kendra and Marti swooped in and efficiently settled the dispute with the Solomon-like option of putting both children down for naps in Matthew’s room. They sat down again only to have the front door bell ring.

  “Who on earth . . . ?” Locals used the kitchen door.

  “Must be somebody who got lost,” Marti suggested.

  “Or a salesman. I’ll get rid of him.” Kendra started to rise, but Ellyn put her hand on her shoulder as she passed behind her.

  “I’ll do it. I can use the practice,” she added with a smile. “Remember me? No more Ms. Nice Guy.”

  They heard the squeak of the front door hinges, unaccustomed to being opened, then a male voice.

  “Is this the home of Kendra Jenner?”

  “Yes.”

  “Never answer their questions,” Marti murmured.

  But the overheard exchange absorbed all of Kendra’s attention.

  “May I speak with her, please.”

  Kendra’s heartbeat stuttered. That voice . . . She’d heard it before, hadn’t she?

  “I’ll ask if she can see you. What’s your name?”

  “Daniel Delligatti.”

  The name meant nothing. But the voice nagged at her. Familiar, but not quite . . . right. She had stood when Ellyn appeared.

  “Who is he?” Marti asked.

  “I don’t know, but . . . there’s something about him.”

  “There’s something about serial killers, too,” Kendra said grimly. “I know, I know. My cynicism is showing. I’ll see him.”

  Aware Ellyn and Marti followed her closely, she turned the corner from the kitchen, staring down the short hallway created between the back of the couch and the wall, toward the man who stood at her front door.

  Late August sunlight from the small windows across the top of the door backlit the figure. But she could see more than enough.

  The clothes were vastly different–a soft blue oxford cloth shirt tucked into faded jeans instead of near rags. The hair was different, too, shorter and the waves mostly tamed by a precise cut. But the features were unchanged. She knew the strong jaw line and penetrating dark eyes in less than a heartbeat.

  She should know them. She saw them every day. They were the features of her son.

  And she saw them many nights in her dreams.

  “Paulo.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Three years ago,

  Santa Estella

  The damned hurricane was half a day early.

  Wind rushed at Kendra Jenner like a mad bull. She barely saved herself from falling by bracing a hand against the rain-slickened adobe of Senora Valeria’s house.

  Her cameraman and sound guy, surely safely in Miami by now and probably enjoying a drink in a hotel bar, would laugh at her being proved wrong. She could have taken the last plane out with them. They’d wanted her to. So had that American consulate official with the shaggy dark hair, thick glasses and baggy suit.

  But she couldn’t give up on finding Taumaturgio–“Miracle Worker”–the benefactor to Santa Estella’s children whose daring so outraged the island’s officials. This story she had to tell.

  So, she’d hired Esteban to guide her through narrow streets twisting between shanties, squat adobe buildings and pockets of partially completed construction abandoned under the weight of local corruption. She’d felt like a human pinball, bumped by every one of the hurrying crowd carrying bulging string bags of bottled water and canned goods. Like a pinball, she’d gone ever downward, from the hilltop where the consulate sat amid hotels and estates, down, down toward the water. Deeper into La Baja.

  Senora Valeria was the seventh of Esteban’s promised sources–not one had anything to tell her of Taumaturgio. After he’d led her inside the old woman’s tiny adobe house, he’d stepped outside for a smoke. He’d never returned.

  So Kendra would have to get herself back to the protection of the American consulate. She slung the strap of her shoulder bag across her body and started climbing the narrow street.

  Rivulets of cold water, mud and stones tumbled down the rough surface under her feet. Rain beat into her face. Soon, her numbed feet no longer felt the stinging blows through her shoes. But they couldn’t feel the street, either, and walking required faith and guesswork. In unpredictable bursts, wind drove the rain at her like pellets. Her clothes became a sodden weight. A hunk of green wood that might have been a shutter cartwheeled in front of her.

  From behind her, the surf she should have been leaving behind seemed to grow louder each second. She didn’t look back. She kept climbing.

  The water was ankle deep, and coming faster. Fighting up another twenty yards, her feet slid on the slick stones. She came down hard on her palms, but saved herself from going all the way down. The wind eased, and she straightened, dragging in air.

  A few more yards and she stumbled again. The water pulled at her, but she resisted. Against water now streaming past her mid-calf, she pushed on.

  The third time she went down, she knew she’d never make it. Not like this. Not all the way to the consulate.

  Fear crested over her. She pushed it back. Think, Jenner. Think. Panic’s the worst thing to do. Think, damn it!

  First, she had to find shelter. That was the only practical thing to do.

  Squinting against the rain, she caught a flash of movement. Someone else trying to find shelter? She pushed her hair back, but saw no sign of humanity. Not a person. Not a light. To her left, blue fabric that had once been an awning whipped and twisted in its death throes. The far side of the narrow street was a blur.

  To her right, a narrow indentation cut into the street. Movement. A door, swinging wide on its hinges. Perhaps it covered only another, sturdier door that would be locked, but maybe . . .

  She pushed off the wall and started toward the swinging door. Reaching it, she barely absorbed the fact that it opened into a dark space enclosed by plywood before she launched herself inside, then stood, hands on thighs, and gulped in air. Slowly she became aware of her shivering. Of the smell of mud. Of abandonment. And then of more . . . a presence. A faint sense of something else breathing in the space . . .

  Her head jerked up. Someone stood on the bottom step of a steep, rickety stairway.

  A man. Tall, with broad shoulders. That much she saw despite the shadowy gloom.

  He said something she didn’t understand, and spread his arms, palms out in an apparent gesture that he meant her no harm. She backed up. He stepped forward. She pivoted and bolted out the door. A gust of wind-driven rain slashed into her like innumerable knives.

  The next moment unfolded in slow motion.

  The man coming behind her, a glimpse of something above and to her left. The man diving at her, crushing her against a wooden wall. Seeing, around his shoulder, a huge earthenware urn with bits of flowers clinging to it, fly past and shatter in a spray of dirt and pottery on the spot where she had stood. Almost silently. The crash swallowed by the blast of wind that had propelled it off a rooftop garden.

  Then they were inside.

  The man released her and stepped back, but she felt the force of his grasp like an imprint on her skin.

  He spoke again, his breathing slightly labored. It sounded like the same thing he’d said before. Again with his hands open and in sight.

  “No me habla espanol.” She hoped that much translated to the island’s mutation of Spanish.

  “Ah,” he said. His hands dropped. She watched them every inch, but they hung there, innocently. Then a spate she didn’t understand, until, finally “American?”

  Some places were anti-American, but not Santa Estella. She nodded. “Yes. American.”

  He nodded back, and water dripped from a hunk of black hair over his forehead. His head and the bottom of his worn pants were nearly as wet as she was, but a dark green slicker protected the rest of him.

  “There you go.”

  Her spirits rose. “Oh. You speak English.”

  His rap
id words flowed past her nearly as fast as the water in the street, ending with “There you go.”

  “There you go?” she repeated.

  He nodded. “There you go.”

  He didn’t speak English. He spoke “there you go.”

  He jerked his head toward the top of the stairs, retreated two steps, and gestured to her to follow.

  She shook her head. He might have saved her, he might not seem threatening, but she’d done her share of stories about murderers who looked like choirboys. Hell, she’d done a story where the murderer was a choirboy.

  With his hands out straight, he slowly raised them, then nodded to the door behind her. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw water seeping over the sill and across the mud-packed floor. He was right. The water was going to rise.

  “On the other hand,” she muttered to herself, “sometimes a choirboy is really a choirboy.”

  She followed him up the stairs.

  *

  During the next, awkward, half hour the man prowled the cavernous second story of the unfinished building gathering items he apparently thought could be of use. He brought them back to where a pair of shoulder-high walls, one about ten feet long and the other six feet, met to form a protective corner. He indicated a closet-like structure to one side could be used as a sort of toilet, with his and hers chamber pots.

  Finally, they sat in the walled corner and shared their resources, hers from her bag, his from a backpack.

  Her bottle of water. His lantern flashlight. Her two cheese and crackers packets. His string bag of oranges. Her Swiss Army knife. His matches.

  All the while, the wind howled louder and the light grew dimmer.

  She shivered so hard her teeth clicked audibly. He interrupted his efforts to start a small fire in the bowl of a hubcap he’d found, using torn sheets from her notebook, scraps of wood and his damp matches, to give her a sharp look. With emphatic gestures he instructed her to change into the dry shirt and socks he drew from his backpack along with the flannel lining he detached from his slicker. She didn’t argue.

  Slipping behind the wall to change, she realized the ferocious wind drove the rain through the outer wall, creating a fine mist. But their refuge had the benefit of steel posts that apparently rose from the ground level and extended up beyond where she could see.