Betrayed (8 page)

Vicki gently touched Evelyn’s arm. “Really, it’s okay. We weren’t always in an orphanage. We were in and out of foster homes until we finally settled down with Mom and Dad Andrews.”

Vicki had always known that it was her fault. Many families were anxious to take in an adorable blonde toddler, but a stubborn first-grader who refused to speak was a different story.

“Andrews. The people you said adopted you?”

“Yes. They were retired schoolteachers. They’d never had children of their own, and they missed them when they stopped teaching, so they volunteered as foster parents. We were their first—and last—assignment. After a couple of years they adopted us.”

The memories came clearly to Vicki’s mind because they were the first  that didn’t clutch at her stomach with that dark, cold queasiness. The old white-framed farmhouse. The big apple tree with its rope swing. The barn and its animals that had immediately captivated Holly.

And for Vicki the attic bedroom. It was not a child’s room with its neat twin beds, old-fashioned wallpaper, and braided rugs, but the girls had found two new dolls on the pillows and a small white bookshelf stuffed with children’s classics. Vicki had walked over to pick out a book and sat down to read. By then she was seven, Holly almost five.

Vicki had read incessantly through the first weeks while Holly chattered excitedly about animals and flowers. The Andrews made no attempt to dissuade Vicki, interfering only to insist she ate and slept.

Then one day she’d emerged from her fantasy world to follow the smell of cinnamon downstairs where Mom Andrews and Holly were shaping snickerdoodle cookies for the oven. Sitting on a tall stool with the Andrews’ fluffy Persian cat in her lap, she’d related to them the entire story of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden.

“Were you happy there?” Evelyn asked. “Were they good to you?”

“They were very kind to us. More than I deserved, I’m sure. Holly doesn’t remember anything earlier. They were just Mom and Dad to her, and she loved the farm and the animals. I’d always thought that was where she’d picked up that song. Holly just wouldn’t stop singing it. To her it was about God making a beautiful world. To me it was about a father who wasn’t there. I mean, I loved the farm and Mom and Dad too, but I could remember the other foster homes and the orphanage, and I guess I was always waiting for the ax to fall and us to end up alone again.”

With an embarrassed laugh, she added, “I guess a psychologist would say that’s why I drifted into working with abandoned children while Holly ended up in the tree-hugger camp. She was always more of an idealist and thought she could save the world, but I always knew better. In fact, Jeff sounds a lot like her.”

“And you never tried to find out more about your birth family when you grew up? Your adoptive family never told you about them?”

Vicki shrugged. How could she explain the unease that always gripped her every time she tried to push back the dark veil of her early childhood? “The Andrews told us what the foster system had on record. Namely, that our parents hadn’t abandoned us, which mattered most. But family records are sealed with adoption, so all they knew was that our parents had been killed when we were very young. Guatemala hardly seemed relevant, especially since Holly’s birth certificate stated she was American born, and it wasn’t as though we were immigrants from there. We were both registered as American citizens by birth, so Mom and Dad Andrews figured my birth parents must have been traveling down here when I was born.

“I’m not sure why I never told Holly about except that—well, she was happy and settled there. She was fifteen when I went to college and didn’t remember another life.  Besides, Holly gets so excited about things—a born crusader. Getting her worked up over some irrelevant piece of our past didn’t seem like a good idea. The past was the past.”

Again that feeling of queasy unease.

“And Mom and Dad Andrews weren’t young. They died just a few months apart when Holly was a freshman in college, so if there was anything else they knew, it went with them. Holly and I were grieving enough over losing the only parents we’d ever known. What good would it do to stir up more past hurt or loss? After all, if we’d had any family, we wouldn’t have ended up in the foster care system, so what was the point? I never expected that either of us would be in Guatemala. Much less that I’d run into you. Who would have believed such a coincidence?”

 “I don’t believe in coincidences,” Evelyn said soberly. “Not in God’s economy.” Then fixing Vicki with a steady gaze, she asked, as she’d asked earlier, “And now?”

“Now?” Vicki ran a tired hand over her face. “It doesn’t sound like we’ll ever be able to find out how our birth parents were killed, but I’ll definitely have to tell Holly about them. That is, if I can ever get her to pick up her phone.”

A sigh escaped Vicki as she fiddled with the Redial on her cell phone. Catching Evelyn’s questioning glance, she added a rueful explanation, “Holly’s not too happy with me. I’m afraid I didn’t take her latest crusade as seriously as I should have.”

“She’ll call when she’s had time to cool down,” Evelyn said quietly. “That’s what sisters do. As to just how your parents were killed . . .” She hesitated. “There is at least one person who knows what happened that day, however locked away that knowledge might be.”

“Really?” Vicki sat up straight. “Who would that be?”

“You."

Chapter Six

Vicki glanced at the dark heads bent studiously over open notebooks before completing the final spelling word she was writing on a portable blackboard. Wiping her sleeve across the dust and sweat of her face, she signaled to Consuelo, her assistant, and ducked out of the thatched shelter to cross a dirt courtyard to the cook shack at the back.

The large A-frame thatched shelter, the narrow wooden benches with their wriggling occupants, and the open courtyard with its low, adobe wall was another of Casa de Esperanza’s neighborhood outreach projects. This one offered elementary schooling to children whose
basurero
parents were willing to spare their labor for a few hours a day.  Vicki had little illusion that her patient reading and math tutelage were as big a draw as their daily reward of a nutritious noon meal, which was not far off according to the sun gleaming palely through the haze of smoke almost directly overhead.

Vicki filled an enamel cup from an enormous pottery jar that held boiled water, drank deeply, then splashed the remaining drops across her hot face before murmuring thanks to a plump, black-braided woman in indigenous dress patting out tortillas in front of the cook shack.

This was the third day Vicki had taken over the teaching responsibilities here, replacing a volunteer currently battling a bout of dengue fever. It was also exactly one week since she’d arrived at Casa de Esperanza. In that time she’d visited every one of its neighborhood projects, pored over financial statements, visited extensively with volunteers, and taken every opportunity she could to spend time with the children themselves. An excited Tía Vee-kee now greeted her every time she stepped through the gate of the children’s home.

Far from modifying her first impressions, Vicki remained thus far reluctantly impressed. The work was not easy, as Vicki was experiencing firsthand, but the volunteers seemed genuinely committed to their cause. And more importantly, to the children. Certainly they were not profiting personally. As to wasteful spending, Vicki was instead astounded at just how much these people were accomplishing with the very limited funds they had.

Maybe not all faith-based NGOs were as exemplary as this one. But unless some red flag was raised in the next few days it would take to write her report, Vicki saw little reason to postpone her seal of approval for a partnership between Children at Risk and Casa de Esperanza. And since Evelyn had informed Vicki at breakfast that she’d found a volunteer to fill in, there was nothing to keep Vicki from booking her flight to that long-earned vacation.

But not without seeing Holly.

Annoyed, Vicki strode back across the courtyard. An entire week and not so much as a message from Holly on her voice mail. The second day Vicki had even called the Wildlife Rescue Center’s Guatemala City headquarters. There were no land lines as far up into the mountains as the biosphere, but the local office maintained a radio-phone network. Yes, Holly was back up at WRC, an Australian soprano had informed Vicki. No, she didn’t know when Holly would be back in town. Yes, she’d pass a message on for Holly to contact Vicki.

And there Vicki had left it. She might have worried if she didn’t know her sister so well. Holly was going to show Vicki by doing on her own whatever it was she’d wanted Vicki to do. Vicki likely wouldn’t hear from Holly until she’d succeeded—or thrown in the towel.

One thing Vicki had taken time for was a visit to the American embassy in Zone 10. A Google search had brought up nothing on the deaths of Jeff and Victoria Craig, no real surprise since local news archives from twenty years past were not likely to have made it to the Internet.

So the previous afternoon after finishing with the children, Vicki had taken a cab down to the fortress she’d seen from the air.

The consular office open to the public was staffed in its totality with local hires rather than actual Americans, right down to the guards at the gates. But for a fee, a Guatemalan clerk had unhesitatingly looked up the appropriate Death Abroad file and printed Vicki a copy. To her disappointment, the report added little to what Evelyn had told her except that there had been multiple gunshot wounds involved, so it was definitely no accident. Assailants: unknown. Presumed motive: robbery. An addendum gave the only mention of Vicki and Holly. A note that since no family members had come forward, the Assistance to Distressed Citizens Abroad Fund had paid for a cremation and the return of two surviving minors to their point of origin.

Later that evening she’d shown the report to Evelyn. “I was just wondering . . . I guess this means Jeff—I mean, my birth father—never finished his Mayan book. So what happened to all the pictures he’d already taken when this happened?”

 “I have no idea. I have only the prints he gave me of his Casa de Esperanza pictures—he always developed his own.” Evelyn shook her head. “He was paranoid about his copyrights and losing his pictures. He didn’t want anyone getting hold of them before the book was finished. He couldn’t just send photos off to his publisher by computer like you can now, and he certainly wouldn’t have been foolish enough to drop them in the Guatemalan mail system. It’s gotten better, but back then if you wanted to send something stateside, you found someone traveling north and asked them to courier it for you. If Jeff did that, I have no idea who or where. He didn’t leave anything here.”

All in all, another closed door.

A side note was that Vicki had run into both of Holly’s male interests, as Vicki had cataloged them. The first had been the embassy staffer Holly had introduced as Michael Camden.

As the clerk was running off Vicki’s photocopy, Michael had walked past, then swung around immediately and walked back to Vicki. “You’re Holly’s friend from the airport the other day. Vicki, right?”

“Yes. And you’re . . . Michael? The defense attaché from the DAO.”

“Michael Camden. The defense attaché would be my boss. I’m simply a lowly attaché attached to the defense attaché’s office, if that isn’t too redundant.” For a lowly attaché, he certainly managed to project a persona of cool authority. He glanced from Vicki to the clerk behind the counter. “Is there any way I can be of assistance?”

“No, I’m just doing some research.” Vicki was not going to discuss her birth parents with a stranger before she’d even shared that information with her sister. “But thank you for asking,” she added with belated politeness.

Michael knit his dark eyebrows together. “Holly was going to set an appointment with my secretary to get together. I still haven’t heard from her. Do you know how I can get in touch with her?”

“No, I’d like to get ahold of her myself,” Vicki answered. “But she’s not in town right now anyway. As far as I know she’s up at the wildlife preserve where she works.”

“If you hear from her, let her know I’d still like to sit down with her.” With a courteous nod, he walked away.

Vicki’s second encounter was Joe, the WRC handyman and pilot. He’d been walking rapidly toward the high guarded gate of the embassy just as Vicki was flagging down a taxi to return to Casa de Esperanza. At first she didn’t recognize him. In his tucked-in, buttoned-up shirt and pants, his blonde mane slicked back and tamed, he looked more like a businessman than the surfer she’d met.

Vicki would have liked to ask him for news of Holly, but she was already in the taxi when she realized who he was. He’d glanced up just as the cab was pulling away. He raised a hand in greeting, the corner of his mouth sloping down in that derisive smile of his, before striding into the embassy.

Which brought Vicki back with annoyance to her sister.
Holly, I love you, but honestly!
If Holly was going to keep sulking much longer, it would serve her right if Vicki just booked that ticket home.

I’ll call the office and have them radio a message that I’m winding down here. Then it’ll be her call if she wants to see me before I leave.

Vicki checked her watch. Just enough time before lunch for her students’ favorite part of the morning studies—the Bible lesson that was an integral part of any Casa de Esperanza project. At the moment they were working their way through the Creation Story, and as Vicki had placed the colorful images of animals and plants and flowers on a flannel board, she wondered if these children had any concept that such a world even existed beyond the surreal landscape they woke up to each morning.

This is my Father’s world.

Vicki’s mouth twisted wryly. Not for these kids at least. Still, what would be the possibilities of some field trips? Maybe even a campout? That would be something to bring up with Evelyn before she left.

It was the vultures that detoured Vicki’s steps before she reached the thatched schoolroom. She paused to check that her students were still bent over their assignment, then quickly crossed the scuffed earth of the courtyard.

This project compound had been built right on the edge of the ravine that served as a municipal dump, offering an unrestricted vista of the landscape that greeted Vicki’s students every day—a wasteland of refuse as far as the eye could see.

Ignoring the streaks mud brick left on her T-shirt, Vicki leaned out over the low adobe wall. Tears burned her eyes as a sudden updraft caught her nostrils.

That stench was a combination of rotting garbage and fumes from the fires, some set purposely to diminish the trash hills, others the spontaneous combustion of methane gas generated by tons of decomposing compost. There’d been a time when Vicki had found it inconceivable that human beings spent their days toiling down in that reeking inferno, much less lived there.

Vicki could see cardboard and scrap wood shacks climbing the slopes of the ravine. Permanent paths wound through unsalvageable garbage and rusted car frames to the dirt tracks where rusting yellow trucks dumped fifteen hundred tons of trash each day. Riches to be fought over with the vultures and scrawny mongrels—and each other. Rakes hammered from foraged metal pulled apart fresh loads as fast they could be shoveled. Deft fingers shook off vegetable peelings to pick out glass, plastic, cardboard, cans, rags—anything that could be sold to the recycling merchants keeping a prudent distance beyond the top of the ravine.

Children were there too, those not fortunate enough to be squirming on the benches behind Vicki. Babies tied to their mothers’ bent backs or tucked for safety into an old tire or box. Older children picked through their parents’ rakings. Just down the slope from where Vicki stood, two boys struggled to roll an old tire up a muddy path. Farther down, a toddler screamed as a stray dog snatched away the half-eaten melon she’d unearthed.

Filthy, their scavenged garments tattered, rags binding hands and feet against the constant cuts and scrapes, hair matted and strawlike from malnutrition, these waifs were distinguished from the debris through which they foraged only by their movements.

But it was the vultures that drew Vicki’s intent gaze. They were always out there by the thousands, wheeling lazily above the mountains of garbage or perched hunch-shouldered on the smoking heaps.