Esperanza (42 page)

“I think I do. Ian lived in 1968, died, ended up in Esperanza in 2008, and . . . and . . .”
And then he vanished mysteriously in April 1968 and now his son is sixty-one years old.

“Wow,” Maddie breathed. “This is so unbelievably awesome.”

“Awesome?”
Lauren balked. “This is confusing. Even if you both make it back, Tess, how will you end up being together if you’re from different times?”

Tess felt small, miserable, uncertain. “I don’t know.”

“Uh, Charlie’s assuring me there’s a way.”

A breath of cool air brushed the back of Tess’s neck, goose bumps sped up her arms.
The three of you need to be gone by tomorrow, Slim.

“Charlie just left,” Mira announced.

Lock me up.
Her dad had just
left,
Mira said, but he actually had left ten years ago, left her mother in the lurch—single mom, one daughter in law school, the other not doing well financially. Her dad’s death had reduced them to statistics. But now she was supposed to believe it had happened for a reason.

Fuck this.

“Give me a call in the next day or so,” Mira said. “Let me know what you decide, Tess. If I pick up anything else, I’ll call you.”

They exchanged cell numbers and e-mail addresses, and a few minutes later, the three of them went into the café. They claimed a table, and once they were seated, Lauren spoke in a soft, conspiratorial tone. “Reality check. What we’ve just heard is so far out there that we need to reach a consensus here. Are we nuts? Is Mira a wacko? Was Charlie really talking to Mira? Did Tess see Charlie? Hello, I’m losing it here.”

“My vote,” Maddie said, “is that we move forward according to the information she gave us.”

“Tess?” Lauren looked at her.

“I’m not sure what I want to do.”

“Wait a minute.” Maddie’s face turned to stone. “You’d actually stay
here,
Tesso? And do what? Resume your work as a field agent with a partner who’s possessed? Hope that whatever weirdness seized Dan will get bored and move on? What kind of solution is that?”

“I need a café con leche,” Tess said.

“This isn’t a Cuban bakery,” Lauren pointed out. “I’ll get us cappuccinos. Then I need to check three banks before five this afternoon.”

“I’m hungry,” Maddie said.

They both got up and left Tess alone at the table. She quickly went online. There were two e-mails from Luke.

Wow. I am so sorry I was such a presumptuous shit. So many of Dad’s predictions came true thru the years, beginning with King’s assassination, then RFK’s, then Nixon & Watergate & everything else. The Internet, Yahoo, cell phones etc. He seemed to have incredible recall of what he’d experienced while in a coma, but admitted that his time in a mental facility had wiped some memories clean. He knew, for instance, that he wasn’t remembering some vital detail about Nomad. He couldn’t recall yr line of work. That made it tough for me to find u
the several times I tried to track u down. Yr phone # was never listed. I figured you’d left the Miami area.

Yes, the
brujos
did try to attack him—and couldn’t get near him. But one of them took my mother—an experience from which she never really recovered. The
brujo
used her until Dad fled to San Francisco to search for Sara Wells, a cultural anthropologist who went to E in 1969. I think he needed her as a validation. He also seemed to return from the dead with the ability to see the dead.

The last time I heard from him, he was @ the ExPat Inn, Otavalo. I told him I would be there in a few days, but when I arrived, he was gone. I spent months traveling around Ecuador, looking for him, but never saw him again.

Just in case you’re going thru the same kinds of doubts he did, I’m sending an attachment that should put your doubts to rest. Start yr search in Otavalo, Tess. Kim Eckart used to be the ExPat owner. My contact info is at the end of this e. Please stay in touch & and when u find Dad, ask him to call. He’ll be thrilled to know he has a 31-year-old granddaughter!

Best,
Luke

Tess eagerly clicked the attachment. The first image was of credit card receipts dated April 6, 1968, and appeared to be for ads Ian had taken out in three South Florida newspapers. The second image was a photo of the man she remembered—the same warm smile, those eyes like dark pools, a beard sprinkled with gray. Not exactly a dead ringer for Clooney, but close enough so when she’d seen Clooney’s face on the cover of the DVD for
Michael Clayton,
it had resonated. The third attachment was from the personal ads of the
Miami Herald,
dated April 8, 1968. In the middle of the page, in large, bold letters, was an ad that read:

Slim, it’s real. Am leaving 4/8/1968, Frisco-Quito. Love, Ian Ritter from Minneapolis

Tess pressed her fists against her eyes.

Dominica refused to release him. If she couldn’t get onto Tango Key in Dan Hernandez’s body, then she would use his body to force Tess, her mother, and niece off the island.

She spoke to him through his limbic brain, associated with pleasure, sexual arousal, rage, a hunger for revenge. Atavistic urges, that was her understanding. It seemed to work. Dan Hernandez drove much too fast to Tess’s mother’s house.

It was early evening when he pulled into an empty lot half a mile from Lauren Livingston’s place. He retrieved his bike from the rack on the back of the car and pedaled through long, narrow shadows, a man on a mission. He rode into the deserted cul-de-sac, then into an overgrown field, and dismounted. Gun. Cell. His needs were simple. He took his time, walking up the road, enjoying the smells of early summer in the Keys. Night-blooming jasmine, the ocean, the day’s warmth trapped in the asphalt. He felt happier as the day surrendered to twilight. He was less visible now.

The half-dozen snowbirds who lived on this street had departed after Easter and the other residents wouldn’t pay any attention to a guy out for his evening constitutional. No one would remember him. She kept working on his limbic brain, stoking the fires, conjuring images of how he had been used by Tess, victimized, wronged.
Revenge, revenge
became his mantra.

Before he crossed the street, he picked up a large branch, tore off the leaves, swung it through the air. He wasn’t sure yet how it would serve him, but sensed he might need it.
For what?
his conscience asked. He didn’t know yet, but the question caused him to hesitate. Dominica felt his sudden uncertainty, the doubts that seeped through him. He looked at the house on the other side of the road, down at the branch he clutched. “What the . . . ?”

Dominica quickly ramped up her own efforts—
revenge, revenge
—and his anger roared back. “Goddamn bitch.” He trotted across the street.

At the top of the steps, he set the branch against the wall, unlocked the door, took one last furtive glance around, and slipped inside. Dan went directly into the kitchen, turned on the gas oven and the four burners, just as she had tried to do. She urged him to open the cabinet doors under the
sink, to remove rags and two cans of lighter fluid. But he knew what to do now and didn’t need prompting from her.

Dan twisted off the top of one can and backed into the living room, saturating the couches, chairs, throw rugs. He moved through the bedrooms, bathrooms, utility room, squirted the lighter fluid on bed, clothes and shoes, towels and bath mats. When he’d emptied the first can, he opened the second and went through the rooms again. He made a deliberate trail of fluid to the front door, stepped out on the porch, and wrapped rags around the end of the stick. He soaked the fabric, held a lit match to it.

The rags burst into flames and Dan hurled the burning branch into the house, certain it would ignite the gas escaping from the stove. He slammed the door and made it down the stairs and out of the cul-de-sac before two convulsive explosions lit up the dusky sky, catapulting burning debris that cast the street and houses in an eerie orange light. He didn’t hesitate, didn’t stop. He hopped on his bike and pedaled madly for the lot where he’d left his car, threw himself inside, and took off. The distant squeal of sirens sent his blood pressure soaring, he drove like a madman.

Eighty-nine minutes to his parents’ place in Little Havana. Some sort of festivity was going on—an engagement party, families and friends, couples and singles, coworkers and bosses, barbecue grills set up behind the house, people stoned, drunk, gone. No one would remember when he arrived.

When the first reports about the fire began coming in on his BlackBerry, anxiety gripped him. Dominica adjusted the dopamine levels in his brain. As he calmed down, she convinced him to find a spare bed and take a nap. He was wonderfully suggestible and collapsed on a couch in one of the back rooms, an office.

Once he was asleep, Dominica went to work on him, reinforcing his conviction that Tess’s near-death experience had snapped her mind, she was desperately in need of psychiatric help, that her breakdown had caused her to kill two men and gravely injure a third man. Self-defense had nothing to do with it. Dominica planted the suggestion that Tess was a flight risk who would attempt to leave the country for Ecuador, searching for the place she claimed she had visited when she was in a coma. Armed and dangerous, that was Tess. A modern-day Bonnie without her Clyde.

Dominica blocked any memory he had of destroying Lauren Livingston’s house. This last part was possible only because she had been inside of him when he’d done it and knew exactly which parts of his brain to manipulate. Then she waited for him to awaken.

When Tess’s cell rang at eleven that evening, she, her mother, and Maddie were tallying their totals for the money Lauren had removed from Charlie Livingston’s safe-deposit box. She was surprised to see Mira’s name and number in her cell’s ID window.

“Hey, Mira,” Tess said.

“Are you alone?”

“No.”

“Pretend your reception isn’t good and come outside.”

“You’re breaking up, Mira. Let me step outside.”

Lauren and Maddie continued running their tallies and Tess quickly stepped out into the breezy darkness of the motel parking lot. The scent of ocean here was much stronger than it ever was in the Upper Keys, as if Tango were its own continent, with its own rules and parameters. It reminded her that nothing in the world she occupied now was what it appeared to be.

“Okay, I’m outside,” Tess said. “What’s up?”

“I’m in the VW on the other side of the lot. Flashing my headlights.”

Tess trotted over to the VW and slipped inside. Mira had changed clothes—jeans, sandals, a black tank top. She looked tense. “Sorry to be so cloak-and-dagger, Tess. But I wanted to speak to you separately from your mom and Maddie.”

“They’re counting the money Mom removed from that safe-deposit box. That was a definite hit, Mira.”

“Not my hit. I just repeat what the ghosties are saying. I hope it’s substantial. You’re going to need it.”

Tess didn’t like the sound of that.

“I don’t know if Maddie told you, but the man I live with—Shep—is an FBI agent. A little while ago, he got a call from an Agent Hernandez, requesting that he bring you in to the Miami office for questioning in the deaths of two men and an assault on a third man. And Hernandez apparently called the Tango County cops to find you and turn you over to Shep. The only reason you haven’t been picked up is because the local boys don’t know where you are.” She paused. “My instincts tell me that the thing inside Dan is making him do this. That’s why I’m here.”

Mira seemed to be waiting for her to offer her version of events. But there wasn’t any
version,
just the truth. All her life, she had been like this. Black or white, good or bad, right or wrong. Tess’s world consisted of contrasts, opposites, absolutes. Nuances were rare. It was why she’d been attracted to law
enforcement rather than to the practice of law. Too many nuances in the law, hardly any in law enforcement. It probably explained why most of her relationships had ended up in the recycling heap.

“Look, I shot both men in self-defense. One of them trashed my mom’s place, the other one tried to kill me, and the third one has shattered kneecaps. I killed one of these
brujos,
but I don’t have a clue how that can even be possible because my understanding of
brujos
is that they’re already dead. I don’t know what else to say.”