Island of Bones (14 page)

Louis looked up from his notebook, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “When did she go missing?”

“Actually, she ran away. Sometimes I give the kids a break and don’t
report them right away. DCF slaps them down pretty hard when they take off on their fosters. They do it a couple of times and DCF pulls them out and sends them to detention.”

“Did you give Mary a break that night?”

Julie sighed. “She was so emotionally draining, it was ruining the family.”

Louis waited for her to continue. She let out a breath, almost as if she
were embarrassed to say anything more.

“Okay, yes, the minute I discovered her gone, I was on the phone. Sometimes you can do only so much for these kids.”

Louis heard a dog bark and looked to the house. He could see a huge golden retriever pushing at the screen door.

“
Ruffus! Stop that!” Julie shouted.

“So Mary was a lost cause?” Louis asked.

Julie was looking at the dog. It was going nuts, jumping up, yelping. “Damn it, Ruffus!” Julie yelled. “Gene! Gene, come get the damn dog!”

“Mrs. Plummer
—-”

Julie’s face snapped back. “What?”

“Mary Rubio...you considered her a lost cause?”

Julie swept back her hair. “In my book, yes. This job is hard enough, what with all the problems these kids have. Having a Mary Rubio in a house full of these kinds of kids only complicates the situation.”

The dog was still barking. “Look, I’ve got to go,” Julie said. “We’re getting ready to go to Disney World.” She started toward the house. “Gene! Come get your dog!”

“Mrs. Plummer?” Louis called out.

She stopped halfway to the house and looked back impatiently. “What?”

“Did you ever hear from Mary again?”

Julie shook her head. “I would be the last person she would contact. She knew she wasn’t part of our family and never would be.”

Louis walked back to the Mustang and got in. He was about to start the engine when the front door of the house opened. A pack of kids came out, ranging
in age from about five to fourteen. Louis knew they were all foster children, and it wasn’t just because they didn’t resemble Julie Plummer. They had a look about them, a darkness in their eyes and an odd tentativeness to their steps that didn’t match their brightly colored summer clothing or the shine of their freshly scrubbed faces.

These kinds of kids...

He put both hands on the wheel, watching Julie herd them into the RV.

Foster homes. He’d had five in less than two years.

Summer, 1967. A house on Strathmoor in Detroit. One of those big red brick places with one apartment upstairs and one down. The man had been called Moe, but all Louis could remember clearly was a house littered with Pabst beer bottles, dirty clothes, and hungry children. He could remember, too, the closet. And an old black leather belt, marked with the flesh of children.

Louis closed his eyes.

Then came one hot day when Moe loaded them all into the station wagon and announced they were going on a trip.

What's the matter with you, Louis? You don’t want to go to Whitmore Lake?

I want to go home.

You ain’t got a home no more.

I want my mama.

Well, your mama didn’t want you. Now get your sorry black ass in that car or I’ll lock you back in the closet and leave you here alone again.

Louis opened his eyes, started the Mustang and drove off, watching the pack of kids in the rearview mirror.

Louis slowed the Mustang for a traffic light and reached down to flip open the Angela Lopez file on the seat. Like the others, it was pathetically incomplete.

Her last address had been listed as Building D, Farm Workers Village. He passed through Immokalee and continued south on 29, finally spotting the sign for the village.

It was nothing more than a stark gathering of white cinder block buildings baking in the sun. Brown-skinned children played in the yards, their feet and legs covered in dust. Thin curtains floated from open windows, and a red, green and white Mexican flag hung from a railing, the only splash of color against a plain white canvas.

He stopped the car and got out, taking Angela’s file with him. A Hispanic woman hanging T-shirts on a sagging clothesline turned to look at him.

He took off his sunglasses and smiled, but the woman’s face only grew harder.

“
Good afternoon. Do you speak English?” he asked.

The woman shook her head and mumbled something, turning back to her laundry. He slipped the picture of Angela Lopez from the folder and held it out to her.

She glanced at it. “
Vete
,” she muttered and turned her back.

Louis looked around. A small pack of children had gathered around his Mustang.
The top was down and the kids were running their hands over the blue vinyl seats. A young woman was pushing a crying baby in a rusty stroller across the asphalt street. She passed an old man sitting on an overturned plastic bucket under a leafless frangipani tree. Louis could see that the man’s eyes were focused on him.

He started toward the man. The man watc
hed him approach, his cigarette dangling loosely in his short fingers.

“Do you speak English?” Louis asked.

The man nodded slowly.

Louis held out Angela’s picture. “Do you know this girl?”

The man looked at it for a long time then pointed across the street to a red and white cinder block building with a tin awning. “There.”

Louis crossed the road, pausing outside the store.
The hand-painted letters outside the store read JUAN’S PLACE and under that, CAMBIAMOS CHEQUES.

Louis pulled open the flimsy screen door and walked in,
taking off his sunglasses. A ceiling fan turned slowly above, stirring the heavy air that smelled of frying food and spices.

A Hispanic man sitting at a table looked up at him. A woman came out from behind the counter, wiping her hands on a towel.

“You lost?” the man asked.

Louis shook his head. “I’m trying to find out about this
girl,” he said, holding out the photo.

Neither the man nor woman said a word.
The man was gripping a can of Tecate beer. He raised it slowly and took a drink.

“She’s been missing for almost four years,” Louis said
. “Her name is Angela Lopez.”

Louis
saw something pass over the woman’s face, something buried and painful that she was trying hard not to let surface. She turned away.

The old man said something to her in soft Spanish
. The only thing Louis could make out was the name “Rosa.” With a glance back at Louis, she disappeared into a room in the back. The man looked back at Louis.

“Why are you here? Why do the cops come now?” he asked.

“I’m not a cop.”

“No difference,” the man said. “Angela has been gone three years. No one cares now. Go away.”

When Louis didn’t move, he waved his hand. “Go. No one here wants to talk to you. Go.
Vete
!”

Damn it.

Louis put Angela’s picture back in the folder
. He hated dead ends. He hated it when people wouldn’t talk to him. He hated having to go back to Fort Myers with no new information.

Landeta’s voice was there in his ear.
Come on, Rocky, you can do better.

Louis pushed open the door and walked back out into the hot sun. The kids at the Mustang scattered when they saw him coming. He reached in and grabbed the files on the other girls
and went back into the store.

The woman was back behind the counter and glanced up at him
. She said something softly in Spanish to the man, who silenced her with a raised hand.

“Why are you back?” the man asked
Louis.

“Whoever took Angela took other girls,” Louis said. He went to the table and laid Cindy Shattuck’s photo in front of the man.

“This girl disappeared in 1964,” Louis said.

He set Paula’s and Mary’s
photographs down. “These girls disappeared in 1965 and 1973.”

Then he set down Angela’s picture. “Angela Lopez
, disappeared 1984.”

The man’s eyes went from the pictures up to Louis’s face. “Why are you doing this?” he asked.

“Because you need to know that Angela is not the only one.”

The man’s black eyes rose to Louis’s face. “
She is dead,” he said.

“Probably,” Louis said. “But we haven’t found her. We haven’t found any of these girls, except one.”

“Which one?” the man asked.

Louis looked down at the last photo in his hand. It was a facial shot of Shelly Umber taken at her autopsy.

“This one. They found her in Pine Island Sound a few weeks ago. She’s probably victim number six.”

The man took a drink
of his beer then spoke quietly. “Angela worked in the fields with her father. But sometimes she worked here to make extra money,” he said. “She left early one day in July.”

The woman was watching, silent.

“Why?” Louis asked.

“She met a boy.”

“From this area? From Immokalee?”

“Fort Myers,” the man said, pulling Angela’s picture toward him. “She told us he was going to take her to lunch in the city.”

Louis was thinking about Emma Fielding, the missing woman from 1953. Frank would have been young and handsome enough to lure her to her death. But by 1984, he was in his mid-fifties. No way he could have been mistaken for a boy.

“Angela called him a boy, not a man?” Louis asked.

“Yes, a boy. That is what she said.”

“Did she tell you his name?”

The man shook his head “I do not remember, but I know it was a good Hispanic name.”

Hispanic?

“Did she describe him to you?” Louis asked. “Tell you anything about him?”

The man shook his head “I think she call him
...”

He looked at his wife
and asked her something in Spanish.

The woman hesitated
. “
Papi chulo,
" she whispered.

She called him
papi chulo
,” the man said.

“What does that mean?” Louis asked.

“It is something young people say. It means he was handsome, a hunk you would say.”

He took a drink from his beer. His face was hard when he put down the can.

Louis looked at the woman. Her expression had changed too. Now she looked sad, not so much like she was remembering what Angela said but what any woman could remember feeling about any young man. She disappeared into the back.

Louis gathered up his photos, stacking the papers and folders.
“The file says her father reported her missing,” he said. “Do you know where I can find him?”

“I heard he died last year in Texas
,” the man said. “Angela had no one else.”

Louis closed the folder and stuck out a hand. “Thanks for your time.”

The man wiped his palm on his jeans then shook Louis’s hand.

Louis went out, pausing in the hot sun, watching the kids playing around his Mustang. He was surprised when the woman came out to stand next to him.

“Can I see the picture?” she asked softly.

Louis pulled it out of the file and handed it to her. The woman’s face seemed to slowly cave in on itself. She brushed at her eyes.

“She did not like to be called Angela,” she said. “I did not call her that.”

“What did you call her?” Louis asked.

“Angel.”

She
was quiet for a long time, staring at the picture. “When Angela became fifteen, she started working with her father in the fields,” the woman said. “The same age I was when I started.”

She looked toward the children playing around the Mustang. “It is hard work,” she said. “
You wake before the sun is red and you walk the three miles to the bus so you can be chosen to work. In the fields, you run and grab a bucket and start picking. You pick as fast as you can so you can eat.”

The woman brushed a hand over her hair. “You fill your bucket
with tomatoes and the man gives you a ticket. You put it into your pants because it is precious, worth forty cents. When the sun goes down, you take your tickets to the house and you get your money. Then you get back on the bus and walk home. You take a cold shower because the hot water is all gone by now. At eleven, you eat then go to bed. The sun comes up again the next day and you do it again.”

The children were beeping the Mustang’s horn. Louis let it go.

“I was lucky to marry a good man,” the woman said. “I didn’t have to work in the fields long. I hoped Angel would be lucky, too.”

“You were close to her?” Louis asked.

She looked up at him, then down at the picture in her hand. “She was like my daughter. We used to talk at night when the store was quiet,” she said. “Angel say she would get away from here someday, that she would never have her children here.”

The woman paused. “I told her that she should go and never come back, not even to see me.
I want to believe that is what she did.”

Louis couldn’t think of anything to say so he nodded.

“Thank you for your help, Rosa,” he said.

She hesitated
then held out the photograph. It was just a copy, not even a good one.

“You can keep it,” he said.

She smiled.

“If I find out anything
about Angela —-”

Rosa shook her head. “No,” she said softly, clutching the picture. “Don’t come back here.
If you come back it will be to tell me she is dead. Don’t come back, please.”