One Grave Less (17 page)

“David set some search parameters for our team and fed them into the computer,” said Gregory. “Apparently, it found something.”

He flipped to another window and they both stared at the screen for several moments, then at each other.

“Well, Diane, my dear,” said Gregory, “apparently, Interpol has an alert posted for you on suspicion of murder.”

Darkness approached quickly in the jungle. There was still light above the canopy, but on the ground it was growing dim rapidly. Maria had been driving for hours. Her hands and arms were numb from holding on to the jerking, vibrating steering wheel as the truck climbed in and out of ruts and bounced over rock-strewn slopes and exposed roots of the giant rain-forest trees. Stinging sweat trickled down her dirt-streaked face and body. The road they were on, if it could be called a road, was overgrown with broad leaves of all shapes and shades of green that slapped the truck, reached though the open window and slapped her, and grabbed at the truck undercarriage. In other circumstances she would have loved the adventure. Now she was just plain scared.

Maria found a clearing of sorts and stopped the truck to assess their resources and clean up before light was completely gone. Standing in the back of the truck, she stripped down to bare skin to wash herself for the first time since the beginning of her captivity almost four days ago. She looked at her poor battered body covered with smudges of dirt, dark swollen bruises, scratches, and cuts.

I haven’t looked this bad since that time in the cave
, she thought to herself.
Of course, there was the time I was stabbed. And being buried alive was really bad
. She had made herself laugh.

She tore a piece of cloth the size of a bandanna from the bolt of fabric, soaked it in whiskey from one of the bottles in their cargo, and gave herself what had to be her most bizarre sponge bath ever. The whiskey burned like hell on her cuts and abrasions. She kept telling herself that alcohol was an antiseptic; it was killing bad things that were much worse than a little sting. Well, not such a
little
sting—actually, quite a large and painful sting.

Thinking of her raw throat and raspy voice, Maria unscrewed the cap from the bottle of whiskey, took a mouthful, swished it as hard and long as she could stand it, gargled with it, and spit it out. It was like gargling with liquid fire. Now she burned inside and out. But it should help her throat.

While Maria bathed, Rosetta took some of the fresh food from the cargo and made dinner. Maria kept an eye on her from the back of the truck as she took her whiskey bath, marveling at the little girl’s skills. Maria hadn’t wanted her to build a fire, but Rosetta said it was okay for a little while. Maria doubted it. They were traveling through a particularly crime-ridden section of the jungle. She feared who—and what—might be attracted by smoke from a fire. But she relented.

Rosetta had found a pot among the things in the truck, cooked a soup from the vegetables, and put out the fire with dirt. Smart girl—nutrition, no lingering smoke, no embers, no sign of a fire.

Maria put her clothes back on, wiping off as much dirt as would come off with a rag and whiskey. She smelled like a distillery, but it was better than what she had smelled like from her days in captivity. She pulled the traditional embroidered blouse that Rosetta had given her over her shirt. The skirt that Rosetta had sewn money up in, Maria folded and put in the bottom of the backpack. Life on this trip was too rough for bare legs. Dirty as her jeans were, she needed the protection and freedom they gave her. There wasn’t much Maria could do with her hair. She left it in the mud-covered dreadlocks it had formed itself into, but she did tie it back with a strip of clean fabric.

For herself, Rosetta had explained that she had bathed before she put her plan into effect. Maria suspected that Rosetta disapproved of using the whiskey to wash in instead of saving it to trade, but there was still plenty of it left to trade.

Sitting in the cab of the pickup, they ate the soup Rosetta had made with bread she had brought in her backpack. The food tasted pretty good. But Maria didn’t savor it. She hurried through the meal.

“Shouldn’t you sleep?” said Rosetta.

The little girl looked at her with suspicion, as if she was afraid the person she had chosen to take her to her mother might not be up to the task. Maria made an effort to relax. She was frightened. How much more scared would Rosetta, a child, be? Maria smiled and squeezed her little hand.

“I’ll sleep in a few hours. I want to get farther away from this area. We’re doing fine. You made a good plan—an amazing plan. We’ve come a long way and managed to collect supplies and weapons while escaping. I’ll get you home. I promise.”

Rosetta nodded and put her head down, taking small bites of bread. She looked up after a moment.

“You won’t leave me, will you?” she whispered.

Maria scooted next to her and put an arm around Rosetta’s shoulders, pulling her close.

“No, I won’t leave you. You have my promise.” She paused for several moments. “Your mother didn’t leave you, you know. Everyone in our profession heard the story of what happened to Diane Fallon. We all heard how she looked for you until she collapsed and had to be carried away. Everyone thought the same thing happened to you that happened to the others at the mission.”

“I knew she didn’t mean to leave me. They said she didn’t want me anymore. But I didn’t believe them.”

“When people say things like that, it eats at you, doesn’t it? That’s why mean people talk like that—to hurt you and make you sad. No, it wasn’t true. Your mother couldn’t work for a whole year after she lost you. She became very ill from her sorrow . . . but she is doing well now,” Maria said quickly, lest she give the little girl another worry. “She is going to be so happy to see you. I promise you that, too.”

They ate the rest of the meal in silence.When they finished, Maria washed out the pan and soup cups with the whiskey left in the bottle and they started on their way again.

The terrain gradually changed from the half-muddy soil that had worried Maria throughout the trip to a dryer, harder soil and less vegetation. They had left the intense flora that had encroached on them from all sides. The path they followed had a slight but steady incline. She expected it. According to the map, they should be approaching a higher elevation.

She checked the map before she started out again. As the crow flies, they were on the right track. But they weren’t flying. She would like to make it to a clearing so she could see the stars. She wanted to compare her compass reading with the Southern Cross star constellation to verify true south. Not that she didn’t trust the compass, but she trusted the stars more. She wasn’t lost, she didn’t think, but she wasn’t certain of her navigation—not while she was so scared.

Maria had driven about fifteen minutes when she spoke to Rosetta. “Ariel,” she said, using her real name.

“Rosetta. You have to remember. If anyone hears Ariel . . .” She let the sentence trail off.

“All right. Rosetta, you hinted that we can’t go to an embassy because someone from there was involved with the horrible things that happened at the mission. I know that remembering is painful for you. I haven’t pressed you about that, and I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t think it was important to our success in getting home. But I need you to tell me what happened.”

Rosetta didn’t say anything. Maria let the request hang out there for the little girl to think about. Several minutes passed before Rosetta began to talk. When she spoke, her voice was so low Maria had to strain to hear it over the noise of the truck.

“Mama was gone for a long time. She was doing her work. She had left me at the mission.”

Rosetta stopped talking and Maria wondered if she was going to continue. But she didn’t push.

“It seemed like she was gone a long time then,” she began again. “Maybe it was just two or three days. The day she left I got a bad feeling. I didn’t know what was going to happen, but in my mind it seemed like the bad stuff started then, the day she left. I was just a little kid then. I don’t remember everything.”

Maria smiled and patted her hand. “I know, sweetheart. Take your time.”

“It seemed like the grown-ups were in a bad mood. Maybe not all of them, but some were. I don’t remember who exactly. But that day I heard Father Joe arguing with one of the people Mama worked with but who always stayed at the mission. I didn’t understand what it was about and I don’t remember what they said.”

They ran over a hole and Rosetta cried out at the unexpected jarring. Maria bit the edge of her tongue.

“Sorry,” said Maria, “I didn’t see that.” It wasn’t the first hole they’d run over, but coming just as it had, it startled the two of them.

“The next day—I think—I was playing outside. I saw Father Joe in the garden. He was crying. It scared me.”

“Was he hurt?” prompted Maria.

“No, he was sad. I asked him if I could bring him a drink of water. He just cried. I asked him what was wrong. He said he did an unforgivable sin. But he had told us that no sin is unforgivable if we confess and repent. I told him that.”

“What did he say?” asked Maria.

“He said he’d thought that was true, but it wasn’t. He said he couldn’t be forgiven. When I asked him what he did, he just cried and told me to go inside. Two days later it happened. I know, because Mama gave me a calendar to mark off the days she was gone. I was scared when I saw Father Joe crying so I went to my room to see how many days before she would be back. It was three more days.”

Rosetta was quiet for a long while.

It was darker than Maria meant it to be before she stopped. Just a little farther, she thought. She realized she couldn’t see the road ahead more than a few feet. The headlights had become weak . . . and then dimmed to nothing. She stopped as blackness surrounded them.

“What happened?” asked Rosetta.

“I’m not sure,” said Maria. “For some reason we lost our headlights.”

She tried turning them off and back on. They illuminated briefly and dimmed out again. Maria hadn’t wanted to stop for the night under the trees. She was hoping for any kind of clearing. She reached for a flashlight, rolled down the window and let the narrow beam of the light guide her. She drove at a slow pace, looking for a place to stop for the night, shining the light to the side and back in front of them.

After a while she lost any semblance of a trail and simply drove through the brush until her light vanished into what looked like a break in the flora ahead. She drove toward it. Through a copse of trees the jungle opened up into a clearing. Maria drove the truck into it and stopped.

“Stay here. I’m going to look around,” she said.

She put the truck in park, leaving it idling. She shined the light on the ground beside the door to make sure she was not stepping into something she would regret. The surface of the ground was blackened and covered in a dark stubble of twigs, stumps, and twisted remnants of vegetation.

“It looks like there’s been a big fire,” she said as she got out.

She shined the light into the darkness. It was a poor flashlight. The beam didn’t extend far. But it did shine far enough into the burned area to show a large mound of dirt and piled-up twigs and limbs ahead of them. Maria looked for a path to drive around or over the rubble. She fixed a route in her mind and got back in the truck. Proceeding cautiously in the pitch black, she managed to get the lurching truck to a spot on the other side of the mound. Here they would be hidden from anyone coming from the direction they had come. She parked and reluctantly turned off the engine, wondering if it would restart in the morning or if the battery would be gone. She knew so little about cars. She hoped that, like her, all it needed was rest.

Maria turned off the flashlight and was shocked at how dark it was without even a glow from the dash lights.

“Okay,” she said as brightly as she could, “we’re camping here for the night.”

“It’s really dark,” said Rosetta.

“It is. Are you afraid of the dark?” asked Maria.

“No . . . it’s just that it’s
really dark
,” the little girl repeated.

“It’s good to see the stars,” Maria said, looking through the windshield at the star field.

Rosetta followed her gaze. “I wish they could be brighter,” she said.

“Do you need to use the bathroom before we turn in?” asked Maria, grabbing the flashlight on the seat.

“I don’t want to go out there in the dark,” Rosetta said.

“No need to go far. We’ll both go.”

Maria opened her door and got out. With the motor off, the jungle sounds were loud. She hadn’t really heard it so much when they stopped earlier. With the truck noise always rumbling, not much of the jungle sound had penetrated her consciousness. But now she could hear cries of night birds and the shrieks and growls of other animals she couldn’t identify. Some of them sounded beautiful. Others sounded very frightening. She was glad she had found such a large clearing. She felt safer out of the forest.

She examined the ground as she walked around to the passenger side to get Rosetta. There was a lot of burned stubble, with bare soil in a few places.

“This is a fine place to camp,” she said, lifting the little girl from the truck.

Maria led them only a few feet into the darkness. She’d brought torn squares of the fabric with her and handed one to Rosetta. After the two of them took care of business, Maria took Rosetta’s hand and led her back toward the truck.

“Look up at the sky,” Maria said. “See that pathway of stars? That’s the Milky Way. That’s the galaxy we are in.”

“Mama told me that,” said Rosetta.

Maria smiled in the darkness. “Did she tell you about the Southern Cross?” she asked.