When I Knew You (16 page)

She was right. It was impossible to miss her. She had bleached-blonde hair puffed up in the back, and wore a purple suit with black buttons the size of ping pong balls. Her heels were so high my toes hurt watching her walk. She scanned the place with charcoaled blue eyes, pausing on me for a moment. She gave the barest nod, and walked over to the counter to place her order, and joined me at the table with a tall cup and a fat straw.

"I should never ever come here," she said as she sat down across from me. "Because if I walk in, I'm having a shake. Period. It's a requirement." She took a long pull from the straw, closing her eyes, savoring it.

"They're pretty good," I said, sipping my tea.
 

Willie Alacon was probably in her forties, and based on her outfit, must work in an office somewhere. Or maybe a high-end bordello. Tough to believe she could do detective work in those heels.

"These shakes are deadly." She loosened a button and sighed. "I lost 30 pounds when I stopped coming here." She closed her eyes in what I guessed was deep shake appreciation. "You know what? It wasn't worth it. I should have kept wearing sweat pants instead." She put the cup down and looked directly at me, narrowing her eyes into a squint. "You look a lot like her, you know. Your mom."

I was taken aback for a second. The comment hit too close, or maybe I was too raw to hear it. "I appreciate you meeting me, Ms. Alacon."

"Willie. Call me Willie," she said. "So, tell me why you called."

I swallowed. "I need your help to find Antonia. She left me your card and a note." I pushed both toward her.

Willie's eyes narrowed. "Wait. What are you talking about?"
 

"Antonia. She's missing," I said.

"Hang on." She glanced at the note, then up at me. "Girlfriend, I thought you were calling about the body."

I felt my blood run cold. "Body?"

"The body found at Trent Bonita's place."

"The man running for governor?"

Willie nodded, scrunching her nose as if she'd caught a whiff of something rotten. "Bonita accidentally dug it up during—get this — a photo opp. That lame governor wanna be, pretending to be working the land like a ranch hand. I guarantee you, that guy never handled a shovel in his life unless the maid was handing it to him in his sandbox."
 

She took the card and note from me, an unruly slip of blond hair falling in her face. She brushed it away briskly, shoving it behind her ear. It slipped right back out.
 

"Yeah. The card is mine." She read through the note quickly. "So, something about DNA, Detective Mora, and Texarkana. The note is definitely from my Dad. I recognize his writing and he always signed with just W."

"Your dad?"

"William Alacon. He was a private eye for thirty years. I'm Willie Junior."

"Really?" She looked about as much like a Willie as I looked like a sumo wrestler.

"He always had a quirky sense of humor." She chuckled.
 

"Yes. So you are a... " I searched for the word.

Willie provided it. "A private dick?" She laughed. "Actually I am. I know it doesn't look like it in this getup, but I have an undercover gig right now in a department store. They think the manager is selling handbags on the black market." Willie waved her hand dismissively. "Got a free manicure out of the deal on top of my fee. I'm milking it for another week before I bust him. There's an employee discount and the big sale is on Tuesday."

"Good plan." I turned the large tea in my hands, trying to focus. "Antonia, my mother, she didn't trust many people. I thought maybe since I had the card that you were someone she did."

Willie took a sip on the straw before she spoke. "I know she trusted my dad."

"So you're familiar with what they were working on?" I asked.

"A little," she said. "Your mom reached out to Dad twelve years ago because of a case he'd taken on in the early '60s. Some sort of missing person case." Willie took another drink from her shake. "He must have given her my card back a dozen years ago. It was right around when he was getting ready to retire. That's when they were working on the case. Guess he had more faith in me than I realized." She bit her lip in thought, smiling a little. "Anyway about a month ago he got a call from her."

"From Antonia?" I asked.
 

Willie nodded. "Yup. They talked, she had to have been pretty intense. He called me that day, told me a little about the case." She looks around the dining area, then lowered her voice. "He thought his missing person case might be connected to the body Bonita found."
 

"Did he tell that to Antonia?" I asked, lowering my voice too, although I doubted the toddler was much of a danger.

"He must have. The body was found about a month ago." She tapped the table in thought. Her brow furrowed. "And now you say your mother is missing?" She shook her head. "If this is related to the Bonita family, you need to be careful who you talk to in this town. Half of the politicos in the county owe Javier Bonita their jobs. He probably has at least one of the balls of every elected official in the county in a jar in his office." She pushed away her shake and pulled out a small tan notebook and pen. "Tell me what happened. Are you sure your mother isn't just lost?"
 

"Not a chance." I filled her in on our meeting at the University without going into detail about why we were there.

"And she's back to the no memory thing, right?" Willie asked.

"Right," I said, fighting to keep my voice from cracking.

"And you haven't called the cops?"
 

I hesitated. "I haven't. My grandmother might have. I don't know."

"Got it." She reached into a black purse and pulled out a notebook. "I'm guessing you already have a suspect?"

Elijah's face came unbidden in my mind, his mask slipping at the fire, his black eyes as dead as a shark. "Absolutely."

I pulled out the photo I'd printed from the University library off my Facebook page. It was a picture of me and Eliah at Gruene Hall with a group of people from the insurance company he worked with back then. Pilar was in the picture, along with Mike. Eliah towered over the group like a misplaced redwood in a stand of crepe myrtle trees. I handed the photo to her.
 

"His name is Eliah. Eliah Trevino." I thought back to the credit union earlier that morning, the CEO checking the screen for information. "When I met him, he sold insurance. But I'm pretty sure that's not what he really does. He's been following me since I left San Antonio."

"You think this is connected to what your mom was working on before?" Willie asked.

My head pounded. What did I know about any of it? "I think it has to be," I said miserably, sagging against the hard back of the wooden chair.

"Okay." She tucked the photo into her purse. "I'll make some calls. I've got a friend inside the department, a real straight arrow. But I have to be honest with you, girlfriend. If this Eliah did take your mom, he probably did it to get to you. Especially if Momma Perez doesn't have her memory these days. He'll keep her until he thinks you're good and scared and will give him anything he wants."

"I'd say I'm there," I said, working hard to control my breathing, trying to stave off full blown panic.

She patted my hand. "Everybody thinks that." She glanced at her watch. "I have to get back. I'll make my calls on the drive, Kati, in the meantime, take a look at this." She reached back into her bag and pulled out a file folder. It had a crease as if it had been shoved in a spot that was too small for it. She straightened the edges, then pushed it toward me.
 

"This is what I
thought
we were going to talk about. I've been carrying it around for a week. A few years back Dad's storage unit got broken into. Several files from particular years were taken, but this one was left behind. It was misfiled. It's about that old case he worked on with Antonia. After your mom called, he told me where to look for it. Dad said it was his tell-tale heart case." She scoffed, her lips curling into a smirk. "Turns out he misfiled it on purpose. He was a marine, he'd never put something in the wrong spot by accident."

"Tell-tale heart?"

"Yeah. Like Poe. You know, that guy who went crazy because he imagined a beating heart under the floorboards that wouldn't go away. I'd bet it's connected to that body from the Bonita ranch. That disaster was right around the time your mom came out of it for a while, right?"

My throat went dry and I felt light headed. "Right."

"Hmm. Your grandmother must be going nuts." She rose to her feet, took one last pull on her shake and unfastened another button on her jacket. "I'll call you the minute I have news."

I pulled out of the parking lot and headed downtown. There was only one place I felt like I could go to try to get a quiet space to lay this all out.
 

I thought of calling Abuela but decided to wait. Something about her reaction up until now bothered me, and I hadn't had time to think about it until I talked with Willie.

Why was she so comfortable with Eliah? Something about the way she looked at him, as if they'd met before as if she knew what was behind the mask that had fooled me for so long. It was unnerving. Something was very, very wrong.
 

I walked toward the portico built from rocks dug out of the mountain. Orange figures, inspired by the drawings in Hueco Tanks pictographs, made a trail along the concrete ceiling at the entrance. Built to make the best use of shade and sun, the library had an air of wisdom of ancient people who understood what it was to live in the desert, to stay cool in the heat, to pull life from the ground along the river snaking between the mountains.

I pressed down on the anxiety in my stomach. If Willie was right, if Eliah did call me, then I'd need to have this figured out. I'd need to understand what Antonia had nearly uncovered before her accident twelve years ago. Could it really have something to do with Trent Bonita?

I had to hold it together so I could think. So I could have something to bargain with to convince Eliah to let Antonia go. I clenched my fists to stop my hands from shaking.

It wasn't very effective.

As I sat down at the computer and began typing, I felt my old annoyance rise. This, I thought, is why I couldn't wait to graduate. I hated the long hours staring at a computer screen, the low constant buzz of a hard drive, the eerie blue glow that seemed to drain the life out of everyone around me. Give me a guy screaming his head off at the top of a ropes course telephone pole any day. But no leaping off poles with giant ropes was going to help me figure this out.
 

I typed in the search terms, looking for news articles about the body Trent Bonita dug up. Sure enough, it had been headline news nearly a month ago. It was that weekend I'd been in the retreat with the non-profit group. I always lost track of the news during retreats.

The photos showed Trent Bonita at the controls of a huge yellow track hoe, digging out a foundation for a new barn. One pundit quipped the bar was to store all the manure that would be tossed around in the campaign. But the photo opp went terribly wrong. According to the news stories he had emptied his ceremonial giant shovel of dirt, several hundred pounds worth pouring out of the clawed bucket of a gleaming yellow track hoe when a pile of bones tumbled out.
 

One video showed Trent's face had gone ashen and he nearly fell out of the cab as stopped the monstrous machine. His father, Javier Bonita, who was remarkably spry for an old man, made a rare appearance right then. He'd jumped out of a white ranch truck that had been parked off on one side and rushed to his son, the elder man's face filled with fury. He waved angrily at the cameras, trying to send them away. They, of course, zoomed in on the pair.

Since then, the entire project was called off while forensic teams rushed in. The speculation was all over the map from this being an ancient Native American burial ground to the body of an undocumented worker who his father, Javier Bonita, the notorious hard-nosed NRA poster boy, had killed for trespassing.

 
I spent the better part of an hour downloading a dozen articles including some background pieces on the Bonita family. I was about to log off when I hesitated, thinking of Antonia. Had she seen the story when she "came back?" Or had something about the news triggered her memory, shocked her system. I thought of what Gustave had said:
only a handful of cases of lucidity saw a lasting effect.
Was it possible? I typed in another set of search terms. Valencia and TBI.

It took a little digging was the article Gustav had mentioned when he met me at the ranch's ropes course. Valencia wrote about three cases where TBI patients had regained some lucidity. I scanned it quickly, my heart pounding in my chest. Hope was like a bird, trapped in my rib cage, beating against my sternum, desperate.
 

If only she could remember. If only she could come back. The article was filled with jargon, and I found it almost impossible to understand but I saved it to my online drive anyway. Maybe when this was all over I could decipher it, call Valencia, find out if there was some treatment, or some medication, that would make it possible for Antonia to come back, even just a little. I wondered if maybe she had come back a little and I hadn't noticed. Maybe that's why she sensed the danger at Abuela's and acted so quickly, pulling me out of the house.
 

I logged off and headed back to grab an empty study room in the back of the library. I had every folder now, every note Antonia had mentioned. I listened to the tape again, making notes.
 

Bonita had made his millions through land acquisition. The family ranch was the Rocking B, the brand was a capital B with a curve on the bottom looking like a pair of devil horns. There was one profile article detailing how Javier Bonita got the land in the first place, being deeded the huge sections of land as the bastard son of Roger Davis. The author made note of the elder Bonita's reclusive nature, a sharp contrast to his spotlight-seeking son, Trent. It was Trent who lead to the new prominence of the Rocking B, transforming it into a different kind of brand that was emblazoned on handbags, wallets, and jewelry.