He had joined the search effort not only because he hoped to find his son, but because he needed to get away from the American women, who had let this thing happen. As he watched the somber team with their deliberate movements, no one hurrying, no one thinking the boy was still alive, his hope began to flag, leaving only his hatred. He knew that if he had been on the beach with a drink in the hot sun, he would have fallen asleep. But his children were teenagers. He and Camila had worked at parenthood longer than the others, and had earned the right to a nap. If your children were small, then it was your job to stay awake, and not to go off fucking strangers in the trees. This was universally understood. And now his daughter had returned traumatized and withdrawn, and he was standing by this brackish river waiting for divers to find scraps of his son. He could kill those women with his bare hands.
One of the three divers was a muscular girl, perhaps twenty-five years old. She looked sleek and amphibious in her black wetsuit. She laid out her gear: mask, fins, bang-stick. A knife, an underwater light, a mesh bag.
A mesh bag.
The divers stood in their wetsuits on the bank where the inner tubes had been found. If Hector had stayed with his sister, everything might have been different. But you made the decision you could make at the time when you made it. The person Hector was at that moment was someone who would heroically swim back. There was no version of Hector who walked to the Jeep. And if there had been, then maybe Raúl Herrera would have killed him, to get to Isabel. Maybe the Fates snipped with their scissors when they wanted to snip.
The girl diver, who had put on her tank, caught Gunther staring at her. She met his eyes for a moment. She was not going to scold the grieving father for staring. But her eyes held a light reproach. She looked away.
He wanted to tell her he had not been thinking of her neoprene-encased body. How could you seduce someone in a wetsuit? You would be exhausted by the time you peeled the thing off. You would need a cold drink. He’d been thinking of his children, and he’d been thinking of murdering two American women, but he couldn’t explain. And now, of course, he was thinking about her neoprene-encased body. An aquatic, erotic creature. The body responded. It was not a choice.
He turned to peer back into the trees where Isabel and the others had stepped over roots and branches, toward their captors. He imagined them like water sprites in their swimming costumes, flitting through the woods. Their bare footprints obscured now by the boots of the searchers. There was no sign they had been here at all.
There was a splash, then another, three, and the hunters had gone into the water to prove for certain that his son was gone.
56.
CAMILA SAT IN the dark hospital room and imagined the divers killing a crocodile and cutting its belly open, her son stepping out. Gunther, standing on the bank of the river, would welcome his son into his arms. She felt the tears come, at the joy of it. Hector was her secret favorite. Boys were so much less complicated for a mother. They loved you always.
The boy Marcus had come to visit Isabel in their room, the only one of the Americans who had. He seemed to have appointed himself Isabel’s protector. Camila had gone to the toilet and come back to find them whispering together. They’d stopped when she entered.
“What is it?” she’d asked.
“Nothing,” Isabel said.
She knew her daughter a little bit, and knew she was lying. But Isabel now slept like an innocent, under a spell.
Camila had been raised a Catholic, in a white dress at her confirmation, married by a priest, the whole thing. So now she tried to think about God and his intentions, out of habit. Si Dios quiere, her grandmother used to say, about every plan for the future. Shall we meet for breakfast? Si Dios quiere. Ojalá que venga. Why would God want to take Camila’s son? Who was this deity who willed such things?
Gunther said there were no gods. He said that man was a brutal creature in a brutal world. The human race was barely removed from clubbing one another on the head, stealing women and provisions, getting through the winter with violence and blood. In Camila’s lifetime, in her country, people had been thrown from airplanes for being a political inconvenience. Even America, the alleged light of the world, was built on the torture and rape and murder of captive people.
And yet Hector, her son, had risked his life for his sister, and for these children who were near strangers to him. There were noble impulses in this damned species, still. Which meant that they would find him. He would come back, her handsome young river god, reborn.
In the hospital bed, Isabel rolled over and moaned. She needed her brother, as much as Camila needed her son.
In her youth, Camila had a little singing career. It had never been much: a cabaret act, with a boy who played the piano. She sang standards and tango for tourists. Men brought flowers, but not for their love of music. They brought flowers for the dresses she wore, the décolleté, the sway of the hips behind the microphone. And sometimes, to be honest, for the handsome boy at the piano. But then she had married and created this beautiful girl, and she had been replaced. It was Isabel men looked at when they walked down the street. The child was only fourteen but their heads turned, and Isabel felt her power.
It was the most terrifying age. Her daughter was aware of her allure and she was right. And she was convinced of her invincibility and she was wrong. The drifting away on the river, the stumbling onto the grave site, it had all come at a very bad time for her.
Isabel shifted again in the bed, and then was still.
If this Raúl Herrera were alive, Gunther would have wished to kill him, to tear him apart. As it was, Gunther’s rage had no target, no outlet. Camila wondered if it would fester. She wondered if he would blame his daughter, see her as ruined, in some primitive way.
Someone was standing in the light from the doorway. Camila looked up and saw Liv through the gap, peering in.
“Camila?” Liv whispered.
“Yes?”
“How are you doing?”
How was she doing? Camila wanted to laugh. What did they know of the gaping emptiness in her heart that would never be filled until her son came back? The American women would be fine. Their marriages might feel the strain. This hellish trip might expose the cracks in their foundations, and they might crumble. But they had their children, intact. That was all any of them wanted. A voice that she did not recognize came from deep in her chest, and she said, “Go away.”
57.
ANGELA RIVERA LAY in bed, listening to the street outside. Voices from the bar on the corner, a distant siren. A part of her mind was always scanning those sounds for trouble, but she tried to shut that habit down for a little while. She had enough trouble of her own.
She’d been assigned to the missing kids because her English was the best in the department. She’d worked for an uncle in Florida four summers in a row, pumping gas at a marina, making conversation with the boat owners, going out with the local kids at night. Nothing like four beers to loosen the tongue. She’d kept it up by watching American movies, practicing when she could, proud of her fluency. And she’d also, of course, been put on the case because everyone was home with their families for the holiday. Let the dyke work at Christmas—what did she care?
But it wasn’t even her beat. No sex crimes involved, at the time they’d assigned her to it. Unless you counted whatever had happened in the trees, with the guide and the pretty American, but she didn’t count that.
Lexi moved in her sleep, stretched one leg out and left it there, toes against Angela’s calf. Lexi was small and wiry, but she liked to sleep diagonally across the bed or else right in the middle, spread out like a starfish. When she came home from working late, Angela had to push her across the bed with both hands before climbing in. Lexi might mumble a protest but she never woke up. She didn’t have Angela’s insomniac tendencies, her way of worrying a case, turning it over and over in her mind.
&nb
sp; They’d found a body near the train tracks where the train had been stopped. Male, thirty to thirty-five, probably dead two days. Old gang tattoos, inked over. His throat had been cut, and they’d found a yellow-handled folding knife with two distinct sets of prints that matched no one in the database. And a child’s pink backpack beneath his body, soaked in blood, with a stuffed pig and some comic books inside.
Angela had asked the older kids, cautiously, about this discovery, and she had gotten the strangest answers. At first, Isabel pretended not to know what she was talking about. Then she said the man had attacked her, and maybe Oscar had fought him, but she couldn’t remember. It was all too terrible. She had started to cry. Angela waited, and then tried to ask more questions. Isabel said she should ask Marcus. He knew.
Marcus didn’t stall. With his mother beside him, he said in a hushed whisper that a man had attacked Isabel, and that Oscar had fought him.
The little one, June, said it was too dark to see. She said there was a man with Noemi, who came to the train car, but then he wasn’t with them anymore. She didn’t know why.
June was the only one Angela believed.
Noemi was still in a fever, and Angela hadn’t talked to Oscar yet, because she wanted to think some more about what the kids had said, and what they weren’t telling her.
Then word had come that the divers found a scrap of the Argentinian boy’s shorts on the bottom of the river, snagged on a branch. Pink-and-green cloth. Was it better to see your kid half-eaten, or better not to find him at all, always to have that sliver of hope that he was still out there somewhere, in torn swim trunks?
Lexi rolled over to the middle of the bed, her forehead against Angela’s shoulder. It was too hot to sleep so close, each breath on her skin. Lexi ran a rape crisis center, and Angela thought about the way she talked to the women there, how calm and practical she was. She helped them navigate the worst thing that had ever happened to them—except when it wasn’t the worst thing, or the first time. She had an evenhanded sensibility, a businesslike response to trauma. And still she slept so deeply, so unafraid.
Angela herself had forty rape cases open, and hundreds more closed. Most of the rapists were relatives. The youngest victim in her current stack was two years old. Sometimes the families didn’t want to prosecute. Sometimes the men disappeared across borders and she couldn’t find them. It was so hard to get justice of any kind. She thought about Isabel’s tormented look in the hospital bathroom, her weeping in her mother’s arms. How was it possible to be calm and reasonable about a child’s pain? It was a nightmare.
A hundred reporters with cameras had gone to the river. They’d done a special report on the weapon the divers carried for crocodiles, the bang-stick. They’d already interviewed the grieving sister of Consuelo Bolaños, holding the orphaned little boy on her lap. No mystery there: They had the gun that had killed Consuelo, and the gunshot residue on Raúl’s fingers and clothes, and an eyewitness. And Raúl was dead. That particular chapter had exhausted its shock value, and the news cameras would be on the prowl for the next one.
The hospital staff had been discreet and compassionate, but they were getting weary of their troubled guests. Someone was going to tip off the media for cash or spite, and the cameras would descend. This unexpected time of privacy would be over. The new body in the trees would keep the public fascination and the television ratings going, make the flames dance higher. Angela wanted to solve the mystery of the man with the pink backpack, but she was afraid of the truth, and of what it might mean.
58.
OSCAR INSPECTED THE bandage on his knee. He guessed it looked like Frankenstein’s monster underneath, but at least they’d given him drugs, and the agony was gone. He felt nothing, only the euphoria of painlessness. His mother, terrified of pills, had insisted he could get through the recovery with ice. Ice! When they’d sliced his knee open.
He was thinking about lifting the bandage to see the stitches when a silver-haired man came into his room and closed the door.
“Hello, Oscar,” he said. “I’m Isabel’s father. My name is Gunther.”
Oscar watched him draw close.
“How is your knee?” the man asked. He spoke Argentine Spanish and used the formal you. He sounded rich, but Oscar could have guessed that from knowing Isabel.
“I haven’t seen it or tried to walk yet,” Oscar said. “But it doesn’t hurt.”
“Good,” Gunther said. “I’ve been hoping to talk to you.” He took a seat by Oscar’s bedside and crossed one knee over the other. “Did you know that they found a man dead near the train tracks? Throat cut wide open.”
Oscar held his breath. He saw Isabel again, crouched and feral in the dark, holding his yellow-handled knife.
“Do you know who this man was?” Gunther asked.
Oscar cleared his throat. He thought about lying. “Noemi’s uncle,” he said. “His name was Chuy.”
“You think he was really her uncle?”
“Sure.”
“Was he screwing the kid?”
“No!” Oscar said. “I mean, I don’t think so.”
“So what happened to him?”
“My lawyer doesn’t want me talking to anyone.”
“Smart lawyer,” Gunther said, smiling. “Shall I leave? Or shall I tell you some things you might wish to know?”
Oscar watched him. “Okay.”
“I have spoken with the machona detective,” Gunther said. “My daughter told her that maybe you killed this man.”
Oscar blinked, startled. “I didn’t!”
Gunther paused. “So why did you not mention the dead man before?”
Oscar’s thoughts were jumbled now. He hadn’t said anything because he hadn’t wanted to get Isabel in trouble. “Did you ask Marcus?”
“Marcus also says maybe you did it.”
Fury exploded in Oscar’s brain. “That’s not true!”
“So who killed him?” Gunther asked.
He took a gulp of air. “She did!”
“Who?”
“Your daughter!”
Gunther’s eyes, beneath bushy silver eyebrows, flicked back and forth between his. He didn’t seem as surprised as Oscar thought he should be. “Why would she do that?”
Oscar lay back on the pillow. “She was afraid,” he said. “The uncle was trying to help us. He went to see who was coming, and then he came back. He grabbed Noemi and Isabel, to run with them. Isabel didn’t know who it was, in the dark.”
“How do you know this?”
“I saw it.”
Isabel’s father rubbed his face and looked at the ceiling. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.”
“What’s going to happen?” Oscar asked.
“I don’t know.” Gunther rolled his neck and Oscar heard it pop. “If my daughter killed this man, as you say, people will want to know why.”
“She thought she was defending herself.”
“Yes, but they will want to know everything. A beautiful girl, a killer. People love this like flies love shit. You understand this, yes?”
“Yes,” Oscar admitted.
“You know my daughter was raped?”
He hadn’t, really, but now it made sense. Fucking Raúl. “Yes.”
“There will be nothing else to talk about,” Gunther said. “It will be a fucking circus.”
The door opened and a nurse looked in.
“A moment, please,” Gunther said, and the nurse retreated and closed the door. He moved his chair closer and found Oscar’s eyes again. “The story the children told is a good, boring, understandable story,” he said. “You were defending them.”
“But I didn’t do it.”
“You know that. And God knows it.”
“Do you believe in God?” Oscar asked.
“No.”
“My mother believes
.”
“So does my wife, in a way,” Gunther said. “She needs to. Our son is dead.”
“I’m sorry,” Oscar said. “I didn’t know there were supposed to be six.”
Gunther clasped his hands together, and put his elbows on his knees. He seemed unable to speak.
“My sister died when I was little,” Oscar said. “I found her.”
“That’s terrible also.”
They sat together in silence.
“Can I tell you something?” Gunther asked, and Oscar noticed that he was calling him vos now. “Two police officers went to the Herreras’ house. Before my daughter was raped. They could have stopped everything, right there. But Raúl Herrera paid them, and they went away. And we got a report that no one was at the house.”
“Oh, shit,” Oscar said.
“If I had a time machine, I know I should use it to kill Hitler, but I would go back one week from today and shoot those three men in the head.”
“Did the detective know?”
“Not then,” Gunther said. “She knows now. You see, no one protected my daughter. No one, in this whole fucking place. But I think these kids are very smart. And I think, with their lie, they’ve made it so you, Oscar, can protect them, like everyone failed to.”
“By saying I killed someone,” Oscar said.
Gunther was silent.
“But I didn’t!”
“Okay,” Gunther said, studying a spot on the far wall. “So it all comes out. The children say you killed a man. You say my daughter did. But you didn’t say anything to the police about this terrible murder, when you were questioned. So you aren’t the rescuer and protector anymore. You’re this strange kid who stole some children with his mom.”
Oscar flinched.
“And then,” Gunther went on, “you either killed an innocent man for no reason and tried to pin it on a girl, or you didn’t say anything when the girl killed him. That looks really fucking suspicious to me, my friend.”