Bad news, very bad. When it rains it pours, as they say here when misfortunes pile up; first Daniel and now this. Just as I feared, the FBI is on my trail, and Officer Arana showed up in Berkeley. That doesn’t mean he’s going to come to Chiloé, as Manuel reassures me, but I’m scared; if he’s gone to the trouble of looking for me since last November, he’s not going to stop now that he’s traced my family.
Arana turned up at my grandmother’s door, in civilian clothes, but flashing his badge. My Nini was in the kitchen, and my dad invited him in, thinking it was something to do with Mike O’Kelly’s delinquents. He got a disagreeable surprise when he found out that Arana was investigating a counterfeiting case and needed to ask Maya Vidal, alias Laura Barron, some questions; the case was practically closed, he added, but the girl was in danger, and he had an obligation to protect her. My Nini and my dad’s fright would have been much worse if I hadn’t told them that Arana is a decent cop and had always treated me well.
My grandmother asked him how he’d tracked me down, and Arana had no objection to telling her, proud of his bloodhound’s nose, as she put it in her message to Manuel. The police officer began with the most basic clue, revising the lists of missing girls from all over the country during 2008 on the police department computer. It seemed unnecessary to investigate previous years, because when he met me he could tell I hadn’t spent much time living on the street; runaway teenagers acquire an unmistakable stamp of abandon very fast. There were dozens of girls on the lists, but he limited his search to those between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five, in Nevada and bordering states. In most cases there were photographs, though some were not all that recent. He had a good memory for faces and was able to narrow the list down to just four girls, one of whom caught his attention, because the notice coincided with the date when he’d first met Brandon Leeman’s so-called niece, June 2008. As he studied the photo and information available, he concluded that Maya Vidal was the one he was looking for. That’s how he found out my real name, that of my relatives, and the addresses of the academy in Oregon and my family in California.
It turns out that my dad, contrary to what I’d assumed, had looked for me for months and sent my description to every police station and hospital in the country. Arana made a call to the academy, talked to Angie to get the details he lacked, and thus arrived at my dad’s old house, where the new occupants gave him the address of my grandparents’ big multicolored house. “It’s lucky that they assigned me to this case instead of another officer, because I’m convinced that Laura, or Maya, is a good girl, and I’d like to help her, before things get complicated for her. I think I can prove that her participation in the crime was insignificant,” the officer told them as he wrapped up his explanation.
In view of Arana’s conciliatory attitude, my Nini invited him to stay for dinner, and my dad opened his best bottle of wine. The policeman pronounced the soup perfect for a foggy November evening. Was it perhaps a typical dish from the lady’s country? He’d noticed her accent. My dad told him that the chicken stew was Chilean, as was the wine, and that his mother and he had been born in that country. The officer wondered if they often went back to Chile, and my dad said they hadn’t been there in over thirty years. My Nini, hanging on the policeman’s every word, kicked her son under the table for talking too much. The less Arana knew about the family, the better. She’d sniffed a little lie in what the officer said, and it had put her on her guard. How was the case going to be closed if they hadn’t recovered either the counterfeit money or the plates? She had also read the magazine article about Adam Trevor and had studied the international traffic in counterfeit money for months, considered herself an expert, and knew the commercial and strategic value of those plates.
Showing her willingness to cooperate with the law, my Nini gave Arana the information that he could have obtained on his own. She told him that her granddaughter had run away from the Oregon academy in June of last year. They searched for her in vain, until they received a call from a church in Las Vegas and she went to pick her up, because at that moment Maya’s father was at work far away. She found her in terrible shape, unrecognizable. It was very tough to see their little girl, who’d been beautiful, athletic, and smart, turned into a drug addict. At this point in the story my grandmother could barely speak from sadness. My dad added that they put his daughter into rehab in a clinic in San Francisco, but a few days before finishing the program, she had escaped again, and they had no idea where she could be. Maya had turned twenty, and they couldn’t stop her from destroying her life, if that’s what she was set on doing.
I’ll never know how much Officer Arana believed. “It’s very important I find Maya soon. There are criminals anxious to get their hands on her,” he said, and warned them in passing what kind of sentence could be expected for covering up or being an accessory to a federal crime. The officer drank the rest of the wine, praised the crème caramel, thanked them for dinner, and before leaving gave them his card, in case they got any news of Maya Vidal or remembered any detail that might prove useful to the investigation. “Find her, Officer, please,” my grandmother begged him at the door, her cheeks wet with tears, holding him by the lapels. As soon as the cop was gone, she dried her histrionic tears, put on her coat, grabbed my father, and took him in her jalopy to Mike O’Kelly’s apartment.
Freddy, who had been submerged in an apathetic silence since his arrival in California, snapped out of his lethargy when he heard that Officer Arana was sniffing around Berkeley. The kid hadn’t said anything about what his life was like between the day he left me in the arms of Olympia Pettiford, in November of last year, and his kidney operation, seven months later, but the fear that Arana might arrest him loosened his tongue. He told them that after helping me, he couldn’t return to Brandon Leeman’s building, because Joe Martin and Chino would have made mincemeat out of him. He was tied to the building by a strong umbilical cord of desperation, since nowhere else could he find such an abundance of drugs, but going near it posed too great a risk. He’d never have been able to convince those thugs he’d had nothing to do with my escape, as he had after Brandon Leeman’s death, when he got me out of the gym just in time.
From Olympia’s house, Freddy took a bus to a town on the border where he had a friend, and he got by with great difficulty for a while, until the need to return became unbearable. In Las Vegas he knew the terrain, could move around with his eyes closed, knew where to score. He took the precaution of staying far away from his old haunts, to avoid Joe Martin and Chino. He survived by dealing, robbing, sleeping outside, getting sicker and sicker, until he ended up in the hospital and then in the arms of Olympia Pettiford.
When Freddy was still on the street, the bodies of Joe Martin and Chino were found inside a burned-out car in the desert. If the kid was relieved to be free of the thugs, the feeling couldn’t have lasted; according to the rumors going around the druggy and delinquent world, the crime had all the hallmarks of a police vendetta. The first bits of news of police department corruption had appeared in the press, and the double murder of Brandon Leeman’s associates had to be related. In a city of vice and mafias, bribery was common, but in this case there was counterfeit money involved, and the FBI had stepped in. The corrupt officers tried to contain the scandal every way they could; the bodies in the desert were a warning to those who were thinking of talking more than they should. The guilty parties knew that Freddy had lived with Brandon Leeman and weren’t about to let a snotty-nosed drug addict ruin them, though in fact he couldn’t identify them, as he’d never seen them in person. Brandon Leeman had given one of those policemen the order to get rid of Joe Martin and Chino, said Freddy, which coincided with what Brandon confessed to me on the trip to Beatty, but he was stupid enough to pay him with counterfeit money, thinking it would circulate without being detected. Things went bad, the money was discovered, the cop took revenge by revealing the plan to Joe Martin and Chino, and that very day they murdered Brandon Leeman. Freddy heard
the gangsters receiving their instructions over the phone to kill Leeman, and later deduced that they’d come from a cop. After witnessing the crime, he ran to the gym to warn me.
Months later, when Joe Martin and Chino kidnapped me on the street and drove me to the apartment to force me to confess where the rest of the money was, Freddy helped me again. The kid didn’t find me tied up and gagged on that mattress by chance, but because he heard Joe Martin talking on his cell and then saying to Chino that they had found Laura Barron. He hid on the third floor, watched them on tenterhooks as they arrived with me, and then saw them leave a short time later. He waited for more than an hour, not knowing what to do, until finally he decided to go into the apartment and find out what they’d done with me. We still didn’t know if the voice on the phone that ordered them to kill Brandon Leeman was the same as the one that later told the murderers where to find me. We didn’t even know if that voice belonged to the corrupt cop, or even if it was a single person; it could quite easily have been several.
Mike O’Kelly and my grandmother didn’t go so far in their speculations as to accuse Officer Arana without proof, but they didn’t rule him out as a suspect either, just as Freddy didn’t rule him out and for that reason was trembling. The man—or men—who’d gotten rid of Joe Martin and Chino in the desert would do the same to him if they got their hands on him. My Nini argued that if Arana were that villain, he would have gotten rid of Freddy in Las Vegas, but according to Mike it would be difficult to murder a patient in the hospital, not to mention a protégé of the fearsome Widows for Jesus.
Manuel went to Santiago for his appointment with Dr. Puga, accompanied by Blanca. In the meantime, Juanito Corrales came to stay with me in the house, so we could get through the fourth Harry Potter. More than a week had passed since I broke up with Daniel, or rather, since he broke up with me. I was still going around sniveling and dazed, feeling as if I’d been beaten up, but I’d gone back to work. We were into the last weeks of classes before summer vacations, and I really couldn’t miss them.
On December 3, Juanito and I went to buy some wool from Doña Lucinda, because I was planning to knit one of my horrendous scarves for Manuel. It was the least I could do. I took our scale—one of the things spared from my destructive rampage—to weigh the wool, because on hers the numbers have disappeared with the tarnish of time, and to sweeten up her day I took her a pear tart; it came out flat, but she’d appreciate it anyway. Her door got jammed in the 1960 earthquake, and since then she uses the back door. You have to go through the patio, past the marijuana plantation, the stove, and the tin drums for dyeing wool, in the midst of the chaos of hens wandering around, rabbits in cages, and a couple of goats, who once provided milk for cheese-making and are now enjoying an obligation-free retirement. Fahkeen was following us at his sideways trot with his nose in the air, so he got wind of what had happened before going inside and started howling urgently. Soon all the dogs within earshot were imitating him, and their howling was heard even farther away, until a short while later dogs were howling all over the island.
In the house we found Doña Lucinda already cold, sitting in her cane chair beside the fire, which had gone out, dressed in her Sunday best, a rosary in her hand and her scant hair neatly done up in a tight bun. Having a premonition that it was her last day in this world, she’d got herself ready so she wouldn’t be any bother to anyone once she was dead. I sat on the floor at her side, while Juanito went to tell the neighbors, who were already on their way, alerted by the dogs’ chorus.
On Friday nobody on the island went to work because of the wake, and on Saturday we all went to the funeral. The death of Doña Lucinda was a surprise despite the fact that she was well over a hundred years old; nobody ever imagined that she might be mortal. For the wake the neighbors brought chairs, and the crowd increased steadily until the patio, and then the whole street, was full. They laid the old lady out on the table where she used to weigh out wool and eat, in a plain coffin, surrounded by a profusion of flowers in jugs and plastic bottles—roses, hydrangeas, carnations, irises. Age had so shrunken Doña Lucinda that her body only took up half the casket, and her head on the pillow was like an infant’s. They’d put a couple of brass candlesticks on the table with stubs of candles and her wedding portrait, hand-colored, in which she stood in a wedding dress, holding the arm of a soldier in an antiquated uniform—the first of her six husbands, ninety-four years ago.
The island fiscal led the women in a rosary and some out-of-tune hymns, while the men, sitting at tables in the patio, soothed their grief with pork and onion stew and beer. The next day the itinerant priest arrived, a missionary nicknamed Three Tides for the length of his sermons, which began when the tide was coming in and didn’t end until it had gone out and come back again three times. He said mass in the church, which was so crammed with people, smoke from the candles, and wildflowers that I started seeing visions of coughing angels.
The casket was in front of the altar on top of a metal frame, covered by a black cloth with a white cross and two candelabras, with a basin underneath “in case the body leaked,” as they told me. I don’t know what that means, but it doesn’t sound pretty. The congregation prayed and sang Chilote waltzes to the sound of two guitars, and then Three Tides took the floor and didn’t give it up for sixty-five minutes. He began by praising Doña Lucinda and soon veered off onto other subjects like politics, the salmon industry, and soccer, while the faithful nodded off. This missionary had arrived in Chile fifty years ago and still speaks with an accent. When it came time for communion several people began to shed tears, which was contagious, and soon we were all crying, even the guitarists.
When mass had finished and the bells tolled for the deceased, eight men picked up the coffin, which weighed almost nothing, and carried it outside at a solemn pace, followed by the whole town, carrying the flowers from the chapel. At the cemetery, the priest blessed Doña Lucinda one more time, and just when they were about to lower her into the ground, the boat builder and his son arrived, all out of breath. They brought a miniature replica of her house to mark the grave, made in a hurry, but perfect. Since Doña Lucinda didn’t have any living relatives, and Juanito and I had discovered the body, people filed by, giving us condolences with a somber squeeze of hands callused from work, before going en masse to the Tavern of the Dead to drown their sorrows in the time-honored way.
I was the last to leave the cemetery, as the fog began to rise off the sea. I thought about how much I’d missed Manuel and Blanca during those two days of mourning, about Doña Lucinda, so beloved by the community, and about how solitary, by comparison, Carmelo Corrales’s burial had been. But most of all I thought about my Popo. My Nini wanted to scatter his ashes on a mountain, as close as possible to the sky, but four years have passed, and they’re still in the clay urn on her dresser, waiting. I walked up the hill along the path to La Pincoya’s cave, hoping to sense my Popo in the air and ask his permission to bring his ashes to this island, bury them in the cemetery looking out to sea, and mark the grave with a miniature replica of his tower of the stars. My Popo doesn’t come when I call him, though, only when he feels like it, and this time I waited in vain on top of the hill. I’ve been very susceptible since the end of my love affair with Daniel, easily frightened by ominous premonitions.
The tide was coming in, and the mist was getting thicker, but the entrance to the cave could still be glimpsed from above; a little farther away were the heavy shapes of the sea lions snoozing on the rocks. The cliff is a sheer twenty-foot drop, cut like a mineshaft, which I’ve climbed down a couple of times with Juanito. You have to be both agile and lucky, as it would be terribly easy to slip and break your neck. That’s why tourists are forbidden to try it.
I’ll try to sum up the events of these days, as I was told and from what I remember, though my brain’s only half functioning, because of the blow. Some aspects of the accident are incomprehensible, but nobody here has any intention of investigating seriously.
/> I spent a long time gazing down at the view, which was rapidly vanishing into the fog; the silver mirror of the sea, the rocks, and the sea lions had disappeared in the gray mist. In December some days are bright and others cold, like this one, with fog or an almost impalpable drizzle that can turn into a heavy shower in no time. That Saturday dawn had broken with a radiant sunrise, but over the course of the morning it began to cloud over. In the cemetery a delicate mist floated, giving the scene an appropriate touch of melancholy for our farewell to Doña Lucinda, the whole town’s great-great-grandmother. An hour later, on the hilltop, the world was wrapped in a cottony blanket, like a metaphor for my state of mind. All the rage, embarrassment, disappointment, and tears that unhinged me when I lost Daniel had given way to a vague and changeable sadness, like the fog. This is called unrequited love, which according to Manuel Arias is the most trivial tragedy of human history, but he should see how it hurts. The fog is worrisome; who knows what dangers lurk a few feet away, as in the London crime novels that Mike O’Kelly likes, in which the murderer counts on the protection of the fog that rises off the Thames?
I felt cold, as the dampness started to seep through my sweater, and fear, because the solitude was absolute. I sensed a presence that was not my Popo, but something vaguely threatening, like a large animal. I ruled it out as another product of my imagination, which plays dirty tricks on me, but at that moment Fahkeen growled. He was at my feet, alert, the fur on his back bristling, his tail stiff, showing his teeth. I heard stealthy footsteps.
“Who’s there?” I called out.