“Their bathing suits were not at the house,” Gunther said. “Why is that?”
“Perhaps they’re still wearing them.”
“And this tiny car,” he said. “I do not believe they were six, plus the housekeeper’s son, in that toy car. It makes no sense. They have been separated.”
“You think Isabel is alone?”
He drank. “I don’t know.”
“I have to believe they’re together.”
“No.” He shook his head. “If they are together, and if Hector could not protect his sister, he can never live with this. It will be terrible for him.” He drained the scotch and pushed the glass toward the bartender.
Camila knew Gunther was really speaking of himself. The bartender poured him a second scotch. “You said just one,” she said.
“Please don’t begin this,” Gunther said.
Camila sipped her drink and felt the beginnings of the numbness she knew Gunther was looking for. But there was no numbing this pain, this fear, not truly. She could only smooth the edges.
“This tortillera detective, she has done nothing,” Gunther said.
“Don’t call her that.”
“It’s what she is.”
“She seems very good, to me.”
“Incompetent. Five days they have been missing.” He drained his new drink, blinked and grimaced, and pushed it back across the bar. The bartender looked to her. Gunther tapped the base of the glass on the wood to retrieve his attention.
The bartender poured.
“These American women,” Gunther said. “They are at fault.”
“I was there, too,” she said quietly.
“No,” he said. “Their children are small. They should have stayed watching. It was their responsibility.”
“Perhaps.”
“They know it,” he said. “This is the reason they attack each other now. Nora was with the guide today, I promise you.”
“I don’t think so,” Camila said.
“Taking a taxi, to go for a walk,” he said, with contempt.
Camila knew he was often right, when he took the dark view. He had no illusions about other people. She suspected that his habit of suspicion came from knowledge of his own character. He saw himself clearly, and knew his own impulses were not as reconstructed as people might wish them to be.
The bartender brought the third drink. Gunther raised it to him in a mock toast. “Salud!”
The young man lifted his beer soberly, then moved away to clean something.
“El patán del río,” Gunther muttered.
It took Camila a moment to understand what he was talking about. The lout of the river. He meant Pedro, the guide. And Nora.
“She has no right to do this to her husband,” Gunther said.
“We don’t know anything,” Camila said.
“I do know that,” Gunther said. “It’s the only thing I know.”
42.
PENNY SAT IN the back seat of the yellow car with her brother, watching the woman with the scrunchie drive. The woman’s knuckles were white on the steering wheel and she seemed nervous, but Penny wasn’t sure why. She remembered the nervous doctor at the big house, who was a drug addict, but this woman didn’t seem like a drug addict. She wasn’t skinny like the doctor.
“Are you okay?” Penny asked Sebastian.
He nodded. Tears had cut rivulets in the dust on his cheeks.
“Do you have the finger-stick?”
He seemed confused by the question.
She dug into his pocket and found the little device, poked his finger for him to draw blood, and waited for the numbers. He was really low, lower than she had ever seen him. “Do you have any sugar?” she asked the woman. “Candy?”
The woman reached for a purse on the passenger seat, then rummaged in it with one hand. She came up with half a roll of mints, the foil uncoiling, and passed them back. Penny studied the mints. SIN AZúCAR! the label said.
“These don’t have sugar,” she said. “Necesito azúcar.” She gave two to Sebastian anyway, and he stuck them in his mouth.
“No tengo nada más,” the woman said. She passed back a water bottle that had probably been sitting in the car a long time, getting cancer toxins from the plastic. Their mother never let them drink from a plastic bottle that had been in the car.
Penny unscrewed the lid and Sebastian drank. She stuck one of the sugar-free candies in her own mouth, feeling the tingling mint. She hadn’t brushed her teeth in a long time. It had gotten dark very fast, like a shade pulled down over the world. Penny had barely noticed, but now the headlights lit up the gray asphalt.
“My stomach hurts,” Sebastian said.
The woman looked at them in the rearview mirror. “Hay una recompensa, verdad?” she asked.
“I don’t know what that means,” Penny said.
“Dinero?” the woman said.
“Sí,” Penny said. “Mis padres pagar.” Of course her parents would give the woman money. They’d already been over that.
“Pagan,” the woman corrected.
“Pagan.”
The woman’s eyes in the mirror looked thoughtful.
Penny wished she would watch where she was going, and drive faster. “You’re taking us to the doctor, right?” she said.
The woman nodded. “Claro,” she said, and her eyes shifted back to the road.
43.
OSCAR COULD BARELY see anything as he stumbled for the trees. His glasses were fogged, and fear had reduced the visible world to a tunnel. The pain in his knee shocked him with every step. In front of him, the strange man, Chuy, carried the little girl, Noemi. Oscar expected to hear shouts behind them, but everything was distant, muffled.
They reached the woods and stopped, in a place that was sheltered and obscured from the view of the train. Oscar, panting, just wanted to be still, to keep the blinding bolts of pain from shooting up his leg.
In the distance he could see the dim forms of people running. Others had fled the train, too, and were here in the woods, afraid. Pollos. Oscar heard a scream.
“Can you keep moving?” Chuy whispered.
He shook his head. “Not yet.”
“Stay here,” Chuy said, and he ran off, staying low.
Oscar could tell by the kids’ breathing that they were terrified. What was he going to tell his mother? He’d done everything wrong.
“Are people coming to hurt us?” June whispered, huddled against her brother.
“Yes,” Isabel said.
“Shh,” Oscar said. “No.”
“I won’t let them hurt you,” Marcus said.
Noemi was silent.
They waited, trying to interpret the sounds coming from the night. There were more shouts, then three gunshots, and they all flinched. Then the car must have rolled off the tracks, because the idling train started moving again. A moan of protest went up from the trees. People had hoped to get back on the train. Now they would be stranded.
Oscar heard footsteps running toward them. “Shit,” he said. He cowered and shrank into the undergrowth. June whimpered.
A dark figure grabbed Isabel, then Noemi. Oscar braced for someone to grab him, too, but instead he heard a terrible noise. A high grunt of effort and then a kind of choking. He could just make out the shape of the intruder, who had fallen to his knees in the dark clearing. Isabel faced the man. She looked feral, half-crouched. In her hand she held Oscar’s folding knife, with its sharp four-inch blade.
The intruder let Noemi go. From his knees, he slumped sideways to the ground.
Oscar crawled toward him, his mind blank with horror. The wounded man was Chuy, and there was dark blood beneath his chin. His throat had been opened from side to side, an extra mouth. He made a gurgling noise that might have been a command. Oscar could still hear people moving through the trees. When he grabbed Chuy’s wrist to look for a pulse, his own blood was pounding too loudly in his ears for him to feel anything.
“He wanted us to run,” Marcus said.
Chuy’s throat was slashed wide open. You couldn’t press on a wound like that.
“We have to go!” Marcus said.
The kid was right.