Three times a week, Miss Edmonds came in from the city to Casa Paloma. My mother had inherited Casa Paloma as a wedding gift from her father. It was a lavish, Spanish-inspired estate on the outskirts of a fishing village called Paza del Mar. There was a small school in Paza del Mar where the locals sent their kids, but the expatriates preferred private tutoring for their children, and so we met in our house, which was the largest by far.
We were learning about soil erosion and landslides and earthquakes when Gidiot pulled my braid so hard, the little red flower MaMaLu had adorned it with fell to the floor. I blinked a few times, refusing to cry, and focused on the diagrams in my book. I wished Gidiot would fall down one of the fault lines, and into the molten core of the earth.
“Ow!” Gidiot howled, rubbing his leg.
“What’s the matter?” Miss Edmonds asked.
“I think something bit me.”
Miss Edmonds nodded and we continued. Bugs were common. No big deal.
“Ow!” Gideon jumped. “Swear there’s something under the table.”
Miss Edmonds took a quick look. “Anyone else feel something?”
We shook our heads.
My eyes darted to the big, antique hutch behind Miss Edmonds. On the bottom were two paneled doors with lattice inserts. The crisscross pattern was purely decorative, but as Esteban and I had discovered one afternoon, they made perfect peep holes if you were hiding in there.
I smiled, knowing Esteban had backtracked in from the garden. He hated school so he hid in the hutch on the days Miss Edmonds was there. That way, he had something to tell MaMaLu when she asked him what he was learning in class.
Esteban poked his fingers through the wood and mini-waved at me. He held out a straw, or maybe it was one of his paper creations. The next minute, Gidiot was hopping around the table on one foot, massaging his calf.
“Ow, ow, ow, ow!”
“Gideon!” Miss Edmonds was not amused. “You’re distracting everyone. Wait outside until the rest of us are done with today’s session.”
I picked up an orange seed from the floor as Gidiot left. There were a few more under the table. Esteban had been shooting orange seeds at him through the straw. I could see little red marks on Gidiot’s legs as he left the room. Esteban gave me the thumbs up from his hiding place.
I laughed at the thought of his crooked thumb sticking out of that old wooden cabinet. I was still laughing when I heard the lock turn on the door.
Damian was back. And this time there was no tray.
“It’s time you earned your keep,” he said.
I nodded and followed him out.
I’d spent all my time in the room, but now we were standing in the U-shaped space that functioned as the kitchen. It was done in mahogany and teak, and part of the countertop was cantilevered to accommodate a pair of barstools. There was a sink, a refrigerator, a two-burner cook-top stove and a microwave oven. All the drawers were locked down, but there was a chopping board, some potatoes and a big-ass butcher knife on the counter.
“I need those peeled and cubed,” said Damian.
And he was going to let me use the knife? He had balls.
“Sure.” I was already thinking of which way to slice them.
I started rinsing the potatoes, but had to grip the sink for a second. My head still hurt and my legs felt weak. My eyes were still closed when Damian grabbed my left hand, forced it palm-down on the cutting board and WHAM!
He severed the tip of my pinky finger off, sliced the top third—nail, bone and all—clean off, as if it were a carrot he was chopping for a salad. The pain set in a few seconds later, after the blood started spewing all over the counter.
I screamed from the agony of it, from the horror of seeing the top of my finger sitting there, dull and lifeless, like some plastic Halloween prop. I closed my eyes and screamed louder when Damian applied pressure to stop the bleeding. I backed into something—something solid and firm—and slid down until I was on the floor.
I tried to pull my finger away, but Damian held on to it. He was keeping it elevated, wrapping it up, doing God knows what, and all I could do was scream and scream and scream, because everything he did made it ten times worse. I screamed until the sobs set in, until I was rolled up in a tight ball, until the tears stopped and all I could manage were soft, soundless whimpers.
When I opened my eyes, Damian was holding a phone over me.
“Did you get that?” he said to the person on the other side. “Good.” He walked to the other side of the counter. “Send the recording to Warren Sedgewick. Tell him that’s what she sounded like when I hacked her body to pieces.”
He picked up my dead finger, put it in a zip-lock bag and threw it into the freezer. “And tell him to expect a souvenir in the mail. It’s the only part of her he’ll have because the rest is scattered all over the place.”
I could hear the faint sound of the other person on the line.