“Where is she now?” Lucy asked. Could it be this easy?
“She called someone from her hometown. Someone who she said would have been looking for her.”
“She’s from a village deep in south-central Mexico. No electricity, no phones.”
“It was a man named Angelo,” George said. “She called him Tuesday morning and he said he would fly here immediately. After she talked to him, she seemed relieved, like the weight of the world was lifted from her shoulders. We wanted to meet him, but she was adamant. She was very worried that if the people who had her sister found out we helped her, they would hurt us.”
“George, these are bad people,” Adam said. “You should have called me, you shouldn’t have let her stay here. We don’t know who she really is.”
“Of course she should stay!” Nadia reminded Lucy of her own mother. A petite Latina mother whose word was law. Lucy’s mother would give a starving man her last slice of bread and admonish anyone who said she shouldn’t. “Johnny came back Tuesday, after she’d already gone, and said there was a baby left at a church, and we’re pretty certain that was her baby. She kept talking about having to leave her baby—and then it all made sense.”
“She walked nearly twenty miles to this ranch,” Lucy said. After giving birth, to save herself and her sister, she’d walked twenty miles in what … three days? Four? How long had she been in the barn, sick? “Did she say where she was heading?”
“I think she wanted to get to a town so she could call this Angelo fellow, but didn’t want anyone to see her, so she kept to the back roads and ranches,” George said.
“When did she leave?” Lucy asked.
“Yesterday at four thirty in the afternoon. She said she was meeting Angelo at seven at an exit on fifty-nine. I wanted to drive her, but she was very jumpy. I gave her my cell phone and told her to call me if she needed anything. I would move heaven and earth for that poor girl.”
“She has your cell phone?” Lucy said. “Have you tried calling her?”
John came back into the dining room from where he was listening in the living room. His face was firm and angry. “Yes. She hasn’t answered. It’s an old flip-phone, no find-your-phone feature.”
“John, I couldn’t force her to stay,” George said.
“You shouldn’t have let her leave!”
“Don’t yell at your father,” Adam said. “This is a difficult situation for everyone.”
“We looked for her all night,” John said. “We knew where she was meeting him, got there not much after seven, and she wasn’t there. We waited, no one showed up. Not Marisol, not this Angelo person.”
“But she has your cell phone,” Lucy said. “We can trace it.”
“But it’s an old phone.”
“Doesn’t matter. If it’s on, it will have pinged a cell tower. We might not be able to get it at its exact location, but we’ll get close. If you contact your service provider, it will make everything go faster.”
“What’s her story?” John said. “We wanted to help—she needed it—but she didn’t want to take it. She was so scared. And young.”
“Marisol and her sister, Ana, disappeared two years ago from Monterrey, Mexico, where they had gone to get jobs,” Lucy said. “Marisol speaks three languages and was earning money to help rebuild their village after a flood and mudslide killed their parents and destroyed the village. A photojournalist with ties to the girls has been looking for them, and when the baby showed up at the church with a personalized locket, the priest contacted her. She brought us in.” Lucy leaned forward. “This cannot go any further than this, but we believe that Marisol’s sister is pregnant and in danger. Marisol most likely left here to rescue her sister.”
“She kept talking about Ana, how she was sick and in trouble.”
“We believe that the same people who have Ana killed another woman.” Lucy didn’t mention that Eloise’s baby was stolen. There was no reason to give these people more nightmares.
“Tell me what to do,” George said. “Tell me how to help.”
“Call your service provider,” Adam said, “then I’ll talk to them.”
Lucy felt physically ill. She stepped outside and sat on a bench and put her head between her knees.
Nate followed her and closed the door behind him. “Lucy—what’s going on? Are you okay?”
She was so tired of being coddled. Of being asked if she was okay. She was fine. She had just browbeat a dying woman into telling her what she needed to know, then dumped sorrow into what had been a happy house. George and Nadia shouldn’t have to know these things. But evil … it seemed to find Lucy. She drew it to her, like a spider’s web.
Worse, she saw the evil. Dissected it. Understood it.
“Angelo,” she said through clenched teeth. “He’s one of them.”