A Dime a Dozen (36 page)

My head seemed clearer once I was clean and dry. I treated my cuts and scrapes from the first aid kit I found in the medicine cabinet, grateful that at least my face had been spared. Once I was dressed for the day, my injuries barely showed.

Harriet had wanted to get an early start and had already left for the office. In the quiet of the cabin, I made myself a simple breakfast of poached eggs, whole wheat toast, and hot tea. As I sat at the kitchen table and ate, I thought about my plans for the day. My first stop would be the County Migrant Bureau over in Marwick, where I would interview the director and get his opinion of MORE. I already expected it to be unflattering, considering the snafus that had happened last fall with Luisa.

From there I needed to drop in on Karen Weatherby at Go the Distance. My reason for going was to find out about the expensive vehicle she purchased from the car dealer. But I also hoped to broach the subject of her and Enrique and their entangled past while I was there.

Finally, I was most eager to talk again with the medical examiner, since some of his tests should be back today. Between the corrosive chemical and the sparkles in the lungs, I was dying to know what new conclusions he had been able to draw about Enrique Morales’ body.

When I finished eating, I put my plate and cup into the sink and hit the road, driving down the mountain and out of town so that I reached the County Migrant Bureau by 9:30. The interview went along about as I had expected. Yes, they had worked closely with MORE, but no, the agency did not have a clear record with them.

“We weren’t too happy with the incidents that happened last fall,” the county agent said to me. “But it wasn’t enough to pull the plug. And they are serving a vital function over there.”

I took notes from our conversation, writing “vital function” and underlining it several times.

“It all boils down to shoddy controls,” the man said several times. “If you’ve got shoddy controls, all kinds of bad things can happen.”

Of course, a part of my investigation had taken into account the office’s controls, and—except for Ellen Mack putting the passwords in her phone—I knew they weren’t shoddy at all. At least no other, unexpected problems had popped up; except for the two blights on their record from last fall, the agency was clean. Unfortunately, it would take a while for Dean and Natalie to rebuild MORE’s reputation with this man and his office. Hopefully, solving the crimes related to Luisa would help repair the damage that had been done.

Glad to get that over with, I turned up the radio loudly and sang along as I drove back through the mountains, back toward Greenbriar. Despite everything that had been going on, I felt myself slipping into a wonderful mood. I had a feeling it had to do with the breathtaking scenery that surrounded me on every side. Once I reached the lake, I felt as though I had died and gone to heaven. Oh, how I had missed the Smokies! Looking out at the deep green of the hills and the sparkling blue of the water, I tried to compare the beauty of this place to my home on the Chesapeake. The two were very different, yet I loved them equally.

Since I was driving back to town along the lake highway, on a whim I decided to make one quick detour before arriving at Go the Distance. I found the road to Camp Greenbriar easily, turned into the camp, and drove about a quarter of a mile. As I had expected, the place was closed up for the season, and I pulled to a stop at a chain that blocked the road. I decided to leave my car there and get out and walk the rest of the way, though I was still feeling a bit edgy from the morning’s encounter with the dogs. I unzipped the bottom compartment in my purse and retrieved a small bottle of mace that I kept there. I clutched it in one hand, and with the other I grabbed a big stick from the side of the road. Thus armed, I felt more confident as I walked into the deserted camp.

When I reached the main compound, I was surprised to see that a number of things had been changed, and I remembered Natalie telling me the place had been bought out by a management company a few years ago and that it had undergone some extensive renovations. From what I could see, the improvements included a big new main building, some tennis courts, and even a swimming pool. Peering through the trees, it looked as though they had added some extra cabins as well.

I headed for the lake, which was pulling at me like a magnet. The walkway was covered with dry, dead leaves, and I crunched through them toward the water.

I reached the small sandy beach area first, and I walked down to the edge of the lake and bent over to dip my fingers in it. Despite the warm March day, the water was still quite cold. Standing, I looked around to see, on the other side of the dock, the empty racks where the canoes would go once the camp opened back up for the summer.

The dock had been rebuilt and improved since my Camp Greenbriar days, but it was still in the same location, halfway between the beach and the boats, jutting about 30 feet into the water. I walked out and stood at the end, gazing at the gorgeous scenery in front of me. Then I turned around to look back at the shore. This was the very spot where Bryan and I had said goodbye to each other at the end of our first summer together, the year that we were 16. Smiling now, I thought back to the dramatics of it all. After six weeks of being together almost every single day, I didn’t think I would be able to survive a whole year without him. How I thought my heart would break as we said our final farewell! I could remember sobbing, holding tightly to him, promising him I wouldn’t forget a single moment of our time together. As my father honked the horn from the parking lot, Bryan took my hands in his, and we looked each other deeply in the eyes.

“You won’t forget me?” I asked tearfully.

“How could I forget you?” Bryan had replied simply. “You’re the great love of my life.” Amazingly, even at the tender age of 16, he had been right. I
was
the great love of his life.

We just didn’t know that his life would be cut so short.

Shaking my head, I walked up the dock and tried to focus on other memories: the relay races, the campfire songs, the arts and crafts. As I walked around the main area and saw how many things had changed under the new management, it struck me that “Camp Greenbriar” as I had known it didn’t really exist anymore except in memories. I found that sad, in a way, but it was also kind of a relief. The place had moved on, just as I, too, was moving on.

Forty-One

When I reached Go the Distance, I wasn’t sure whether to walk in or knock. It was a place of business, of course, but with Karen living right upstairs, it was also someone’s home. Preferring to err to the side of good manners, I rang the bell and waited, and after a while I could hear the footsteps of someone coming.

Karen peeked out of the curtain and then opened the door.

“Callie? What are you doing here?”

To my surprise, I saw that she had been crying. Her eyes were red and swollen, and in her hand she clutched a tissue.

“I wanted to ask you a few questions,” I said. “Are you okay? You look upset.”

“I was thinking about Enrique,” she said, looking down. “I just heard the results of the autopsy. It turns out he was
murdered
.”

“Oh, Karen,” I said. “No wonder you’ve been crying. Why don’t I come in and make some tea and you can tell me about it?”

We were sitting in the break room 15 minutes later, our tea turning cold in front of us, the entire story of Enrique’s autopsy laid out for me by Karen. Though it was a gruesome death, and the thought of murder was incredibly disquieting, I was intrigued by her extreme distress. A part of me still wondered if she and Enrique had been closer than they should’ve been.

“You know, Karen,” I said gently, “I’m a little confused about your relationship to Enrique. It seems as though you knew him well, but I don’t quite understand why. Did he come here a lot with the children or something?”

She looked at some point over my shoulder, sighed heavily, and then looked me in the eye.

“It’s a long story,” she said. “Why don’t we go back to what I was doing when you got here? Then we can work as we talk.”

“No kids here today?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“Pepe and Adriana have gone to Texas to stay with Luisa’s sister. I really miss them, though of course I’m glad they’re safe now.”

I nodded, feeling sorry I hadn’t had a chance to say goodbye.

Karen had been in the midst of cleaning out the giant closet in the art room. I followed her down to the sunny space where the closet doors were propped open and various art supplies littered the table and counters and floor.

“If you want, you can sort these things while I wipe off the shelves,” she said, not waiting for a reply. There was a bucket of soapy water on the floor inside the closet, and she reached in and took out a big sponge, squeezing out the excess over the bucket. Then she climbed the stepladder and began wiping the shelves, starting at the very top, the lemony smell of cleaner filling the room.

“My maiden name is Tinsdale,” she said as she worked. “My family owns Tinsdale Orchards.”

As I divided crayons from colored pencils and markers, she went on to tell me her story, which was basically a more elaborate version of what Natalie had already told me. Hearing Karen explain it, however, made the thoughts and feelings of that poor little neglected rich girl come alive. At one point, Karen climbed off of her ladder for emphasis, gesticulating wildly as she described the life of the migrants.

“As adults, we can look at the squalor of how they lived,” she said, “and we’re repulsed by it. But for a kid, Callie, it was like a magical wonderland. They lived in their cars! They had tents down by the creek! To me, it was like a four-month-long camping trip, and I was fascinated by everything about it.”

She rinsed the sponge in the bucket and started wiping again.

“But beyond the logistics of how they lived, I was drawn most of all to the dramatics of how they
lived
. I came from a silent, sterile house where there was no noise, no mess, no love, and enough distance between people and rooms to make it seem like an endless, empty castle. By contrast, these people were so crammed together, so noisy, so angry, so happy, so alive! And they loved each other! Even the food they cooked was alive, rich with the smells of onions and tomatoes and peppers, and when you’d bite into it your eyes would burn because it was so strong. The mothers yelled at their children and the parents kissed each other right out in front of everybody, and if you wandered into the wrong campsite you might be swatted and yelled at or your might be pulled in for a giant, smelly embrace and handed more food, another tamale, another fajita. I know those people were poor and unhappy and tired and in every way disadvantaged, and I don’t kid myself that I would’ve been better off as one of them. I’m just saying that to a child, I couldn’t see all that was wrong there. I could only see that the people connected to each other, that they were real, that they were like a giant family. And a family was the one thing I didn’t have. I was speaking fluent Spanish by the time I was ten, and every night I prayed that God might turn my skin brown and my hair black and let me go with them when they left.”

“When did you meet Enrique?” I asked.

“I couldn’t even tell you, except to say that he was always there, always a part of the group that returned every year. I spent November through July like a hermit, creeping around my big old house, going to school in town but living inside my own little shell. No one could get inside, not that anyone ever tried. By the time summer came, I was crossing the days off on my calendar, wishing them away, living for the moment when those first few trucks and cars full of migrants would come rattling up the hill.”

She chuckled as she described how she spent the first half of every summer reading on a blanket in the yard, toasting her skin in the sun, trying to get herself as dark as they were.

“It never worked, of course, so by the time they got there I was always a red, splotchy, peeling mess. They didn’t care. They didn’t care that my hair was always in tangles or that I had no mother or that my clothes were stained and torn. They were outcasts too, and they pulled me into their world and made me one of them as quickly and simply as if I were a part of it year-round. We always had the fall together, the glorious harvest, when the parents would head into the fields and the children were left to their own devices back at the camp. All year long I worked on my handwriting so that in the fall I could write intelligent, grown-up sounding excuse letters to my teachers so I wouldn’t have to go to school. ‘Karen cannot come to school next week, for she has developed a ventricular aberration of the patella.’ The stupid teachers never knew the difference. I doubt I made it to my classes even half the time during harvest.”

“That’s so sad.”

“What’s sad was when slowly the migrants would start to leave. That’s when Enrique and I grew close, because his family was one of the ones that stayed through to the end. By October there were maybe half a dozen kids left, and Enrique was always my favorite. He was funny and adventurous and between the two of us we were forever building bridges out of twigs or damming the creek with stones or creating playhouses in the kudzu. For several years there, he was my very best friend in the world, and when the end came and his family would load their car and drive away until the next time, I was utterly inconsolable. Those were the times when the housekeeper would write my excuse notes for school for me, real notes that couldn’t begin to touch on what was wrong: ‘Karen could not come to school last week because she was ill,’ when in fact I was locked in my dark bedroom, moaning and crying like the mad wife out of
Jane Eyre
. Sooner or later I would emerge and everyone would pretend that there was nothing wrong, and I would go back to school, dead inside, until the following summer when my friends would return and I could come back to life again.”