Esperanza (38 page)

Lauren’s eyes teared up, she slipped an arm around Tess’s shoulders. “You want to hear something really weird? While you were in a coma, I spent hours by your bed talking to you, texting you, e-mailing you, begging you to come back. You’re not slipping away from us again, Tess. One way or another, we’re going with you.”

Tess wrapped her arms around her mother, neither of them speaking or moving until Maddie called, “Hey, ladies, we should pick up a bag of groceries in the store here.”

Tess didn’t know if the
brujos
would arrive in the bodies of the two bodyguards they’d seen on the security video or if they would arrive in their natural forms, as whiffs of smoke. They had to be ready for either eventuality. So once they were inside their suite, they sealed the cracks under the doors with towels, taped the edges of the windows and the sliding glass doors. Tess felt like she had done this before, against the same enemy. The feeling didn’t come with images or sound bites, but she accepted the emotion as a different kind of memory, every bit as valid.

Lauren made a pot of Cuban coffee in the suite’s tiny kitchen. They sat around the butcher block table for hours, talking quietly, and came up with a plan. But it was predicated on Tess’s belief that the bruise was a kind of alarm that would itch and burn if a
brujo
was nearby. “It’ll buy us a little time,” she said. “As soon as I feel anything, you two get out of here. Go to Tango Key. I’ll meet you there.”

“Nope.” Lauren shook her head. “Maddie and I agree we’re not going anywhere without you.”

“Mom, it can’t take me. The only way it can hurt me is by seizing either of you. So let
me
be the decoy. We’ll stay in touch by cell phone.”

Maddie pressed her hands between her knees and looked around uneasily. She whispered, “They could be here now, Tesso. Listening to what we’re saying.”

“I don’t think so.”

Her mother pushed back from the table and went over to the coffeepot. “Refills. We’re all staying up. I’m going to make omelets.”

She went to work, browning mushrooms, whipping up eggs, folding in cheese and diced tomatoes. Watching her, Tess found another memory, of Ian creating culinary delights that had reminded her of her dad, not of her mother.

“Mom, when I was growing up, who cooked dinner most of the time?”

“Your dad. He was a fantastic cook. Since Charlie died, I’ve gotten better. But nothing I cook will ever equal the kind of stuff he could concoct.”

“I remember Ian cooking meals.”
And I fell in love with him.
“Ian Ritter. He’s from Minneapolis.”

“Fantastic, hon. It’s a start. With Google, anyone can be found.”

By two, her mother’s eyes were pinched with fatigue and Maddie kept nodding off, chin dropping toward her chest. Tess convinced them to move into the bedroom and promised she would wake them if her wrist acted up. Once Tess was alone in the kitchen, with fresh coffee in her mug, she used Maddie’s laptop and went online.

She brought up the reverse phone book for Minneapolis. A query for Ian Ritter produced numerous links at the University of Minnesota and the
Minneapolis Tribune
. She clicked that link first, a piece from 1978 about the inauguration ceremony for the Ian Ritter School of Journalism Award. One paragraph in particular seized her attention:

The award, named after journalism professor and Tribune columnist Ian Ritter, brings a $10,000 prize to a journalism student for investigative skills. Named after the professor and Pulitzer-prize-winning columnist who vanished under mysterious circumstances in April 1968, the prize is funded by a special trust established by Ritter’s ex-wife, Louise Ritter Bell, and their son, Luke Ritter, and his wife, Casey O’Toole Ritter, the Minneapolis Tribune, and the Department of Journalism.

“What the fuck,” Tess whispered.
1968?

And did
her
Ian have a son?

How old is your son?

Twenty-one. He’s a senior at the University of Minnesota.

This conversation took place outside a store, in the fog, while she and Ian waited for a bus. Which bus?

Thirteen.

Apparently the key to unlocking her memories was to ask the right question. She clicked the link and it led her to Professor Luke Ritter’s university Web site in 2008. It provided mundane info, like the classes he would be teaching in the fall. Tess clicked on his bio.

Born in 1947.
She pressed her fists against her eyes, struggling against the dreadful possibility—the likelihood—that if Luke Ritter was
her
Ian’s son, it meant that she and Ian were separated by forty years in time. Luke would be in his early sixties now, nearly Lauren’s age, and Ian might be dead. Tess clicked his campus e-mail address:

Dear Professor Ritter,

My name is Tess Livingston. I met your dad under unusual circumstances and would be most grateful to know what, if anything, you can tell me about his location now. Did he return to Esperanza? Thank you in advance for anything you can provide.

She included her cell number and two e-mail addresses, but by three, Luke Ritter had not responded, her eyes ached and throbbed with fatigue. She slipped Maddie’s computer into its pretty fabric case and set it next to her bulging pack in the bedroom. As she headed for the door, her niece whispered, “Tesso?”

In the spill of light from the hallway, she could see Maddie sitting up, hugging a pillow against her chest, dark hair wild. “I put your MacBook against your pack.”

“We have to get out of the country,” Maddie said. “You know that, right?”

“Right now, we just need to get through tonight.”

But it was as if she hadn’t spoken. Focused on her bottom line, Maddie rushed on. “Lauren and I have our passports with us. Do you have yours?”

“Yes. Go to sleep, Maddie.”

“What time does the sun rise?”

“A few hours. Don’t worry. I’ll wake you if there’s trouble.”

Tess left the bedroom before Maddie could ask any more questions. The couch in the living room sure looked inviting and she propped up the pillows, grabbed one of the throws, and sank into the comfortable cushions with the Glock pressed to her chest.

Her heart beat frantically for a long time.

Tess. Wake up now, you’re in danger
. . .

She bolted upright, blinking hard and fast against the dark, certain she had heard her dead father’s voice. “Dad?” she whispered, and realized she was clawing at the mark on the underside of her wrist. It itched like crazy. She leaped off the couch, ran into the bedroom, turned on the lamp, and woke her mom and Maddie. “They’re close. You two have to get out now.”

Maddie knuckled her eyes like a sleepy three-year-old, took hold of Tess’s arm, looked at the mark. “Oh my God,” she whispered. “The bruise is getting darker.” With that, she vaulted out of bed.

Lauren had gone to bed in jeans and a T-shirt, and now hurried around the bedroom, jamming stuff in her pack. “How much time do we have? How close are they?”

Time. Tess didn’t know, it was all too new. Even though the bruise itched and had turned a deeper plum color, it didn’t burn yet. Yesterday when this happened, the burning had started right after she had pulled into her mother’s driveway. So perhaps they had a little time.

Tess raced back into the living room, jammed her arms into the sleeves of a lightweight jacket. Ridiculous. A jacket in June. But its multiple pockets held two guns and four clips. When Lauren and Maddie joined her, she handed her mother one of the weapons and two clips “Mom, take this. Twenty-two rounds. You’ll be carrying it illegally, but use it if you have to.”

“Lauren doesn’t know how to shoot a gun,” Maddie said.

“Ha,” Lauren said, “Tess taught me long before you arrived.”

Tess tore the towels away from the cracks under the door, swept up her room card. As they entered the quiet hall, she noted her room’s distance from the elevator and the exit sign that led to the stairs. The latter was closest, but she suspected these
brujo
bastards would arrive in human form, as the bodyguards, and would use the elevator. Would she hear the elevator doors opening if she was inside her suite? Probably not. But she had her own alert system. The bruise looked nearly black and itched terribly, but it still didn’t burn. They had time.
Please let me be right
. She pushed open the door to the stairs, hugged her mother and Maddie.

Her mother whispered, “We’ll check into—”

“No, don’t tell me. The less I know, the better. I’ll call when I’m on my way.”

She waited by the railing, watching them descend through the stairwell, footfalls echoing. Many flights down, her mother leaned out over the railing and blew Tess a kiss. Tess choked back a sob and hoped that sending them away was the right thing to do. The door below clattered open and shut.

Plan, what’s my plan?
She muted the iPhone’s ringer, ripped away the tape on the sliding glass doors, opened them a foot, closed the slats on the wooden Levalors. She swept up all the towels, and in the room her mother and Maddie had shared, stuffed pillows and some of the towels under the covers, the oldest trick in the adolescent playbook. She hoped these
brujos
had been dead too long to know it. She left some clothes on the chair, turned out the lights, went into the smaller bedroom, and threw the covers back. She draped towels over the back of the chair to make the room look inhabited, turned on the lamp.

Her wrist began to burn. Badly.
Shit, not much time.
Bathroom. Shower on. She spun the faucet to hot, tossed a beach towel over the upper edge of the door. It was large enough so that it fell halfway down the glass. It would make it difficult to see inside. She stepped out, shut the door.
Where to hide?

Linen closet. It stood between the bathroom and the bedrooms. The wooden slats in the door would enable her to see them once they crossed the living room and entered the hall. She slipped inside quickly, testing the range of her vision. Not as wide as she’d hoped, but it would do. The skin at her wrist now radiated heat.
They’re close
. She turned on the phone’s recorder.

The fridge hummed, the shower drummed, the breeze kept knocking the Levalors together,
clickety-clack.
Then she heard something else, a popping sound, and the bruise suddenly felt as though it were on fire, burning from the inside out. They had arrived.

Tess peered through the door slats, heart thundering so loudly she was terrified they might hear it. One of them entered her view—dark hair, a muscular man. As he moved toward the bathroom, she saw his face. One of the bodyguards. His companion, just now coming into view, was the bald-headed clone of Vic Mackey from
The Shield.
He veered toward the bedrooms and Tess suddenly had no idea how she was going to do this. She couldn’t shoot them simultaneously and didn’t know which one to aim at first. The dark-haired guy solved the problem. He slipped into the bathroom and shut the door. Tess opened the linen closet quietly, grateful that it
didn’t squeak, and slid across the tile floor in her stocking feet, toward the bedroom where baldie had disappeared. She heard popping sounds in the bathroom, the shattering of glass, and the bald guy spun around, clutching his weapon, and saw her.

For the briefest second, their eyes locked, and Tess sensed the
brujo
inside, a male energy shocked to see her here, armed. Tess fired. The bullet struck him square in the forehead, an explosion of blood and bone marking the entry point. His eyes widened with astonishment—then he simply fell back onto the bed. Nothing emerged from him, no dark wisps. Tess dived for the floor and rolled away from the door as the other man charged in, shouting,
“Ben, get out, it’s a setup, the shower’s empty.”
And Tess opened up.

Her shots hit the man in the legs and he went down so hard that she heard his knees cracking. He shrieked in pain, fell forward onto his chest, lost his grip on his weapon. Tess leaped to her feet and moved toward him. “Don’t move.” She swept up his weapon.

“Ben,”
the man hollered.

“He’s dead,” Tess said. “Ben is dead.”

Dead?

Ben?

Dominica looked up and saw the body on the bed in front of her, a bullet through the head. Fire or the instantaneous death of the host body were the only ways to obliterate a
brujo.
Ben, gone. And
she,
this terrible, wretched bitch, had done it.

Grief nearly crushed her, a sorrow so deep she hadn’t even known these emotions existed. She started sobbing and, in between sobs, tried to speak. But this horrible woman was snapping questions at her, threatening to shoot
her
in the head if she didn’t start talking. Her fierce, sudden rage stole the life from her grief.

“I promise you this, Tess Livingston. I will take everyone you love as much as I loved Ben and will make sure their deaths are excruciatingly painful. Worse than the lawn man’s.”

“What are you called?”

“Dominica.”

“What do you want from me, Dominica?”

“Your death.”