6.
 I stopped at my apartment, a cozy little second floor walkup in Mission Beach, where the ocean was a flint-colored curve in the sky. I made coffee and checked my calls. I longed to lie down on my cot by the picture window. I longed for a storm to roll in and batter the honey-paneled walls. I longed for someone like Liana to come and lie beside me. I longed for a lot. But I popped a few more pills and kept moving. My heart trembled like a scared mouse.
Okay, what I got? I got four lives: Maria, Anna, Paul Conlon, John Doyle. So far I've managed to trace one of them back, and that's Doyle. What about Anna and Maria-Liana Esquivel? I made a few phone calls. The parish was easy. There were a few Esquivels, but only one family with an Anna and a Maria. Within two hours I was in San Ysidro, where the last dusty boulevard in the USA points down into Mexico. There, during a sunset as hushed as a late Sunday afternoon, I met their mother, Maria Esquivel, in her living room. She was about fifty and looked seventy. I wondered who put such a severe shine on the floor that the sunshine seemed to sink into the amber wood. She had no teeth, but was not afraid to grin. She was one of those people who grin when they don't know something. This woman was constantly grinning. "Your daughter is Maria?" She grinned. "Your daughter is Anna?" She grinned. "Daughter," I said, raising my voice as though she were deaf. "Er, hija."
Her grin went away, replaced by lynx intelligence. "Ah, hija," she said. "Si, yo tengo dos hijas—Anna y Maria. Pero..."
"Aw Jesus," I said, "stop please." I'm ashamed of my lack of languages. How can an American live next door to one of the world's largest countries and not speak the lingo? But then her English wasn't fit to sneeze into a spittoon. She counted something (her children, I think) on all fingers; when she reached ten, she borrowed another handful of fingers from herself. She showed me the shrine of photos on her living room table. Nice big family. Lots of well-mannered looking boys and girls. "Anna y Maria? " I said. She pointed with a knobby finger. I did a double-take. Anna was no doubt the woman I'd met this morning, several years and kilo weight more mature, but Maria was a wizened looking woman with sickly eyes, black curls, and thick glasses. "Maria?" I asked. "La pobre pasada?"
"No no no," Mrs. Esquivel said. "Maria no esta muerte. Esta una..." (nun, I think she said in Spanish). Proudly, she showed me a small stack of letters and cards with Mexican stamps on them. The writer had a cramped, pretty style. This was getting more confusing by the minute. "Does your husband speak English?" I asked loudly.
"No, no," she said waggling her finger again.
My last try: "Do you know about Mr. Doyle?"
"Quien?" She looked pained.
"Senor Doyle. Cognosce...?"
She looked horrified. She burst into an avalanche of rolled r's and spattered syllables, and I felt myself being led to the door faster than I'd come in. "Bueno," she kept shouting as though I'd stepped on her toes, "buen'."
"Bueno," I tried to reply, but it obviously didn't cut the same standard. I couldn't manage to get the same lilt into the middle vowel. The last I saw of her before the door slammed was a waggling finger.
At the gate, I emptied about two pounds of junk mail and letters from the mail box, and started back up the walk. I rifled through the pile. Sure enough, there was a red envelope, card-type, from Anna. Wait a minute. Ana Maria Doyle. To Mrs. Maria Esquivel. What kind of shell game were these people playing with their names? I was about to knock on the door when I heard the old lady on the phone. "Yeah, Victor," she was saying, "some big dumb tin horn was just here asking more of them stupid questions. I think he said this is the last time..."
I slipped the mail quietly back into the mailbox, and drove off as quickly as I could. On I-5 headed north, I pulled out the piece of junk mail I'd stuck in my pocket. I shook it, and out fell the red envelope. I couldn't wait to see. I pulled over on the freeway shoulder and laid the envelope and the photo side by side. Sure enough, the handwriting matched. Same careless, expansive scrawl. Now my heart was really thumping. I was onto something that the investigators from C.M.I. had missed entirely.
|
Thank you for reading. If you love it, tell your friends. Please post a favorable review at Amazon, Good Reads, and other online resources. If you want to thank the author, you may also buy a copy for the low price of a cup of coffee. It's called Read-a-Latte: similar (or lower) price as a latte at your
|
TOP
|
MAIN
Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
|
